32. In conclusion, he passes to political authority, deriving it from the same principle, and comments with severity and success, though in the verbose style usual to him, on the system of Hobbes. It is, however, worthy of remark, that he not only peremptorily declares the irresponsibility of the supreme magistrate in all cases, but seems to give him a more arbitrary latitude in the choice of measures, so long as he does not violate the chief negative precepts of the decalogue, than is consistent with his own fundamental rule of always seeking the greatest good. He endeavours to throw upon Hobbes, as was not uncommon with the latter’s theological opponents, the imputation of encouraging rebellion while he seemed to support absolute power; and observes with full as much truth that if kings are bound by no natural law, the reason for their institution—namely, the security of mankind, assigned by the author of the Leviathan, falls to the ground.
[897] Cap. viii., sect. 14, 15.
Remarks on Cumberland’s theory. 33. I have gone rather at length into a kind of analysis of this treatise, because it is now very little read, and yet was of great importance in the annals of ethical philosophy. It was, if not a textbook in either of our universities, concerning which I am not confident, the basis of the system therein taught, and of the books which have had most influence in this country. Hutcheson, Law, Paley, Priestley, Bentham, belong, no doubt some of them unconsciously, to the school founded by Cumberland. Hutcheson adopted the principle of general benevolence as the standard of virtue; but by limiting the definition of good to happiness alone, he simplified the scheme of Cumberland, who had included conservation and enlargement of capacity in its definition. He rejected also what encumbers the whole system of his predecessor, the including the Supreme Being among those rational agents whose good we are bound to promote. The schoolmen, as well as those whom they followed, deeming it necessary to predicate metaphysical infinity of all the divine attributes, reckoned unalterable beatitude in the number. Upon such a subject no wise man would like to dogmatise. The difficulties on both sides are very great, and perhaps among the most intricate to which the momentous problem concerning the cause of evil has given rise. Cumberland, whose mind does not seem to have been much framed to wrestle with mysteries, evades, in his lax verbosity, what must perplex his readers.
34. In establishing the will of a supreme lawgiver as essential to the law of nature, he is followed by the bishop of Carlisle and Paley, as well as by the majority of English moralists in the eighteenth century. But while Paley deems the recognition of a future state so essential, that he even includes in the definition of virtue that it is performed “for the sake of everlasting happiness,” Cumberland not only omits this erroneous and almost paradoxical condition, but very slightly alludes to another life, though he thinks it probable from the stings of conscience and on other grounds; resting the whole argument on the certain consequences of virtue and vice in the present, but guarding justly against the supposition that any difference of happiness in moral agents can affect the immediate question except such as is the mere result of their own behaviour. If anyone had urged, like Paley, that without taking a future state into consideration, the result of calculating our own advantage will either not always be in favour of virtue, or, in consequence of the violence of passion, will not always seem so, Cumberland would probably have denied the former alternative, and replied to the other, that we can only prove the truth of our theorems in moral philosophy, and cannot compel men to adopt them.
35. Sir James Mackintosh, whose notice of Cumberland is rather too superficial, and hardly recognises his influence on philosophy, observes that “the forms of scholastic argument serve more to encumber his style than to insure his exactness.”[898] There is not, however, much of scholastic form in the treatise on the Laws of Nature, and this is expressly disclaimed in the Preface. But he has, as we have intimated, a great deal too much of a mathematical line of argument which never illustrates his meaning, and has sometimes misled his judgment. We owe, probably to his fondness for this specious illusion, I mean the application of reasonings upon quantity to moral subjects, the dangerous sophism that a direct calculation of the highest good, and that not relatively to particulars, but to all rational beings, is the measure of virtuous actions, the test by which we are to try our own conduct and that of others. And the intervention of general rules, by which Paley endeavoured to dilute and render palatable this calculating scheme of utility, seems no more to have occurred to Cumberland than it was adopted by Bentham.
[898] Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy, p. 48.
36. Thus as Taylor’s Ductor Dubitantium is nearly the last of a declining school, Cumberland’s Law of Nature may be justly considered as the herald, especially in England, of a new ethical philosophy, of which the main characteristics were, first, that it stood complete in itself without the aid of revelation; secondly, that it appealed to no authority of earlier writers whatever, though it sometimes used them in illustration; thirdly, that it availed itself of observation and experience, alledging them generally, but abstaining from particular instances of either, and making, above all, no display of erudition; and fourthly; that it entered very little upon casuistry, leaving the application of principles to the reader.
Puffendorf’s Law of Nature and Nations. 37. In the same year, 1672, a work still more generally distinguished than that of Cumberland, was published at Lund, in Sweden, by Samuel Puffendorf, a Saxon by birth, who filled the chair of moral philosophy in that recently-founded university. This large treatise, On the Law of Nature and Nations, in eight books, was abridged by the author, but not without some variations, in one perhaps more useful, On the Duties of a Man and a Citizen. Both have been translated into French and English; both were long studied in the foreign universities, and even in our own. Puffendorf has been, perhaps, in moral philosophy, of greater authority than Grotius, with whom he is frequently named in conjunction; but this is not the case in international jurisprudence.
Analysis of this work. 38. Puffendorf, after a very diffuse and technical chapter on moral beings, or modes, proceeds to assert a demonstrative certainty in moral science, but seems not to maintain an inherent right and wrong in actions antecedent to all law, referring the rule of morality altogether to the divine appointment. He ends, however, by admitting that man’s constitution being what it is, God could not, without inconsistency, have given him any other law than that under which he lives.[899] We discern good from evil by the understanding, which judgment when exercised on our own actions is called conscience; but he strongly protests against any such jurisdiction of conscience, independent of reason and knowledge, as some have asserted. This notion “was first introduced by the schoolmen, and has been maintained in these latter ages by the crafty casuists for the better securing, of men’s minds and fortunes to their own fortune and advantage.”[900] Puffendorf was a good deal imbued with the Lutheran bigotry which did no justice to any religion but its own.
[899] C. 2.