[380] Cf. Book i. chap. iii. § [2].
[381] It may perhaps be said that this comparison has no force for Libertarians, who consider the essence of Virtue to lie in free choice. But to say that any free choice is virtuous would be a paradox from which most Libertarians—admitting that Evil may be freely chosen no less than Good—would recoil. It must therefore be Free choice of good that is conceived to realise the divine end: and if so, the arguments for the utilitarian interpretation of Good—thus freely chosen—would still be applicable mutatis mutandis: and if so, the arguments for regarding rules of utilitarian duty as divinely sanctioned would be similarly applicable.
[382] It is not necessary, if we are simply considering Ethics as a possible independent science, to throw the fundamental premiss of which we are now examining the validity into a Theistic form. Nor does it seem always to have taken that form in the support which Positive Religion has given to Morality. In the Buddhist creed this notion of the rewards inseparably attaching to right conduct seems to have been developed in a far more elaborate and systematic manner than it has in any phase of Christianity. But, as conceived by enlightened Buddhists, these rewards are not distributed by the volition of a Supreme Person, but by the natural operation of an impersonal Law.
[383] It may be well to remind the reader that by ‘adequate’ is here meant ‘sufficient to make it the agent’s interest to promote universal good’; not necessarily ‘proportional to Desert.’
[384] I cannot fall back on the resource of thinking myself under a moral necessity to regard all my duties as if they were commandments of God, although not entitled to hold speculatively that any such Supreme Being really exists. I am so far from feeling bound to believe for purposes of practice what I see no ground for holding as a speculative truth, that I cannot even conceive the state of mind which these words seem to describe, except as a momentary half-wilful irrationality, committed in a violent access of philosophic despair.
[385] The terms ‘rational’ and ‘moral’ seem to me most appropriate when I wish to suggest the affinity between the two notions: the terms ‘good’ and ‘neutral’ seem preferable when I wish to lay stress on the difference.
[386] Werke, v. pp. 100-104 (Hartenstein).
[387] Werke, v. p. 30.
[388] Ibid. p. 83.
[389] Ibid. p. 46.