But how far is man able to attain either natural or Christian perfection? This is the part of Thomas’s system in which the cohesion of the different elements seems weakest. He is scarcely aware that his Aristotelianized Christianity inevitably combines two different difficulties in dealing with this question: first, the old pagan difficulty of reconciling the proposition that will is a rational desire always directed towards apparent good, with the freedom of choice between good and evil that the jural view of morality seems to require; and, secondly, the Christian difficulty of harmonizing this latter notion with the absolute dependence on divine grace which the religious consciousness affirms. The latter difficulty Thomas, like many of his predecessors, avoids by supposing a “co-operation” of free-will and grace, but the former he does not fully meet. It is against this part of his doctrines that the most important criticism, in ethics, of his Duns Scotus. rival Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308) was directed. He urged that will could not be really free if it were bound to reason, as Thomas (after Aristotle) conceives it; a really free choice must be perfectly indeterminate between reason and unreason. Scotus consistently maintained that the divine will is similarly independent of reason, and that the divine ordering of the world is to be conceived as absolutely arbitrary. On this point he was followed by the acute intellect of William of Occam (d. c. 1347). This doctrine is William of Occam. obviously hostile to all reasoned morality; and in fact, notwithstanding the dialectical ability of Scotus and Occam, the work of Thomas remained indubitably the crowning result of the great constructive effort of medieval philosophy. The effort was, indeed, foredoomed to failure, since it attempted the impossible task of framing a coherent system out of the heterogeneous data furnished by Scripture, the fathers, the church and Aristotle—equally unquestioned, if not equally venerated, authorities. Whatever philosophic quality is to be found in the work of Thomas belongs to it in spite of, not in consequence of, its method. Still, its influence has been great and long-enduring,—in the Catholic Church primarily, but indirectly among Protestants, especially in England, since the famous first book of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity is to a great extent taken from the Summa theologiae.
Partly in conscious antagonism to the schoolmen, yet with close affinity to the central ethico-theological doctrine which they read out of or into Aristotle, the mystical manner of thought continued to maintain itself in the church. Medieval mysticism. Philosophically it rested upon Neoplatonism, but its development in strict connexion with Christian orthodoxy begins in the 12th century with Bernard of Clairvaux and Hugo of St Victor. It blended the Christian element of love with the ecstatic vision of Plotinus, sometimes giving the former a decided predominance. In its more moderate form, keeping wholly within the limits of ecclesiastical orthodoxy, this mysticism is represented by Bonaventura and Gerson; while it appears more independent and daringly constructive in the German Eckhart, advancing in some of his followers to open breach with the church, and even to practical immorality.
In the brief account above given of the general ethical view of Thomas Aquinas no mention has been made of the detailed discussion of particular duties included in the Summa theologiae; in which, for the most part, an excellent Casuistry. combination of moral elevation with sobriety of judgment is shown, though on certain points the scholastic pedantry of definition and distinction is unfavourable to due delicacy of treatment. As the properly philosophic interest of scholasticism faded in the 14th and 15th centuries, the quasi-legal treatment of morality came again into prominence, borrowing a good deal of matter from Thomas and other schoolmen. One result of this was a marked development and systematization of casuistry. The best known Summae casuum conscientiae, compiled for the conduct of auricular confession, belong to the 14th and 15th centuries. The oldest, the Astesana, from Asti in Piedmont, is arranged as a kind of text-book of morality on a scholastic basis; later manuals are merely lists of questions and answers. It was inevitable that, in proportion as this casuistry assumed the character of a systematic penal jurisprudence, its precise determination of the limits between the prohibited and the allowable, with all doubtful points closely scrutinized and illustrated by fictitious cases, would have a tendency to weaken the moral sensibilities of ordinary minds; the greater the industry spent in deducing conclusions from the diverse authorities, the greater necessarily became the number of points on which doctors disagreed; and the central authority that might have repressed serious divergences was wanting in the period of moral weakness[24] that the church went through after the death of Boniface VIII. A plain man perplexed by such disagreements might naturally hold that any opinion maintained by a pious and orthodox writer must be a safe one to follow; and thus weak consciences were subtly tempted to seek the support of authority for some desired relaxation of a moral rule. It does not, however, appear that this danger assumed formidable proportions until after the Reformation; when, in the struggle made by the Catholic church to recover its hold on the world, the principle of authority was, as it were, forced into keen, balanced and prolonged conflict with that of reliance on private judgment. To the Jesuits, the The Jesuits. foremost champions in this struggle, it seemed indispensable that the confessional should be made attractive; for this purpose ecclesiastico-moral law must be somehow “accommodated” to worldly needs; and the theory of “Probabilism” supplied a plausible method for effecting this accommodation. The theory proceeded thus: A layman could not be expected to examine minutely into a point on which the learned differed; therefore he could not fairly be blamed for following any opinion that rested on the authority of even a single doctor; therefore his confessor must be authorized to hold him guiltless if any such “probable” opinion could be produced in his favour; nay, it was his duty to suggest such an opinion, even though opposed to his own, if it would relieve the conscience under his charge from a depressing burden. The results to which this Probabilism, applied with an earnest desire to avoid dangerous rigour, led in the 17th century were revealed to the world in the immortal Lettres provinciales of Pascal.
In tracing the development of casuistry we have been carried beyond the great crisis through which Western Christianity passed in the 16th century. The Reformation which Luther initiated may be viewed on several sides, The Reformation. Transition to modern ethical philosophy. even if we consider only its ethical principles and effects. It maintained the simplicity of Apostolic Christianity against the elaborate system of a corrupt hierarchy, the teaching of Scripture alone against the commentaries of the fathers and the traditions of the church, the right of private judgment against the dictation of ecclesiastical authority, the individual responsibility of every human soul before God in opposition to the papal control over purgatorial punishments, which had led to the revolting degradation of venal indulgences. Reviving the original antithesis between Christianity and Jewish legalism, it maintained the inwardness of faith to be the sole way to eternal life, in contrast to the outwardness of works; returning to Augustine, and expressing his spirit in a new formula, to resist the Neo-Pelagianism that had gradually developed itself within the apparent Augustinianism of the church, it maintained the total corruption of human nature, as contrasted with that “congruity” by which, according to the schoolmen, divine grace was to be earned; renewing the fervent humility of St Paul, it enforced the universal and absolute imperativeness of all Christian duties, and the inevitable unworthiness of all Christian obedience, in opposition to the theory that “condign” merit might be gained by “supererogatory” conformity to evangelical “counsels.” It will be seen that these changes, however profoundly important, were, ethically considered, either negative or quite general, relating to the tone and attitude of mind in which all duty should be done. As regards all positive matter of duty and virtue, and most of the prohibitive code for ordinary men, the tradition of Christian teaching was carried on substantially unchanged by the Reformed churches. Even the old method of casuistry was maintained[25] during the 16th and 17th centuries; though Scriptural texts, interpreted and supplemented by the light of natural reason, now furnished the sole principles on which cases of conscience were decided.
In the 17th century, however, the interest of this quasi-legal treatment of morality gradually faded; and the ethical studies of educated minds were occupied with the attempt, renewed after so many centuries, to find an independent Humanism. philosophical basis for the moral code. The renewal of this attempt was only indirectly due to the Reformation; it is rather to be connected with the more extreme reaction from the medieval religion which was partly caused by, partly expressed in, that enthusiastic study of the remains of old pagan culture that spread from Italy over Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. To this “humanism” the Reformation seemed at first more hostile than the Roman hierarchy; indeed, the extent to which this latter had allowed itself to become paganized by the Renaissance was one of the points that especially roused the Reformers’ indignation. Not the less important is the indirect stimulus given by the Reformation towards the development of a moral philosophy independent alike of Catholic and Protestant assumptions. Scholasticism, while reviving philosophy as a handmaid to theology, had metamorphosed its method into one resembling that of its mistress; thus shackling the renascent intellectual activity which it stimulated by the double bondage to Aristotle and to the church. When the Reformation shook the traditional authority in one department, the blow was necessarily felt in the other. Not twenty years after Luther’s defiance of the pope, the startling thesis “that all that Aristotle taught was false” was prosperously maintained by the youthful Ramus before the university of Paris; and almost contemporaneously the group of remarkable thinkers in Italy who heralded the dawn of modern physical science—Cardanus, Telesio, Patrizzi, Campanella, Bruno—began to propound their Aristotelian theories of the constitution of the physical universe. It was to be foreseen that a similar assertion of independence would make itself heard in ethics also; and, indeed, amid the clash of dogmatic convictions, and the variations of private judgment, it was natural to seek for an ethical method that might claim universal acceptance from all sects.
C. Modern Ethics.—The need of such independent principles was most strongly felt in the region of man’s civil and political relations, especially the mutual relations of communities. Accordingly we find that modern ethical Grotius. controversy began in a discussion of the law of nature. Albericus Gentilis (1557-1611) and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) were the first to give a systematic account. Natural law, according to Grotius and other writers of the age, is that part of divine law which follows from the essential nature of man, who is distinguished from animals by his “appetite” for tranquil association with his fellows, and his tendency to act on general principles. It is therefore as unalterable, even by God himself, as the truths of mathematics, although its effect may be overruled in any particular case by an express command of God; hence it is cognizable a priori, from the abstract consideration of human nature, though its existence may be known a posteriori also from its universal acceptance in human societies. The conception, as we have seen, was taken from the later Roman jurists; by them, however, the law of nature was conceived as something that underlay existing law, and was to be looked for through it, though it might ultimately supersede it, and in the meanwhile represented an ideal standard, by which improvements in legislation were to be guided. Still the language of the jurists in some passages (cf. Inst. of Justinian, ii. 1, 2) clearly implied a period of human history in which men were governed by natural law alone, prior to the institution of civil society. Posidonius had identified this period with the mythical “golden age”; and such ideas easily coalesced with the narrative in Genesis. Thus there had become current the conception of a “state of nature” in which individuals or single families lived side by side—under none other than those “natural” laws which prohibited mutual injury and interference in the free use of the goods of the earth common to all, and upheld parental authority, fidelity of wives, and the observance of compacts freely made. This conception Grotius took, and gave it additional force and solidity by using the principles of this natural law for the determination of international rights and duties, it being obvious that independent nations, in their corporate capacities, were still in that “state of nature” in their mutual relations. It was not, of course, assumed that these laws were universally obeyed; indeed, one point with which Grotius is especially concerned is the natural right of private war, arising out of the violation of more primary rights. Still a general observance was involved in the idea of a natural law as a “dictate of right reason indicating the agreement or disagreement of an act with man’s rational and social nature”; and we may observe that it was especially necessary to assume such a general observance in the case of contracts, since it was by an “express or tacit pact” that the right of property (as distinct from the mere right to non-interference during use) was held by him to have been instituted. A similar “fundamental pact” had long been generally regarded as the normal origin of legitimate sovereignty.
The ideas above expressed were not peculiar to Grotius; in particular the doctrine of the “fundamental pact” as the jural basis of government had long been maintained, especially in England, where the constitution historically established readily suggested such a compact. At the same time the rapid and remarkable success of Grotius’s treatise (De jure belli et pacis) brought his view of Natural Right into prominence, and suggested such questions as—“What is man’s ultimate reason for obeying these laws? Wherein exactly does this their agreement with his rational and social nature consist? How far, and in what sense, is his nature really social?”
It was the answer which Hobbes (1588-1679) gave to these fundamental questions that supplied the starting-point for independent ethical philosophy in England. The nature of this answer was determined by the psychological Hobbes. views to which Hobbes had been led, possibly to some extent under the influence of Bacon,[26] partly perhaps through association with his younger contemporary Gassendi, who, in two treatises, published between the appearance of Hobbes’s De cive (1642) and that of the Leviathan (1651), endeavoured to revive interest in Epicurus. Hobbes’s psychology is in the first place materialistic; he holds, that is, that in any of the psycho-physical phenomena of human nature the reality is a material process of which the mental feeling is a mere “appearance.” Accordingly he regards pleasure as essentially motion “helping vital action,” and pain as motion “hindering” it. There is no logical connexion between this theory and the doctrine that appetite of desire has always pleasure (or the absence of pain) for its object; but a materialist, framing a system of psychology, will naturally direct his attention to the impulses arising out of bodily wants, whose obvious end is the preservation of the agent’s organism; and this, together with a philosophic wish to simplify, may lead him to the conclusion that all human impulses are similarly self-regarding. This, at any rate, is Hobbes’s cardinal doctrine in moral psychology, that each man’s appetites or desires are naturally directed either to the preservation of his life, or to that heightening of it which he feels as pleasure.[27] Hobbes does not distinguish instinctive from deliberate pleasure-seeking; and he confidently resolves the most apparently unselfish emotions into phases of self-regard. Pity he finds to be grief for the calamity of others, arising from imagination of the like calamity befalling oneself; what we admire with seeming disinterestedness as beautiful (pulchrum) is really “pleasure in promise”; when men are not immediately seeking present pleasure, they desire power as a means to future pleasure, and thus have a derivative delight in the exercise of power that prompts to what we call benevolent action. Since, then, all the voluntary actions of men tend to their own preservation or pleasure, it cannot be reasonable to aim at anything else; in fact, nature rather than reason fixes this as the end of human action; it is reason’s function to show the means. Hence if we ask why it is reasonable for any individual to observe the rules of social behaviour that are commonly called moral, the answer is obvious that this is only indirectly reasonable, as a means to his own preservation or pleasure. It is not, however, in this, which is only the old Cyrenaic or Epicurean answer, that the distinctive point of Hobbism lies. It is rather in the doctrine that even this indirect reasonableness of the most fundamental moral rules is entirely conditional on their general observance, which cannot be secured apart from government. For example, it is not reasonable for me to perform my share of a contract, unless I have reason for believing that the other party will perform his; and this I cannot have, except in a society in which he will be punished for non-performance. Thus the ordinary rules of social behaviour are only hypothetically obligatory; they are actualized by the establishment of a “common power” that may “use the strength and means of all” to enforce on all the observance of rules tending to the common benefit. On the other hand Hobbes yields to no one in maintaining the paramount importance of moral regulations. The precepts of good faith, equity, requital of benefits, forgiveness of wrong so far as security allows, the prohibition of contumely, pride, arrogance,—which may all be summed up in the formula, “Do not that to another which thou wouldest not have done to thyself” (i.e. the negative of the “golden rule”)—he still calls “immutable and eternal laws of nature”—meaning that, though a man is not unconditionally bound to realize them, he is, as a reasonable being, bound to desire that they should be realized. The pre-social state of man, in his view, is also pre-moral; but it is therefore utterly miserable. It is a state in which every one has a right to everything that may conduce to his preservation;[28] but it is therefore also a state of war—a state so wretched that it is the first dictate of rational self-love to emerge from it into social peace and order. Hence Hobbes’s ideal constitution naturally comes to be an unquestioned and unlimited—though not necessarily monarchical—despotism. Whatever the government declares to be just or unjust must be accepted as such, since to dispute its dictates would be the first step towards anarchy, the one paramount peril outweighing all particular defects in legislation and administration. It is perhaps easy to understand how, in the crisis of 1640, when the ethico-political system of Hobbes first took written shape, a peace-loving philosopher should regard the claims of individual conscience as essentially anarchical, and dangerous to social well-being; but however strong might be men’s yearning for order, a view of social duty, in which the only fixed positions were selfishness everywhere and unlimited power somewhere, could not but appear offensively paradoxical.
There was, however, in his theory an originality, a force, an apparent coherence which rendered it undeniably impressive; in fact, we find that for two generations the efforts to construct morality on a philosophical basis take more or less the form of answers to Hobbes. From an ethical point of view Hobbism divides itself naturally into two parts, which by Hobbes’s peculiar political doctrines are combined into a coherent whole, but are not otherwise necessarily connected. Its theoretical basis is the principle of egoism; while, for practically determining the particulars of duty it makes morality entirely dependent on positive law and institution. It thus affirmed the relativity of good and evil in a double sense; good and evil, for any individual citizen, may from one point of view be defined as the objects respectively of his desire and his aversion; from another, they may be said to be determined for him by his sovereign. It is this latter aspect of the system which is primarily attacked by the first generation of writers that replied to Hobbes. This attack, or rather the counter-exposition of orthodox doctrine, is conducted on different methods by the Cambridge moralists and by Cumberland respectively. Cumberland is content with the legal view of morality, but endeavours to establish the validity of the laws of nature by taxing them on the single supreme principle of rational regard for the “common good of all,” and showing them, as so based, to be adequately supported by the divine sanction. The Cambridge school, regarding morality primarily as a body of truth rather than a code of rules, insist on its absolute character and intuitive certainty.
Cudworth was the most distinguished of the little group of thinkers at Cambridge in the 17th century, commonly known as the Cambridge Platonists (q.v.). In his treatise on Eternal and Immutable Morality his main aim is to maintain the The Cambridge moralists, Cudworth. “essential and eternal distinctions of good and evil” as independent of mere will, whether human or divine. These distinctions, he insists, have an objective reality, cognizable by reason no less than the relations of space or number; and he endeavours to refute Hobbism—which he treats as a “novantique philosophy,” a mere revival of the relativism of Protagoras—chiefly by the following argumentum ad hominem. He argues that Hobbes’s atomic materialism involves the conception of an objective physical world, the object not of passive sense that varies from man to man, but of the active intellect that is the same in all; there is therefore, he urges, an inconsistency in refusing to admit a similar exercise of intellect in morals, and an objective world of right and wrong, which the mind by its normal activity clearly apprehends as such.