"Oh, if indeed that eye foresee,
Or see, (in Him is no before.)"—
and as Dante sang five centuries ago.
But it is the last chapter which best shows the power of the author and the pure and generous spirit with which the whole book is filled. Here she shows why the Moral Law should be obeyed; and dividing the advocates of Happiness as a motive into three classes, Euthumists, Public Eudaimonists, and Private Eudaimonists, she refutes them all and establishes her simple scheme, which she states in these words:—
"The law itself, the Eternal Right, for right's own sake, that alone must be our motive, the spring of our resolution, the ground of our obedience. Deep from our inmost souls comes forth the mandate, the bare and simple law claiming the command of our whole existence merely by its proper right, and disdaining alike to menace or to bribe."
The terms Euthumism and Eudaimonism are, perhaps, peculiar to this essay, and may need some explanation. The Euthumist is one who assumes moral pleasure as a sufficient reason why virtue should be sought; the Eudaimonist believes we should be virtuous for the sake of affectional, intellectual, and sensual pleasure; if he means the pleasure of all mankind, he is a Public Eudaimonist; but if he means the pleasure of the individual, he is a Private Eudaimonist. Democritus is reckoned the first among Euthumists; and in England this school has been represented, among others, by Henry More and Cumberland, by Sharrock, [Footnote: Sharrock is a name unfamiliar to most readers. His [Greek: Hypothesis aethikae] published in 1660, contains the first clear statement of Euthumism made by any Englishman. See p.223.] Hutcheson, and Shaftesbury. Paley thrust himself among Public Eudaimonists, and our author well exposes his grovelling morals, aiming to produce the "greatest happiness of the greatest number," a system which has too long been taught among the students of our colleges and high schools. But he properly belongs to the Private Eudaimonists; for this interpreter of ethics to the ingenuous youth of England and America says, "Virtue is the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness. According to which definition, the good of mankind is the subject, the will of God the rule, and everlasting happiness the motive of virtue."
It is such heresies as this, and the still grosser pravities into which the ethics of expediency run, that this book will do much to combat. Nothing is more needed in our schools for both sexes than the systematic teaching of the principles here set forth; and we have no doubt this volume could be used as a text-book, at least with some slight omissions and additions, such as a competent teacher could well furnish. Portions of it, indeed, were some years since read by Mrs. Lowell to her classes, and are now incorporated in her admirable book, "Seed Grain"; nor does there seem to be any good reason why it should not be introduced at Cambridge. With a short introduction containing the main principles of metaphysics, and with the omission of some rhetorical passages unsuited to a text-book, it might supplant the books of both intellectual and moral philosophy now in use in our higher schools.
But it is not as a school-book that this essay is to be considered; it will find a large and increasing circle of readers among the mature and the cultivated, and these will perceive that few have thought so profoundly or written so clearly on these absorbing topics. Take, for example, the classification of possible beings, made in the first chapter:—
"Proceeding on our premises, that the omnipotence of God is not to be supposed to include self-contradictions, we observe at the outset, that (so far as we can understand subjects so transcendent) there were only, in a moral point of view, three orders of beings possible in the universe:—1st. One Infinite Being. A Rational Free Agent, raised by the infinitude of his nature above the possibility of temptation. He is the only Holy Being. 2d. Finite creatures who are Rational Free Agents, but exposed by the finity of their natures to continual temptations. These beings are either Virtuous or Vicious. 3d. Finite creatures who are not rational nor morally free. These beings are Unmoral, and neither virtuous nor vicious."—pp. 24-25.
Nothing can be shorter or more thorough than this statement, and, if accepted, it settles many points in theology as well as in ethics.
Then, too, the comparison, in the last chapter, of the Law of Honor, considered as a system of morals, with the systems of Paley and Bentham, shows a fine perception of the true relation of chivalry to ethics, and gives occasion for one of the most eloquent passages in the book:—