The numerous *ethical systems* that have had currency in earlier or later times, may be divided into two cla.s.ses,-the one embracing those which make virtue a means; the other, those which make it an end. According to the former, virtue is to be practised for the good that will come of it; according to the latter, for its own sake, for its intrinsic excellence.
These cla.s.ses have obvious subdivisions. The former includes both the selfish and the utilitarian theory; while the latter embraces a wide diversity of views as to the nature, the standard, and the criterion of virtue, according as it is believed to consist in conformity to the fitness of things, in harmony with an unsophisticated taste, in accordance with the interior moral sense, or in obedience to the will of G.o.d. There are, also, border theories, which blend, or rather force into juxtaposition, the ideas that underlie the two cla.s.ses respectively.
It is proposed, in the present chapter, to give an outline of *the history of ethical philosophy in Greece and Rome*, or rather, in Greece; for Rome had no philosophy that was not born in Greece.
*Socrates* was less a moral philosopher than a preacher of virtue.
Self-ordained as a censor and reformer, he directed his invective and irony princ.i.p.ally against the Sophists, whose chief characteristic as to philosophy seems to have been the denial of objective truth, and thus, of absolute and determinate right. Socrates, in contrast with them, seeks to elicit duty from the occasions for its exercise, making his collocutors define right and obligation from the nature of things as presented to their own consciousness and reflection. Plato represents him, whenever a moral question is under discussion, as probing the very heart of the case, and drawing thence the response as from a divine oracle.
*Plato* held essentially the same ground, as may be seen in his identifying the True, the Beautiful, and the Good; but it is impossible to trace in his writings the outlines of a definite ethical system, whether his own, or one derived from his great master.
The three *princ.i.p.al schools of ethical philosophy in Greece* were the Peripatetic, the Epicurean, and the Stoic.
The *Peripatetics* derived their philosophy from Aristotle, and their name from his habit of walking up and down under the plane-trees of the Lyceum.
According to him, virtue is conduct so conformed to human nature as to preserve all its appet.i.tes, proclivities, desires, and pa.s.sions, in mutual check and limitation. It consists in shunning extremes. Thus courage stands midway between cowardice and rashness; temperance, between excess and self-denial; generosity, between prodigality and parsimony; meekness, between irascibility and pusillanimity. Happiness is regarded as the supreme good; but while this is not to be attained without virtue, virtue alone will not secure it. Happiness requires, in addition, certain outward advantages, such as health, riches, friends, which therefore a good man will seek by all lawful means. Aristotle laid an intense stress on the cultivation of the domestic virtues, justly representing the household as the type, no less than the nursery, of the state, and the political well-being of the state as contingent on the style of character cherished and manifested in the home-life of its members.
There is reason to believe that *Aristotle"s personal character* was conformed to his theory of virtue,-that he pursued the middle path, rather than the more arduous route of moral perfection. Though much of his time was spent in Athens, he was a native of Macedonia, and was for several years resident at the court of Philip as tutor to Alexander, with whom he retained friendly relations for the greater part of his royal pupil"s life. Of his connection with the Macedonian court and public affairs, there are several stories that implicate him dishonorably with political intrigues, and though there is not one of these that is not denied, and not one which rests on competent historical authority, such traditions are not apt so to cl.u.s.ter as to blur the fair fame of a st.u.r.dily incorruptible man, but are much more likely to cling to the memory of a trimmer and a time-server.
*Epicurus,* from whom the Epicurean philosophy derives its name, was for many years a teacher of philosophy in Athens. He was a man of simple, pure, chaste, and temperate habits, in his old age bore severe and protracted sufferings, from complicated and incurable disease, with singular equanimity, and had his memory posthumously blackened only by those who-like theological bigots of more recent times-inferred, in despite of all contemporary evidence, that he was depraved in character, because they thought that his philosophy ought to have made him so.
He represented *pleasure as the supreme good*, and its pleasure-yielding capacity as the sole criterion by which any act or habit is to be judged.
On this ground, the quest of pleasure becomes the prime, or rather the only duty. "Do that you may enjoy," is the fundamental maxim of morality.
There is no intrinsic or permanent distinction between right and wrong.
Individual experience alone can determine the right, which varies according to the differences of taste, temperament, or culture. There are, however, some pleasures which are more than counterbalanced by the pains incurred in procuring them, or by those occasioned by them; and there are, also, pains which are the means of pleasures greater than themselves. The wise man, therefore, will measure and govern his conduct, not by the pleasure of the moment, but with reference to the future and ultimate effects of acts, habits, and courses of conduct, upon his happiness. What are called the virtues, as justice, temperance, chast.i.ty, are in themselves no better than their opposites; but experience has shown that they increase the aggregate of pleasure, and diminish the aggregate of pain. Therefore, and therefore alone, they are duties. The great worth of philosophy consists in its enabling men to estimate the relative duration, and the permanent consequences, as well as the immediate intensity, of every form of pleasure.
Epicurus specifies *two kinds of pleasure*, that of rest and that of motion. He prefers the former. Action has its reaction; excitement is followed by depression; effort, by weariness; thought for others involves the disturbance of one"s own peace. The G.o.ds, according to Epicurus, lead an easy, untroubled life, leave the outward universe to take care of itself, are wholly indifferent to human affairs, and are made ineffably happy by the entire absence of labor, want, and care; and man becomes most G.o.dlike and most happy, therefore most virtuous, when he floats through life, unharming and unharmed, idle and useless, self-contained and self-sufficing, simple in his tastes, moderate in his requirements, frugal in his habits.
It may be doubted *whether Epicurus denoted by pleasure,*(*18*)* mere physical pleasure alone*. It is certain that his later followers regarded the pleasures of the body as the only good; and Cicero says that Epicurus himself referred all the pleasures of the intellect to the memory of past and the hope of future sensual gratification. Yet there is preserved an extract of a letter from Epicurus, in which he says that his own bodily pains in his years of decrepitude are outweighed by the pleasure derived from the memory of his philosophical labors and discoveries.
*Epicureanism numbered among its disciples*, not only *men of approved virtue*, but not a few, like Pliny the Younger, of a more active type of virtue than Epicurus would have deemed consistent with pleasure. But in lapse of time it became the pretext and cover for the grossest sensuality; and the a.s.sociations which the unlearned reader has with the name are only strengthened by conversance with the literature to which it gave birth.
Horace is its poet-laureate; and he was evidently as sincere in his philosophy as he was licentious in his life. There is a certain charm in good faith and honesty, even when on the side of wrong and vice; and it is his perfect frankness, self-complacency, nay, self-praise, in a sensuality which in plain prose would seem by turns vapid and disgusting, that makes Horace even perilously fascinating, so that the guardians of the public morals may well be thankful that for the young the approach to him is warded off by the formidable barriers of grammar and dictionary.
While Epicureanism thus generated, on the one hand, in men of the world laxity of moral principle and habit, on the other hand, in minds of a more contemplative cast, it *lapsed into atheism*. From otiose G.o.ds, careless of human affairs, the transition was natural to a belief in no G.o.ds. The universe which could preserve and govern itself, could certainly have sprung into uncaused existence; for the tendencies which, without a supervising power, maintain order in nature, continuity in change, ever-new life evolved from incessant death, must be inherent tendencies to combination, harmony, and organization, and thus may account for the origin of the system which they sustain and renew. This type of atheism has its most authentic exposition in the "De Rerum Natura" of Lucretius.
He does not, in so many words, deny the being of the G.o.ds,-he, indeed, speaks of them as leading restful lives, withdrawn from all care of mortal affairs; but he so scoffs at all practical recognition of them, and so jeers at the reverence and awe professed for them by the mult.i.tude, that we are constrained to regard them as rather the imagery of his verse than the objects of his faith. He maintains the past eternity of matter, which consists of atoms or monads of various forms. These, drifting about in s.p.a.ce, and impinging upon one another, by a series of happy chances, fell into orderly relations and close-fitting symmetries, whence, in succession, and by a necessity inherent in the primitive atoms, came organization, life, instinct, love, reason, wisdom. This poem has a peculiar value at the present day, as closely coincident in its cosmogony with one of the most recent phases of physical philosophy, and showing that what calls itself progress may be motion in a circle.
The *Stoics*, so called from a portico(19) adorned with magnificent paintings by Polygnotus, in which their doctrines were first taught, owe their origin to Zeno, who lived to a very great age, ill.u.s.trious for self-control, temperance, and the severest type of virtue, and at length, in accordance with a favorite dogma and practice of his school, when he found that he had before him only growing infirmity with no hope of restoration, terminated his life by his own hand.
According to the Stoic philosophy, *virtue is the sole end of life*, and virtue is the conformity of the will and conduct to universal nature.
Virtue alone is good; vice alone is evil; and whatever is neither virtue nor vice is neither good nor evil in itself, but is to be sought or shunned, according as it is auxiliary to virtue or conducive to vice,-if neither, to be regarded with utter indifference. Virtue is indivisible. It does not admit of degrees. He who only approximates to virtue, however closely, is yet to be regarded as outside of its pale. Only the wise man can be virtuous. He needs no precepts of duty. His intuitions are always to be trusted. His sense of right cannot be blinded or misled. As for those who do not occupy this high philosophic ground, though they cannot be really virtuous, they yet may present some show and semblance of virtue, and they may be aided in this by precepts and ethical instruction.(20) It was for the benefit of those who, on account of their lack of true wisdom, needed such direction, and were at the same time so well disposed as to receive and follow it, that treatises on practical morality were written by many of the later Stoics, and that in Rome there were teachers of this school who exercised functions closely a.n.a.logous to those of the Christian preacher and pastor.
Stoicism found *its most congenial soil* in the stern, hardy integrity and patriotism of those Romans, whose incorruptible virtue is the one redeeming feature of the declining days of the Republic and the effeminacy and coa.r.s.e depravity of the Empire. Seneca"s ethical writings(21) are almost Christian, not only in their faithful rebuke of every form of wrong, but in their tender humanity for the poor, the slaves, the victims of oppression, in their universal philanthropy, and in their precepts of patience under suffering, forbearance, forgiveness, and returning good for evil. Epictetus, the deformed slave of a capricious and cruel master, beaten and crippled in mere wantonness, enfranchised in his latter years, only to be driven into exile and to sound the lowest depths of poverty, exhibited a type of heroic virtue which has hardly been equalled, perhaps never transcended by a mere mortal; and though looking, as has been already said, to annihilation as the goal of life, he maintained a spirit so joyous, and has left in his writings so attractive a picture of a soul serenely and supremely happy, that he has given support and consolation to mult.i.tudes of the bravest and best disciples of the heaven-born religion, which he can have known-if at all-only through its slanderers and persecutors. Marcus Aurelius, in a kindred spirit, and under the even heavier burdens of a tottering empire, domestic dissensions, and defeat and disaster abroad, maintained the severest simplicity and purity of life, appropriated portions of his busiest days to devout contemplation, meditated constantly on death, and disciplined himself to regard with contempt alike the praise of flatterers and the contingency of posthumous fame. We have, especially in Nero"s reign, the record of not a few men and women of like spirit and character, whose lofty and impregnable virtue lacked only loving faith and undoubting trust in a fatherly Providence to a.s.similate them to the foremost among the Apostles and martyrs of the Christian Church.
*The Sceptical school of philosophy* claims in this connection a brief notice. Though so identified in common speech with the name of a single philosopher, that Pyrrhonism is a synonyme for Scepticism, it was much older than Pyrrho, and greatly outnumbered his avowed followers. It was held by the teachers of this school that objective truth is unattainable.
Not only do the perceptions and conceptions of different persons vary as to every object of knowledge; but the perceptions and conceptions of the same persons as to the same object vary at different times. Nay, more, at the same time one sense conveys impressions which another sense may negative, and not infrequently the reflective faculty negatives all the impressions derived from the senses, and forms a conception entirely unlike that which would have taken shape through the organs of sense. The soul that seeks to know, is thus in constant agitation. But happiness consists in imperturbableness of spirit, that is, in suspense of judgment; and as it is our duty to promote our own happiness, it is our duty to live without desire or fear, preference or abhorrence, love or hatred, in entire apathy,-a life of which Mohammed"s fabled coffin is the fittest symbol.
The *New Academy*, whose philosophy was a hybrid of Platonism and Pyrrhonism, while it denied the possibility of ascertaining objective truth, yet taught that on all subjects of speculative philosophy probability is attainable, and that, if the subject in hand be one which admits of being acted upon, it is the duty of the moral agent to act in accordance with probability,-to pursue the course in behalf of which the more and the better reasons can be given. There are moral acts and habits which seem to be in accordance with reason and the nature of things. We may be mistaken in thinking them so; yet the probability that they are so creates a moral obligation in their favor. The New Academy professed a hypothetical acquiescence in the ethics of the Peripatetic school, maintaining, therefore, that the mean between two extremes is probably in accordance with right and duty, and that virtue is probably man"s highest good, yet probably not sufficient in itself without the addition of exterior advantages.
*Cicero* considered himself as belonging to the New Academy. His instincts as an advocate, often induced by professional exigencies to deny what he had previously affirmed, made the scepticism of this school congenial to him; while his love of elegant ease and luxury and his lack of moral courage were in closer harmony with the practical ethics of the Peripatetics than with the more rigid system of the Stoics. At the same time, his pure moral taste and his sincere reverence for the right brought him into sympathy with the Stoic school. His "De Officiis" is an exposition of the Stoic system of ethics, though by the professed disciple of another philosophy. It is as if a Mohammedan, without disclaiming his own religion, should undertake an exposition of the ethics of Christianity, on the ground that, though Mohammed was a genuine prophet, there was, nevertheless, a higher and purer morality in the New Testament than in the Koran.
Chapter XV.
MODERN HISTORY OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY.
*For several centuries after the destruction of the Western Empire*, philosophy had hardly an existence except in its records, and these were preserved chiefly for their parchment, half-effaced, covered by what took the place of literature in the (so called) Dark Ages, and at length deciphered by such minute and wearisome toil as only mediaeval cloisters have ever furnished. For a long period, monasteries were the only schools, and in these the learned men of the day were, either successively or alternately, learners and teachers, whence the appellation of _Schoolmen_.
The learned men who bear this name were fond of casuistry, and discussed imagined and often impossible cases with great pains (their readers would have greater); but, so far as we know, they have left no systematic treatises on moral philosophy, and have transmitted no system that owes to them its distinguishing features. Yet we find among them a very broad division of opinion as to the ground of right. The fundamental position of the Stoics, that virtue is conformity to nature, and thus independent of express legislation,-not created by law, human or divine, but the source and origin of law,-had its champions, strong, but few; while the Augustinian theology, then almost universal, replaced Epicureanism in its denial of the intrinsic and indelible moral qualities of actions. The extreme Augustinians regarded the positive command of G.o.d as the sole cause and ground of right, so that the very things which are forbidden under the severest penalties would become virtuous and commendable, if enjoined by Divine authority. William of Ockham, one of the most ill.u.s.trious of the English Schoolmen, wrote: "If G.o.d commanded his creatures to hate himself, the hatred of G.o.d would be the duty of man."
The *earliest modern* theory of morals that presented striking peculiarities was that of *Hobbes* (A. D. 1588-1679), who was indebted solely to the stress of his time, alike for his system and for whatever slender following it may have had. He was from childhood a staunch royalist, was shortly after leaving the University the tutor of a loyal n.o.bleman, and, afterward, of Charles II. during the early years of his exile; and the parliamentary and Puritan outrages seemed to him to be aimed at all that was august and reverend, and adapted to overturn society, revert progress, and crush civilization. According to him, men are by nature one another"s enemies, and can be restrained from internecine hostility only by force or fear. An instinctive perception of this truth in the infancy of society gave rise to monarchical and absolute forms of government; for only by thus centralizing and ma.s.sing power, which could be directed against any disturber of the peace, could the individual members of society hold property or life in safety. The king thus reigns by right of human necessity, and obedience to him and to const.i.tuted authorities under him is man"s whole duty, and the sum of virtue. Might creates right. Conscience is but another name for the fear of punishment. The intimate connection of religion with civil freedom in the English Commonwealth no doubt went far in uprooting in Hobbes all religious faith; and while he did not openly attack Christianity, he maintained the duty of entire conformity to the monarch"s religion, whatever it might be, which is of course tantamount to the denial of objective religious truth.(22)
Hobbes may fairly be regarded as *the father of modern ethical philosophy*,-not that he had children after his own likeness; but his speculations were so revolting equally to thinking and to serious men, as to arouse inquiry and stimulate mental activity in a department previously neglected.
The gauntlet thus thrown down by Hobbes was taken up by *Cudworth* (A. D.
1617-1688), the most learned man of his time, whose "Intellectual System of the Universe" is a prodigy of erudition,-a work in which his own thought is so blocked up with quotations, authorities, and ma.s.ses of recondite lore, that it is hardly possible to trace the windings of the river for the debris of auriferous rocks that obstruct its flow. The treatise with which we are concerned is that on "Eternal and Immutable Morality." In this he maintains that the right exists, independently of all authority, by the very nature of things, in co-eternity with the Supreme Being. So far is he from admitting the possibility of any dissiliency between the Divine will and absolute right, that he turns the tables on his opponents, and cla.s.ses among Atheists those of his contemporaries who maintain that G.o.d can command what is contrary to the intrinsic right; that He has no inclination to the good of his creatures; that He can justly doom an innocent being to eternal torments; or that whatever G.o.d wills is just because He wills it.
*Samuel Clarke* (A. D. 1675-1729) followed Cudworth in the same line of thought. He was, it is believed, the first writer who employed the term _fitness_ as defining the ground of the immutable and eternal right, though the idea of fitness necessarily underlies every system or theory that a.s.signs to virtue intrinsic validity.
*Shaftesbury* (A. D. 1671-1713) represents virtue as residing, not in the nature or relations of things, but in the bearing of actions on the welfare or happiness of beings other than the actor. Benevolence const.i.tutes virtue; and the merit of the action and of the actor is determined by the degree in which particular affections are merged in general philanthropy, and reference is had, not to individual beneficiaries or benefits, but to the whole system of things of which the actor forms a part. The affections from which such acts spring commend themselves to the moral sense, and are of necessity objects of esteem and love. But the moral sense takes cognizance of the affections only, not of the acts themselves; and as the conventional standard of the desirable and the useful varies with race, time, and culture, the acts which the affections prompt, and which therefore are virtuous, may be in one age or country such as the people of another century or land may repudiate with loathing. Las Casas, in introducing negro slavery into America, with the fervently benevolent purpose of relieving the hardships of the feeble and overtasked aborigines, performed, according to this theory, a virtuous act; but had he once considered the question of intrinsic right or natural fitness, a name so worthily honored would never have been a.s.sociated with the foulest crime of modern civilization.
According to *Adam Smith* (A. D. 1723-1790), moral distinctions depend wholly on sympathy. We approve in others what corresponds to our own tastes and habits; we disapprove whatever is opposed to them. As to our own conduct, "we suppose ourselves," he writes, "the spectators of our own behavior, and endeavor to imagine what effect it would in this light produce in us." Our sense of duty is derived wholly from our thus putting ourselves in the place of others, and inquiring what they would approve in us. Conscience, then, is a collective and corporate, not an individual faculty. It is created by the prevalent opinions of the community.
Solitary virtue there cannot be; for without sympathy there is no self-approval. By parity of reason, the duty of the individual can never transcend the average conscience of the community. This theory describes society as it is, not as it ought to be. We are, to a sad degree, conventional in our practice, much more so than in our beliefs; but it is the part of true manliness to have the conscience an interior, not an external organ, to form and actualize notions of right and duty for one"s self, and to stand and walk alone, if need there be, as there manifestly is in not a few critical moments, and as there is not infrequently in the inward experience of every man who means to do his duty.
*Butler* (A. D. 1692-1752), in his "Ethical Discourses," aims mainly and successfully to demonstrate the rightful supremacy of conscience. His favorite conception is of the human being as himself a household [_an economy_],-the various propensities, appet.i.tes, pa.s.sions, and affections, the members,-Conscience, the head, recognized as such by all, so that there is, when her sovereignty is owned, an inward repose and satisfaction; when she is disobeyed, a sense of discord and rebellion, of unrest and disturbance. This is sound and indisputable, and it cannot be more clearly stated or more vividly ill.u.s.trated than by Butler; but he manifestly regards conscience as legislator no less than judge, and thus fails to recognize any objective standard of right. It is evident that on his ground there is no criterion by which honestly erroneous moral judgments can be revised, or by which a discrimination can be made between the results of education or involuntary prejudice, and the right as determined by the nature of things and the standard of intrinsic fitness.
Of all modern ethical writers since the time of Cudworth and Clarke, none so much as approaches the position occupied by *Richard Price* (A. D.
1723-1791), a London dissenting divine, a warm advocate of American independence, and the intimate friend of John Adams. He maintained that right and wrong are inherent and necessary, immutable and eternal characteristics, not dependent on will or command, but on the intrinsic nature of the act, and determined with unerring accuracy by conscience, whenever the nature of the case is clearly known. "Morality," he writes, "is fixed on an immovable basis, and appears not to be in any sense fact.i.tious, or the arbitrary production of any power, human or divine; but equally everlasting and necessary with all truth and reason." "Virtue is of intrinsic value and of indispensable obligation; not the creature of will, but necessary and immutable; not local and temporary, but of equal extent and antiquity with the Divine mind; not dependent on power, but the guide of all power."(23)
*Paley* (A. D. 1743-1805) gives a definition of virtue, remarkable for its combination of three partial theories. Virtue, according to him, is "the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of G.o.d, and for the sake of everlasting happiness." Of this definition it may be said, 1. The doing good to mankind is indeed virtue; but it is by no means the whole of virtue. 2. Obedience to the will of G.o.d is our duty; but it is so, because his will must of necessity be in accordance with the fitting and right.
Could we conceive of Omnipotence commanding what is intrinsically unfit and wrong, the virtuous man would not be the G.o.d-server, but the Prometheus suffering the implacable vengeance of an unrighteous Deity. 3.
Though everlasting happiness be the result of virtue, it is not the ground or the reason for it. Were our being earth-limited, virtue would lose none of its obligation. Epictetus led as virtuous a life as if heaven had been open to his faith and hope.-Paley"s system may be described in detail as Shaftesbury"s, with an external washing of Christianity; Shaftesbury having been what was called a free-thinker, while Paley was a sincere believer in the Christian revelation, and contributed largely and efficiently to the defence of Christianity and the ill.u.s.tration of its records. The chief merit of Paley"s treatise on Moral Philosophy is that it clearly and emphatically recognizes the Divine authority of the moral teachings of the New Testament, though in expounding them the author too frequently dilutes them by considerations of expediency.
*Jeremy Bentham* (A. D. 1747-1832) is Paley _minus_ Christianity. The greatest good of the greatest number is, according to him, the aim and criterion of virtue. Moral rules should be constructed with this sole end; and this should be the pervading purpose of all legislation. Bentham"s works are very voluminous, and they cover, wisely and well, almost every department of domestic, social, public, and national life. The worst that can be said of his political writings is that they are in advance of the age,-literally Utopian;(24) for it would be well with the country which was prepared to embody his views. But, unfortunately, his principles have no power of self-realization. They are like a watch, perfect in all other parts, but without the mainspring. Bentham contemplates the individual man as an agency, rather than as an intellectual and moral integer. He must work under yoke and harness for ends vast and remote, beyond the appreciation of ordinary mortals; and he must hold all partial affections and nearer aims subordinate to rules deduced by sages and legislators from considerations of general utility. Bentham"s influence on legislation, especially on criminal law, has been beneficially felt on both sides of the Atlantic. In the department of pure ethics, there are no essential points of difference between him and other writers of the utilitarian school.(25)
In *France* there has been a large preponderance of sensualism, expediency, and selfishness in the ethical systems that have had the most extensive currency. There was a great deal of elaborate ethical speculation and theory among the French philosophers of the last century; but among them we cannot recall a single writer who maintained a higher ground than Bentham, except that Rousseau-perhaps the most immoral of them all-who was an Epicurean so far as he had any philosophy, sometimes soars in sentimental rhapsodies about the intrinsic beauty and loveliness of a virtue which he knew only by name.
*Malebranche* (A. D. 1638-1714), whose princ.i.p.al writings belong to the previous century, represents entirely opposite views and tendencies. He hardly differs from Samuel Clarke, except in phraseology. He resolves virtue into love of the universal order, and conformity to it in conduct.
This order requires that we should prize and love all beings and objects in proportion to their relative worth, and that we should recognize this relative worth in our rules and habits of life. Thus man is to be more highly valued and more a.s.siduously served than the lower animals, because worth more; and G.o.d is to be loved infinitely more than man, and to be always obeyed and served in preference to man, because he is worth immeasurably more than the beings that derive their existence from him.
Malebranche ascribes to the Supreme Being, not the arbitrary exercise of power in const.i.tuting the right, but recognition, in his government of the world and in his revealed will, of the order, which is man"s sole law.
"Sovereign princes," he says, "have no right to use their authority without reason. Even G.o.d has no such miserable right."
At nearly the same period commenced the ethical controversy between *Fenelon* (A. D. 1651-1715) and *Bossuet* (A. D. 1627-1704), as to the possibility and obligation of disinterested virtue. Fenelon and the Quietists, who sympathized with him, maintained that the pure love of G.o.d, without any self-reference, or regard for one"s own well-being either here or here-after, is the goal and the test of human perfection, and that nothing below this-nothing which aims or aspires at anything less than this-deserves the name of virtue. Bossuet defended the selfish theory of virtue, attacked his amiable antagonist with unconscionable severity and bitterness, and succeeded in obtaining from the court of Rome-though against the wishes of the Pope-the condemnation of the obnoxious tenet.
The Pope remarked, with well-turned ant.i.thesis, that Fenelon might have erred from excess in the love of G.o.d, while Bossuet had sinned by defect in the love of his neighbor.