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$35. Equity and Mercy.

this makes equity a more strict justice than can be contained in any law or set of laws; equity added to law and correcting it will exhaust justice and reach its full limits; but in this way equity is not opposed to justice, but is justice itself opposed to law. Law, which is founded on and aims at effectuating justice, will always have equity beyond it, as its ideal, and will be constantly incorporating with itself principles and maxims which before belonged only to equity; as we see has been the case with our English law, where there is a system of equity as strict and defined in its minutia as the original or Common law itself, where in fact what once was equity is now law, and has a further equity beyond it yet to reach.

2. But Mercy goes beyond not law only but equity also; it is not however on this account more just than justice, but it is justice of the highest kind. When Aristotle adds the characteristics of remembering past benefits rather than injuries against the opponent, and of being willing to endure injustice at his hands, he speaks of what belongs to mercy rather than to equity. But how is this to be explained; what is mercy; and how can it be said to be justice of the highest kind? It has been shown that there is a justice in three kinds of emotion, in those of sympathy, antipathy, and of the comparison of having. Now equity does not travel beyond the kind of emotion to which the action originally belongs; for instance, if the parties are allies, as buyer and seller, or if they are enemies, or if they are friends. Each relation has its own justice, and the corresponding equity consists in taking all the circumstances of the relationship into account, and exhausting or completing the justice arising out of

that relationship. But mercy consists in the injured party, for it is not possible to the other, carrying up the kind of equity or of justice into the next higher kind, and treating the enemy as if he were an ally, the ally as if he were a friend. The highest and greatest mercy is the justice of Love; and mercy does not cease to be justice, nor is it opposed to justice simply, but to the justice of a lower relationship. It follows that there is no tribunal which can enforce or command mercy; but mercy is commanded and enforced solely by the moral and spiritual law, the law of conscience. The enforcement of supposed acts of mercy or of love would be to destroy the very character which gives them their validity. If a superior tribunal could enforce them, a superior tribunal could destroy them. Their supreme validity consists in their being themselves supreme, a free gift not enforced. The condemnation which we pass on those who are not merciful consists in this, that their hearts are not open to the charm of love under circumstances which are most powerful to call forth that feeling. Hence the guilt of the servant in the parable: "O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me: Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellow-servant, even as I had pity on thee?" And the servant is not punished for refusing to show mercy, but is dealt with in that relationship of justice in which he himself had chosen to stand.

§ 36. Justice is combined with love in the manner which has been shown; but from its combination with anger there arises an emotion of a special kind, Indignation, the véos of Aristotle, Rhet. ii. 9. Indignation is the justice of anger, and arises when

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$ 35. Equity and Mercy.

$36. Indignation.

Book I. CH. II. PART IV.

$ 36. Indignation.

§ 37. The Moral Sense.

we see or experience injustice, or injury that is not merited; and again, in emotions of the comparison of having, when we see any one enjoying honour or goodfortune which is not deserved by him, or not suitable to his real nature or qualities, and also on the other hand when we see any one deprived, or are deprived ourselves, of the honour or fortune which we think is our just due. Aristotle distinguishes νέμεσις from φθόνος, and Plato had already declared of of God, in the Timæus, xxix. E, —άyalòs nv, άɣală dè οὐδεὶς περὶ οὐδένος οὐδέποτε ἐγγίγνεται φθόνος, but among the Greeks Négeois was the constant attendant on the Gods. This side of justice, its combination with anger, was most constantly in their minds as a divine attribute. With Christianity, however, became more prevalent the representation of God by the other mode of combination of justice, namely with love, the result of which is mercy. The two attributes need not be conceived as equally essential to the nature of God, but indignation will last so long as injustice, mercy so long as love. If all injustice were abolished, so also would be indignation; and then, in an ideal state, we may conceive that only the highest kind of justice, that of love, will remain.

§ 37. 1. No part of ethical enquiry has received more attention, in modern times, than Conscience or the Moral Sense; it has been the pivot upon which everything turned, at once the starting point and the goal of investigation. It has seemed that, if this were known and analysed, the whole theory of the matter would be clear. It has been to modern ethic what the conception of End, réλos, the completion or goal of which was Happiness, sidapovía, the Summum Bonum, was to ancient ethic. The difference between

the two central conceptions comprised several points; 1st, the new conception involved a change from an objective to a subjective point of view, from habits,

s, characters, and circumstances gratifying them, to emotions and thoughts, thus making the agent himself the inappealable tribunal of action; 2nd, it involved a conception of Duty or obligation compelling or binding, instead of a Happiness attracting, the will; 3rd, it placed the criterion of goodness at the beginning instead of at the end of action, making the judgment intuitive instead of tentative; and 4th, it rested on an analysis which took account of newly discovered facts of consciousness, facts at any rate not attended to before as of so much importance, and

figuratively speaking deeper, as if evolved from a greater depth. The last point contained the cause of the passing from the one view to the other. Certain emotions had received a new intensity for some minds, and in their lower degrees of intensity had become sensible to a greater number of minds; the terms expressing them had become current, and questions connected with them had become more widely interesting. These emotions belonged to the domain of religion; and the relations of man to the unseen world of religious objects had become more clear and more complicated, coordinately and simultaneously with the intensifying the corresponding emotions. Hence an entire Theology arose, the nature and functions of the actors in which were conceived by analogy with, and described in terms drawn from, the temporal sovereignty and its ministers, in their administrative and judicial functions. The emotions of remorse and of self-approval, when supposed to be ratified by an all-seeing and all-powerful judge, of

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whose verdict these emotions themselves were but the echo in the human heart, became of an interest far greater than any state of happiness, not depending on these, that could be pictured, however reasonable or complete. That might be dispensed with; these were inevitable, and inevitable the misery or the blessedness which they involved. It seemed trifling to be occupied with the interests of a life even of virtue and of intellectual pleasures, and with questions as to what constituted or would secure them, when eternity with its infinities of bliss or of agony, and of physical as the consequence of mental suffering or delight, had commingled with time, and taken up the brief period of mortal life into its bosom, as a pool upon the shore is mingled with the waters of a measureless ocean.

2. Such is a very brief history of the course of thought which effected the change from the old conception to the new, abstracting, as it will be seen, from the various events, classes of men, and schools of thought, which were the organs or instruments of the change; the reconciliation of which conceptions, and their incorporation into a single system, is one of the chief problems of ethic at the present time. Let us see, therefore, what is the analysis of the Moral Sense. The means and materials are at hand in the analysis which has been conducted up to the present point. Justice is the emotion which depends upon the congruity of two moments or objects in comparison, as compared; it arises, then, from the formal element in consciousness; but all possible moments or objects of comparison have also qualities for feeling, a material element which in all its kinds has pleasure or pain of enjoyment. The emotions be