consists in benevolence, and nothing can more deserve the name of perfection.

The moral theory of Hutcheson discloses conflicting elements which he laboured, but laboured in vain, to reconcile. If the moral sense be merely a "sensible pleasure" arising on the contemplation of certain actions, it can lay no claim to universality. It may vary, as Hutcheson sometimes admits, with different persons, and therefore cannot be, in itself, a criterion of right and wrong. The pleasure which it imparts can be only one pleasure among many; it may be more enduring; it may or may not be the stronger; but as a mere subjective feeling it can have no rightful authority over our lives. Yet the rightful supremacy of the moral sense, or the moral faculty, as Hutcheson occasionally calls it, is asserted by him as by Butler. The feeling of pleasure is thus translated into an authoritative judgment, approving moral excellence. Again, while the moral sense is represented as a power which should direct and control all our actions, Hutcheson rejects the idea that the pleasure of the individual can be the incitement to virtue, which must spring, he says, from an entirely different principle of action from interest or self-love. His test of immediate pleasure therefore breaks down, and he is compelled, as in his analysis of the beautiful, to seek an objective criterion. He finds this, as we have seen, in Benevolence.

In his zeal for benevolence, he represents this as the sole object of moral approbation. Yet his scheme of life includes duties to self and to God; and how is it possible to bring these under benevolence, defined as a

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disinterested desire for the happiness of others? seems to be only by an illusion that love and gratitude to the supreme Being can be brought under the rule of benevolence, since, Hutcheson says, "our actions cannot possibly be of any advantage or hurt to Him." Benevolence has changed its character when it is used so widely as to include religion. In consistency also, Hutcheson should enjoin the pursuit of the happiness of self only as a means towards the happiness of others. When he tells us, further, that each individual may be an object of his own benevolence, he is simply stretching the meaning of the word. His "universal calm benevolence" turns out in the end to be a desire for the preservation and perfection of a cosmic system in which our individual happiness, and the happiness of all other sensitive beings, are bound up.

So far from being based on immediate feeling, this calm goodwill requires the exercise of reason in calculating the consequences of our actions. At this point there is much in Hutcheson to remind us of the later theories of Utilitarianism of which he was the precursor. Yet there are distinctive features which merit attention. He did not attempt the impossible feat of combining, with his criterion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, the doctrine that each individual can desire only his own happiness. He did not seek to derive benevolence, by any alchemy of association, from self-interest, but held disinterested affections, defective as they often are, to be among the primitive possessions of the race. He points, not to the actual consequences of what is done, but to the spirit and intention of our actions as the object of

moral approval. Still, in framing general rules for the conduct of life, he takes into consideration the consequences which a good man may be expected to foresee. His distinction between an action as "formally good," or flowing from good affections, and as "materially good," or tending in actual fact to the interest of the system of which each forms a part, anticipates a similar distinction taken by Mill between the worth of the agent and the morality of the action. He thus opens up questions which have been discussed in connection with the Utilitarianism of later times. Without entering here on so wide a controversy, it may be remarked that Hutcheson had a very imperfect idea of the difficulties of the Greatest Happiness principle. His derivation of justice, and of personal rights generally, rests on the statement that such rights tend to the public good; but his formula of the greatest happiness does not in itself recognise individuals as possessed of equal rights, nor would the ends of justice be served if each were supposed to be entitled to an equal share of happiness. A still more fundamental question is whether happiness, which he defines as "pleasant sensation of any kind, or a continued state of such sensations," is to be taken as the end. There are passages, especially in the later writings, which show a tendency to pass beyond the limits of hedonism. But the step was never decisively taken, and thus the moral philosophy of Hutcheson lends colour to the remark of Schleiermacher, that "the English school of Shaftesbury, with all their talk about virtue, are really given up to pleasure." Though a student of Aristotle, he never fully appreciated the

view of that great thinker that not the variable element of pleasure alone, but the full and harmonious exercise of faculty, with pleasure as its accompaniment, is the end of action.

Hutcheson's Metaphysical Synopsis is chiefly interesting as a specimen of such teaching in his time. He follows the traditional method of instruction so far as to divide his subject into Ontology and Pneumatology. In treating of Being in the first part of his book, he adopts the current theory that all our knowledge, whether through sensation or consciousness, is of ideas, though we are forced by nature to regard some of these as images or representations of external things. Rejecting innate ideas, in the sense of axioms known to the mind from birth, he admits the existence of self-evident and immutable truths, and among these he mentions the logical laws and the mutual implication of substance and quality. The idea of Being is described as the simplest and most abstract of all our ideas. He occupies himself largely, in the scholastic manner, with distinctions which may be drawn between the principal aspects of reality. He believes the nature of substance, whether mental or material, to be unknown to us, though we may form some obscure idea of it as the substrate of qualities. In the second part, he divides the faculties of the human mind into Intellect and Will. He follows Locke in distinguishing between primary and secondary qualities of matter, a distinction which we shall find recurring again and again in the history of Scottish philosophy. Though still maintaining that we cannot know the ultimate nature of things, he

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holds that the soul is a thinking being, and, as such, different from the body, since different qualities demonstrate different substances. He contrasts the unity and simplicity of the self with body as an aggregate made up of diverse parts. From the simplicity of the soul he concludes that it is not generated like the body, and does not, like it, perish by dissolution. Its duration after death depends upon the will of God. We have a probable hope that the soul will survive the body, because all men desire immortality, and the administration of the world by a just and benevolent God seems to require it. It is incredible, he thinks, that God should have endowed man with this desire if it be vain and worthless. the third part, he rejects the Cartesian demonstration of the existence of God, and dwells on the argument from design. Throughout his writings he takes the brightest view of the constitution of human nature and of the universe. Ideas of a God arise naturally in the mind from the evidences of design, and the moral faculty declares that God espouses the cause of virtue and universal happiness. From the benevolence of God, he argues-ignoring the circle-that the world. is constituted in the best possible way, and he suggests with easy-going optimism that some evils may be so connected with the means of attaining the supreme good that Omnipotence cannot dispense with them.

"The never-to-be-forgotten Hutcheson," as Adam Smith called him, has fallen dim nowadays, and his books, once widely known on the Continent as well as in Great Britain, are rarely read. But the importance of his influence on later thought is not to be denied.