the general principle; the principle explains the event; and their unanimity authorizes us to believe that we must be right, since, proceed as we may, the conclusion is the same; and the inductive plan, of striking averages, harmonizes with the deductive plan, of reasoning from ideas.

But, in the study of morals there is no such harmony. Partly from the force of prejudice, and partly from the complexity of the subject, all attempts at a scientific investigation of morals have failed. It is not, therefore, surprising that, in this field, the inductive inquirer arrives at one conclusion, and the deductive inquirer at another. The inductive inquirer endeavours to attain his object by observing the actions of men, and subjecting them to analysis, in order to learn the principles which regulate them. The deductive inquirer, beginning at the other end, assumes certain principles as original, and reasons from them to the facts which actually appear in the world. The former proceeds from the concrete to the abstract; the latter, from the abstract to the concrete. The inductive moralist looks at the history of past society, or at the condition of the present, and takes for granted that the first step is, to assemble the facts, and then to generalize them. The deductive inquirer, using the facts rather to illustrate his principles, than to suggest them, appeals, in the first place, not to external facts, but to internal ideas, and he makes those ideas the major premiss of a syllogistic argument. Both parties agree, that we have the power of judging some actions to be right, and others to be wrong. But as to how we get that power, and as to what that power is, they are at utter variance. The inductive philosopher says, that its object is happiness, that we get it by association, and that it is due to the action and reaction of social causes, which are susceptible of analysis. The deductive philosopher says, that this power of distinguishing between right and wrong, aims, not at happiness, but at truth; that it is inherent, that it cannot be analyzed, that it is a primary conviction, and that we may assume it and

reason from it, but can never hope to explain it by reasoning to it.

It requires but a slight acquaintance with the works of Hutcheson to see that he belongs to the latter of these two schools. He assumes, that all men have what he terms a moral faculty, which, being an original principle, does not admit of analysis.28 He further assumes, that the business of this faculty is to regulate all our powers. 29 From these two assumptions, he reasons downwards to the visible facts of our conduct, and deductively constructs the general scheme of life. His plan being entirely synthetic, he depreciates the analytic method, and complains of it as an artful attempt to diminish the number of our perceptive powers.30 The truth is, that every such diminution would have taken away some of his original principles, and would thereby have prevented him from using them as the major premisses of separate arguments. And if you deprive a deductive reasoner of his major premisses, you leave him nothing on which to stand. Hutcheson, therefore, like all the philosophers of his school, was extremely jealous of the invasions of the inductive spirit, with its constant tendency to attack convictions supposed to be primary, and seek to resolve them into their elements. He repulsed such encroachments upon his major premisses, because the power and beauty of his method were displayed in reasoning from the premisses, and not in reasoning to them. According to him, the moral faculty, and the authority which it exercised, were impervious to analysis; it was impossible to track them higher, or to resolve them into simpler constituents; and it was in vain that many attempted to refer them to cir

28 In his Moral Philosophy, vol. i. p. 52, he calls it "an original determination or sense in our nature, not capable of being referred to other powers of perception."

29"This moral sense from its very nature appears to be designed for regulating and controlling all our powers." Hutcheson's Moral Philosophy, vol. i. p. 61.

30 See, in his Moral Philosophy, vol. i. p. 79, his complaint against those who "would reduce all our perceptive powers to a very small number, by one artful reference or another."

cumstances external to themselves, such as education, custom, or the association of ideas.3í

Hence, the judgments which men pass upon the conduct of others, or of themselves, are, in their origin, altogether inexplicable; each judgment being merely a different form of one great moral faculty. Inasmuch, however, as that faculty escapes observation, and is only known by its results, it is evident that, for all purposes of reasoning, the judgments must be deemed primary, and arguments are to be constructed from them, as if they were the ultimate and highest conditions ef our nature. In this way, Hutcheson was led to that love of multiplying original principles, which Sir James Mackintosh has justly noticed as a characteristic of his philosophy, and, after him, of the Scotch philosophy in general;32 though the distinguished author of this remark has failed to perceive that such characteristic was but a single part of a far larger scheme, and was intimately connected with those habits of deductive thought which a long train of preceding circumstances had indelibly imprinted on the Scotch mind.

In Hutcheson, the tendency was so strong, as to make him believe, that, by arguing from a certain number of original principles, he could construct the theory and explain the march of human affairs, with little or no aid from the experience of the past, or, indeed, of the present. His views, for instance, respecting the nature and objects of legislation, criminal, as well as civil, might have been written by a recluse who had never quitted his hermitage, and whose purity was still unsoiled by the realities of the world. Starting from the so-called nature of things, his first steps were ideal, and from them

31

""Tis in vain here to alledge instruction, education, custom, or association of ideas, as the original of moral approbation." Hutcheson's Moral Philosophy, vol. i. p. 57. Compare his work on Beauty and Virtue, p. 84.

32To him may also be ascribed that proneness to multiply ultimate and original principles in human nature, which characterized the Scottish School till the second extinction of a passion for metaphysical speculation in Scotland." Mackintosh's Dissertation on Ethical Philosphy, edit. Whewell, Edinburgh, 1837, p. 208.

he sought to advance to the actual. In his account of the duties of life, as they existed before the power of government was consolidated, he quotes no evidence to show what really happened among barbarous tribes who were in that state; but he contents himself with deductive inferences from the principles he had previously laid down.33 Difficult questions relating to the laws of property, are treated in the same manner; that is to say, the conclusions respecting them are arrived at on speculative grounds, and not by comparing how the different enactments have worked in different countries.34 Experience is either shut out, or made subordinate to theory; and facts are adduced to illustrate the inference, but not to suggest it. So, too, the proper relation between the people and their rulers, and the amount of liberty which the people should possess, instead of being inductively generalized from an historical inquiry into the circumstances which had produced most happiness, might, in the opinion of Hutcheson, be ascertained by reasoning from the nature of government, and from the ends for which it was instituted.35

The next great attempt to study the actions of men scientifically, and to generalize the principles of their conduct without the intervention of supernatural ideas, was made by Adam Smith, who, in 1759, published his Theory of Moral Sentiments, and, in 1776, his Wealth of Nations. To understand the philosophy of this, by far the greatest of all the Scotch thinkers, both works must be taken together, and considered as one; since they are, in reality, the two divisions of a single subject.

33 See his ingenious chapter, entitled "A deduction of the more special laws of nature and duties of life, previous to civil government, and other adventitious states." Moral Philosophy, vol. i. p. 227; and compare vol. ii. pp. 294-309, “ How civil power is acquired.”

34 See, for example, his remarks on "the right of possession." Moral Philosophy, vol. i. p. 344; on "rights by mortgage," p. 350; and on inheritance, p. 356.

35 In his Moral Philosophy, vol. ii. pp. 346, 347, he sums up a long argument on "the nature of civil laws," by saying: "Thus the general duties of magistrates and subjects are discoverable from the nature of the trust committed to them, and the end of all civil power."

In the Moral Sentiments, he investigates the sympathetic part of human nature; in the Wealth of Nations, he investigates its selfish part. And as all of us are sympathetic as well as selfish; in other words, as all of us look without as well as within, and as this classification is a primary and exhaustive division of our motives to action, it is evident, that if Adam Smith had completely accomplished his vast design, he would at once have raised the study of human nature to a science, leaving nothing for subsequent inquirers except to ascertain the minor springs of affairs, all of which would find their place in this general scheme, and be deemed subordinate to it. In his attempt to perform this prodigious task, and to traverse the enormous field which he saw lying before him, he soon perceived that an inductive investigation was impossible, because it would require the labour of many lives even to assemble the materials from which the generalization was to be made. Moved by this reflection, and, probably, moved still more by the intellectual habits which prevailed around him, he resolved on adopting the deductive method instead of the inductive; but, in seeking for the premisses from which he was to reason, and on which his structure was to be built, he resorted to a peculiar artifice, which is perfectly valid, and which he had an undoubted right to employ, though, to make it available, requires such delicate tact, and involves so many refinements, that extremely few writers have used it with effect on social questions, either before or since.

The plan to which I allude is, that when any subject becomes unmanageable by the inductive method, whether from the impossibility of experimenting upon it, or from its extreme natural complexity, or from the presence of immense and bewildering details collected around it, we may, in all such cases, make an imaginary separation of inseparable facts; and reason upon trains of events which have no real and independent existence, and which are nowhere to be found except in the mind of the inquirer. A result obtained in this way, cannot

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