research, who gave them this power, and from what luminary do they receive their beams? From the necessary forms of thought; from an antecedent reason, ever evolving itself in history, poetry, philosophy; in all the principles of taste and beauty that reign over sculpture, painting, and the other arts-the aesthetics of the soul-which exist as truly there as did music in the infant Mozart, long ere, beguiled by some mysterious power, he sang his Requiem, and was borne on its melting strains, while its echoes were floating around him, away into "the valley of the shadow of death."

proceeding to the heart, of necessity must there either help or hinder the motion which is called vital; when it helpeth, it is called delight, conmotion about the heart, as conception is nothing tentment, or pleasure, which is nothing really but but motion in the head, and the objects that cause it are called pleasant or delightful, &c. The same delight, with reference to the object, is called love: but when such motion weakeneth or hindereth the vital motion, then it is called pain, and in relation to that which causeth it, hatred, &c. which pleaseth and is delightful to himself, good, Every man, for his own part, calleth that and that evil which displeaseth him; insomuch that while every inan differeth from other in constitution, they differ also from one another concerning the common distinction of good and evil. Hobbes, we see, inverts this order, or Nor is there any such thing as absolute goodness rather will know nothing about it, and considered without relation; for even the goodthus is evidently pocketing the" counters" ness which we apprehend in God Almighty is His goodness to us."-Human Nature, ch. vii. and letting the gold slip through his fingers. In every instance in which our pri- The way to support this theory-one demary beliefs are denied, the grandest pro-structive of all morality--is to disregard vince of truth is struck out of the chart of the most solemn convictions of the mind, knowledge, and man is reduced to a state to dwell on the lower passions and on the of dependence upon " seemings" and "ap-variety of outward objects which men purparitions." sue in life. A little deeper insight into

From speech, the invention of letters, the matter would exhume some common and reasoning-under all of which heads principles of right and wrong, even from there are many admirable observations the dregs of society. It has happened in in connexion with "the powers cogni- this question as in languages. By marking tive"-the course of analysis leads to only their diversities, comparative philothe interior beginnings of voluntary mo-logy did not grow, and the brotherhood of tions, commonly called the passions, and tongues was unknown. Thus also the the speeches by which they are expressed." seeming contradictions of some moral prinThe school to which Hobbes belonged, ciple or law in the varying customs of naand his favorite doctrine of motion, may tions, have been aggravated; without at all lead us to expect a somewhat mechanical inquiring into the extent to which superstiaccount of love, hate, good, evil, aversion, tion, &c., may modify an original sentiand desire, with all other affections and ment. Most of the phenomena in this qualities of a similar description. In these perverted form attest a religious sensibilie some of the deepest springs of moral feeling. The whole character of ethical science depends on the source to which we trace the emotions. There can be only two views of good and evil. The one, that moral qualities are immutable; constituting the perfection of the Deity, lying at the basis of his laws, and imposing unalterable obligations on his intelligent creatures; the other, that no such qualities exist and no such obligations, that objects are merely pleasurable or painful, and that good and evil are consequently as variable as the appetites of men. The latter is the doctrine we are taught throughout these volumes.

"In the eighth section of the second chapter is showed, that conceptions and apparitions are nothing really but motion in some internal substance of the head; which motion not stopping there, but

lity, which has been spoiled by craft and sin; and thus rest at length on the very law which is asserted not to exist. Let phenomenal diversity be given up for an inquiry into the fountain of good and evil, right and wrong, noble and ignoble, kind and unkind, benevolent and malicious, truth and falsehood; and, allowance being made for a diseased state of feeling, as for bad health amidst malaria, it will be found that these judgments imply antecedent susceptibilities of moral discrimination, partially or more fully developed in all, without which man would never have advanced beyond the mere elementary distinctions of pleasure and pain. The word ought would never have existed.

When goodness is thus reduced to anything whatever for which a man has an inclination, it will be no matter of surprise

that the will should be arranged under the category of appetite. The reader's own consciousness will tell him whether or not his volitions are regulative of his desires, or whether they are one and the same affection of the mind.

"In deliberation, the last appetite or aversion immediately adhering to the action, or to the omission thereof, is that we call the will; the act (not the faculty) of willing. And beasts that have deliberation, must necessarily also have will... Will, therefore, is the last appetite in deliberating."-Leviathan, Pt. I., ch. vi.

"Man can have no passion, or appetite to anything of which appetite God's will is not the cause."-Leviathan, Pt. II., ch. xxi.

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sions are not called voluntary; for they proceed 'Appetite, fear, hope, and the rest of the pasnot from but are the will, and the will is not voluntary: for a man can no more say he will will, than he will will will, and so make an infinite repetition of the word will, which is absurd and insignificant.”—Human Nature, ch. xii.

If any, therefore, ask what is meant by the use of the term voluntary, it is merely "freedom from impediment" in the performance of what is thus necessarily chosen; and, in this manner, liberty and necessity of action unite precisely as in a stream of water that flows in a falling channel. The illustrations which he employs are mostly of this kind, and reduce the freedom of man to the very same law as that of an atmospheric railroad-irresistible impulse behind, and a vacuum in front.

Any such faculty he denies, and has, therefore, very properly conferred a will on beasts; who, if it be what he says, have as sound a claim to such dignity as Socrates or Saint Paul. Suppose, now, the tenth commandment to condemn a man's habit of feeling, and that, after a severe struggle, he triamphs over his propensities; this stern authority of conscience, according to the definition here given, becomes identical The great difficulty which perplexes rein kind with the base appetite which it re-ligious necessitarians, is to elucidate the strains. The essential distinction between ultimate distinction between physical and good and evil being denied, he merely sub-metaphysical necessity, and consequently to stitutes one pleasure for another. Such, explain the nature of morality, and the and with such abuse of language, is the reading of the inmost thoughts that Hobbes and his followers would pass off upon us for a profound analysis of the interior beginnings of voluntary motions.

foundations of moral law. Should this distinction be denied--as it was by Hobbes, who resolved all vices and virtues into motion--logic is inexorable and knows but one cause, properly speaking, in the universe. While Hobbes was staying at Paris, he Nay, even here it does not pause, but carentered on the question of Liberty and Ne- ries its iron sceptre into the dominion and cessity with Bramhall, afterwards Arch- very bosom of the Deity. There were reabishop of Armagh, and gave a distinct state- sons, that is, motives, for the divine conment of his views in a letter to the Mar- duct, and, in the then view of the supreme quess of Newcastle, published 1654; which, mind, such conduct was necessary. Morewith the treatise on Human Nature and the over, as He is self-existent---no more easy "De Corpore Politico," composed the Tri- conception to us than self-determination--pos, a three-legged stool for the utterance he cannot be otherwise than absolutely perof portentous oracles to mankind; and fect; and therefore, in any objective good aptly placed, like the ancient one, over he may originate, the above reasoning will sulphurous exhalations, though perhaps give optimism as the result. Whatever is from a deeper pit. The general principle is best. Again :---Motion is justly consiof all his reasoning on this point is contained in the following extracts:

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Nothing taketh beginning from itself, but from the action of some other immediate agent without itself. And, therefore, when first a man hath an appetite or will to something to which immediately before he had no appetite nor will, the cause of his will is not the will itself, but something else, not in his own disposing. So that, whereas it is out of controversy, that of voluntary actions, the will is the necessary cause, and by this which is said the will is also caused by other things whereof it disposeth not, it followeth that voluntary actions have all of them necessary causes, and therefore are necessitated."-Letter, &c.

He be

dered a proof of a deity; and, as long as it
continues, it is one form of divine opera-
tion. Thought is intellectual action, and is
equally dependent on the Creator.
ing, therefore, the primordial source of all
activity---unless you postulate free agency
to account for sin---fatalism is the legiti-
mate consequence. The original impulse
in nature and in man involved all the ex-
panding circles of thought and action that,
from the dawn of time to the present hour,
have spread throughout the universe.
Millions of minds and worlds beat with
these pulsations, but their common centre

is the living God. A wise destiny, there- Conscience, I therefore define to be opinion of evifore, rules all things, and naught but good dence."-Human Nature, ch. vi.

can exist.

are of

imagination of Catiline and his band of profligates, of Felix when before Paul, or of the wretches who fell under the lash, of Juvenal and Tacitus, with what infinite delight would they have announced the discovery that conscience is a calf. This, however, was reserved for a later age. They knew not the genius of their own language.

"When two or more men know of one and the same fact, they are said to be conscious of it one to another; which is as much as to know it together. Afterwards, men made use of the same word metaphorically for the knowledge of their own secret facts and secret thoughts, and therefore it is rhetorically said, that the conscience is a thousand witnesses."-Leviathan, Pt. I., ch. vii.

We have made these observations as We doubt whether any culprit, from applicable to the ground on which the Cain downwards, ever dreamt of this defiquestion of liberty and necessity is here nition. Had it only flashed across the brought before us. Hobbes presumes that a volition is a phenomenon of nature. This is to beg the very point at issue, and to settle it by his own arbitrary classification. We think his success is on a par with his notorious pretensions to the quadrature of the circle. And moreover, we opinion that logic is as little likely to decide the one, as the axioms of Euclid the other. Kant judged wisely in removing it to a totally different province. Without dreaming, therefore, of ever answering the necessarian; convinced that each party must presume the whole question in his data; we fall back upon our faith, that "conscience---practical reason if you please. --demands the freedom of man, as a At the first touch of this philological postulate, ere he can be regarded as the wand, crimes vanish; the Furies assume a possible object or subject of moral law." placid, marble look; no avenging spirit There is in this maxim a philosophical haunts the guilty; but, by an etymological depth and verity which comes home to us; virtue, to which Medusa's head was noand, satisfied with it, we leave the logical thing, all that has ever been visited by readvocates of free will to get necessarians, morse, punished by God, and deemed base who have their eyes open, to grant them by man, is resolved into opinion of evidence, that beautiful fact, spontaneity, and the or into matter of private intelligence? The logical advocates of necessity to get liber-process indicated here and carried out in tarians, equally awake, to grant them the the "Diversions of Purley," is what is ugly concession, that all things, both mind meant by the ultra-nominalism of Hobbes. and matter, range under one common mechanism of cause and effect, and then to argue the question. Whoever succeeds, in either case, has impaled his victim. He has his pound of flesh in the bond, and may claim the blood too. If he be a metaphysical Shylock, he will have ample satisfaction.

Moral distinctions and a will having disappeared, there can be no occupation for a conscience. Our readers will, however, guess long ere they divine its elementary state, and discover what it becomes under the power of analysis.

Even on the old question of the schools, the ridicule poured on the doctrine of the realists, that besides Aristides and Cato, and all other men, there is "something which we call man, viz. man in general,”---has led us to forget that universal terms have still a foundation in nature. There are conceptions, it is true, but they rest upon a collection of qualities which are embodied in each of the species. In reality, there is no individual nature about a man. He may be a dwarf or a giant, a hunchback or an Apollo Belvidere, and he will be known and distinguished by these marks, but his nature is "It is either science or opinion which we commonnot an individuality. It is the incorporaly mean by the word conscience; for men say that tion of that common idea which embraces such and such a thing is true, in or upon their the essentials of each and all of the human conscience; which they never do when they race; the general form which is realized in think it doubtful; and therefore they know or think every particular example, and the only posthey know it to be true. But men when they say sible basis of scientific classification. things upon their conscience are not, therefore, There are sorts in nature, and sorting in presumed certainly to know the truth of what they all that man does. He never makes the say. It remaineth, then, that that word is used

by them that have an opinion, not only of the sort, he merely recognises the fact of its extruth of a thing, but also of their knowledge of it, istence. No extent to which he may beto which the truth of the proposition is consequent. lieve in the subjective character of the

laws of the understanding can destroy the The only important question-Is there differences of external objects, as the unal- anything that necessitates the agreement?— terable consciousness of every moment. It is here shuffled out of sight. If, however, is the same with resemblances. The con- all nations call the rainbow beautiful, we ditions of my nature exist in every man; infer some common sense of beauty. And those of my individuality, only in myself. though languages are thus far arbitrary that The former make me human. It is, how-one will do, in many respects, as well as ever, to a matter of far greater consequence than that of general names that we at present refer. Ultra-nominalism is the bane of morals and of moral philosophy. It specially consists in evacuating the most important terms in law, ethics, and religion, of everything beyond a conventional import. It denounces and labors to undermine the principle, that moral attributes, existing in intelligent beings, are the antecedents and ground-work of attributives, which rightly describe or mark their character. We have already given one example in the gross and selfish view which We have now detailed the chief points Hobbes takes of "goodness." Another, of the reply which Hobbes makes to the taken from his tabular view of science, is as question-What sort of a being is man? follows:---"Consequences from Speech. In contracting, the science of Just and Unjust."

All law, therefore, becomes exclusively positive. Moral law can have no possible foundation. Where this view of the philosophy of language is carried out, God himself becomes an abstraction, and retains only a nominal existence. Against every such system reason and realism equally protest. They assert the principle we have announced, and affirm that benevolence is one and the same quality to all holy beings. in creation. The Apostle Paul and the philanthropist Howard, in cherishing the spirit of Jesus Christ, aimed at a moral assimilation to its great pattern. Love to man brought him from Heaven. His incarnation did not make it different from what it was when he was in the bosom of the Father. It is not simply relative to human faculties, any more than it is simply a name; but is immutable, varying in its operations according to its objects. We, therefore, know moral qualities in their own absolute nature; and the goodness which our highest powers accredit and recognise, is goodness likewise to all rational existence. These views are, in the philosophy of Hobbes, so much delusion and absurdity. He speaks, and they disappear, as by diabolical enchantment.

"Words, and consequently the attributes of God, have their signification by agreement and constitution of men, &c."-Leviathan, Pt. II., ch. xxxi.

another, yet the laws and conceptions of the mind are one. We reject the assumption that we have no knowledge of God, and the consequent impiety that we fashion him according to our fancy. Words are an effect, not a cause. What justice, goodness, veracity signify, must be known, before these abstract terms are formed and known in a just, good, and truthful being, or by an intuitive perception of their nature and obligation. Ultra-nominalism is a barefaced denial of the moral consciousness of mankind.

There is nothing ennobling in his account -
of the species. Without a will to rule his
lower nature; equally destitute of a moral
faculty; establishing good and evil ad libi-
tum, there being no immutable principles of
either; the creatures of absolute necessity,
and dragged in chains, not by kindness, but
by cupidity; it follows that the character
of man is throughout a lone and naked sel-
fishness, which moulds all the elements of
nature into so many instruments of personal
gratification.

As each has a similar end, war must ensue. In a chapter which treats of the difference of manners, by which he means "those qualities of mankind that concern their living together in peace and unity," the great battle of the passions is announced. Man is in search of his own happiness, and his unvarying object is "not to enjoy once only and for one instant of time; but to assure for ever the way of his future desire." Hence he aims at " power after power, in order to secure his prior acquisitions."

Here, then, we have arrived at the threshold of Hobbes' political system; and before we enter upon it, it may be necessary to quote a few of his fundamental maxims, by way of explanation. We shall do so without much criticism.

“First, * All men are by nature equal,' for as to bodily strength, in which men may be thought to differ, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself; and as to the faculties of the

mind, there is a greater equality amongst men than that of strength.'"-Leviathan, Pt. I., ch.

xiii.

which is called warre, and such a warre as is of every man against every man.'"--Ibid.

The reader has only to throw his imaginIf history teaches anything, it is just the ation into this tumultuous scene, to think reverse of this position. Hero-worship is of men and women without union or love, as old as time; and Nimrod, Samson, and and of each man trying to circumvent his Achilles; David, Alexander, Hannibal, neighbor, and he will own that the wildest Cæsar, Scanderbeg, and Napoleon; the uproar of the elements that was ever raised poets, and philosophers, and mathemati- is tame in comparison with a general concians of Greece and Italy in all ages; flict of the passions, that threatens the exShakspeare and his equal, Milton; Bacon, tinction of mankind in a deluge of blood. and Hobbes himself; indeed, the whole A state of nature is, according to Hobbes, The world is in arms. galaxy of warriors, statesmen, metaphysi- a state of war. cians, painters, and sculptors, from Phidias Brotherhood, justice, peace, do not exist. and Apelles, down to the great masters of The earth is sown with dragons' teeth. All recent times; yes, the entire family of men dip their arrows in poison. Union is genius proclaims its inherent and original unknown. The inhabitants of the globe superiority, its right to teach and govern are a set of independent marauders, each of man, and to lead him into regions of know-whom scorns to own himself inferior to his ledge and conquest, "flowing with milk fellow. To quarrel is their nature, and and honey," not one foot of which had he "Competition, diffidence of one another, and possessed unless its guidance had taken him glory, are the three principal causes of from eating acorns or making bricks, and quarrel." conducted him through seas and deserts into the better land.

"If any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in their way to their end * endeavor to destroy or subdue one another."Leviathan, Pt. I., ch. xiii.

Universal distrust follows, and each man

may

Stimulated by these, human beings become more rapacious than vultures, and wild beasts that roam the forest for their prey promise better society. Were one placed at a little distance from this planet, and able to contemplate these tragic scenes, throwing their shadows before them, he would be apt to pray, if no remedy were discoverable, that heaven would convert the habitable world into a solitude, and by letting loose its central fires, or breaking up the fountains of the great deep, on whose waters no ark should appear, once and for ever put an end to all flesh.

Perhaps, however, there will be no need of imprecations. We can easily see that the great question with men in such a condition would be how to escape mutual destruction. Whence, then, shall deliverance come? Who shall change this state in which there is" continual fear and danger of violent death ;" and human life is "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short?" What chance is there of lessening the peril and of lengthening existence, when there is as yet no justice among men?

"To this warre of every man against every man this also is consequent-that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Force and By force or wiles master the persons of all fraud are in warre the two cardinall vertues," &c. till he see no other power-Ibid. great enough to endanger him."—Ibid.

men he can

Fourthly, Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them in awe, they are in that condition

In this exigency one would look for a band of Sabine damsels to touch the hearts of fathers, husbands, brothers, and friends,