108 



origin, obtained by reason from experience. It might also 

 be added that, as a matter of theory, Cudworth differed from 

 Hobbes in his conception of reason, the latter maintaining its 

 essential nature, whereas Hobbes did not insist on this. 



In Hobbes' system, the bond of union between the different 

 citizens of the state resulted at first from the use of reason on 

 the part of each, which enabled each to see that the Common- 

 wealth mode of life was the only sensible way to live ; other- 

 wise no one could ever feel secure. Hobbes' method for 

 reaching a moral basis was thus, so to say, an inductive pro- 

 cess; and yet this was not, for him, opposed to religion or 

 revelation, for he believed in revelation through nature. 

 But Cudworth, adhering strictly to the idealistic theological 

 point of view, dispensed with the activity of the mind which 

 might make the Moral Law capricious or arbitrary, and held 

 to the divine imparting of these laws. Hence he was not 

 prepared to accept Hobbes' inductive basis. Progressive 

 morality on such a basis seemed to him contradictory, as 

 morality could only be a matter of clear convictions from which 

 one starts a priori. The principle of morals could not be 

 progressively obtained, and therefore Cudworth, and Clarke 

 following him, maintained that absolute certainty in morals 

 cannot be relative to merely existing circumstances. For 

 Cudworth, the ultimate term is not the established condi- 

 tion, but the will of God not merely as such, however, but as 

 involving the eternal and immutable distinctions between 

 right and wrong. An external law, such as the civil, cannot 

 be the source of moral obligation, but an internal obligation 

 must be the source of civil law. 



3. CLARKE AND WOLLASTON. 



At a later period Samuel Clarke 1 and William Wollaston 2 

 continued the attempt to place ethics upon a basis as indis- 

 putable as that of mathematics. 



Clarke made the claim, in answer to the selfish hypo- 

 thesis assumed as put forward by Hobbes as a basis of morals, 

 that the cognition of self-evident practical propositions is, in 

 itself, independently of any selfish interest, a sufficient motive 

 to a rational being as such for acting in accordance with them. 

 "It might," he says, "seem altogether a needless under- 

 taking to attempt to prove and establish the eternal difference 

 of Good and Evil, had there not appeared certain Men, as 

 Mr. Hobbes and some few others, who have presumed, con- 



1 1675-1729. 

 2 1659-1724. 



