84 THE CREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



universal, from which he attempted to explain all the 

 variety of human conduct ; one tracing all moral facts to 

 self-love, another to sympathy, a third to benevolence, 

 another again to a union of self-love and benevolence. 

 But with the best of aims, and sometimes with extra- 

 ordinary genius, unfortunately none of the celebrated line 

 of English ethical constructors possessed, nor was it 

 possible in their time that they could possess, that full 

 and comprehensive knowledge of man's real nature which 

 the conjoint conclusions of the several sciences mostly in 

 their infancy when these men wrote have only recently 

 disclosed to us. The important contributory sciences of 

 psychology and physiology scarcely existed a century ago ; 

 sociology and anthropology have only been admitted into 

 the rank of sciences in the present generation ; and the 

 reformed natural history of Darwin, which includes man 

 in the circle of the animal kingdom, with all the ethical 

 consequences which flow from that fact, is only a thing 

 of yesterday ; from all which it follows that a science 

 of human nature, the indispensable foundation for any 

 stable system of ethics, was not possible to any of our 

 eighteenth-century thinkers. 



There was no psychology before the appearance of 

 Locke's great Essay on the Human Understanding, nor 

 for a considerable time after was there further attempt to 

 apply scientific methods to the investigation of mental 

 phenomena. The foundation for a science of physiology 

 was, indeed, laid by Harvey's discovery of the circulation 

 of the blood, even before Locke's time, but there was little 

 further development of that science for more than a cen- 

 tury, and certainly none in connection with psychology 

 till we come to Hartley. It is true that Hobbes, with the 

 divination of genius, had early apprehended the general 

 and deep connection between our mental and bodily 



