on vanity, lawful self-love
egoism, and rational acquisitiveness avarice, it was easy for him to prove
that it is vice which makes the individual industrious and the state
prosperous, that virtue is seldom found, and that if it were universal it
would become injurious to society.

With different shading and with less one-sidedness, Bolingbroke (cf.
p. 193) defended the standpoint of naturalism. God has created us for
happiness in common; we are destined to assist one another. Happiness is
attainable in society alone, and society cannot exist without justice and
benevolence. He who exercises virtue, _i.e._, promotes the good of the
species, promotes at the same time his own good. All actions spring from
self-love, which, guided at first by an immediate instinct, and later, by
reason developed through experience, extends itself over ever widening
spheres. We love ourselves in our relatives, in our friends, further still,
in our country, finally, in humanity, so that self-love and social love
coincide, and we are impelled to virtue by the combined motives of interest
and duty. This is an ethic of common sense from the standpoint of the
cultured man of the world--which at the proper time has the right, no
doubt, to gain itself a hearing.

Meanwhile Shaftesbury's ideas had impressed Hutcheson and Butler, according
to the peculiarities of each. Both of these writers deem it necessary to
explain and correct the distinction between the selfish and the benevolent
affections by additions, which were of influence on the ethics of Hume;
both devote their zeal to the new doctrine of feelings of reflection or
moral taste, in which the former gives more prominence to the aesthetic,
merely judging factor, the latter to the active or mandatory one.

Francis Hutcheson[1] (died 1747), professor at Glasgow, in his posthumous
_System of Moral Philosophy_, 1755, which had been preceded by an _Inquiry
concerning the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue_, 1725, pursues
the double aim of showing against Hobbes and Locke the originality and
disinterestedness both of benevolence and of moral approval. Virtue is not
exercised because it brings advantage to the agent, nor approved on account
of advantage to the observer.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Fowler's treatise, cited above--TR.]

(1) The benevolent affections are entirely independent of self-love and
regard for the rewards of God and of man, nay, independent even of the
lofty satisfaction aff