val cloisters
have ever furnished. For a long period, monasteries were the only schools,
and in these the learned men of the day were, either successively or
alternately, learners and teachers, whence the appellation of _Schoolmen_.
The learned men who bear this name were fond of casuistry, and discussed
imagined and often impossible cases with great pains (their readers would
have greater); but, so far as we know, they have left no systematic
treatises on moral philosophy, and have transmitted no system that owes to
them its distinguishing features. Yet we find among them a very broad
division of opinion as to the ground of right. The fundamental position of
the Stoics, that virtue is conformity to nature, and thus independent of
express legislation,--not created by law, human or divine, but the source
and origin of law,--had its champions, strong, but few; while the
Augustinian theology, then almost universal, replaced Epicureanism in its
denial of the intrinsic and indelible moral qualities of actions. The
extreme Augustinians regarded the positive command of God as the sole
cause and ground of right, so that the very things which are forbidden
under the severest penalties would become virtuous and commendable, if
enjoined by Divine authority. William of Ockham, one of the most
illustrious of the English Schoolmen, wrote: "If God commanded his
creatures to hate himself, the hatred of God would be the duty of man."

The *earliest modern* theory of morals that presented striking
peculiarities was that of *Hobbes* (A. D. 1588-1679), who was indebted
solely to the stress of his time, alike for his system and for whatever
slender following it may have had. He was from childhood a staunch
royalist, was shortly after leaving the University the tutor of a loyal
nobleman, and, afterward, of Charles II. during the early years of his
exile; and the parliamentary and Puritan outrages seemed to him to be
aimed at all that was august and reverend, and adapted to overturn
society, revert progress, and crush civilization. According to him, men
are by nature one another's enemies, and can be restrained from
internecine hostility only by force or fear. An instinctive perception of
this truth in the infancy of society gave rise to monarchical and absolute
forms of government; for only by thus centralizing and massing power,
which could be directed against any disturber of the peace, could the
individual members of society hold property