ators from
considerations of general utility. Bentham's influence on legislation,
especially on criminal law, has been beneficially felt on both sides of
the Atlantic. In the department of pure ethics, there are no essential
points of difference between him and other writers of the utilitarian
school.(25)

* * * * *

In *France* there has been a large preponderance of sensualism,
expediency, and selfishness in the ethical systems that have had the most
extensive currency. There was a great deal of elaborate ethical
speculation and theory among the French philosophers of the last century;
but among them we cannot recall a single writer who maintained a higher
ground than Bentham, except that Rousseau--perhaps the most immoral of them
all--who was an Epicurean so far as he had any philosophy, sometimes soars
in sentimental rhapsodies about the intrinsic beauty and loveliness of a
virtue which he knew only by name.

*Malebranche* (A. D. 1638-1714), whose principal writings belong to the
previous century, represents entirely opposite views and tendencies. He
hardly differs from Samuel Clarke, except in phraseology. He resolves
virtue into love of the universal order, and conformity to it in conduct.
This order requires that we should prize and love all beings and objects
in proportion to their relative worth, and that we should recognize this
relative worth in our rules and habits of life. Thus man is to be more
highly valued and more assiduously served than the lower animals, because
worth more; and God is to be loved infinitely more than man, and to be
always obeyed and served in preference to man, because he is worth
immeasurably more than the beings that derive their existence from him.
Malebranche ascribes to the Supreme Being, not the arbitrary exercise of
power in constituting the right, but recognition, in his government of the
world and in his revealed will, of the order, which is man's sole law.
"Sovereign princes," he says, "have no right to use their authority
without reason. Even God has no such miserable right."

At nearly the same period commenced the ethical controversy between
*Fenelon* (A. D. 1651-1715) and *Bossuet* (A. D. 1627-1704), as to the
possibility and obligation of disinterested virtue. Fenelon and the
Quietists, who sympathized with him, maintained that the pure love of God,
without any self-reference, or regard for one's own well-being either here
or here-aft