ays, the bishop,
'has placed in the strongest and happiest light.'[188] He endeavours,
again, to approximate to the 'intellectual school,' of which Richard
Price (1723-1791) was the chief English representative at the time. Like
Kant, Price deduces the moral law from principles of pure reason. The
truth of the moral law, 'Thou shalt do to others as you wish that they
should do to you,' is as evident as the truth of the law in geometry,
'things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.'
Stewart so far approves that he wishes to give to the moral law what is
now called all possible 'objectivity,' while the 'moral sense' of
Hutcheson apparently introduced a 'subjective' element. He holds,
however, that our moral perceptions 'involve a feeling of the heart,' as
well as a 'judgment of the understanding,'[189] and ascribes the same
view to Butler. But then, by using the word 'reason' so as to include
the whole nature of a rational being, we may ascribe to it the 'origin
of those simple ideas which are not excited in the mind by the operation
of the senses, but which arise in consequence of the operation of the
intellectual powers among the various objects.'[190] Hutcheson, he says,
made his 'moral sense' unsatisfactory by taking his illustrations from
the 'secondary' instead of the 'primary qualities,'[191] and thus with
the help of intuitive first principles, Stewart succeeds in believing
that it would be as hard for a man to believe that he ought to sacrifice
another man's happiness to his own as to believe that three angles of a
triangle are equal to one right angle.[192] It is true that a feeling
and a judgment are both involved; but the 'intellectual judgment' is the
groundwork of the feeling, not the feeling of the judgment.[193] In
spite, however, of this attempt to assimilate his principles to those of
the intellectual school, the substance of Stewart's ethics is
essentially psychological. It rests, in fact, upon his view that
philosophy depends upon inductive psychology, and, therefore,
essentially upon experience subject to the cropping up of convenient
'intuitions.'

This appears from the nature of his argument against the Utilitarians.
In his time, this doctrine was associated with the names of Hartley,
Tucker, Godwin, and especially Paley. He scarcely refers to
Bentham.[194] Paley is the recognised anvil for the opposite school. Now
he agrees, as I have said, with Paley's view of natural theology