It is otherwise with the desire of knowledge, which is always accompanied with a strong desire of social communication, and with the love of moral excellence, which, in its practical tendency, coincides so remarkably with benevolence, that many authors have attempted to resolve the one principle into the other. How far their conclusion, in this instance, is a necessary consequence of the premises from which it is deduced will appear hereafter.

The foregoing observations coincide so remarkably with a passage in Aristotle's Ethics, that I am tempted to quote it at length in the excellent English translation of Dr. Gillies. After stating the same inconsistencies in our language about self-love, which Dr. Ferguson has pointed out, Aristotle proceeds thus:

"These contradictions cannot be reconciled but by distinguishing the different senses in which man is said to love himself. Those who reproach self-love as a vice consider it only as it appears in worldlings and voluptuaries, who arrogate to themselves more than their due share of wealth, power, or pleasure. Such things are to the multitude the objects of earnest concern and eager contention, because the multitude regards them as prizes of the highest value, and, in endeavouring to attain them, strives to gratify its passion at the expense of its reason. This kind of self-love, which belongs to the contemptible multitude, is doubtless obnoxious to blame, and in this acceptation the word is generally taken. But should a man assume a preeminence in exercising justice, temperance, and other virtues, though such a man has really more true self-love than the multitude, yet nobody would impute this affection to him as a crime. Yet he takes to himself the fairest and greatest of all goods, and those the most acceptable to the ruling principle in his nature, which is properly himself, in the same manner as the sovereignty in every community is that which most properly constitutes the state. He is said, also, to have, or not to have, the command of himself, just as this principle bears sway, or as it is subject to control; and those acts are considered as most voluntary which proceed from this

legislative or sovereign power. Whoever cherishes and gratifies this ruling part of his nature is strictly and peculiarly a lover of himself, but in a quite different sense from that in which self-love is regarded as a matter of reproach; for all men approve and praise an affection calculated to produce the greatest private and the greatest public happiness; whereas they disapprove and blame the vulgar kind of self-love as often hurtful to others, and always ruinous to those who indulge it." *

Aristotle's Ethics, Book ix. chap. 8.

CHAPTER SECOND.

OF THE MORAL FACULTY.

General Observations on the Moral Faculty, tending chiefly to show that it is an original principle of our nature, and not resolvable into any other principle or principles more general.

As some authors have supposed that vice consists in an excessive regard to our own happiness, so others have gone into the opposite extreme, by representing virtue as merely a matter of prudence, and a sense of duty but another name for a rational self-love. This view of the subject was far from being unnatural; for we find that these two principles lead in general to the same course of action; and we have every reason to believe, that, if our knowledge of the universe was more extensive, they would be found to do so in all instances whatever. Accordingly, by many of the best of the ancient moralists, our sense of duty was considered as resolvable into self-love, and the whole of ethics was reduced to this question, What is the supreme good? or, in other words, What is most conducive, on the whole, to our happiness? *

That we have, however, a sense of duty, which is not resolvable into a regard to our happiness, appears from various considerations.

(1.) There are, in all languages, words equivalent to duty and to interest, which men have constantly distin

The same opinion has been adopted by various philosophers of the first eminence in England, and it has long been the prevailing system on the continent. From the following passage in one of D'Alembert's Letters to the King of Prussia, it appears to have been considered both by the writer and by his royal correspondent as a fundamental principle in morals. "Je n'ai pas en effet perdu un moment pour lire cet excellent mémoire; et je puis, Sire, assurer à V. M. que je suis absolument de son avis sur les principes qui doivent servir de base à la morale. Si V. M. veut prendre la peine de jeter les yeux sur mes Elémens de Philosophie, elle verra que j'y indique comme la source de la morale et du bonheur, la liaison intime de notre véritable interêt avec l'accomplissement de nos devoirs,' et que je regarde l'amour éclairé de nous-mêmes comme le principe de tout sacrifice morale."-Euvres Post. du Roi de Prusse, Tom. XIV. p. 99.

guished in their signification. They coincide in general in their applications, but they convey very different ideas. When I wish to persuade a man to a particular action, I address some of my arguments to a sense of duty, and others to the regard he has to his own interest. I endeavour to show him that it is not only his duty, but his interest to act in the way that I recommend to him.

This distinction was expressed among the Roman moralists by the words honestum and utile. Of the former Cicero says, "quod vere dicimus, etiamsi a nullo laudetur, naturâ esse laudabile." *

The to xalov among the Greeks corresponds, when applied to the conduct, to the honestum of the Romans.† Dr. Reid remarks that the word xa0ñxov (officium) extended both to the honestum and the utile, and comprehended every action performed either from a sense of duty, or from an enlightened regard to our true interest. In English we use the word reasonable with the same latitude, and indeed almost exactly in the same sense in which Cicero defines officium: "Id quod cur factum sit ratio probabilis reddi potest." In treating of such offices Cicero, and Panatius before him, first points out those that are recommended to us by our love of the honestum, and next those that are recommended by our regard to the utile.

This distinction between a sense of duty and a regard to interest is acknowledged even by men whose moral principles are not the purest, nor the most consistent. What unlimited confidence do we repose in the conduct of one whom we know to be a man of honor, even in those cases in which he acts out of the view of the world, and where the strongest temptations of worldly interest concur to lead him astray! We know that his heart would revolt at the idea of any thing base or unworthy. Dr. Reid observes that what we call honor, considered as a principle of conduct, "is only another name for a regard to duty, to rectitude, to propriety of conduct." This, I think, is going rather too far; for,

De Offic. Lib. i. 4.

Reid's Essays on the Active Powers. Essay 3d, Chap. 5.
Essays on the Active Powers, p. 230. 4to. Edit.

although the two principles coincide in general in the direction they give to our conduct, they do not coincide always; the principle of honor being liable, from its nature and origin, to be most unhappily perverted in its applications by a bad education and the influence of fashAt the same time, Dr. Reid's remark is perfectly in point, for the principle of honor is plainly grafted on a sense of duty, and necessarily presupposes its existence.

Dr. Paley, one of the most zealous advocates for the selfish system of morals, admits the fact on which the foregoing argument proceeds, but endeavours to evade the conclusion by means of a theory so extraordinary, that I shall state it in his own words. "There is always understood to be a difference between an act of prudence and an act of duty. Thus, if I distrusted a man who owed me a sum of money, I should reckon it an act of prudence to get another person bound with him ; but I should hardly call it an act of duty. On the other hand it would be thought a very unusual and loose kind of language to say, that, as I had made such a promise, it was prudent to perform it; or, that, as my friend, when he went abroad, placed a box of jewels in my hands, it was prudent in me to preserve it for him till he returned.

"Now, in what, you will ask, does the difference consist, inasmuch as, according to our account of the matter, both in the one case and the other, in acts of duty as well as acts of prudence, we consider solely what we ourselves shall gain or lose by the act?

"The difference, and the only difference, is this, that, in the one case we consider what we shall gain or lose in the present world; in the other case, we consider also what we shall lose or gain in the world to come."

On this curious passage I have no comment to offer. A sufficient answer to it may, I trust, be derived from the following reasonings. In the meantime, it will be allowed to be at least one presumption of an essential distinction between the notions of duty and of interest, that there are different words to express these notions in all languages, and that the most illiterate of mankind. are in no danger of confounding them together.