three different determinations. Nothing is prescribed in the moral law that is not also in accordance with some primitive tendency, and with self-interest rightly understood; if it were not so, it would go hard with virtue. On the other hand, if everything not done from regard to duty were opposed to moral law and order, society could not only not subsist, but would never have been formed. When a struggle does ensue between passion and self-interest, passion is blind; when between egoism and the moral determination, egoism is at fault. It is in the true interest of Passion to be sacrificed to Egoism, and of Egoism to be sacrificed to Order. He closes the review of the various moral facts by explaining in what sense the succession of the three states is to be understood. The state of Passion is historically first, but the Egoistic and the Moral states are not so sharply defined. As soon as reason dawns it introduces the moral motive as well as the egoistic, and to this extent the two states are contemporaneous. Only, so far is the moral law from being at this stage fully conceived, that, in the majority of men, it is never conceived in its full clearness at all. Their confused idea of moral law is the so-called moral conscience, which works more like a sense or an instinct, and is inferior to the clear rational conception in everything except that it conveys the full force of obligation. In its grades of guilt human justice rightly makes allowance for different degrees of intelligence. The Egoistic determination and the Moral state, such as it is, once developed, passion is not to be supposed abolished, but henceforth what really takes place in all is a perpetual alternation of the various states. Yet though no man is able exclusively to follow the moral determination, and no man will constantly be under the influence of any one of the motives, there is one motive commonly uppermost whereby each can be characterized. Thus men, according to their habitual conduct, are known as passionate, egoistic, or virtuous. We now summarize the opinions of Jouffroy : : I. The Standard is the Idea of Absolute Good or Universal Order in the sense explained by the author. Like Cousin, he identifies the 'good' with the 'true.' What, then, is the criterion that distinguishes moral from other truths? If obligation be selected as the differentia, it is in effect to give up the attempt to determine what truths are obligatory. The idea of 'good' is obviously too vague to be a differentia. How far the idea of Universal Order' gets us out of the difficulty may be doubted, especially after the candid admission of the author, that it is an idea of which the majority of men have never any very clear notions. II. The moral faculty is Reason; Conscience is hardly more than a confused feeling of obligatoriness. Sympathy is one of the primitive tendencies of our nature. Jouffroy's opinion on the subject is open to the objections urged against Butler's psychology. He upholds the freedom of the Will, but embarrasses his argument by admitting, like Reid, that there is a stage in our existence when we are ruled by the passions, and are destitute of liberty. III. The Summum Bonum is the end of every creature; the passions ought to be subordinated to self-interest, and self-interest to morality. In regard to the other points, it is unnecessary to continue the summary. APPENDIX. A.-History of Nominalism and Realism, p. 181. THE controversy respecting Universals first obtained its place in philosophy from the colloquies of Sokrates, and the writings and teachings of Plato. We need not here touch upon their predecessors Parmenides and Heracleitus, who, in a confused and unsytematic manner, approached this question from opposite sides, and whose speculations worked much upon the mind of Plato in determining both his aggressive dialectic, and his constructive theories. Parmenides of Elea, improving upon the ruder conceptions of Xenophanes, was the first to give emphatic proclamation to the celebrated Eleatic doctrine, Absolute Ens as opposed to Relative Fientia: i.e., the Cogitable, which Parmenides conceived as the One and All of reality, "Ev kai Пãv, enduring and unchangeable, of which the negative was unmeaning; and the Sensible or Perceivable, which was in perpetual change, succession, and multiplicity, without either unity, or reality, or endurance. To the last of these two departments Heracleitus assigned especial prominence. In place of the permanent underlying Ens, which he did not recognize, he substituted a cogitable process of change, or generalized concept of what was common to all the successive phases of change-a perpetual stream of generation and destruction, or implication of contraries, in which everything appeared only that it might disappear, without endurance or uniformity. In this doctrine of Heracleitus, the world of sense and particulars could not be the object either of certain knowledge or even of correct probable opinion; in that of Parmenides, it was recognized as an object of probable opinion, though not of certain knowledge. But in both doctrines, as well as in the theories of Democritus, it was degraded, and presented as incapable of yielding satisfaction to the search of a philosophizing mind, which could find neither truth nor reality except in the world of Concepts and Cogitata. Besides the two theories above-mentioned, there were current in the Hellenic world, before the maturity of Sokrates, several other veins of speculation about the Cosmos, totally divergent one from the other, and by that very divergence sometimes stimulating curiosity, sometimes discouraging all study, as though the problems were hopeless. But Parmenides and Heracleitus, together with the arithmetical and geometrical hypotheses of the Pythagoreans, are expressly noticed by Aristotle as having specially contributed to form the philosophy of Plato. Neither Parmenides, nor Heracleitus, nor the Pythagoreans, were Dialecticians. They gave out their own thoughts in their own way, with little or no regard to dissentients. They did not cultivate the art of argumentative attack or defence, nor the correct application and diversified confrontation of universal terms, which are the great instruments of that art. It was Zeno, the disciple of Parmenides, that first employed Dialectic in support of his master's theory, or rather against the counter theories of opponents. He showed, by arguments memorable for their subtlety, that the hypothesis of an Absolute, composed of Entia Plura Discontinua, led to consequences even more absurd than those that opponents deduced from the Parmenidean hypothesis of Ens Unum Continuum. The Dialectic, thus inaugurated by Zeno, reached still higher perfection in the colloquies of Sokrates; who not only employed a new method, but also introduced new topics of debate -ethical, political, and social matters instead of physics and the Cosmos. The peculiar originality of Sokrates is well known: a man who wrote nothing, but passed his life in indiscriminate colloquy with every one; who professed to have no knowledge himself, but interrogated others on matters that they talked about familiarly and professed to know well; whose colloquies generally ended by puzzling the respondents, and by proving to themselves that they neither knew nor could explain even matters that they had begun by affirming confidently as too clear to need explana tion. Aristotle tells us that Sokrates was the first that set himself expressly and methodically to scrutinize the definitions of general or universal terms, and to confront them, not merely with each other, but also, by a sort of inductive process, with many particular cases that were, or appeared to be, included under them. And both Xenophon and Plato give us abundant examples of the terms to which Socrates applied his interrogatories: What is the Holy? What is the Unholy? What is the Beautiful or Honourable? What is the Ugly or Base? What is Justice-Injustice-Temperance-Madness-Courage Cowardice -A City-A man fit for civil life? What is the Command of Men? What is the character fit for commanding men? Such are the specimens, furnished by a hearer,† of the universal terms whereon the interrogatories of Sokrates bore. All of them were terms spoken and heard familiarly by citizens in the market-place, as if each understood them perfectly; but when Sokrates, professing his own ignorance, put questions asking for solutions of difficulties that perplexed his own mind, the answers showed that these *Metaphysics, A. 987, b. 2; M. 1078, b. 18. + Xenophon Memorab. I. 1, 16; IV. 6, 1-13. |