goodness which this world shows. To these faculties and affections God himself is the only adequate supply. They can find their full satisfaction only in the contemplation of that righteousness which is an everlasting righteousness, of that goodness in the sovereign mind which gave birth to the universe. This is Butler's highest doctrine, which he sets forth with a calm suppressed enthusiasm almost too deep for words. This contemplation would give rise to the highest form of happiness, but it is not for this that it is sought. It would cease to be the ultimate end that it is, if sought for the sake of happiness, or for any end but itself. There can be no doubt that if once realized, it would be, as we shall see, in the highest measure, the dynamic of the soul.

Butler's search for virtue is wholly through psychology. Plato and Aristotle, though they do not begin with it, very soon have recourse to it. Kant, on the other hand, when seeking for principles of morality, disdains to fumble after them among the A débris of observation and experience, but searches for them wholly a priori among the pure ideas of the reason. We find nothing in him about the virtuous character consisting in a harmony of the mental elements, although it might be said that his idea of virtue is a will in harmony with the moral universe. Laying his hand at once on the individual will, and intensifying to its highest power the idea of responsibility, he starts with the assertion that the only real and absolute good in the whole world is a good will. And a good will is one purely and entirely determined by the moral law. This law is not a law generalized out of human experience, binding therefore only within the range of that experience, but a law which transcends it; is wide as the universe, and extends in its essential principle to all beings who can think it. Man, according to Kant, shut up on every other side of his being to a merely relative knowledge, in the moral law for the first time comes into contact with absolute truth, truth valid not only for all men, but for all intelligents. Human conscience is nothing but the entering into the individual of this objective law-the witness, as it has been called, that the will or self has come into subjection to, and harmony with, the universal reason, which is the will of God.

From the reality of this law Kant deduces three great moral ideas. First, since it commands imperatively, unconditionally, we must be able to obey it. Freedom, therefore, as a necessary consequence, follows from the consciousness of an imperative law of duty. Again, in this phenomenal life, we see the will that would obey duty hindered by many obstacles, crushed by many miseries, unrewarded with that happiness which rightfully belongs to well-doing. There must, therefore, be a life beyond

this phenomenal one, where the hindrances will be removed, where duty and the will to obey it will have full play, where virtue and happiness, here often sundered, shall at last meet. That is, there must be an immortality. Lastly, reason represents to us the moral will as worthy of happiness. But we see that here they do coincide, nature does not effect such a meeting. Man cannot constrain it. There must be somewhere a Power above nature, stronger than man, who will uphold the moral order, will bring about the union between virtue and happiness, between guilt and misery. And this being is God. Such is Kant's practical proof of the great triad of moral truths in which the morally-minded man believes, Freedom, Immortality, and God. The necessity for the belief in these arises out of the reality of the moral law.

To Kant's ideal of duty it matters nothing, though it is contradicted by experience, though not one instance could be shown of a character which acted on, or even of a single action which emanated from, the pure unmingled moral law. The question is not what experience shows, but what reason ordains. And though this ideal of moral excellence may never yet have been actualized, yet none the less it remains a true ideal the one standard which the moral heart of man approves, however in practice he may fall beneath it. On this pure idea of the moral law Kant would build a science of ethics, valid not for man only, but for all intelligent beings. Applied to man, it would need to be supplemented by an anthropology, and would then stand to pure ethics, as mixed stand to pure mathematics.

As to the relation in which, according to Kant, the objective moral law stands to the human conscience, there is a very ingenious speculation of the late Professor Ferrier, which will illustrate it. He asks the question whether it is the existence of our minds which generates knowledge, or the entering of knowledge into us which constitutes our minds? Is the radical and stable element mind, and is intelligence the secondary and derivative one? Professor Ferrier's reply is, that 'it is not man's mind which puts him in possession of ideas, but it is ideas, that is knowledge, which first puts him in possession of a mind.' The mind does not make ideas, but ideas make mind. In like manner, applying the same principle to poetic inspiration, he shows that it is not the poetic mind which creates the ideas of beauty and sublimity which it utters, but those ideas which, entering into a man, create the poetic mind. And so in moral truth, it is not our moral nature which makes the distinction between right and wrong, but the existence of right and wrong, and the apprehension of them by us, which create our moral nature. 'I have no moral nature,' he says, 'before the distinction between right and wrong is revealed to me. My moral nature

exists subsequently to this revelation. At any rate, I acquire a moral nature, if not after, yet in the very act which brings before me the distinction. The distinction exists as an immutable institution of God prior to the existence of our minds. And it is the knowledge of this distinction which forms the prime constituent, not of our moral acquisitions, but of our moral existence.' This very ingenious speculation is in the very spirit of the Platonic philosophy, and may serve to illustrate Kant's view of the priority and independence of the moral law to our apprehensions of it.

Where, then, is the motive power in the Kantian ethics? Kant's answer is plain. It is the naked representation of duty, the pure moral law. And this, according to Kant, exerts so strong a motive power over the will, that it is only when a man has acknowledged its obligatory force, and obeyed it, that he learns for the first time his own free causal power, his independence of all merely sensitive determinators. The naked moral law, defecated, as he speaks, of all emotions of the sensory, is the one only dynamic which is truly moral. This, acting on the will, with no emotion interposed, will alone, he insists, place morality on a true foundation, will create a higher speculative ethics, and a higher practical morality, and will awaken deeper moral sentiments, than any system of ethics, compounded now of ideal, now of actual elements, can do.

In the rigidity with which he holds that in a pure moral action the law shall alone sway the will, that all emotion, love the purest, pity the tenderest, shall be excluded, Kant is ultrastoical. The representation of duty, when embraced, will awaken reverence for the law, and this is a pure moral emotion. But in determining the act, the stern imperative must stand alone, and refuse all aid from emotion or affection. For these there is no place in a pure morality, except as the submissive servants of duty.

In making this high demand, it should be remembered, that Kant is setting forth, not an actual state which he expects to find in human nature, but an ideal, which nevertheless because it is an ideal, affects human nature more powerfully than any maxim merely generalized from experience. And perhaps if the moral idea is to be set forth in its native strength and dignity, it is well that it should be exhibited thus nakedly. It does come shorn of much of its power, when so largely mingled, as it is in Butler, with considerations of mere prudence.

As has been remarked, however, even Kant, much as he desired to get rid of experience in constructing his morality, was not able to do so. He was obliged to come to experience before he could give content to his moral law-So act, that thou

couldst consistently will the principle of thy action to become law universal for all intelligents.' So Kant shaped his imperative. This is not very unlike Austin's utilitarian question, 'What would be the probable effect on the general happiness or good, if similar acts were general or frequent?' Again, as we saw, he is obliged to supplement his moral life here with the belief of a future, where virtue and happiness shall be one, where the ideal shall become actual; thus proving that human feelings cannot to the end be banished from a moral system, that some account must be taken of happiness, though Kant is right in giving to such considerations a subordinate, not a primary, place.

From this brief survey of the motive power as it appears in the systems of some of the most famous Intuitive Moralists,' it would have been interesting, had our space allowed, to have turned to the Utilitarian theorists, and examined at length the answers they give to the same question. As it is, however, a few remarks must suffice. This school of philosophers, as is well known, maintains that utility, or the tendency to promote pleasure or to cause pain, is the only quality in actions which makes them good or bad. They hold, moreover, that pleasure and pain are the only possible objects of choice, the only motives which can determine the will. These are the funda mental tenets of that school of philosophers represented by Epicurus in the ancient world, and by Bentham, and his followers Mr. Mill and Professor Bain, in our own day. If by the happiness which is said to be the end of action is meant merely the happiness of one's-self, the system is one of the plainest and most intelligible, the dynamic force is the most obvious, and the most surely operating that can well be imagined. But then the course of action dictated by the desire of exclusive self-interest is not, according to the view of most men, a moral one at all, and the motive is not moral, but selfish. The aim of all morality, as we conceive it, is to furnish men with a standard. of action, and a motive to work by, which shall not intensify each man's selfishness, but which shall raise him in a great measure above the thought of self. If, on the other hand, it is said that it is not my own private interest, but the general interest, which I am to aim at, this may be said in two distinct senses: Either I am to seek the greatest happiness of all men, the sum-total of human interests, because an. enlightened experience tells me that my happiness is in many ways bound up with theirs, but then the good of others thus pursued is but a means to my own private good, and I am still acting on the motive of self-love-a strong but not a moral one: Or I am to aim at the general happiness for its own sake, and not

merely as a means to my own; but then I am carried beyond the range of self-interest, and acknowledge as binding other motives which lie outside of the utilitarian theory. To the question, Why am I to act with a view to the happiness of others? the utilitarian can, on his own principles, give no other answer than this, Because it is your own interest to do so. If we are to find another, we must leave the region of personal pleasure and pain, and allow the power of some other motive which is impersonal. With Bentham it is a fundamental principle that the desire of personal good is the only motive which governs the will. This is the one exclusive mode of volition which he recognises. He denies the other two, unselfish regard for others, and the moral law or the abstract sense of right, and yet these two exist as really as self-love. It is just as certain a fact that men do sometimes act from generous impulses, or from respect to what they feel to be right in itself, apart from all consequences, as that they do often act merely with an eye to their own happiness. In the naked form, therefore, in which Bentham puts it, utilitarianism is founded on a psychological mistake. But the utilitarian system takes many forms. Yet, as Jouffroy, who has discriminated between the varieties with great acuteness, observes

'Whether a man pursues the gratification of impulse, or the accompanying pleasure, or the different objects fitted to produce it; whether he prefers, as most fitted to promote his highest good, the satisfaction of certain tendencies and pleasures; or finally, whether for the attainment of his end he adopts the circuitous means of general interest, or the direct pursuit of his own, it is of little consequence to determine : he is impelled to act, in each and every instance, by calculations of what is best for himself. Self-love remains essentially the same under all its forms, and impresses a similar character upon the various schemes of conduct to which it leads.'

In Mr. Mill's treatise on Utilitarianism there is no departure from the fundamentals of the utilitarian creed, though much straining of ingenuity to make it include principles and sentiments which do not readily come within that theory. Indeed, in this treatise one prominent characteristic of all the author's writings is more than usually conspicuous. On the one hand we see an amiably obstinate adherence to the sensational and utilitarian tenets which formed his original philosophic outfit. On the other hand, a redundance of argument, sometimes verging on special pleading, to reconcile to his favourite hypothesis views and feelings gathered in alien regions, with which his wider experience has made him familiar. This effort continued throughout his Utilitarianism has occasioned, if we may venture to hint it, a want of clear statement and precise thought, with