But is not this to restore nature. Butler, finding nature to be full of horrors, makes God the source of much that is terrible. Shaftesbury assumes that, as nature is divine, all that is natural must be worthy of adoration. God, when regarded as the universal creator of all things and all men, is still to retain the attributes of goodness, wisdom, and power. How, then, account for evil? It is the old problem; and Shaftesbury attempts to solve it chiefly by evasion. He gets rid of some evils by calling them unnatural. the old distinction over again? Does not God at once become the God of a part, not of the whole, and therefore an interfering and not an all-pervading power? How are we to know what is and what is not unnatural? If God makes all things, why does He not sanction vice as well as virtue? This is the real meaning of the attacks made by other moralists upon Shaftesbury's ethical system. Admit a God who is, strictly speaking, the universal source of everything, and His will can no longer be the code of morality; He must be supposed to will the bad as well as the good, for the existence of anything proves it to be in accordance with His will. To resist Him is not wrong, but impossible. Shaftesbury attempts to answer by appealing to the universal harmony. But these fluent metaphors fail to give us any definite standard. What is this harmony? Is there, after all, any such harmony? Is not discord written on the face of creation with equal distinctness? Shaftesbury R resolutely sees harmony everywhere; but surely it is difficult to discover. In this painful world, Candide will get the better of Pangloss. There are hideous things in the world which cannot be hid from sight or left out of our account in drawing up schemes of morality. Poverty, and starvation, and disease may be blessings in disguise, but the disguise will last our time. To say that they are not real evils, is useless for Shaftesbury's purpose. We have to assume their reality, whether or not we may be able to discover some day that they are ultimately mere shams. Nobody in grief or serious temptation would be influenced by Shaftesbury's plausible philosophising. To the statement that there cannot be evil, they reply only too confidently there is. The error into which Shaftesbury falls is something like the ordinary misconceptions of Berkeley's theory. Because there is said to be no such thing as substance, we are to knock our heads against a post. Because there is no cure for evil in Shaftesbury's metaphysical system, we are to act in this world of hard facts as if it were a mere fancy. It is better to take things as they are, and make the best of them without vain repinings in an equally vain attempt to retreat into a dreamland of philosophy. THE most complete antithesis of Shaftesbury was Bernard de Mandeville, author of the Fable of the Bees.' Between them the two writers give a very fair summary of the ethical tendencies of the eighteenth century freethinkers in England. They are treated as joint opponents of orthodoxy in several controversial writings of the times, as, for example, in Berkeley's 'Minute Philosopher,' in a very able essay on the 'Characteristics' by John Brown, better known as the author of the Estimate,' and in that amorphous mass of dissertation which Warburton called a •Demonstration of the Divine Legation of Moses.' Their theories are the Scylla and Charybdis between which it was a delicate matter to steer a straight course. Agreeing in refuting the teaching of divines, they are at the opposite poles of speculation in all else; and it was some consolation to the orthodox 1 The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices Public Benefits: with an Essay on Charity and Charity-schools, and a Search into the Nature of Society, &c. London, 1806. that two such enemies of the faith might be, more or less, trusted to neutralise each other. Their relations to each other and to their common enemies illustrate some of the problems which were then agitating men's minds. The agitation has not quite subsided. Mandeville published the Fable of the Bees' in 1714, three years after the appearance of the Characteristics.' It opens with a doggrel poem, setting forth that a hive of bees, once thriving and vicious, lost its prosperity together with its vice on a sudden reformation. A line or two from the conclusion gives the pith of the doctrine : Then leave complaints: fools only strive A comment follows expounding this cynical theory in detail. In subsequent editions, for the Fable' enjoyed a wide popularity for many years, were added various explanations and defences of the doctrine. In 1723 the book was presented as a nuisance by the Grand Jury of Middlesex. Observing, says that respectable body, with the greatest sorrow and concern,' the many books published almost every week by impious and licentious writers, whose principles have a direct tendency to the subversion of all religion and civil government, our duty to the Almighty, our love to our country, and regard to our oaths, oblige us 6 to present' the publisher of the Fable of the Bees,' and thereby, as it would appear, to give him a useful advertisement. His No harm followed to Mandeville in person. reputation, however, was gibbeted in all the respectable writings of the day; his name became a bye-word, and his book was regarded as a kind of pothouse edition of the arch-enemy Hobbes. The indignation was not unnatural. Mandeville is said to have been in the habit of frequenting coffee-houses and amusing his patrons by ribald conversation. The book smells of its author's haunts. He is a cynical and prurient writer, who shrinks from no jest, however scurrilous, and from no paradox, however grotesque, calculated to serve the object—which he avows in his preface to be his sole object-of amusing his readers; readers, it may be added, far from scrupulous in their tastes. And yet, with all Mandeville's brutality, there runs through his pages a vein of shrewd sense which gives a certain pungency to his rough assaults on the decent theories of life. Nay, there are many remarks indicative of some genuine philosophical acuteness. A hearty contempt for the humbugs of this world, and a resolution not to be blinded by its professions, are not in themselves bad things. When, indeed, a man includes amongst the humbugs everything which passes with others for virtue and purity, his teaching is repulsive; though, even in such a case, we may half forgive a writer like Swift, whose bitterness |