[Footnote 1:  Hartley, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duties, his Expectations. 1749.]

[Footnote 2:  Priestley, Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind on the Principles of the Association of Ideas, 1775; Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit, 1777; The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity, 1777; Free Discussions of the Doctrines of Materialism, 1778 (against Richard Price’s Letters on Materialism and Philosophical Necessity).  Cf. on both Schoenlank’s dissertation, Hartley und Priestley, die Begruender des Assoziationismus in England, 1882.]

As early as in Hartley[1] the principle, which is so important for ethics, appears that things and actions (e.g., promotion of the good of others) which at first are sought and done because they are means to our own enjoyment, in time come to have a direct worth of their own, apart from the original egoistic end.  James Mill (1829) has repeated this thought in later times.  As fame becomes an immediate object of desire to the ambitious man, and gold to the miser, so, through association, the impulse toward that which will secure approval may be transformed into the endeavor after that which deserves approval.

[Footnote 1:  Cf.  Jodl, Geschichte der Ethik, vol. i. p. 197 seq.]

Among later representatives of the Associational school we may mention Erasmus Darwin (Zooenomia, or the Laws of Organic Life, 1794-96).

%2.  Deism%.

As Bacon and Descartes had freed natural science, Hobbes, the state, and Grotius, law from the authority of the Church and had placed them on an independent basis, i.e., the basis of nature and reason, so deism[1] seeks to free religion from Church dogma and blind historical faith, and to deduce it from natural knowledge.  In so far as deism finds both the source and the test of true religion in reason, it is rationalism; in so far as it appeals from the supernatural light of revelation and inspiration to the natural light of reason, it is naturalism; in so far as revelation and its records are not only not allowed to restrict rational criticism, but are made the chief object of criticism, its adherents are freethinkers.

[Footnote 1:  Cf.  Lechler’s Geschichte des Englischen Deismus, 1841, which is rigorously drawn from the sources. [Hunt, History of Religious Thought in England, 1871-73 [1884]; Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 1876 [1880]; Cairns, Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, 1881.]]

The general principles of deism may be compressed into a few theses.  There is a natural religion, whose essential content is morality; this comprises not much more than the two maxims, Believe in God and Do your duty.

Positive religions are to be judged by this standard.  The elements in them which are added to natural religion, or conflict with it, are superfluous and harmful additions, arbitrary decrees of men, the work of cunning rulers and deceitful priests.  Christianity, which in its original form was the perfect expression of the true religion of reason, has experienced great corruptions in its ecclesiastical development, from which it must now be purified.