the object of a higher, reflective, judging affection.  This faculty of moral distinctions, the sense for right and wrong, or, which amounts to the same thing, for beauty and ugliness, is innate; we approve virtue and condemn vice by nature, not as the result of a compact, and from this natural feeling for good and evil exercise develops a cultivated moral taste or tact.  And when, further, the reason, by means of this faculty of judgment, gains control over the passions, man becomes an ethical artist, a moral virtuoso.

Virtue pleases by its own worth and beauty, not because of any external advantage.  We must not corrupt the love of the good for its own sake by mixing with it the hope of future reward, which at the best is admissible only as a counter-weight against evil passions.  When Shaftesbury speaks of future bliss, his highest conception of the heavenly life is uninterrupted friendship, magnanimity, and nobility, as a continual rewarding of virtue by new virtue.

The good is the beautiful, and the beautiful is the harmonious, the symmetrical; hence the essence of virtue consists in the balance of the affections and passions.  Of the three classes into which Shaftesbury divides the passions, one, including the “unnatural” or unsocial affections, as malevolence, envy, and cruelty, which aim neither at the good of the individual nor that of others, is always and entirely evil.

The two other classes, the social (or “natural”) affections and the “self-affections,” may be virtuous or vicious, according to their degree, i. e., according to the relation of their strength to that of the other affections.  In itself a benevolent impulse is never too strong; it can become so only in comparison with self-love, or in respect to the constitution of the individual in question, and conversely.  Commonly the social impulses do not attain the normal standard, while the selfish exceed it; but the opposite case also occurs.  Excessive parental tenderness, the pity which enervates and makes useless for aid, religious zeal for making converts, passionate partisanship, are examples of too violent social affections which interfere with the activity of the other inclinations.  Just as erroneous, on the other side, is the neglect of one’s own good.  For although the possession of selfish inclinations does not make a man virtuous, yet the lack of them is a moral defect, since they are indispensable to the general good.  No one can be useful to others who does not keep himself in a condition for service.  The impulse to care for private welfare is good and necessary in so far as it comports with the general welfare or contributes to this.  The due proportion between the social passions, which constitute the direct source of good, and those of self-love, consists in subordinating the latter to the former.  The kinship of this ethics of harmony with the ethical views of antiquity is evident.  It is completed by the eudemonistic conclusion of the system.