As the harmony of impulses constitutes the essence of virtue, so also it is the way to true happiness.  Experience shows that unsocial, unsympathetic, vicious men are miserable; that love to society is the richest source of happiness; that even pity for the suffering of others occasions more pleasure than pain.  Virtue secures us the love and respect of others, secures us, above all, the approval of our own conscience, and true happiness consists in satisfaction with ourselves.  The search after this pure, constant, spiritual pleasure in the good, which is never accompanied by satiety and disgust, should not be called self-seeking; he alone takes pleasure in the good who is already good himself.

Shaftesbury is not well disposed toward positive Christianity, holding that it has made virtue mercenary by its promises of heavenly rewards, removed moral questions entirely out of this world into the world to come, and taught men most piously to torment one another out of pure supernatural brotherly love.  In opposition to such transcendental positions Shaftesbury, a priest of the modern view of the world, gives virtue a home on earth, seeks the hand of Providence in the present world, and teaches men to reach faith in God by inspiring contemplation of the well-ordered universe.  Virtue without piety is possible, indeed, though not complete.  But morality is first and fixed, hence it is the condition and the criterion of genuine religion.  Revelation does not need to fear free rational criticism, for the Scriptures are accredited by their contents.  Besides reason, banter is with Shaftesbury a second means for distinguishing the genuine from the spurious:  ridicule is the test of truth, and wit and humor the only cure for enthusiasm.  With these he scourges the over-pious as religious parasites, who for safety’s sake prefer to believe too much rather than too little.

Before Shaftesbury’s theory of the moral sense and the disinterested affections had gained adherents and developers, the danger, which indeed had not always been escaped, that man might content himself with the satisfaction of possessing noble impulses, without taking much care to realize them in useful actions, called forth by way of reaction, a paradoxical attempt at an apology for vice.  Mandeville, a London physician of French extraction, and born in Holland, had aroused attention by his poem, The Grumbling Hive; or Knaves Turned Honest, 1706, and in response to vehement attacks upon his work, had added a commentary to the second edition, The Fable of the Bees; or Private Vices Public Benefits, 1714.  The moral of the fable is that the welfare of a society depends on the industry of its members, and this, in turn, on their passions and vices.  Greed, extravagance, envy, ambition, and rivalry are the roots of the acquisitive impulse, and contribute more to the public good than benevolence and the control of desire.  Virtue is good for the individual, it is true, since it makes