Meanwhile Shaftesbury’s ideas had impressed Hutcheson and Butler, according to the peculiarities of each.  Both of these writers deem it necessary to explain and correct the distinction between the selfish and the benevolent affections by additions, which were of influence on the ethics of Hume; both devote their zeal to the new doctrine of feelings of reflection or moral taste, in which the former gives more prominence to the aesthetic, merely judging factor, the latter to the active or mandatory one.

Francis Hutcheson[1] (died 1747), professor at Glasgow, in his posthumous System of Moral Philosophy, 1755, which had been preceded by an Inquiry concerning the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 1725, pursues the double aim of showing against Hobbes and Locke the originality and disinterestedness both of benevolence and of moral approval.  Virtue is not exercised because it brings advantage to the agent, nor approved on account of advantage to the observer.

[Footnote 1:  Cf.  Fowler’s treatise, cited above—­TR.]

(1) The benevolent affections are entirely independent of self-love and regard for the rewards of God and of man, nay, independent even of the lofty satisfaction afforded by self-approbation.  This last, indeed, is vouchsafed to us only when we seek the good of others without personal aims:  the joy of inward approval is the result of virtue, not the motive to it.  If love were in reality a concealed egoism, it would yield to control in cases where it promises advantage, which, as experience shows, is not the fact.  Benevolence is entirely natural and as universal in the moral world as gravitation in the corporeal; and like gravitation further in that its intensity increases with propinquity—­the nearer the persons, the greater the love.  Benevolence is more widespread than malevolence; even the criminal does more innocent and kind acts in his life than criminal ones—­the rarity of the latter is the reason why so much is said about them.

(2) Moral judgment is also entirely uninfluenced by consideration of the advantageous or disadvantageous results for the agent or the spectator.  The beauty of a good deed arouses immediate satisfaction.  Through the moral sense we feel pleasure at observing a virtuous action, and aversion when we perceive an ignoble one, feelings which are independent of all thought of the rewards and punishments promised by God, as well as of the utility or harm for ourselves.  Hutcheson argues a complete distinction between moral approval and the perception of the agreeable and the useful, from the facts that we judge a benevolent action which is forced, or done from motives of personal advantage, quite differently from one inspired by love; that we pay esteem to high-minded characters whether their fortunes be good or ill; and that we are moved with equal force by fictitious actions, as, for instance, on the stage, and by those which really take place.