I.—­Specially excluding any such External Standard of moral Good as the arbitrary Will, either of God or the Sovereign, he views it as a simple ultimate natural quality of actions or dispositions, as included among the verities of things, by the side of which the phenomena of Sense are unreal.

II.—­The general Intellectual Faculty cognizes the moral verities, which it contains within itself and brings rather than finds.

III.—­He does not touch upon Happiness; probably he would lean to asceticism.  He sets up no moral code.

IV.—­Obligation to the Positive Civil Laws in matters indifferent follows from the intellectual recognition of the established relation between ruler and subject.

V.—­Morality is not dependent upon the Deity in any other sense than the whole frame of things is.

SAMUEL CLARKE. [1675-1729.]

Clarke put together his two series of Boyle Lectures (preached 1704 and 1705) as ’A Discourse, concerning the Being and Attributes of God, the Obligations of Natural Religion and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation,’ in answer to Hobbes, Spinoza, &c.  The burden of the ethical discussion falls under the head of the Obligations of Natural Religion, in the second series.

He enounces this all-comprehensive proposition:  ’The same necessary and eternal different Relations that different Things bear one to another, and the same consequent Fitness or Unfitness of the application of different things or different relations one to another, with regard to which the will of God always and necessarily does determine itself to choose to act only what is agreeable to Justice, Equity, Goodness, and Truth, in order to the welfare of the whole universe—­ought likewise constantly to determine the Wills of all subordinate rational beings, to govern all their actions by the same rules, for the good of the public, in their respective stations.  That is, these eternal and necessary differences of things make it fit and reasonable for creatures so to act; they cause it to be their duty, or lay an obligation on them so to do; even separate from the consideration of these Rules being the positive Will or Command of God, and also antecedent to any respect or regard, expectation or apprehension of any particular private and personal Advantage or Disadvantage, Reward or Punishment, either present or future, annexed either by natural consequence, or by positive appointment, to the practising or neglecting of these rules.  In the explication of this, nearly his whole system is contained.

His first concern is to impress the fact that there are necessary and eternal differences of ail things, and implied or consequent relations (proportions or disproportions) existing amongst them; and to bring under this general head the special case of differences of Persons (e.g., God and Man, Man and Fellow-man), for the sake of the implication that to different persons there belong peculiar Fitnesses and Unfitnesses of circumstances; or, which is the same thing, that there arises necessarily amongst them a suitableness or unsuitableness of certain manners of Behaviour.  The counter-proposition that he contends against is, that the relations among persons depend upon positive constitution of some kind, instead of being founded unchangeably in the nature and reason of things.