This bare indication of topics will suffice to give an idea of the working out of Hutcheson’s system.  For summary:—­I.—­The Standard, according to Hutcheson, is identical with the Moral Faculty.  It is the Sense of unique excellence in certain affections and in the actions consequent upon them.  The object of approval is, in the main, benevolence.

II.—­His division of the feelings is into calm and turbulent, each of these being again divided into self-regarding and benevolent.  He affirms the existence of pure Disinterestedness, a calm regard for the most extended well-being.  There are also turbulent passions of a benevolent kind, whose end is their simple gratification.  Hutcheson has thus a higher and lower grade of Benevolence; the higher would correspond to the disinterestedness that arises from the operation of fixed ideas, the lower to those affections that are generated in us by pleasing objects.

He has no discussion on the freedom of the will, contenting himself with mere voluntariness as an element in moral approbation or censure.

III.—­The Summum Bonum is fully discussed.  He places the pleasures of sympathy and moral goodness (also of piety) in the highest rank, the passive sensations in the lowest.  Instead of making morality, like health, a neutral state (though an indispensable condition of happiness), he ascribes to it the highest positive gratification.

IV.—­In proceeding upon Rights, instead of Duties, as a basis of classification, Hutcheson is following in the wake of the jurisconsults, rather than of the moralists.  When he enters into the details of moral duties, he throws aside his ‘moral sense,’ and draws his rules, most of them from Roman Law, the rest chiefly from manifest convenience.

V. and VI.—­Hutcheson’s relation to Politics and Theology requires no comment.

BERNARD DE MANDEVILLE. [1670-1733.]

MANDEVILLE was author of ’The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Public Benefits’ (1714).  This work is a satire upon artificial society, having for its chief aim to expose the hollowness of the so-called dignity of human nature.  Dugald Stewart considered it a recommendation to any theory of the mind that it exalted our conceptions of human nature.  Shaftesbury’s views were entitled to this advantage; but, observes Mandeville, ’the ideas he had formed of the goodness and excellency of our nature, were as romantic and chimerical, as they are beautiful and amiable.’  Mandeville examined not what human nature ought to be, but what it really is.  In contrast, therefore, to the moralists that distinguish between a higher and a lower in our nature, attributing to the higher everything good and noble, while the lower ought to be persecuted and despised, Mandeville declares the fancied higher parts to be the region of vanity and imposture, while the renowned deeds of men, and the greatness of kingdoms, really arise from the passions usually reckoned base and sensual.  As his views are scattered through numerous dissertations, it will be best to summarize them under a few heads.