by the whining and melancholy moralists, who will never allow us to be happy, because at every moment many of our fellow-beings are in misery.  The second is the doctrine of the Stoics, who annihilate self-interest in favour of the vast commonwealth of nature; on that the author bestows a lengthened comment and correction, founded on his theory of regulating the manifestations of joy or grief by the light of the impartial judge.  He gives his own panacea for human misery, namely, the power of nature to accommodate men to their permanent situation, and to restore tranquillity, which is the one secret of happiness.

Chapter IV. handles Self-Deceit, and the Origin and Use of General Rules.  The interference of our passions is the great obstacle to our holding towards ourselves the position of an impartial spectator.  Prom this notorious fact the author deduces an argument against a special moral faculty, or moral sense; he says that if we had such a faculty, it would surely judge our own passions, which are the most clearly laid open to it, more correctly than the passions of others.

To correct our self-partiality and self-deceit is the use of general rules.  Our repeated observations on the tendency of particular acts, teach us what is fit to be done generally; and our conviction of the propriety of the general rules is a powerful motive for applying them to our own case.  It is a mistake to suppose, as some have done, that rules precede experience; on the contrary, they are formed by finding from experience that all actions of a certain kind, in certain circumstances, are approved of.  When established, we appeal to them as standards of judgment in right and wrong, but they are not the original judgments of mankind, nor the ultimate foundations of moral sentiment.

Chapter V. continues the subject of the authority and influence of General Rules, maintaining that they are justly regarded as laws of the Deity.  The grand advantage of general rules is to give steadiness to human conduct, and to enable us to resist our temporary varieties of temper and disposition.  They are thus a grand security for human duties.  That the important rules of morality should be accounted laws of the Deity is a natural sentiment.  Men have always ascribed to their deities their own sentiments and passions; the deities held by them in special reverence, they have endowed with their highest ideal of excellence, the love of virtue and beneficence, and the abhorrence of vice and injustice.  The researches of philosophical inquiry confirmed mankind in the supposition that the moral faculties carry the badge of authority, that they were intended as the governing principles of our nature, acting as the vicegerents of the Deity.  This inference is confirmed by the view that the happiness of men, and of other rational creatures, is the original design of the Author of nature, the only purpose reconcilable with the perfections we ascribe to him.