A profound truth, which in teaching us a nobler spirit of religion, instructs us also in the three principles of education, of morals, and of laws. But Bossuet's address is not of the fashion established amongst us!

I trace the same want of moral knowledge in our fiscal impositions. Some taxes are laid on which must necessarily engender vice; some taken off as if necessarily to increase it. We have taxed the diffusion of knowledge two hundred per cent. ; the consequence is, the prevention of legal knowledge, and the diffusion of smuggled instruction by the most pernicious teachers. We have diminished the duty upon gin, and from that day commenced a most terrible epoch of natural demoralization. "Formerly," says the wise prelate I have so often quoted, "when I first came to London, I never saw a female coming out of a gin-shop; I have since repeatedly seen females with infants in their arms, to whom they appear to be giving some part of their liquor."

Our greatest national stain is the intemperance of the poor; to that intemperance our legislators give the greatest encouragement ;-they forbid knowledge; they interfere with amusement; they are favourable only to intoxication.

For want, too, of extending our researches into morality, the light breaks only the darkness immediately round us, and embraces no ample and catholic circumference. Thus, next to our general regard for appearance, we consider morality only as operating on the connexions between the sexes. Morality, strictly translated, with us means the absence of licentiousness-it is another word for one of its propertieschastity; as the word profligacy bears only the construction of sexual intemperance. I do not deny that this virtue is one of immense importance. Wherever it is disregarded, a general looseness of all other principles usually ensues. Men rise by the prostitution of their dearest ties, and indifference to marriage becomes a means of the corruption of the State. But as the strongest eyes cannot look perpetually to one object without squinting at last, so to regard but one point of morals, however valuable, distorts our general vision for the rest. And what is very remarkable among us, out of the exclusiveness of our regard to chastity, arises the fearful amount of prostitution which exists throughout England, and for which no remedy is ever contemplated. Our extreme regard for the chaste induces a contemptuous apathy to the unchaste. We care not how many there are, what they suffer-or how far they descend into the lower abysses of crime. Thus, in many of the agricultural districts, nothing can equal the shameless abandonment of the female peasantry. Laws favouring bastardy promote licentiousness --and, as I have before shown, the pauper marries the mother of illegitimate children, in order to have a better claim on the parish. In our large towns an equally systematic contempt of the unfortunate vic

tims, less, perhaps, of sin than of ignorance and of poverty, produces consequences equally prejudicial. No regard, as in other countries, by a rigid police order, is paid to their health, or condition; the average of their career on earth is limited to four years. Their houses are unvisited their haunts unwatched-and thus is engendered a fearful mass of disease, of intemperance, and of theft. Too great a contempt for one vice, rots it, as it were, into a hundred other vices yel more abandoned. And thus, by a false or partial notion of morality, we have defeated our own object, and the exclusive intolerance to the unchaste has cursed the country with an untended, unmedicated leprosy of prostitution.

To the want, too, of a cultivation of morality as a science, all its rules are with us vague, vacillating, and uncertain; they partake of the nature of personal partiality, or of personal persecution. One person is proscribed by society for some offence which another person commits with impunity. One woman elopes, and is “the abandoned creature ;" another does the same, and is only "the unfortunate lady."Miss is received with respect by the same audience that drove Kean to America. Lady - is an object of interest, for the same crime as that which makes Lady - —— an object of hatred. Lord ill uses and separates from his wife-nobody blames him. Lord Byron is discarded by his wife, and is cut by society. is a notorious gambler, and takes in all his acquaintance-everybody courts himhe is a man of fashion. Mr. —— imitates him, and is shunned like a pestilence—he is a pitiful knave! In vain would we attempt to discover any clue to these distinctions-all is arbitrary and capricious; often the result of a vague and unmerited personal popularity-often a sudden and fortuitous reaction in the public mind, that, feeling it has been too harsh to its last victim, is too lenient to its next. Hence, from a lack of that continuous stream of ethical meditation and instruction, which, though pursued but by a few, and on high and solitary places, flows downward, and, through invisible crevices and channels, saturates the moral soil,-Morality with us has no vigour and no fertile and organized system. It acts by starts and fits-it adheres to mere forms and names—now to a respect for appearances—now to a respect for property-clinging solely with any enduring strength, to one material and worldly belief which the commercial and aristocratic spirits have engendered, viz. in the value of station and the worth of wealth.

CHAPTER VIL

WHAT OUGHT TO BE THE AIM OF ENGLISH MORALISTS IN THIS AGE.

Influence of Moral Philosophy upon the World.-Evils of our exclusive attention to Locke.Philosophy the Voice of a certain Intellectual Want.-What is that Want in our Day.-What should be the true Moral to inculcate.-Picture of a Moralist.

Ir seems, then, that owing to the natural tendencies of trade and of an imperfect and unelevating description of aristocracy, the Low and the Mercantile creep over the national character, and the more spiritual and noble faculties are little encouraged and lightly esteemed. It is the property of moral philosophy to keep alive the refining and unworldly springs of thought and action; a counter attraction to the mire and clay of earth, and drawing us insensibly upward to a higher and purer air of Intellectual Being. Civilized life with its bustle and action, the momentary and minute objects in which it engages and frets the soul, requires a perpetual stimulus to larger views and higher emotions; and where these are scant and feeble, the standard of opinion settles down to a petty and sordid level.

In metaphysical knowledge, England has not advanced since Locke. A few amongst us may have migrated to the Scotch school-a few more may have followed forth the principles of Locke into the theories of Helvetius-a very few indeed, adventuring into the mighty and mooned sea of the Kantian philosophy, may steer their solitary and unnoticed barks along its majestic deeps; but these are mere stragglers from the great and congregated herd. The philosophy of Locke is still the system of the English, and all their new additions to his morality are saturated with his spirit. The beauty and daring, and integrity of his character-the association of his name with a great epoch in the Liberties of Thought, contribute to maintain his ascendency in the English heart; and his known belief in our immortality has blinded us to the materialism of his doctrines.

Few, sir, know or conjecture the influence which one mighty mind insensibly wields over those masses of men, and that succession of time, which appear to the superficial altogether out of the circle of his con

him.

Kant, too, has been only introduced to us just as Germany has got beyond

EVILS OF EXCLUSIVE ATTENTION TO LOCKE.

159

trol. I think it is to our exclusive attention to Locke, that I can trace much of the unspiritual and material form which our philosophy has since rigidly preserved, and which, so far from counteracting the leelling influences of a worldly cast, has strengthened and consolidated tem. Locke, doubtless, was not aware of the results to be drawn from his theories, but the man who has declared that the soul may be material that by revelation only can we be certain that it is not so who leaves the Spiritual and the Immortal undefended by philosophy, and protected solely by theology, may well, you must allow, be the founder of a school of Materialists, and the ready oracle of those who refuse an appeal to Theology and are sceptical of Revelation therefore it seems to me a most remarkable error in the educational system of Cambridge, that Locke should be the sole metaphysician professedly studied-and that while we are obliged to pore over, and digest, and nourish ourselves with, the arguments that have led schools so powerful and scholars so numerous to pure materialism, we study none of those writings which have replied to his errors and elevated his system.

and

It is even yet more remarkable, that while Locke should be the great metaphysician of a clerical University, so Paley should be its tutelary moralist. Of all the systems of unalloyed and unveiled selfishness which human ingenuity ever devised, Paley's is, perhaps, the grossest and most sordid. Well did Mackintosh observe that his definition of Virtue, alone is an unanswerable illustration of the debasing vulgarity of his code. "Virtue is the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness." So that any act of good to man in obedience to God, if it arise from any motive but a desire of the reward which he will bestow-if it spring from pure gratitude for past mercies, from affectionate veneration to a protecting Being-does not come under the head of virtue; nay, if influenced solely by such purer motives, the mind altogether escape from the mercenary desire of rewards -its act would violate the definition of virtue, and, according to Paley, would become a vice! Alas for an University, that adopts materialism for its metaphysical code, and selfishness for its mora!!

Philosophy ought to be the voice of a certain intellectual want in every age. Men, in one period, require toleration and liberty; their common thoughts demand an expounder and enforcer. Such was the want which Locke satisfied-such his service to mankind! In our time we require but few new theories on these points already established. Our intellectual want is to enlarge and spiritualize the liberty of thought we have acquired-the philosophy of one age advances by in

nica.

Essay on the Human Understanding, book iv. chap. 3.

See Mackintosh's Dissertation in the Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britan

160 PHILOSOPHY THE VOICE OF SOME INTELLECTUAL WANT.

corporating the good, but correcting the error of the last. This new want, no great philosopher has appeared amongst us to fulfil.*

But there are those who feel the want they cannot supply; if the lesser Spirits and Powers of the age are not able to furnish forth that philosophy, they can expedite its appearance; and this by endeavouring to dematerialize and exalt the standard of opinion-to purify the physical and wordly influences-to decrust from the wings of Contemplation the dust that, sullying her plumes, impedes her flight-to labour in elevating the genius of action, as exhibited in the more practical world of politics and laws-to refine the coarse, and to ennoble the low; this sir, it seems to me, is the true moral which the infirmities of this present time the most demand, and which the English writer or the English legislator, studying to benefit his country, ought to place unceasingly before him. Rejecting the petty and isolated points, the saws and maxims, which a vulgar comprehension would deem to be morals where they are only truisms, his great aim for England shall be to exalt and purify the current channels of her opinion. To effect this for others, he shall watch narrowly over himself, discarding, as far as the contaminations of custom and the drawbacks of human feebleness will allow, the selfish and grosser motives that he sees operating around him; weaning himself, as a politician, from the ambition of the adventurer, and the low desire of wealth and power; seeking, as a writer, in despite, now of the popular, now of the lordly clamour, to inculcate a venerating enthusiasm for the true and ethereal springs of Greatness and of Virtue; and breathing thus through the physical action and outward form of Freedom, the noble aspirations that belong in states as in men to the diviner excitation of the soul !

Such seems to me the spirit of that moral teaching which we now require, and such the end and destiny that the moralists of our age and nation should deem their own!

What I principally mean to insist upon is this-Philosophy ought to counteract whatever may be the prevalent error of the Popular opinion of the time. If the error were that of a fanatical and stilted excess of the chivalric principic-Philosophy might do most good by insisting on the counteracting principles of sobriety and common sense; but if the error be that of a prevalent disposition to the sordid and worldly influences-Philosophy may be most beneficial by going even to extremes in establishing the more generous and unselfish motives of action. Hence one reason why no individual School of Philosophy can be permanent. Each age requires a new representative of its character, and a new corrector of its opinions. A material and cold philosophy may be most excellent at one period, and the very extravagance of an idealizing philosophy may be most useful at another.

END OF BOOK III.