"their brutishness, which imagine that virtue is only as men will account of it," seems literally accurate. And the curious thing is that writers of the Utilitarian school, while denying the doctrine of the lex naturæ, really found themselves upon it. They must appeal to the rational faculty in support of their contention that man ought to pursue happiness, and, as the more refined of them hold, the higher kinds of happiness. For their "ought," they allow, is incapable of proof. They may not consent to call it an intuition of the practical reason. But that is what it really is, if it is anything more than an arbitrary assumption; it cannot possibly be derived from sensible experience. Of course, there is a Utilitarianism to which both you and I would heartily subscribe: the doctrine that the criterion of the goodness or badness of actions is their congruity or incongruity with man's rational nature. Equally of course, should we agree in rejecting the teaching that the determinative source of moral quality is the free volition of Deity. Right and Wrong, in their nature, are what they are from everlasting to everlasting, and are unchangeable even by the fiat of Omnipotence. Considerations such as these were long out of fashion in this country. But fashions change. Truth does not. "Truth," in Cudworth's happy phrase, "is the most unbending and incompliable, the most firm and adamantine thing in the world." On that foundation I have endeavoured to build in this work. However many its defects, of which no one can be more conscious than myself, I am very sure that, in offering it to you, I may truly use the words of Montaigne: C'est icy un livre de bonne foy. I am, dear Mr. Lecky, Very truly yours, ATHENEUM CLUB, March 25, 1899. W. S. LILLY. SUMMARY A striking characteristic of the present day is the well- nigh total effacement, from the general mind, of the Most so-called "laws " are not laws at all; they do not possess that character of necessity which is the This is true, for example, of the laws of conduct pre- It is true, for the most part, of the so-called laws of Again, if we keep strictly within the domain of the ex- perimental sciences, we have no right to speak of laws; for necessity has no place in pure physics. The age in which we live supplies an illustration of this This arises, in great degree, from the absorbing devo- tion of the age to those sciences, and from the claim made for them as the one criterion of reality This tendency of the age is strikingly exemplified in the domain of politics, where " no one acts on first prin- The present work is the outcome of the deep conviction that "nothing is that errs from law :" that it rules in the political province, as in every segment of The only firm foundation upon which the State can be built is the moral law, in virtue of which man is a being invested with rights and encompassed by duties. The natural rights and the natural duties of man are the primary postulates of politics Natural rights and natural duties. "There is a system of rights and obligations which should be main- tained by law, whether it is so or not, and which may properly be called natural." The ideals con- stituting this absolute jural order are the first prin- ciples of political philosophy At the basis, then, of Politics lies the question, What is In it we may proceed either synthetically or analytic- ally. Both the a priori and the a posteriori methods are equally valid and valuable The a priori method has never been popular in England; and the absurdities and atrocities of the Jacobin publicists, who followed it exclusively, over- Their mistake, however, did not lie in their belief that there are first principles in politics, but in their gross misapprehension of those principles, and in their fond conceit that what might suit the phan- Quite other is the true use of first principles in politics: The topic of the present chapter is the Origin of the Man, as we meet with him in history, possesses exactly the same distinctive characteristics in the earliest So much is certain. Equally certain is it that the polity which earliest history reveals is monarchical. Of civil society the germ is the family, which is an embryonic or rudimentary State Such is the answer of history to the question how the State arose. If we ask of philosophy why it arose, the answer is that in living gregariously, and not 18 |