*Malebranche* (A. D. 1638-1714), whose principal writings belong to the previous century, represents entirely opposite views and tendencies. He hardly differs from Samuel Clarke, except in phraseology. He resolves virtue into love of the universal order, and conformity to it in conduct. This order requires that we should prize and love all beings and objects in proportion to their relative worth, and that we should recognize this relative worth in our rules and habits of life. Thus man is to be more highly valued and more assiduously served than the lower animals, because worth more; and God is to be loved infinitely more than man, and to be always obeyed and served in preference to man, because he is worth immeasurably more than the beings that derive their existence from him. Malebranche ascribes to the Supreme Being, not the arbitrary exercise of power in constituting the right, but recognition, in his government of the world and in his revealed will, of the order, which is man’s sole law. “Sovereign princes,” he says, “have no right to use their authority without reason. Even God has no such miserable right.” At nearly the same period commenced the ethical controversy between *Fénélon* (A. D. 1651-1715) and *Bossuet* (A. D. 1627-1704), as to the possibility and obligation of disinterested virtue. Fénélon and the Quietists, who sympathized with him, maintained that the pure love of God, without any self-reference, or regard for one’s own well-being either here or here-after, is the goal and the test of human perfection, and that nothing below this—nothing which aims or aspires at anything less than this—deserves the name of virtue. Bossuet defended the selfish theory of virtue, attacked his amiable antagonist with unconscionable severity and bitterness, and succeeded in obtaining from the court of Rome—though against the wishes of the Pope—the condemnation of the obnoxious tenet. The Pope remarked, with well-turned antithesis, that Fénélon might have erred from excess in the love of God, while Bossuet had sinned by defect in the love of his neighbor. Among the recent French moralists, the most distinguished names are those of *Jouffroy* and *Cousin*, who—each with a terminology of his own—agree with Malebranche in regarding right and wrong as inherent and essential characteristics of actions, and as having their source and the ground of their validity in the nature of things. The aim of Cousin’s well-known treatise on “The True, the Beautiful, and the Good,” is purely ethical, and the work is designed to identify the three members of the Platonic triad with corresponding attributes of the Infinite Being,—attributes which, virtually one, have their counterpart and manifestation in the order of nature and the government of the universe. * * * * *