His immediate predecessors and contemporaries in the field of ethics were principally concerned with the origin and authority of right and wrong. Why does mankind generally agree as to what is right and what is wrong; whence are the notions of “ought” and “ought not” derived if not from the church or the Bible? At the time Smith wrote, English moralists were divided upon this point into two main schools. Of the first, who derived all moral rules from self-interest, Hobbes, Mandeville, and Hume were the principal exponents. The second school sought for a less variable standard, and have been called Intuitionalists, because they believed either with Clarke and Price that moral truths are perceived like axioms of Euclid, by the intellect, or with Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, that there is innate in us a moral sense or taste (developed by Bishop Butler into conscience) which prompts us to do right and tells us the difference between good and evil. Moralists were equally divided upon the question, “In what does virtue consist?” His old teacher Hutcheson had answered that it consisted in benevolence; others thought that prudence was the true mark of the good man. In Adam Smith’s view, prudence and benevolence are equally essential ingredients in the constitution of a perfectly virtuous character. With virtue he associates happiness, and his individual view of both is based partly upon the Greek philosophy of an independent leisure, partly upon the Christian conception of doing good to others; and we feel that he does not always succeed in reconciling the new ideal with the old. “Happiness,” he says, “consists in tranquillity and enjoyment. Without tranquillity there can be no enjoyment.” Tranquillity, he thinks, is “the natural and usual state of a man’s mind.” But the tranquillity to be desired was as far removed from indolence or apathy as from avarice or ambition. It was the active tranquillity of a well furnished mind and a benevolent heart.