A peculiar position in the ethical thought of the eighteenth century is held by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)._(_27_)_ He opposes not only the utilitarians, but the Intellectualists and the Intuitionists as well, and tries to secure a mediating position between them. That the content of ethics is utilitarian he openly admits, but he derives the ethical neither from considerations of usefulness nor from the intellect; he places its origin in feeling. At the same time he emphasizes, as does Adam Smith also a few years later, its relationship to the æsthetic. But the important thing is that he puts forward a living philosophy of nature which connects itself with ethics. He is convinced that harmony reigns in the universe and that man is meant to experience this harmony in himself. Æsthetic feeling and ethical thinking are for him forms of a growing union with the divine life, which struggles to find expression in the spiritual being of man as it does in nature. With Shaftesbury ethics descend from a rocky mountain range into a luxuriant plain. The utilitarians know as yet nothing of a world. Their ethic is contained in considerations about the relation of the individual to society. The anti-utilitarians have some idea of a world, but not a correct one. They elaborate ethics with a formal theology and a formal philosophizing about the All, but Shaftesbury plants ethical thought in the universe of reality, which he himself contemplates through an idealising optimism, reaching thereby a direct and universal notion of the moral. [pg 088] A mysticism based on a philosophy of nature begins to spin its magic threads through European thought. The spirit of the Renaissance rules again, no longer, however, like a raging storm, as in Giordano Bruno, but as a gentle breeze. Shaftesbury thinks pantheistically, more pantheistically than he confesses to himself, but his is not a pantheism which throws his age into struggles about world-views, and comes into conflict with theism. It is the pantheism which rules in Hinduism and in Late Stoicism also; one which is not dangerous, and raises no question of principle, desiring only to be regarded as a vivifying of belief in God. Shaftesbury exerts also a liberating influence on the spiritual life of his time by giving ethics a much freer attitude towards religion than anyone had ventured to do up to that time. Religion, according to him, has not to give decisions about ethics, but on the contrary must test its own claims to be true by its relation to pure ethical ideas. He even ventures to represent the Christian teaching about rewards and punishment as not consistent with pure ethical considerations. Morality, he says, is pure, only when good has been done simply because it is good.