in any respect identical with that of the modern Utilitarians. He
sowed the seed for their doctrine, no doubt, but himself had his
garner well stored with grain from a very different source. He was a
Christian, and believed in Divine law; he was a theist and believed in
God. The modern Utilitarian believes only in a bundle of {283}
sensations and in an invariable sequence. By denying innate ideas of
morality, Mr. Locke, as his illustrations prove, only meant to
proclaim the very obvious fact, that, as all men obviously do not
agree in their principles of action, it is reasonable to demand of
them some reason for accepting one principle of action rather than
another. No man can object to such a reasonable demand. But this does
not prevent him in another place (ii. 33. 11), from talking, as no
modern Utilitarian would, of “the unchangeable rule of right and
wrong which the law of God hath established.” This method of
speaking, common to Locke I believe with many of the most solid
thinkers of his time, would lead me to class his ethical doctrine
under the rubric of what might be called THEOCRATIC INSTITUTIONALISM;
that is to say, he looks on morality as the result of a law laid down
and sanctioned by the ultimate source of all laws, physical as well as
moral. This, no doubt, seems to imply something arbitrary, which
neither Plato nor Aristotle would allow to be possible in any of the
fundamental manifestations of Divine reason; but notwithstanding this
preference of the word νόμος, _law_, to φύσις, _nature_, had
the English thinker been cross-questioned on the subject, he would
probably have said that these institutions or laws which God lays on
man flow necessarily from the excellence of the Divine nature; and
this would have been pure Platonism. That he was sound-hearted at
bottom no less than sound-headed, his book amply proves,
notwithstanding the confusion of ideas in which he entangled himself
by the assertion of propositions which, when logically followed out,
lead directly to materialism in philosophy, atheism in theology, and
sensualism in morals.
{284}
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