Cardinal Doctrines of the Malthusian Ethics—Application to Desire of Marriage—Place of Man on the Earth—Criticism of Moral Philosophy—Teleology and Utility—Benevolence and Self-love—Malthus and Paley—Greatest Happiness—Earthly Paradise—Malthus and the French Revolution—Malthus not a Political Reactionary—Not committed to _laissez faire_—His Modifications of that Doctrine—Utilitarianism _plus_ Nationality—Experience as much the Riddle as the Interpretation—The State an Organism—Political Ideals before and after 1846. The moral philosophy of Malthus, like that of Aristotle, starts from a teleology. Nature makes nothing in vain. Every desire has its proper place and proper gratification, if we can find them. The passions are the materials out of which happiness is made; and they are therefore to be regulated and harmonized; they are not to be extinguished, or even diminished in intensity.[726] There is a way of so gratifying the desires that they produce a general balance of consequences in favour of happiness; and there is an opposite way with opposite effects. The former is evidently the way of nature, for utility is the only guide of conduct we have apart from Scripture.[727] We must not eradicate any impulses; but we must follow none so far “as to trench upon some other law [_sic_] which equally demands our attention.” What is the golden mean, and what is too much or too little, we can only know by our own and others’ experience of the consequences of actions.[728] Nature shows us the wrongness of an act by bringing from it a train of painful consequences. Diseases, instead of being the “inevitable inflictions of Providence,” are “indications that we have offended against some of the laws of nature. The plague at Constantinople and in other towns of the East is a constant admonition of this kind to the inhabitants. The human constitution cannot support such a state of filth and torpor; and as dirt, squalid poverty, and indolence are in the highest degree unfavourable to happiness and virtue,[729] it seems a benevolent dispensation that such a state should by the laws of nature produce disease and death, as a beacon to others to avoid splitting on the same rock.”[730] As epidemics indicate bad food, unwholesome houses, or bad drainage, and as indigestion follows over-eating, so the misery that follows on too great an increase of numbers is simply the law of nature recoiling on the law-breaker.[731] In this case it has taken a longer experience to teach men the conduct most favourable to happiness, and therefore the conduct right for them. But even the best food, best clothing, and best housing have not been taught all at once; and the principle of the lesson is clearly the same in all the cases.