With these ethical views, it was easy for Malthus to meet the objection that the general adoption of the moral restraint recommended in his _Essay on Population_ would diminish the numbers of the people too far. He (or his spokesman) answers[756] that we might as well fear to teach benevolence lest we should make men too careless of their private interests. “There is in such a case a mean point of perfection, which it is our duty to be constantly aiming at; and the circumstance of this point being surrounded on all sides with dangers is only according to the analogy of all ethical experience.” There is as much danger of making men too generous or too compassionate, as there is of “depopulating the world by making them too much the creatures of reason, and giving prudence too great a mastery over the natural passions and affections. The prevailing error in the game of life is, not that we miss the prizes through excess of timidity, but that we overlook the true state of the chances in our eager and sanguine expectations of winning them.[757] Of all the objections that were ever made to a moralist who offered to arm men against the passions that are everywhere seducing them into misery, the most flattering, but undoubtedly the most chimerical, is that his reasons are so strong that, if he were allowed to diffuse them, passion would be extinguished altogether, and the activity as well as the enjoyments of man annihilated along with his vices.”[758] In his view of the passions and of the moral sentiments, Malthus is clearly a man of the eighteenth century, and on the whole is more nearly at one with Paley than with any moralist after Tucker. There are points of divergence. He could not, in view of his cosmology, have fully approved Paley’s definition of virtue, “doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God and for the sake of everlasting happiness.”[759] He may have seen how it followed that a solitary man had no duties, that a pagan had no power to do right, that the moral imperative was hypothetical, and that it had no force for any who abjured their future bliss. At least he contents himself with agreeing that “the will of God is plainly general happiness, as we discover both by Scripture and the light of nature;”[760] and, “provided we discover it, it matters nothing by what means;”—there are clear marks of design in the world showing that its Maker willed the happiness of His creatures; and what He willed they should will.