A natural sense of right and wrong was acknowledged in order to find in Man himself an explanation of his moral life. This original predisposition, that was to ensure autonomy to man’s higher life having been admitted, the psychological mentality of the time did not hesitate to make it a matter of psychology to determine which was the organ of this natural function of man. Whilst such researches proceeded, Cumberland having already illustrated the Ciceronian doctrine of the _lex naturae_ as the natural reaction of altruistic tendencies against the selfish motives of Hobbes’s theory, the Earl of Shaftesbury, a friend of Locke, contributed the best of all these theories. He claimed the autonomy of morals, freeing it no less from physiological than from theological fetters. For the intrinsic value of morals is equally destroyed whether you make good deeds dependent of the fear of punishment and hope of reward or on the mechanism of nature. Goodness, righteousness, and virtue are real of themselves, a reality; they can be conceived and understood; they cannot be inferred from anything else. Why he did not work out so original a notion is easily understood; the philosophy of his time afforded him little more than psychology, and his personal gifts and breeding fitted him rather for æsthetics than for so arduous a task; hence it was perfectly natural that his idea should have developed into a real eudemonism. The nature of virtue is to him harmony, he thus blends the conclusions of materialism and of the doctrine which upheld the social instinct of man; the supremacy was to be ascribed to the egoistic motives by the school of Hobbes, to the sense of altruism by the others. To Shaftesbury each of these schools held half of the truth and only the combination of both tendencies could produce in their harmony real morality. Neither lax nor ascetic morals must result from the harmonious combination of the two opposites. Such a theory implies the perfection of the individual as the ultimate end of all intellectual life; it throws light on the nobler side of Illuminism, and if it is not theoretically sound it is the blending of all that was best in a movement that was generous in its optimism.