The individual and his relation to society as reflected in British ethics

Part I THE INDIVIDUAL IN RELATION TO LAW AND INSTITUTIONS BY

JAMES H. TUFTS

{associate professor of philosophy in the UNIVERSITV of CHICAGO) AND

HELEN B. THOMPSON

(fellow in philosophy)

CHICAGO

This Series of Contributions to Philosophy is edited by the PhilosophicaJ Department of the University of Chicago. Issues are as follows:

No. I, Prof. J. R. Angell: Studies from the Psychological Laboratory. (Pp. 52, Jo. 35.)

No. 2, Dr. W. A. Heidel : The Necessary and the Contingent in the Aristotelian System. "ffiS." 46, J!o.3S.) ■;■-■"

No. 3, Dr. John Dewey : The Significance of the Problem of Knowledge. (Pp. 20, ^0.35.)

No. 4, Dr. S. F. MacLennan: The Impersonal Judgment ; Its Nature, Origin, and Significance. (Pp. 49, $0.35.)

No. 5, Dr. James H. Tufts apd Miss Helen B.

Thompson : The Individual and His Relation to Society, as . Reflected in British Ethics. Part I : The Individual in Relation to Law and Institutions.

No. 6 (shortly), Dr. James H. Tufts : The Individual and His Relation to Society, as Reflected in British Ethics. Part II : The Individual in Social and Economic Relations.

These six numbers will constitute Vol. I. I1.50.

No. V

THE INDIVIDUAL AND HIS RELATION

TO SOCIETY

I

AS REFLECTED IN BRITISH ETHICS

Part I

THE INDIVIDUAL IN RELATION TO LAW AND INSTITUTIONS

BY

JAMES H. TUFTS

(associate professor of philosophy in the university of Chicago) AND

HELEN B. THOMPSON

(fellow in philosophy)

Copyright 1898 by JAMES H. TUFTS

Contents

Introduction, 5

PART I.

THE INDIVIDUAL IN RELATION TO LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS. SECTION I.

SECTION II. The Individual in the Reflective Thought of the Period, ii

1. Economics: individual and national prosperity, - 11

2. Theology: divine sovereignty and human freedom, - 12

3. Politics, . - 14

Hooker and Milton, 14 ; Hobbes: the individual made the source of sovereignty, 16; physical concept of the individual, 18; jus naturale transformed from a social to an individual category, 19 ; the concept "right reason," 20.

4. Ethics prior to Cumberland, - - - - - - 21

Bacon, 23 ; Hobbes, 24 ; his conception of man, 24 ; his psychology of desire, 26 ; conception of ethics and the ethical categories, 26 ; his conception of the individual allows only an external universal, 27.

2 CONTENTS

5. Cumberland, - 27

(i) His problem to find a universal within the individual, 29 ; his method, "right reason," 30 ; (2) the solution of the problem: (a) the individual broadened by the internalizing of the moral law, 31 ; relation of reason to will, 34 ; (6) universal benevolence as criterion, 37 ; relation of the individual to the universal in this, 43.

6. Locke, 45

(i) The individual's right to toleration, 46 ; (2) the individual as sovereign, 47 ; (3) the individual's power recognized : (a) in the discovery of the law, 49 ; (6) in its motivation, 50 ; social elements in the criterion, 51.

Conclusion, - 53

NOTE

The treatment of the theme in Part I will be found to include a wider range than is indicated by the title. But the emphasis is intended to be upon the moral constitution and relations of the individual, and other aspects of thought are treated only as throwing light on these. As to the respective shares of the joint authors in the work, while each has had the benefit of the suggestions of the other, Miss Thompson is directly responsible for the section on Cumberland, and Mr. Tufts for the remainder of the essay.

Introduction

British ethical reflection may be conveniently considered under three periods : the first antecedent to Shaftesbury ; the second extending from Shaftesbury to the close of the eighteenth century ; the third embracing the present century. The present essay, which is designed to form part of a study of the development of individuality and individualism as reflected in modern thought, will confine itself to the first two periods, and, without pretending to be exhaustive, will aim to interpret the leading categories in terms of the actual life of the writers.

As has often been noted, the two periods in question are characterized by different points of view in their treatment of ethical questions. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were preeminently interested in religious and political themes. Commerce and industry had entered on that course of expansion which was to break down national barriers and reorganize the structure and interests of society ; but commerce and industry were as yet viewed rather as means to political power than as ends in themselves. The attitude of England to the Reformation was doubtless at the outset largely determined by policy, but the new conception of individual rights and responsibilities soon laid such hold on countrymen of Knox and Milton that, instead of the cujus regio ejus religio of the continent, the religious convictions of the subject could shape a commonwealth or change a dynasty. And finally, the ecclesiastical and constitutional struggles forced the relation of the individual to authority home upon the whole people, and called out the most notable productions of the time. In the eighteenth century, at least in the first half, neither religious nor political enthusiasm lifted individuals above private interests into unity of faith and action ; but with the spread of commerce and intelligence, economic and social conditions had brought their categories of interest and good-will into the foreground, while the virtues were estimated, not in relation to law of God or man, but in terms of the ordinary relations of the merchant and neighbor. God, in the first period, is author of a law ; in the second he is the benevolent disposer of a universe in which private and public happiness is most skillfully adjusted. Milton sings man's disobedience and redemption, or sounds the note of human freedom ; Swift and Pope satirize man's cupidity or praise his natural goodness. The century of Hobbes and Cumberland is the age of natural rights and laws of nature ; the century of Shaftesbury and Butler, of Hume and Smith, is the period of self-love and sympathy ; while Locke, with the ethics of the one and the psychology of the other, stands as mediator between the two.

THE INDIVIDUAL AND HIS RELATION TO SOCIETY AS REFLECTED IN BRITISH ETHICS.

PART I.

THE INDIVIDUAL IN RELATION TO LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS SECTION I. THE LIFE AND ACTIVITIES OF THE PERIOD.

I. Although, as already stated, this was not a period in which economic categories were dominant in thought, it is none the less true that the actual economic conditions were intricately involved in the religious and political conditions, and must, therefore, be briefly noted in an attempt to get a conception of the individual of this period.

The fact of capital importance is that in this period England ceased to be exclusively agricultural and became in a steadily rising degree a commercial and manufacturing people. This meant that the influences which had been so potent in Italy and the Low Countries for the awakening and strengthening of individuality were now to be transferred to British soil. The causes of this were no doubt in part political. The deliberate aim to build up national power, clearly conceived by the statesmen of Elizabeth's time, fostered all agencies which it was believed would conduce to this end. Refugees from the cruelties of Alva, Huguenots from France, bringing the trades of wool and linen and silk manufacture, found ready welcome. Shipping, as peculiarly valuable for an island kingdom, was given especial encouragement. Colonies, whatever the motives of the emigrants themselves, were favored by the government as supplying raw material and requiring manufactures from the home country, exchanged in English ships.' It was an age of commerce and industry controlled in the interests of national power.

Looking now at the significance for individuality of the new lines of activity thus opened to the British people, we note in the first place that it means the growing power of movable property, born of labor,

' For the economic conditions and theories of this time I am chiefly indebted to Cunningham's English Commerce and Industry.

in its struggle with landed property, born of conquest." Individual skill and boldness of initiative found new fields for development. The expansion of England involved the widening of individual as well as of national horizons. Although as yet submitting to be governed in his private business by regulations made in the supposed interest of the nation, the individual was started on the road on which he would ultimately refuse to consider public policy as a thing apart from the sum of the goods of the individuals composing the public. This becomes more apparent when we consider the changes in the character of commerce itself which mark the modern as compared with the mediaeval system. These changes, as pointed out by Cunningham,' accompany the breaking down of the corporate conduct of industry and commerce by the guild, and the substitution of individual self-interest as the leading factor. The recognition of the fact that the state might be economically justified in allowing free play to individual self-interest marks a distinct departure. The revolution in public opinion about money transactions marks even more completely the change. In the Middle Ages, to take any interest for the use of money was usury. It was taking advantage of the needs of the borrower. But with the increase of bullion, the opportunities for investment, and the new situation of the borrower, who was now not the unfortunate victim of circumstances but the prosperous banker or trader seeking to extend his business, money transactions were regarded like other exchanges. It became possible, through the formation of capital, to handle the property resulting from the labor of many just as the feudal lord had controlled the persons. But inasmuch as capital stands for the accumulated labor and skill of men in a form set free from the persons of the laborers, it now becomes possible to control the one and leave the other a measure of freedom. The old feudal conditions had always been favorable enough for the development of courage and power in the lord ; the new commercial conditions afforded the opportunity for the same development on the part of the merchant. Ambition had now a larger scope for exercise and a richer prize to reward success, when dress and style of life were regulated, not by station, but by ability. Competition began its work of stimulation, and "an active middle class was coming to the front, well able to insist on having a say in the direction of affairs."^

THE INDIVIDUAL IN RELATION TO LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS Q

2. Politically the English people was feeling its way toward that democracy which the radical William of Occam had already proclaimed as the source of all sovereignty, and to which Wiclif had already made appeal in things religious. While on the surface the Tudor monarchs exercised almost arbitrary royal power, they held it "only because they were ever regardful of popular opinion."" "A new age of political liberty was felt to be at hand when Martin Marprelate forced the political and ecclesiastical measures of the government into the arena of public discussion;"" and though the Stuarts proclaimed the doctrines of divine right and absolute monarchy, and thus began at once that struggle against the tide which was to cost one his life and another his throne, the tide was but checked in this course or that to gather strength for a more resistless sweep. The popular will, at first seeking for expression through the crown, was to find in Parliament a fitter organ.^ It was but anticipating the actual advance of history when the Commons declared, in their struggle with the King and Lords, "that the people under God are the original of all just power, and that the House of Commons have the supreme power of the nation." Commercial England would have naught of an absolute sovereignty over taxation. Puritan England was in no temper to hear of any right divine to compel the individual's conscience.

3. For the great significance of the religious consciousness of this age was its sense of individual responsibility to God, and to God alone, of the divine will manifesting itself in the individual and so exalting him to dignity and power. The individual of the Renaissance had grown into consciousness of himself and his powers through the activities of commercial and industrial life, and had found expression in literature and art. Over against the old constraints of the mediaeval he had set the new forces of the rediscovered secular life with its joys and its free play of aesthetic interests. The individual of the Reformation found himself in a sterner crisis, and over against the older powers of dogma and tradition he set the mighty universal of God himself, to whom he could appeal, and reinforced by whose strength he could defy all human sovereignty. " The Christian is through his God an independent being, who needs nothing, and stands neither

' Medley, Manual of English Constitutional History, chap, vi, sec. 43. 'Green, Short History of the English People, chap. viii.

3 Burgess, Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law, Vol. I, Bk. Ill, chap. i.

under the bondage of commands of law nor in dependence on men. He is priest before God, and a king over the world."' The professed seat of authority in the Middle Ages was, to be sure, the divine law; but it was a law mediated through a church, interpreted by the clergy, embodied in writings which only the doctor could read. The authority of the Reformation was to be experienced directly and immediately by the individual ; at most it was recorded in writings which any believer could interpret ; and for those who pushed the principle farthest there was an inner illumination of the spirit supreme over any dogma of the letter. A desire to be one's self went hand in hand with a humble trust in the Almighty — a union which may sometimes degenerate into cant and hypocrisy, but is none the less a vital characteristic of the time, and speaks in Spinoza, no less than in Calvin or Cromwell, in the demand for freedom of prophesying as well as in the creeds of the new faith.' It was a true instinct which led Hobbes in his defense of political absolutism to attack the Puritan view of religion, for this had been the most powerful factor in the Puritan spirit of independence.

4. The intellectual atmosphere of the time, no less than the industrial, political, and religious, was that of an awakening liberty of thought, accompanied by a new recognition of the scope and significance of natural law. A Bacon was followed by a Boyle and a Newton. Galileo and Descartes stand at once the assertors of a new method and the discoverers of the laws of a nature which, to a degree impossible before, stands now revealed to man as orderly and harmonious, it seems to his naive theory of knowledge, not the embodiment of his own categories, but the source from which all experience flows, and whose laws are there, majestic, eternal, and supreme, to be recognized and obeyed if the individual would rise to mastery of his situation and bend nature's forces to his ends. This conception of natural law we shall see to be of determining influence for a whole line of English ethics, but the end to be attained by discovery and invention was consciously in mind in a Bacon's " New Atlantis," and finds recognition in a Hobbes and Spinoza. In principle, at least, the individual was beginning to feel dimly, yet surely, that knowledge is power.'

5. In literature, after that splendor of dramatic spontaneity which 'Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, III, 719.

» Cf. further Harnack, III, 577 f.

3 Windelband, History of Philosophy, p. 386.

THE INDIVIDUAL IN RELATION TO LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS I I

could find itself at home in every sphere of life had passed away, but two names stand forth as conspicuous. Bacon, like his contemporary, Montaigne, gives the reflections of the man who is finding himself at home in his world. Milton, who is in prose the impassioned pleader for larger liberty in speech, in the realization of the ends of marriage, and in the conduct of the state, embodies in his epic of the race the twofold aspect of Puritan consciousness, the story of divine law and of human guilt and emancipation. But if we are to judge the literary spirit of a time not merely by its productions, but by its appreciations, then we have to remember that the book which was read until it formed the warp into which all the new contents of life were woven was the new English Bible, and especially the Old Testament. The blending of theocracy with recognition of individual choice of rulers, the ascriptions to divine majesty, the emotional outpouring of the individual soul and its reliance on God which find triumphant expression in the Psalms, all these voiced the Puritan consciousness ; and the New Englander, in his bleak and lonely land, left out no part of the parallel, but saw in the Indians the heathen who, like the Canaanites, were hostile to the people of God.

SECTION II. THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE REFLECTIVE THOUGHT OF THE-

PERIOD.

The reflective thought of the period was naturally centered about the two categories which we have found coming to consciousness in the various activities of life, viz. : that of the individual on the one hand, and that of some controlling law or universal on the other. The category through which it was sought to reconcile these was usually that of compact. We shall point this out briefly for economics and theology, and more in detail in the case of politics and ethics.

/. Economics.

Although there is little distinctively economic theory in this period, the general point of view is that of an increasing recognition of private interest as a motive force, while the conception of trade and national power involved in the mercantile theory is kept steadily in view. " In mediaeval times it [the individual desire of wealth] was recognized only to be condemned as immoral ; in our own day it is sometimes spoken of as though there were a prearranged harmony which made private self-seeking tend unconsciously to public good ; in Elizabeth's time Hales considers it is possible for the government so to modify circumstances that it shall lead to the public good."' Hobbes, while conceiving private interest as the motive force, and defending the good as the satisfaction of desires, puts his economic theories under the head of the " Nutrition and Procreation of a Commonwealth," and would have not merely foreign trade but domestic industry controlled for public advantage. Harrington, who stands to Hobbes in economics as Cumberland stands in ethics, affords an interesting illustration of the employment of the two categories. The conception of natural law is taken for the basis of his political and economic organization, and this law of nature is identical, not with the individual's interest, but with the "interest of mankind." But the individual is recognized in that the authority of the government as contrasted with its force depends on the "goods of the mind" and the choice of those who obey it. And the power of wealth, now just emerging to distinct consciousness, finds recognition in the new and important doctrine that the nature of a government is determined by the distribution of its landed property,' which must, accordingly, be so regulated by the government as to secure a proper balance of interest. The end, viz., the common interest, is prescribed by the law of nature, but the efficient forces of individual wealth are seen in new significance when it is declared that they may make or unmake the universal, which is still in older fashion regarded as something other than the sum of its particulars.

2. Theology.

The great theological controversies of the day showed in more explicit form the struggle between individual and universal. It was by no means a revolt against all authority — that was reserved for a later generation — but a recourse in the first instance to divine authority, immediately manifest or directly accessible in the Scriptures, as contrasted with church and dogma ; and, in the second instance, when the "formal rule" of Protestantism had become as external an authority as the dogmas of the church, an appeal to the laws of reason, or the inner light. In the great theological controversy of the time, Calvinism stood for the absolute sovereignty of God. His eternal decrees are unsearchable, his grace is irresistible, his elect are secure

' Cunningham, II, 70 £f.

"Bonar, Philosophy and Political Economy, 87 £.

against outward assault and inward lapse. The Arminian, on the other hand, sought the "maintenance of human responsibility, and the moral conditions of praise and blame, reward and penalty, while still upholding salvation by grace."' It was an "attempt to formulate a protest from an ethical point of view." But it is characteristic of the time that in Arminianism as well as in Calvinism the central category is that of sovereignty. For the celebrated "governmental theory of the atonement," which was defended by Grotius the Arminian, conceives the relation of God to man as that of ruler to subject. Moreover, the modification of the Calvinistic system which obtained greatest acceptance in England was in close analogy to the political theories of the day. For while the "covenants" of works and grace which were taught by the " Federal Theology" and set forth in the Westminster Confession were not contracts in exactly the sense of the social contract, they yet setup "jural relations in the room of bare sovereignty," and attempted to give some answer to the difficulty beginning to be felt in making men accept the guilt of Adam as their own. The realistic conceptions of the Middle Ages still lived on in some forms of the theory in the connection of men with Adam, but the growing individualism showed itself in the general acceptance of creationism, and in the conception that the relation of the individual to Christ was personal and not generic. The famous Barebones bore in his long name the symbol at once of racial guilt and of personal salvation.

As already stated, the second advance in this field during this period lay in the movement called Rational Theology .° Reformed theology had become scholasticism. The shelter of the advancing line of progress became all too soon the bulwark of authority, and the individual sought a new support in the " laws of right reason," a universal to which Descartes had already made triumphant appeal, and to which the methods and successes of the dawning science of nature seemed to lend additional surety. What is antiquity but " man's authority born some ages before us " ? '

In its attempts to magnify the divine greatness, Calvinism had reduced the individual's "natural" condition to the state of sin and misery. From this the elect was rescued and made triumphant by

'Fisher, History of Christian Doctrine, 1896, pp. 339 £.

° TuUoch, Rational Theology and Christian Theology in England in the Seventeenth Century.

3 John Hales, cited in TuUoch, I, p. 249.

grace. But for man in this "state of nature" little divine illumination was admitted. The "rational" theologians, on the other hand, in their attempt to reinstate man into some measure of individual dignity, emphasized rather man's rational ability and considered "jeligion as a seed of a deiform nature."' Some of the school, in their emphasis upon the rational nature of man, resorted to the Neo-Platonist conception of innate ideas against which Locke was to direct his polemic. This found favor especially with the "Cambridge School," which remained in sympathy with the church. Another party, of which Lord Herbert of Cherbury was the leader, found a more congenial formulation in the Stoic and Ciceronian conception of " common notions " and a religion of nature.' The individual was not driven to external authority, nor deprived of all "natural light." He had within himself the sources of truth, and their validity was guaranteed, it was maintained, by their universal presence in the minds of men.^ Every man was thus not merely, as with Luther, the interpreter of a Scripture ; he was himself a deposit, a document of revelation.

The doctrine of innate ideas which, to Locke's view, was an obstacle to progress, a hindrance to a completely rational theory of human experience, and a reliance of conservatism, was thus in its origin an assertion of the worth of the individual, and of the immediate access of the individual to the sources of truth and reason.

J. Political Theory.

I. The political theories of the time vary from the defenses of divine right to the doctrines of popular sovereignty, but the instructive aspect of the period is that the ablest thinkers, whether the "judicious" Churchman, the impassioned advocate of freedom, or the timid and conservative absolutist, all agree in recognizing the original sovereignty of the people, and in assuming that in them must be found the sanction for the power of monarch or commonwealth.

• Bishop Burnett, cited in Fisher's History of Christian Doctrine, p. 366.

= Dilthey has pointed put with great detail the dependence of Herbert upon Cicero and Stoic writings, and in general the utilization of the Stoic concept of "nature " as an auxiliary, in the attempt to reach autonomy of thought in this period. {Archiv fur Gesch. d. Philos., Bde. VI and VII, especially VII, p. 41.)

3 Cf. Hooker : " The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God himself. For that which all men have at all times learned, nature herself must needs have taught ; and God being the author of nature her voice is but his instrument." (Ecclesiastical Polity, I, viii, 3.)

In the case of the Churchman or the Puritan this is carried back still farther to the divine authority itself as ultimate. For, as we have seen, this was really the essence of the religious consciousness of the Reformers. The classic statement from Hooker is as follows :

Two foundations there are which bear up public societies : the one a natural inclination, whereby all men desire sociable life and fellowship ; the other an order expressly or secretly agreed upon touching the manner of their

union in living together The lawful power of making laws to command

whole political societies of men belongeth so properly unto the same entire societies, that for any prince or potentate of what kind soever on earth to exercise the same of himself, and not either by express commission immediately, personally received from God, or else by authority derived at first from their consent upon whose persons they impose laws, is no better than mere tyranny. Laws they are not therefore, which public approbation hath not made so.'

Clearer still is the statement of the New England document entitled "The Model of the Church in Civil Power," written probably by Richard Mather :

In the free state no magistrate hath power over the bodies, goods, lands, liberties, of a free people, but by their own consent ; and as all free men are only stewards of God, they may not give the magistrate power over these things as they please, but as God pleases.

But the plea for the rights of the individual which takes the highest ground is found in Milton's political writings :

No man who knows aught can be so stupid as to deny that all men naturally were bom free, being the image and resemblance of God Himself, and we are by privilege above all the creatures born to command and not to obey ; and that they lived so till from the root of Adam's transgression, falling among themselves to do wrong and violence, and foreseeing that such courses must needs turn to the destruction of them all, they agreed by common league to bind each other from mutual injury and jointly to defend themselves against any that gave disturbance to such agreement. Hence came cities, towns, and Commonwealths ; and because no faith in all was found sufficiently binding, they saw it needful to ordain some authority that might restrain by force and punishment what was violated against peace and common right.''

•Ecclesiastical Polity, I, x, i, 8.

= The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.

He argues that this has been the theory of government actually observed in Scotland and Holland, and in Britain from the earliest times, and cites with approval the bold utterance of Zwingli : " But when by sufferance and consent of the whole people, or the better part of them, a tyrant is deposed or put to death, God is the chief leader in that action."

It will scarcely escape notice how similar the view of Milton as to the reasons for establishing government is to the view of Hobbes, but this whole view of the state of nature, which is found not merely in the Epicurean Hobbes, but in the churchman Hooker, is really a part of the Reformation view of the natural man. To the theologian the natural man is " desperately wicked," and to the advocate of monarchical government anarchy involves the war of every man with his fellow. Hooker's view is, indeed, strikingly like that of Hobbes in its conception, not merely of the condition of man without civil society and law, but also in the reason assigned for that condition.

Laws politic [says Hooker] ordained for external order and regiment amongst men, are never framed as they should be, unless presuming the will of man to be inwardly obstinate, rebellious, and averse from all obedience unto the sacred laws of his nature ; in a word, unless presuming man to be

in regard of his depraved mind little better than a wild beast If