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"There's a good time coming."-MACKAY.
Come, string your harps, ye tuneful Nine,
And sweep the sounding chords,

And let your choicest strains combine

With love's divinest words!

For lo! the world's horizon gives

The promise of a day

When right shall reign o'er all that lives,

With undisputed sway.

When force, and fraud, and selfish aims,

And pride of power and place,

Shall cease to urge their vaunted claims,
And brutalize the race:

When man shall for his brother's weal
His friendly aid impart,

And for his woes and weakness feel

As feel's a brother's heart.

When Freedom shall o'er all the land
Her spotless banner wave;

And not a man be found to brand,

Or buy, or sell a slave:

When Truth shall utter thoughts sublime,

And Calumny be dumb;

And men of every hue and clime

One brotherhood become.

When war's accursed trade shall cease,

The sword no longer slay,

And in the stately halls of Peace

Her banners hang for aye:

When mutual faith and noble deeds

Shall in sweet union bind

The various tongues. and tribes, and creeds,
And nations of mankiud.

Then "ONWARD!" let your motto be,

Ye dauntless patriot-band,

Who seek from error's grasp to free

Your favoured fatherland:

For truth and right o'er wrong and might

Shall yet victorious prove,

And earth be filled with peace and light,

And liberty and love.

J. S.

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With the foregoing quotations from our collection of MS. verse we must now pause for a time. We have other "thoughts in rhyme" yet in our hands, to the consideration of which we hope shortly to direct the attention of those who feel interested in our Poetic Critique.

The Reviewer.

The Philosophy of Ethics: an Analytical Essay. By SIMON S. LAURIE. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas.

66

SIMON S. LAURIE has for a long time held the honourable and responsible offices of secretary and treasurer to the Education Committee of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; inspector of the General Assembly Schools in the Highlands and islands of Scotland; and examining visitor of the schools in the counties of Aberdeen, Banff, and Moray, receiving benefit from the Dick bequest. He is a gentleman of great general intelligence and industrial gifts. With him "labour is pleasure." He has distinguished himself as an authority on the science of education, and would probably have gained "the chair of Paideutics," which it was understood that Professor Pillans had proffered funds to endow, if Government could have been prevailed upon to inaugurate a true training system for the teachers of Scotland, by making a session's attendance at the university, under a professor of the philosophy of teaching, imperative upon all public schoolmasters. By an ingenious "application of psychology to language" he contrived to construct a theory of The Fundamental Doctrine of Latin Syntax;" and he is understood to have been the suggesting editor of that excellent series of school-books which was for some time known as "Constable's Series," but which have now been absorbed into several other series of educational works. In this work he appears in a more ambitious character-as the Paley of Scotland, an expositor of morals consistent with the common and current notions of men, and yet based on a philosophy given in human nature and issuing from the personality of man. author endeavours to collate into a philosophic synthesis the ideas regarding the immutability of morality entertained by Plato and Cudworth, the selfish system of Epicurus and Hobbes, the intuitionalism of Butler, the sympathy of Smith, and the utilitarianism of J. S. Mill. He certainly does succeed in showing that there are forms of ethical thought which to some extent justify each of these views. His own system, however, affiliates itself more to the ethical schools of Aristotle and Kant than to either of the foregoing. His clear verbal distinctions, and his careful logical severance of cognate ideas into their several species, and his peculiarly lucid phraseology, prove him to be a logically acute thinker, as well as a deep-seeking student of human nature. If the

The

work has any special fault, it is its coldly scientific phraseology— its reasoning quietness rather than its imaginative brilliancy.

Some of the incidental thoughts are well and happily expressed,— as when he says "manhood is virtue," or when he asserts that "equity, not equality, is the law of justice." His distinction of happiness into personal and distributive felicity; of felicity into two forms, quantity and quality, &c., are also useful and far-reaching. It would be impossible to analyze, in any brief space, the treatise before us. Its fifteen chapters contain matter of much moment in moral controversy. The argument is conducted with skill, and the linking of thought to thought is highly ingenious. We subjoin, as at once fairest to our readers and the author, the following excerpts, which shall show much more easily than any synopsis of ours the general doctrines and tones of the work. Our first extract is the author's summary of the main course of speculation evolved in the six earliest chapters, and will readily suggest to the thoughtful reader the value of the full-length exposition of the points noted :—

"1. There are many and diverse felicities possible for man. 2. These felicities vary essentially in their quality, as well as in their quantity. 3. The discernment of the higher and lower quality of felicities is ultimately and inexplicably determined by feeling (self-consciousness making it possible for a rational being to compare two or more feelings and felicities). Or, in other words, there is in man an instinctive sentient discrimination of the quantity of felicities. 4. Inasmuch as man is a being of 'large discourse, looking before and after,' there is also an intellectual capacity for measuring their quantity. 5. The criterion of rightness or approveableness in acts and states of will, transitive and intransitive, is their tendency to promote the felicity of man as he is constituted and conditioned; and where two or more ends and motives conflict, that end and motive is the right (and therefore, as we shall afterwards show, the obligatory) which is characterized by the higher or greater felicity, or both. 6. Transitive acts have a twofold end, and therefore a twofold criterion-the felicity of the object or objects of the acts, and the felicity of the subject acting; consequently a twofold motivea motive being the conscious desire of an end. 7. The attainment of the former end-the felicity of others-determines the direction which the just or beneficent act is to take, and, consequently, the rightness of the act objectively considered; while the attainment of the latter end-the felicity of the subject-determines the rightness of the benevolent and just acting, compared with any other possible acting-rightness we say, for with that alone are we in the meantime concerned. We have yet to consider wherein lies the morality of an act as distinguished from its mere rightness" (pp. 45, 46). "It is impossible to detect in the socalled conscience or moral sense any elements save these,-(1) a feeling of complacence and displacence; (2) an instinctive sentient discrimination of quality in felicities, and, through this, in the acts of which the felicities are the end; (3) a rational conception of quantity in felicities; (4) a sense of law, imperativeness, or obligation, and their correlatives-obedience and duty-attached to the perception of rightness, but not inherent in it " (p. 57).

Our next excerpt exhibits the author's critique of utilitarianism as compared with his own system; and forms a sort of comparative abstract of his own theory and that of the advocates of a thorough

going code of morals, founded on the axiom, "The greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible numbers."

"The doctrine expounded in the preceding pages differs from utilitarianism because-(1.) It repudiates the doctrine that the criterion of the duty of a moral agent is the 'greatest happiness of the greatest number.' We have endeavoured to show that this magic phrase might possibly be a criterion of the distribution of felicities; but that it is a blunder-the result of mental confusion—to imagine that a moral agent can by means of such a standard ascertain those acts which are right, good, moral. (2.) The improved form of this theory, that which explicitly affirms that the utilitarian system embraces in its scope the higher happiness, and admits differences in kind (although it fails to give us any other means of computing these than the arithmetical), in point of fact transfers the criterion from the 'greatest happiness of the greatest number' to the 'happiness of mankind.' But here the utilitarian argument labours and halts, as in the first case it blundered. Nor can any one closely peruse the more recent utilitarian writings without perceiving that they are constantly shifting their own standardat one time calling on the reader to fix his attention on the 'happiness of mankind,'-thus swamping the whole of morality in benevolence or justice; at another time guiding themselves and their readers by the light of happiness, as discovered by the moral agent to exist in his own consciousness, or it may be in the norm of man. Now the individual consciousness of felicity, and again the general happiness is appealed to. We have shown, on the contrary, that no other criterion of rightness and duty in acts and states of will exists than the felicity, which by our divinely appointed constitution they yield; and that while quality of felicity determines the relative supremacy of mutually opposing states of will, quantity determines all other possible dubitations. In the latter class of cases (quantitative) cultivated reason, in the former (qualitative) an instinctive sentient power of discriminating the higher and lower in sentiment and sensation, through the touchstone of felicity, is the guide of man. Accordingly, where questions of 'quality' arise, man possesses a 'moral sense,' that is to say, an instinctive discriminative faculty. This discrimination is effected through felicity. These qualitative and quantitative standards are not to be found in 'mankind,' nor, save temporarily and for the passing occasion, in the consciousness of the moral agents, but in that consciousness as enlightened by inner observation and by outward experience of life, and by the discoveries and revelations of others—in the consciousness, that is to say, of each individual, in so far as he truly represents the norm of man. (3.) Further, the doctrine which we have expounded embraces within the sphere of obligatory morality and of moral discrimination those subjective acts which concern the agent alone, as well as those which, done by him, affect his fellow-men. Utilitarianism, even in its best form, recognizes the obligatoriness of those acts only which have external sanctions. (4.) These differences necessitate a further divergence from utilitarianism on the subject of obligation. The very highest form in which the obligatoriness of the moral act has been put by the writers of that school, apart from external and adventitious sanctions, is this, that it rests on a conviction of a community and harmony of aims and interests with our fellow-men-a form not essentially different from that given by David Hume. This theory of obligation is perhaps a necessary consequence of the utilitarian theory of discrimination of the right; but it is inadequate, and exhibits its inadequacy in the fact that it is found necessary to restrict its operation to those duties or moralities which society may and can enforce, leaving outside the pale of morality proper the subjective condition of a moral agent, and thereby excluding the sentiments, as well as the quality of felicities, from a place in a moral system strictly so called. The sense

of obligation, law, and duty, are thus regarded as being merely the reproduction in thought of the penal laws of society. To consider this consequence of a strict utilitarianism with the fulness which its importance merits would be to enter on a criticism of the system which would carry us beyond our present purpose. Obligation and the 'idea' of duty, as understood by us, rest to some extent on the external sanctions and acts for support, but primarily arise out of the attractive force of the felicity of the moral act, which is thus discovered to be at once the end and law of man's constitution, a law which is further protected by the coercive force of the pains of disobedience. The doctrine on this subject, however, is of too much importance to admit of perfunctory summarizing. (5.) But the divergence of the results of the preceding analysis from utilitarianism, old and new, is most strongly marked by the fact that the sentiments are admitted into our scheme as ends in themselves. (6.) Further, we think it will be found to flow, from the definition of virtue and merit given, that with the utilitarian (who in consequence of the connection which subsists between his ethics and metaphysics is, for the most part, a necessitarian), 'virtue' can have no meaning, except in so far as it is a short way of indicating 'the virtues,' that is, the recognized secondary maxims of morality; and that it cannot be an end in itself, but, at best, simply a means to an ulterior end. Finally, the Utilitarian theory instinctively avoids the question of the conditions of human happiness, and thereby is constantly led to confound happiness or felicity, in the strictly moral (and stoic) signification, the condition of which is always virtue, with happiness, in the sense of rounded and complacent content. The fact that it avoids, if it does not abjure, this interpretation of moral happiness, does not alter the fact that the two significations of the word are not consistently distinguished in their writings, and that this confusion has been one cause of their evading the question of the nature of the moral energizing, and of their consequent failure steadily to keep in view the fact that moral happiness means more or less of personal suffering, and that the greater the act of virtue (strange as the contradiction may appear), the greater is the pain of the virtuous agent. Our divergence from the utilitarian theory is farther conspicuously visible in our treatment of the crucial question of justice, in which utilitarianism proper is made to reveal itself in its true colours, as a system of objective criteria and aims, and purely external sanctions" (pp. 139-143).

In the following sentence the author allows us to "hear the conclusion of the whole matter" in a brief and pointed forthflushing of his main thought in a single sentence:—

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"Our doctrine might be summarized thus :-In qualitative acts and states of will there is an immediate, intuitive moral sense; in quantitative acts and states of will there is a mediate, discursive moral perception. Both alike discriminate the true end of moral energizing, and in that end detect implicit, positive law" (p. 147).

The Church. London: E. Stock.

THIS is a cheap religious magazine, whose contents are really adapted well for family use. Sermons, brief tales, mission news, gems from sacred literature, Scripture explanations, and details regarding natural phenomena, poetry, and an abstract of the intelligence of the month, unitedly form a capital variety in a penny monthly magazine.

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