8. Those actions which in any given community the average force of moral obligation produces, are held in that community to be Duties, which all men are expected, and are esteemed bound, to perform, because all men are expected to have an average share of moral sentiment; and for the fulfilment of that expectation which they raise by the very fact of having the form of men, they are held answerable.

9. Correlative to every duty, there is a Right on the part of those individuals towards whom the duty ought to be performed.

10. The non-fulfilment of this expectation, the non-performance of duties, indicates Demerit that is to say, a want of ordinary benevolence; or a more than ordinary deficiency of those qualities which coöperate with benevolence to produce actions beneficial to others, or both. This deficiency causes the delinquent party to be pronounced vicious; and presents him to us as an object of distrust and dislike, as one who may probably inflict injuries upon us individually, and as certain to inflict moral pain upon us, by inflicting injuries upon others.

11. Thus the non-performance of duties produces in us a sentiment of moral pain, to which, in reference to the party causing it, we give the name of Disapprobation; and in consequence of that pain, there is excited in us a sentiment of malevolence towards the delinquent party, whereby the infliction of injuries upon him, in return for the injuries he has inflicted upon others, assumes the character of Punishment; which, so long as it does not exceed a cer

tain limit, gives us not only a pleasure of malevolence, but a moral pleasure also. What that limit may be, depends upon a variety of circumstances; partly upon the force and direction of the sentiment of benevolence; and partly upon the judgment we may form as to the likelihood that the punishment will reform the guilty person, or otherwise deter him, or others, from future like breaches of duty.

12. It must, however, be observed that when the injurious act becomes extraordinary, so as to imply an extraordinary degree of sagacity, address, courage, fortitude, firmness, or ability, there at once arises a pleasurable sentiment of admiration, which, unless it be overpowered by fear that this extraordinary capacity may be employed for our own individual injury, goes a great way to neutralize the pain of moral disapprobation, and makes us proportionably much more indulgent to great villains than to small ones; an anomaly which moralists, hitherto, have been very much puzzled to explain. When the object of moral disapprobation displays, at the same time, a general littleness of understanding and capacity, he becomes thereby an object not only of disapprobation, but also of contempt, a painful sensation in itself, and an additional cause of malevolence; which explains the greater proportional acrimony felt against little villanies.

13. When a man goes beyond the limit of mere duty, and performs actions beneficial to others which are not expected of him, because men in general, in his situation, do not perform them, he is presented to us in a pleasurable light, and becomes an object

of moral approbation. We see in him the probable cause of extraordinary pleasures to ourselves, exclusive of moral pleasure; and the certain cause of moral pleasure by reason of beneficial actions done to others; and the stronger our sentiment of benevolence is, the greater will be the delight which such a man will cause us; in other words, the stronger will be our feeling of approbation. As such a man causes us pleasure, he becomes thereby peculiarly an object of our benevolence; and the more extraordinary his virtue is, and the more extraordinary are the acts which it prompts him to perform, in the same proportion is our benevolence towards him augmented by the addition of a pleasure of admiration. This in the object is what is called Merit or Desert; such a man is meritorious or deserving ; in other words we are under a mental necessity of admiring and loving him; and not to do so, would imply a deficiency in us, of the ordinary force of moral sentiment. Merit, in a general sense, is any thing which tends to augment our benevolence towards a man, and to render him peculiarly an object of our regard; that is to say, any qualities he may have, which are the causes of pleasure to us. But in moral disquisitions, this word is employed exclusively to signify those qualities which make men objects of moral approbation.

14. Whenever the augmented benevolence caused by merit exists, we are impelled by the force of moral obligation to confer benefits upon the object of it; which benefits bear the name of Rewards. That vice ought to be punished, that virtue ought to be re

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warded, that duty ought to be performed, these are but phrases for indicating that force of moral obligation which makes an ordinary part of human nature, and which, if not counteracted by the force of other motives, always will determine human conduct.

15. The mystic hypothesis has involved all this) subject of moral obligation, duty, merit, responsibility, punishments and rewards in entangled contradictions from which the adherents of that hypothesis have found it impossible to escape; a confusion which has given birth to unnumbered volumes of abstruse, but barren and inconclusive controversy, and has caused mental and moral philosophy, under the name of theological metaphysics, to be regarded as a fruitless and tantalizing study, leading to nothing but pains of doubt, and fit to form part of the punishment of the damned.*

16. Instead of looking upon man, such as, in fact, he presents himself to us, as a being possessing in himself an original spontaneous power of action, operating according to uniform laws, the Mystics, relying upon analogies already pointed out, regard man as a machine, a creature, the handiwork of a personal, mechanical God, dependent upon his constructor for all the powers of action which he pos

* "Others apart, sat on a hill retired,

In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high,
Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end in wandering mazes lost."

Paradise Lost, Book II. v. 588.

sesses; just as men make puppets, and move them by inserting a spring, or pulling a wire.

These same analogies lead straight to the conclusion, that the apparent acts of men are, in fact, not their acts, but the acts of him who made men, and by whose perpetual sustaining energy, men exist and act. But as all the acts of God are of necessity assumed to be right, he himself, by the mystic hypothesis, being the very cause and substance of all things, and of right among the rest, therefore all acts performed by God through the agency of men, are right; whatever is, is right; all human acts are right; and the idea that there is or can be, any such thing as wrong or evil in that universe which the all perfect and omnipotent God makes and sustains is an impious delusion.*

This paradox, the obvious and unavoidable consequence of the mystic hypothesis when fairly carried out, this denial of all difference between good and evil, right and wrong, is so abhorrent to common sense and moral sentiment, that of all European mystics, Spinosa alone has had the candor to admit, and the courage to embrace it. The rest, un

* Such is the substance of many Oriental, Gnostic creeds. Several texts of the Jewish and Christian scriptures appear to teach this doctrine. Malebranche, though he rejected the consequences, yet held to the principle; and Leibnitz did but repeat the same thing under a new form of words, in his theory of "the best of all possible worlds." The same doctrine may be found elegantly stated and argued by the joint labors of Pope and Bolingbroke, in the first epistle of the Essay on Man; and it passes current among many who are familiar neither with poets nor metaphysicians, under the familiar pious exclamation, "All 's for the best!"