a full meal. The perfumes I smelt yesterday now no more affect me with any pleasure; but the good turn I did yesterday, a year, seven years since, continues still to please and delight me as often as I reflect on it.

5th. The expectation of eternal and incomprehensible happiness in another world is that also which carries a constant pleasure with it.

If then I will faithfully pursue that happiness I propose to myself, whatever pleasure offers itself to me, I must carefully look that it cross not any of those five great and constant pleasures above mentioned. For example, the fruit I see tempts me with the taste of it that I love, but if it endanger my health, I part with a constant and lasting for a very short and transient pleasure, and so foolishly make myself unhappy, and am not true to my own interest.

Hunting, plays, and other innocent diversions delight me : if I make use of them to refresh myself after study and business, they preserve my health, restore the vigour of my mind, and increase my pleasure; but if I spend all, or the greatest part of my time in them, they hinder my improvement in knowledge and useful arts, they blast my credit, and give me up to the uneasy state of shame, ignorance, and contempt, in which I cannot but be very unhappy. Drinking, gaming, and vicious delights will do me this mischief, not only by wasting my time, but by a positive efficacy endanger my health, impair my parts, imprint ill habits, lessen my esteem, and leave a constant lasting torment on my conscience; therefore all vicious and unlawful pleasures I will always avoid, because such a mastery of my passions will afford me a constant pleasure greater than any such enjoyments; and also deliver me from the certain evil of several kinds, that by indulging myself in a present temptation I shall certainly afterwards

suffer.

All innocent diversions and delights, as far as they will contribute to my health, and consist with my improvement, condition, and my other more solid pleasures of knowledge and reputation, I will enjoy, but no further, and this I will carefully watch and examine, that I may not be deceived by the flattery of a present pleasure to lose a greater.

OF ETHICS IN GENERAL.

1. Happiness and misery are the two great springs of human actions, and though through different ways we find men so busy in the world, they all aim at happiness, and desire to avoid misery, as it appears to them in different places and shapes.

2. I do not remember that I have heard of any nation of men who have not acknowedged that there has been right and wrong in men's actions, as well as truth and falsehood in their sayings; some measures there have been everywhere owned, though very different; some rules and boundaries to men's actions, by which they were judged to be good or bad; nor is there, I think, any people amongst whom there is not distinction between virtue and vice; some kind of morality is to be found everywhere received; I will not say perfect and exact, but yet enough to let us know that the notion of it is more or less everywhere, and that men think that even where politics, societies, and magistrates are silent, men yet are under some laws to which they owe obedience.

3. But, however morality be the great business and concernment of mankind, and so deserves our most attentive application and study; yet in the very entrance this occurs very strange and worthy our consideration, that morality hath been generally in the world rated as a science distinct from theology, religion, and law; and that it hath been the proper province of philosophers, a sort of men different both from divines, priests, and lawyers, whose profession it has been to explain and teach this knowledge to the world; a plain argument to me of some discovery still amongst men, of the law of nature, and a secret apprehension of another rule of action which rational creatures had a concernment to conform to, besides what either the priests pretended was the immediate command of their God (for all the heathen ceremonies of worship pretended to revelation, reason failing in the support of them), or the lawyer told them was the command of the Government.

4. But yet these philosophers seldom deriving these rules up to their original, nor arguing them as the commands of the great God of heaven and earth, and such as according to

which he would retribute to men after this life, the utmost enforcements they could add to them were reputation and disgrace by those names of virtue and vice, which they endeavoured by their authority to make names of weight to their scholars and the rest of the people. Were there no human law, nor punishment, nor obligation of civil or divine sanctions, there would yet still be such species of actions in the world as justice, temperance, and fortitude, drunkenness, and theft, which would also be thought some of them good, some bad; there would be distinct notions of virtues and vices; for to each of these names there would belong a complex idea, or otherwise all these and the like words which express moral things in all languages would be empty, insignificant sounds, and all moral discourses would be perfect jargon. But all the knowledge of virtues and vices which a man attained to, this way, would amount to no more than taking the definitions or the significations of the words of any language, either from the men skilled in that language, or the common usage of the country, to know how to apply them, and call particular actions in that country by their right names; and so in effect would be no more but the skill how to speak properly, or at most to know what actions in the country he lives in are thought laudable or disgraceful; i. e. are called virtues and vices: the general rule whereof, and the most constant that I can find is, that those actions are esteemed virtuous which are thought absolutely necessary to the preservation of society, and those that disturb or dissolve the bonds of community are everywhere esteemed ill and vicious.

5. This would necessarily fall out, for were there no obligation or superior law at all, besides that of society, since it cannot be supposed that any men should associate together and unite in the same community, and at the same time allow that for commendable, i. e. count it a virtue, nay not discountenance and treat such actions as blameable, i. e. count them vices which tend to the dissolution of that society in which they were united; but all other actions that are not thought to have such an immediate influence on society I find not (as far as I have been conversant in histories), but that in some countries or societies they are virtues, in others vices, and in others indifferent, according as the authority of

some esteemed wise men in some places, or as inclination or fashion of people in other places, have happened to establish them virtues or vices; so that the ideas of virtues taken up this way teach us no more than to speak properly according to the fashion of the country we are in, without any very great improvement of our knowledge, more than what men meant by such words; and this is the knowledge contained in the common ethics of the schools; and this is not more but to know the right names of certain complex modes, and the skill of speaking properly.

6. The ethics of the schools, built upon the authority of Aristotle, but perplexed a great deal more with hard words and useless distinctions, telling us what he or they are pleased to call virtues and vices, teach us nothing of morality, but only to understand their names, or call actions as they or Aristotle does; which is, in effect, but to speak their language properly. The end and use of morality being to direct our lives, and by showing us what actions are good, and what bad, prepare us to do the one and avoid the other; those that pretend to teach morals mistake their business, and become only language-masters where they do not do this,-when they teach us only to talk and dispute, and call actions by the names they prescribe, when they do not show the inferments that may draw us to virtue and deter us from vice.

7. Moral actions are only those that depend upon the choice of an understanding and free agent. And an understanding free agent naturally follows that which causes pleasure to it and flies that which causes pain; i. e. naturally seeks happiness and shuns misery. That, then, which causes to any one pleasure, that is good to him; and that which causes him pain, is bad to him: and that which causes the greater pleasure is the greater good, and that which causes the greater pain, the greater evil. For happiness and misery consisting only in pleasure and pain, either of mind or body, or both, according to the interpretation I have given above of those words, nothing can be good or bad to any one but as it tends to their happiness or misery, as it serves to produce in them pleasure or pain: for good and bad, being relative terms, do not denote anything in the nature of the thing, but only the relation it bears to another, in its aptness and tendency to produce in it pleasure or pain; and

thus we see and say, that which is good for one man is bad for another.

8. Now, though it be not so apprehended generally, yet it is from this tendency to produce to us pleasure or pain, that moral good or evil has its name, as well as natural. Yet perhaps it will not be found so erroneous as perhaps at first sight it will seem strange, if one should affirm, that there is nothing morally good which does not produce pleasure to a man, nor nothing morally evil that does not bring pain to him. The difference between moral and natural good and evil is only this; that we call that naturally good and evil, which, by the natural efficiency of the thing, produces pleasure or pain in us; and that is morally good or evil which, by the intervention of the will of an intelligent free agent, draws pleasure or pain after it, not by any natural consequence, but by the intervention of that power. Thus, drinking to excess, when it produces the head-ache or sickness, is a natural evil; but as it is a transgression of law, by which a punishment is annexed to it, it is a moral evil. For rewards and punishments are the good and evil whereby superiors enforce the observance of their laws; it being impossible to set any other motive or restraint to the actions of a free understanding agent, but the consideration of good or evil; that is, pleasure or pain that will follow from it.

9. Whoever treats of morality so as to give us only the definitions of justice and temperance, theft and incontinency, and tells us which are virtues, which are vices, does only settle certain complex ideas of modes with their names to them, whereby we may learn to understand others well, when they talk by their rules, and speak intelligibly and properly to others who have been informed in their doctrine. But whilst they discourse ever so acutely of temperance or justice, but show no law of a superior that prescribes temperance, to the observation or breach of which law there are rewards and punishments annexed, the force of morality is lost, and evaporates only into words, disputes, and niceties. And, however Aristotle or Anacharsis, Confucius, or any one amongst us, shall name this or that action a virtue or a vice, their authorities are all of them alike, and they exercise but what power everyone has, which is to show what complex ideas their words shall stand for: for without showing a law that