Page:The ethics of Hobbes (IA ethicsofhobbes00hobb).pdf/58

"The philosopher of Malmesbury was the terror of the last age, as Tindal and Collins have been of this. The press sweat with controversy; and every young churchman militant would needs try his arms in thundering upon Hobbes's steel cap." Mackintosh says: "The answers to the Leviathan would form a library." In the ethical field the opposition moved along two lines. In the first place, his institutional morality, which made the sovereign's will the measure of right and wrong, called forth specially the opposition of Cudworth and Clarke. In opposition to it, they proclaimed an eternal and immutable morality, founded on the nature of things. Moral relations are not the creations of the sovereign's will or the result of legislative enactment. They are antecedent to and independent of the sovereign's will or civil law. They are inherent in the very nature of things. In the second place, Hobbes's theory of constitutional egoism, which, as we have seen, underlies his theory of morality, met with very vigorous opposition. These opponents of Hobbes met him on his own ground. That is, they entered into a psychological analysis of man, endeavoring to show that such an analysis reveals not a constitutional egoism, as Hobbes claims, but rather that man is by nature social and capable of altruistic conduct. Among the first, if not the first, to meet Hobbes on these grounds was Richard Cumberland. In his De Legibus Naturae Disquisitio Philosophica, he contends that man by nature is social, and, therefore, a state of nature is not one of mutual warfare. This is plainly indicated both in the bodily and mental constitution of man. He also regards the universal good, instead of the individual's good, as the great end of conduct for rational beings. Indeed, he holds that the good of each is absolutely dependent upon the "good of all." Shaftesbury was another writer who opposed Hobbes, mainly on psychological grounds. In his treatise, enti-