Here, a proposition, asserting some thing to be fit, supposes the notion of obligation or duty: but the notion of obligation itself supposes the previous one of fitness. The matter proceeds in this course :-The promotion of happiness is fit. What is thus fit in itself, is obligatory on a moral agent. If one moral agent wills to do what is thus fit, another wills to do the contrary, it is fit, again, that the first should be rewarded, the second punished. Other illustrations of this sort of sequence will be found in the course of this work: but all proceeding from a perception that something is fit, originally, of itself, and on its own ac

count.

It has now been found that the general affirmation made regarding any action, that it is good, or the contrary, may contain, or stand for a variety of propositions; some of which are propositions, or truths, in the strict meaning-asserting something; others, only definitions - naming something. In an inquiry into the mode in which such propositions or truths are discovered, I have ascribed such discovery to the faculty of reason; and, finally, have attempted an enumeration of these truths, as not only containing the first principles of moral science, but as thence forming the source of all our other moral notions, the names of which I have also attempted to define. It will now fall

to be inquired, how far these principles and definitions are just, and answer the purpose they are intended to serve: namely, to explain in general what actions are good or bad, in all the senses in which this may be affirmed. The inquiry will fall to be conducted both according to an analytic and a synthetic method: that is, it will be attempted to be shewn, that to whatever actions or agents the common judgments or feelings of mankind apply any moral quality or distinction, such quality or distinction is reducible, in the mode of its application, to some or other of the attributes above specified, under the names of fitness, obligation, virtue or depravity, merit or guilt; and that the degree in which any action or character is conceived to possess any of these attributes, will correspond with the principles and definitions above stated : and also, on the other hand, that, from these principles and definitions, again, may be deduced, by direct reasoning, the ordinary doctrines of practical morality, and the rules according to which virtue and vice, merit and guilt, are estimated. Between these two modes of illustration, however, it is not proposed to maintain a regular separation; but to employ both promiscuously, as occasion may suggest.

It is proper also to add, that though I conceive all the foregoing axioms to be truths perceived by reason, their claim to be received as first principles of moral science does not at all depend upon

the validity of this or any other hypothesis as to the faculty by which they are discovered. Even if approbation and disapprobation are mere feelings — yet if these axioms are the most general expressions to which those feelings can be reduced, they are entitled to be considered as first principles of morals. All the difference is, that one person would say - reason perceives that happiness ought, misery ought not to be promoted; another the promotion of happiness is viewed with a pleasing, of misery with a painful emotion. In the inquiries then that are now to be followed, we meet on common ground. By whatever faculty we distinguish right and wrong, there is still a question what that faculty perceives to be right, and what it perceives to be wrong. Upon this question, and upon what others may rise out of it, we who maintain, and you who deny the instrumentality of reason in our moral determinations, may, indifferently, either split or agree, without any regard to what may be our respective opinions upon that head.

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CHAP. II.

OF THE MORAL FITNESS OF CERTAIN ENDS OR EFFECTS.

LITTLE requires to be said upon this subject, as the axioms relating to fitness convey all that can well be stated, and illustrations without number will at once suggest themselves.

It will perhaps occur that if it is morally fit that there should be happiness rather than misery, much rather than little happiness, that many should be happy rather than few, then, as no number of happy beings, no degree of happiness, can be imagined, but what would admit of increase, it would become morally fit that there should be an infinite number of beings infinitely happy-which is absurd. Now of these two propositions—on the one hand, that the number of living beings and the degree of their happiness must each have finite bounds; on the other, that their number and the degree of their happiness ought always to be great rather than small of these two propositions, all that we can say is, that we can see where they would cross one another,

but we cannot give up either. And I apprehend it cannot be so properly said that they contradict or falsify, as that, at some point, they necessarily touch and bound one another.

It is a question that has always presented itself to the philosophical inquirer, how infinite power, guided by infinite wisdom, and prompted by infinite benevolence, could have suffered the existence of that host of moral and physical evils that afflict our earthly condition.

The question is not more natural to be asked, than difficult to be answered. Yet it would seem, if I mistake not, that the difficulty or even impossibility of solving this problem has induced few or none to suppose a limitation of the divine attributes. There seems, so to speak, to be an answer to the difficulty lying somewhere in the recesses of the human breast, though we cannot drag it into light. We cannot persuade ourselves that there is either a want of power, a want of wisdom, or a want of goodness, in the Being who formed us, and the universe in which we dwell. But in whatever way we may strive to approximate the solution-whether we try to satisfy ourselves with the reflection that in whatever position of comfort and happiness the living creation might have been placed, a greater extension, a greater degree of comfort and happiness would still have been possible ad infinitum, so that the same difficulty, why were not things better ordered, must have existed under any cir