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of some of the better known men who at some time gave him specific and often sustained attention: John Dennis,14 William Law,15 Reimarus,16 Hume,17 Berkeley,18 Hutcheson,19 Godwin,20 John Brown, 21 Fielding, 22 Gibbon,, Diderot, 24 Holbach,25 Rousseau,26 Malthus,27 James Mill,28 Mackintosh,20 Adam Smith, 30 Warburton,31 John Wesley,32 Herder,33 Montesquieu,34 Hazlitt,35 and Bentham.36

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Vice and Luxury Publick Mischiefs: or, Remarks on the Fable of the Bees (1724).

15 Remarks upon

16

the Fable of the Bees (1724).

Programma quo Fabulam de Apibus examinat. 17 Essays, ed. Green and Grose, 1889, 1, 308-9.

(1726).

18 Alciphron: or, the Minute Philospher (first and second dialogues); Discourse Addressed to Magistrates, 1736 (Works, ed. Fraser, Oxford, 1871, III, 424).

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18 Letter in London Journal for Nov. 14 and 21, 1724; Inquiry into the Original of... Virtue... In which the Principles of Shaftesbury are. defended against . . . the Fable of the Bees (1725); three letters in the Dublin Journal, Feb. 5, 12, and 19, 1726-reprinted as the latter half of Reflections upon Laughter, and Remarks upon the Fable of the Bees (Glasgow, 1750).

Political Justice ed. 1793, II, 815; ed. 1796, 1, 484-5, note.

"Estimate (1758), 11, 86; On Honour (1743), lines 176-9; Essays on the Characteristics (1751), in the second essay.

22 Tom Jones, book 6, chap. I; Amelia, book 3, chap 5; Covent-Garden Journal, ed. Jensen, New Haven, 1, 258-263.

23 Memoirs, ed. Hill, 1900, p. 23.

"Euvres, ed. Assézat, Paris, x, 299 and IV, 102-3 (the latter sometimes attributed to Rousseau).

La Morale Universelle (1820), 1, xxi-xxiii.

28 Narcisse, preface (Euvres, ed. Petitain, 1859, v, 142). See also Masson's edition of the Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard.

27 Essay on . .. Population, ed. Bettany, 1890, p. 553, note.

28

Fragment on Mackintosh (1835), pp. 55-63.

29" Disertation Second," in Encyclopædia Britannica, ed. 1842, 1, 323.

30 Letter in Edinburgh Review (1755), No. 1, pp. 63-79; Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), pp. 474-87 and 492.

Divine Legation of Moses (1846), 1, 156ff.

32 Diary, entry for Apr. 14, 1756, and letter cited in Abbey's English Church and its Bishops (1887), 1, 32.

Adrastea, IV (2), 234-252.

De l'Esprit des Lois, book 7, chap. 1.

35 See index of Waller and Glover edition for some twenty-three references. 36 Works, ed. Bowring, 1843, 1, 49, note, and x, 73.

Some of these, such as Fielding, referred to him repeatedly, and some wrote whole books on him. William Law devoted a volume to him; so did John Dennis; and Francis Hutcheson, no mean figure in the history of philosophy, wrote two books against him; while Adam Smith allotted him half of a special article, and Berkeley, a dialogue.

Nor was this vogue merely academic. The Fable of the Bees made a public scandal, and reached through the resultant notoriety not only the public eye but the public emotion. Mandeville, with his teaching of the usefulness of vice, inherited the office of Lord High Bogey-man, which Hobbes had held in the preceding century. The Fable was twice presented by the Grand Jury as a public nuisance; minister and bishop alike denounced it from the pulpit.37 The book, indeed, aroused positive consternation, ranging from the reprehension of Bishop Berkeley 38 to the horror of John Wesley,39 who protests that not even Voltaire could have said so much for wickedness. In France, the Fable was actually ordered burned by the common hangman.10

It would, in fact, be difficult to overrate the degree and extent of Mandeville's eighteenth-century fame. A letter of Wesley's," in 1750, indicates that the Fable was current in Ireland. In France, in 1765, we find Diderot complaining that the tenets of the book had become so familiar as to be a conversational nuisance.42 In 1768, the friend of Laurence Sterne, John Hall-Stevenson, thought a good title for one of his pieces would be "The New Fable of the Bees." As late, indeed, as 1787, and in America at that, the

"Some of the sermons against it that got into print were The True Christian Method of Educating the Children both of the Poor and Rich, preached in 1724 by Thomas Wilson, Bishop, of Sodor and Man; Chandler's Doing Good.... an Answer to . . . the Fable of the Bees (1728); a sermon delivered in 1727 by Isaac Watts (printed as An Essay towards the Encouragement of Charity-Schools, 1728); and Barnes's Charity and Charity Schools Defended (delivered 1724, printed 1727).

"Works, ed. Fraser, 1871, III, 424.

"Journal, ed. Curnock, IV, 157.

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40 G. Peignot, Dictionnaire .. des Principaux Livres Condamnés au Feu (Paris, 1806), 1, 282.

Cited in Abbey's English Church and its Bishops (1887), 1, 32. 42 Euvres, ed. Assézat, x, 299.

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author of our first American comedy-a play meant for popular consumption 13-refers to Mandeville as if the latter's theories were as well known to the audience as the latest proclamation of General Washington.

This outline of Mandeville's vogue will serve as a prelude to the search into his specific influence, and may also give some initial intimations of the justification for the claims I made at the outset concerning his importance.

II

Now, to understand the effect which Mandeville exercised on ethical theory, it will be necessary to sketch briefly his general philosophical position. A good part of Mandeville will escape in the process: the wit, humor, and worldly-wise cynicism which gave his thought its edge must be omitted; but that cannot be helped.-. Mandeville called his book "Private Vices, Publick Benefits." Now, by that he did not mean that all evil has a good side to it, and that this good outweighs the ill. His paradox turned, instead, on a matter of definition. He adopted certain current ethical conceptions as to the prerequisites of morality. But when he came rigorously to apply the definition of virtue which he had thus derived he found that the world did not furnish any examples of people who lived up to the definition, and thus it became an obvious deduction that, since all is vicious, even matters beneficial to us arise from vicious causes, and private vices are public benefits.

The conception of virtue propounded by Mandeville proclaimed, first, that no action was really virtuous if inspired by selfish emotion; and this assumption, since Mandeville considered all natural emotion fundamentally selfish, implied the ascetic position that no action was virtuous if done from natural impulse. Secondly, Mandeville's definition of virtue declared that no action was meritorious unless the motive that inspired it was a "rational" one. As Mandeville interpreted "rational" to imply an antithesis to emotion and self-regard, both aspects of his ethical code-the ascetic and the rationalistic-alike condemned as vicious all action

Royall Tyler, The Contrast, III, ii.

whose dominant motive was natural impulse and self-regarding bias-or, to put it from a different angle, his code condemned all such acts as were caused by the traits man shared with the animals.

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This conception of morality was no invention of Mandeville's. He merely adopted the creed of two great popular groups of the period. The first group comprised the theologians who, from the orthodox belief in the depravity of human nature, concluded naturally that virtue could not be found except in such action as unselfishly denied or transcended the working of the nature they condemned. To all logical inferences from Mandeville's position as to the moral necessity of unselfishness and the conquest of natural impulse these ascetics were also fairly committed. The other group comprised the rationalistic or "intellectualistic ethical thinkers, who identified morality with such action as proceeded from rational motives. This group was committed to conclusions logically deducible from Mandeville's position only in so far as, like him, they made an antithesis between reason and emotion; but, since this antithesis was very commonly made, at least implicitly, these thinkers too were largely implicated in Mande

"All

“This was the respectable orthodox position. Thus Luther wrote, things in thyself are unrighteous, sinful, and damnable" (Select Works, trans. Cole, 1826, 1, 13 and passim). And Calvin argued (Institutes, III, ix, 2), “For there is no medium between the two things: the earth must either be worthless in our estimation, or keep us enslaved by an intemperate love of it. Therefore, if we have any regard to eternity, we must carefully strive to disencumber ourselves of these fetters "; and he speaks (Institutes, III, ix, 3) of the "contempt which believers should train themselves to feel for the present life." This belief in the corruption of human nature the Synod of Dort authenticated as the official Protestant doctrine. It is found in representative moral works of all sorts. For example, in his Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (Temple Classics, p. 68), Jeremy Taylor wrote, "He that would die holily and happily, must in this world love tears, humility, solitude, and repentance." In 1722, in his Conscious Lovers (III, i), Steele satirized this attitude as if it were of general currency: "To love is a passion, 'tis a desire, and we must have no desires."

45 Rationalism, of one aspect or another, in seventeenth and eighteenth century ethics was, it is almost unnecessary to note, very marked, whether in a writer such as the Cambridge Platonist Culverwel, who states (Of the Light of Nature, ed. Brown, 1857, p. 66) that "the law of nature is built upon reason," or in a more systematic thinker like the "intellectualist" Samuel Clarke, who argues (Works, ed. 1738, 11, 50-1): "From this first,

ville's conclusions. The implications, then, which Mandeville was to deduce from the rigorous application of his definition of virtue were such as could genuinely involve and provoke the thought of his day.

The conclusion reached by Mandeville that all human action is at bottom vicious was attained by a psychological analysis of human

original, and literal signification of the words, Flesh and Spirit; the same Terms have, by a very easy and natural figure of Speech, been extended to signify All Vice and All Virtue in general; as having their Root and Foundation, one in the prevailing of different Passions and Desires over the Dictates of Reason, and the other in the Dominion of Reason and Religion over all the irregularities of Desires and Passions. Every Vice, and every instance of Wickedness, of whatever kind it be; has its Foundation in some unreasonable Appetite or ungoverned Passion, warring against the Law of the Mind." And again—“ All Religion or Virtue, consists in the Love of Truth, and in the Free Choice and Practice of Right, and in being influenced regularly by rational and moral Motives" (Sermons, ed. 1742, 1, 457). Even so empirical a thinker as Locke holds, in contradiction to his main philosophy, that a complete morality can be derived by the exercise of pure ratiocination from general a priori principles, without reference to concrete circumstances; and Spinoza also, who had placed so great a stress on the dependence of thought upon feeling, nevertheless attempts to demonstrate his ethics "ordine geometrico."

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However, although the general thought identified virtue with conduct in accord with "reason," 39 reason was usually an ill-defined and contradictorily employed term. The ethical rationalism of the period implied, first, that the organization of the universe was a geometrically rational one, and that, therefore, moral laws were the "immutable and eternal" affairs whose disconnection with the facts of human nature Fielding was later to ridicule in Tom Jones. To such a conception the tastes and emotions in which men differed from one another were either irritating or negligible; and its stress was naturally laid upon the abstract, rational relationships which were true alike of all men. To this conception, therefore, reason tended to imply an antithesis to taste and individual impulse. Secondly, the ethical rationalism of the day insisted that acts were virtuous only if their motivation was from " reason." It is at this pointthe phase of rationalistic ethics of chief importance in relation to Mandeville that current philosophy was most inchoate. No real attempt was usually made to define motivation by "reason." "Reason" sometimes implied any practical action, sometimes a proper blend of deliberation and impulse, and very often, indeed, it was used, as Mandeville used it, in connection with acts the decision to perform which was not determined by emotional or personal bias (which might, however, provided it did not determine the will to act, legitimately accompany the action). Again and

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