However, as I have not spent my days without thinking and reflecting seriously within myself upon the articles and duties of natural religion, and they are my thoughts which you require, I have attempted, by recollecting old meditations, and consulting a few scattered papers in which I had formerly, for my own use, set down some of them (briefly, and almost solecistically), to give an answer to the two first of your questions, together: though I must own, not without trouble in adjusting and compacting loose sentiments, filling up vacuities, and bringing the chaos into the shape of something like a system.
Notwithstanding what I have said, in a treatise of natural religion, a subject so beaten and exhausted in all its parts by all degrees of writers, in which many notions will inevitably occur that are no one’s property, and so many things require to be proved which can scarce be proved by any other but the old arguments (or not so well), you must not expect to find much that is new. Yet something perhaps you may. That which is advanced in the following papers, concerning the nature of moral good and evil, and is the prevailing thought that runs through them all, I never met with anywhere. And even as to those matters in which I have been prevented by others, and which perhaps may be common, you have them, not as I took them from anybody, but as they used to appear to me in my walks and solitudes. So that they are indeed my thoughts, such as have been long mine, which I send you; without any regard to what others have or have not said: as I persuade myself you will easily perceive. It is not hard to discern whether a work of this kind be all of a piece, and to distinguish the genuine hand of an author from the false wares and patchwork of a plagiary. Though after all, it would be madness in a man to go out of his right way, only because it has been frequented by others, or perhaps is the high road.
Sensible how unfinished this performance is, I call it only a delineation, or rude draft. Where I am defective, or trip, I hope you will excuse a friend who has now passed the threshold of old age, and is, upon that and other accounts, not able to bear much study or application. And thus I commit to your candor what follows: which, for the sake of order and perspicuity, I have divided into sections and propositions.
The Religion of Nature Delineated
I
Of Moral Good and Evil
The foundation of religion lies in that difference between the acts of men, which distinguishes them into good, evil, indifferent. For if there is such a difference, there must be religion; and contra. Upon this account it is that such a long and laborious inquiry has been made after some general idea,1 or some rule,2 by comparing the foresaid acts with which, it might appear to which kind they respectively belong.3 And though men have not yet agreed upon any one, yet one certainly there must be.4 That, which I am going to propose, has always seemed to me not only evidently true, but withal so obvious and plain, that perhaps for this very reason it has not merited the notice of authors. And the use and application of it is so easy, that if things are but fairly permitted to speak for themselves their own natural language, they will, with a moderate attention, be found themselves to proclaim their own rectitude or obliquity; that is, whether they are disagreeable to it or not. I shall endeavor by degrees to explain my meaning.
I. That act which may be denominated morally good or evil, must be the act of a being capable of distinguishing, choosing, and acting for himself:5 or more briefly, of an intelligent and free agent. Because, in proper speaking, no act at all can be ascribed to that which is not endowed with these capacities. For that which cannot distinguish, cannot choose: and that which has not the opportunity, or liberty, of choosing for itself and acting accordingly from an internal principle, acts, if it acts at all, under a necessity incumbent ab extra. But that which acts thus, is in reality only an instrument in the hand of something which imposes the necessity; and cannot properly be said to act, but to be acted. The act must be the act of an agent, therefore not of his instrument.
A being under the abovementioned inabilities is, as to the morality of its acts, in the state of inert and passive matter, and can be but a machine: to which no language or philosophy ever ascribed ἤθη or mores.
II. Those propositions are true, which express things as they are: or, truth is the conformity of those words or signs, by which things are expressed, to the things themselves. Definition.
III. A true proposition may be denied, or things may be denied to be what they are, by deeds, as well as by express words or another proposition. It is certain there is a meaning in many acts and gestures. Everybody understands weeping,6 laughing, shrugs, frowns, etc.; these are a sort of universal language. Applications are many times made, and a kind of dialogue maintained, only by casts of the eye and motions of the adjacent muscles.7 And we read of feet that speak;8 of a philosopher who answered an argument by only getting up and walking;9 and of one who pretended to express the same sentence as many ways by gesticulation, as even Cicero himself could by all his copia of
