subordinating the latter to the former. The kinship
of this ethics of harmony with the ethical views of antiquity is evident.
It is completed by the eudemonistic conclusion of the system.

As the harmony of impulses constitutes the essence of virtue, so also it is
the way to true happiness. Experience shows that unsocial, unsympathetic,
vicious men are miserable; that love to society is the richest source
of happiness; that even pity for the suffering of others occasions more
pleasure than pain. Virtue secures us the love and respect of others,
secures us, above all, the approval of our own conscience, and true
happiness consists in satisfaction with ourselves. The search after this
pure, constant, spiritual pleasure in the good, which is never accompanied
by satiety and disgust, should not be called self-seeking; he alone takes
pleasure in the good who is already good himself.

Shaftesbury is not well disposed toward positive Christianity, holding that
it has made virtue mercenary by its promises of heavenly rewards, removed
moral questions entirely out of this world into the world to come, and
taught men most piously to torment one another out of pure supernatural
brotherly love. In opposition to such transcendental positions Shaftesbury,
a priest of the modern view of the world, gives virtue a home on earth,
seeks the hand of Providence in the present world, and teaches men to reach
faith in God by inspiring contemplation of the well-ordered universe.
Virtue without piety is possible, indeed, though not complete. But morality
is first and fixed, hence it is the condition and the criterion of genuine
religion. Revelation does not need to fear free rational criticism, for the
Scriptures are accredited by their contents. Besides reason, banter is
with Shaftesbury a second means for distinguishing the genuine from the
spurious: ridicule is the test of truth, and wit and humor the only
cure for enthusiasm. With these he scourges the over-pious as religious
parasites, who for safety's sake prefer to believe too much rather than too
little.

Before Shaftesbury's theory of the moral sense and the disinterested
affections had gained adherents and developers, the danger, which indeed
had not always been escaped, that man might content himself with the
satisfaction of possessing noble impulses, without taking much care
to realize them in useful actions, called forth by way of reaction, a
paradoxical attempt at an apology for