“It is almost impossible for a working neurologist to think clearly about the functions of the highest centres because the counters of thought, the words he must employ—are often of psychological origin and for the most part meaningless.”

In his book The Right and the Good Professor W. D. Ross states a theory that ethics is concerned with two distinct conceptions which are logically quite independent of each other and must not be confused: the right, viz. the act which we are under an obligation to do irrespective of our motives, and the morally good, viz. the good motives, desires and so on, irrespective of what actions they lead us to. In a later book, Foundations of Ethics, he repeats this theory somewhat altered and enlarged. Professor Broad says about the first book that it is “the most important contribution to ethical theory made in England for a generation,” and for the second book he proposes the nickname “the righter and the better.”

Ever since they were first published, the works of Bernard Mandeville have met with a few careful readers as well as with a larger number of stupid or unscrupulous assailants. Both classes are faithfully recorded at the end of F. B. Kaye's splendid edition of The Fable of the Bees (Oxford, 1924), which has helped to revive interest in Mandeville, and which has moulded the current estimate of his ideas: the treatment of Mandeville in such a work as Basil Willey's Eighteenth Century Background (London, 1940) is confessedly based almost entirely on Kaye. My purpose in this paper is to suggest some modifications of the account given by Kaye, and to make claims for Mandeville's importance in one particular field, the relation of ethics to politics.

I Wish to suggest both that three (and not two) values are often used for the appraisal of moral judgments and also that there are some generally shared purposes which would be furthered if this usage became even more common. In doing this I shall by-pass two problems which have been not infrequently discussed in recent years:

Until comparatively recently the complete text of the Opus Postutmum has not been available to students of the Kantian philosophy.Prior to the publication of Adickes’ commentary on this material in 1920, students of Kant were almost wholly dependent upon Reicke's incomplete and markedly inadequate edition of 1882–84.2 Adickes’ commentary, with its abundance of quoted passages, provided an access to a great deal of material hitherto unavailable. But it was not until the publication of the Academy Edition in 1936 that the complete text became available for independent study. Because of the recent publication of the full text, most accounts of Kant's position in the Opus Postumum have depended upon Reicke's inadequate edition or, as has been more frequently the case, upon Adickes’ commentary.3 In view of the considerable influence it has had upon Kant interpretation, Adickes’ analysis of the Opus Postumum warrants a careful and critical examination.

I. Since the beginnings of philosophy, in all cultures which have produced any, religion and philosophy have been closely tied up together, and have often been uneasy yoke-fellows, each at times feeling it a duty to combat the other. I think there are two main reasons for this, (a) All higher religions develop a theology, or systematic statement of doctrine; the philosopher tends to regard this as a spurious kind of philosophy or science that deliberately neglects inconvenient facts; while the theologian in his turn suspects the philosopher of ignoring important data which he ought to consider, viz.: the phenomena of concrete religion, (b) Akin to this is the tendency of both parties to use the word “God” in a different sense; Pascal’s objection that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is not the God of the philosophers is prima facie justified. Nevertheless both parties might have a claim to use the word.