Paley (1866), verse translations from bk.
12 a tant points he anticipates the utilitarianism afterwards systematized by Paley, who expresses in the amplest terms his obligations to his predecessor.
This universal motive is further connected, as by Paley, through the will of God, with the "general good, the root where out all our rules of conduct and sentiments of honour are to branch."
Paley (1802), this is a sort of after-birth or anachronism.2 Natural Law.
Mill tried to reconcile criminal law and its punishments with his very hard type of determinism by saying that law was needed in order to weight the scale, and in order to hold out a prospect of penalties which might deter from crime and impel towards good citizenship, so Paley held that virtue was not merely obedience to God but obedience " for 1 Criticism of the scheme, from the point of view of an idealist theism, will be found in John Caird's Introduc to the Phil.
Paley includes that too; virtue is " doing good to mankind," in obedience to God, for the sake of heaven.
Empiricism is restated by Paley, who is Kant's younger contemporary as a man and also on the whole as a writer.
Less the archdeacon knew nothing of the German Paley professor, and would have cared nothing for him how ever well he had known him.
The " argument from design " had been a favourite form of reasoning amongst Christian theologians, and, as worked out by Paley in his Natural Theology, it served the useful purpose of emphasizing the fitness which exists between all the inhabitants of the earth and their physical environment.
Paley - a conclusive and well-nigh solitary proof.
(Whether one calls the unknowable a revealed mystery or an unexplained and inexplicable fact makes little difference.) William Paley (1743-1805) borrows from many writers; he borrows Lardner's learning and Butler's " particular evidence for Christianity," viz.
The phrase itself is, as Paley has pointed out, ambiguous.
As Paley says, he loves " to record their fidelity to their masters, their sympathy in the trials of life, their gratitude for kindness and considerate treatment, and their pride in bearing the character of honourable men..
2), Thomas Day (author of Sandford and Merton), Sterne, Warburton, Hutcheson, Beattie, John Wesley, Whitfield, Adam Smith, Millar, Robertson, Dr Johnson, Paley, Gregory, Gilbert Wakefield, Bishop Porteus, Dean Tucker.
Paley, even went so far as to doubt whether a single written copy of the Iliad existed in Greece at the time of the Peloponnesian War.
Paley, Quintus Smyrnaeus and the " Homer " of the tragic Poets (1879); G.
This idea, which occupies a prominent position in systems like those of Bentham, Volney, and even Paley, was evidently of prime importance at all events to the later Cyrenaics.
WILLIAM PALEY (1743-1805), English divine and philosopher, was born at Peterborough.
The subscription controversy was then agitating the university, and Paley published an anonymous Defence of a pamphlet in which Bishop Law had advocated the retrenchment and simplification of the Thirty-nine Articles; he did not, however, sign the petition (called the "Feathers" petition from being drawn up at a meeting at the Feathers tavern) for a relaxation of the terms of subscription.
In 1776 Paley was presented to the rectory of Musgrave in Westmorland, supplemented at the end of the year by the vicarage of Dalston, and presently exchanged for that of Appleby.
At the suggestion of his friend John Law (son of Edward Law, bishop of Carlisle and formerly his colleague at Cambridge), Paley published (1785) his lectures, revised and enlarged, under the title of The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy.
In the dedication just referred to, Paley claims a systematic unity for his works.
Now the second presupposition depends, according to Paley, on the credibility of the Christian religion (which he treats almost exclusively as the revelation of these "new sanctions" of morality).
In his Natural Theology Paley has adapted with consummate skill the argument which Ray (1691) and Derham (1711) and Nieuwentyt 1 (1730) had already made familiar to Englishmen.
A charge of wholesale plagiarism from this book was brought against Paley in the Athenaeum for 1848.
Paley refers several times to Nieuwentyt, who uses the famous illustration of the watch.
But the task is so judiciously performed that it would probably be difficult to get a more effective statement of the external evidences of Christianity than Paley has here presented.
Meadley (1809) and his son Edmund Paley, prefixed to the 1825 edition of his works; Leslie Stephen in Dictionary of National Biography; Quarterly Review, ii.
On Paley as a theologian and philosopher, see Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, i.
Paley, Henry Hayman (in the Introduction to his Odyssey), P. Geddes, R.
Paley, though an excellent expositor and full of common sense, had the usual defect of common-sense people in philosophy - that of tame acquiescence in the prejudices of his age.
Like Paley, he regards men as moved entirely by pleasure and pain, and omits from the list of pleasures most of those which to wellnatured men make life really worth living: and he treats all pleasures as homogeneous in character so that they can be measured into equal and equally desirable lots.
He puts far greater stress than his predecessors upon the sympathetic pleasures, and thus quite avoids that appearance of mean prudential selfishness that is such a depressing feature in Paley and Bentham.
This is carefully worked out by Paley in his Horae Paulinae (ed.
Accordingly his treatment of external rights and duties, though decidedly inferior in methodical clearness and precision, does not differ in principle from that of Paley or Bentham, except that he lays greater stress on the immediate conduciveness of actions to the happiness of individuals, and more often refers in a merely supplementary or restrictive way to their tendencies in respect of general happiness.
School; the latter method, with considerably more divergence of view and treatment, was employed independently and almost simultaneously by Paley and Bentham in both ethics and politics, and is at the present time widely maintained under the name of Utilitarianism.
This Paley and Bentham (after Locke) interpreted as merely the effect on the will of the pleasures or pains attached to the observance or violation of moral rules, combining with this the doctrine of Hutcheson that " general good " or " happiness " is the final end and standard of these rules; while they eliminated all vagueness from the notion of general happiness by defining it to consist in " excess of pleasure over pain " - pleasures and pains being regarded as " differing in nothing but continuance or intensity."
Paley, however, holds that scripture is given less to teach morality than to illustrate it by example and enforce it by new sanctions and greater certainty, and that the light of nature makes it clear that God wills the happiness of his creatures.
In this way the utilitarian method is freed from the subversive tendencies which Butler and others had discerned in it; as used by Paley, it merely explains the current moral and jural distinctions, exhibits the obvious basis of expediency which supports most of the received rules of law and morality and furnishes a simple solution, in harmony with common sense, of some perplexing casuistical questions.
Paley expressly acknowledges his obligations to the original and suggestive, though diffuse and whimsical, work of Abraham Tucker (Light of Nature Pursued, 17681 774).
This substitution of hypothetical history for direct analysis of the moral sense is really older than the utilitarianism of Paley and Bentham, which it has so profoundly modified.
In the utilitarianism of Paley and Bentham the proper rules of conduct, moral and legal, are determined by comparing the imaginary consequences of different modes of regulation on men and women, conceived as specimens of a substantially uniform and unchanging type.
Paley (3rd ed., 1898, 1896); Midias by W.
This, according to Paley, would be inconvenient.