Metaphysics, or, the philosophy of consciousness, phenomenal and real / by Henry Longueville Mansel.

  • Henry Longueville Mansel
Date:
1860
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Metaphysics, or, the philosophy of consciousness, phenomenal and real / by Henry Longueville Mansel. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    391/424 page 379
    standard in the human mind may indeed be faint and fluctuating, and must be imperfect; it may vary with the intellectual and moral culture of the nation or the individual; and in its highest human representation it must fall far short of the reality. But it is present in all mankind, as a basis of moral obligation and an induce- ment to moral progress ; it is present in the universal consciousness of sin—in the conviction that we are offenders against God. However degrading may be the practices into which men have fallen, under systems of false religion, it may be safely asserted that no man, and no nation of men, ever consciously deified vice as such. The voluptuous deities of the pagan mythology were deified as regards their enjoyments, not as regards their vices : their acts were contemplated as divine, not because they were breaches of morality, but because the worshipper falsely conceived them to be ingredients of happiness. The god of a nation of savage warriors may delight in revenge and bloodshed; but the supposed and of Muller, Christian Doctrine of Sin, vol i., p. 95. God did not create morality by his will: it is inherent in his nature, and coeternal with Himself; nor can He be conceived as capable of reversing it. But God did in one sense create human morality, when He created the moral constitution of man, and placed him in certain circumstances, such as those of mortality, of property, of sexual relation, etc., through which the eternal principles of morality are manifested in relation to this present life. On the foundation of morality in the nature of God, see Cudworth, Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, b. i., ch. iii.; b. iv., ch. iv. v. vi.
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