Excerpt from The Principles of Moral Philosophy Investigated, and Briefly Applied to the Constitution of Civil Society: Together With Remarks on the Principle Assumed by Mr. Paley as the Basis of All Moral Conclusions, and on Other Positions of the Same Author I cannot clofe this Preface without perform ing an act Of jufiice, and expreffing how materially I have been indebted In many of the fubfequent difcuflions to the Important' Obfervations fuggefied by my excellent friend, Mr. Babington, Of Rothley (...) Temple. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

This essay offers a reassessment of William Paley's Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy. It focuses on his defence of religious ethics from challenges laid down in David Hume's Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. By restoring the context of theological/philosophical debate to Paley's thinking about ethics, the essay attempts to establish his genuine commitment to a worldly theology and to a programme of human advancement. This description of orthodox thought takes us beyond the bipolar debate about whether intellectual culture (...) in the period was religious or secular: it was clearly religious; the question is: what kind of religion? It also makes questionable the view that England was somehow isolated from so-called Enlightenment currents of thought that were thriving elsewhere on the Continent. The “science of man”, far from being the sole preserve of Scottish and continental thinkers, also provided the basis for moral thought in eighteenth-century England. (shrink)