"duties of children to parents, and of parents to children: duties of husbands and wives: duties of rulers and subjects: duties of friendship and good neighbourhood." Self-love, then, naturally expands to include love of others. Founded on the child's "natural delight in the pleasure of taste and hearing, and its aversion to pain and death," self-love can lead to a love of humanity in general. ^* Clearly Edwards's distinction between self‐ love and "consent to being in general" has nothing to do with the conventional contrast between egoism and altruism.

He wavers a little on the question of whether man-made conceptions of justice originate in self-love alone or whether a sense of consistency and proportion should be considered an independent source of "secondary virtue," as he calls it. "There is an agreement in nature and measure, when he that loves has the proper returns of love; when he that from his heart promotes the good of another has his good promoted by the other: for there is a kind of justice in becoming gratitude." At this point, Edwards seems to distinguish "proportion" from empathy and to identify a sense of justice more closely with the former than with the latter. "Indeed, most of the duties incumbent on us, if well considered, will be found to partake of the nature of justice. There is some natural agreement of one thing to another; ... some answerableness of the act to the occasion ; some equality and proportion in things of a similar nature, and of a direct relation one to another." With great insight, Edwards shows the affinity between a sense of justice and an appreciation of beauty and "harmony," only to remind us that a "secondary kind of beauty" can evoke no more than a secondary kind of virtue. ^† "Who will affirm, that a

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*

Freud's analysis of the ego ideal, which is rooted in the infant's illusion of occupying the center of the universe but later becomes the foundation of man's loftiest ethical ideals, can be read as a twentieth-century restatement of this argument.

†

It was some such idea of justice founded on a sense of "proportion" and "measure," I believe, that Edwards's followers had in mind when they defended God's "vindictive" justice on the grounds that punishment is the natural and fitting sequel to crime. The "sense of desert," Edwards explained, consists of a "natural agreement, proportion and harmony, between malevolence or injury, and resentment and punishment; or between loving and being loved, between showing kindness and being rewarded, etc." But Edwards was still speaking of human justice here and probably would have con-

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