disposition to approve of the harmony of good music, or the beauty of a square or equilateral triangle, is the same with true holiness, or a truly virtuous disposition of mind?" Even so, "approbation of the secondary beauty that lies in uniformity and proportion, which is natural to all," is so important, Edwards seems to suggest at one point, that it should be considered "another ground" on which secondary virtue can rest. Two pages later, however, he says that "there are no particular moral virtues whatsoever"—no secondary virtues, that is—that do not "come to have some kind of approbation from self-love."

Whether or not self-love is the only source of a sense of duty, Edwards clearly dissents from those moral philosophers who postulate an innate moral sense that enables man to distinguish right from wrong. ^* Our "natural" conscience, he insists—conscience uninformed, that is, by "consent to being in general"—originates in our wish to be loved and cared for, even in the instinct of self-preservation, and in the sense of fitness and "consistency" that makes it so natural for us to assume that this wish to be loved (in others as in ourselves) ought to be gratified, that our need for love ought to evoke an appropriate response not just from other human beings but from "being in general."

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sidered it inappropriate to extend the same reasoning to the inscrutable ways of providence.

*

Edwards follows Locke in rejecting the hypothesis of innate ideas. If the mind is a blank slate at birth, conscience has to be seen as the product of experience, including, of course, the experience of grace, which transforms "natural" conscience into a love of being in general. The distinction between "true virtue" and "secondary virtue" enables Edwards to accept Locke's argument that all natural morality originates in self-love. Only when the theological foundations underlying Locke's own position (and that of liberals like Mandeville, who based a cruder version of this argument on Pascal) began to crumble did liberals find it necessary to stress man's capacity for disinterested public spirit and intelligent sympathy as opposed to empathy (which merely projects the loved self onto others). In his Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume took issue with the "selfish system of morals" proposed by Hobbes and Locke. He admitted that "sympathy ... is much fainter than our concern for ourselves," but for that very reason, he argued, "it is necessary for us, in our calm judgments, ... to neglect all these differences between ourselves and others and render our sentiments more public and social." Adam Smith took a similar position in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

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