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30 u chapter 3 u On Human Action in the Divine Court1 [Carmichael disagreed fundamentally with Pufendorf’s opinion that natural law must abstract from belief in the immortality of the soul and an afterlife. Pufendorf had said in his preface: “The greatest difference [between natural law and theology ] is that the scope of the discipline of natural law is confined within the orbit of this life” (Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, p. 8). In a note to this preface Carmichael offered the opposite point of view.] We are taught by the light of nature as the fruit of acting well, to hope, and indeed to expect, not only felicity in this life in particular (although this is most closely attached to duties enjoined by natural law) but also, in general, some greater happiness or greater alleviation of misery, if not in this, at least in a future life, than evildoers will be able to attain. Furthermore , if any way of obtaining the greatest happiness after this life is left to man, [we are] to conceive of the hope of it as the more probable, the more, in the individual actions of life, we render ourselves obedient to the divine law. It is not correct, therefore, to say that the end of the discipline of natural law is confined to the scope merely of this life. [“Author ’s Preface,” 6.1] [Carmichael also disagreed with Pufendorf’s position (“Author’s Preface,” secs. 6 and 7) that natural law, like human jurisdiction, “is concerned only with a man’s external actions and does not penetrate to what is hidden in the heart . . .” (Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, p. 9). Carmichael comments:] 1. From Carmichael’s notes in Supplements and Observations, 1724, to the “Author’s Preface”; and bk. I, ch. 1, “On Human Action.” on human action 31 Since the law of nature has been ordered and sanctioned by God himself , we are warranted in saying that its edicts are particularly applicable in the court of God and of conscience and, just as evidently, direct the internal motions of the mind as well as external modes of behavior. But the contrary follows from the premises established by Pufendorf; although he attempts to soften the actual conclusion and seems to hint elsewhere at something else.2 See the criticism of Pufendorf by the distinguished Leibniz (the so-called Anonymous) in Barbeyrac’s examination of this subject.3 [“Author’s Preface,” 6.3] The internal acts of the mind are themselves human, and so far as external acts depend for their direction on internal acts, they derive their quali fication [as human] from that source. It is not necessary [for acts of the mind] that there be a previous dictate of the intellect and command of the will: this would involve an infinite regress. It is enough that internal conscience and self-approval be intimately and essentially involved in all those [mental actions]. Human actions therefore are those actions which above we called free and taught that they are in every case and peculiarly subject to moral rule (pp. 25–26). This is not the place to discuss whether the schools are right to call other motions that proceed from our faculties human actions.4 [I.1.2.i] It is a dispute about a word whether judgments, together with the operations which the mind performs upon ideas previously impressed upon it by objects, should be counted as acts of intellect or will. It makes no difference how we settle it, provided that we always recognize that the mind behaves actively in them, and hence freely, and that those acts therefore (contrary to what some think) are not devoid of morality. It is therefore perhaps a scholastic prejudice that all our modes of thought must be reduced to two or, as it is commonly expressed, must be attributed to one 2. Pufendorf thought that while natural jurisprudence must be abstracted from Christian theology, the “Christian virtues too do as much as anything to dispose men’s minds to sociability” (Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, p. 9). See also Moore and Silverthorne, “Protestant Theologies,” pp. 173 ff. 3. See ch. 1, nn. 22, 23. 4. Burgersdyck and Heereboord included under the rubric of human actions not only free actions, but also involuntary actions (actiones invitae) or passions: Idea Philosophiae , ch. V; Collegium Ethicum, ch. VI; see ch. 1, n. 8, above. [3...

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