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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Excerpts From the Life and Letters of John Locke Of Ethics in General Happiness and misery are the two great springs of human actions, and though through different ways we find men so busy in the world, they all aim at happiness, and desire to avoid misery, as it appears to them in different places and shapes.

I do not remember that I have heard of any nation of men who have not acknowledged that there has been right and wrong in men's actions, as well as truth and falsehood in their sayings; some measures there have been everywhere owned, though very different; some rules and boundaries to men's actions, by which they were judged to be good or bad; nor is there, I think, any people amongst whom there is not distinction between virtue and vice; some kind of morality is to be found everywhere received; I will not say perfect and exact, but yet enough to let us know that the notion of it is more or less everywhere, and that men think that even where politics, societies, and magistrates are silent, men yet are under some laws to which they owe obedience.

But, however morality be the great business and concernment of mankind, and so deserves our most attentive application and study; yet in the very entrance this occurs very strange and worthy our consideration, that morality hath been generally in the world rated as a science distinct from theology, religion, and law; and that it hath been the proper province of philosophers, a sort of men different both from divines, priests, and lawyers, whose profession it has been to explain and teach this knowledge to the world; a plain argument to me of some discovery still amongst men, of the law of nature, and a secret apprehension of another rule of action which rational creatures had a concernment to conform to, besides what either the priests pretended was the immediate command of their God (for all the heathen ceremonies of worship pretended to revelation, reason failing in the support of them), or the lawyer told them was the command of the Government.