Ethical Handbook

To the Reader.

...things which at other times might have forcibly held me back, I nonetheless could not then abandon my undertaking, nor set down my pen, until I had completed the work I had begun. To be perfectly frank, this also added a "spur to the running horse" original: currenti calcar addidit; a classical idiom for urging on someone who is already moving at full speed.. I believed it was entirely fitting for a man who had worked so diligently to lay the primary and most vital foundations of Natural Theology The study of God based on reason and the observation of nature, rather than on divine revelation.—specifically by demonstrating that God exists and the human soul is immortal—to now build this third part concerning Life and Morals upon those very foundations. Such was the occasion for this work.

The goal, however—not of the writer (for mine, as I have said, is simply to fulfill the duty of my own conscience), but of the writing itself—is the same goal that all works on Ethics should share: namely, the improvement of human life. For many people seem to fall into the error of thinking that ethical systems are created only to air useless trivialities. They treat moral discipline—as Cicero Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE), the Roman statesman and philosopher whose works on duty were foundational to Western ethics. puts it—as a "display of knowledge, rather than a law for living." Yet the true and genuine purpose of Moral Philosophy is that, by reading its precepts...