Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics

Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics, with some of their applications, is by William Thomas Thornton. An epigraph from Berkeley's Hylas and Philonous says that since the revolt from metaphysical notions to the plain dictates of nature and common sense, its speaker finds his understanding strangely enlightened. The text says Utilitarians are exhorted to be virtuous, less for their own than for other people's sakes.

The text mentions Mr. Mill's splendid outburst that, rather than worship a fiend that could send him to hell for refusing, he would go to hell as he was bid. A passage on Hume says that, not long before, in order to disparage natural religion, he emphatically denied the existence of any causal connection between successive events, and he now, in order equally to discredit the very possibility of revealed religion, tacitly assumes that same connection. The text lists facts or fancies cited by Mr. Galton in proof that praying is of no use, the first being that sick people who pray or are prayed for do not on the average recover more rapidly than others.