At nearly the same period commenced the ethical controversy between *Fénélon* (A. D. 1651-1715) and *Bossuet* (A. D. 1627-1704), as to the possibility and obligation of disinterested virtue. Fénélon and the Quietists, who sympathized with him, maintained that the pure love of God, without any self-reference, or regard for one’s own well-being either here or here-after, is the goal and the test of human perfection, and that nothing below this—nothing which aims or aspires at anything less than this—deserves the name of virtue. Bossuet defended the selfish theory of virtue, attacked his amiable antagonist with unconscionable severity and bitterness, and succeeded in obtaining from the court of Rome—though against the wishes of the Pope—the condemnation of the obnoxious tenet. The Pope remarked, with well-turned antithesis, that Fénélon might have erred from excess in the love of God, while Bossuet had sinned by defect in the love of his neighbor.
Among the recent French moralists, the most distinguished names are those of *Jouffroy* and *Cousin*, who—each with a terminology of his own—agree with Malebranche in regarding right and wrong as inherent and essential characteristics of actions, and as having their source and the ground of their validity in the nature of things. The aim of Cousin’s well-known treatise on “The True, the Beautiful, and the Good,” is purely ethical, and the work is designed to identify the three members of the Platonic triad with corresponding attributes of the Infinite Being,—attributes which, virtually one, have their counterpart and manifestation in the order of nature and the government of the universe.
In *Germany*, the necessarian philosophers of the Pantheistic school ignore ethics by making choice and moral action impossible. Man has no distinct and separate personality. He is for a little while detached in appearance from the soul of the universe (_anima mundi_), but in reality no more detached from it than is a boulder or a log of drift-wood from the surface on which it rests. He still remains a part of the universal soul, the multiform, all-embracing God, who is himself not a self-conscious, freely willing being, but impelled by necessity in all his parts and members, and, no less than in all else, in those human members through which alone he attains to some fragmentary self-consciousness.