College Work VII · Witherspoon 1912 text

Reform College · original work VII

Witherspoon’s moral philosophy — a reading edition

The book is his. The notes are this hall’s. Read the public-domain lectures first; then these pages. Not a substitute for Nassau Hall, and not a Hillsdale reprint.

John Witherspoon (1723–1794) took the presidency of the College of New Jersey in 1768, signed the Declaration, and taught moral philosophy as the capstone of the BA this college is built to compete with. The lectures survive in student notes, edited (Princeton University Press, 1912) and now free: archive.org. This edition does not steal the volume. It tells you how to read it in Lincoln’s method, in the order of Knox–Rutherford–Craighead, and against the later university that kept Princeton’s name.

Lincoln act: copy the sentence in roman below. Recite it. Then read the lecture. Then write the opponent’s brief in 400 words. Do not highlight the PDF and call it PHL 401.

How to sit the course

PHL 401 in the catalog is this book, entire. Accelerated students take it as a sequence of boxes, one a week, after LYC 08 (Lex Rex). Burr took the same capstone at sixteen. You may be slower. You may not be shallower.

1. Moral philosophy is a science

Witherspoon will not let ethics be a taste. It has first principles, as geometry does. Man is a creature who reasons and who is under obligation. If you begin with “values,” you have already left his classroom for the later university.

Note from this hall. Pair with Work VI: common notions. Obligation is not a postulate the state grants. Copy his opening on the nature of the subject. Recite it before you read Arnn, or anyone, on virtue.

2–4. Man, virtue, duty to God

He is a Scottish moralist, not a sentimentalist only: conscience and reason together. Duty to God is first because a man who is his own end will make a prince of himself, then of the state.

Note. Craighead’s covenant sits here. A people that will not be bound upward will not bind the magistrate downward. This is not a unit in comparative religion. It is why Witherspoon could sign a Declaration that names the Creator without turning the BA into a church.

5–6. Duty to others; rights of men

Rights, in this book, are what duty looks like from the other side. They are not a shopping list issued by a convention as a favor. Life, reputation, property, liberty of action within law — the grammar Blackstone also taught, which Lincoln copied.

“The rights of men are, first, to life, to reputation, to property, to liberty, to the use of his faculties, and to the protection of the laws.”

Witherspoon, line of the lectures on rights — read the 1912 text for the full division; do not treat this sentence as the whole book.

Note. The Second Amendment cases in this hall are applications of “use of his faculties” and “protection of the laws,” not a later sport. A bureau that forbids the means of protection has inverted the duty Witherspoon assigned to the magistrate: to secure, not to invent, the right.

7–8. Compact and civil society

Civil society arises by compact, express or tacit. The magistrate’s power is a trust. It is not a property in his blood. Rutherford is behind this even when the name is not on the page; Witherspoon is a Presbyterian of the same church.

Note. North Carolina at Hillsborough is the express compact refused. Tacit compact cannot be inferred from a people who said no until the amendments moved. Work I is the historical scholium to these lectures. Read them together.

9–10. Civil liberty and forms of government

He asks, in so many words, what civil liberty is for. Not a mood. It puts human powers in motion — industry, letters, heroism — and it is the nurse of those things. He will not say it is required for every private virtue (a slave or a subject may still be good). He will say a free government is the condition under which a people remains fit for office.

“Civil liberty cannot be long preserved without virtue.”

The sentence this college put on the catalog. It is his. Live in it.

He is not a simple democrat. Democracy nurses eloquence because persuasion must replace the whip; it also risks the mob. Mixed government, representation, an independent knowing of the laws — these are the Princeton restatement of the English constitution, before the later university dissolved them into process.

Note. Lincoln’s Lyceum Address (1838) is the American recitation of this lecture: law against the mob, institutions against passion. LYC 01 and LYC 11. Witherspoon would have recognized the assignment.

11–12. Resistance; law of nature and nations

Resistance is last. Petition, representation, the forms — then refusal. He will not bless a first resort to the sword. He will not say the magistrate is a god. States, as to one another, remain in natural liberty; there are rights of nations because there are rights of men.

Note. This is Class IV of the resistance theory sequence, with the book open. Knox called the estates first. Rutherford put the king under law. Craighead renewed the covenant in the Piedmont. Witherspoon made it a BA course. PxD2 will not teach the other thing — private war — and claim his name. Lesser magistrates, juries, a Congress that still contains the dissenters, a court that speaks while the body is in the case.

The 1776 undergraduate “Dialogue on Civil Liberty” at Nassau Hall is the examination of these lectures taken in public, the year he signed. Hamilton’s public writing is the same act at King’s. Lincoln’s stump is the same act without a college. That is why the accelerated track ends in a speech deposited in HOLD.

Examination (PHL 401)

When you have sat that, you have taken the capstone Burr took. You have not taken Princeton’s later degree, and you have not taken Hillsdale’s honorary hood. You have read the book the rival college was for.

Witherspoon, Lectures on Moral Philosophy, ed. V. L. Collins (Princeton, 1912), public domain: archive.org/details/lecturesonmoralp00with_1. Notes: Reform College at PXD2, Work VII. Read him first.