Thought, Word and Deed

Abstract

Why does Cleopatra have the messenger whipped ? I put this highly concrete question first because the matters of vital importance that are in question here are of such wide scope. The scope is displayed in three familiar sentences: 'In the beginning was the Word' (St John the Evangelist). 'In the beginning was the Deed' (Goethe). 'Words are also deeds' (Wittgenstein). That Thought belongs to a trinity with Word and Deed is well shown by William Wollaston, whose Religion of Nature Delineated (1722) (Third Edition 1725) has been too quickly dismissed by modern readers--especially by those who have not read it. Even such a sympathetic reader and broad-minded thinker as Donald MacKinnon shares Bishop Butler's suspicion that Wollaston has 'made of morality and of immorality things so rarefied that they seem to have become kinds of construction which we compel the actual complexity of our human nature to accept in order that the laws of that nature shall be exhibited as one with the laws of logic' (A Study in Ethical Theory, p. 176). When other historians and philosophers refer to Wollaston at all, it is to note that he was the target of the supposedly decisive attacks of Hume and Butler on the bloodless rationalism that would derive moral distinctions from reason rather than