Is an act done for ‘virtue’s sake’ done for pleasure of moral sense?
28. Here, again, neither Butler nor Hutcheson, while they avoid the most obvious inconsistency of Shaftesbury’s doctrine, do much for its positive development. With each the ‘moral faculty,’ though it is said to approve and disapprove, is still a ‘sense’ or ‘sentiment,’ a specific susceptibility of pleasure in the contemplation of goodness; and each again recognises a ‘reflex affection’ for—a desire to have—the goodness of which the view conveys this pleasure. But they neither have the merit of stating so explicitly as Shaftesbury does that this rational affection alone constitutes the goodness of man, as man; nor, on the other hand, do they lapse, as he does, into the representation of it as a desire for the pleasure which the view of goodness causes. Butler, indeed, having no account to give of the goodness which is approved or morally pleasing, but the fact that it is so pleasing, could logically have nothing to say against the view that this reflex affection is merely a desire for this particular sort of pleasure; but by representing it as equivalent in its highest form to the love of God, to the longing of the soul after Him as the perfectly good, he in effect gives it a wholly different character. Hutcheson, by his definition of the object of moral approbation, [1] which is also a definition of the object of the reflex affection, is fairly entitled to exclude, as he does, along with the notion that the goodness which we morally approve is the quality of exciting the pleasure of such approval, the notion that ‘affection for goodness’ means desire for this or any other pleasure. But, in spite of his express rejection of this view, the question will still return, how either a faculty of consciousness of which we only know that it is ‘a kind of taste or relish,’ or a desire from the determination of which reason is expressly excluded, can have any other object than pleasure or pain.
[1] See above, sec. 25.
Hume excludes every object of desire but pleasure.
29. In contrast with these well-meant efforts to derive that distinction between the selfish and unselfish, between the pleasant and the morally good, which the Christian conscience requires, from principles that do not admit of it, Hume’s system has the merit of relative consistency. He sees that the two sides of Locke’s doctrine—one that thought originates nothing, but takes its objects as given in feeling, the other that the good which is object of desire is pleasant feeling—are inseparable. Hence he decisively rejects every notion of rational or unselfish affections, which would imply that they are other than desires for pleasure; of virtue, which would imply that it antecedently determines, rather than is constituted by, the specific pleasure of moral sense; and of this pleasure itself, which would imply that anything but the view of tendencies to produce pleasure can excite it. But here his consistency stops. The principle which forbade him to admit any object of desire but pleasure is practically forgotten in his account of the sources of pleasure, and its being so forgotten is the condition of the desire for pleasure being made plausibly to serve as a foundation for morals. It is the assumption of pleasures determined by objects only possible for reason, made in the treatise on the Passions, that prepares the way for the rejection of reason, as supplying either moral motive or moral standard, in the treatise on Morals.
His account of ‘direct passions’: All desire is for pleasure.
30. ‘The passions’ is Hume’s generic term for ‘impressions of reflection’—appetites, desires, and emotions alike. He divides them into two main orders, ‘direct and indirect,’ both ‘founded on pain and pleasure.’ Thedirectpassions are enumerated as ‘desire and aversion, grief and joy, hope and fear, along with volition’ or will. These ‘arise from good and evil’ (which are the same as pleasure and pain) ‘most naturally and with least preparation.’ ‘Desire arises from good, aversion from evil, considered simply.’ They become will or volition, ‘when the good may be attained or evil avoided by any action of the mind or body’—will being simply ‘the internal impression we feel and are conscious of when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body or new perception of our mind.’ ‘When good is certain or probable it produces joy’ (which is described also as a pleasure produced by pleasure or by the imagination of pleasure); ‘when it is uncertain, it gives rise to hope.’ To these the corresponding opposites are grief and fear. We must suppose them to be distinguished from desire and aversion as being what he elsewhere calls ‘pure emotions’; such as do not, like desires, ‘immediately excite us to action.’ Given such an immediate impression of pleasure or pain as excites a ‘distinct passion’ of one or other of these kinds, and supposing it to ‘arise from an object related to ourselves or others,’ it excites mediately, through this relation, the new impressions of pride or humility, love or hatred—pride when the object is related to oneself, love when it is related to another person. These areindirectpassions. They do not tend to displace the immediate impression which is the condition of their excitement, but being themselves agreeable give it additional force. ‘Thus a suit of fine clothes produces pleasure from their beauty; and this pleasure produces the direct passions, or the impressions of volition and desire. Again, when these clothes are considered as belonging to oneself, the double relation conveys to us the sentiment of pride, which is an indirect passion; and the pleasure which attends that passion returns back to the direct affections, and gives new force to our desire or volition, joy or hope.’ [1]
[1] Vol. II., pp. 214, 215. Cf. pp. 76, 90, 153 and 203. [Book II., part III., sec. IX.; part 1, sec. I; part I., sec. VI.; part II., sec. VI.; part III., sec. VI.]
Yet he admits ‘passions’ which produce pleasure, but proceed not from it
31. Alongside of the unqualified statement that ‘the passions, both direct and indirect, are founded on pain and pleasure,’ and the consequent theory of them, we find the curiously cool admission that ‘beside pain and pleasure, the direct passions frequently arise from a natural impulse or instinct, which is perfectly unaccountable. Of this kind is the desire of punishment to our enemies, and of happiness to our friends; hunger and lust, and a few other bodily appetites. These passions, properly speaking, produce good and evil, and proceed not from them like the other affections.’ [1] In this casual way appears the recognition of that difference of the desire for imagined pleasure from appetite proper on the one side, and on the other from desire determined by reason, which it is the point of Hume’s system to ignore. The question is, how many of the pleasures in which he finds the springs of human conduct are other than products of a desire which is not itself moved by pleasure, or emotions excited by objects which reason constitutes.
[1] P. 215. [Book II., part III., sec. IX.] The passage in the ‘Dissertation on the Passions’ (Vol. IV., ‘Dissertation on the Passions,’ sub init.), which corresponds to the one here quoted, throws light on the relation in which Hume’s later redaction of his theory stands to the earlier, as occasionally disguising, but never removing, its inconsistencies. ‘Some objects, by being naturally conformable or contrary to passion, excite an agreeable or painful sensation, and are thence calledgoodorevil. The punishment of an adversary, by gratifying revenge, is good: the sickness of a companion, by affecting friendship, is evil.’ Here he avoids the inconsistency of admitting in so many words a ‘desire’ which is not for a pleasure. But the inconsistency really remains. What is the passion, the ‘conformability’ to which of an object in the supposed cases constitutes pleasure? Since it is neither an appetite (such as hunger), nor an emotion (such as pride), it remains that it is a desire, and a desire which, though the ‘gratification’ of it is a pleasure, cannot be a desire for that or any other pleasure.
Desire for objects, as he understands it, excluded by his theory of impressions and ideas.
32. In what sense, we have first to ask, do Hume’s principles justify him in speaking of desirefor an objectat all. ‘The appearance of an object to the senses’ is the same thing as ‘an impression becoming present to the mind,’ [1] and if this is true of impressions of sense it cannot be less true of impressions of reflection. If sense ‘offers not its object as anything distinct from itself,’ neither can desire. Its object, according to Hume, is an idea of a past impression; but this, if we take him at his word, can merely mean that a feeling which, when at its liveliest, was pleasant, has passed into a fainter stage, which, in contrast with the livelier, is pain—the pain of want, which is also a wish for the renewal of the original pleasure. In fact, however, when Hume or anyone else (whether he admit the possibility of desiring an object not previously found pleasant, or no), speaks of desire for an object, he means something different from this. He means either desire for an object that causes pleasure, which is impossible except so far as the original pleasure has been—consciously to the subject feeling it—pleasure caused by an object,i.e., a feeling determined by the conception of a thing under relations to self; or else desire for pleasure as an object,i.e., not merely desire for the revival of some feeling which, having been pleasant as ‘impression,’ survives without being pleasant as ‘idea,’ but desire determined by the consciousness of self as a permanent subject that has been pleased, and is to be pleased again. It is here, then, as in the case of the attempted derivation of space, or of identity and substance, from impressions of sense. In order to give rise to such an impression of reflection as desire for an object is, either the original impression of sense, or the idea of this, must be other than Hume could allow it to be. Either the original impression must be other than a satisfaction of appetite, other than a sight, smell, sound, &c., or the idea must be other than a copy of the impression. One or other must be determined by conceptions not derived from feeling, the correlative conceptions of self and thing. Thus, in order to be able to interpret his primary class of impressions of reflection [2] as desires for objects, or for pleasures as good, Hume has already made the assumption that is needed for the transition to that secondary class of impressions through which he has to account for morality. He has assumed that thought determines feeling, and not merely reproduces it. Even if the materials out of which it constructs the determining object be merely remembered pleasures, the object is no more to be identified with these materials than the living body with its chemical constituents.
[1] See General Introduction, paragraph 208.
[2] See above, sec. 19.
Pride determined by reference to self.
33. In the account of the ‘indirect passions’ the termobjectis no longer applied, as in the account of the direct ones, to the pleasure or pain which excites desire or aversion. It is expressly transferred to the self or other person, to whom the ‘exciting causes’ of pride and love must be severally related. ‘Pride and humility, though directly contrary, have yet the same object,’ viz., self; but since they are contrary, ‘’tis impossible this object can be their cause, or sufficient alone to excite them … We must therefore make a distinction betwixt that idea which excites them, and that to which they direct their view when excited…. The first idea that is presented to the mind is that of the cause or productive principle. This excites the passion connected with it; and that passion, when excited, turns our view to another idea, which is that of self…. The first idea represents thecause, the second theobjectof the passion.’ [1] Again a further distinction must be made ‘in the causes of the passion betwixt thatqualitywhich operates, and thesubjecton which it is placed. A man, for instance, is vain of a beautiful house which belongs to him, or which he has himself built or contrived. Here the object of the passion is himself, and the cause is the beautiful house; which cause again is subdivided into two parts, viz., the quality which operates upon the passion, and the subject in which the quality inheres. The quality is the beauty, and the subject is the house, considered as his property or contrivance.’ [2] It is next found that the operative qualities which produce pride, however various, agree in this, that they produce pleasure—a ‘separate pleasure,’ independent of the resulting pride. In all cases, again, ‘the subjects to which these qualities adhere are either parts of ourselves or something nearly related to us.’ The conclusion is that ‘the cause, which excites the passion, is related to the object which nature has attributed to the passion; the sensation, which the cause separately produces, is related to the sensation of the passion: from this double relation of ideas and impressions the passion is derived.’ [3] The ideas, it will be observed, are severally those of the exciting ‘subject’ (in the illustrative case quoted, the beautiful house) and of the ‘object’ self; the impressions are severally the pleasure immediately caused by the ‘subject’ (in the case given, the pleasure of feeling beauty) and the pleasure of pride. The relation between the ideas may be any of the ‘natural ones’ that regulate association. [4] In the supposed case it is that of cause and effect, since a man’s property ‘produces effects on him and he on it.’ The relation between the impressions must be that of resemblance—this, as we are told by the way (somewhat strangely, if impressions are only stronger ideas), being the only possible relation between impressions—the resemblance of one pleasure to another.
[1] Vol. II., pp. 77 and 78. [Book II., part I., sec. II.]
[2] Ibid., p. 79. [Book II., part I., sec. II.]
[3] Vol. II., pp. 84, 85. [Book II., part I., sec. V.]
[4] Book I., part 1, secs. 4 and 5.
This means that it takes its character from that which is not a possible ‘impression’.
34. Pride, then, is a special sort of pleasure excited by another special sort of pleasure, and the distinction of the two sorts of pleasure from each other depends on the character which each derives from an idea—one from the idea of self, the other from the idea of some ‘quality in a subject,’ which may be the beauty of a picture, or the achievement of an ancestor, or any other quality as unlike these as these are unlike each other, so long as the idea of it is capable of association with the idea of self. Apart from such determination by ideas, the pleasure of pride itself and the pleasure which excites it, on the separateness of which from each other Hume insists, could only be separate in time and degree of liveliness—a separation which might equally obtain between successive feelings of pride. Of neither could anything be said but that it was pleasant—more or less pleasant than the other, before or after it, as the case might be. Is the idea, then, that gives each impression its character, itself an impression grown fainter? It should be so, of course, if Hume’s theory of consciousness is to hold good, either in its general form, or in its application to morals, according to which all actions, those moved by pride among the rest, have pleasure for their ultimate motive; and no doubt he would have said that it was so. The idea of the beauty of a picture, for instance, is the original impression which it ‘makes on the senses’ as more faintly retained by the mind. But is the original impressionmerelyan impression—an impression undetermined by conceptions, and of which, therefore, as it is to the subject of it, nothing can be said, but simply that it is pleasant? This, too, in the particular instance of beauty, Hume seems to hold; [1] but if it is so, the idea of beauty, as determined by reference to the impression, is determined by reference to the indeterminate, and we know no more of the separate pleasure that excites the pleasure of pride, when we are told that its source is an impression of beauty, than we did before. Apart from any other reference, we only know that pride is a pleasure excited by a pleasure which is itself excited by a pleasure grown fainter. Of effect, proximate cause, and ultimate cause, only one and the same thing can be said, viz., that each feels pleasant. Meanwhile in regard to that other relation from which the pleasure of pride, on its part, is supposed to take its character, the same question arises. This pleasure ‘has self for its object.’ Is self, then, an impression stronger or fainter? Can one feeling be said without nonsense to have another feeling for its object? If it can, what specification is gained for a pleasure or pain by reference to an object of which, as a mere feeling, nothing more can be said than that it is a pleasure or pain? If, on the other hand, the idea of self, relation to which makes the feeling of pride what it is, and through it determines action, is not a copy of any impression of sense or reflection—not a copy of any sight or sound, any passion or emotion [2]—how can it be true that the ultimate determination of action in all cases arises from pleasure or pain?
[1] Vol. II., p. 96; IV [Book II., part I., sec. VIII.], ‘Dissertation on the Passions,’ II. 7.
[2] Intr. to Vol. I., paragraph 208.
Hume’s attempt to represent idea of self as derived from impression.
35. From the pressure of such questions as these Hume offers us two main subterfuges. One is furnished by his account of the self, as ‘that succession of related ideas and impressions of which we have an intimate memory and consciousness’ [1]—an account which, to an incurious reader, conveys the notion that ‘self,’ if not exactly an impression, is something in the nature of an impression, while yet it seems to give the required determination to the impression which has this for its ‘object.’ It is evident, however, that its plausibility depends entirely on the qualification of the ‘succession, &c.,’ as that of which we have an ‘intimate consciousness.’ The succession of impressions, simply as such, and in the absence of relation to a single subject, is nothing intelligible at all. Hume, indeed, elsewhere represents it as constituting time, which, as we have previously shown, [2] by itself it could not properly be said to do; but if it could, the characterisation of pleasure as having time for its object would not be much to the purpose. The successive impressions and ideas are further said to be ‘related,’i.e.,naturallyrelated, according to Hume’s sense of the term; but this we have found means no more than that when two feelings have been often felt to be either like each other or ‘contiguous,’ the recurrence of one is apt to be followed by the recurrence in fainter form of the other. This characteristic of the succession brings it no nearer to the intelligible unity which it must have, in order to be an object of which the idea makes the pleasure of pride what it is. The notion of its having such unity is really conveyed by the statement that we have an ‘intimate consciousness’ of it. It is through these words, so to speak, that we read into the definition of self that conception of it which we carry with us, but of which it states the reverse. Now, however difficult it may be to say what this intimate consciousness is, it is clear that it cannot be one of the feelings, stronger or fainter—impressions or ideas—which the first part of the definition tells us form a succession, for this would imply that one of them was at the same time all the rest. Nor yet can it be a compound of them all, for the fact that they are a succession is incompatible with their forming a compound. Here, then, is a consciousness, which is not an impression, and which we can only take to be derived from impressions by supposing these to be what they first become in relation to this consciousness. In saying that we have such a consciousness of the succession of impressions, we say in effect that we are other than the succession. How, then, without contradiction, can our self be said tobethe succession of impressions, &c.—a succession which in the very next word has to be qualified in a way that implies we are other than it? This question, once put, will save us from surprise at finding that in one place, among frequent repetitions of the account of self already given, the ‘succession &c.’ is dropped, and for it substituted ‘the individual personof whose actions and sentiments each of us is intimately conscious.’ [3]
[1] Vol, II., p. 77, &c. [Book II., part I., sec. II.]
[2] Intr. to Vol. I., sec. 261.
[3] Vol. II., p. 84. [Book II., part I., sec. V.]
Another device is to suggest a physiological account of pride.
36. The other way of gaining an apparent determination for the impression, pride, without making it depend on relation to that which is not an impression at all, corresponds to that appeal to the ‘anatomist’ by the suggestion of which, it will be remembered, Hume avoids the troublesome question, how the simple impressions of sense, undetermined by relation, can have that definite character which they must have if they are to serve as the elements of knowledge. The question in that case being really one that concerns the simple impression, as it is for the consciousness of the subject of it, Hume’s answer is in effect a reference to what it is for the physiologist. So in regard to pride; the question being what character it can have, for the conscious subject of it, to distinguish it from any other pleasant feeling, except such as is derived from a conception which is not an impression, Hume is ready on occasion to suggest that it has the distinctive character which for the physiologist it would derive from the nerves organic to it, if such nerves could be traced. ‘We must suppose that nature has given to the organs of the human mind a certain disposition fitted to produce a peculiar impression or emotion, which we call PRIDE: to this emotion she has assigned a certain idea, viz., that of SELF, which it never fails to produce. This contrivance of nature is easily conceived. We have many instances of such a situation of affairs. The nerves of the nose and palate are so disposed, as in certain circumstances to convey such peculiar sensations to the mind; the sensations of lust and hunger always produce in us the idea of those peculiar objects, which are suitable to each appetite. These two circumstances are united in pride. The organs are so disposed as to produce the passion; and the passion, after its production, naturally produces a certain idea.’ [1]
[1] Vol. II., p. 85. [Book II., part I., sec. V.]
Fallacy of this: it does not tell us what pride is to the subject of it.
37. Here, it will be noticed, the doctrine, that the pleasant emotion of pride derives its specific character from relation to the idea of self, is dropped. The emotion we call pride is supposed to be first produced, and then, in virtue of its specific character as pride, toproducethe idea of self. [1] If the idea of self, then, does not give the pleasure its specific character, what does? ‘That disposition fitted to produce it,’ Hume answers, which belongs to the ‘organs of the human mind.’ Now either this is the old story of explaining the soporific qualities of opium by itsvis soporifica, or it means that the distinction of the pleasure of pride from other pleasures, like the distinction of a smell from a taste, is due to a particular kind of nervous irritation that conditions it, and may presumably be ascertained by the physiologist. Whether such a physical condition of pride can be discovered or no, it is not to the purpose to dispute. The point to observe is that, if discovered, it would not afford an answer to the question to which an answer is being sought—to the question, namely, what the emotion of pride is to the conscious subject of it. If it were found to be conditioned by as specific a nervous irritation as the sensations of smell and taste to which Hume assimilates it, it would yet be no more the consciousness of such irritation than is the smell of a rose to the person smelling it. In the one case as in the other, the feeling, as it is to the subject of it, can only be determined by relation to other feelings or other modes of consciousness. It is by such a relation that, according to Hume’s general account of it, pride is determined, but the relation is to the consciousness of an object which, not being any form of feeling, has no proper place in his psychology. Hence in the passage before us he tries to substitute for it a physical determination of the emotion, which for the subject of it is no determination at all; and, having gained an apparent specification for it in this way, to represent as its product that idea of a distinctive object which he had previously treated as necessary to constitute it. Pride produces the idea of self, just as ‘the sensations of hunger and lust always produce in us the idea of those peculiar objects, which are suitable to each appetite.’ Now it is a large assumption in regard to animals other than men, that, because hunger and lust move them to eat and generate, they so move them through the intervention of any ideasof objectswhatever—an assumption which in the absence of language on the part of the animals it is impossible to verify—and one still more questionable, that the ideas of objects which these appetites (if it be so) produce in the animals, except as determined by self-consciousness, are ideas in the same sense as the idea of self. But at any rate, if such feelings produce ideas of peculiar objects, it must be in virtue of the distinctive character which, as feelings, they have for the subjects of them. The withdrawal, however, of determination by the idea of self from the emotion of pride, leaves it with no distinctive character whatever, and therefore with nothing by which we may explain its production of that idea as analogous to the production by hunger, if we admit such to take place, of the ‘idea of the peculiar object suited to it.’
[1] Cf. Vol. IV., ‘Dissertation on the Passions,’ II. 2.
Account of love involves the same difficulties; and a further one as to nature of sympathy.
38. If, in Hume’s account of pride, forpleasure, wherever it occurs, is substitutedpain, it becomes his account of humility. A criticism of one account is equally a criticism of the other; and with him every passion that ‘has self for its object,’ according as it is pleasant or painful, is included under one or other of these designations. In like manner, every passion that has ‘some other thinking being’ for its object, according as it is pleasant or painful, is either love or hatred. To these the key is to be found in the same ‘double relation of impressions and ideas’ by which pride and humility are explained. If beautiful pictures, for instance, belong not to oneself but to another person, they tend to excite not pride but esteem, which is a form of love. The idea of them is ‘naturally related’ to the idea of the person to whom they belong, and they cause a separate pleasure which naturally excites the resembling impression of which this other person is the object. Write ‘other person,’ in short, where before was written ‘self,’ and the account of pride and humility becomes the account of love and hatred. Of this pleasure determined by the idea of another person, or of which such a person ‘is the object,’ Hume gives norationale, and, failing this, it must be taken to imply the same power of determining feeling on the part of a conception not derived from feeling, which we have found to be implied in the pleasure of which self is the object. All his pains and ingenuity in the second part of the book ‘on the Passions,’ are spent on illustrating the ‘double relation of impressions and ideas’—on characterising the separate pleasures which excite the pleasure of love, and showing how the idea of the object of the exciting pleasure is related to the idea of the beloved person. The objection to this part of his theory, which most readily suggests itself to a reader, arises from the essential discrepancy which in many cases seems to lie between the exciting and the excited pleasure. The drinking of fine wine, and the feeling of love, are doubtless ‘resembling impressions,’ so far as each is pleasant, and from the idea of the wine the transition is natural to that of the person who gives it; but is there really anything, it will be asked, in my enjoyment of a rich man’s wine, that tends to make me love him, even in the wide sense of ‘love’ which Hume admits? This objection, it will be found, is so far anticipated by Hume, that in most cases he treats the exciting pleasure as taking its character from sympathy. Thus it is not chiefly the pleasure of ear, sight, and palate, caused by the rich man’s music, and gardens, and wine, that excites our love for him, but the pleasure we experience through sympathy with his pleasure in them. [1] The explanation of love being thus thrown back on sympathy (which had previously served to explain that form of pride which is called ‘love of fame’), we have to ask whether sympathy is any less dependent than we have found pride to be on an originative, as distinct from a merely reproductive, reason.
[1] Vol. II., p. 147. [Book II., part II., sec. V.]
Hume’s account of sympathy.
39. ‘When any affection is infused by sympathy, it is at first known only by its effects, and by those external signs in the countenance and conversation which convey an idea of it.’ By inference from effect to cause, ‘we are convinced of the reality of the passion,’ conceiving it ‘to belong to another person, as we conceive any other matter of fact.’ This idea of another’s affection ‘is presently converted into an impression, and acquires such a degree of force and vivacity as to become the very passion itself, and produce an equal emotion as any original affection.’ The conversion is not difficult to account for when we reflect that ‘all ideas are borrowed from impressions, and that these two kinds of perceptions differ only in the degrees of force and vivacity with which they strike upon the soul…. As this difference may be removed in some measure by a relation between the impressions and ideas’—in the case before us, the relation between the impression of one’s own person and the idea of another’s, by which the vivacity of the former may be conveyed to the latter—‘’tis no wonder an idea of a sentiment or passion may by this means be so enlivened as to become the very sentiment or passion.’ [1]
[1] Vol. II., pp. 111-114. [Book II., part I., sec. IX.]
It implies a self-consciousness not reducible to impressions.
40. Upon this it must be remarked that the inference from the external signs of an affection, according to Hume’s doctrine of inference, can only mean that certain impressions of the other person’s words and gestures call up the ideas of their ‘usual attendants’; which, again, must mean either that they convey the belief in certain exciting circumstances experienced by the other man, and the expectation of certain acts to follow upon his words and gestures; or else that they suggest to the spectator the memory of certain like manifestations on his own part and through these of the emotion which in his own case was their antecedent. Either way, the spectator’s idea of the other person’s affection is in no sense a copy of it, or that affection in a fainter form. If it is an idea of an impressionof reflectionat all, it is of such an impression as experienced by the spectator himself, and determined, as Hume admits, by his consciousness of himself; nor could any conveyance of vivacity to the idea make it other than that impression. How it should become to the spectator consciously at once another’s impression and his own, remains unexplained. Hume only seems to explain it by means of the equivocation lurking in the phrase, ‘idea of another’s affection.’ The reader, not reflecting that, according to the copying theory, so far as the idea is a copy of anythingin the other, it can only be a copy of certain ‘external signs, &c.,’ and so far as it is a copyof an affection, only of an affection experienced by the man who has the idea, thinks of it as being to the spectator the other’s affection minus a certain amount of vivacity—the restoration of which will render it an impression at once his own and the other’s. It can in truth only be so in virtue(a)of an interpretation of words and gestures, as related to a person, which no suggestion by impressions of their usual attendants can account for, and in virtue(b)of there being such a conceived identity, or unity in difference, between the spectator’s own person and the person of the other that the same impression, in being determined by his consciousness of himself, is determined also by his consciousness of the other as an ‘alter ego.’ Thus sympathy, according to Hume’s account of it, so soon as that account is rationalized, is found to involve the determination of pleasure and pain, not merely by self-consciousness, but by a self-consciousness which is also self-identification with another. If self-consciousness cannot in any of its functions be reduced to an impression or succession of impressions, least of all can it in this. On the other hand, if it is only through its constitutive action, its reflection of itself, upon successive impressions of sense that these become the permanent objects which we know, we can understand how by a like action on certain impressions of reflection, certain emotions and desires, it constitutes those objects of interest which we love as ourselves.
Ambiguity in his account of benevolence: It is a desire and therefore has pleasure for its object. What pleasure?
41. Pride, love, and sympathy, then, are the motives which Hume must have granted him, if his moral theory is to march. Sympathy is not only necessary to his explanation of that most important form of pride which is the motive to a man in maintaining a character with his neighbours when ‘nothing is to be gained by it’—nothing, that is, beyond the immediate pleasure it gives—and of all forms of ‘love,’ except those of which the exciting cause lies in the pleasures of beauty and sexual appetite: he finds in it also the ground of benevolence. Where he first treats of benevolence, indeed, this does not appear. Unlike pride and humility, we are told, which ‘are pure emotions of the soul, unattended with any desire, and not immediately exciting us to action, love and hatred are not completed within themselves … Love is always followed by a desire of the happiness of the person beloved, and an aversion to his misery; as hatred produces a desire of the misery, and an aversion to the happiness, of the person hated.’ [1] This actual sequence of ‘benevolence’ and ‘anger’ severally upon love and hatred is due, it appears, to ‘an original constitution of the mind’ which cannot be further accounted for. That benevolence is no essential part of love is clear from the fact that the latter passion ‘may express itself in a hundred ways, and may subsist a considerable time, without our reflecting on the happiness of its object.’ Doubtless, when we do reflect on it, we desire the happiness; but, ‘if nature had so pleased, love might have been unattended with any such desire.’ [2] So far, the view given tallies with what we have already quoted from the summary account of the direct and indirect passions, where the ‘desire of punishment to our enemies and happiness to our friends’ is expressly left outside the general theory of the passions as a ‘natural impulse wholly unaccountable,’ a ‘direct passion’ which yet does not proceed from pleasure.’ With his instinct for consistency, however, Hume could scarcely help seeking to assimilate this alien element to his definition of desire as universally for pleasure; and accordingly, while the above view of benevolence is never in so many words given up, an essentially different one appears a little further on, which by help of the doctrine of sympathy at once makes the connection of benevolence with love more accountable, and brings it under the general definition of desire. ‘Benevolence,’ we are there told, ‘is an original pleasure arising from the pleasure of the person beloved, and a pain proceeding from his pain, from which correspondence of impressions there arises a subsequent desire of his pleasure and aversion to his pain.’ [3]
[1] Vol. II., p. 153. [Book II., part II., sec. VI.]
[2] Vol. II., p. 154. [Book II., part II., sec. VI.]
[3] Vol. II., p. 170. [Book II., part II., sec. IX.] Compare Vol. II., ‘Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals,’ Appendix II.,note3, where ‘general benevolence,’ also called ‘humanity,’ is identified with ‘sympathy.’ ‘Benevolence is naturally divided into two kinds, thegeneraland theparticular. The first is, where we have no friendship, or connection, or esteem for the person, but feel only a general sympathy with him, or a compassion for his pains, and a congratulation with his pleasures,’ &c. &c.
Pleasure of sympathy with the pleasure of another.
42. Now, strictly construed, this passage seems to efface the one clear distinction of benevolence that had been previously insisted on—that it is a desire, namely, as opposed to a pure emotion. If benevolenceisan ‘original pleasure arising from the pleasure of the person beloved,’ it is identical with love, so far as sympathy is an exciting cause of love, instead of being distinguished from it as desire from emotion. We must suppose, however, that the sentence was carelessly put together, and that Hume did not really mean to identify benevolence with the pleasure spoken of in the former part of it (for which his proper term is simply sympathy), but with the desire for that pleasure, spoken of in the latter part. In that case we find that benevolence forms no exception to the general definition of desire. It is desire for one’s own pleasure, but for a pleasure received through the communication by sympathy of the pleasure of another. In like manner, the sequence of benevolence upon love, instead of being an unaccountable ‘disposition of nature,’ would seem explicable, as merely the ordinary sequence upon a pleasant emotion of a desire for its renewal. Though it be not strictly the pleasant emotion of love, but that of sympathy, for which benevolence is the desire, yet if sympathy is necessary to the excitement of love, it will equally follow that benevolence attends on love. Pleasure sympathised with, we may suppose, first excites the secondary emotion of love, and afterwards, when reflected on, that desire for its continuance or renewal, which is benevolence. That love ‘should express itself in a hundred ways, and subsist a considerable time’ without any consciousness of benevolence, will merely be the natural relation of emotion to desire. When a pleasure is in full enjoyment, it cannot be so reflected on as to excite desire; and thus, if benevolence is desire for that pleasure in the pleasure of another, which is an exciting cause of love, the latter emotion must naturally subsist and express itself for some time before it reaches the stage in which reflection on its cause, and with it benevolent desire, ensues.
All ‘passions’ equally interested or disinterested: Confusion arises from use of ‘passion’ alike for desire and emotion. Of this Hume avails himself in his account of active pity.
43. Thisrationale, however, of the relation between love and benevolence is not explicitly given by Hume himself. He nowhere expressly withdraws the exception, made in favour of benevolence, to the rule that all desire is for pleasure—an exception which, once admitted, undermines his whole system—or tells us in so many words that benevolence is desire for pleasure to oneself in the pleasure of another. In an important note to the Essays, [1] indeed, he distinctly puts benevolence on the same footing with such desires as avarice or ambition. ‘A man is no more interested when he seeks his own glory, than when the happiness of his friend is the object of his wishes; nor is he any more disinterested when he sacrifices his own ease and quiet to public good, than when he labours for the gratification of avarice or ambition.’ … ‘Though the satisfaction of these latter passions gives us enjoyment, yet the prospect of this enjoyment is not the cause of the passion, but, on the contrary, the passion is antecedent to the enjoyment, and without the former the latter could not possibly exist.’ In other words, if ‘passion’ meansdesire—and, as applied toemotion, the designation ‘interested’ or ‘disinterested’ has no meaning—every passion is equally disinterested in the sense of presupposing an ‘enjoyment’ a pleasant emotion, antecedent to that which consists in its satisfaction; but at the same time equally interested in the sense of being a desire for such enjoyment. Whether from a wish to find acceptance, however, or because forms of man’s good-will to man forced themselves on his notice which forbade the consistent development of his theory, Hume is always much more explicit about the disinterestedness of benevolence in the former sense than about its interestedness in the latter. [2] Accordingly he does not avail himself of such an explanation of its relation to love as that above indicated, which by avowedly reducing benevolence to a desire for pleasure, while it simplified his system, might have revolted the ‘common sense’ even of the eighteenth century. He prefers—as his manner is, when he comes upon a question which he cannot face—to fall back on a ‘disposition of nature’ as the ground of the ‘conjunction’ of benevolence with love. There is a form of benevolence, however, which would seem as little explicable by such natural conjunction as by reduction to a desire for sympathetic pleasure. How is it that active good-will is shown towards those whom, according to Hume’s theory of love, it should be impossible to love—towards those with whom intercourse is impossible, or from whom, if intercourse is possible, we can derive no such pleasure as is supposed necessary to excite that pleasant emotion, but rather such pain, in sympathy with their pain, as according to the theory should excite hatred? To this question Hume in effect finds an answer in the simple device of using the same terms, ‘pity’ and ‘compassion,’ alike for the painfulemotionproduced by the spectacle of another’s pain and for ‘desire for the happiness of another and aversion to his misery.’ [3] According to the latter account of it, pity is already ‘the same desire’ as benevolence, though ‘proceeding from a different principle,’ and thus has a resemblance to the love with which benevolence is conjoined—a ‘resemblance not of feeling or sentiment but of tendency or direction.’ [4] Hence, whereas ‘pity’ in the former sense would make us hate those whose pain gives us pain, by understanding it in the latter sense we can explain how it leads us to love them, on the principle that one resembling passion excites another.
[1] ‘Inquiry concerning Human Understanding,’ note to sec. 1. In the editions after the second, this note was omitted.
[2] Attention should be called to a passage at the end of the account of ‘self-love’ in the Essays, where he seems to revert to the view of benevolence as a desire notoriginallyproduced by pleasure, but productive of it, and thus passing into a secondary stage in which it is combined with desire for pleasure. He suggests tentatively that ‘from the original frame of our temper we may feel a desire for another’s happiness or good, which, by means of that affection, becomes our own good, and is afterwards pursued from the combined motives of benevolence and self-enjoyment.’ The passage might have been written by Butler. (Vol. IV., ‘Inquiry concerning Principles of Morals,’ Appendix II.)
[3] Book II., part 2, secs. 7 and 9. Within a few lines of each other will be found the statements(a)that ‘pity is an uneasiness arising from the misery of others,’ and(b)that ‘pity is desire for the happiness of another,’ &c.
[4] ‘Dissertation on the Passions’ (in the Essays), sec. 3, sub-sec. 5.
Explanation of apparent conflict between reason and passion.
44. We are now in a position to review the possible motives of human action according to Hume. Reason, constituting no objects, affords no motives. ‘It is only the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’ [1] To any logical thinker who accepted Locke’s doctrine of reason, as having no other function but to ‘lay in order intermediate ideas,’ this followed of necessity. It is the clearness with which Hume points out that, as it cannot move, so neither can it restrain, action, that in this regard chiefly distinguishes him from Locke. The check to any passion, he points out, can only proceed from some counter-motive, and such a motive reason, ‘having no original influence,’ cannot give. Strictly speaking, then, a passion can only be called unreasonable, as accompanied by some false judgment, which on its part must consist in ‘disagreement of ideas, considered as copies, with those objects which they represent;’ and ‘even then it is not the passion, properly speaking, which is unreasonable, but the judgment.’ It is nothing against reason—not, as Locke had inadvertently said, a wrong judgment—‘to prefer my own acknowledged lesser good to my greater.’ The only unreasonableness would lie in supposing that ‘my own acknowledged lesser good,’ being preferred, could be attained by means that would not really lead to it. Hence ‘we speak not strictly when we talk of the combat of reason and passion.’ They can in truth never oppose each other. The supposition. that they do so arises from a confusion between ‘calm passions’ and reason—a confusion founded on the fact that the former ‘produce little emotion in the mind, while the operation of reason produces none at all.’ [2] Calm passions, undoubtedly, do often conflict with the violent ones and even prevail over them, and thus, as the violent passion causes most uneasiness, it is untrue to say with Locke [3] that it is the most pressing uneasiness which always determines action. The calmness of a passion is not to be confounded with weakness, nor its violence with strength. A desire may be calm either because its object is remote, or because it is customary. In the former case, it is true, the desire is likely to be relatively weak; but in the latter case, the calmer the desire, the greater is likely to be its strength, since the repetition of a desire has the twofold effect, on the one hand of diminishing the ‘sensible emotion’ that accompanies it, on the other hand of ‘bestowing a facility in the performance of the action’ corresponding to the desire, which in turn creates a new inclination or tendency that combines with the original desire. [4]
[1] Vol. II., p. 195. [Book II., part III., sec. III.]
[2] Vol. II., pp. 195, 196. [Book II., part III., sec. III.]
[3] Above, sec. 3.
[4] Vol. II. pp. 198-200. [Book II., part III., sec. IV.] It will be found that here Hume might have stated his case much more succinctly by avoiding the equivocal use of ‘passion’ at once for ‘desire’ and ‘emotion.’ When a ‘passion’ is designated as ‘calm’ or ‘violent,’ ‘passion’ means emotion. When the terms ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ are applied to it, it means ‘desire.’ Since of the strength of any desire there is in truth no test but the resulting action, and habit facilitates action, if we will persist in asking the idle question about the relative strength of desires, we must suppose that the most habitual is the strongest.
A ‘reasonable’ desire means one that excites little emotion:Enumeration of possible motives.
45. The distinction, then, between ‘reasonable’ and ‘unreasonable’ desires—and it is onlydesiresthat can be referred to when will, or the determination to action, is in question—in the only sense in which Hume can admit it, is a distinction not of objects but of our situation in regard to them. The object of desire in every case—whether near or remote, whether either by its novelty or by its contrariety to other passions it excites more or less ‘sensible emotion’—is still ‘good,’i.e.pleasure. The greater the pleasure in prospect, the stronger the desire. [1] The only proper question, then, according to Hume, as to the pleasure which in any particular case is an object of desire will be whether it is(a)an immediate impression of sense, or(b)a pleasure of pride, or(c)one of sympathy. Under the first head, apparently, he would include pleasures incidental to the satisfaction of appetite, and pleasures corresponding to the several senses—not only the smells and tastes we call ‘sweet,’ but the sights and sounds we call ‘beautiful.’ [2] Pleasures of this sort, we must suppose, are theultimate‘exciting causes’ [3] of all those secondary ones, which are distinguished from their ‘exciting causes’ as determined by the ideas either of self or of another thinking person—the pleasures, namely, of pride and sympathy. Sympathetic pleasure, again, will be of two kinds, according as the pleasure in the pleasure of another does or does not excite the further pleasure of love for the other person. If the object desired is none of these pleasures, nor the means to them, it only remains for the follower of Hume to suppose that it is ‘pleasure in general’—the object of ‘self love.’
[1] Cf p. 198. [Book II., part III., sec. IV.] ‘The same good, when near, will cause a violent passion, which, when remote, produces only a calm one.’ The expression, here, is obviously inaccurate. It cannot be thesame goodin Hume’s sense,i.e.equally pleasant in prospect, when remote as when near.
[2] No other account of pleasure in beauty can be extracted from Hume than this—that it is either a ‘primary impression of sense,’ so far co-ordinate with any pleasant taste or smell that but for an accident of language the term ‘beautiful’ might be equally applicable to these, or else a pleasure in that indefinite anticipation of pleasure which is called the contemplation of utility.
[3]Ultimatebecause according to Hume theimmediateexciting cause of a pleasure of pride may be one of love, and vice versa. In that case, however, a more remote ‘exciting cause’ of the exciting pleasure must be found in some impressions of sense, if the doctrine that these are the sole ‘original impressions’ is to be maintained.
If pleasure sole motive, what is the distinction of self-love? Its opposition to disinterested desires, as commonly understood, disappears: it is desire for pleasure in general.
46. Anyone reading the ‘Treatise on Human Nature’ alongside of Shaftesbury or Butler would be surprised to find that while sympathy and benevolence fill a very large place in it, self-love ‘eo nomine’ has a comparatively small one. At first, perhaps, he would please himself with thinking that he had come upon a more ‘genial’ system of morals. The true account of the matter, however, he will find to be that, whereas with Shaftesbury and his followers the notion of self-love was really determined by opposition to those desires for other objects than pleasure, in the existence of which they really believed, however much the current psychology may have embarrassed their belief, on the other hand with Hume’s explicit reduction of all desire to desire for pleasure self-love loses the significance which this opposition gave it, and can have no meaning except as desire for ‘pleasure in general’ in distinction from this or that particular pleasure. Passages from the Essays may be adduced, it is true, where self-love is spoken of under the same opposition under which Shaftesbury and Hutcheson conceived of it, but in these, it will be found, advantage is taken of the ambiguity between ‘emotion’ and ‘desire,’ covered by the term ‘passion.’ That there are sympatheticemotions—pleasures occasioned by the pleasure of others—is, no doubt, as cardinal a point in Hume’s system as that alldesireis for pleasure to self; but between such emotions and self-love there is no co-ordination. No emotion, as he points out, determines action directly, but only by exciting desire; which with him can only mean that the image of the pleasant emotion excites desire for its renewal. In other words, no emotion amounts to volition or will. Self-love, on the other hand, if it means anything, means desire and a possibly strongest desire, or will. It can thus be no more determined by opposition to generous or sympatheticemotionsthan can these by opposition to hunger and thirst. Hume, however, when he insists on the existence of generous ‘passions’ as showing that self-love is not our uniform motive, though he cannot consistently mean more than that desire for ‘pleasure in general,’ or desire for the satisfaction of desire, is not the uniform motive—which might equally be shown (as he admits) by pointing to such self-regarding ‘passions’ as love of fame, or such appetites as hunger—is yet apt, through the reader’s interpretation of ‘generous passions’ asdesiresfor something other than pleasure, to gain credit for recognising a possibility of living for others, in distinction from living for pleasure, which was in truth as completely excluded by his theory as by that of Hobbes. If he himself meant to convey any other distinction between self-love and the generous passions than one which would hold no less between it and every emotion whatever, it was through a fresh intrusion upon him of that notion of benevolence, as a ‘desire not founded on pleasure,’ which was in too direct contradiction to the first principles of his theory to be acquiesced in. [1]
[1] Cf. II. p. 197 [Book II., part III., sec. III.], where, speaking of ‘calm desires,’ he says they ‘are of two kinds; either certain instincts originally implanted in our natures, such as benevolence and resentment, the love of life, and kindness to children; or the general appetite to good and aversion to evil, considered merely as such.’ This seems to imply a twofold distinction of the ‘general appetite to good’(a)from desires for particular pleasures, which are commonly not calm, and(b)from certain desires, which resemble the ‘general appetite’ in being calm but are not for pleasure at all. See above, sec. 31. In that section of the Essays where ‘self-love’ is expressly treated of, there is a still clearer appearance of the doctrine, that there are desires (in that instance called ‘mental passions’) which have not pleasure for their object any more than have such ‘bodily wants’ as hunger and thirst. From these self-love, as desire for pleasure, is distinguished, though, when the pleasure incidental to their satisfaction is discovered and reflected on, it is supposed to combine with them. (Vol. IV. Appendix on Self-love, near the end. See above, sec. 43 and note.)
This amounts, in fact, to a complete withdrawal from Hume’s original position and the adoption of one which is most clearly stated in Hutcheson’s posthumous treatise—the position, namely, that we begin with a multitude of ‘particular’ or ‘violent’ desires, severally ‘terminating upon objects’ which are not pleasures at all, and that, as reason developes, these gradually blend with, or are superseded by, the ‘calm’ desire for pleasure; so that moral growth means the access of conscious pleasure-seeking. This in effect seems to be Butler’s view, and Hutcheson reckons it ‘a lovely representation of human nature,’ though he himself holds that benevolence may exist, not merely as one of the ‘particular desires’ controlled by self-love, but as itself a ‘calm’ and controlling principle, co-ordinate with self-love. (‘System of Moral Philosophy,’ Vol. I. p. 51, &c.)
How Hume gives meaning to this otherwise unmeaning definition: ‘Interest,’ like other motives described, implies determination by reason.
47. Such desire, then, being excluded, what other motive than ‘interest’ remains, by contrast with which the latter may be defined? It has been explained above (§7) that since pleasure as such, or as a feeling, does not admit of generality, ‘pleasure in general’ is an impossible object. When the motive of an action is said to be ‘pleasure in general,’ what is really meant is that the action is determined by the conception of pleasure, or, more properly, of self as a subject to be pleased. Such determination, again, is distinguished by opposition to two other kinds—(a)to that sort of determination which is not by conception, but either by animal want, or by the animalimaginationof pleasure, and(b)to determination by the conception of other objects than pleasure. By an author, however, who expressly excluded the latter sort of determination, and who did not recognise any distinction between the thinking and the animal subject, the motive in question could not thus be defined. Hence the difficulty of extracting from Hume himself any clear and consistent account of that which he variously describes as the ‘general appetite for good, considered merely as such,’ as ‘interest,’ and as ‘self-love.’ To say that he understood by it a desire for pleasure which is yet not a desire for any pleasure in particular, may seem a strange interpretation to put on one who regarded himself as a great liberator from abstractions, but there is no other which his statements, taken together, would justify. This desire for nothing, however, he converts into a desire for something by identifying it on occasion, (1) with any desire for a pleasure of which the attainment is regarded as sufficiently remote to allow of calmness in the desire, and (2) with desire for the means of having all pleasures indifferently at command. It is in one or other of these senses—either as desire for some particular pleasure distinguished only by its calmness, or as desire for power—that he always understands ‘interest’ or ‘self-love,’ except where he gains a more precise meaning for it by the admission of desires, not for pleasure at all, to which it may be opposed. Now taken in the former sense, its difference from the desires for the several pleasures of ‘sense,’ ‘pride,’ and ‘sympathy,’ of which Hume’s account has already been examined, cannot lie in the object, but—as he himself says of the distinction, which he regarded as an equivalent one, between ‘reasonable and unreasonable’ desires—in our situation with regard to it. If then the object of each of these desires, as we have shown to be implied in Hume’s account of them, is one which only reason, as self-consciousness, can constitute, it cannot be less so when the desire is calm enough to be called self-love. Still more plainly is the desire in question determined by reason—by the conception of self as a permanent susceptibility of pleasure—if it is understood to be desire for power.
Thus Hume, having degraded morality for the sake of consistency, after all is not consistent.
48. Having now before us a complete view of the possible motives to human action which Hume admits, we find that while he has carried to its furthest limit, and with the least verbal inconsistency possible, the effort to make thought deny its own originativeness in action, he has yet not succeeded. He has made abstraction of everything in the objects of human interest but their relation to our nervous irritability—he has left nothing of the beautiful in nature or art but that which it has in common with a sweetmeat, nothing of that which is lovely and of good report to the saint or statesman but what they share with the dandy or diner-out—yet he cannot present even this poor residuum of an object, by which all action is to be explained, except under the character it derives from the thinking soul, which looks before and after, and determines everything by relation to itself. Thus if, as he says, the distinction between reasonable and unreasonable desires does not lie in the object, this will not be because reason has never anything to do with the constitution of the object, but because it has always so much to do with it as renders selfishness—the self-conscious pursuit of pleasure—possible. Sensuality then will have been vindicated, the distinction between the ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ modes of life will have been erased, and after all the theoretic consistency—for the sake of which, and not, of course, to gratify any sinister interest, Hume made his philosophic venture—will not have been attained. Man will still not be ultimately passive, nor human action natural. Reason may be the ‘slave of the passions,’ but it will be a self-imposed subjection.
If all good is pleasure, what ismoralgood? Ambiguity in Locke’s view.
49. We have still, however, to explain how Hume himself completes the assimilation of the moral to the natural; how, on the supposition that the ‘good’ can only mean the ‘pleasant,’ he accounts for the apparent distinction between moral and other good, for the intrusion of the ‘ought and ought not’ of ethical propositions upon the ‘is and is not’ of truth concerning nature. [1] Here again he is faithful to hisrôleas the expander and expurgator of Locke. With Locke, it will be remembered, the distinction ofmoralgood lay in the channel through which the pleasure, that constitutes it, is derived. It was pleasure accruing through the intervention of law, as opposed to the operation of nature: and from the pleasure thus accruing the term ‘morally good’ was transferred to the act which, as ‘conformable to some law,’ occasions it. [2] This view Hume retains, merely remedying Locke’s omissions and inconsistencies. Locke, as we saw, not only neglected to derive the existence of the laws, whose intervention he counted necessary to constitute the morally good, from the operation of that desire for pleasure which he pronounced the only motive of man; in speaking of moral goodness as consisting in conformity to law, he might, if taken at his word, be held to admit something quite different from pleasure alike as the standard and the motive of morality. Hume then had, in the first place, to account for the laws in question, and so account for them as to remove that absolute opposition between them and the operation of nature which Locke had taken for granted; secondly, to exhibit that conformity to law, in which the moral goodness of an act was held to consist, as itself a mode of pleasure—pleasure, namely, to the contemplator of the act; and thirdly, to show that not the moral goodness of the act, even thus understood, but pleasure to himself was the motive to the doer of it. [3]
[1] Vol. II, p. 245. [Book III., part I., sec. I.]
[2] Above, secs. 16-18.
[3] Of the three problems here specified, Hume’s treatment of thesecondis discussed in the following secs. 50-54; of thefirstin secs. 55-58; of thethirdin secs. 60 to the end.
Development of it by Clarke, which breaks down for want of true view of reason.
50. It was a necessary incident of this process that Locke’s notion of a Law of God, conformity to which rendered actions ‘in their own nature right and wrong,’ should disappear. The existence of such a law cannot be explained as a result of any desire for pleasure, nor conformity to it as a mode of pleasure. Locke, indeed, tries to bring the goodness, consisting in such conformity, under his general definition by treating it as equivalent to the production of pleasure in another world. This, however, is to seek refuge from the contradictory in the unmeaning. The question—Is it the pleasure it produces, or its conformity to law, that constitutes the goodness of an act?—remains unanswered, while the further one is suggested—What meaning has pleasure except as the pleasure we experience? [1] Between pleasure, then, and a ‘conformity’ irreducible to pleasure, as the moral standard, the reader of Locke had to choose. Clarke, supported by Locke’s occasional assimilation of moral to mathematical truth, had elaborated the notion of conformity. To him an action was ‘in its own nature right’ when it conformed to the ‘reason of things’—i.e.to certain ‘eternal proportions,’ by which God, ‘qui omnia numero, ordine, mensurâ posuit,’ obliges Himself to govern the world, and of which reason in us is ‘the appearance.’ [2] Thus reason, as an eternal ‘agreement or disagreement of ideas,’ was the standard to which action ought to conform, and, as our consciousness of such agreement, at once the judge of and motive to conformity. To this Hume’s reply is in effect the challenge to instance any act, of which the morality consists either in any of those four relations, ‘depending on the nature of the ideas related,’ which he regarded as alone admitting of demonstration, or in any other of those relations (contiguity, identity, and cause and effect) which, as ‘matters of fact,’ can be ‘discovered by the understanding.’ [3] Such a challenge admits of no reply, and no other function but the perception of such relations being allowed to reason or understanding in the school of Locke, it follows that it is not this faculty which either constitutes, or gives the consciousness of, the morally good. Reason excluded, feeling remains. No action, then, can be called ‘right in its own nature,’ if that is taken to imply (as ‘conformity to divine law’ must be), relation to something else than our feeling. It could only be so called with propriety in the sense of exciting some pleasureimmediately, as distinct from an act which may be a condition of the attainment of pleasure, but does not directly convey it.
[1] Above, sec. 14.
[2] Boyle Lectures, Vol. II, prop. 1. secs. 1-4.
[3] Book III. part 1, sec. 1. (Cf. Book I part 3, sec. 1, and Introduction to Vol. I, secs. 283 and ff.) It will be observed that throughout the polemic against Clarke and his congeners Hume writes as if there were a difference between objects of reason and feeling, which he could not consistently admit. He begins by putting the question thus (page 234), ‘whether ‘tis by means of our ideas or impressions we distinguish betwixt vice and virtue:’ but if, as he tells us, ‘the idea is merely the weaker impression, and the impression the stronger idea,’ such a question has no meaning. In like manner he concludes by saying (page 245) that ‘vice and virtue may be compared to sounds, colours, heat and cold, which are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind.’ But, since the whole drift of Book I. is to show that all ‘objective relations’ are such ‘perceptions’ or their succession, this still leaves us without any distinction between science and morality that shall be tenable according to his own doctrine.
With Hume, moral good is pleasure excited in a particular way, viz.: in thespectatorof the ‘good’ act and by the view of its tendency to produce pleasure.
51. So far, however, there is nothing to distinguish the moral act either from any ‘inanimate object,’ which may equally excite immediate pleasure, or from actions which have no character, as virtuous or vicious, at all. Some further limitation, then, must be found for the immediate pleasure which constitutes the goodness called ‘moral,’ and of which praise is the expression. This Hume finds in the exciting object which must be(a)‘considered in general and without reference to our particular interest,’ and(b)an object so ‘related’ (in the sense above [1] explained) to oneself or to another as that the pleasure which it excites shall cause the further pleasure either of pride or love. [2] The precise effect of such limitation he does not explain in detail. A man’s pictures, gardens, and clothes, we have been told, tend to excite pride in himself and love in others. If then we can ‘consider them in general and without reference to our particular interest,’ and in such ‘mere survey’ find pleasure, this pleasure, according to Hume’s showing, will constitute them morally good. [3] He usually takes for granted, however, a further limitation of the pleasure in question, as excited only by ‘actions, sentiments, and characters,’ and thus finds virtue to consist in the ‘satisfaction produced to the spectator of an act or character by the mere view of it.’ [4] Virtues and vices then mean, as Locke well said, the usual likes and dislikes of society. If we choose with him to call that virtue of an act, which really consists in the pleasure experienced by the spectator of it, ‘conformity to the law of their opinion,’ we may do so, provided we do not suppose that there is some other law, which this imperfectly reflects, and that the virtue is something other than the pleasure, but to be inferred from it. ‘We do not infer a character to be virtuous, because it pleases; but in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in effect feel that it is virtuous.’ [5]
[1] Sec. 33.
[2] Vol. II. pp. 247 and 248. [Book III., part I., sec. II.]
[3] Hume treats them as such in Book III. part 3, sec. 5.
[4] Vol. II. p. 251. Cf. p. 225. [Book III., part I., sec. II.; Book II., part III., sec. X.]
[5] Vol. II. p. 247. [Book III., part I., sec. II.]
52. Some further explanation, however, of the ‘particular manner’ of this pleasure was clearly needed in order at once to adjust it to the doctrine previously given of the passions (of which this, as a pleasant emotion, must be one), and to account for our speaking of the actions which excite it—at least of some of them—as actions which weoughtto do. If we revert to the account of the passions, we can have no difficulty in fixing on that of which this peculiar pleasure, excited by the ‘mere survey’ of an action without reference to the spectator’s ‘particular interest,’ must be a mode. It must be a kind of sympathy—pleasure felt by the spectator in the pleasure of another, as distinct from what might be felt in the prospect of pleasure to himself. [1] On the other hand, there seem to be certain discrepancies between pleasure and moral sentiment. We sympathise where we neither approve nor disapprove; and, conversely, we express approbation where it would seem there was no pleasure to sympathise with,e.g., in regard to an act of simple justice, or where the person experiencing it was one with whom we could have no fellow-feeling—an enemy, a stranger, a character in history—or where the experience, being one not of pleasure but of pain (say, that of a martyr at the stake), should excite the reverse of approbation in the spectator, if approbation means pleasure sympathised with. Our sympathies, moreover, are highly variable, but our moral sentiments on the whole constant. How must ‘sympathy’ be qualified, in order that, when we identify moral sentiment with it, these objections may be avoided?
[1] Vol. II. pp. 335-337. [Book III., part III., sec. I.]
Moral sense is thus sympathy with pleasure qualified by consideration of general tendencies.
53. Hume’s answer, in brief, is that the sympathy, which constitutes moral sentiment, is sympathy qualified by the consideration of ‘general tendencies.’ Thus we sympathise with the pleasure arising from any casual action, but the sympathy does not become moral approbation unless the act is regarded as a sign of some quality or character, generally permanently agreeable or useful (sc.and productive of pleasure directly or indirectly) to the agent or others. An act of justice may not be productive of any immediate pleasure with which we can sympathise; nay, taken singly, it may cause pain both in itself and in its results, as when a judge ‘takes from the poor to give to the rich, or bestows on the dissolute the labour of the industrious; ‘but we sympathise with the general satisfaction resulting to society from ‘the whole scheme of law and justice,’ to which the act in question belongs, and approve it accordingly. The constancy which leads to a dungeon is a painful commodity to its possessor, but sympathy with his pain need not incapacitate a spectator for that other sympathy with the general pleasure caused by such a character to others, which constitutes it virtuous. Again, though remote situation or the state of one’s temper may at any time modify or suppress sympathy with the pleasure caused by the good qualities of any particular person, we may still apply to him terms expressive of our liking. ‘External beauty is determined merely by pleasure; and ‘tis evident a beautiful countenance cannot give so much pleasure, when seen at a distance of twenty paces, as when it is brought nearer to us. We say not, however, that it appears to us less beautiful; because we know what effect it will have in such a position, and by that reflection we correct its momentary appearance.’ As with the beautiful, so with the morally good. ‘In order to correct the continual contradictions’ in our judgment of it, that would arise from changes in personal temper or situation, ‘we fix on some steady and general points of view, and always in our thoughts place ourselves in them, whatever may be our present situation.’ Such a point of view is furnished by the consideration of ‘the interest or pleasure of the person himself whose character is examined, and of the persons who have a connection with him,’ as distinct from the spectator’s own. The imagination in time learns to ‘adhere to these general views, and distinguishes the feelings they produce from those which arise from our particular and momentary situation.’ Thus a certain constancy is introduced into sentiments of blame and praise, and the variations, to which they continue subject, do not appear in language, which ‘experience teaches us to correct, even where our sentiments are more stubborn and unalterable.’ [1]
[1] Book III. Vol. II. part 3, sec. 1. Specially pp. 339, 342, 346, 349.