The deliberate hypocrisy of Regan and Gonerill, of which I spoke, I had explained in the sentence before by a periphrasis to mean their ‘hypocritical pretensions to virtue.’ If I had no right to use the word hastily in this absolute sense, you had still less to confound the meaning of a whole passage. Edmund is indeed ‘a hypocrite to his father; he is a hypocrite to his brother, and to Regan and Gonerill’; but he is not a hypocrite to himself. This is that consummation of hypocrisy of which I spoke, and of which you ought to know something.
I have commenced my observations on Lear, you say, with ‘an acknowledgment remarkable for itsnaivetéand its truth’; the import of which remarkable acknowledgment is, that I find myself incompetent to do justice to this tragedy, by any criticism upon it. This you construe into a ‘determination on my part to write nonsense’; you seem, Sir, to have sat down with a determination to write something worse than nonsense. As a proof of my having fulfilled the promise, (which I hadnotmade,) you cite these words, ‘It is then the best of all Shakespear’s plays, for it is the one in which he wasmost in earnest‘; and add significantly, ‘Macbeth andOthello were merejeux d’esprit, we presume.’ You may presume so, but not from what I have said. You only aim at being a word-catcher, and fail even in that. In like manner, you say, ‘If this means that we sympathise so much with the feelings and sentiments of Hamlet, that we identify ourselves with the character, we have to accuse Mr. Hazlitt of strangely misleading us a few pages back. “The moral ofOthellocomes directly home to the business and bosoms of men; the interest inHamletis moreremoteand reflex.” And yet it is we who are Hamlet.’—Yes, because we sympathise with Hamlet, in the way I have explained, and which you ought to have endeavoured at least to understand, as reflecting and moralising on the general distresses of human life, and not as particularly affected by those which come home to himself, as we see in Othello. You accuse me of stringing words together without meaning, and it is you who cannot connect two ideas together.
You call me ‘a poor cankered creature,’ ‘a trader in sedition,’ ‘a wicked sophist,’ and yet you would have it believed that I am ‘principally distinguished by anindestructiblelove of flowers and odours, and dews and clear waters, and soft airs and sounds and bright skies, and woodland solitudes and moonlight bowers.’[86]I do not understand how you reconcile such ‘welcome and unwelcome things,’ but anything will do to feed your spleen at another’s expence, when it is the person and not the thing you dislike. Thus you complain of my style, that it is at times figurative, at times poetical, at times familiar, not always the same flat dull thing that you would have it. You point out the omission of a line in a quotation from a well-known passage in Shakespear. You do not however think the detection of this omission is a sufficient proof of your sagacity, but you proceed to assign as a motive for it, ‘That I do it to improve the metre,’ which is ridiculous. You say I conjure up objections to Shakespear which nobody ever thought of, in order to answer them. The objection to Romeo and Juliet, which I have answered, was made by the late Mr. Curran, as well as the objection to the want of interest and action in Paradise Lost, which I have answered in another place.—‘Thus he endeavours to convince one class of critics, that the poet’s genius was not confined to the production of stage effect by supernatural means. In another place he expresses his astonishment that Shakespear should be considered as a gloomy writer, who painted nothing but gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire.’ One of these classes of critics which, you say, ‘are phantoms of my own creating,’ comprehends the whole French nation, and the other thegreatest part of the English with Dr. Johnson at their head, who in his Preface, ‘one of the most perfect pieces of criticism since the days of Quintilian’ (and which might have been written in the days of Quintilian just as well as in ours) has neglected to expatiate on Shakespear’s ‘indestructiblelove of flowers and odours, and woodland solitudes and moonlight bowers.’ You know nothing of Shakespear, nor of what is thought about him: you mind only the text of the commentators. With respect to Mr. Wordsworth’s Ode, which I have dragged into my account of Romeo and Juliet, I did not quarrel with the poetical conceit, but with the metaphysical doctrine founded upon it by his school. There is a difference between ‘ends of verse and sayings of philosophers.’ If Shakespear had been a great German transcendental philosopher (either at the first or second hand) his talking of the music of the spheres might have rendered him suspected. You compare my account of Hamlet to the dashing style of a showman: I think the showman’s speech is proper to a show, and mine to Hamlet. You, Sir, have no sympathy in common with Hamlet; nothing to make him seem ever ‘present to your mind’s eye’; no feeling to produce such an hallucination in your mind, nor to make you tolerate it in others. You are an Ultra-Crepidarian critic.
You laugh at my theory, that ‘Filch’s picking of pockets has ceased to be so good a jest as formerly,’ from the degeneracy of the age, that is, from the diminution of the practice, as at variance with the Police Report. Shortly after I had hazarded this piece of conjectural criticism, the Beggar’s Opera was hooted off the stage in America—because they have no Police Report there. I may have been premature in applying this conclusion from a highly advanced state of civilization, or from the degeneracy of the age we live in, to our own country.
What you say of my remarks on the use which Shakespear makes of the principal analogy in Cymbeline, and of contrast in Macbeth is beneath an answer. You should confine yourself to mere matters of verbal criticism. Thus you object to my use of the term ‘logical diagrams’ as unprecedented and barbarous: yet we talk of syllogising in mode and figure, and besides, the word has been made pretty malleable by Mr. Burke. What do you say to his talking of ‘the geometricians and chemists of France, bringing the one from the dry bones of their diagrams, and the other from the soot of their furnaces, dispositions worse than indifferent to common feelings and habitudes.’ Would you call this ‘slip-slop absurdity’? But to talk ofthe dry bones of diagrams, and escape with impunity from the censure of small critics, a man must assert that the king of this country ‘holds his crown in contempt of the choice of the people.’
I am obliged to you for informing me of the real name of the person who wrote the ingenious parallel between Richard the Third and Macbeth.
The article in the last Review on my Lectures on English Poetry, requires a very short notice.—You would gladly retract what you have said, but you dare not. You are a coward to public opinion and to your own. You begin by observing, ‘Mr. Hazlitt seems to have bound himself like Hannibal to wage everlasting war, not indeed against Rome, but against accurate reasoning, just observation, and precise, or even intelligible language.’ This might be true, if the opinion of the Quarterly Review were synonymous with accurate reasoning, just observation, and knowledge of language. ‘We have traced him in his two former predatory excursions on taste and common sense. Had he written on any other subject, we should scarcely have thought of watching his movements.’ You were ‘principally excited to notice’ the Round Table by some political heresies which had crept into it: you ‘condescended to notice’ the Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, ‘to shew how small a portion of talent and literature was necessary to carry on the trade of sedition.’ You have been tempted to watch my movements in the present work to shew how little talent and literature is necessary to write a popular work on poetry. ‘But though his book is dull, his theme is pleasing, and interests in spite of the author. As we read, we forget Mr. Hazlitt, to think of those concerning whom he writes.’ Do you think, Sir, that a higher compliment could come from you?
It would neither be for my credit nor your own, that I should follow you in detail through your abortive attempts to deny me exactly those qualifications which you feel conscious that I possess, or afraid that others will ascribe to me. You are already bankrupt of your word, nor can I be admitted as an evidence in my own case. You say that I am utterly without originality, without a power of illustration, or language to make myself understood!—I shall leave it to the public to judge between us. There is one objection however which you make to me which is singular enough: viz. that I quote Shakespear. I can only answer, that ‘I would not change that vice for your best virtue.’ ‘If a trifling thing is to be told, he will not mention it in common language: he must give it, if possible, in words which the Bard of Avon hassomewhereused. Werethe beauty of the applications conspicuous, we might forget or at least forgive,the deformityproducedby the constant stitching in of these patches‘—[i.e.by the beauty of the applications]. ‘Unfortunately, however, the phrases thus obtruded upon usseemto be selected, not on account ofany intrinsic beauty, but merely because they arefantastic and unlikewhat would naturally occur to an ordinary writer.’ Certainly, Sir, your style is very different from Shakespear’s. I observe in your notes to the Baviad and Mæviad, you diversify your matter by frequently quoting Greek.—Now it appears to me that these quotations of your’s add to the wit only by varying the type. If these learned patches ‘plagued the Cruscas and Lauras,’ my quotations have given other people ‘the horrors’!
You quote my definition of poetry, and say that it is not a definition of anything, because it is completely unintelligible. To prove this, you take one word which occurs in it, and is no way important, the wordsympathy, which you tell us has two significations, one anatomical, and the other moral; and poetry, according to you, ‘has no skill in surgery or ethics.’ I do not think this shews a want of clearness in my definition, but a want of good faith or understanding in you.
You say that I get at a number of extravagant conclusions ‘by means sufficiently simple and common. He employs the term poetry in three distinct meanings, and his legerdemain consists in substituting one of these for the other. Sometimes it is the general appellation of a certain class of compositions, as when he says that poetry is graver than history. Secondly, it denotes the talent by which these compositions are produced; and it is in this sense that he calls poetry that fine particle within us, which produces in our being rarefaction, expansion, elevation and purification.’ [This is Mr. Gifford’s academic style, not mine.] ‘Thirdly, it denotes the subjects of which these compositions treat. It is in this meaning that he uses the term, when he says that all that is worth remembering in life is the poetry of it; that fear is poetry, that hope is poetry, that love is poetry; and in the very same sense he might assert that fear is sculpture and painting and music; that the crimes of Verres are the eloquence of Cicero, and the poetry of Milton the criticism of Mr. Hazlitt.’ It is true I have used the word poetry in the three senses above imputed to me, and I have done so, because the word has these threedistinctmeanings in the English language, that is, it signifies the composition produced, the state of mind or faculty producing it, and, in certain cases, the subject-matter proper to call forth that state of mind. Your objection amounts to this, that in reasoning on a difficult question I write common English, and this is the whole secret of my extravagance and obscurity.—Do you mean that the distinguishing between the compositions of poetry, the talent for poetry, or the subject-matter of poetry, would have told us whatpoetryis? This is what you would say, or you have no meaning at all. I have expressly treated the subject according to this very division, and I have endeavoured to define that common somethingwhich belongs to these several views of it, and determines us in the application of the same common name, viz. an unusual vividness in external objects or in our immediate impressions, exciting a movement of imagination in the mind, and leading by natural association orsympathyto harmony of sound and the modulation of verse in expressing it. This is what you, Sir, cannot understand. I could not ‘assert in the same sense that fear is sculpture and painting, etc.’ because this would be an abuse of the English language: we talk of thepoetry of painting, etc. which could not be, if poetry was confined to the technical sense of ‘lines in ten syllables.’ The crimes of Verres, I also grant, were not the same thing as the eloquence of Cicero, though I suspect you confound the crimes of revolutionary France with Mr. Pitt’s speeches; and as to Milton’s poetry and my criticisms, there is almost as much difference between them as between Milton’s poetry and your verses. You say, ‘the principal subjects of which poetry treats, are the passions and affections of mankind; we are all under the influence of our passions and affections, that is, in Mr. Hazlitt’s new language, we all act on the principles of poetry, and are in truth all poets. We all exert our muscles and limbs, therefore we are anatomists and surgeons; we have teeth which we employ in chewing, therefore we are dentists,’ etc. Not at all; we are all poets, inasmuch as we are under the influence of the passions and imagination, that is, as we have certain common feelings, and undergo the same process of mind with the poet, who only expresses in a particular manner what he and all feel alike; but in exerting our muscles, we do not dissect them; in chewing with our teeth, we do not perform the part of dentists, etc. There is nothing parallel in the two cases. ‘You anticipate,’ you say, ‘these brilliant conclusions for me’; and do not perceive the difference between the extension of a logical principle, and an abuse of common language.—You proceed, ‘As another specimen of his definitions, we may take the following. “Poetry does not define the limits of sense, nor analyse the distinctions of the understanding, but signifies the excess of the imagination beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or feeling.” Poetry was at the beginning of the book asserted to bean impression; it is nowthe excess of the imagination beyond an impression; what this excess is we cannot tell, but at least it must be something very unlike an impression.’ Poetry at the beginning of the book was asserted to be not simply an impression, ‘but an impressionby its vividness exciting an involuntary movement of the imagination: now, you say it isthe excess of the imagination beyond an impression; and you bring this as a proof of a contradiction in terms. An impression, by its vividness exciting amovement of the imagination, you discover, must be something very unlike an impression, and as to the imagination itself, you cannot tell what it is; it is an unknown power in your poetical creed. What is most extraordinary is, that you had quoted the very passage which you here represent as a total contradiction to the latter, only two pages before. What, Sir, do you think of your readers? What must they think of you!—‘Though thetotal want of meaning,’ you add, ‘is the weightiest objection to such writing, yetthe abusewhich it involves ofparticular words and phrases’ (in addition to a total want of meaning) ‘is very remarkable,’ (it must be so,) ‘and will not be overlooked by those who are aware of the inseparable connexion between justness of thought and precision of language.’ (You are not aware that there is no precise measure of thought or expression.) ‘What, in strict reasoning, can be meant by the impression of a feeling?’ (The impression which it makes on the mind, as distinct from some other to which it gives birth, is what I meant.) ‘How canactualandordinarybe used as synonymous?’ (They are not.) ‘Every impression must be an actual impression’; (there is then no such thing as an imaginary impression;) ‘and the use of that epithet annihilates the limitations which Mr. Hazlitt meant’ (in the total want of all meaning,) ‘to guard his proposition.’We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.You say, ‘you have not the faintest conception of what I mean by the heavenly bodies returning on the squares of the distances or on Dr. Chalmers’s Discourses.’ Nor will I tell you what I meant.A knavish speech sleeps in a fool’s ear.‘As to the assertion that there can never be another Jacob’s dream, we see no reason why dreams should be scientific.’ Shakespear says, that dreams ‘denote a foregone conclusion.’ You quote what I say of Swift, and misrepresent it. ‘Mr. Hazlitt’s doctrine, therefore, is, that the inability to become mad, is very likely to drive a man mad.’ My doctrine is, that the inability to get rid of a favourite idea, when constantly thwarted, or of the impression of any object, however painful, merely because it is true, is likely to drive a man mad. It is this tenaciousness on a particular point that almost always destroys the general coherence of the understanding. I do not say that the inability to get rid of the distinction between right and wrong continued in Swift’s mind after he was mad—I say it contributed to drive him mad. I mean that a sense of great injustice often produces madness in individual cases, and that a strong sense of general injustice, and an abstracted view of human nature such as it is, compared with what it ought to be, is likely to produce the same effect in a mind like that of the author of Gulliver’s Travels. Do you understand yet? You do not go intomy general character of Swift, which might have drawn you into something of a wider field of speculation; and you pick out a straggling sentence or two to cavil at in my account of Pope, of Chaucer, of Milton, and Shakespear, on which you are glad to discharge the gall that has been accumulating in your mind for several pages. If you think by this means, to put me or the public out of conceit with my writings, you have mistaken the matter entirely. You can only put down my arguments by meeting them fairly, or my style, by writing better than you do.
‘We occasionally,’ you proceed, ‘discover a faint semblance of connected thinking in Mr. Hazlitt’s pages; but wherever this is the case, his reasoning is for the most part incorrect.’ This is a curious inference. ‘This faint semblance of connected thinking,’ is, it appears, when I maintain some opinion, which is ‘a sprout from some popular doctrine’; but if I push it a little farther than you were aware of, my reasoning becomes incorrect. Thus it has been a popular doctrine with some critics, (which yet you do not admit)—‘That the progress of science is unfavourable to the culture of the imagination. It is no doubt true, that the individual who devotes his labour to the investigation of abstract truth, must acquire habits of thought very different from those which the exercise of the fancy demands.’ You add in italics, ‘the cause lies in the exclusive appropriation of his time to reasoning, and not in the logical accuracy with which he reasons.’ Whenever I have any discovery to communicate, which I think you cannot comprehend, I will in future put it in italics, to make it equally profound and clear. It appears by you, that the incompatibility between the successful pursuit of different studies does not arise from anything incompatible in the studies themselves, but from the time devoted to each. The mind is equally incapacitated from passing from one to the other, whether they are the most opposite or the most alike. The dreams of alchemy, and the schemes of astrology, the traditional belief in the doctrine of ghosts and fairies, though made up almost entirely of imagination, self-will, superstition and romance, were not a jot more favourable to the caprices and fanciful exaggerations of poetry, either in the public mind, or in that of individuals, than the modern system which excludes (both by the logical accuracy with which it proceeds, and a constant appeal to demonstrable facts), every alloy of passion, and all exercise of the imagination. You should never put your thoughts in italics. If I were to attempt a character of verbal critics, I should be apt to say, that their habits of mind disqualify them for general reasoning or fair discussion: that they are furious about trifles, because they have nothing else to interest them; that they have no way of givingdignity to their insignificant discoveries, but by treating those who have missed them with contempt; that they are dogmatical and conceited, in proportion as they have little else to guide them in their quaint researches but caprice and accident; that the want of intellectual excitement gives birth to increasing personal irritability, and endless petty altercation. You, Sir, would make all this self-evident, by the help of italics, and say, thatthe cause lies not in anything in the nature of verbal criticism, but the exclusive appropriation of their time to it.
You next run foul of my account of the pleasure derived from tragedy. You are afraid to understand what I say on any subject, and it is not therefore likely you should ever detect what is erroneous in it. I have shewn by a reference to facts, and to the authority of Mr. Burke (whom you would rather contradict than believe me) that the objects which are supposed to please only in fiction, please in reality; that ‘if there were known to be a public execution of some state criminal in the next street, the theatre would soon be empty’—that therefore the pleasure derived from tragedy is not anything peculiar to it, as poetry or fiction; but has its ground in the common love of strong excitement. You say, I have misstated the fact, to give a false view of the question, which, according to you, is ‘why that which is painful in itself, pleases in works of fiction.’ I answer, I have shewn that this is not a fair statement of the question, by stating the fact, that what is painful in itself, pleases not the sufferer indeed, but the spectator, in reality as well as in works of fiction. The common proverb proves it—‘What is sport to one, is death to another.’
You observe, that ‘Some lines I have quoted from Chaucer, are very pleasing—
——“Emelie that fayrer was to seneThan is the lilie upon his stalke grene,And fresher than the May with floures newe:For with the rose-colour strove hire hewe;I n’ot which was the finer of hem too.”
——“Emelie that fayrer was to seneThan is the lilie upon his stalke grene,And fresher than the May with floures newe:For with the rose-colour strove hire hewe;I n’ot which was the finer of hem too.”
——“Emelie that fayrer was to seneThan is the lilie upon his stalke grene,And fresher than the May with floures newe:For with the rose-colour strove hire hewe;I n’ot which was the finer of hem too.”
——“Emelie that fayrer was to sene
Than is the lilie upon his stalke grene,
And fresher than the May with floures newe:
For with the rose-colour strove hire hewe;
I n’ot which was the finer of hem too.”
‘But surely the beauty does not lie in the last line, though it is with this that Mr. Hazlitt is chiefly struck. “This scrupulousness” he observes, “about the literal preference, as if some question of matter of fact were at issue, is remarkable.”’
That is, I am not chiefly struck with the beauty of the last line, but with its peculiarity as characteristic of Chaucer. The beauty of the former lines might be in Spenser: the scrupulous exactness of the latter could be found nowhere but in Chaucer. I had said just before, that this poet ‘introduces a sentiment or a simile, as if it weregiven in upon evidence.’ I bring this simile as an instance in point, and you say I have not brought it to prove something else.
You charge me with misrepresenting Longinus, and prove that I have not. The wordἐναγώνιονsignifies not as you are pleased to paraphrase it ‘vehemently energetic,’ but simply ‘full of contests.’ Must the Greek language be new-fangled, to prove that I am ignorant of it?
The only mistake you are able to point out, is a slip of the pen, which you will find to have been corrected long ago in the second edition.—Your pretending to say that Dr. Johnson was an admirer of Milton’s blank verse, is not a slip of the pen—you know he was not. There is as little sincerity in your concluding paragraph. You would ascribe what little appearance of thought there is in my writings to a confusion of images, and what appearance there is of imagination to a gaudy phraseology. If I had neither words nor ideas, I should be a profound philosopher and critic. How fond you are of reducing every one else to your own standard of excellence!
I have done what I promised. You complain of the difficulty of remembering what I write; possibly this Letter will prove an exception. There is a train of thought in your own mind, which will connect the links together: and before you again undertake to run down a writer for no other reason, than that he is of an opposite party to yourself, you will perhaps recollect that your wilful artifices and shallow cunning, though they pass undetected, will hardly screen you from your own contempt, nor, when once exposed, will the gratitude of your employers save you from public scorn.
Your conduct to me is no new thing: it is part of a system which has been regularly followed up for many years. Mr. Coleridge, in his Literary Life, has the following passage to shew the treatment which he and his friends received from your predecessor, the editor of the Anti-Jacobin Review.—‘I subjoin part of a note from the Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin, in which having previously informed the public that I had been dishonoured at Cambridge for preaching Deism, at a time when for my youthful ardour in defence of Christianity I was decried as a bigot by the proselytes of French philosophy, the writer concludes with these words—“Since this time he has left his native country, commenced citizen of the world, left his poor children fatherless, and his wife destitute.Ex hoc discehis friends, Lamb and Southey.” With severest truth,’ continues Mr. Coleridge, ‘it may be asserted that it would not be easy to select two men more exemplary in their domestic affections than those whose names were thus printed at full length, as in the same rank of morals with a denounced infidel and fugitive, who had left his children fatherless, and his wifedestitute!Is it surprising that many good men remained longer than perhaps they otherwise would have done, adverse to a party which encouraged and openly rewarded the authors of such atrocious calumnies?’
With me, I confess, the wonder does not lie there:—all I am surprised at is, that the objects of these atrocious calumnies were ever reconciled to the authors of them and their patrons. Doubtless, they had powerful arts of conversion in their hands, who could with impunity and in triumph take away by atrocious calumnies the characters of all who disdained to be their tools; and rewarded with honours, places, and pensions all those who were. It is in this manner, Sir, that some of my old friends have become your new allies and associates.—They have changed sides, not I; and the proof that I have been true to the original ground of quarrel is, that I have you against me. Your consistency is the undeniable pledge of their tergiversation. The instinct of self-interest and meanness of servility are infallible and safe; it is speculative enthusiasm and disinterested love of public good, that being the highest strain of humanity, are apt to falter, and ‘dying, make a swan-like end.’ This tendency to change was, in the case of our poetical reformists, precipitated by another cause. The spirit of poetry is, as I believe, favourable to liberty and humanity, but not when its aid is most wanted, in encountering the shocks and disappointments of the world. Poetry may be described as having the range of the universe; it traverses the empyrean, and looks down on nature from a higher sphere. When it lights upon the earth, it loses some of its dignity and its use. Its strength is in its wings; its element is the air. Standing on its feet, jostling with the crowd, it is liable to be overthrown, trampled on, and defaced; for its wings are of a dazzling brightness, ‘sky-tinctured,’ and the least soil upon them shews to disadvantage. Sullied, degraded as I have seen it, I shall not here insult over it, but leave it to Time to take out the stains, seeing it is a thing immortal as itself. ‘Being so majestical, I should do it wrong to offer it but the shew of violence.’—The reason why I have not changed my principles with some of the persons here alluded to, is, that I had a natural inveteracy of understanding which did not bend to fortune or circumstances. I was not a poet, but a metaphysician; and I suspect that the conviction of an abstract principle is alone a match for the prejudices of absolute power. The love of truth is the best foundation for the love of liberty. In this sense, I might have repeated—
‘Love is not love that alteration finds:Oh! no, it is an everfixed mark,That looks on tempests and is never shaken.’
‘Love is not love that alteration finds:Oh! no, it is an everfixed mark,That looks on tempests and is never shaken.’
‘Love is not love that alteration finds:Oh! no, it is an everfixed mark,That looks on tempests and is never shaken.’
‘Love is not love that alteration finds:
Oh! no, it is an everfixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.’
Besides, I had another reason. I owed something to truth, for she had done something for me. Early in life I had made (what I thought) a metaphysical discovery; and after that, it was too late to think of retracting. My pride forbad it: my understanding revolted at it. I could not do better than go on as I had begun. I too, worshipped at no unhallowed shrine, and served in no mean presence. I had laid my hand on the ark, and could not turn back! I have been called ‘a writer of third-rate books.’ For myself, there is no work of mine which I should rate so high, except one, which I dare say you never heard of—An Essay on the Principles of Human Action. I do not think the worse of it on that account; nor though you might not be able to understand it, could you attribute this to the gaudiness of the phraseology, nor the want of thought. I will here, Sir, explain the nature of the argument as clearly and in as few words as I can.
The object of that Essay (and I have written this Letter partly to introduce it through you to the notice of the reader) is to leave free play to the social affections, and to the cultivation of the more disinterested and generous principles of our nature, by removing a stumbling-block which has been thrown in their way, and which turns the very idea of virtue or humanity into a fable, viz. the metaphysical doctrine of the innate and necessary selfishness of the human mind. Do you understand so far? The question I propose to examine is not the practical question, how far man is more or less selfish or social in the actual sum-total of his habits and affections, nor the moral or political question, to what degree of perfection he can be advanced still further in the one, or weaned from the other; but my intention is to state and answer the previous question, whether there is, as it has been contended, a total incapacity and physical impossibility in the human mind, of feeling an interest in anything beyond itself, so that both the common feelings of compassion, natural affection, friendship, etc. and the more refined and abstracted ones of the love of justice, of country, or of kind, are, and must be a delusion, believed in only by fools, and turned to their advantage by knaves. This doctrine which has been sedulously and confidently maintained by the French and English metaphysicians of the two last centuries, by Hobbes, Mandeville, Rochefoucault, Helvetius and others, and is a principal corner-stone of what is called the modern philosophy, I think tends to, and has done a great deal of mischief, and I believe I have found out a view of the subject, which gets rid of it unanswerably and for ever, in manner and form following. I conceive, that to establish the doctrine of exclusive and absolute selfishness on a metaphysical basis, that is to say, on the original and impassable distinction of the faculties of the humanmind, it is necessary to make it appear, that there is some peculiar and abstracted principle which gives it an immediate, mechanical, and irresistible interest in whatever relates to itself, and which by the same rule shuts out and is a bar to the very possibility of our feeling not an equal, but any kind or degree of interest whatever, at any moment of our lives, in the history and fate of others. This is so far from being true, that the contrary is demonstrable. Thus, Sir, My self-interest in anything signifies (by the statement) the particular manner in which whatever relates to myself affects me, so as to create an anxiety about it, and be a motive to action. Now the same word,self, is indifferently applied to the whole of my being, past, present, and to come; and it is supposed from the use of language and the habitual association of ideas, that this self isone thingas well as one word, and my interest in it all along the same necessary, identical interest. That a man must love himself as such, seems a self-evident and simple proposition. The idea appears like an absolute truth, and resists every attempt at analysis, like an element in nature. Some persons, who formerly took the pains to read this work, imagined (do not be alarmed, Sir!) that I wanted to argue them out of their own existence, merely because I endeavoured to define the nature and meaning of this word, self; to take in pieces, by metaphysical aid, this fine illusion of the brain and forgery of language, and to shew what there is real, and what false in it. The word denotes, by common consent, three different selves, my past, my present, and my future self. Now it is taken for granted by some, and insisted upon by others, that I must have the same unavoidable interest in all these, because they are all equally myself. But that is impossible; for in truth my personal identity is founded only on my personal consciousness, and that does not extend beyond the present moment.—It must be maintained, on the other side of the question, that my past, my present, and my future self are inseparably linked together, equally identified by an intimate communion of transferable thoughts and feelings in one metaphysical principle of self-interest, before they can be equally myself, the same identical thing, to any purpose of sentiment or for any motive of action. It will easily be seen how far this is the case, and how far it is not. I have a peculiar, exclusive self-interest or sympathy (never mind the word, Sir,) with my present self, by means of sensation (or consciousness), and with my past self, by means of memory, which I have not, and cannot have with the past or present feelings or interests of others; for this reason that these faculties are exclusive, peculiar, and confined to myself. But I have no exclusive, or peculiar, or independent faculty, like sensation or memory, giving me the same absolute,unavoidable, instinctive interest in my own future sensations, and none at all in those of others. This ideal self is then nominally the same, but strictly different; composed of distinct and unequal parts; bound together by laws and principles which have no parity of relation to each other. By shewing how personal identity produces self-interest as far as it goes, we shall see exactly when and how it ceases.—If I touch a burning coal, this gives me a present sensation differing in kind and degree from any impression I can receive from the same sensation being inflicted on another: there is no communication between another’s nerves and my brain producing a correspondent jar and magnetic sympathy of frame. Again, if I have suffered a pain of this sort in time past, this leaves traces in my mind, by my continued identity with myself, or by means of memory, of a kind totally distinct from any conception I can form of the same pain inflicted a year ago (for instance) on another. These two important faculties then give me an appropriate and exclusive interest only in what happens or has happened to myself. So far as the operation of these two faculties goes, I am strictly a selfish being, I am necessarily cut off from all knowledge of or sympathy with the feelings of any one but myself. But if I am to undergo a certain pain at a future time, the next year or the next moment, however near or remote, I have no faculty impressing this feeling intuitively and with mechanical force and certainty on my mind beforehand, as my present or past impressions are stamped upon it by means of sensation and memory. I have no principle of thought or sentiment in the original conformation of my mind, projecting me forward into my future being, giving me a present unavoidable consciousness of it, and removed from all cognisance of what happens to others; I have no faculty identifying my future interests inseparably with my present feelings, and therefore I have no exclusive, mechanical and proper self-interest in them, merely because they are mine: for that which ismine, is that which touches me by secret springs, and in a way in which what relates to others can take no hold of me. The only faculty by which I can anticipate what is to befal myself in future, is the same common and disposable faculty in kind and in mode of operation, by which I can, I do, and must anticipate in degree, and more or less according to circumstances, the feelings and thoughts of others, and take a proportionable interest in them, viz. the Imagination. To suppose that there is a principle of self-interest in the mind, without a faculty of self-interest, is an absurdity and a contradiction. This idea of an abstract, exclusive, metaphysical self-interest in my own being generally, is taken (by a gross and blind prejudice) from the manner in which the faculties of sensation and memory affect me, and appliedto a part of my being, where I have no such interest in myself, because I have no such faculty giving it me. What proves that there is no mechanical sympathy identifying my future with my present being, is, that I am for the most part, indifferent to, ignorant of what is to happen to myself hereafter. There is no presentiment in the case. If the house is about to fall on my head, this occasions no uneasiness to my self-love, unless there are circumstances to alarm my imagination beforehand. To suppose, that besides the ideal or rational interest I have in the event, I have anotherrealmetaphysical interest in it, without object or consciousness, is as if I should say, that I have a particular interest in the past, without remembering it, or in the present without feeling it.—But the future is the only subject of action, that is, of a practical or rational interest at all, either of self-love or benevolence. All voluntary action, that is, all action undertaken with a view to produce a certain event or the contrary, must relate to the future. The primary, essential motive of the volition of anything must be theideaof that thing, and the idea solely. For the thing itself, which is the object of desire and pursuit, is by the supposition a nonentity. It iswilledfor that very reason, that it is supposed not to exist. If it did exist, or had existed, it would be absurd to will it to exist or not to exist; and as a thing which does not exist, but which we will to be or not to be, it is a mere fiction of the mind, and can exert no power over the thoughts, nor influence the will or the affections in any way, except through the imagination. The future, whether as it relates to myself or others, exists only in the mind; and in the mind, not by memory, not by sensation, which are exclusive and selfish faculties, but by the imagination, which is not a limited, narrow faculty, but common, discursive, and social. If my sympathy with others is not a sensible substantial mechanical interest, neither is my self-interest anything but an imaginary and ideal one, I am bound to my future interest only by the same fine links of fancy and reason, which give that of others a hold on my affections. As a voluntary agent, I am necessarily, and in the first instance, that is, in the metaphysical sense of the question, a disinterested one. I could not love myself, if I were not so formed, as to be capable of loving others. I have no solid, material, gross, actual self-interest in my own future welfare, and I therefore can only have the same airy, notional, hypothetical interest in it, which I must have in kind, though not in degree, in the pleasures and pains of others, which I get at the knowledge of and sympathise with in the same way. There is then no exclusive ground of self-interest, incompatible with sympathy, and rendering it a chimera; self-love and sympathy both rest on the same general ground of reason, ofimagination, and of common sense.—It may be said, that my own future interests have a reality beyond the mere idea. So have the interests of others, and the only question is, whether the sympathy, the motive to action, is not equally imaginary in both cases. It may be said, that I shall become my future self, but that is no reason why I should take a particular interest in it till I do. If a pin pricks me in any part of my body, I am instantly apprised of it, and feel an interest in removing it; but my future self does not find any means of apprising me of its sensations, in which I can feel no interest, except from previous apprehension. Lastly, it may be said that I do feel an interest in myself and my future welfare, which I do not, and cannot feel in that of others. This I grant; but that does not prove a metaphysical antecedent self-interest, precluding the possibility of all interest in others, (for the social affections are as much a matter of fact, as the influence of self-love) but a practical self-interest, arising out of habit and circumstances, and more or less consistent with other disinterested and humane feelings, according to habit, opinion, and circumstances. I love myself better than my neighbour, for the same reason (and for no other) that I love my child better than a stranger’s—from having my thoughts more fixed upon its welfare, my time more taken up in providing for it, and from my knowing better by experience, what its wants and wishes are. People have accounted for natural affection as an innate idea, as they have for self-love. According to the metaphysical doctrine of selfishness, my own child or a stranger’s, and every one else, are equally and perfectly indifferent to me, as much as if they were mere machines. As to a paramount universal abstract notion of personal identity, impelling and overruling all my actions, thoughts, feelings, etc. to one sole object, and centre of self-interest, there is no such thing in nature. It requires almost as much pains and discipline, to make us attentive to our own real and permanent happiness, as to that of others. Is it not the constant theme of moralists and divines, that man is the sport of impulse, and the creature of habit? I would ask, whether the convivialist is deterred from indulging in his love of the bottle, by any consideration of the ruin of his health or business? Is the debauchee restrained in the career of his passions, any more by reflecting on the disgrace or probable diseases he is bringing on himself, than on the injury he does to others? It would be as hard a task to make the spendthrift prudent, as the miser generous. Man is governed by his passions, and not by his interest.—The selfish theory is founded on mixing up vulgar prejudices, and scholastic distinctions; and by being insisted on, tends to debase the mind, and not at all promote the cause of truth.
I do not think I should illustrate the foregoing reasoning so well by anything I could add on the subject, as by relating the manner in which it first struck me. I remember I had been reading a speech which Mirabaud (the author of the work, called the System of Nature) has put into the mouth of a supposed infidel at the day of Judgment; and was afterwards led on by some means or other, to consider the question, whether it could properly be said to be an act of virtue in any one to sacrifice his own final happiness to that of any other person, or number of persons, if it were possible for the one ever to be made the price of the other. Suppose it be my own case—that it were in my power to save twenty other persons, by voluntarily consenting to suffer for them, why should I not do a generous thing, and never trouble myself about what might be the consequences to myself thousands of years hence? Now the reason, I thought, why a man should prefer his own future welfare to that of others, was, that he has a necessary, or abstract interest in the one, which he cannot have in the other, and this again is the consequence of his being always the same individual, of his continued identity with himself. The distinction is this, that however insensible I may be to my own interest at any future period, yet when the time comes, I shall feel very differently about it. I shall then judge of it from the actual impression of the object, that is, truly and certainly; and as I shall still be conscious of my past feelings, and shall bitterly repent my own folly and insensibility, I ought, as a rational agent, to be determined now by what I shall then wish I had done, when I shall feel the consequences of my actions most deeply and sensibly. It is this continued consciousness of my own feelings which gives me an immediate interest in whatever relates to my future welfare, and makes me at all times accountable to myself for my own conduct. As therefore this consciousness will be renewed in me after death, if I exist again at all—But stop——As I must be conscious of my past feelings to be myself, and as this conscious being will be myself, how, if that consciousness should be transferred to some other being? How am I to know that I am not imposed upon by a false claim of identity? But that is impossible, because I shall have no other self than that which arises from this very consciousness. Why then, if so, this self may be multiplied in as many different beings as the Deity may think proper to endue with the same consciousness, which, if it can be renewed by an act of omnipotence in any one instance, may clearly be so in a hundred others. Am I to regard all these as equally myself? Am I equally interested in the fate of all? Or if I must fix upon some one of them in particular as my representative and other self, how am I to be determined in my choice?——Here then Isaw an end to my speculations about absolute self-interest and personal identity. I saw plainly, that the consciousness of my own feelings, which is made the foundation of my continued interest in them, could not extend to what had never been, and might never be, that my identity with myself must be confined to the connection between my past and present being, that with respect to my future feelings and interests they could have no communication with, or influence over my present feelings and interests, merely because they were future, that I shall be hereafter affected by the recollection of my former feelings and actions, and my remorse be equally heightened by reflecting on my past folly, and late-earned wisdom, whether I am really the same thinking being, or have only the same consciousness renewed in me; but that to suppose that this remorse can re-act in the reverse order on my present feelings, or create an immediate interest in my future feelings before it exists, is an express contradiction. For, how can this pretended unity of consciousness which is only reflected from the past, which makes me so little acquainted with the future, that I cannot even tell for a moment how long it will be continued, whether it will be entirely interrupted by, or renewed in me after death, and which might be multiplied in I don’t know how many different beings, and prolonged by complicated sufferings, without my being any the wiser for it; how, I ask, can a principle of this sort transfuse my present into my future being, and make me as much a participator in what does not at all affect me as if it were actually impressed upon my senses? I cannot, therefore, have a principle of active self-interest arising out of the connexion between my future and present being, for no such connexion exists or is possible. I am what I am in spite of the future. My feelings, actions, and interests are determined by causes already existing and acting, and cannot depend on anything else, without a complete transposition of the order in which effects follow one another in nature.
In this manner, Sir, may a man learn to distinguish the limits which circumscribe his identity with himself, and the frail tenure on which he holds his fleeting existence. Here indeed, ‘on this bank and shoal of time,’ we give ourselves credit for a few years, and so far make sure of our continued identity—as far as we can see the horizon before us, while the same busy scene exists, while the same objects, passions, and pursuits engross our attention, we seem to grasp the realities of things; they are incorporated with our imagination and take hold of our affections, and we cannot doubt of our interest in them. Farther than this, we do not go with the same confidence; the indistinctness of another state of being takes away its reality, and we lose the abstract idea of self for want of objects to attach it to. Butthe reasoning is the same in both cases. The next year, the next hour, the next moment is but a creation of the mind; in all that we hope or fear, love or hate, in all that is nearest and dearest to us, we but mistake the strength of illusion for certainty, and follow the mimic shews of things and catch at a shadow and live in a waking dream. Everything before us exists in an ideal world. The future is a blank and dreary void, like sleep or death, till the imagination brooding over it with wings outspread, impregnates it with life and motion. The forms and colours it assumes are but the pictures reflected on the eye of fancy, the unreal mockeries of future events. The solid fabric of time and nature moves on, but the future always flies before it. The present moment stands on the brink of nothing. We cannot pass the dread abyss, or make a broad and beaten way over it, or construct a real interest in it, or identify ourselves with what is not, or have a being, sense, and motion, where there are none. Our interest in the future, our identity with it, cannot be substantial; that self which we project before us into it is like a shadow in the water, a bubble of the brain. In becoming the blind and servile drudges of self-interest, we bow down before an idol of our own making, and are spell-bound by a name. Those objects to which we are most attached, make no part of our present sensations or real existence; they are fashioned out of nothing, and rivetted to our self-love by the force of a reasoning imagination, (the privilege of our intellectual nature)—and it is the same faculty that carries us out of ourselves as well as beyond the present moment, that pictures the thoughts, passions and feelings of others to us, and interests us in them, that clothes the whole possible world with a borrowed reality, that breathes into all other forms the breath of life, and endows our sympathies with vital warmth, and diffuses the soul of morality through all the relations and sentiments of our social being.
Such, Sir, is the metaphysical discovery of which I spoke; and which I made many years ago. From that time I felt a certain weight and tightness about my heart taken off, and cheerful and confident thoughts springing up in the place of anxious fears and sad forebodings. The plant I had sown and watered with my tears, grew under my eye; and the air about it was wholesome and pleasant. For this cause it is, that I have gone on little discomposed by other things, by good or adverse fortune, by good or ill report, more hurt by public disappointments than my own, and not thrown into the hot or cold fits of a tertian ague; as the Edinburgh or Quarterly Review damps or raises the opinion of the town in my favour. I have some love of fame, of the fame of a Pascal, a Leibnitz, or aBerkeley (none at all of popularity) and would rather that a single inquirer after truth should pronounce my name, after I am dead, with the same feelings that I have thought of theirs, than be puffed in all the newspapers, and praised in all the reviews, while I am living. I myself have been a thinker; and I cannot but believe that there are and will be others, like me. If the few and scattered sparks of truth, which I have been at so much pains to collect, should still be kept alive in the minds of such persons, and not entirely die with me, I shall be satisfied.