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 called _good_ or _evil_. 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 desire _for an object_ at 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 term _object_ is 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 the _cause_, the second the _object_ of the passion.’ [1] Again a further distinction must be made ‘in the causes of the passion betwixt that _quality_ which operates, and the _subject_ on 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 impression _merely_ an 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._, _naturally_ related, 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 to _be_ the 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 person_ of 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, to _produce_ the 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 its _vis 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 ideas _of objects_ whatever--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, for _pleasure_, wherever it occurs, is substituted _pain_, 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 no _rationale_, 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 impression _of reflection_ at 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 anything _in the other_, it can only be a copy of certain ‘external signs, &c.,’ and so far as it is a copy _of 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., _note_ 3, where ‘general benevolence,’ also called ‘humanity,’ is identified with ‘sympathy.’ ‘Benevolence is naturally divided into two kinds, the _general_ and the _particular_. 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 benevolence _is_ an ‘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. This _rationale_, 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’ means _desire_--and, as applied to _emotion_, 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 painful _emotion_ produced 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 not _originally_ produced 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 only _desires_ that 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 the _ultimate_ ‘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 the _same good_ in 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] _Ultimate_ because according to Hume the _immediate_ exciting 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 sympathetic _emotions_--pleasures occasioned by the pleasure of others--is, no doubt, as cardinal a point in Hume’s system as that all _desire_ is 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 sympathetic _emotions_ than 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’ as _desires_ for 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 animal _imagination_ of 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 is _moral_ good? 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 his _rôle_ as the expander and expurgator of Locke. With Locke, it will be remembered, the distinction of _moral_ good 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 the _second_ is discussed in the following secs. 50-54; of the _first_ in secs. 55-58; of the _third_ in 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 pleasure _immediately_, 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 the _spectator_ of 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 we _ought_ to 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.

In order to account for the facts it has to become sympathy with unfelt feelings.

54. It thus appears that though the virtue of an act means the pleasure which it causes to a spectator, and though this again arises from sympathy with imagined pleasure of the doer or others, yet the former may be a pleasure which no particular spectator at any given time does actually feel--he need only know that under other conditions on his part he would feel it--and the latter pleasure may be one either not felt at all by any existing person, or only felt as the opposite of the uneasiness with which society witnesses a departure from its general rules. Of the essential distinction between a feeling of pleasure or pain and a knowledge of the conditions under which a pleasure or pain is generally felt, Hume shows no suspicion; nor, while he admits that without substitution of the knowledge for the feeling there could be no general standard of praise or blame, does he ask himself what the quest for such a standard implies. As little does he trouble himself to explain how there can be such sympathy with an unfelt feeling--with a pleasure which no one actually feels but which is possible for posterity--as will explain our approval of the virtue which defies the world, and which is only assumed, for the credit of a theory, to bring pleasure to its possessor, because it certainly brings pleasure to no one else. For the ‘artificial’ virtue, however, of acts done in conformity with the ‘general scheme of justice,’ or other social conventions, he accounts at length in part II. of his Second Book--that entitled ‘Of Justice and Injustice.’

Can the distinction between the ‘moral’ and ‘natural’ be maintained by Hume? What is ‘artificial virtue’?

55. To a generation which has sufficiently freed itself from all ‘mystical’ views of law--which is aware that ‘natural right,’ if it means a right that existed in a ‘state of nature,’ is a contradiction in terms; that, since contracts could not be made, or property exist apart from social convention, any question about a primitive obligation to respect them is unmeaning--the negative side of this part of the treatise can have little interest. That all rights and obligations are in some sense ‘artificial,’ we are as much agreed as that without experience there can be no knowledge. The question is, how the artifice, which constitutes them, is to be understood, and what are its conditions. If we ask what Hume understood by it, we can get no other answer than that the artificial is the opposite of the natural. If we go on to ask for the meaning of the natural, we only learn that we must distinguish the senses in which it is opposed to the miraculous and to the unusual from that in which it is opposed to the artificial, [1] but not what the latter sense is. The truth is that, if the first book of Hume’s treatise has fulfilled its purpose, the only conception of the natural, which can give meaning to the doctrine that the obligation to observe contracts and respect property is artificial, must disappear. There are, we shall find, two different negations which in different contexts this doctrine conveys. Sometimes it means that such an obligation did not exist for man in a ‘state of nature,’ _i.e._, as man was to begin with. But in that sense the law of cause and effect, without which there would be no nature at all, is, according to Hume, not natural, for it--not merely our recognition of it, but the law itself--is a habit of imagination, gradually formed. Sometimes it conveys an opposition to Clarke’s doctrine of obligation as constituted by certain ‘eternal relations and proportions,’ which also form the order of nature, and are other than, though regulative of, the succession of our feelings. Nature, however, having been reduced by Hume to the succession of our feelings, the ‘artifice,’ by which he supposes obligations to be formed, cannot be determined by opposition to it, unless the operation of motives, which explains the artifice, is something else than a succession of feelings. But that it is nothing else is just what it is one great object of the moral part of his treatise to show.

[1] Book II. part 1, sec. 2.

No ground for such distinction in relation between motive and act.

56. He is nowhere more happy than in exposing the fallacies by which ‘liberty of indifferency’--the liberty supposed to consist in a possibility of unmotived action--was defended. [1] Every act, he shows, is determined by a strongest motive, and the relation between motive and act is no other than that between any cause and effect in nature. In one case, as in the other, ‘necessity’ lies not in an ‘esse’ but in a ‘percipi.’ It is the ‘determination of the thought of any intelligent being, who considers ‘an act or event,’ to infer its existence from some preceding objects;’ [2] and such determination is a habit formed by, and having a strength proportionate to, the frequency with which certain phenomena--actions or events--have followed certain others. The weakness in this part of Hume’s doctrine lies, not in the assumption of an equal uniformity in the sequence of act upon motive with that which obtains in nature, but in his inability consistently to justify the assumption of an absolute uniformity in either case. When there is an apparent irregularity in the consequences of a given motive--when according to one ‘experiment’ action _(a)_ follows upon it, according to another action _(b)_, and so on--although ‘these contrary experiments are entirely equal, we remove not the notion of causes and necessity; but, supposing that the usual contrariety proceeds from the operation of contrary and concealed causes, we conclude that the chance or indifference lies only in our judgment on account of our imperfect knowledge, not in the things themselves, which are in every case equally necessary, though to appearance not equally constant or uniform.’ [3] But we have already seen that, if necessary connection were in truth only a habit arising from the frequency with which certain phenomena follow certain others, the cases of exception to a usual sequence, or in which the balance of chances did not incline one way more than another, could only so far weaken the habit. The explanation of them by the ‘operation of concealed causes’ implies, as he here says, an opposition of real necessity to apparent inconstancy, which, if necessity were such a habit as he says it is, would be impossible. [4] This difficulty, however, applying equally to moral and natural sequences, can constitute no difference between them. It cannot therefore be in the relation between motive and act that the followers of Hume can find any ground for a distinction between the process by which the conventions of society are formed, and that succession of feelings which he calls nature. May he then find it in the character of the motive itself by which the ‘invention’ of justice is to be accounted for? Is this other than a feeling determined by a previous, and determining a sequent, one? Not, we must answer, as Hume himself understood his own account of it, which is as follows:-

[1] Book II. part 3, secs. 1 and 2.

[2] Vol. II. p, 189. [Book II., part III., sec. II.]

[3] Ibid., p. 185. [Book II., part III., sec. I.]

[4] See Introduction to Vol. I. secs. 323 and 336.

Motive to artificial virtues.

57. He will examine, he says, ‘two questions, viz., concerning the manner in which the rules of justice are established by the artifice of men; and concerning the reasons which determine us to attribute to the observance or neglect of these rules a moral beauty and deformity.’ [1] Of the motives which he recognises (§ 45) it is clear that only two--‘benevolence’ and ‘interest’--can be thought of in this connection, and a little reflection suffices to show that benevolence cannot account for the artifice in question. Benevolence with Hume means either sympathy with pleasure--and this (though Hume could forget it on occasion) [2] must be a particular pleasure of some particular person--or desire for the pleasure of such sympathy. Even if a benevolence may be admitted, which is not a desire for pleasure at all but an impulse to please, still this can only be an impulse to please some particular person, and the only effect of thought upon it, which Hume recognises, is not to widen its object but to render it ‘interested.’ [3] ‘There is no such passion in human minds as the love of mankind, merely as such, independent of personal qualities, of services, or of relation to ourself.’ [4] The motive, then, to the institution of rules of justice cannot be found in general benevolence. [5] As little can it be found in private benevolence, for the person to whom I am obliged to be just may be an object of merited hatred. It is true that, ‘though it be rare to meet with one who loves any single person better than himself, yet ‘tis as rare to meet with one in whom all the kind affections, taken together, do not overbalance all the selfish’; but they are affections to his kinsfolk and acquaintance, and the generosity which they prompt will constantly conflict with justice. [6] ‘Interest,’ then, must be the motive we are in quest of. Of the ‘three species of goods which we are possessed of--the satisfaction of our minds, the advantages of our body, and the enjoyment of such possessions as we have acquired by our industry and good fortune’--the last only ‘may be transferred without suffering any loss or alteration; while at the same time there is not sufficient quantity of them to supply every one’s desires and necessities.’ Hence a special instability in their possession. Reflection on the general loss caused by such instability leads to a ‘tacit convention, entered into by all the members of a society, to abstain from each other’s possessions;’ and thereupon ‘immediately arise the ideas of justice and injustice; as also those of property, right, and obligation.’ It is not to be supposed, however, that the ‘convention’ is of the nature of a promise, for all promises presuppose it. ‘It is only a general sense of common interest; which sense all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules;’ and this ‘general sense of common interest,’ it need scarcely be said, is every man’s sense of his own interest, as in fact coinciding with that of his neighbours. In short, ‘’tis only from the selfishness and confined generosity of man, along with the scanty provision nature has made for his wants, that justice derives its origin.’ [7]

[1] Book III. part 2, sec. 2.

[2] Cf. sec. 54.

[3] Cf. secs. 42, 43, and 46.

[4] Vol. II. p. 255. [Book III., part II., sec. I.]

[5] For the sense in which Hume did admit a ‘general benevolence,’ see sec. 41, note.

[6] Vol. II. pp. 256 and 260. [Book III., part II., sec. II.]

[7] Vol. II. pp. 261, 263, 268. [Book III., part II., sec. II.]

How artificial virtues become moral.

58. Thus the origin of rules of justice is explained, but the obligation to observe them so far appears only as ‘interested,’ not as ‘moral.’ In order that it may become ‘moral,’ a pleasure must be generally experienced in the spectacle of their observance, and a pain in that of their breach, apart from reference to any gain or loss likely to arise to the spectator himself from that observance or breach. In accounting for this experience Hume answers the second of the questions, proposed above. ‘To the imposition and observance of these rules, both in general and in every particular instance, men are at first induced only by a regard to interest; and this motive, on the first formation of society, is sufficiently strong and forcible. But when society has become numerous, and has increased to a tribe or nation, this interest is more remote; nor do men so readily perceive that disorder and confusion follow upon each breach of these rules, as in a more narrow and contracted society. But though, in our own actions, we may frequently lose sight of that interest which we have in maintaining order, and may follow a lesser and more present interest, we never fail to observe the prejudice we receive, either mediately or immediately, from the injustice of others.... Nay, when the injustice is so distant from us, as no way to affect our interest, it still displeases us, because we consider it as prejudicial to human society, and pernicious to every one that approaches the person guilty of it. We partake of their uneasiness by _sympathy_; and as everything which gives uneasiness in human actions, upon the general survey, is called vice, and whatever produces satisfaction, in the same manner, denominated virtue, this is the reason why the sense of moral good and evil follows upon justice and injustice. And though this sense, in the present case, be derived only from contemplating the actions of others, yet we fail not to extend it even to our own actions. The _general rule_ reaches beyond those instances from which it arose, while at the same time we naturally _sympathise_ with others in the sentiments they entertain of us.’ [1]

[1] Vol. II. p. 271. [Book III., part II., sec. II.]

Interest and sympathy account for all obligations civil and moral.

59. To this account of the process by which rules of justice have not only come into being, but come to bind our ‘conscience’ as they do, the modern critic will be prompt to object that it is still affected by the ‘unhistorical’ delusions of the systems against which it was directed. In expression, at any rate, it bears the marks of descent from Hobbes, and, if read without due allowance, might convey the notion that society first existed without any sort of justice, and that afterwards its members, finding universal war inconvenient, said to themselves, ‘Go to; let us abstain from each other’s goods.’ It would be hard, however, to expect from Hume the full-blown terminology of development. He would probably have been the first to admit that rules of justice, as well as our feelings towards them, were not made but grew; and in his view of the ‘passions’ whose operation this growth exhibits, he does not seriously differ from the ordinary exponents of the ‘natural history’ of ethics. These passions, we have seen, are ‘Interest’ and ‘Sympathy,’ which with Hume only differ from the pleasures and desires we call ‘animal’ as any one of these differs from another--the pleasure of eating, for instance, from that of drinking, or desire for the former pleasure from desire for the latter. Nor do their effects in the regulation of society, and in the growth of ‘artificial’ virtues and vices, differ according to his account of them from sentiments which, because they ‘occur to us whether we will or no,’ he reckons purely natural, save in respect of the further extent to which the modifying influence of imagination--itself reacted on by language--must have been carried in order to their existence; and since this in his view is a merely ‘natural’ influence, there can only be a relative difference between the ‘artificiality’ of its more complex, and the ‘naturalness’ of its simpler, products. Locke’s opposition, then, of ‘moral’ to other good, on the ground that other than natural instrumentality is implied in its attainment, will not hold even in regard to that good which, it is admitted, would not be what it is, _i.e._, not a pleasure, but for the intervention of civil law.

What is meant by an action which _ought_ to be done.

60. The doctrine, which we have now traversed, of ‘interested’ and ‘moral’ obligation, implicitly answers the question as to the origin and significance of the ethical copula ‘ought.’ It originally expresses, we must suppose, obligation by positive law, or rather by that authoritative custom in which (as Hume would probably have been ready to admit) the ‘general sense of common interest’ first embodies itself. In this primitive meaning it already implies an opposition between the ‘interest which each man has in maintaining order’ and his ‘lesser and more present interests.’ Its meaning will be modified in proportion as the direct interest in maintaining order is reinforced or superseded by sympathy with the general uneasiness which any departure from the rules of justice causes. And as this uneasiness is not confined to cases where the law is directly or in the letter violated, the judgment, that an act _ought_ to be done, not only need not imply a belief that the person, so judging, will himself gain anything by its being done or lose anything by its omission; it need not imply that any positive law requires it. Whether it is applicable to every act ‘causing pleasure on the mere survey’--whether the range of ‘imperfect obligation’ is as wide as that of moral sentiment--Hume does not make clear. That every action representing a quality ‘fitted to give immediate pleasure to its possessor’ should be virtuous--as according to Hume’s account of the exciting cause of moral sentiment it must be--seems strange enough, but it would be stranger that we should judge of it as an act which _ought_ to be done. It is less difficult, for instance, to suppose that it is virtuous to be witty, than that one ought to be so. Perhaps it would be open to a disciple of Hume to hold that as, according to his master’s showing, an opposition between permanent and present interest is implied in the judgment of obligation as at first formed, so it is when the pleasure to be produced by an act, which gratifies moral sense, is remote rather than near, and a pleasure to others rather than to the doer, that the term ‘ought’ is appropriate to it.

Sense of morality no motive: When it seems so the motive is really pride.

61. But though Hume leaves some doubt on this point, he leaves none in regard to the sense in which alone any one can be said to do an action _because he ought_. This must mean that he does it to avoid either a legal penalty or that pain of shame which would arise upon the communication through sympathy of such uneasiness as a contrary act would excite in others upon the survey. So far from its being true that an act, in order to be thoroughly virtuous, must be done for virtue’s sake, ‘no action can be virtuous or morally good unless there is some motive to produce it, distinct from the sense of its morality.’ [1] An act is virtuous on account of the pleasure which supervenes when it is contemplated as proceeding from a motive fitted to produce pleasure to the agent or to others. The presence of this motive, then, being the antecedent condition of the act’s being regarded as virtuous, the motive cannot itself have been a regard to the virtue. It may be replied, indeed, that though this shows ‘regard to virtue’ or ‘sense of morality’ to be not the primary or only virtuous motive, it does not follow that it cannot be a motive at all. An action cannot be prompted for the first time by desire for a pleasure which can only be felt as a consequence of the action having been done, but it may be repeated, after experience of this pleasure, from desire for its renewal. In like manner, since with Hume the ‘sense of morality’ is not a desire at all but an emotion, and an emotion which cannot be felt till an act of a certain kind has been done, it cannot be the original motive to such an action; but why may not desire for so pleasant an emotion, when once it has been experienced, lead to a repetition of the act? The answer to this question is that the pleasure of moral sentiment, as Hume thinks of it, is essentially a pleasure experienced by a spectator of an act who is other than the doer of it. If the doer and spectator were regarded as one person, there would be no meaning in the rule that the tendency to produce pleasure, which excites the sentiment of approbation, must be a tendency to produce it to the doer himself or others, as distinct from the spectator himself. Thus pleasure, in the specific form in which Hume would call it ‘moral sentiment,’ is not what any one could attain by his own action, and consequently cannot be a motive to action. Transferred by sympathy to the consciousness of the man whose act is approved, ‘moral sentiment’ becomes ‘pride,’ and desire for the pleasure of pride--otherwise called ‘love of fame’--is one of the ‘virtuous’ motives on which Hume dwells most. When an action, however, is done for the sake of any such positive pleasure, he would not allow apparently that the agent does it ‘from a sense of duty’ or ‘because he ought.’ He would confine this description to cases where the object was rather the avoidance of humiliation. ‘I ought’ means ‘it is expected of me.’ ‘When any virtuous motive or principle is common in human nature, a person who feels his heart devoid of that motive may hate himself’ (strictly, according to Hume’s usage of terms, ‘despise himself’) ‘on that account, and may perform the action without the motive from a certain sense of duty, in order to acquire by practice that virtuous principle, or at least to disguise to himself as much as possible his want of it.’ [2]

[1] Vol. II., p. 253. [Book III., part II., sec. I.]

[2] Vol. II., p. 253. [Book III., part II., sec. I.]

Distinction between virtuous and vicious motive does not exist for person moved.

62. What difference, then, we have finally to ask, does Hume leave between one motive and another, which can give any significance to the assertion that an act, to be virtuous, must proceed from a virtuous motive? When a writer has so far distinguished between motive and action as to tell us that the moral value of an action depends on its motive--which is what Hume is on occasion ready to tell us--we naturally suppose that any predicate, which he proceeds to apply to the motive, is meant to represent what it is in relation to the subject of it. It cannot be so, however, when Hume calls a motive virtuous. This predicate, as he explains, refers not to an ‘esse’ but to a ‘percipi;’ which means that it does not represent what the motive is to the person whom it moves, but a pleasant feeling excited in the spectator of the act. To the excitement of this feeling it is necessary that the action should not merely from some temporary combination of circumstances produce pleasure for that time and turn, but that the desire, to which the spectator ascribes it, should be one according to his expectation ‘fitted to produce pleasure to the agent or to others.’ In this sense only can Hume consistently mean that virtue in the motive is the condition of virtue in the act, and in this sense the qualification has not much significance for the spectator of the act, and none at all in relation to the doer. It has not much for the spectator, because, according to it, no supposed desire will excite his displeasure and consequently be vicious unless in its general operation it produces a distinct overbalance of pain to the subject of it _and_ to others; [1] and by this test it would be more difficult to show that an unseasonable passion for reforming mankind was _not_ vicious than that moderate lechery was so. It has no significance at all for the person to whom vice or virtue is imputed, because a difference in the results, which others anticipate from any desire that moves him to action, makes no difference in that desire, as he feels and is moved by it. To him, according to Hume, it is simply desire for the pleasure of which the idea is for the time most lively, and, being most lively, cannot but excite the strongest desire. In this--in the character which they severally bear for the subjects of them--the virtuous motive and the vicious are alike. Hume, it is true, allows that the subject of a vicious desire may become conscious through sympathy of the uneasiness which the contemplation of it causes to others, but if this sympathy were strong enough to neutralize the imagination which excites the desire, the desire would not move him to act. That predominance of anticipated pain over pleasure in the effects of a motive, which renders it vicious to the spectator, cannot be transferred to the imagination of the subject of it without making it cease to be his motive because no longer his strongest desire. A vicious motive, in short, would be a contradiction in terms, if that productivity of pain, which belongs to the motive in the imagination of the spectator, belonged to it also in the imagination of the agent.

[1] I write ‘AND to others,’ not ‘OR,’ because according to Hume the production of pleasure to the agent alone is enough to render an action virtuous, if it proceeds from some permanent quality. Thus an action could not be unmistakably vicious unless it tended to produce pain _both_ to the doer and to others. If, though tending to bring pain to others, it had a contrary tendency for the agent himself, there would be nothing to decide whether the viciousness of the former tendency was, or was not, balanced by the virtuousness of the latter.

‘Consciousness of sin’ disappears.

63. Thus the consequence, which we found to be involved in Locke’s doctrine of motives, is virtually admitted by its most logical exponent. Locke’s confusions began when he tried to reconcile his doctrine with the fact of self-condemnation, with the individual’s consciousness of vice as a condition of himself; or, in his own words, to explain how the vicious man could be ‘answerable to himself’ for his vice. Consciousness of vice could only mean consciousness of pleasure wilfully foregone, and since pleasure could not be wilfully foregone, there could be no such consciousness. Hume, as we have seen, cuts the knot by disposing of the consciousness of vice, as a relation in which the individual stands to himself, altogether. A man’s vice is someone else’s displeasure with him, and, if we wish to be precise, we must not speak of self-condemnation or desire for excellence as influencing human conduct, but of aversion from the pain of humiliation and desire for the pleasure of pride--humiliation and pride of that sort of which each man’s sympathy with the feeling of others about him is the condition.

Only respectability remains; and even this not consistently accounted for.

64. That such a doctrine leaves large fields of human experience unexplained, few will now dispute. Wesley, Wordsworth, Fichte, Mazzini, and the German theologians, lie between us and the generation in which, to so healthy a nature as Hume’s, and in so explicit a form, it could be possible. Enthusiasm--religious, political, and poetic--if it has not attained higher forms, has been forced to understand itself better since the time when Shaftesbury’s thin and stilted rhapsody was its most intelligent expression. It is now generally agreed that the saint is not explained by being called a fanatic, that there is a patriotism which is not ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel,’ and that we know no more about the poet, when we have been told that he seeks the beautiful, and that what is beautiful is pleasant, than we did before. This admitted, Hume’s Hedonism needs only to be clearly stated to be found ‘unsatisfactory.’ If it ever tends to find acceptance with serious people, it is through confusion with that hybrid, though beneficent, utilitarianism which finds the moral good in the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’ without reflecting that desire for such an object, not being for a feeling of pleasure to be experienced by the subject of the desire, is with Hume impossible. Understood as he himself understood his doctrine, it is only ‘respectability’--the temper of the man who ‘naturally,’ _i.e._, without definite expectation of ulterior gain, seeks to stand well with his neighbours--that it will explain; and this it can only treat as a fixed quantity. Taking for granted the heroic virtue, for which it cannot account, it still must leave it a mystery how the heroic virtue of an earlier age can become the respectability of a later one. Recent literary fashion has led us perhaps unduly to depreciate respectability, but the avowed insufficiency of a moral theory to explain anything beyond it may fairly entitle us to enquire whether it can consistently explain even that. The reason, as we have sufficiently seen, why Hume’s ethical speculation has such an issue is that he does not recognize the constitutive action of self-conscious thought. Misunderstanding our passivity in experience--unaware that it has no meaning except in relation to an object which thought itself projects, yet too clear-sighted to acquiesce in the vulgar notion of either laws of matter or laws of action, as simply thrust upon us from an unaccountable without--he seeks in the mere abstraction of passivity, of feeling which is a feeling of nothing, the explanation of the natural and moral world. Nature is a sequence of sensations, morality a succession of pleasures and pains. It is under the pressure of this abstraction that he so empties morality of its actual content as to leave only the residuum we have described. Yet to account even for this he has to admit such motives as ‘pride,’ ‘love,’ and ‘interest;’ and each of these, as we have shown, implies that very constitutive action of reason, by ignoring which he compels himself to reduce all morality to that of the average man in his least exalted moments. The formative power of thought, as exhibited in such motives, only differs in respect of the lower degree, to which it has fashioned its matter, from the same power as the source of the ‘desire for excellence,’ of the will autonomous in the service of mankind, of the forever (to us) unfilled ideal of a perfect society. It is because Hume de-rationalizes respectability, that he can find no _rationale_, and therefore no room, for the higher morality. This might warn us that an ‘ideal’ theory of ethics tampers with its only sure foundation when it depreciates respectability; and if it were our business to extract a practical lesson from him, it would be that there is no other genuine ‘enthusiasm of humanity’ than one which has travelled the common highway of reason--the life of the good neighbour and honest citizen--and can never forget that it is still only on a further stage of the same journey. Our business, however, has not been to moralise, but to show that the philosophy based on the abstraction of feeling, in regard to morals no less than to nature, was with Hume played out, and that the next step forward in speculation could only be an effort to re-think the process of nature and human action from its true beginning in thought. If this object has been in any way attained, so that the attention of Englishmen ‘under five-and-twenty’ may be diverted from the anachronistic systems hitherto prevalent among us to the study of Kant and Hegel, an irksome labour will not have been in vain.

T. H. Green.