Part 24

So much for the strictly metaphysical part of the empirical doctrine. Let us now consider shortly its application to morals. “Moral principles,” says Mr. Locke (i. 3), “are even further removed than intellectual ones from any title to be innate. Will any one say that those who live by fraud and rapine have innate principles of truth which they allow and assent to?” This question displays in the most vivid manner the extraordinary misconception, not to say wrong-headedness, which possessed the English philosopher as to this whole matter. The nature of innate ideas implies neither universality nor inaccessibility to corruption. A man may be born with an innate sense for music, though all his fellows were as harsh as asses or as deaf as stones. If some men are colour-blind, and others purblind, and others altogether blind, these defects, inadequacies, or total eclipses of vision, do not make light intrinsically a less enjoyable thing, or the healthy eye an organ less marvellously adapted for enjoying it. As with vision so with morals. A whole population given to drunkenness does not make drunkenness a whit less beastly, nor will the general practice of fraud and rapine render the appropriation of my labour by another man’s rapacity a whit more reasonable. Again says Mr. Locke (i. 3, 4), “There cannot any one moral rule be proposed whereof a man may not justly demand a reason,” from which sentence it plainly appears, that, whereas by innate ideas Plato means the necessary expression of reason in a normally developed {282} mind, Locke understands by them some blind unaccountable impulse independent of and extrinsic to reason. The supplying of a reason for any course of action, say for speaking the truth or keeping a man’s word, does not in the least make that course of action less the product of a truthful instinct in nature, or an innate love of truth. Morality is not the less innate because it is reasonable; but inasmuch as it is an essential element in the universal or divine Reason, in virtue of this it is necessarily an inborn quality in the individual or human reason, always of course with the probability of those large exceptions and defections which the very nature of finite existence implies. But we need not detain ourselves with a chapter of such shallow misunderstandings. The immoralities and follies of men, though a thousand times as many as they are, no more affect the inborn necessity and absolute immutability of the moral law, than the false summing of a class of schoolboys affects the relations of number. Errors are as common in arithmetic as in morals; only men hire those special pleaders, their passions, to justify the moral law, while the arithmetical blunder is exposed by the master of accounts. But though Mr. Locke argues against the existence of innate ideas in morals with even more self-gratulation than in his psychological account of the formation of ideas, we are not to suppose that his ethical theory was in any respect identical with that of the modern Utilitarians. He sowed the seed for their doctrine, no doubt, but himself had his garner well stored with grain from a very different source. He was a Christian, and believed in Divine law; he was a theist and believed in God. The modern Utilitarian believes only in a bundle of {283} sensations and in an invariable sequence. By denying innate ideas of morality, Mr. Locke, as his illustrations prove, only meant to proclaim the very obvious fact, that, as all men obviously do not agree in their principles of action, it is reasonable to demand of them some reason for accepting one principle of action rather than another. No man can object to such a reasonable demand. But this does not prevent him in another place (ii. 33. 11), from talking, as no modern Utilitarian would, of “the unchangeable rule of right and wrong which the law of God hath established.” This method of speaking, common to Locke I believe with many of the most solid thinkers of his time, would lead me to class his ethical doctrine under the rubric of what might be called THEOCRATIC INSTITUTIONALISM; that is to say, he looks on morality as the result of a law laid down and sanctioned by the ultimate source of all laws, physical as well as moral. This, no doubt, seems to imply something arbitrary, which neither Plato nor Aristotle would allow to be possible in any of the fundamental manifestations of Divine reason; but notwithstanding this preference of the word νόμος, _law_, to φύσις, _nature_, had the English thinker been cross-questioned on the subject, he would probably have said that these institutions or laws which God lays on man flow necessarily from the excellence of the Divine nature; and this would have been pure Platonism. That he was sound-hearted at bottom no less than sound-headed, his book amply proves, notwithstanding the confusion of ideas in which he entangled himself by the assertion of propositions which, when logically followed out, lead directly to materialism in philosophy, atheism in theology, and sensualism in morals.

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The next significant name in the genealogical tree of modern Utilitarianism is DAVID HARTLEY. As it was the distinction of Mr. Locke to have given respectability to the vulgar British prejudice against innate ideas, so the claim of Hartley to reputation rests on his having first given prominence to the doctrine of the association of ideas, a doctrine which from its originator down to the most recent times, plays an important part in every form and phasis of speculative and practical externalism. Hartley was a Yorkshireman, born at Armley, near Leeds, in the year 1705, educated at Cambridge originally for the Church; but having a thoughtful mind and a tender conscience, he did not feel himself in a condition to subscribe the Church Articles in the offhand way which academical morality sanctioned; and accordingly betook himself to the study of medicine, an art which he afterwards practised with success, first in Newark and London, and then at Bath, where he died. These facts are of great significance, as indicating the remarkable combination in his character and works of an extremely sensitive evangelic morality, with a tendency to give physical explanations of spiritual operations, from which evangelic moralists are naturally averse. The object of his great work, _Observations on Man_, published in the year 1749, is to give a complete treatise of human nature on the inductive method of Locke and Newton; and accordingly the first volume, which contains his most peculiar views, is merely a following into detail of the doctrine of Locke, that all our knowledge proceeds from sensation, and that ideas in the brain are the product of impressions on the sensuous nerves. This one-sided notion Hartley {285} pursues into the inmost network and curious membranous wrappings of the brain, and by the action and reaction and interaction of vibrations and vibratiuncles in that region, attempts to explain the generation of thought and reasoning; and this he does through long chapters, and with not a little iteration, in language than which the most extreme materialist could desire nothing more crass. In fact, we find in Hartley the great precursor of those masters of physical science in the present day, who seem to expect some important discovery in mental science from the curious comparison of cerebral structure in the monkey and the man. A few short extracts will make this more obvious. “Simple ideas,” he says, “run into clusters and create complex ideas”--(i. 75.) Here we have that vague use of the word “idea,” which serves equally for a sensation and a thought, and which lies at the bottom of all that strange confusion of thought which runs with such unhappy persistency through all the speculations of Mr. Locke. Again, “Ideas, intellect, memory, fancy, affections, will, all these are of the same original, and differ only in degree, or some accidental circumstance; they are all deducible from the external impressions made on the senses, the vestiges, or ideas of these, and their mutual connexion by means of association taken together and operating on one another” (i. 80). And in harmony with this (i. 101), he afterwards gives a formal derivation of ideal vibratiuncles from sensory vibrations; and (103) talks of that “idea or state of mind, _i.e._ set of compound vibratiuncles, which we term the WILL;” and again (p. 212) he says, “the permanence of sensations is of the nature of an idea.” Here the great {286} mystery which puzzled the Greeks so much, the mysterious bond which unites the ἕν and the πολλά--the one and the many--is solved very decidedly, as it would appear, on the Epicurean side. It is not the one which produces the many, but the many which produce the one; the one--what I call Mind, Will--is only a modification of the many. The radical objection to all this is that every man who is not a professional metaphysician feels it to be nonsense; the popular feeling protests; Shakespeare, who represents the thoughts and the language of a high and a healthy humanity, never talks in this style; and, more than that, the profoundest thinkers from Plato down to Hegel find in the proposition that thought is manufactured out of sensations a much greater mystery than that which this theory was invented to explain. One feels conscious that sensations might go on for ever, and not produce anything that had the slightest semblance to a thought; just as rain and sunshine acting on thistle-down from summer to summer produce only thistles and not roses. It appears, indeed, that our inductive philosopher is here involving himself in the vulgar fallacy of confounding the occasion or the condition of a thing with the cause. An accidental occasion, or an indispensable condition, are equally remote from the idea of a cause. The accidental occasion, for instance, of a house being built on a certain site, is that a certain gentleman, happening to take a walk in a certain district, and being not averse to house-building, determines to have a house on that site; the indispensable condition of the house being erected is that there should be a site for it to stand on, and stone and lime for it to be built with; but the only proper efficient {287} cause of the house being a house is the mind of the architect, the plan which that mind originates, and the instructions which he gives to the contractor, and the contractor to the masons. The sensuous tendency which Hartley’s medical studies had given to his thoughts comes out strongly in another passage (i. 342), where he attempts to explain the evidence of mathematical axioms:--“We infer that 2+2=4 only from prior instances of having actually perceived this; and from the necessary coincidence of all these instances with all other possible ones.” This recalls a famous passage in J. Stuart Mill’s treatise against Sir W. Hamilton, in which he stamps with his authority the ingenious demonstration of a London barrister, to the effect that “in some possible world two and two may make five”--where, however, the more recent is grandly consistent as compared with the wavering double-sidedness of the more ancient speculator. The fact of the matter is, that Hartley, like Locke, was swayed at bottom by a sound sense and a lofty religious philosophy which crossed his mechanical theories; whereas the modern thinker, not believing in Mind, properly so called, at all, but only in a bundle of sensations and a thread of associations, like the Romanist Transubstantiation doctors, had no scruple in flinging open defiance in the face of Reason, and making a public ovation of unmitigated nonsense. Such is the natural culmination of all one-sided philosophizing. The seed of a favourite fancy grows up into a stately dogma; the dogma blossoms into a paradox; and the paradox ripens into an absurdity. The extreme nonsensicality of Mill, and the mildly modified error of Hartley with regard to {288} the nature of mathematical evidence, arise from the same cause. They are only the natural expression of the principle that thought is sensation and sensation is thought; thought the matured sensation, and sensation the nascent thought. Mill denies altogether the existence of thought as a distinct thing from sensation; therefore he is quite consistent to say that in some possible world two and two may make five; for it is as a thing thought, and not as a thing perceived, that in the science of number 2+2=4. Mill, in fact, by this paradox, with a hardihood of consistency which is almost sublime, denies the possibility of science altogether; there is no ἐπιστήμη of any kind possible any more than ontology; only ἐμπειρία is possible--an experience of something that is accidentally what it is, and may have been otherwise. This is the highest power of what the Germans call the “Lockian empiricism;” and Mr. Mill in asserting the contingency of all science, has argued, as a good logician could not but do, from that half of the truth of things which it has been the unfortunate destiny of him and his school to mistake for the whole. As for Hartley, he qualifies his one-sidedness with a condition which takes the sting from its nonsense, and, like Locke, saves himself by a very transparent inconsistency; for he talks of a “_necessary_ coincidence” of a certain number of observed equalities with all possible equalities; interpolating thus into the product of sensations the idea of necessity which belongs to a different region altogether, and by no possibility could grow out of a mere succession of sensuous impressions and nervous thrills, however often repeated. A tide-waiter may feel convinced that the tide will {289} flow to-morrow just as it has flowed to-day, and has flowed regularly ever since he began to observe its motions; but no degree of strength in this conviction comes up to the certainty which every sane man has that two and two not only always do make four, and always have made four, but in every possible world must make four. The two certainties differ not in degree only but in kind; and mathematical demonstration having to do only with thoughts, the creation of pure mind, cannot in the slightest degree be affected by any complete or incomplete realization of these thoughts in any time, past, present, or to come. When I say that all the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, or that the angle at the centre of a circle is double the angle at the circumference, I prove this from certain necessary relations of lines to lines drawn under conditions of which my thought is the absolute master. The proof is only the evolution of what lies in the thing,--of what cannot be otherwise, so long as the figure remains subject to the dictatorial power of my conception.

It will be now quite evident from these specimens, that Hartley’s philosophy is just the sensuous side of Locke worked curiously into detail, with a practical rejection of the intellectual side. Indeed, he says expressly (i. 360) that “all our most complex ideas arise from sensation, and REFLECTION IS NOT A DISTINCT SOURCE, as Mr. Locke makes it.” This throwing of reflection overboard is the necessary postulate of all the absurdity that afterwards grew out from the Lockian philosophy; and James Mill accordingly[289.1] disowns the “ideas of reflection” with {290} the same fatal one-sideness, and, it may be added, with the same transparent superficiality of logic; for when a man talks of “generalizing states of consciousness,” what is this but another term for reflection? Generalizing is a species, and one of the most universally practised species, of reflection.

It was necessary to be thus particular about Hartley’s doctrine on the generation of ideas, because, as expressed in the above passages, it is one of the broadest statements of Externalism possible, and if consistently followed out, as it has been by the Mills, neither morals nor mathematics can escape from its grasp. According to this doctrine there exists no morality founded on the eternal reasons and relations of things, but all notions of right and wrong proceed from association alone, from clusters of ideas which are only modified sensations,--all affection as well as all reasoning being the mere result of association--(i. 499.) Let us now inquire a little more closely what this ASSOCIATION is, which performs such marvels in the transmutation of sensations into ideas; for surely never was a word so largely used by philosophical writers in recent times, and so villainously abused. Association is a popular term, and therein precisely lies its large capacity of doing harm, when sophistically used. Now what it means in popular language is pretty plain. When I think of London I think of beauty, splendour, magnitude, multitude, wealth, din, incalculable noise of rattling cabs above ground and of screeching railways under ground. These are my associations with London. When I think of Oxford, I think of Greek and Grammars and square caps, of {291} mitres, and lawn sleeves, High Church and Broad Church, learning and luxury, bigotry and boating, cricket, cram, and scholarly conceit. When I think of the Highlands, I think of Bens and Glens, of lochs and waterfalls, of steamboats and tourists, of salmon-fishing, grouse-shooting, deerstalking. Free Churches, untrousered legs, and Ossianic poems. There does not seem much mystery in this. Ideas must hang together somehow or other; if they did not, they would be like a swarm of mad bees in our head, and would reel about in an unmanageable chaos; if therefore they are to hang together in some way, what more natural than that those ideas which come in together should remain together, and that those which have a family likeness and affinity should arrange themselves into companies. Add to this the natural tendency of black to recall white, and of life to suggest death, and you have the whole three bonds of association among human thoughts and emotions--contiguity, similarity, and contrast--of which philosophical writers make parade. Now what is the place which belongs to this popular principle of association in a system of metaphysics or mental philosophy? To me its place appears a very secondary one; and to give it any place at all we must carefully distinguish between accidental and necessary, between ephemeral and eternal associations, the confounding of which rather seems to stand out as the prominent employment of the Sensation philosophers. There are two great classes of associations, the one principally of external and accidental, the other of internal and necessary origin; the one dominant in weak minds, the other in strong minds; the one common to us with the brutes, the {292} other altogether impossible to brutes; the one more in the manner of a loose bundle, the other in the style of a stable architecture. With people not much given to think consecutively ideas are apt to hang together by certain mere superficial points of attachment; like drifted matter on an open beach, they lie just as they come in; the most incongruous things together all in a heap. Such associations, subjected to no controlling and discriminating power, are the fruitful source of all vain opinions, prejudices, senseless conceits, and hollow reasonings. With another class of people, again, in whom a strict watch is always kept over the materials with which sense supplies the mind, we find a totally opposite sort of associations. In this case the influence of the external factor diminishes, while the internal factor comes largely into play. The mind of such persons is not merely a mirror of such things as may chance to fall upon it, it is a commander-in-chief and a dictator, which discriminates, selects, and disposes according to an innate ordering faculty, which rejoices to trace out the cognate order which everywhere lives beneath the diverse surface of external things. The former of these forms of association is always more or less arbitrary; the latter is imperatorial and absolute; the one claims kinship with mere fancy and fashion; the other is reason in the realm of imagination rejoicing in the discovery of what under various guises is only a manifestation of the eternally Reasonable. Now the fault of the Association theory as used by moralists of the Utilitarian school, is that they have left reason altogether out of the account, and fixed their eyes exclusively on those external associations {293} which form the principal furniture of the lower class of minds; nay, they have gone further than this, and systematically explained away the highest ideas, such as Beauty and Duty, into mere unsubstantial or monstrous products of some abnormal association! The applause which Alison received in Edinburgh by the publication of a treatise on Beauty, the drift of which was to resolve all our ideas of what is excellent in form or expression into mere arbitrary association; is one of the great reproaches of the Scottish philosophy. Similar ideas with regard to Duty are vented by Professor Bain.[293.1] Here, as in every other case, we see that it has been the business of the successors of Locke in this country to exaggerate his errors and to omit his truths. With regard to association Mr. Locke (iii. 33) did the wiser thing when he treated it not as the handmaid, much less as the substitute, for reason, but rather as its great enemy; and in the domain of morals, particularly, Professor Ferrier does not overstate the matter when he says in his own eloquent way that the Utilitarian philosophy presents to us “not the picture of a man, but that of a weathercock shifting helplessly in the winds of sensibility, a wretched association-machine, through which ideas pass, linked together by laws over which the machine has no control.”[293.2] And another sturdy Scotch thinker, yet alive, justly indignant at the juggle which has been played with this word, bursts out into the exclamation, “The Association psychology,--that barren bastard, between Materialism and Idealism, which, but intended as a jeer to the priest, is a disgrace to common-sense.” {294} Thus the Scottish interpreter of Hegel; but though these strong words, in the fulness of their meaning, may be applicable to his successors, Hartley certainly never intended by his curious interplay of vibrations and vibratiuncles to jeer the ministers or to damage the cause of Christianity. In this respect he was a perfect parallel to Locke. He had inherited the central idea of all true philosophy,--the idea of God,--from Christianity; and he stuck by that. And if in his first volume he seemed to derive the noblest thing internal from the basest things external, to turn the whole miraculous world of thought and feeling, as Ferrier says, into a wretched “association-machine,” it was not so bad after all; for behind the machine he believed also in the steam, and the imperial mind of Him who made the machine; so in theology he remained a sound theist, and in morals he went so far as literally to stumble on the paradoxical love of “self-annihilation,” so prominent in the transcendental ethics of Budd. Hartley was the most pious and the most pure of metaphysical writers; and while he balanced his first proposition that “sensations beget ideas” by a second, that “God is the source of all Good” (i. 114), and a third, that “Final causes are the key to all mystery” (i. 366), he might launch his book into the world with a good conscience, and the sure hope of a good result, if only people would take him as a whole. This, however, unfortunately, people had not the thought or the will to do; the fewest people, Goethe said, can comprehend a whole; so they took up his sensuous association, and left his spiritual piety to float. He fared in this like St. Paul, whose sound sense, we read, certain persons lightly dismissed, {295} who were forward to wrest his more obscure doctrines to their own destruction.