Part 25

There are two points generally discussed in ethical treatises, which belong most naturally to our present rubric; _first_, whether moral judgments are performed by a separate faculty called Conscience; _second_, whether all our emotions are not originally selfish; whether benevolence, like remorse, is not a derived and compounded rather than an original and simple element of our nature. To both these questions the Association theory of Hartley gave the start; for with him, as we have seen, everything is compounded; will, judgment, conscience, whatever acts seem most emphatically to proceed from the imperial I within, are radically only transmuted sensations, the composite result of a curiously interwoven tissue of associations. Now there are no questions in ethical science more easily answered than these. Conscience is certainly not a separate faculty; it is an exercise of judgment, that is, of discriminating reason, accompanied with an emotion. You confess to me, for instance, as your friend, that on such and such an occasion, from a regard to some petty interest, or a desire to curry favour with some influential person, you displayed a cowardly reticence, where an open profession of your sentiments would have been advantageous to the cause of humanity; and you feel ashamed of your conduct. Here is nothing but Reason applied to action; and the emotion of self-reproach in reference to an unreasonable action, which is the exact correlative of the feeling of incongruity which attaches itself to a false proposition. Man is not a mere cognitive machine; he has emotions of delight, which make him start from his seat {296} and cry out εὕρηκα! at the naked perception of a purely speculative truth, much more when he uses his reason on the most important acts that concern the well-being of himself individually, and the society of which he is a part. Let anything very good be done by his tribe, or nation, or church, if he is a complete man he instantly flames up into a noble enthusiasm, and becomes ambitious of attempting like deeds; let anything very bad be done, he fumes, in grim indignation, or blushes with shame, and is ready to reproach and to condemn, and even to trample his proper self under foot. This is the most natural thing in the world; the necessary result of applying reason to action at all; for a man cannot act without motive power, that is, without passions, which may be either noble or base. But though there is no separate faculty called Conscience, there is a peculiar sensibility of the soul in reference to moral action, when judgment is pronounced by any individual on the character of any action which he has performed. Self-condemnation, self-reproach, and, in their sharpest potency, what are called the stings of remorse, are judgments of reason accompanied by emotions, which well deserve a separate name; and just as for the classical Latin _judicium_ when speaking of the fine arts, we now use the peculiar word TASTE, so for our judgments of actions, with the peculiar emotions which accompany them, we use the word CONSCIENCE. It is not a new word; it is as old as Periander and Bias;[296.1] it has been used {297} by both heathens and Christians for more than two thousand years; and there is no reason why it should be abolished. The ignoring of its compound character by incurious people can do no harm; its analysis into practical reason and passion by the more curious can do little good. When, on the other hand, it is declared generally to be the mere product of association, a great deal of harm may be done; for from this doctrine a consistent one-sided moralist may prove that morals are the mere creatures of habit, fashion, fancy, and caprice, as readily and with precisely the same warrant that Alison proved that beauty is an accidental product of the same unreasoning elements. What we ought to say is simply this--there is an enlightened conscience, and there is an unenlightened conscience; neither of these can act independently of associations; for associations supply the bonds by which the materials of thought and feeling are bound into separate parcels; but the difference is this: in the enlightened conscience feelings and actions are bound together by associations over which cultivated Reason has exercised a control; in the unenlightened conscience, where the emotions connected with the performance of certain actions are the crude product of all sorts of random influences, it is natural that moral judgments should exhibit all sorts of inadequacy, perversity, and absurdity. To a conscience so constituted the neglect of a piece of insignificant silly ceremonial may cause more pain than the commission of a murder.

As to the sophistical refinement that all our social sympathies are fundamentally selfish, there can be no doubt that, under the influence of that passion for unity which is the inspiration of system-builders, {298} Hartley, after Hobbes, did common sense the dishonour of publicly propounding this theory. But he propounded it, after his fashion, in a very innocent way; in such a way indeed as to show that the whole question arises out of a confusion of language, or, what is worse, a studied affectation of using words in a different sense from that in which they are used by the vulgar.[298.1] To the thinker this is a matter of indifference; not so to the vulgar: they all insist in using common words in their common sense, and allow the subtle qualifications of the philosopher to drop. It is strange, however, to observe that there are even at the present day writers of pith and judgment who seem to imagine that there is something more than a mere juggle of words in this question. Mr. Barrett, in his _Physical Ethics_, an ingenious and thoughtful work, says that “the merit of Hartley was not only that he showed the ultimate selfishness of all motives, but that he saw the true subordination among the various emotions, and their natural evolution from their simple elements.” This sentence, by the simple abuse of a single word, does great injustice to Hartley. The word _selfishness_, in the classical use of the English language, is a word of a very bad odour; it is equivalent to the φιλαυτία of the Greeks, and means that excessive regard to self which leads a man to disregard and to disown the rights and feelings of other selves in the complex social machine of which he is a part. Now Hartley {299} does not use this word; he uses a word capable also of a good meaning--_self-interest_, better still if he had stumbled on Bentham’s phrase, _self-regard_. But as it is, the ingenious association-moralist (i. 458) divides self-interest into three species--

_Gross self-interest_, _Refined self-interest_, and _Rational self-interest_,

which, when analysed, turn out to be altogether different things baptized with the same name. If a rational self-interest convinces me that, when I see my neighbour fall into the sea, it is my duty to jump in after him at the risk of being drowned myself, it requires an open force put upon language to say that such an action is the result of any kind of deliberate self-regard; it seems more like the result of a social instinct, and so far from being the product of any sort of prudential calculation, it is more likely to be strangled in the first conception than brought to a brilliant birth by the consideration of self in any shape. It seems to me indeed quite unworthy of anything styling itself philosophy to deal in such manifest quibbles. I might in a similar way, for instance, classify all religions under a common name, according as they are inspired by

_Gross reverence_, _Refined reverence_, and _Rational reverence;_

but though the name is the same in all the three cases, the feeling may be very different, and the {300} product altogether opposed; for the gross reverence of vulgar superstition may be founded on fear, while the rational reverence of enlightened piety may be based on philosophic wonder and on that perfect love which casteth out fear.

Much less ingenious than Hartley as a speculator, but more distinct, perspicuous, and effective as a writer, was Dr. PALEY, a man whose position among the thinkers of the last century, though somewhat dwarfed by the contemporary magnitude of Hume and Bentham, will ever secure him an honourable place among the preachers of the Utilitarian doctrine. As an author, he commanded a wider circle of intelligent readers than any of his contemporaries who handled the same subjects; he was a Churchman too, the only clergyman, so far as I know, among the Utilitarian doctors; and the last of that school--Austin only excepted[300.1]--who did not think it a disgrace but an honour to keep on friendly terms with Christianity. The salient points of his moral philosophy are four--Utility, the doctrine of Consequences, the Will of God, and the Future life. Of the first, what remains to be said will be said more opportunely when, in the next section, we shall have to discuss Hume; the doctrine of Consequences a passing hint under Bentham will dismiss; and for the other two points a few sentences may suffice. “Virtue,” according to Paley, “is the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God for the sake of everlasting happiness.” {301} This definition characterizes the man, the book, the age, the country, and the profession to which he belonged admirably. It is a definition that, taken as a matter of fact, in all likelihood expressed the feeling of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand British Christians living in these islands in the generation immediately preceding the French Revolution; still, it is a definition which contains as many errors as it contains clauses. In the first place, as to the doing good to mankind, it is a principle which lies at the basis of the doctrine of Utility, and has its origin doubtless not so much in modern anti-Christian systems as in the prominence which Christianity gives to works of charity and brotherly-kindness; than which practically of course there can be nothing better, but as part of the definition of virtue in this place it is faulty; for virtue of various kinds may be exercised where no men exist to be the objects of our benevolence, as with Adam in Paradise, and Robinson Crusoe in his desert island, and the poet Campbell’s Last Man. Then as to the Will of God, that no doubt is a power which overrules all; tides and tempests and thunderstorms must obey that, and human life of course no less; but what constitutes the Divine will, and how is it to be learned, in what way by the Christian, and in what other way by the unbeliever? Properly speaking, the will of God rather expresses the ultimate source of virtuous conduct than furnishes a practical definition of its quality. Lastly, as to the everlasting happiness, this is the greatest blunder of the three. It may no doubt be very true under the relations in which it was spoken, that “if in this life only we have hope in Christ we are of all men {302} most miserable:” that was a sentence which applied with the most vivid pointedness to St. Paul and to many others in similar circumstances; but it is very far from furnishing a warrant for the general proposition that the sure expectation of an everlasting reward is a motive necessary for the existence of virtue in this mortal life. For if this really were the case, either the virtue of Socrates was no virtue at all, or a virtue far above the standard of any Christian virtue according to Paley’s definition; for Socrates died the death of a martyr with a very doubtful faith of what might happen to him after death. But, in fact, the prospect of an external reward is no part of any virtue, either Christian or heathen,--rather in many cases would annihilate the very idea of virtue. To give away ten pounds to-day with the sure expectation of getting a thousand pounds for it to-morrow would be no act of generosity. Aristotle says that a man is bound to be virtuous by the distinctive law of his nature, whether he lives seventy years or seven hundred years; and Christianity surely ought to say no less. It is plain therefore that Dr. Paley was no great master of definitions. Nevertheless he wrote a most useful practical book; such a book as justly commended itself to the practical English mind; such a book as might have been expected from the finished manhood of a young man of whom when he went to college it had been said by his father, that “he had by far the clearest head he had ever met with.” A clear head unquestionably is a most useful quality in business and in daily life, but a quality which of itself will not make a great philosopher, or even a great man.

DAVID HUME, born at Edinburgh in the year {303} 1710, was older than Dr. Paley by more than thirty years, though we have placed Paley first, as with Locke and Hartley completing the band of decidedly Christian Externalists. But in Hume we find the father of an altogether new school, the real progenitor of that living sect of philosophers whom the popular memory traces back no further than to Bentham and James Mill. In him therefore we may reasonably expect to find in one form or another all that came afterwards, some parts of course less worked out and less consistent, but the whole more rich, various, and complete; and, as in the case of Locke and Hartley, we may probably have cause to rejoice that by a certain broad and salutary inconsistency he saved himself from a narrow and pedantic dogmatism. We shall not therefore err in calling him comparatively a great man, but only comparatively; compared with the highest style of men, great with first-rate position and constructive minds, he is not great; he is only rich, various, and subtle. Nevertheless in respect of those who followed him with kindred tendencies, his stature remains unapproached. He is, as Emerson says of Plato, “a terrible destroyer of originalities.” In the page of intellectual record he stands unquestioned as the man who shook all the easy thinkers of an easy century out of their easy seats with much observation; but there are two ways of shaking people out of their seats--first in the manner of an architect who pulls down a crazy old cabin in order that he may set quarrymen, masons, plasterers, carpenters, painters, and other artisans to work that they may erect a palatial structure in its stead; secondly, in the manner of a strong Samson, who shakes the pillars of some temple of Dagon, and buries himself {304} and all the Philistines beneath its roof. That this is too much the manner of Hume as a philosopher is obvious; only he does not actually die like Samson, but gets himself paralysed for a moment, and then recovers partially by virtue of that strong infection of common sense which, as a Scotchman, he naturally had. We have called him a rich man; for unquestionably his treatise on the Principles of Morals, perhaps on the whole the best of his works, exhibits him as at once a subtle thinker, a shrewd observer, and a graceful stylist, in a combination as happy as it is rare. The man of the world is present here as well as the philosopher; and perhaps the philosopher is not fully aware how much the acceptance of his abstract speculations is due to his secular shrewdness and his gentlemanly demeanour. But with all his wealth there is a certain meagreness about Hume arising out of his ignorance and entire misprision of the past. It is difficult for a man to write well on morals with an entire disregard of Aristotle and Plato, and with a fashionable Parisian contempt for the New Testament. No doubt this was to a great extent the misfortune of the philosopher rather than his fault; yet the fact remains, and cannot but weigh heavily with all who would make a true estimate of the permanent value of his contributions to ethical philosophy. In Hume’s time, as we have seen above (p. 131), Aristotle had not yet recovered from the supposed blows inflicted on him by Bacon--“his fame,” to use Hume’s own language, “was utterly decayed;”[304.1] and as for Plato, St. Paul, and St. John, our subtle Scotch David had no organ for them, and could appreciate their excellence {305} as some kilted piper picked up from Celtic games at Braemar might be expected to appreciate the harmonies of Sebastian Bach. Greek certainly he had--the fruit of private study in his riper years--more than usually falls to the lot of Scottish philosophers; and what he had of that noble language he knew how to use more effectively and with more grace and originality than many English scholars with ten times his erudition; but in reading his Principles of Morals I find no trace of any appreciation of the work done by his great Hellenic predecessors; on the contrary, I find the strange delusion possessing both him and Bentham that they were commencing a new epoch, and doing for moral science what Newton had done for physical, and what Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, not to mention St. Paul and St John, had altogether failed to do. Hume’s own view of his relation to the ancient moralists is distinctly stated thus--“I found that the moral philosophy transmitted to us by antiquity laboured under the same inconvenience that has been found in their natural philosophy, of being entirely hypothetical and depending more on invention than experience; every one consulted his fancy in erecting schemes of virtue and happiness, without regarding human nature, upon which every moral conclusion must depend.”[305.1] The complacent conceit of this passage to a man who really knows the ancient moralists, {306} is only less ludicrous than the benign self-satisfaction which inspires the well-known overture to the _Deontology_ of Bentham. And the conceit becomes the more ludicrous when, in searching for this new principle which is to redeem ethics from fancifulness and transport it into certainty, we find nothing but the old Socratic formula:--

Reason + sentiment = virtue = happiness.

Nay more; he defines this sentiment to be “an internal sense or feeling which nature has made universal in the whole species.” _Risum teneatis, amici?_ Here we have the innate ideas of Plato, one part of them certainly, which Mr. Locke was supposed to have blown into smoke. And afterwards, in language even more distinctly Platonic, in the section “Why Utility Pleases,” he says, “Had nature made no original moral distinctions independently of education, distinctions founded on the original constitution of the mind, the words _honourable_ and _shameful_, _lovely_ and _odious_, _noble_ and _despicable_, had never had place in any language; nor could politicians, had they invented those terms, ever have been able to render them intelligible, or make them convey any idea to the audience.” We see therefore in these passages plainly, that Hume was by no means a thorough and consistent Externalist; he protests stoutly against Hobbes and all who declare that there is naturally no difference between men and tigers till the policeman introduced it; and he does not seem to have approached Professor Bain’s conception, that Conscience is always and everywhere modelled on the statute-book. He agrees entirely with Socrates in assigning to love and the {307} social affections--the τὰ φιλικά--as strong a sway in human society as to the selfish principle. Here his common sense and his knowledge of the world saved him signally from the perverse ingenuity of Hartley. It will be observed through all his works, indeed, that though he was fond of puzzling himself as a thinker, he had fundamentally far more faith in the common instincts and feelings of the great masses of men than in the conclusions of the metaphysicians. “Nature,” he says wisely, “will always assert her rights, and prevail in the end over any abstract reasoning whatsoever;”[307.1] while with regard to individual speculators he says, “It is easy for a profound philosopher to commit a mistake in his subtle reasonings, and one mistake is the necessary parent of another, while he pushes on his consequences, and is not deterred from embracing any conclusion by its unusual appearance or its contradiction to common sense.”[307.2] And accordingly he makes no scruple of shelving the whole theory of the Ethics of Selfishness by the single sentence that it “seems to have proceeded entirely from that love of simplicity which has been the source of much false reasoning in philosophy.”[307.3] What then have we to lay hold of as distinctively Humian? Hitherto all is mere Socrates. A well-disciplined reason and a well-educated natural instinct of benevolence acting together for the public weal.--This is Utility; this is Hume; this is Socrates also, and Aristotle; for these great ancient thinkers had the εὐδαιμονία and the ὠφέλιμον in their eye and on their tongue as {308} much as any modern Utilitarian. Where then lies the differentiating element of this great progenitor of the most modern school? The difference, we must reply, is partly imaginary, arising out of the gross misconception of the character of ancient philosophy, transparent in all the writings of the Utilitarians; partly real, in so far as the ancients, while acknowledging Utility as a principle, kept Reason in the foreground, while the moderns push Utility into the van, and use Reason only as an instrument to make that point alone prominent. The modern Utilitarian accordingly looks more to the consequences of the action, the ancient Rationalist to the quality of the actor; but how this should be looked upon as a great discovery in morals, or as tending in any way to the elevation of human character or the regeneration of society, seems difficult to understand. It rather appears to me that the prominence thus given to the results of action has a tendency to turn the eye of men away from the great work of purifying the sources of action, the foulness of which is the constant cause of foul results; prudential considerations will be very apt to obtain undue preponderance; and everywhere, as Lecky observes, “the philosophy of sensation will be found to be accompanied with the morals of interest.”