Hume’s doctrine of morals parallel to his doctrine of nature.
1. In his speculation on morals, no less than on knowledge, Hume follows the lines laid down by Locke. With each there is a precise correspondence between the doctrine of nature and the doctrine of the good. Each gives an account of reason consistent at least in this that, as it allows reason no place in the constitution of real objects, so it allows it none in the constitution of objects that determine desire and, through it, the will. With each, consequently, the ‘moral faculty,’ whether regarded as the source of the judgments ‘ought and ought not,’ or of acts to which these judgments are appropriate, can only be a certain faculty of feeling, a particular susceptibility of pleasure and pain. The originality of Hume lies in his systematic effort to account for those objects, apparently other than pleasure and pain, which determine desire, and which Locke had taken for granted without troubling himself about their adjustment to his theory, as resulting from the modification of primary feelings by ‘associated ideas.’ ‘Natural relation,’ the close and uniform sequence of certain impressions and ideas upon each other, is the solvent by which in the moral world, as in the world of knowledge, he disposes of those ostensibly necessary ideas that seem to regulate impressions without being copied from them; and in regard to the one application of it as much as to the other, the question is whether the efficiency of the solvent does not depend on its secretly including the very ideas of which it seems to get rid.
Its relation to Locke: Locke’s account of freedom, will, and desire.
2. The place held by the ‘Essay concerning Human Understanding,’ as a sort of philosopher’s Bible in the last century, is strikingly illustrated by the effect of doctrines that only appear in it incidentally. It does not profess to be ethical treatise at all, yet the moral psychology contained in the chapter ‘of Power’ (II. 21), and the account of moral good and evil contained In the chapter ‘of other Relations’ (II. 28) furnished the text for most of the ethical speculation that prevailed in England, France, and Scotland for a century later. If Locke’s theory was essentially a reproduction of Hobbes’, it was yet in the form he gave it that it survived while Hobbes was decried and forgotten. The chapter on Power is in effect an account of determination by motives. More, perhaps, than any other part of the essay it bears the marks of having been written ‘currente calamo.’ In the second edition a summary was annexed which differs somewhat in the use of terms, but not otherwise, from the original draught. The main course of thought, however, is clear throughout. Will and freedom are at first defined in all but identical terms as each a ‘power to begin or forbear action barely by a preference of the mind’ (§§ 5, 8, 71). Nor is this identification departed from, except that the term ‘will’ is afterwards restricted to the ‘preference’ or ‘power of preference,’ while freedom is confined to the power of acting upon preference; in which sense it is pointed out that though there cannot be freedom without will, there may be will without freedom, as when, through the breaking of a bridge, a man cannot help falling into the water, though he prefers not to do so. ‘Freedom’ and ‘will’ being thus alike powers, if not the same power, it is as improper to ask whether the will is free as whether one power has another power. The proper question is whether man is free (§§ 14, 21), and the answer to this question, according to Locke, is that within certain limits he is free to act, but that he is not free to will. When in any case he has the option of acting or forbearing to act, he cannot help preferring, i.e. willing, one or other alternative. If it is further asked, What determines the will or preference? the answer is that ‘nothing sets us upon any new action but some uneasiness’ (§ 29), viz., the ‘most urgent uneasiness we at any time feel’ (§ 40), which again is always ‘the uneasiness of desire fixed on some absent good, either negative, as indolence to one in pain, or positive, as enjoyment of pleasure.’ In one sense, indeed, it may be said that the will often runs counter to desire, but this merely means that we ‘being in this world beset with sundry uneasinesses, distressed with different desires,’ the determination of the will by the most pressing desire often implies the counteraction of other desires which would, indeed, under other circumstances, be the most pressing, but at the particular time of the supposed action are not so.
Two questions: Does man always act from the strongest motive? and, What constitutes his motive? The latter the important question: Distinction between desires that are, and those that are not, determined by the conception of self.
3. So far Locke’s doctrine amounts to no more than this, that action is always determined by the strongest motive; and only those who strangely hold that human freedom is to be vindicated by disputing that truism will care to question it. To admit that the strongest desire always moves action (there being, in fact, no test of its strength but its effect on action) and that, since every desire causes uneasiness till it is satisfied, the strongest desire is also the most pressing uneasiness, [1] is compatible with the most opposite views as to the constitution of the objects which determine desire. To understand that it is this constitution of the desired object, not any possible intervention of unmotived willing between the presentation of a strongest motive and action, which forms the central question of ethics, is the condition of all clear thinking on the subject. It is a question, however, which Locke ignores, and popular philosophy, to its great confusion, has not only continued to do the same, but would probably resent as pedantic any attempt at more accurate analysis. When we hear of the strongest ‘desire’ being the uniform motive to action, we have to ask, in the first place, whether the term is confined to impulses determined by a prior consciousness, or is taken to include those impulses, commonly called ‘mere appetites,’ which are not so determined, but depend directly and solely on the ‘constitution of our bodily organs.’ The appetite of hunger is obviously quite independent of any remembrance of the pleasure of eating, yet nothing is commoner than to identify with such simple appetite the desire determined by consciousness of some sort, as when we say of a drunkard, who never drinks merely because he is thirsty, that he is governed by his appetite. Upon this distinction, however, since it is recognised by current psychology, it is less important to insist than on that between the kinds of prior consciousness which may determine desire proper. Does this prior consciousness consist simply in the return of an image of past pleasure with consequent hope of its renewal, or is it a conception—the thought of an object under relations to self or of self in relation to certain objects—in a word, self-consciousness as distinct from simple feeling?
[1] Locke’s language in regard to ‘the most pressing uneasiness’ will not be found uniformly consistent. His usual doctrine is that the strength of a desire, as evinced by the resulting action, and the uneasiness which it causes are in exact proportion to each other. According to this view, desire for future happiness can only become a prevalent motive when the uneasiness which it causes has come to outweigh every other (Cf. Chap, xxi., Secs. 43 and 45). On the other hand, he sometimes seems to distinguish the desire for future pleasure from present uneasiness, while at the same time implying that it may be a strongest motive (Cf. sec. 65). But if so, it follows that there may be a strongest desire which is not the most pressing uneasiness. (See below, sec. 13.) Hume, distinguishing strong from violent desires, and restricting ‘uneasiness’ to the latter, is able to hold that it is not alone the present uneasiness which determines action. (Book II., part 3, sec. 3, sub fin.)
Effect of this conception on the objects of human desire.
4. Of desire determined in the former way we have experience, if at all, in those motives which actuate us, as we say, ‘unconsciously’; which means, without our attending to them—feelings which we do not fix even momentarily by reference to self or to a thing. As we cannot set ourselves to recall such feelings without thinking them, without determining them by that reference to self which we suppose them to exclude, they cannot be described; but some of our actions (such as the instinctive recurrence to a sweet smell), seem only to be thus accounted for, and probably those actions of animals which do not proceed from appetite proper are to be accounted for in the same way. But whether such actions are facts in human experience or no, those which make us what we are as men are not so determined. The man whom we call the slave of his appetite, the enlightened pleasure-hunter, the man who lives for his family, the artist, the enthusiast for humanity, are alike in this, that the desire which moves their action is itself determined not by the recurring image of a past pleasure, but by the conception of self. The self may be conceived of simply as a subject to be pleased, or may be a subject of interests, which, indeed, when gratified, produce pleasure but are not produced by it—interests in persons, in beautiful things, in the order of nature and society—but self is still not less the ‘punctum stans’ whose presence to each passing pleasure renders it a constituent of a happiness which is to be permanently pursued, than it is the focus in which the influences of that world which only self-conscious reason could constitute—the world of science, of art, of human society—must be regathered in order to become the personal interests which move the actions of individuals. It is in this self-consciousness involved in our motives, in that conversion into a conception by reference to self, which the image even of the merest animal pleasure must undergo before it can become an element in the formation of character, that the possibility of freedom lies. Without it we should be as sinless and as unprogressive, as free from remorse and aspiration, as incapable of selfishness and self-denial as the animals. Each pleasure would be taken as it came. We should have ‘the greatest happiness of which our nature is capable,’ without possibility of asking ourselves whether we might not have had more. It is only the conception of himself as a permanent subject to be pleased that can set man upon the invention of new pleasures, and then, making each pleasure a disappointment when it comes, produce the ‘vicious’ temper; only this that can suggest the reflection how much more pleasure he might have had than he has had, and thus produce what the moralists know as ‘cool selfishness’; only this, on the other hand, which, as ‘enlightened self-love,’ perpetually balances the attraction of imagined pleasure by the calculation whether it will be good for one as a whole. Nor less is it the conception of self, with a ‘matter’ more adequate to its ‘form,’ taking its content not from imagined pleasure, but from the work of reason in the world of nature and humanity, which determines that personal devotion to a work or a cause, to a state, a church, or mankind, which we call self-sacrifice.
Objects so constituted Locke should consistently exclude: But he finds room for them by treating every desire for an object, of which the attainment gives pleasure, as a desire for pleasure.
5. If, now, we ask ourselves whether Locke recognised this function of reason, as self-consciousness, in the determination of the will, the answer must be yes and no. His cardinal doctrine, as we have sufficiently seen, forbade him to admit that reason or thought could originate an object. The only possible objects with him are either simple ideas or resoluble into these, and the simple idea, as that which we receive in pure passivity, is virtually feeling. Now no combination of feelings (supposing it possible [1]) can yield the conception of self as a permanent subject even of pleasure, much less as a subject of social claims. It cannot, therefore, yield the objects, ranging from sensual happiness to the moral law, humanity, and God, of which this conception is the correlative condition. Thus, strictly taken, Locke’s doctrine excludes every motive to action, but appetite proper and such desire as is determined by the imagination of animal pleasure or pain, and in doing so renders vice as well as virtue unaccountable—the excessive pursuit of pleasure as well as that dissatisfaction with it which affords the possibility of ordinary reform. On the other hand, the same happy intellectual unscrupulousness, which we have traced in his theory of knowledge, attends him also here. Just as he is ready on occasion to treat any conceived object that determines sense as if it were itself a sensation, so he is ready to treat any object that determines desire, without reference to the work of thought in its construction, as if it were itself the feeling of pleasure, or of uneasiness removed, which arises upon satisfaction of the desire. In this way, without professedly admitting any motive but remembered pleasure—a motive which, if it were our only one, would leave ‘man’s life as cheap as beasts’’—he can take for granted any objects of recognised interest as accounting for the movement of human life, and as constituents of an utmost possible pleasure which it is his own fault if every one does not pursue.
[1] Cf. Introduction to Vol. I., §§ 215 and 247.
Confusion covered by calling ‘happiness’ the general object of desire.
6. The term ‘happiness’ is the familiar cover for confusion between the animal imagination of pleasure and the conception of personal well-being. It is so when—having raised the question. What moves desire?—Locke answers, ‘happiness, and that alone.’ What, then, is happiness? ‘Good and evil are nothing but pleasure and pain,’ and ‘happiness in its full extent is the utmost pleasure we are capable of.’ [1] This is ‘the proper object of desire in general,’ but Locke is careful to explain that the happiness which ‘moves every particular man’s desire’ is not the full extent of it, but ’so much of it as is considered and taken to make a necessary part of his happiness.’ It is that ‘wherewith he in his present thoughts can satisfy himself.’ Happiness in this sense ‘every one constantly pursues,’ and without possibility of error; for ‘as to present pleasure the mind never mistakes that which is really good or evil.’ Every one ‘knows what best pleases him, and that he actually prefers.’ That which is the greater pleasure or the greater pain is really just as it appears (Ibid. §§ 43, 58, 63). Now in these statements, if we look closely, we shall find that four different meanings of happiness are mixed up, which we will take leave to distinguish by letters—(a) happiness as an abstract conception, the sum of possible pleasure; (b) happiness as equivalent to the pleasure which at any time survives most strongly in imagination; (c) happiness as the object of the self-conscious pleasure-seeker; (d) happiness as equivalent to any object at any time most strongly desired, not really a pleasure, but by Locke identified with happiness in sense (b) through the fallacy of supposing that the pleasure which arises on satisfaction of any desire, great in proportion to the strength of the desire, is itself the object which excites desire.
[1] Ibid., sec. 42, and cap. 28, sec. 5.
‘Greatest sum of pleasure’ and ‘Pleasure in general’ unmeaning expressions.
7. Happiness ‘in its full extent,’ as ‘the utmost pleasure we are capable of,’ is an unreal abstraction if ever there was one. It is curious that those who are most forward to deny the reality of universals, in that sense in which they are the condition of all reality, viz., as relations, should yet, having pronounced these to be mere names, be found ascribing reality to a universal, which cannot without contradiction be supposed more than a name. Does this ‘happiness in its full extent’ mean the ‘aggregate of possible enjoyments,’ of which modern utilitarians tell us? Such a phrase simply represents the vain attempt to get a definite by addition of indefinites. It has no more meaning than ‘the greatest possible quantity of time’ would have. Pleasant feelings are not quantities that can be added. Each is over before the next begins, and the man who has been pleased a million times is not really better off—has no more of the supposed chief good in possession—than the man who has only been pleased a thousand times. When we speak of pleasures, then, as forming a possible whole, we cannot mean pleasures as feelings, and what else do we mean? Are we, then, by the ‘happiness’ in question to understand pleasure in general, as might be inferred from Locke’s speaking of it as the ‘object of desire in general’? But it is in its mere particularity that each pleasure has its being. It is a simple idea, and therefore, as Locke and Hume have themselves taught us, momentary, indefinable, in ‘perpetual flux,’ changing every moment upon us. Pleasure in general, therefore, is not pleasure, and it is nothing else. It is not a conceived reality, as a relation, or a thing determined by relations, is, since pleasure as feeling, in distinction from its conditions which are not feelings, for the same reason that it cannot be defined, cannot be conceived. It is a mere name which utilitarian philosophy has mistaken for a thing; but for which—since no one, whatever his theory of the desirable, can actually desire either the abstraction of pleasure in general or the aggregate of possible pleasures—a practical substitute is apt to be found in any lust of the flesh that may for the time be the strongest.
In what sense of happiness is it true that it ‘is really just as it appears?’ In what sense that it is every one’s object?
8. Having begun by making this fiction ‘the proper object of desire in general,’ Locke saves the appearance of consistency by representing the particular pleasure or removal of uneasiness, which he in fact believed to be the object of every desire, as if it were a certain part of the ‘full extent of happiness’ which the individual, having this full extent before him, picked out as being what ‘in his present thoughts would satisfy him.’ Nor does he ever give up the notion of a ‘happiness in general,’ in distinction from the happiness of each man’s actual choice, as a possible motive, which a man who finds himself wretched in consequence of his actions may be told that he ought to have adopted. His real notion, however, of the happiness which is motive to action is a confused result of the three other notions of happiness, distinguished above as (b), (c) and (d). As that about which no one can be mistaken, ‘happiness’ can only be so in sense (b), as the ‘pleasure which survives most strongly in imagination.’ Of this it can be said truly, and of this only, that ‘it really is just as it appears,’ and that ‘a man never chooses amiss’ since he must ‘know what best pleases him.’ But with this, almost in the same breath, Locke confuses ‘happiness’ in senses (c) and (d). So soon as it is said of an object that it is ‘taken by the individual to make a necessary part of his happiness,’ it is implied that it is determined by his conception of self. It is something which, as the result of the action of this conception on his past experience, he has come to present to himself as a constituent of his personal good. Unless he were conscious of himself as a permanent subject, he could have no conception of happiness as a whole from relation to which each present object takes its character as a part. Nor of the objects determined by this relation is it true, as Locke says, that they are always pleasures, or that they ‘are really just as they appear.’ Our readiness to accept his statements to this effect, is at bottom due to a confusion between the pleasure, or removal of uneasiness, incidental to the satisfaction of a desire and the object which excites the desire. If having explained desire, as Locke does, by reference to the good, we then allow ourselves to explain the good by reference to desire, it will indeed be true that no man can be mistaken as to his present good, but only in the sense of the identical proposition that every man most desires what he does most desire; and true also, that every attained good is pleasure, but only in the sense that what satisfies desire does satisfy it. The man of whom it could be truly said, in any other sense than that of the above identical proposition, that his only objects of desire—the only objects which he ‘takes to make a necessary part of his happiness’—were pleasures, would be a man, as we say, of no interests. He would be a man who either lived simply for pleasures incidental to the satisfaction of animal appetite, or one who, having been interested in certain objects in which reason alone enables us to be interested—e.g., persons, pursuits, or works of art—and having found consequent pleasure, afterwards vainly tries to get the pleasure without the interests. To the former type of character, of course, the approximations are numerous enough, though it may be doubted whether such an ideal of sensuality is often fully realised. The latter in its completeness, which would mean a perfect misery that could only issue in suicide, would seem to be an impossibility, though it is constantly being approached in proportion to the unworthiness and fleetingness of the interests by which men allow themselves to be governed, and which, after stimulating an indefinite hunger for good, leave it without an object to satisfy it; in proportion, too, to the modern habit of hugging and poring over the pleasures which our higher interests cause us till these interests are vitiated, and we find ourselves in restless and hopeless pursuit of the pleasure when the interest which might alone produce it is gone.
No real object of human desire can ever be just as it appears.
9. Just as it is untrue, then, of the object of desire, as ‘taken to be part of one’s happiness’ or determined by the conception of self, that it is always a pleasure, so it is untrue that it is always really just as it appears, except in the trifling sense that what is most strongly desired is most strongly desired. Rather it is never really what it appears. It is least of all so to the professed pleasure-seeker. Obviously, to the man who seeks the pleasure incidental to interests which he has lost, there is a contradiction in his quest which for ever prevents what seems to him desirable from satisfying his desire. And even the man who lives for merely animal pleasure, just because he seeks it as part of a happiness, never finds it to be that which he sought. There is no mistake about the pleasure, but he seeks it as that which shall satisfy him, and satisfy him, since he is not an animal, it cannot. Nor are our higher objects of desire ever what they seem. That is too old a topic with poets and moralizers to need enforcing. Each in its turn, we know, promises happiness when it shall have been attained, but when it is attained the happiness has not come. The craving for an object adequate to oneself, which is the source of the desire, is still not quenched; and because it is not, nor can be, even ‘the joy of success’ has its own bitterness.
Can Locke consistently allow the distinction between true happiness and false? Or responsibility?
10. The case, then, stands thus. Locke, having too much ‘common sense’ to reduce all objects of desire to the pleasures incidental to satisfactions of appetite, takes for granted any number of objects which only reason can constitute (or, in other words, which can only exist for a self-conscious subject) without any question as to their origin. It is enough for him that they are not conscious inventions of the individual, and that they are related to feeling—though related as determining it. This being so, they are to him no more the work of thought than are the satisfactions of appetite. The conception of them is of a kind with the simple remembrance or imagination of pleasures caused by such satisfactions. The question how, if only pleasure is the object of desire, they came to be desired before there had been experience of the pleasures incidental to their attainment, is virtually shelved by treating these latter pleasures as if they were themselves the objects originally desired. So far consistency at least is saved. No object but feeling, present or remembered, is ostensibly admitted within human experience. But meanwhile, alongside of this view, comes the account of the strongest motive as determined by the conception of self—as something which a man ‘takes to be a necessary part of his happiness,’ and which he is ‘answerable to himself’ for so taking. The inconsistency of such language with the view that every desired object must needs be a pleasure, would have been less noticeable if Locke himself had not frankly admitted, as the corollary of this view that the desired good ‘is really just as it appears.’ The necessity of this admission has always been the rock on which consistent Hedonism has broken. Locke himself has scarcely made it when he becomes aware of its dangerous consequences, and great part of the chapter on Power is taken up by awkward attempts to reconcile it with the distinction between true happiness and false, and with the existence of moral responsibility. If greatest pleasure is the only possible object, and the production of such pleasure the only possible criterion of action, and if ‘as to present pleasure and pain the mind never mistakes that which is really good or evil,’ with what propriety can any one be told that he might or that he ought to have chosen otherwise than he has done? ‘He has missed the true good,’ we say, ‘which he might and should have found’; but ‘good,’ according to Locke, is only pleasure, and pleasure, as Locke in any other connexion would be eager to tell us, must mean either some actual present pleasure or a series of pleasures of which each in turn is present. If every one without possibility of mistake has on each occasion chosen the greatest present pleasure, how can the result for him at any time be other than the true good, i.e., the series of greatest pleasures, each in its turn present, that have been hitherto possible for him?
Objections to the Utilitarian answer to these questions.
11. A modern utilitarian, if faithful to the principle which excludes any test of pleasure but pleasure itself, will probably answer that every one does attain the maximum of pleasure possible for him, his character and circumstances being what they are; but that with a change in these his choice would be different. He would still choose on each occasion the greatest pleasure of which he was then capable, but this pleasure would be one ‘truer’—in the sense of being more intense, more durable, and compatible with a greater quantity of other pleasures—than is that which he actually chooses. But admitting that this answer justifies us in speaking of any sort of pleasure as ‘truer’ than that at any time chosen by any one—which is a very large admission, for of the intensity of any pleasure we have no test but its being actually preferred, and of durability and compatibility with other pleasures the tests are so vague that a healthy and unrepentant voluptuary would always have the best of it in an attempt to strike the balance between the pleasures he has actually chosen and any truer sort—it still only throws us back on a further question. With a better character, it is said, such as better education and improved circumstances might have produced, the actually greatest happiness of the individual—i.e., the series of pleasures which, because he has chosen them, we know to have been the greatest possible for him—might have been greater or ‘truer.’ But the man’s character is the result of his previous preferences; and if every one has always chosen the greatest pleasure of which he was at the time capable, and if no other motive is possible, how could any other than his actual character have been produced? How could that conception of a happiness truer than the actual, of something that should be most pleasant, and therefore preferred, though it is not—a conception which all education implies—have been a possible motive among mankind? To say that the individual is, to begin with, destitute of such a conception, but acquires it through education from others, does not remove the difficulty. How do the educators come by it? Common sense assumes them to have found out that more happiness might have been got by another than the merely natural course of living, and to wish to give others the benefit of their experience. But such experience implies that each has a conception of himself as other than the subject of a succession of pleasures, of which each has been the greatest possible at the time of its occurrence; and the wish to give another the benefit of the experience implies that this conception, which is no possible image of a feeling, can originate action. The assumption of common sense, then, contradicts the two cardinal principles of the Hedonistic philosophy; yet, however disguised in the terminology of development and evolution, it, or some equivalent supposition, is involved in every theory of the progress of mankind.
According to Locke present pleasures may be compared with future, and desire suspended till comparison has been made.
12. Such difficulties do not suggest themselves to Locke, because he is always ready to fall back on the language of common sense without asking whether it is reconcilable with his theory. Having asserted, without qualification, that the will in every case is determined by the strongest desire, that the strongest desire is desire for the greatest pleasure, and that ‘pleasure is just so great, and no greater, than it is felt,’ he finds a place for moral freedom and responsibility in the ‘power a man has to suspend his desires and stop them from determining his will to any action till he has examined whether it be really of a nature in itself and consequences to make him happy or no.’ [1] But how does it happen that there is any need for such suspense, if as to pleasure and pain ‘a man never chooses amiss,’ and pleasure is the same with happiness or the good? To this Locke answers that it is only present pleasure which is just as it appears, and that in ‘comparing present pleasure or pain with future we often make wrong judgments of them;’ again, that not only present pleasure and pain, but ‘things that draw after them pleasure and pain, are considered as good and evil,’ and that of these consequences under the influence of present pleasure or pain we may judge amiss. [2] By these wrong judgments, it will be observed, Locke does not mean mistakes in discovering the proper means to a desired end (Aristotle’s ?????a ? ?a?’ ??asta) [3], which it is agreed are not a ground for blame or punishment, but wrong desires—desires for certain pleasures as being the greater, which are not really the greater. Regarding such desires as involving comparisons of one good with another, he counts them judgments, and (the comparison being incorrectly made) wrong judgments. A certain present pleasure, and a certain future one, are compared, and though the future would really be the greater, the present is preferred; or a present pleasure, ‘drawing after it’ a certain amount of pain, is compared with a less amount of present pain, drawing after it a greater pleasure, and the present pleasure preferred. In such cases the man ‘may justly incur punishment’ for the wrong preference, because having ‘the power to suspend his desire’ for the present pleasure, he has not done so, but ‘by too hasty choice of his own making has imposed on himself wrong measures of good and evil.’ ‘When he has once chosen it,’ indeed, ‘and thereby it is become part of his happiness, it raises desire, and that proportionately gives him uneasiness, which determines his will.’ But the original wrong choice, having the ‘power of suspending his desires,’ he might have prevented. In not doing so he ‘vitiated his own palate,’ and must be ‘answerable to himself’ for the consequences. [4]
[1] II. 21, Sec. 51 and 56.
[2] Ibid., Sec. 61, 63, 67.
[3] [Greek ?????a ? ?a?’ ??asta (agnoia he kath’ hekasta) = unawareness of the particular circumstances. Tr.]
[4] Ibid., Sec. 56.
What is meant by ‘present’ and ‘future’ pleasure? By the supposed comparison Locke ought only to have meant the competition of pleasures equally present in imagination …
13. Responsibility for evil, then (with its conditions, blame, punishment, and remorse) supposes that a man has gone wrong in the comparison of present with future pleasure or pain, having had the chance of going right. Upon this we must remark that as moving desire—and it is the determination of desire that is here in question—NO pleasure can be present in the sense of actual enjoyment, or (in Hume’s language) as ‘impression,’ but only in memory or imagination, as ‘idea.’ Otherwise desire would not be desire. It would not be that uneasiness which, according to Locke, implies the absence of good, and alone moves action. On the other hand, to imagination EVERY pleasure must be present that is to act as motive at all. In whatever sense, then, pleasure, as pleasure, i.e. as undetermined by conceptions, can properly be said to move desire, every pleasure is equally present and equally future. [1] For man, if he only felt and retained his feelings in memory, or recalled them in imagination, the only difference among the imagined pleasures which solicit his desires, other than difference of intensity, would lie in the imagined pains with which each may have become associated. One pleasure might be imagined in association with a greater amount of the pain of waiting than another. In that sense, and only in that, could one be distinguished from the other as a future pleasure from a present one. According as the greater imagined intensity of the future pleasure did or did not outweigh the imagined pain of waiting for it, the scale of desire would turn one way or the other. Or with one pleasure, imagined as more intense than another, might be associated an expectation of a greater amount of pain to be ‘drawn after it.’ Here, again, the question would be whether the greater imagined intensity of pleasure would have the more effect in exciting desire, or the greater amount of imagined sequent pain in quenching it—a question only to be settled by the action which results. In whatever sense it is true of the ‘present pleasure or pain,’ that it is really just as it appears, it is equally true of the future. Whenever the determination of desire is in question, the statement that present pleasure is just as it appears must mean that the pleasure present in imagination is so, and in this sense all motive pleasures are equally so present. Undoubtedly the pleasure associated with the pain of prolonged expectancy might turn out greater, and that associated with sequent pain less, than was imagined; but so might a pleasure not thus associated. Of every pleasure alike it is as true, that while it is imagined it is just as it is imagined, as that while felt it is just as it is felt; and if man only felt and imagined, there would be no more reason why he should hold himself accountable for his imaginations than for his feelings. Whatever pleasure was most attractive in imagination would determine desire, and, through it, action, which would be the only measure of the amount of the attraction. It would not indeed follow because an action was determined by the pleasure most attractive in imagination, that the ensuing pleasure in actual enjoyment would be greater than might have been attained by a different action—though it would be very hard to show the contrary—but it would follow that the man attained the greatest pleasure of which his nature was capable. There would be no reason why he should blame himself, or be blamed by others, for the result.
[1] It is noticeable that when Locke takes to distinguishing the pleasures that move desire into present and future, he speaks as if the future pleasure alone were an absent good, in contradiction to his previous view that every object of desire is an absent good. (Cf. sec. 65 with sec. 57 of cap. 21.)
… and this could give no ground for responsibility. In order to do so, it must be understood as implying determination by conception of self.
14. Thus on Locke’s supposition, that desire is only moved by pleasure—which must mean imagined pleasure, since pleasure, determined by conceptions, is excluded by the supposition that pleasure alone is the ultimate motive, and pleasure in actual enjoyment is no longer desired—the ‘suspense of desire,’ that he speaks of, can only mean an interval, during which a competition of imagined pleasures (one associated with more, another with less, of sequent or antecedent pain) is still going on, and none has become finally the strongest motive. Of such suspense it is unmeaning to say that a man has ‘the power of it,’ or that, when it terminates in an action which does not produce so much pleasure as another might have done, it is because the man ‘has vitiated his palate,’ and that therefore he must be ‘answerable to himself’ for the consequences. This language really implies that pleasures, instead of being ultimate ends, are determined to be ends through reference to an object beyond them which the man himself constitutes; that it is only through his conception of self that every pleasure—not indeed best pleases him, or is most attractive in imagination—but becomes his personal good. It may be that he identifies his personal good with the pleasure most attractive in imagination; but a pleasure so identified is quite a different motive from a pleasure simply as imagined. It is no longer mere pleasure that the man seeks, but self-satisfaction through the pleasure. The same consciousness of self, which sets him on the act, continues through the act and its consequences, carrying with it the knowledge (commonly called the ‘voice of conscience’) that it is to himself, as the ultimate motive, that the act and its consequences, whether in the shape of natural pains or civil penalties, are due—a knowledge which breeds remorse, and, through it, the possibility of a better mind. Thus, when Locke finds the ground of responsibility in a man’s power of suspending his desire till he has considered whether the act, to which it inclines him, is of a kind to make him happy or no, the value of the explanation lies in the distinction which it may be taken to imply, but which Locke could not consistently admit, between the imagination of pleasure and the conception of self as a permanent subject of happiness, by reference to which an imagined pleasure becomes a strongest motive. It is not really as involving a comparison between imagined pleasures, but as involving the consideration whether the greatest imagined pleasure will be the best for one in the long run, that the suspense of desire establishes the responsibility of man. Even if we admitted with Locke that nothing entered into the consideration but an estimate of ‘future pleasures’—and Locke, it will be observed, by supposing the estimate to include ‘pleasures of a sort we are unacquainted with,’ [1] which is as much of a contradiction as to suppose a man influenced by unfelt feelings, renders this restriction unmeaning—still to be determined by the consideration whether something is good for me on the whole is to be determined, not by the imagination of pleasure, but by the conception of self, though it be of self only as a subject to be pleased.
[1] Cap. 21, sec. 65. He has specially in view the pleasures of ‘another life’, which ‘being intended for a state of happiness, must certainly be agreeable to every one’s wish and desire: could we suppose their relishes as different there as they are here, yet the manna in heaven will suit every one’s palate.’
Locke finds moral freedom in necessity of pursuing happiness.
15. The mischief is that, though his language implies this distinction, he does not himself understand it. ‘The care of ourselves,’ he tells us, ‘that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty. The stronger ties we have to an unalterable pursuit of happiness in general, which is our greatest good, and which, as such, our desires always follow, the more are we free from any necessary determination of our will to any particular action, till we have examined whether it has a tendency to, or is inconsistent with, our real happiness.’ [1] But he does not see that the rationale of the freedom, thus paradoxically, though truly, placed in the strength of a tie, lies in that determination by the conception of self to which the ‘unalterable pursuit of happiness’ is really equivalent. To him it is not as one mode among others in which that self-determination appears, but simply in itself, that the consideration of what is for our real happiness is the ‘foundation of our liberty,’ and the consideration itself is no more than a comparison between imagined pleasures and pains. Hence to a reader who refuses to read into Locke an interpretation which he does not himself supply, the range of moral liberty must seem as narrow as its nature is ambiguous. As to its range, the greater part of our actions, and among them those which we are apt to think our best, are not and could not be preceded by any consideration whether they are for our real happiness or no. In truth, they result from a character which the conception of self has rendered possible, or express an interest in objects of which this conception is the condition, and for that reason they represent a will self-determined and free; but they do not rest on the foundation which Locke calls ‘the necessary foundation of our liberty.’ As to the nature of this liberty, the reader, who takes Locke at his word, would find himself left to choose between the view of it as the condition of a mind ‘suspended’ between rival presentations of the pleasant, and the equally untenable view of it as that ‘liberty of indifference,’ which Locke himself is quite ready to deride—as consisting in a choice prior to desire, which determines what the desire shall be. [2]
[1] Cap. 21, sec. 51.
[2] Cf. the passage in sec. 56: ‘When he has once chosen it, and thereby it is become part of his happiness, it raises desire,’ &c. (Cf. also sec. 43 sub fin.)
If an action is moved by desire for an object, Locke asks no questions about origin of the object: But what is to be said of actions, which we only do because we ought?
16. This ambiguous deliverance about moral freedom, it must be observed, is the necessary result on a mind, having too strong a practical hold on life to tamper with human responsibility, of a doctrine which denies the originativeness of thought, and in consequence cannot consistently allow any motive to desire, but the image of a past pleasure or pain. The full logical effect of the doctrine, however, does not appear in Locke, because, with his way of taking any desire of which the satisfaction produces pleasure to have pleasure for its object, he never comes in sight of the question how the manifold objects of actual human interest are possible for a being who only feels and retains, or combines, his feelings. An action moved by love of country, love of fame, love of a friend, love of the beautiful, would cause him no more difficulty than one moved by desire for the renewal of some sensual enjoyment, or for that maintenance of health which is the condition of such enjoyment in the future. If pressed about them, we may suppose that—availing himself of the language probably current in the philosophic society in which he lived, though it first became generally current in England through the writings of his quasi-pupil, Shaftesbury—he would have said that he found in his breast affections for public good, as well as for self-good, the satisfaction of which gave pleasure, and to which his doctrine, that pleasure is the ‘object of desire in general,’ was accordingly applicable. The question—of what feelings or combinations of feelings are the objects which excite these several desires copies?—it does not occur to him to ask. It is only when a class of actions presents itself for which a motive in the way of desire or aversion is not readily assignable that any difficulty arises, and then it is a difficulty which the assignment of such a motive, without any question asked as to its possibility for a merely feeling and imagining subject, is thought sufficiently to dispose of. Such a class of actions is that of which we say that we ‘ought’ to do them, even when we are not compelled and had rather not. We ought, it is generally admitted, to keep our promises, even when it is inconvenient to us to do so and no punishment could overtake us if we did not. We ought to be just even in ways that the law does not prescribe, and when we are beyond its ken; and that, too, in dealing with men towards whom we have no inclination to be generous. We ought even—so at least Locke ‘on the authority of Revelation’ would have said—to forgive injuries which we cannot forget, and if not ‘to love our enemies’ in the literal sense, which may be an impossibility, yet to act as if we did. To what motive are such actions to be assigned?
Their object is pleasure, but pleasure given not by nature but by law.
17. ‘To desire for pleasure or aversion from pain,’ Locke would answer, ‘but a pleasure and pain other than the natural consequences of acts and attached to them by some law.’ This is the result of his enquiry into ‘Moral Relations’ (Book II., chap. 28). Good and evil, he tells us, being ‘nothing but pleasure and pain, moral good or evil is only the conformity or disagreement of our actions to some law, whereby good or evil, i.e., pleasure or pain, is drawn on us by the will and power of the law-maker.’ All law according to its ‘true nature’ is a rule set to the actions of others by an intelligent being, having ‘power to reward the compliance with, and punish deviation from, his rule by some good and evil that is not the natural product and consequence of the action itself; for that, being a natural convenience or inconvenience, would operate of itself without a law.’ Of such law there are three sorts. 1. Divine Law, ‘promulgated to men by the light of nature or voice of revelation, by comparing their actions to which they judge whether, as duties or sins, they are like to procure them happiness or misery from the hands of the Almighty.’ 2. Civil Law, ‘the rule set by the Commonwealth to the actions of those who belong to it,’ reference to which decides ‘whether they be criminal or no.’ 3. ‘The law of opinion or reputation,’ according to agreement or disagreement with which actions are reckoned ‘virtues or vices.’ This law may or may not coincide with the divine law. So far as it does, virtues and vices are really, what they are always supposed to be, actions ‘in their own nature ‘severally right or wrong. It is not as really right or wrong, however, but only as esteemed so, that an act is virtuous or vicious, and thus ‘the common measure of virtue and vice is the approbation or dislike, praise or blame, which by a tacit consent establishes itself in the several societies, tribes, and clubs of men in the world, whereby several actions come to find credit or disgrace among them, according to the judgment, maxims, or fashions of the place.’ Each sort of law has its own ‘enforcement in the way of good and evil.’ That of the civil law is obvious. That of the Divine Law lies in the pleasures and pains of ‘another world,’ which (we have to suppose) render actions ‘in their own nature good and evil.’ That of the third sort of law lies in those consequences of social reputation and dislike which are stronger motives to most men than are the rewards and punishments either of God or the magistrate (chap. 28, §§ 5-12).
Conformity to law not the moral good, but a means to it.
18. ‘Moral goodness or evil,’ Locke concludes, ‘is the conformity or non-conformity of any action’ to one or other of the above rules (§ 14). But such conformity or non-conformity is not a feeling, pleasant or painful, at all. If, then, the account of the good as consisting in pleasure, of which the morally good is a particular form, is to be adhered to, we must suppose that, when moral goodness is said to be conformity to law, it is so called merely with reference to the specific means of attaining that pleasure in which moral good consists. Not the conception of conformity to law, but the imagination of a certain pleasure, will determine the desire that moves the moral act, as every other desire. The distinction between the moral act and an act judiciously done for the sake, let us say, of some pleasure of the palate, will lie only in the channel through which comes the pleasure that each is calculated to obtain. If the motive of an act done for the sake of the pleasure of eating differs from the motive of an act done for the sake of sexual pleasure on account of the difference of the channels through which the pleasures are severally obtained, in that sense only can the motive of either of these acts, upon Locke’s principles, be taken to differ from the motive of an act morally done. The explanation, then, of the acts not readily assignable to desire or aversion, of which we say that we only do them because we ‘ought,’ has been found. They are so far of a kind with all actions done to obtain or avoid what Locke calls ‘future’ pleasures or pains that the difficulty of assigning a motive for them only arises from the fact that their immediate result is not an end but a means. They differ from these, however, inasmuch as the pleasure they draw after them is not their ‘natural consequence,’ any more than the pain attaching to a contrary act would be, but is only possible through the action of God, the magistrate, or society in some of its forms.
Hume has to derive from ‘impressions’ the objects which Locke took for granted.
19. After the above examination we can easily anticipate the points on which a candid and clear-headed man, who accepted the principles of Locke’s doctrine, would see that it needed explanation and development. If all action is determined by impulse to remove the most pressing uneasiness, as consisting in desire for the greatest pleasure of which the agent is at the time capable; if this, again, means desire for the renewal of some ‘impression’ previously experienced, and all impressions are either those of sense or derived from them, how are we to account for those actual objects of human interest and pursuit which seem far removed from any combination of animal pleasures or of the means thereto, and specially for that class of actions determined, as Locke says, by expectation of pain or pleasure other than the ‘natural consequence’ of the act, to which the term ‘moral’ is properly applied? Hume, as we have seen, [1] in accepting Locke’s principles, clothes them in a more precise terminology, marking the distinction between the feeling as originally felt and the same as returning in memory or imagination as that between ‘impression and idea,’ and excluding original ideas of reflection. ‘An impression first strikes upon the senses, and makes us perceive heat or cold, thirst or hunger, pleasure or pain, of some kind or other. Of this impression there is a copy taken by the mind, which remains after the impression ceases; and this we call an idea. This idea of pleasure or pain, when it returns upon the soul, produces the new impressions of desire and aversion, hope and fear, which may properly be called impressions of reflection, because derived from it’ (a). ‘These, again, are copied by the memory and imagination, and become ideas; which perhaps in their turn give rise to other impressions’ (b). Thus the impressions of reflection, marked (a), will be determined by ideas copied from impressions of sense. If desires, they will be desires for the renewal either of a pleasure incidental to the satisfaction of appetite, or of a pleasant sight or sound, a sweet taste or smell. These desires and their satisfactions will again be copied in ideas, but how can the impressions (b) to which these ideas give rise be other than desires for the renewal of the original animal pleasures? How do they come to be desires as unlike these as are the motives which actuate not merely the saint or the philanthropist, but the ordinary good neighbour or honest citizen or head of a family?
[1] General Introd., Vol. I, par. 195
Questions which he found at issue, a. Is virtue interested? b. What is conscience?
20. During the interval between the publication of Locke’s essay and the ‘Treatise on Human Nature’ there had been much writing on ethical questions in English. The effect of this on Hume is plain enough. He writes with reference to current controversy, and in the moral part of the treatise probably had the views of Clarke, Shaftesbury, Butler, and Hutcheson more consciously before him than Locke’s. This does not interfere, however, with the propriety of affiliating him in respect of his views on morals, no less than on knowledge, directly to Locke, whose principles and method were in the main accepted by all the moralists of that age. His characteristic lies in his more consistent application of these, and the effect of current controversy upon him was chiefly to show him the line which this application must take. It was a controversy which turned almost wholly on two points; (a) the distinction between ‘interested and disinterested,’ selfish and unselfish affections; (b) the origin and nature of that ‘law,’ relation to which, according to Locke, constitutes our action ‘virtuous or vicious.’ In the absence of any notion of thought but as a faculty which puts together simple ideas into complex ones, of reason but as a faculty which calculates means and perceives the agreement of ideas mediately, it could have but one end.
Hobbes’ answer to first question,
21. By the generation in which Hume was bred the issue as to the possible disinterestedness of action was supposed to lie between the view of Hobbes and that of Shaftesbury. Hobbes’ moral doctrine had not been essentially different from Locke’s, but he had been offensively explicit on questions which Locke left open to more genial views than his doctrine logically justified. Each started from the position that the ultimate motive to every action can only be the imagination of one’s own pleasure or pain, and neither properly left room for the determination of desire by a conceived object as distinct from remembered pleasure. But while Locke, as we have seen, illogically took for granted desires so determined, and thus made it possible for a disciple to admit any benevolent desires as motives on the strength of the pleasure which they produce when satisfied, Hobbes had been more severe in his method, and had explained every desire, of which the direct motive could not be taken to be the renewal of some animal pleasure, as desire either for the power in oneself to command such pleasure at will or for the pleasure incidental to the contemplation of the signs of such power. Hence his peculiar treatment of compassion and the other ‘social affections,’ which it is easier to show to be untrue to the facts of the case than to be other than the proper consequence of principles which Locke had rendered orthodox. [1] The counter-doctrine of Shaftesbury holds water just so far as it involves the rejection of the doctrine that pleasure is the sole ultimate motive. It becomes confused just because its author had no definite theory of reason, as constitutive of objects, that could justify this rejection.
[1] See ‘Leviathan,’ part 1, chap. 6.
Counter-doctrine of Shaftesbury. Vice is selfishness: But no clear account of selfishness.
22. He begins with a doctrine that directly contradicts Locke’s identification of the good with pleasure, and of the morally good with pleasure occurring in a particular way, ‘In a sensible creature that which is not done through any affection at all makes neither good nor ill in the nature of that creature; who then only is supposed good, when the good or ill of the system to which he has relation is the immediate object of some passion or affection moving him.’ [1] This, it will be seen, as against Locke, implies that the good of a man’s action lies not in any pleasure sequent upon it to him, but in the nature of the affection from which it proceeds; and that the goodness of this affection depends on its being determined by an object wholly different from imagined pleasure—the conceived good of a system to which the man has relation, i.e., of human society, which in Shaftesbury’s language is the ‘public’ as distinct from the ‘private’ system. It is not enough that an action should result in good to this system; it must proceed from affection for it. ‘Whatever is done which happens to be advantageous to the species through an affection merely towards self-good does not imply any more goodness in the creature than as the affection itself is good. Let him in any particular act ever so well; if at the bottom it be that selfish affection alone which moves him, he is in himself still vicious.’ [2] Here, then, we seem to have a clear theory of moral evil as consisting in selfish, of moral good as consisting in unselfish affections. But what exactly constitutes a selfish affection, according to Shaftesbury? The answer that first suggests itself, is that as the unselfish affection is an affection for public good, so a selfish one is an affection for ‘self-good,’ the good of the ‘private system.’ Shaftesbury, however, does not give this answer. ‘Affection for private good’ with him is not, as such, selfish; it is so only when ‘excessive’ and ‘inconsistent with the interest of the species or public.’ [3] This qualification seems at once to efface the clear line of distinction previously drawn. It puts ‘self-affection’ on a level with public affection which, according to Shaftesbury, may equally err on the side of excess. It implies that an affection for self-good, if only it be advantageous to the species, may be good; which is just what had been previously denied. And not only so; although, when the self-affections are under view, they are only allowed a qualified goodness in virtue of their indirect contribution to the good of the species, yet conversely, the superiority of the affections, which have this latter good for their object, is urged specially on the ground of the greater amount of happiness or ‘self-good’ which they produce.
[1] ‘Inquiry concerning Virtue,’ Book I. part 2, sec. 1.
[2] Ibid., Book I., part 2, sec. 2.
[3] Ibid., Book II., part 1, sec. 3.
Confusion in his notions of self-good and public good: Is all living for pleasure, or only too much of it, selfish?
23. The truth is that the notions which Shaftesbury attached to the terms ‘affection for self-good’ and ‘affection for public good’ were not such as allowed of a consistent opposition between them. They can only be so opposed if, on the one hand, self-good is identified with pleasure; and on the other, affection for public good is carefully distinguished from desire for that sort of pleasure of which the gratification of others is a condition. But with Shaftesbury, affections for self-good do not represent merely those desires for pleasure determined by self-consciousness—for pleasure presented as one’s personal good—which can alone be properly reckoned sources of moral evil. They include equally mere natural appetites—hunger, the sexual impulse, &c.—which are morally neutral, and they do not clearly exclude any desire for an object which a man has so ‘made his own’ as to find his happiness—‘self-enjoyment’ or ‘self-good,’ according to Shaftesbury’s language—in attaining it, though it be as remote from imagined pleasure as possible. [1] On the other hand, ‘affections for public good,’ as he describes them, are not restricted to such desires for the good of others as are irrespective of pleasure to self. They include not only such natural instincts as ‘parental kindness and concern for the nurture and propagation of the young,’ which, morally, at any rate, are not to be distinguished from the appetites reckoned as affections for self-good, but also desires for sympathetic pleasure—the pleasure to oneself which arises on consciousness that another is pleased. Shaftesbury’s special antipathy, indeed, is the doctrine that benevolent affections are interested in the sense of having for their object a pleasure to oneself, apart from and beyond the pleasure of the person whom they move us to please; but unless he regards them as desires for the pleasure which the subject of them experiences in the pleasure of another, there is no purpose in enlarging, as he does with much unction, on the special pleasantness of the pleasures which they produce. With such vagueness in his notions of what he meant by affections for ‘self-good’ and for ‘public good,’ it is not strange that he should have failed to give any tenable account of the selfishness in which he conceived moral evil to consist. He could not apply such a term of reproach to the ‘self-affections’ in general, without condemning as selfish the man who ‘finds his own happiness in doing good,’ and who is in truth indistinguishable from one to whom ‘affection for public good’ has become, as we say, the law of his being. Nor could he identify selfishness, as he should have done, with all living for pleasure without a more complete rupture than he was capable of with the received doctrine of his time and without bringing affection for public good, in the form in which it was most generally conceived, and which was, at any rate, one of the forms under which he presented it to himself—as desire, namely, for sympathetic pleasure—into the same condemnation. His way out of the difficulty is, as we have seen, in violation of his own principle to find the characteristic of selfishness not in the motive of any affection but in its result; not in the fact that a man’s desire has his own good for its object, which is true of one to whom his neighbour’s good is as his own, nor in the fact that it has pleasure for its object, which Shaftesbury, as the child of his age, could scarcely help thinking was the case with every desire, but in the fact that it is stronger than is ‘consistent with the interest of the species or public.’
[1] Book II., part 2, sec. 2.
What have Butler and Hutcheson to say about it? Chiefly that affections terminate upon their objects. But this does not exclude the view that all desire is for pleasure.
24. Neither Butler nor Hutcheson [1] can claim to have carried the ethical controversy much beyond the point at which Shaftesbury left it. Each took for granted that the object of the ‘self-affection’ was necessarily one’s own happiness, and neither made any distinction between living for happiness and living for pleasure. They could not then identify selfishness with the living for pleasure without condemning the self-affection, and with, it the best man’s pursuit of his own highest good in the service of others, altogether as evil. Nor in the absence of any better theory of the object of the self-affection could the social affections, which, according to Butler, are subject in the developed man to the direction of self-love, escape the suggestion that they are one mode of the general desire for pleasure. Butler and Hutcheson, indeed, are quite clear that they are ‘disinterested’ in the sense of ‘terminating upon their objects.’ [2] This means, what is sufficiently obvious when once pointed out, (a) that a benevolent desire is not a desire for that particular pleasure, or rather ‘removal of uneasiness,’ which shall ensue when it is satisfied, and (b) that it cannot originally arise from the general desire for happiness, since this creates no pleasures but merely directs us to the pursuit of objects found pleasant independently of it, and thus, if it directs us to benevolent acts, presupposes a pleasure previously found in them. This, however, as Butler points out, is equally true of all particular desires whatever—of those styled self-regarding, no less than of the social—and if it is not incompatible with the former being desires for pleasure, no more is it with the latter being so. Much confusion on the matter, it may be truly said, arises from the loose way in which the words ‘affection’ and ‘passion’ are used by Butler and his contemporaries, not excluding Hume himself, alike for appetite, desire, and emotion. In every case a pleasure other than satisfaction of desire must have been experienced before desire can be excited by the imagination of it. A pleasure incidental to the satisfaction of appetite must have been experienced before imagination of it could excite the desire of the glutton. In like manner, social affection, as desire, cannot be first excited by the pleasure which shall arise when it is satisfied; it must previously exist as the condition of that pleasure being experienced; but it does not follow that it is other than a desire for an imagined pleasure, for that sympathetic pleasure in the pleasure of another in which the social affection as emotion consists. Now though Butler and Hutcheson sufficiently showed that it is no other pleasure than this which is the original object of benevolent desires, they did not attempt to show that it is not this; and failing such an attempt, the received doctrine that the object of all desire, social and self-regarding alike, is pleasure of one sort or another, would naturally be taken to stand. This admitted, there can be nothing in the fact that a certain pleasure depends on the pleasure of another, and that a certain other does not, to entitle an action moved by desire for the former sort of pleasure to be called unselfish in the way of praise, and one moved by desire for the latter sort selfish in the way of reproach. The motive—desire for his own pleasure—is the same to the doer in both cases. The distinction between the acts can only lie in that which Shaftesbury had said could not constitute moral good or ill—in the consequences by which society judges of them, but which do not form the motive of the agent. In other words, it will be a distinction fixed by that law of opinion or reputation, in which Locke had found the common measure of virtue and vice, though he had not entered on the question of the considerations by which that law is formed.
[1] The works of Hutcheson, published before Hume’s treatise was written, and which strongly affected it, were the ‘Enquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue’ (1725), and the ‘Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections’ (1728). In what follows I wrote with direct reference to his posthumous work, not published till after Hume’s treatise, but which only reproduces more systematically his earlier views.
[2] See in Preface to Butler’s Sermons, the part relating to Sermon XI., ‘Besides, the only idea of an interested pursuit’ &c.; also the early part of Sermon XI., ‘Every man hath a general desire,’ &c.
Of moral goodness Butler’s account circular: Hutcheson’s inconsistent with his doctrine that reason gives no end.
25. Such a conclusion would lie ready to hand for such a reader of Butler and Hutcheson as we may suppose Hume to have been, but it is needless to say that it is not that at which they themselves arrive. Butler, indeed, distinctly refuses to identify moral good and evil respectively with disinterested and interested action, [1] but neither does he admit that desire for pleasure or aversion from pain is the uniform motive of action in such a way as to compel the conclusion that moral good and ill represent a distinction, not of motives, but of consequences of action contemplated by the onlooker. An act is morally good, according to him, when it is approved by the ‘reflex faculty of approbation,’ bad when it is disapproved, but what it is that this ‘faculty’ approves he never distinctly tells us. The good is what ‘conscience’ approves, and conscience is what approves the good—that is the circle out of which he never escapes. If we insist on extracting from him any more satisfactory conclusion as to the object of moral approbation, it must be that it is the object which ‘self-love’ pursues, i.e., the greatest happiness of the individual, a conclusion which in some places he certainly adopts. [2] Hutcheson, on the other hand, gives a plain definition of the object which this faculty approves. It consists in ‘affections tending to the happiness of others and the moral perfection of the mind possessing them.’ If in this definition by ‘tending to’ may be understood ‘of which the motive is’—an interpretation which the general tenor of Hutcheson’s view would justify—it implies in effect that the morally good lies in desires of which the object is not pleasure. That desire for moral perfection, if there is such a thing, is not desire for pleasure is obvious enough; nor could desire for the happiness of others be taken to be so except through confusion between determination by the conception of another’s good, to which his apparent pleasure is rightly or wrongly taken as a guide, and by the imagination of a pleasure to be experienced by oneself in sympathy with the pleasure of another. Nor is it doubtful that Hutcheson himself, though he might have hesitated to identify moral evil, as selfishness, with the living for pleasure, yet understood by the morally good the living for objects wholly different from pleasure. The question is whether the recognition of such motives is logically compatible with his doctrine that reason gives no ends, but is only a ‘subservient power’ of calculating means. If feeling, undetermined by thought or reason, can alone supply motives, and of feeling, thus undetermined, nothing can be said but that it is pleasant or painful, what motive can there be but imagination of one’s own pleasure or pain—one’s own, for if imagination is merely the return of feeling in fainter form, no one can imagine any feeling, any more than he can originally feel it, except as his own?
[1] See preface to Sermons (about four pages from the end in most editions):-‘The goodness or badness of actions does not arise hence,’ &c. The conclusion he there arrives at is that a good action is one which ‘becomes such creatures as we are’; and this, read in the light of the second sermon, must be understood to mean an action ‘suitable to our whole nature,’ as containing a principle of ‘reflex approbation.’ In other words, the good action is so because approved by conscience.
[2] See a passage towards the end of Sermon III., ‘Reasonable self-love and conscience are the chief,’ &c. &c.; also a passage towards the end of Sermon XI., ‘Let it be allowed though virtue,’ &c. &c.
Source of the moral judgment: Received notion of reason incompatible with true view. Shaftesbury’s doctrine of rational affection; spoilt by doctrine of ‘moral sense’
26. The work of reason in constituting the moral judgment (‘I ought’), as well as the moral motive (‘I must, because I ought’), could not find due recognition in an age which took its notion of reason from Locke. The only theory then known which found the source of moral distinctions in reason was Clarke’s, and Clarke’s notion of reason was essentially the same as that which appears in Locke’s account of demonstrative knowledge. [1] It was in truth derived from the procedure of mathematics, and only applicable to the comparison of quantities. Clarke talks loftily about the Eternal Reason of things, but by this he means nothing definite except the laws of proportion, and when he finds the virtue of an act to consist in conformity to this Eternal Reason, the inevitable rejoinder is the question—Between what quantities is this virtue a proportion? [2] In Shaftesbury first appears a doctrine of moral sense. Over and above the social and self-regarding affections proper to a ‘sensible’ creature, the characteristic of man is a ‘rational affection’ for goodness as consisting in the proper adjustment of the two orders of ‘sensible’ affection. This rational affection is not only a possible motive to action—it is the only motive that can make that character good of which human action is the expression; for with Shaftesbury, though a balance of the social and self-affections constitutes the goodness of those affections, yet the man is only good as actuated by affection for this goodness, and ‘should the sensible affections stand ever so much amiss, yet if they prevail not because of those other rational affections spoken of, the person is esteemed virtuous.’ [3] Such a notion, it is clear, if it had met with a psychology answering it, had only to be worked out in order to become Kant’s doctrine of the rational will as determined by reverence for law; but Shaftesbury had no such psychology, nor, with his aristocratic indifference to completeness of system, does he seem ever to have felt the want of it. He never asked himself what precisely was the theory of reason implied in the admission of an affection ‘rational’ in the sense, not that reason calculates the means to its satisfaction, but that it is determined by an object only possible for a rational as distinct from a ‘sensible’ creature; and just because he did not do so, he slipped into adaptations to the current view of the good as pleasure and of desire as determined by the pleasure incidental to its own satisfaction. Thus, to a disciple, who wished to extract from Shaftesbury a more definite system than Shaftesbury had himself formed, the ‘rational affection’ would become desire for a specific feeling of pleasure supposed to arise on the view of good actions as exhibiting a proper balance between social and self-regarding affections. This pleasure is the ‘moral sense,’ [4] with which Shaftesbury’s name has become specially associated, while the doctrine of rational affection, with which he certainly himself connected it, but which it essentially vitiates, has been forgotten.
[1] See Clarke’s Boyle Lectures, Vol. II., proposition 1. The germ of Clarke’s doctrine of morals is to be found in Locke’s occasional assimilation of moral to mathematical truth and certainty. (Cf. Essay, Book IV, ch. 4, sec. 7, and ch. 12, sec. 8).
[2] Cf. Hume, Vol. II., p. 238. [Book III., part I., sec. I.]
[3] ‘Inq. concerning Virtue,’ Book I., pt. 2. sec. 4. Cf. Sec. 3 sub init.
[4] In using the term ‘moral sense,’ Shaftesbury himself, no doubt, meant to convey the notion that the moral faculty was one of ‘intuition,’ in Locke’s sense of the word, as opposed to reason, the faculty of demonstration, rather than that it was a susceptibility of pleasure and pain.
Consequences of the latter.
27. That doctrine is of value as maintaining that those actions only are morally good of which the rational affection is the motive, in the sense that they spring from a character which this affection has fashioned. But if the rational affection is desire for the pleasure of moral sense, we find ourselves in the contradiction of supposing that the only motive which can produce good acts is one that cannot operate till after the good acts have been done. It is desire for a pleasure which yet can only have been experienced as a consequence of the previous existence of the desire. Shaftesbury himself, indeed, treats the moral sense of pleasure in the contemplation of good actions as a pleasure in the view of the right adjustment between the social and self-affections. If, however, on the strength of this, we suppose that certain actions are first done, not from the rational affection, but yet good, and that then remembrance of the pleasure found in the view of their goodness, exciting desire, becomes motive to another set of acts which are thus done from rational affection, we contradict his statement that only the rational affection forms the goodness of man, and are none the nearer to an account of what does form it. To say that it is the ‘right adjustment’ of the two orders of affection tells us nothing. Except as suggesting an analogy from the world of art, really inapplicable, but by which Shaftesbury was much influenced, this expression means no more than that goodness is a good state of the affections. From such a circle the outlet most consistent with the spirit of that philosophy, which had led Shaftesbury himself to bring down the rational affection to the level of a desire for pleasure, would lie in the notion that a state of the affections is good in proportion as it is productive of pleasure; which again would suggest the question whether the specific pleasure of moral sense itself, the supposed object of rational affection, is more than pleasure in that indefinite anticipation of pleasure which the view of affections so ordered tends to raise in us.
Is an act done for ‘virtue’s sake’ done for pleasure of moral sense?
28. Here, again, neither Butler nor Hutcheson, while they avoid the most obvious inconsistency of Shaftesbury’s doctrine, do much for its positive development. With each the ‘moral faculty,’ though it is said to approve and disapprove, is still a ‘sense’ or ‘sentiment,’ a specific susceptibility of pleasure in the contemplation of goodness; and each again recognises a ‘reflex affection’ for—a desire to have—the goodness of which the view conveys this pleasure. But they neither have the merit of stating so explicitly as Shaftesbury does that this rational affection alone constitutes the goodness of man, as man; nor, on the other hand, do they lapse, as he does, into the representation of it as a desire for the pleasure which the view of goodness causes. Butler, indeed, having no account to give of the goodness which is approved or morally pleasing, but the fact that it is so pleasing, could logically have nothing to say against the view that this reflex affection is merely a desire for this particular sort of pleasure; but by representing it as equivalent in its highest form to the love of God, to the longing of the soul after Him as the perfectly good, he in effect gives it a wholly different character. Hutcheson, by his definition of the object of moral approbation, [1] which is also a definition of the object of the reflex affection, is fairly entitled to exclude, as he does, along with the notion that the goodness which we morally approve is the quality of exciting the pleasure of such approval, the notion that ‘affection for goodness’ means desire for this or any other pleasure. But, in spite of his express rejection of this view, the question will still return, how either a faculty of consciousness of which we only know that it is ‘a kind of taste or relish,’ or a desire from the determination of which reason is expressly excluded, can have any other object than pleasure or pain.
[1] See above, sec. 25.
Hume excludes every object of desire but pleasure.
29. In contrast with these well-meant efforts to derive that distinction between the selfish and unselfish, between the pleasant and the morally good, which the Christian conscience requires, from principles that do not admit of it, Hume’s system has the merit of relative consistency. He sees that the two sides of Locke’s doctrine—one that thought originates nothing, but takes its objects as given in feeling, the other that the good which is object of desire is pleasant feeling—are inseparable. Hence he decisively rejects every notion of rational or unselfish affections, which would imply that they are other than desires for pleasure; of virtue, which would imply that it antecedently determines, rather than is constituted by, the specific pleasure of moral sense; and of this pleasure itself, which would imply that anything but the view of tendencies to produce pleasure can excite it. But here his consistency stops. The principle which forbade him to admit any object of desire but pleasure is practically forgotten in his account of the sources of pleasure, and its being so forgotten is the condition of the desire for pleasure being made plausibly to serve as a foundation for morals. It is the assumption of pleasures determined by objects only possible for reason, made in the treatise on the Passions, that prepares the way for the rejection of reason, as supplying either moral motive or moral standard, in the treatise on Morals.
His account of ‘direct passions’: All desire is for pleasure.
30. ‘The passions’ is Hume’s generic term for ‘impressions of reflection’—appetites, desires, and emotions alike. He divides them into two main orders, ‘direct and indirect,’ both ‘founded on pain and pleasure.’ The direct passions are enumerated as ‘desire and aversion, grief and joy, hope and fear, along with volition’ or will. These ‘arise from good and evil’ (which are the same as pleasure and pain) ‘most naturally and with least preparation.’ ‘Desire arises from good, aversion from evil, considered simply.’ They become will or volition, ‘when the good may be attained or evil avoided by any action of the mind or body’—will being simply ‘the internal impression we feel and are conscious of when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body or new perception of our mind.’ ‘When good is certain or probable it produces joy’ (which is described also as a pleasure produced by pleasure or by the imagination of pleasure); ‘when it is uncertain, it gives rise to hope.’ To these the corresponding opposites are grief and fear. We must suppose them to be distinguished from desire and aversion as being what he elsewhere calls ‘pure emotions’; such as do not, like desires, ‘immediately excite us to action.’ Given such an immediate impression of pleasure or pain as excites a ‘distinct passion’ of one or other of these kinds, and supposing it to ‘arise from an object related to ourselves or others,’ it excites mediately, through this relation, the new impressions of pride or humility, love or hatred—pride when the object is related to oneself, love when it is related to another person. These are indirect passions. They do not tend to displace the immediate impression which is the condition of their excitement, but being themselves agreeable give it additional force. ‘Thus a suit of fine clothes produces pleasure from their beauty; and this pleasure produces the direct passions, or the impressions of volition and desire. Again, when these clothes are considered as belonging to oneself, the double relation conveys to us the sentiment of pride, which is an indirect passion; and the pleasure which attends that passion returns back to the direct affections, and gives new force to our desire or volition, joy or hope.’ [1]
[1] Vol. II., pp. 214, 215. Cf. pp. 76, 90, 153 and 203. [Book II., part III., sec. IX.; part 1, sec. I; part I., sec. VI.; part II., sec. VI.; part III., sec. VI.]
Yet he admits ‘passions’ which produce pleasure, but proceed not from it
31. Alongside of the unqualified statement that ‘the passions, both direct and indirect, are founded on pain and pleasure,’ and the consequent theory of them, we find the curiously cool admission that ‘beside pain and pleasure, the direct passions frequently arise from a natural impulse or instinct, which is perfectly unaccountable. Of this kind is the desire of punishment to our enemies, and of happiness to our friends; hunger and lust, and a few other bodily appetites. These passions, properly speaking, produce good and evil, and proceed not from them like the other affections.’ [1] In this casual way appears the recognition of that difference of the desire for imagined pleasure from appetite proper on the one side, and on the other from desire determined by reason, which it is the point of Hume’s system to ignore. The question is, how many of the pleasures in which he finds the springs of human conduct are other than products of a desire which is not itself moved by pleasure, or emotions excited by objects which reason constitutes.
[1] P. 215. [Book II., part III., sec. IX.] The passage in the ‘Dissertation on the Passions’ (Vol. IV., ‘Dissertation on the Passions,’ sub init.), which corresponds to the one here quoted, throws light on the relation in which Hume’s later redaction of his theory stands to the earlier, as occasionally disguising, but never removing, its inconsistencies. ‘Some objects, by being naturally conformable or contrary to passion, excite an agreeable or painful sensation, and are thence 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, mensur 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.
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