{264}
OF recent British phenomena in the domain of ethical philosophy,
what is called Utilitarianism is the most notable, certainly the most
noisy. If, indeed, there is anything distinctive in the most recent
tone of philosophic thought and sentiment in this country, apart from
speculations springing out of pure physical science, it is this very
thing, or something that claims close kindred with it. It is talked of
in the streets and commented on in the closet; and numbering, as it
does, amongst its advocates some of the most astute intellects of the
age, it certainly deserves an attentive examination. No doubt its
merits, whatever they be, are likely to fall short of its pretensions;
for never was a system ushered in with a greater flourish of trumpets
and a more stirring consciousness on the part of its promulgators that
a new gospel was being preached which was to save the world at last
from centuries of hereditary mistake. At the watchword of the system,
shot from Edinburgh to Westminster more than a hundred years ago, the
son of a London attorney felt “the scales fall from his eyes;” all
was now clear that had hitherto been dim; a distinct test was revealed
for marking out by a sharp line a domain where, previous to the
arrival of the great discriminator, all {265} had been mere floating
clouds, shifting mists, and aërial hallucinations; the unsubstantial
idealism of Plato and the unreasonable asceticism of the New Testament
were destined at length to disappear; only let schools be established
for the creation of universal intelligence to assert itself by
universal suffrage, and the redemption of the world from imaginary
morality and superstitious sentiment would be complete. This, so far
as my observation has gone, is the sort of tone under the inspiration
of which the doctrine of Utility has been proclaimed to the world; and
that I am not exaggerating but rather understating the self-gratulation
of the school, is evident from the fact that Dr. Southwood Smith, one
of Bentham’s most admiring disciples, actually believed and printed
that his discovery of the principle of utility marked an era in moral
philosophy as important as that achieved for physical science by Sir
Isaac Newton’s discovery of the principle of gravitation. Nor was
Dr. Smith at all singular in this tone of transcendental laudation.
The dogmatism which, as we shall see, was a characteristic feature in
the intellectual character of Bentham, was inherited more or less by
most of his disciples; and the importance which they attribute to
themselves and their own discoveries is only surpassed by the
superciliousness with which they ignore whatever has been done by
their predecessors. This ignoring of the past, indeed, to the best of
my judgment, seems to be the radical defect, not only of the
Benthamites, but of the great body of our British philosophers from
Locke downwards; we do not start from a large and impartial survey of
the inherited results of thought, so much as from some point of local
or {266} sectional prominence; our petty systems are of the nature of
a reaction rather than an architecture, and like all reactions are
one-sided in their direction and extravagant in their estimate of
their own importance. If scholars sometimes make their learning
useless by their ignorance of the present, the men of the present are
not less apt to make their intellectual position ridiculous by
ignoring, misunderstanding, or misrepresenting their relation to the
past;--for a large appreciation of what has been achieved by our
predecessors alone can guarantee a just estimate of the true value of
our own labours. All judgments are comparative; and as Primrose Hill
is a mighty mountain to the boy born within the chime of the Bow
Bells, so Locke and Hume and Bentham may be taken for the greatest
captains of thinking by men to whom Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are
unknown.
The first thing that strikes us in attempting a critical estimate of
Utilitarianism is its name. Names are sometimes attached to systems
accidentally, and in that case need not be curiously analysed; but
when they are deliberately chosen by the propounder of a new theory,
they are significant, and provoke question. “WHY UTILITY
PLEASES” is the heading of one of Hume’s chapters; and the answer
to it simply is, that as Utility consists in the adaptation of means
to ends, and as the recognition of such adaptation is a peculiar
function of reason, it cannot but be that reasonable creatures should
receive pleasure from being affected in a manner so suitable to their
nature. The eyes, as Plotinus says, are susceptible of pleasure from
light, because an impressibility to light is of the essence of their
quality and {267} the idea of their structure;[267.1] so reason is
necessarily pleased with what is reasonable, and utility must please a
creature whose whole energy, when he acts according to his best
nature, is expended in discovering and applying means which shall be
useful to secure certain ends. But the answering of this question does
not advance us one step in moral philosophy; moral philosophy is a
science of ends, not of means--a science of what Aristotle calls the
ἀρχιτεκτονικόν, or supreme τέλος--the ultimate aim. So our new
philosophy has taken as a watchword a term that means nothing by
itself, any more than the terms _plus_ and _minus_ in algebra. To give
the term a meaning, the further question must be put, _Useful for
what?_ and then the old commonplace comes out--Useful for what all men
desire, Happiness, of course; for “all men desire Happiness,
that’s past doubt,” says Locke,[267.2] and Aristotle also, for
that matter; but we do not consult philosophers to hear such truisms.
What then comes next? The truism is put into an antithetic shape, and
we are told as the grand result of the profoundest modern thought that
_the greatest happiness of the greatest number_ is the ultimate
principle of moral science, the pole-star of all social navigation, by
attention to which alone the blinding mists of transcendental
sentiment and the sharp ledges of unnatural asceticism can be avoided.
But is this maxim really in any way worthy of the applause with which
it has been received? May we not well ask, in the first place, _Who
ever {268} doubted it?_ If happiness is desirable, and if man is
naturally a social and sympathetic animal, as all the ancients took
for granted, then the more that can be made to partake of it so much
the better. Of this neither Aristotle nor Plato ever had any doubt.
They wished every country to contain as large a population as was
compatible with the conditions of health; beyond these limits, indeed,
they saw a difficulty, and, to prevent the evil of overpopulation,
were willing to allow certain remedies which, to modern sentiment, may
appear harsh and inhuman; but they never doubted that in a
well-ordered State happiness was the common right of the many, not the
special privilege of the few; and Aristotle in his _Politics_ lays it
down expressly as a reason why oligarchy is to be reckoned among the
worst forms of government, that it assumes that power is to be used
for the interest of the few, not for the good of the many. The famous
Benthamite formula, therefore, can be regarded only as a very
appropriate war-cry for an oppressed democracy fighting against an
insolent oligarchy; to this praise it is justly entitled, and in this
sphere it has no doubt been extensively useful; but as a maxim
pretending to enunciate a fundamental principle of ethical philosophy
it has neither novelty nor pertinence.
The Utilitarian school, therefore, judged by its name, and by its
favourite shibboleth, has no distinctive character; and its chosen
appellation merely shows an utter deficiency of the first principles
of a scientific nomenclature. To say that morality consists in
happiness, falls logically under the same category with the
proposition that a cat is an animal--we {269} knew that; but what we
wish to know is, by what differentiating marks a cat is distinguished
from other animals, and specially from others of the feline family.
Wherein does the special happiness of the creature called Man consist?
Aristotle, to my thinking, answered that question with as much
precision as it ever can be answered, and neither Hume nor Bentham
added anything to his definition. So far as these spokesmen of modern
ethics said that virtue consisted in acting according to reason, as
necessarily involving the greatest happiness of the reasonable being
called Man, they said what was quite true, but nothing that was new;
they merely repeated the Stagirite, putting the element of
εὐδαιμονία into the van, which he had wisely kept in the
rear. So far as they went beyond this, they said what was neither new
nor true, but only a refurbishment of the old doctrine of Epicurus,
that for man, as for beast, pleasure is the only good, and there is no
need of a distinctive phraseology for the happiness of creatures so
essentially the same. What then is the distinctive character of
Utilitarianism, if we fail to discover it in its name? for that the
school, as a matter of fact, does stand on a very distinct basis, and
in an attitude of very decided antagonism to other systems, is
unquestioned. Between Paley, the model churchman of the eighteenth
century, and Bentham, the stereotyped hater of all churchmen,
churches, and creeds, there is no doubt a great gap; still there is a
strong family likeness even between these two extremes of the school;
and the point in which this likeness asserts itself we think may be
best expressed by the phrase EXTERNALISM. From Thomas Hobbes of
Malmesbury {270} down to Alexander Bain of Aberdeen, the morality of
the Utilitarians is a morality in which the moral virtue of the inner
soul is as much as possible denied, and the moral virtue of outward
institutional or other machinery as much as possible asserted. Look
everywhere for the origin of right and wrong--only not in the soul.
The kingdom of heaven, according to the prophets of this gospel, is
not within you, but without. This, if I am not mistaken, is the
keynote which gives a unity and a significance to all the variations
of Utilitarianism from Bentham to Bain. Let us hear it in their own
words: “What one expects to find in an ethical principle is
something that points out some _external_ consideration as a means of
warranting and guiding the internal sentiments of approbation and
disapprobation:” so Bentham. “Conscience is moulded on _external_
authority as its type.” “Utility sets up an _outward_ standard in
the room of an inward, being the substitution of a regard to
_consequences_ for a mere _unreasoning sentiment_ or feeling:” so
Bain. “The contest between the morality which appeals to an
_external_ standard and that which grounds itself on _internal_
conviction, is the contest of progressive morality against stationary;
of reason and argument against the deification of mere opinion and
habit:” so Mill. The assumptions implied in these last sentences, no
less than the proposition stated, are peculiarly interesting. They are
redolent of all that narrowness, exclusiveness, and dogmatism, which
we have already noticed as so characteristic of Bentham. It is assumed
that the advocates of an innate morality hold it to be a thing that
acts apart from, or contrary to reason. It is assumed that moral
progress is possible only {271} under the action of an ethical system
founded on the doctrine of consequences, whereas experience has proved
that a morality of motives, such as Christianity contains, is as much
capable of expansion and of new applications as any other morality. It
is assumed that all our sentiments and feelings, that is, the whole
emotional part of our nature, is to be supposed false, till its right
to exist and to energize shall have been approved by reason. But what
if emotions be primary sources of all moral life, which reason indeed
may examine, but which it has no more authority to disown than it has
power to create? What if the emotions and the sentiments, which you
treat with such disrespect, really supply the steam without which your
curious ratiocinative machinery were utterly worthless? But these
questions anticipate part of our coming argument. Meanwhile let
EXTERNALISM stand here as the only significant designation for the
system of ethics which we are now to examine; and let the word
UTILITY be remitted to that limbo of vagueness and confusion whence
it originally came forth.
It will be most convenient to treat this subject historically, because
this method will display in the clearest light the operation of that
one-sided reaction out of which the Lockian philosophy, no less than
the Benthamite Ethics took its rise. And here it will be manifest that
we cannot altogether escape metaphysics, however odious that word may
sound to the general English ear; for in our inquiry we must find or
assert certain first principles which form the foundation of all
reason, whether practical or speculative; and though metaphysics, like
clouds, are apt to be misty, they are just as certainly the {272}
fountain of all moral science, as the clouds are the fathers of the
rain, which supplies the water that moves the useful machinery of the
mill. We must therefore start from Mr. Locke, the acknowledged father
of whatever school of British thinking deserves the name of a
philosophy. No doubt before him came Hobbes; but this man stands
alone, like a huge trap-rock bolt up in a flat country; and therefore
we shall let him lie over for a separate treatment, if opportunity
should occur; but in tracing up the main line of Utilitarian Ethics
from Mill to Hartley, I found that they ended naturally and
legitimately in Locke, just as a net-work of waters may often be
traced to one common well-head. Now Locke is the father of what the
Germans call the empirical philosophy. What does this mean? It simply
means, as any one may see by a superficial glance cast on the first
chapter of the “Essay on the Human Understanding,” that he
commenced his philosophy by a formal declaration of war against the
doctrine of INNATE IDEAS inherited by modern thinkers from the
Platonists of Athens, Alexandria, and Florence; and, if all innate
sources of true knowledge are denied, then there remains for morality,
as for everything else, only the source of external experience, which
comes to us not by nature but by acquisition; for according to the use
of the English language, whatever things a man does not originally
possess, he acquires. Locke, therefore, in the language of Plato and
Aristotle, denied the existence of ἐπιστήμη, or science properly so
called, which is founded on necessary principles of internal reason,
and asserted that all knowledge is to be got by ἐμπειρία or
experience, in other words, is what the {273} Germans call empirical.
That Locke’s ideas on this fundamental question of all speculation
were anything but clear we shall see immediately; but on the face of
the matter the very noticeable thing is, that in rejecting the
doctrine of innate ideas the Englishman does not go directly to Plato
and Plotinus, the sources from which this doctrine had come, but he
goes to war with certain floating loose notions of Herbert and other
dreamy speculators of his own or the previous generation. Now, this is
evidently a method of proceeding altogether unphilosophical. If a man
means to refute Christianity scientifically, he does not go to the
books of the Jesuits, but to the New Testament. So the refutation of
the doctrine of innate ideas should have commenced with the
examination of Plato, its original promulgator. But it was Locke’s
destiny to fight against Plato as Bacon fought against Aristotle,
without knowing his adversary. The consequence was in both cases the
same; a real battle against a real adversary, and a real victory on
the one side against a real defeat on the other; but not the victory
and not the adversary supposed. The world, however, always willing to
be deceived by names, gave the combatants credit for having done a
much greater thing than they had really achieved; it was not the mock
image of Æneas, but the real Æneas that Diomede had routed in the
fight. And so it came to be an accepted fact in this country with
large classes of persons that Locke had driven Plato out of the field,
just as Bacon had quashed Aristotle. And the deception in the case of
Locke has lasted longer; and that for a very obvious reason. The
physical science movement {274} inaugurated by Bacon led much more
naturally to a recognition of the true Aristotle than to a recovery of
the genuine Plato. It suited the practical genius of John Bull to
regard the severe Idealist as a transcendental dreamer; and Mr. Locke
taught him to put this shallow prejudice into dignified and grave
language. A thinker who does such a service to any nation is pretty
sure to be overrated; and so it fared with Mr. Locke, who besides
being a thinker was a sensible man, and on public affairs held liberal
opinions in harmony with the progressive element of the age.
Accordingly a recent juridical writer of the Utilitarian school has
not scrupled to call him in the most unqualified terms, “the
greatest and best of philosophers.”[274.1] With this partial
verdict, however, we do not find that foreign writers agree; and the
following estimate of the merits of our typical English Philosopher by
a recent German writer, is unquestionably nearer the truth.
“Precision and clearness, perspicacity and distinctness, are the
characteristic of Locke’s writings. Acute rather than deep in
thinking, he is true to the character of his nationality.”[274.2] So
much for the position of our great English “empiric.” Let us now
look more nicely at his doctrine, and the reasons of it.
The philosophy against which Locke argues is, that there exist
“certain innate principles, primary notions, κοιναὶ ἔννοιαι,
characters, as it were, stamped on the mind, which the soul receives
in its very first being, and brings into the world with it”--(i. 2.)
And the assertion of the belief in these innate ideas, he afterwards
indicates to have approved itself “a {275} short and easy way for
lazy people, and of no small advantage for those who affect to be
masters and teachers. Nor is it a small power it gives one man over
another to have the authority to be the dictator of principles, and
teacher of unquestionable truth, and to make men swallow that for an
innate principle which may serve his purpose who teacheth them”--(i.
4. 24.) From these words it is plain that Locke protested against the
doctrine of innate ideas, in the same spirit, and with the same
object, that Luther did against the doctrine of the infallibility of
the Pope; his mission, he considered, was to rouse reason from its
lethargy, and to teach men to think with open eyes, not blindly to
believe; and, in so far as he meant this, the mission of the
philosophical, as of the religious reformer, was unquestionably right.
But, as above remarked, in making this protest, he was fighting
against the language of Plato without knowing, or, so far as we can
see, ever attempting to know the ideas of Plato. This will be more
manifest from the arguments which he uses. “If there be such innate
principles,” says he, “it is strange that children and idiots have
no apprehension of them; children do not join general abstract
speculations with their sucking bottles and rattles”--(i. 2.) “If
we attentively consider young children, we shall have little reason to
think that they bring many ideas into the world with them”--(i. 4.
2.) These are Mr. Locke’s words, and they certainly indicate a
conception of the doctrine of innate ideas the most crass and crude
that could well be conceived. Assuredly neither the Athenian, nor the
Alexandrian, nor the Florentine Platonists, ever dreamt of anything so
absurd. Surely Plato knew that children {276} did not march into the
world with Euclid’s axioms in their mouth, nor did he believe that
even a miraculous baby, like himself, came out of his mother’s womb
armed cap-à-pie with all the principles of the ideal philosophy, like
Pallas Athena out of the head of Jove. What Plato actually said was,
that everything was what it grew to be by virtue of a divine type,
which lay in the germ, and which type was the expression of an
energizing thought in the Divine mind; and this type, form, or idea
(εἶδος), he called innate, because it was possessed originally
as part of the internal constitution of the thing, not acquired from
without. Who the men were who in Locke’s day or before him,
maintained the existence of ready-made, panoplied, and full-grown
ideas in the minds of idiots and babies, I do not know; but, so far as
the Platonists were concerned, the Englishman was fighting with a
shadow. Idiots, in any case, as imperfect and abnormal specimens of
their kind, have nothing to do with the argument; and as to children,
the things that sleep within them cannot, in the nature of things, be
known till they grow up into full leafage and burst in perfect
blossom. Inborn ideas are not the less inborn because they do not
exist full-grown at the moment of birth. They did exist for ever in
the original self-existent Divine mind; they do exist in the derived
existence of the human mind the moment it awakens into consciousness
of its individualism. In either case they are not acquired; they are
possessed. Plato’s doctrine, therefore, was, that the germ of all
human ideas lies in the human mind, and is developed from within, not
derived from anything external. In this, there cannot be the slightest
doubt that he spoke wisely; {277} as little that Mr. Locke wrote most
unwisely, when, in accounting for the origin of our ideas, he said,
“the senses at first let in particular ideas and furnish _the empty
cabinet_.” Here we fall in with one of Mr. Locke’s short similes,
which have proved more effective in spreading his doctrine than his
diffuse and somewhat wearisome chapter. “One of the most common
forms of fallacious reasoning,” says Mr. Mill, “is that of arguing
from a metaphysical expression as if it were literal.”[277.1] This
is precisely the error which seems to have run away with the wits of
the sensation-philosophers, when they read Mr. Locke’s chapter on
the Origin of Ideas. The mind was “an empty cabinet,”--if empty,
it had merely a holding or containing power, before it was filled and
furnished altogether and absolutely from without. But a single word
will show the inadequacy and the utter falsity of this style of
talking. The senses (as Plato long ago showed in the _Theætetus_) let
in no _ideas_, they let in _impressions_, which the plastic power of
mind elaborates into ideas; and again, the mind is in nowise like an
empty cabinet, in which the senses hang up ready-painted pictures; but
the mind, in so far as it creates ideas, and not merely experiences
sensations, both paints the pictures and hangs them up, and this it
does by an inherent divine power and divine right, of which no mere
sensation can give any account. In fact there is nothing more hopeless
than an attempt to explain the genesis of ideas, connected as it is
with the miraculous fact of consciousness, by any sensuous process. It
were much nearer the truth to adopt the strong language of a
distinguished Scotch metaphysician, and say that {278} “man becomes
an I or a conscious being, not in consequence of or even on occasion
of his sensations, but actually in spite of them.”[278.1] The real
fact of the matter is, as any one may observe in the reasonings of
young persons, that in the formation of ideas the mind is active, not
passive; and this distinction is strongly expressed in the very
structure of some languages, in which verbs, expressive of mere
sensation, such as verbs of smelling, are followed by the case which
belongs to the passive voice, whereas verbs which express both a
sensation and an intellectual idea, imposed on the sensuous expression
by the plastic mind, demand the case which belongs to the presence of
an active and transitive force. The healthy instincts of the human
race manifested in the common uses of language, are often more to be
trusted in such matters than the subtleties of metaphysicians. Nature,
at least, which the popular instinct follows, is always complete;
speculation is apt to be one-sided. If we will have a simile that may
express both sides of the wonderful fact of knowledge, we may say
sensation supplies the materials, but the manufacturer of ideas is
MIND.
I said above that Mr. Locke was a sensible man; and it is nothing
contrary to this to admit that by the incautious use of one or two
strong similes--“the empty cabinet, the sheet of blank paper, and
the dark room,”--he became the originator of a school which made
itself famous by the ingenious maintenance of the nonsense that
judgment and sensation are the same thing. A vain Frenchman, pleased
to utter glittering paradoxes in gay saloons, might say this, might
even go so far as to parade the proposition {279} that if horses had
only possessed human hands they would have been men, and if men had
been armed with equine hoofs they would have been horses; such
paradoxes were, no doubt, a logical deduction from the doctrine that
sensation is the father of ideas, and that all internal faculties are
the result of mere external forces; but Mr. Locke was too much of a
solid and sober Englishman to allow himself to be led into sheer
nonsense by the charm of mere logical consistency, and chose rather to
prove his good sense by his inconsistency. After asserting in the
strongest terms that the only origin of ideas is sensation, he goes on
to divide ideas into ideas of sensation and ideas of reflection, which
division instantly suggests the question--_What is reflection, and
whence comes the reflecting power?_ And by raising this question the
empirical speculator at once brings in the whole of Platonism and
innate ideas by a side gate, just after they had been driven out at
the grand entrance; for how can this question be answered except in
the well-known words of Leibnitz--“_Nihil est in intellectu quod non
prius fuerit in sensu_, NISI INTELLECTUS IPSE.” Mr. Locke’s
successors, however, have shown no inclination to follow his example
in this respect. They have been ambitious of the cheap popular virtue
of consistency, which even thieves and murderers may achieve; and
verily they have had their reward. Their master may be compared to a
man who held out a poison in his right hand, and administered
forthwith the antidote with his left. His followers, from Helvetius to
Mill, thinking--naturally enough perhaps--that the right hand
contained the right thing, instantly snapt it up and ran away with it,
not choosing to encumber {280} themselves with the incongruous bounty
of the left. The fruit has been that climax of nonsense in which half
truths always issue when left to blossom by themselves. The
one-sidedness of the philosophy taken from Locke’s right hand,
which, in a popular way we may call Materialism, culminates in the
Nihilism of John Stuart Mill. Under his cunning manipulation not only
mind vanishes but the outward world also. “It may be safely laid
down as a truth that of the outward world we know and can know
nothing, except the sensations which we experience from it; ontology
therefore is not possible.” So what Plato called the human mind and
the New Testament the human soul, becomes only a bundle of sensations.
But the fallacy involved in this phraseology is easily pointed out.
Instead of saying, We know nothing but sensations, he ought to have
said, Nothing but sensations, and the thoughts or ideas vulgarly
called classes of things and laws of nature which we recognise in the
outward world, by virtue of the thoughts and ideas that arise out of
the necessary action of the thinking Unity, the Creator of thoughts
and ideas within us; and an ontology therefore is possible, because we
know what we are as thinking beings by the very act of thinking, and
we know what the world is as the general and absolute thought, or
rather the product and manifestation of absolute thought, by the
recognised identity of its working and products with the working and
products of our own minds. In other words, Thought, or Reason, or
Mind--God the absolute thought, and man in his little world of limited
thinking, is the only thing that is or can be meant by an ontology,
and is known partly as direct fact, partly as indirect, but {281}
assured inference from unequivocal manifestation. This is the common
sense of the whole matter; and whosoever will not accept this may
content himself with Nihilism and Atheism. I cannot.
So much for the strictly metaphysical part of the empirical doctrine.
Let us now consider shortly its application to morals. “Moral
principles,” says Mr. Locke (i. 3), “are even further removed than
intellectual ones from any title to be innate. Will any one say that
those who live by fraud and rapine have innate principles of truth
which they allow and assent to?” This question displays in the most
vivid manner the extraordinary misconception, not to say
wrong-headedness, which possessed the English philosopher as to this
whole matter. The nature of innate ideas implies neither universality
nor inaccessibility to corruption. A man may be born with an innate
sense for music, though all his fellows were as harsh as asses or as
deaf as stones. If some men are colour-blind, and others purblind, and
others altogether blind, these defects, inadequacies, or total
eclipses of vision, do not make light intrinsically a less enjoyable
thing, or the healthy eye an organ less marvellously adapted for
enjoying it. As with vision so with morals. A whole population given
to drunkenness does not make drunkenness a whit less beastly, nor will
the general practice of fraud and rapine render the appropriation of
my labour by another man’s rapacity a whit more reasonable. Again
says Mr. Locke (i. 3, 4), “There cannot any one moral rule be
proposed whereof a man may not justly demand a reason,” from which
sentence it plainly appears, that, whereas by innate ideas Plato means
the necessary expression of reason in a normally developed {282} mind,
Locke understands by them some blind unaccountable impulse independent
of and extrinsic to reason. The supplying of a reason for any course
of action, say for speaking the truth or keeping a man’s word, does
not in the least make that course of action less the product of a
truthful instinct in nature, or an innate love of truth. Morality is
not the less innate because it is reasonable; but inasmuch as it is an
essential element in the universal or divine Reason, in virtue of this
it is necessarily an inborn quality in the individual or human reason,
always of course with the probability of those large exceptions and
defections which the very nature of finite existence implies. But we
need not detain ourselves with a chapter of such shallow
misunderstandings. The immoralities and follies of men, though a
thousand times as many as they are, no more affect the inborn
necessity and absolute immutability of the moral law, than the false
summing of a class of schoolboys affects the relations of number.
Errors are as common in arithmetic as in morals; only men hire those
special pleaders, their passions, to justify the moral law, while the
arithmetical blunder is exposed by the master of accounts. But though
Mr. Locke argues against the existence of innate ideas in morals with
even more self-gratulation than in his psychological account of the
formation of ideas, we are not to suppose that his ethical theory was
in any respect identical with that of the modern Utilitarians. He
sowed the seed for their doctrine, no doubt, but himself had his
garner well stored with grain from a very different source. He was a
Christian, and believed in Divine law; he was a theist and believed in
God. The modern Utilitarian believes only in a bundle of {283}
sensations and in an invariable sequence. By denying innate ideas of
morality, Mr. Locke, as his illustrations prove, only meant to
proclaim the very obvious fact, that, as all men obviously do not
agree in their principles of action, it is reasonable to demand of
them some reason for accepting one principle of action rather than
another. No man can object to such a reasonable demand. But this does
not prevent him in another place (ii. 33. 11), from talking, as no
modern Utilitarian would, of “the unchangeable rule of right and
wrong which the law of God hath established.” This method of
speaking, common to Locke I believe with many of the most solid
thinkers of his time, would lead me to class his ethical doctrine
under the rubric of what might be called THEOCRATIC INSTITUTIONALISM;
that is to say, he looks on morality as the result of a law laid down
and sanctioned by the ultimate source of all laws, physical as well as
moral. This, no doubt, seems to imply something arbitrary, which
neither Plato nor Aristotle would allow to be possible in any of the
fundamental manifestations of Divine reason; but notwithstanding this
preference of the word νόμος, _law_, to φύσις, _nature_, had
the English thinker been cross-questioned on the subject, he would
probably have said that these institutions or laws which God lays on
man flow necessarily from the excellence of the Divine nature; and
this would have been pure Platonism. That he was sound-hearted at
bottom no less than sound-headed, his book amply proves,
notwithstanding the confusion of ideas in which he entangled himself
by the assertion of propositions which, when logically followed out,
lead directly to materialism in philosophy, atheism in theology, and
sensualism in morals.
{284}
The next significant name in the genealogical tree of modern
Utilitarianism is DAVID HARTLEY. As it was the distinction of Mr.
Locke to have given respectability to the vulgar British prejudice
against innate ideas, so the claim of Hartley to reputation rests on
his having first given prominence to the doctrine of the association
of ideas, a doctrine which from its originator down to the most recent
times, plays an important part in every form and phasis of speculative
and practical externalism. Hartley was a Yorkshireman, born at Armley,
near Leeds, in the year 1705, educated at Cambridge originally for the
Church; but having a thoughtful mind and a tender conscience, he did
not feel himself in a condition to subscribe the Church Articles in
the offhand way which academical morality sanctioned; and accordingly
betook himself to the study of medicine, an art which he afterwards
practised with success, first in Newark and London, and then at Bath,
where he died. These facts are of great significance, as indicating
the remarkable combination in his character and works of an extremely
sensitive evangelic morality, with a tendency to give physical
explanations of spiritual operations, from which evangelic moralists
are naturally averse. The object of his great work, _Observations on
Man_, published in the year 1749, is to give a complete treatise of
human nature on the inductive method of Locke and Newton; and
accordingly the first volume, which contains his most peculiar views,
is merely a following into detail of the doctrine of Locke, that all
our knowledge proceeds from sensation, and that ideas in the brain are
the product of impressions on the sensuous nerves. This one-sided
notion Hartley {285} pursues into the inmost network and curious
membranous wrappings of the brain, and by the action and reaction and
interaction of vibrations and vibratiuncles in that region, attempts
to explain the generation of thought and reasoning; and this he does
through long chapters, and with not a little iteration, in language
than which the most extreme materialist could desire nothing more
crass. In fact, we find in Hartley the great precursor of those
masters of physical science in the present day, who seem to expect
some important discovery in mental science from the curious comparison
of cerebral structure in the monkey and the man. A few short extracts
will make this more obvious. “Simple ideas,” he says, “run into
clusters and create complex ideas”--(i. 75.) Here we have that vague
use of the word “idea,” which serves equally for a sensation and a
thought, and which lies at the bottom of all that strange confusion of
thought which runs with such unhappy persistency through all the
speculations of Mr. Locke. Again, “Ideas, intellect, memory, fancy,
affections, will, all these are of the same original, and differ only
in degree, or some accidental circumstance; they are all deducible
from the external impressions made on the senses, the vestiges, or
ideas of these, and their mutual connexion by means of association
taken together and operating on one another” (i. 80). And in harmony
with this (i. 101), he afterwards gives a formal derivation of ideal
vibratiuncles from sensory vibrations; and (103) talks of that “idea
or state of mind, _i.e._ set of compound vibratiuncles, which we term
the WILL;” and again (p. 212) he says, “the permanence of
sensations is of the nature of an idea.” Here the great {286}
mystery which puzzled the Greeks so much, the mysterious bond which
unites the ἕν and the πολλά--the one and the many--is solved
very decidedly, as it would appear, on the Epicurean side. It is not
the one which produces the many, but the many which produce the one;
the one--what I call Mind, Will--is only a modification of the many.
The radical objection to all this is that every man who is not a
professional metaphysician feels it to be nonsense; the popular
feeling protests; Shakespeare, who represents the thoughts and the
language of a high and a healthy humanity, never talks in this style;
and, more than that, the profoundest thinkers from Plato down to Hegel
find in the proposition that thought is manufactured out of sensations
a much greater mystery than that which this theory was invented to
explain. One feels conscious that sensations might go on for ever, and
not produce anything that had the slightest semblance to a thought;
just as rain and sunshine acting on thistle-down from summer to summer
produce only thistles and not roses. It appears, indeed, that our
inductive philosopher is here involving himself in the vulgar fallacy
of confounding the occasion or the condition of a thing with the
cause. An accidental occasion, or an indispensable condition, are
equally remote from the idea of a cause. The accidental occasion, for
instance, of a house being built on a certain site, is that a certain
gentleman, happening to take a walk in a certain district, and being
not averse to house-building, determines to have a house on that site;
the indispensable condition of the house being erected is that there
should be a site for it to stand on, and stone and lime for it to be
built with; but the only proper efficient {287} cause of the house
being a house is the mind of the architect, the plan which that mind
originates, and the instructions which he gives to the contractor, and
the contractor to the masons. The sensuous tendency which Hartley’s
medical studies had given to his thoughts comes out strongly in
another passage (i. 342), where he attempts to explain the evidence of
mathematical axioms:--“We infer that 2+2=4 only from prior instances
of having actually perceived this; and from the necessary coincidence
of all these instances with all other possible ones.” This recalls a
famous passage in J. Stuart Mill’s treatise against Sir W. Hamilton,
in which he stamps with his authority the ingenious demonstration of a
London barrister, to the effect that “in some possible world two and
two may make five”--where, however, the more recent is grandly
consistent as compared with the wavering double-sidedness of the more
ancient speculator. The fact of the matter is, that Hartley, like
Locke, was swayed at bottom by a sound sense and a lofty religious
philosophy which crossed his mechanical theories; whereas the modern
thinker, not believing in Mind, properly so called, at all, but only
in a bundle of sensations and a thread of associations, like the
Romanist Transubstantiation doctors, had no scruple in flinging open
defiance in the face of Reason, and making a public ovation of
unmitigated nonsense. Such is the natural culmination of all one-sided
philosophizing. The seed of a favourite fancy grows up into a stately
dogma; the dogma blossoms into a paradox; and the paradox ripens into
an absurdity. The extreme nonsensicality of Mill, and the mildly
modified error of Hartley with regard to {288} the nature of
mathematical evidence, arise from the same cause. They are only the
natural expression of the principle that thought is sensation and
sensation is thought; thought the matured sensation, and sensation the
nascent thought. Mill denies altogether the existence of thought as a
distinct thing from sensation; therefore he is quite consistent to say
that in some possible world two and two may make five; for it is as a
thing thought, and not as a thing perceived, that in the science of
number 2+2=4. Mill, in fact, by this paradox, with a hardihood of
consistency which is almost sublime, denies the possibility of science
altogether; there is no ἐπιστήμη of any kind possible any
more than ontology; only ἐμπειρία is possible--an experience
of something that is accidentally what it is, and may have been
otherwise. This is the highest power of what the Germans call the
“Lockian empiricism;” and Mr. Mill in asserting the contingency of
all science, has argued, as a good logician could not but do, from
that half of the truth of things which it has been the unfortunate
destiny of him and his school to mistake for the whole. As for
Hartley, he qualifies his one-sidedness with a condition which takes
the sting from its nonsense, and, like Locke, saves himself by a very
transparent inconsistency; for he talks of a “_necessary_
coincidence” of a certain number of observed equalities with all
possible equalities; interpolating thus into the product of sensations
the idea of necessity which belongs to a different region altogether,
and by no possibility could grow out of a mere succession of sensuous
impressions and nervous thrills, however often repeated. A tide-waiter
may feel convinced that the tide will {289} flow to-morrow just as it
has flowed to-day, and has flowed regularly ever since he began to
observe its motions; but no degree of strength in this conviction
comes up to the certainty which every sane man has that two and two
not only always do make four, and always have made four, but in every
possible world must make four. The two certainties differ not in
degree only but in kind; and mathematical demonstration having to do
only with thoughts, the creation of pure mind, cannot in the slightest
degree be affected by any complete or incomplete realization of these
thoughts in any time, past, present, or to come. When I say that all
the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, or that the
angle at the centre of a circle is double the angle at the
circumference, I prove this from certain necessary relations of lines
to lines drawn under conditions of which my thought is the absolute
master. The proof is only the evolution of what lies in the thing,--of
what cannot be otherwise, so long as the figure remains subject to the
dictatorial power of my conception.
It will be now quite evident from these specimens, that Hartley’s
philosophy is just the sensuous side of Locke worked curiously into
detail, with a practical rejection of the intellectual side. Indeed,
he says expressly (i. 360) that “all our most complex ideas arise
from sensation, and REFLECTION IS NOT A DISTINCT SOURCE, as Mr.
Locke makes it.” This throwing of reflection overboard is the
necessary postulate of all the absurdity that afterwards grew out from
the Lockian philosophy; and James Mill accordingly[289.1] disowns the
“ideas of reflection” with {290} the same fatal one-sideness, and,
it may be added, with the same transparent superficiality of logic;
for when a man talks of “generalizing states of consciousness,”
what is this but another term for reflection? Generalizing is a
species, and one of the most universally practised species, of
reflection.
It was necessary to be thus particular about Hartley’s doctrine on
the generation of ideas, because, as expressed in the above passages,
it is one of the broadest statements of Externalism possible, and if
consistently followed out, as it has been by the Mills, neither morals
nor mathematics can escape from its grasp. According to this doctrine
there exists no morality founded on the eternal reasons and relations
of things, but all notions of right and wrong proceed from association
alone, from clusters of ideas which are only modified sensations,--all
affection as well as all reasoning being the mere result of
association--(i. 499.) Let us now inquire a little more closely what
this ASSOCIATION is, which performs such marvels in the
transmutation of sensations into ideas; for surely never was a word so
largely used by philosophical writers in recent times, and so
villainously abused. Association is a popular term, and therein
precisely lies its large capacity of doing harm, when sophistically
used. Now what it means in popular language is pretty plain. When I
think of London I think of beauty, splendour, magnitude, multitude,
wealth, din, incalculable noise of rattling cabs above ground and of
screeching railways under ground. These are my associations with
London. When I think of Oxford, I think of Greek and Grammars and
square caps, of {291} mitres, and lawn sleeves, High Church and Broad
Church, learning and luxury, bigotry and boating, cricket, cram, and
scholarly conceit. When I think of the Highlands, I think of Bens and
Glens, of lochs and waterfalls, of steamboats and tourists, of
salmon-fishing, grouse-shooting, deerstalking. Free Churches,
untrousered legs, and Ossianic poems. There does not seem much mystery
in this. Ideas must hang together somehow or other; if they did not,
they would be like a swarm of mad bees in our head, and would reel
about in an unmanageable chaos; if therefore they are to hang together
in some way, what more natural than that those ideas which come in
together should remain together, and that those which have a family
likeness and affinity should arrange themselves into companies. Add to
this the natural tendency of black to recall white, and of life to
suggest death, and you have the whole three bonds of association among
human thoughts and emotions--contiguity, similarity, and contrast--of
which philosophical writers make parade. Now what is the place which
belongs to this popular principle of association in a system of
metaphysics or mental philosophy? To me its place appears a very
secondary one; and to give it any place at all we must carefully
distinguish between accidental and necessary, between ephemeral and
eternal associations, the confounding of which rather seems to stand
out as the prominent employment of the Sensation philosophers. There
are two great classes of associations, the one principally of external
and accidental, the other of internal and necessary origin; the one
dominant in weak minds, the other in strong minds; the one common to
us with the brutes, the {292} other altogether impossible to brutes;
the one more in the manner of a loose bundle, the other in the style
of a stable architecture. With people not much given to think
consecutively ideas are apt to hang together by certain mere
superficial points of attachment; like drifted matter on an open
beach, they lie just as they come in; the most incongruous things
together all in a heap. Such associations, subjected to no controlling
and discriminating power, are the fruitful source of all vain
opinions, prejudices, senseless conceits, and hollow reasonings. With
another class of people, again, in whom a strict watch is always kept
over the materials with which sense supplies the mind, we find a
totally opposite sort of associations. In this case the influence of
the external factor diminishes, while the internal factor comes
largely into play. The mind of such persons is not merely a mirror of
such things as may chance to fall upon it, it is a commander-in-chief
and a dictator, which discriminates, selects, and disposes according
to an innate ordering faculty, which rejoices to trace out the cognate
order which everywhere lives beneath the diverse surface of external
things. The former of these forms of association is always more or
less arbitrary; the latter is imperatorial and absolute; the one
claims kinship with mere fancy and fashion; the other is reason in the
realm of imagination rejoicing in the discovery of what under various
guises is only a manifestation of the eternally Reasonable. Now the
fault of the Association theory as used by moralists of the
Utilitarian school, is that they have left reason altogether out of
the account, and fixed their eyes exclusively on those external
associations {293} which form the principal furniture of the lower
class of minds; nay, they have gone further than this, and
systematically explained away the highest ideas, such as Beauty and
Duty, into mere unsubstantial or monstrous products of some abnormal
association! The applause which Alison received in Edinburgh by the
publication of a treatise on Beauty, the drift of which was to resolve
all our ideas of what is excellent in form or expression into mere
arbitrary association; is one of the great reproaches of the Scottish
philosophy. Similar ideas with regard to Duty are vented by Professor
Bain.[293.1] Here, as in every other case, we see that it has been the
business of the successors of Locke in this country to exaggerate his
errors and to omit his truths. With regard to association Mr. Locke
(iii. 33) did the wiser thing when he treated it not as the handmaid,
much less as the substitute, for reason, but rather as its great
enemy; and in the domain of morals, particularly, Professor Ferrier
does not overstate the matter when he says in his own eloquent way
that the Utilitarian philosophy presents to us “not the picture of a
man, but that of a weathercock shifting helplessly in the winds of
sensibility, a wretched association-machine, through which ideas pass,
linked together by laws over which the machine has no control.”[293.2]
And another sturdy Scotch thinker, yet alive, justly indignant at the
juggle which has been played with this word, bursts out into the
exclamation, “The Association psychology,--that barren bastard,
between Materialism and Idealism, which, but intended as a jeer to the
priest, is a disgrace to common-sense.” {294} Thus the Scottish
interpreter of Hegel; but though these strong words, in the fulness of
their meaning, may be applicable to his successors, Hartley certainly
never intended by his curious interplay of vibrations and
vibratiuncles to jeer the ministers or to damage the cause of
Christianity. In this respect he was a perfect parallel to Locke. He
had inherited the central idea of all true philosophy,--the idea of
God,--from Christianity; and he stuck by that. And if in his first
volume he seemed to derive the noblest thing internal from the basest
things external, to turn the whole miraculous world of thought and
feeling, as Ferrier says, into a wretched “association-machine,”
it was not so bad after all; for behind the machine he believed also
in the steam, and the imperial mind of Him who made the machine; so in
theology he remained a sound theist, and in morals he went so far as
literally to stumble on the paradoxical love of “self-annihilation,”
so prominent in the transcendental ethics of Budd. Hartley was the
most pious and the most pure of metaphysical writers; and while he
balanced his first proposition that “sensations beget ideas” by a
second, that “God is the source of all Good” (i. 114), and a
third, that “Final causes are the key to all mystery” (i. 366), he
might launch his book into the world with a good conscience, and the
sure hope of a good result, if only people would take him as a whole.
This, however, unfortunately, people had not the thought or the will
to do; the fewest people, Goethe said, can comprehend a whole; so they
took up his sensuous association, and left his spiritual piety to
float. He fared in this like St. Paul, whose sound sense, we read,
certain persons lightly dismissed, {295} who were forward to wrest his
more obscure doctrines to their own destruction.
There are two points generally discussed in ethical treatises, which
belong most naturally to our present rubric; _first_, whether moral
judgments are performed by a separate faculty called Conscience;
_second_, whether all our emotions are not originally selfish; whether
benevolence, like remorse, is not a derived and compounded rather than
an original and simple element of our nature. To both these questions
the Association theory of Hartley gave the start; for with him, as we
have seen, everything is compounded; will, judgment, conscience,
whatever acts seem most emphatically to proceed from the imperial I
within, are radically only transmuted sensations, the composite result
of a curiously interwoven tissue of associations. Now there are no
questions in ethical science more easily answered than these.
Conscience is certainly not a separate faculty; it is an exercise of
judgment, that is, of discriminating reason, accompanied with an
emotion. You confess to me, for instance, as your friend, that on such
and such an occasion, from a regard to some petty interest, or a
desire to curry favour with some influential person, you displayed a
cowardly reticence, where an open profession of your sentiments would
have been advantageous to the cause of humanity; and you feel ashamed
of your conduct. Here is nothing but Reason applied to action; and the
emotion of self-reproach in reference to an unreasonable action, which
is the exact correlative of the feeling of incongruity which attaches
itself to a false proposition. Man is not a mere cognitive machine; he
has emotions of delight, which make him start from his seat {296} and
cry out εὕρηκα! at the naked perception of a purely speculative
truth, much more when he uses his reason on the most important acts
that concern the well-being of himself individually, and the society
of which he is a part. Let anything very good be done by his tribe, or
nation, or church, if he is a complete man he instantly flames up into
a noble enthusiasm, and becomes ambitious of attempting like deeds;
let anything very bad be done, he fumes, in grim indignation, or
blushes with shame, and is ready to reproach and to condemn, and even
to trample his proper self under foot. This is the most natural thing
in the world; the necessary result of applying reason to action at
all; for a man cannot act without motive power, that is, without
passions, which may be either noble or base. But though there is no
separate faculty called Conscience, there is a peculiar sensibility of
the soul in reference to moral action, when judgment is pronounced by
any individual on the character of any action which he has performed.
Self-condemnation, self-reproach, and, in their sharpest potency, what
are called the stings of remorse, are judgments of reason accompanied
by emotions, which well deserve a separate name; and just as for the
classical Latin _judicium_ when speaking of the fine arts, we now use
the peculiar word TASTE, so for our judgments of actions, with the
peculiar emotions which accompany them, we use the word CONSCIENCE.
It is not a new word; it is as old as Periander and Bias;[296.1] it
has been used {297} by both heathens and Christians for more than two
thousand years; and there is no reason why it should be abolished. The
ignoring of its compound character by incurious people can do no harm;
its analysis into practical reason and passion by the more curious can
do little good. When, on the other hand, it is declared generally to
be the mere product of association, a great deal of harm may be done;
for from this doctrine a consistent one-sided moralist may prove that
morals are the mere creatures of habit, fashion, fancy, and caprice,
as readily and with precisely the same warrant that Alison proved that
beauty is an accidental product of the same unreasoning elements. What
we ought to say is simply this--there is an enlightened conscience,
and there is an unenlightened conscience; neither of these can act
independently of associations; for associations supply the bonds by
which the materials of thought and feeling are bound into separate
parcels; but the difference is this: in the enlightened conscience
feelings and actions are bound together by associations over which
cultivated Reason has exercised a control; in the unenlightened
conscience, where the emotions connected with the performance of
certain actions are the crude product of all sorts of random
influences, it is natural that moral judgments should exhibit all
sorts of inadequacy, perversity, and absurdity. To a conscience so
constituted the neglect of a piece of insignificant silly ceremonial
may cause more pain than the commission of a murder.
As to the sophistical refinement that all our social sympathies are
fundamentally selfish, there can be no doubt that, under the influence
of that passion for unity which is the inspiration of system-builders,
{298} Hartley, after Hobbes, did common sense the dishonour of
publicly propounding this theory. But he propounded it, after his
fashion, in a very innocent way; in such a way indeed as to show that
the whole question arises out of a confusion of language, or, what is
worse, a studied affectation of using words in a different sense from
that in which they are used by the vulgar.[298.1] To the thinker this
is a matter of indifference; not so to the vulgar: they all insist in
using common words in their common sense, and allow the subtle
qualifications of the philosopher to drop. It is strange, however, to
observe that there are even at the present day writers of pith and
judgment who seem to imagine that there is something more than a mere
juggle of words in this question. Mr. Barrett, in his _Physical
Ethics_, an ingenious and thoughtful work, says that “the merit of
Hartley was not only that he showed the ultimate selfishness of all
motives, but that he saw the true subordination among the various
emotions, and their natural evolution from their simple elements.”
This sentence, by the simple abuse of a single word, does great
injustice to Hartley. The word _selfishness_, in the classical use of
the English language, is a word of a very bad odour; it is equivalent
to the φιλαυτία of the Greeks, and means that excessive regard
to self which leads a man to disregard and to disown the rights and
feelings of other selves in the complex social machine of which he is
a part. Now Hartley {299} does not use this word; he uses a word
capable also of a good meaning--_self-interest_, better still if he
had stumbled on Bentham’s phrase, _self-regard_. But as it is, the
ingenious association-moralist (i. 458) divides self-interest into
three species--
_Gross self-interest_,
_Refined self-interest_, and
_Rational self-interest_,
which, when analysed, turn out to be altogether different things
baptized with the same name. If a rational self-interest convinces me
that, when I see my neighbour fall into the sea, it is my duty to jump
in after him at the risk of being drowned myself, it requires an open
force put upon language to say that such an action is the result of
any kind of deliberate self-regard; it seems more like the result of a
social instinct, and so far from being the product of any sort of
prudential calculation, it is more likely to be strangled in the first
conception than brought to a brilliant birth by the consideration of
self in any shape. It seems to me indeed quite unworthy of anything
styling itself philosophy to deal in such manifest quibbles. I might
in a similar way, for instance, classify all religions under a common
name, according as they are inspired by
_Gross reverence_,
_Refined reverence_, and
_Rational reverence;_
but though the name is the same in all the three cases, the feeling
may be very different, and the {300} product altogether opposed; for
the gross reverence of vulgar superstition may be founded on fear,
while the rational reverence of enlightened piety may be based on
philosophic wonder and on that perfect love which casteth out fear.