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.