the virtuous man receives from the consciousness of well-doing
is anything but an equivalent for the sufferings he undergoes
or the wishes he may have to renounce.” It is thus that the
before-mentioned self-sacrifice of the moral hero is conceived
by Mill to be possible and actual. The moral sentiments, on
this view, are not phases of self-love as Hobbes held; nor can
they be directly identified with sympathy, either in Hume’s
way or in Adam Smith’s; in fact, though apparently simple
they are really derived in a complex manner from self-love
and sympathy combined with more primitive impulses. Justice
(e.g.) is regarded by Mill as essentially resentment moralized
by enlarged sympathy and intelligent self-interest; what we
mean by injustice is harm done to an assignable individual
by a breach of some rule for which we desire the violator to be
punished, for the sake both of the person injured and of society
at large, including ourselves. As regards moral sentiments
generally, the view suggested by Mill is more definitely given
by the chief living representative of the associationist school,
Alexander Bain; by whom the distinctive characteristics of
conscience are traced to “education under government or
authority,” though prudence, disinterested sympathy and other
emotions combine to swell the mass of feeling vaguely denoted
by the term moral. The combination of antecedents is somewhat
differently given by different writers; but all agree in
representing the conscience of any individual as naturally
correlated to the interests of the community of which he is a
member, and thus a natural ally in enforcing utilitarian rules,
or even a valuable guide when utilitarian calculations are difficult
and uncertain.
This substitution of hypothetical history for direct analysis of the moral sense is really older than the utilitarianism of Paley and Bentham, which it has so profoundly modified. The effects of association in modifying mental phenomena were noticed by Locke, and made a cardinal Association and evolution. point in the metaphysic of Hume; who also referred to the principle slightly in his account of justice and other “artificial” virtues. Some years earlier, Gay,[1] admitting Hutcheson’s proof of the actual disinterestedness of moral and benevolent impulses, had maintained that these (like the desires of knowledge or fame, the delight of reading, hunting and planting, &c.) were derived from self-love by “the power of association.” But a thorough and systematic application of the principle to ethical psychology is first found in Hartley’s Observations on Man (1748). Hartley, too, was the first to conceive association as producing, instead of mere cohesion of mental phenomena, a quasi-chemical combination of these into a compound apparently different from its elements. He shows elaborately how the pleasures and pains of “imagination, ambition, self-interest, sympathy, theopathy, and the moral sense” are developed out of the elementary pleasures and pains of sensation; by the coalescence into really complex but apparently single ideas of the “miniatures” or faint feelings which the repetition of sensations contemporaneously or in immediate succession tends to produce in cohering groups. His theory assumes the correspondence of mind and body, and is applied pari passu to the formation of ideas from sensations, and of “compound vibratiuncules in the medullary substance” from the original vibrations that arise in the organ of sense.[2] The same general view was afterwards developed with much vigour and clearness on the psychical side alone by James Mill in his Analysis of the Human Mind. The whole theory has been persistently controverted by writers of the intuitional school, who (unlike Hartley) have usually thought that this derivation of moral sentiments from more primitive feelings would be detrimental to the authority of the former. The chief argument against this theory has been based on the early period at which these sentiments are manifested by children, which hardly allows time for association to produce the effects ascribed to it. This argument has been met in recent times by the application to mind of the physiological theory of heredity, according to which changes produced in the mind (brain) of a parent, by association of ideas or otherwise, tend to be inherited by his offspring; so that the development of the moral sense or any other faculty or susceptibility of existing man may be hypothetically carried back into the prehistoric life of the human race, without any change in the manner of derivation supposed. At present, however, the theory of heredity is usually held in conjunction with Darwin’s theory of natural selection; according to which different kinds of living things in the course of a series of generations come gradually to be endowed with organs, faculties and habits tending to the preservation of the individual or species under the conditions of life in which it is placed. Thus we have a new zoological factor in the history of the moral sentiments; which, though in no way opposed to the older psychological theory of their formation through coalescence of more primitive feelings, must yet be conceived as controlling and modifying the effects of the law of association by preventing the formation of sentiments other than those tending to the preservation of human life. The influence of the Darwinian theory, moreover, has extended from historical psychology to ethics, tending to substitute “preservation of the race under its conditions of existence” for “happiness” as the ultimate end and standard of virtue.
Before concluding this sketch of the development of English ethical thought from Hobbes to the thinkers of the 19th century, it will be well to notice briefly the views held by different moralists on the question of free-will,—so far, that is, as they have been put forward as ethically important. We must Free-will. first distinguish three meanings in which “freedom” is attributed to the will or “inner self” of a human being, viz. (1) the general power of choosing among different alternatives of action without a motive, or against the resultant force of conflicting motives; (2) the power of choice between the promptings of reason and those of appetites (or other non-rational impulses) when the latter conflict with reason; (3) merely the quality of acting rationally in spite of conflicting impulses, however strong, the non posse peccare of the medieval theologians.[3] It is obvious that “freedom” in this third sense is in no way incompatible with complete determination; and, indeed, is rather an ideal state after which the moral agent ought to aspire than a property which the human will can be said to possess. In the first sense, again, as distinct from the second, the assertion of “freedom” has no ethical significance, except in so far as it introduces a general uncertainty into all our inferences respecting human conduct. Even in the second sense it hardly seems that the freedom of a man’s will can be an element to be considered in examining what it is right or best for him to do (though of course the clearest convictions of duty will be fruitless if a man has not sufficient self-control to enable him to act on them); it is rather when we ask whether it is just to punish him for wrong-doing that it seems important to know whether he could have done otherwise. But in spite of the strong interest taken in the theological aspect of this question by the Protestant divines of the 17th century, it does not appear that English moralists from Hobbes to Hume laid any stress on the relation of free-will either to duty generally or to justice in particular. Neither the doctrine of Hobbes, that deliberation is a mere alternation of competing desires, voluntary action immediately following the “last appetite,” nor the hardly less decided Determinism of Locke, who held that the will is always moved by the greatest present uneasiness, appeared to either author to require any reconciliation with the belief in human responsibility. Even in Clarke’s system, where Indeterminism is no doubt a cardinal notion, its importance is metaphysical
- ↑ In the before-mentioned dissertation. Cf. note 2 to p. 835. Hartley refers to this treatise as having supplied the starting-point for his own system.
- ↑ It should be noticed that Hartley’s sensationalism is far from leading him to exalt the corporeal pleasures. On the contrary, he tries to prove elaborately that they (as well as the pleasures of imagination, ambition, self-interest) cannot be made an object of primary pursuit without a loss of happiness on the whole—one of his arguments being that these pleasures occur earlier in time, and “that which is prior in the order of nature is always less perfect than that which is posterior.”
- ↑ It may be observed that in the view of Kant and others (2) and (3) are somewhat confusingly blended.
