The significance of this change is not easily to be overrated. It does away at once with an almost indefinite amount of theoretical confusion, and puts Hume on the right track just where his historical, but not logical, successors—Tucker, Paley, and Bentham—were destined to go astray. And it must not for a moment be supposed that Hume is here going to the other extreme, and contending for the existence of a perfectly differentiated 'altruism' in our human nature, as opposed to an equally differentiated 'egoism,' as Hutcheson, for example, had mistakenly done. He rather shows that, in the last resort, this distinction resolves itself into an abstraction, and holds, in language which Butler himself would have had to commend: "Whatever contradiction may vulgarly be supposed between the selfish and social sentiments or dispositions, they are really no more opposite than selfish and ambitious, selfish and revengeful, selfish and vain." And one is almost startled at the agreement with Butler, when he immediately adds: "It is requisite that there be an original propensity of some kind, in order to be a basis to self-love, by giving a relish to the objects of its pursuit; and none more fit for this purpose than benevolence or humanity."[1]
To conclude, then: in place of the three quasi-distinct (but by no means coordinate) principles—egoism, limited altruism,[2] and 'sympathy' which had been assumed in the Treatise, we have 'sympathy,' in the ambiguous sense first explained, stricken out in the Inquiry, and a human nature there assumed which, as Hume sometimes has occasion to show, a priori implies at least a certain degree of the benevolent tendency, alongside of the equally essential self-regarding tendency,—the two becoming differentiated, in so far as they do become differentiated at all, only in the course of human experience.
While I am inclined to lay a great deal of stress upon this change of position on the part of Hume, I cannot at all agree
- ↑ See Inquiry, § ix, pt. ii. Butler's Sermons upon Human Nature had been published in 1726.
- ↑ Our limited altruism is mentioned here as a quasi-distinct principle, because it implies another kind of association, i.e., by 'causation,' besides association by 'similiarity' and by contiguity,' which are involved in our general sympathy.
