have been much more consistent for him to show that both the self-regarding and the other-regarding virtues are ultimately to be recognized as virtues because they conduce to the common weal, or—if we may use the phrase now so hackneyed, which had already, in Hume's time, been employed by Hutcheson—'the greatest happiness of the greatest number.'
Such was Hume's system, as actually worked out by himself. When we come to compare it with that of Gay,—his only predecessor who had stated the Utilitarian principle in a perfectly unambiguous form,—we see at once what an important advance had been made in the development of ethical theory. Gay's system had been as frankly individualistic, in its way, as that of Hobbes; but, at the same time, it had avoided those offensive paradoxes of the earlier doctrine, which had undoubtedly kept many from appreciating the plausibility of the egoistic position. Indeed, it would be quite unfair to put Gay and his successors (i.e., those Utilitarian writers who maintained the egoistic character of the motive of the moral agent) in the same category with Hobbes. Gay and the others never employed egoism as a means by which to vilify human nature, but rather seem to have regarded it as a tempting device for simplifying ethical theory. Moreover, they partly succeeded in disguising its essentially unlovely character by supposing the development of a derived 'sympathy' through the 'association of ideas.' Hume had at first allowed himself to use 'association' in much the same way; but the very fact that his explanations in the Treatise are so much less clear than those of Gay in the "Dissertation," suggests a lack of certainty in his own mind as to the validity of the method; and, as we have seen, he entirely gave up, in his later work, this attempt to reduce the altruistic tendencies of human nature to terms of something else.
Taken by itself, Hume's recognition and defence of original altruism could not be regarded as an important contribution to English Ethics. From the time of Cumberland to that of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, there had never been wanting
