A Treatise of Human Nature · David Hume
GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. II.
Hume’s doctrine of morals parallel to his doctrine of nature. 1. In his speculation on morals, no less than on knowledge, Hume follows the lines laid down by Locke. With each there is a precise correspondence between the doctrine of nature and the doctrine of the good. Each gives an account of reason consistent at least in this that, as it allows reason no place in the constitution of real objects, so it allows it none in the constitution of objects that determine desire and, through it, the will. With each, consequently, the ‘moral faculty,’ whether regarded as the source of the judgments ‘ought and ought not,’ or of acts to which these judgments are appropriate, can only be a certain faculty of feeling, a particular susceptibility of pleasure and pain. The originality of Hume lies in his systematic effort to account for those objects, apparently other than pleasure and pain, which determine desire, and which Locke had taken for granted without troubling himself about their adjustment to his theory, as resulting from the modification of primary feelings by ‘associated ideas.’ ‘Natural relation,’ the close and uniform sequence of certain impressions and ideas upon each other, is the solvent by which in the moral world, as in the world of knowledge, he disposes of those ostensibly necessary ideas that seem to regulate impressions without being copied from them; and in regard to the one application of it as much as to the other, the question is whether the efficiency of the solvent does not depend on its secretly including the very ideas of which it seems to get rid.
Its relation to Locke: Locke’s account of freedom, will, and desire. 2. The place held by the ‘Essay concerning Human Understanding,’ as a sort of philosopher’s Bible in the last century, is strikingly illustrated by the effect of doctrines that only appear in it incidentally. It does not profess to be ethical treatise at all, yet the moral psychology contained in the chapter ‘of Power’ (II. 21), and the account of moral good and evil contained In the chapter ‘of other Relations’ (II. 28) furnished the text for most of the ethical speculation that prevailed in England, France, and Scotland for a century later. If Locke’s theory was essentially a reproduction of Hobbes’, it was yet in the form he gave it that it survived while Hobbes was decried and forgotten. The chapter on Power is in effect an account of determination by motives. More, perhaps, than any other part of the essay it bears the marks of having been written ‘currente calamo.’ In the second edition a summary was annexed which differs somewhat in the use of terms, but not otherwise, from the original draught. The main course of thought, however, is clear throughout. Will and freedom are at first defined in all but identical terms as each a ‘power to begin or forbear action barely by a preference of the mind’ (§§ 5, 8, 71).
Nor is this identification departed from, except that the term ‘will’ is afterwards restricted to the ‘preference’ or ‘power of preference,’ while freedom is confined to the power of acting upon preference; in which sense it is pointed out that though there cannot be freedom without will, there may be will without freedom, as when, through the breaking of a bridge, a man cannot help falling into the water, though he prefers not to do so. ‘Freedom’ and ‘will’ being thus alike powers, if not the same power, it is as improper to ask whether the will is free as whether one power has another power. The proper question is whether man is free (§§ 14, 21), and the answer to this question, according to Locke, is that within certain limits he is free to act, but that he is not free to will. When in any case he has the option of acting or forbearing to act, he cannot help preferring, _i.e._ willing, one or other alternative. If it is further asked, What determines the will or preference? the answer is that ‘nothing sets us upon any new action but some uneasiness’ (§ 29), viz., the ‘most urgent uneasiness we at any time feel’ (§ 40), which again is always ‘the uneasiness of desire fixed on some absent good, either negative, as indolence to one in pain, or positive, as enjoyment of pleasure.’ In one sense, indeed, it may be said that the will often runs counter to desire, but this merely means that we ‘being in this world beset with sundry uneasinesses, distressed with different desires,’ the determination of the will by the most pressing desire often implies the counteraction of other desires which would, indeed, under other circumstances, be the most pressing, but at the particular time of the supposed action are not so.
Two questions: Does man always act from the strongest motive? and, What constitutes his motive? The latter the important question: Distinction between desires that are, and those that are not, determined by the conception of self. 3. So far Locke’s doctrine amounts to no more than this, that action is always determined by the strongest motive; and only those who strangely hold that human freedom is to be vindicated by disputing that truism will care to question it. To admit that the strongest desire always moves action (there being, in fact, no test of its strength but its effect on action) and that, since every desire causes uneasiness till it is satisfied, the strongest desire is also the most pressing uneasiness, [1] is compatible with the most opposite views as to the constitution of the objects which determine desire. To understand that it is this constitution of the desired object, not any possible intervention of unmotived willing between the presentation of a strongest motive and action, which forms the central question of ethics, is the condition of all clear thinking on the subject. It is a question, however, which Locke ignores, and popular philosophy, to its great confusion, has not only continued to do the same, but would probably resent as pedantic any attempt at more accurate analysis.
When we hear of the strongest ‘desire’ being the uniform motive to action, we have to ask, in the first place, whether the term is confined to impulses determined by a prior consciousness, or is taken to include those impulses, commonly called ‘mere appetites,’ which are not so determined, but depend directly and solely on the ‘constitution of our bodily organs.’ The _appetite_ of hunger is obviously quite independent of any remembrance of the pleasure of eating, yet nothing is commoner than to identify with such simple appetite the desire determined by consciousness of some sort, as when we say of a drunkard, who never drinks merely because he is thirsty, that he is governed by his appetite. Upon this distinction, however, since it is recognised by current psychology, it is less important to insist than on that between the kinds of prior consciousness which may determine desire proper. Does this prior consciousness consist simply in the return of an image of past pleasure with consequent hope of its renewal, or is it a conception--the thought of an object under relations to self or of self in relation to certain objects--in a word, self-consciousness as distinct from simple feeling?
4. Of desire determined in the former way we have experience, if at all, in those motives which actuate us, as we say, ‘unconsciously’; which means, without our attending to them--feelings which we do not fix even momentarily by reference to self or to a thing. As we cannot set ourselves to recall such feelings without thinking them, without determining them by that reference to self which we suppose them to exclude, they cannot be described; but some of our actions (such as the instinctive recurrence to a sweet smell), seem only to be thus accounted for, and probably those actions of animals which do not proceed from appetite proper are to be accounted for in the same way. But whether such actions are facts in human experience or no, those which make us what we are as men are not so determined. The man whom we call the slave of his appetite, the enlightened pleasure-hunter, the man who lives for his family, the artist, the enthusiast for humanity, are alike in this, that the desire which moves their action is itself determined not by the recurring image of a past pleasure, but by the conception of self.
The self may be conceived of simply as a subject to be pleased, or may be a subject of interests, which, indeed, when gratified, produce pleasure but are not produced by it--interests in persons, in beautiful things, in the order of nature and society--but self is still not less the ‘punctum stans’ whose presence to each passing pleasure renders it a constituent of a happiness which is to be permanently pursued, than it is the focus in which the influences of that world which only self-conscious reason could constitute--the world of science, of art, of human society--must be regathered in order to become the personal interests which move the actions of individuals. It is in this self-consciousness involved in our motives, in that conversion into a conception by reference to self, which the image even of the merest animal pleasure must undergo before it can become an element in the formation of character, that the possibility of freedom lies. Without it we should be as sinless and as unprogressive, as free from remorse and aspiration, as incapable of selfishness and self-denial as the animals. Each pleasure would be taken as it came. We should have ‘the greatest happiness of which our nature is capable,’ without possibility of asking ourselves whether we might not have had more.
It is only the conception of himself as a permanent subject to be pleased that can set man upon the invention of new pleasures, and then, making each pleasure a disappointment when it comes, produce the ‘vicious’ temper; only this that can suggest the reflection how much more pleasure he might have had than he has had, and thus produce what the moralists know as ‘cool selfishness’; only this, on the other hand, which, as ‘enlightened self-love,’ perpetually balances the attraction of imagined pleasure by the calculation whether it will be good for one as a whole. Nor less is it the conception of self, with a ‘matter’ more adequate to its ‘form,’ taking its content not from imagined pleasure, but from the work of reason in the world of nature and humanity, which determines that personal devotion to a work or a cause, to a state, a church, or mankind, which we call self-sacrifice. Objects so constituted Locke should consistently exclude: But he finds room for them by treating every desire for an object, of which the attainment gives pleasure, as a desire for pleasure.
5. If, now, we ask ourselves whether Locke recognised this function of reason, as self-consciousness, in the determination of the will, the answer must be yes and no. His cardinal doctrine, as we have sufficiently seen, forbade him to admit that reason or thought could originate an object. The only possible objects with him are either simple ideas or resoluble into these, and the simple idea, as that which we receive in pure passivity, is virtually feeling. Now no combination of feelings (supposing it possible [1]) can yield the conception of self as a permanent subject even of pleasure, much less as a subject of social claims. It cannot, therefore, yield the objects, ranging from sensual happiness to the moral law, humanity, and God, of which this conception is the correlative condition. Thus, strictly taken, Locke’s doctrine excludes every motive to action, but appetite proper and such desire as is determined by the imagination of animal pleasure or pain, and in doing so renders vice as well as virtue unaccountable--the excessive pursuit of pleasure as well as that dissatisfaction with it which affords the possibility of ordinary reform. On the other hand, the same happy intellectual unscrupulousness, which we have traced in his theory of knowledge, attends him also here. Just as he is ready on occasion to treat any conceived object that determines sense as if it were itself a sensation, so he is ready to treat any object that determines desire, without reference to the work of thought in its construction, as if it were itself the feeling of pleasure, or of uneasiness removed, which arises upon satisfaction of the desire. In this way, without professedly admitting any motive but remembered pleasure--a motive which, if it were our only one, would leave ‘man’s life as cheap as beasts’’--he can take for granted any objects of recognised interest as accounting for the movement of human life, and as constituents of an utmost possible pleasure which it is his own fault if every one does not pursue.
Are we, then, by the ‘happiness’ in question to understand pleasure _in general_, as might be inferred from Locke’s speaking of it as the ‘object of desire _in general_’? But it is in its mere particularity that each pleasure has its being. It is a simple idea, and therefore, as Locke and Hume have themselves taught us, momentary, indefinable, in ‘perpetual flux,’ changing every moment upon us. Pleasure _in general_, therefore, is not pleasure, and it is nothing else. It is not a conceived reality, as a relation, or a thing determined by relations, is, since pleasure as feeling, in distinction from its conditions which are not feelings, for the same reason that it cannot be defined, cannot be conceived. It is a mere name which utilitarian philosophy has mistaken for a thing; but for which--since no one, whatever his theory of the desirable, can actually desire either the abstraction of pleasure in general or the aggregate of possible pleasures--a practical substitute is apt to be found in any lust of the flesh that may for the time be the strongest. In what sense of happiness is it true that it ‘is really just as it appears?’ In what sense that it is every one’s object?
8. Having begun by making this fiction ‘the proper object of desire in general,’ Locke saves the appearance of consistency by representing the particular pleasure or removal of uneasiness, which he in fact believed to be the object of every desire, as if it were a certain part of the ‘full extent of happiness’ which the individual, having this full extent before him, picked out as being what ‘in his present thoughts would satisfy him.’ Nor does he ever give up the notion of a ‘happiness in general,’ in distinction from the happiness of each man’s actual choice, as a possible motive, which a man who finds himself wretched in consequence of his actions may be told that he ought to have adopted. His real notion, however, of the happiness which is motive to action is a confused result of the three other notions of happiness, distinguished above as _(b)_, _(c)_ and _(d)_. As that about which no one can be mistaken, ‘happiness’ can only be so in sense _(b)_, as the ‘pleasure which survives most strongly in imagination.’ Of this it can be said truly, and of this only, that ‘it really is just as it appears,’ and that ‘a man never chooses amiss’ since he must ‘know what best pleases him.’
But with this, almost in the same breath, Locke confuses ‘happiness’ in senses _(c)_ and _(d)_. So soon as it is said of an object that it is ‘taken by the individual to make a necessary part of his happiness,’ it is implied that it is determined by his conception of self. It is something which, as the result of the action of this conception on his past experience, he has come to present to himself as a constituent of his personal good. Unless he were conscious of himself as a permanent subject, he could have no conception of happiness as a whole from relation to which each present object takes its character as a part. Nor of the objects determined by this relation is it true, as Locke says, that they are always pleasures, or that they ‘are really just as they appear.’ Our readiness to accept his statements to this effect, is at bottom due to a confusion between the pleasure, or removal of uneasiness, incidental to the satisfaction of a desire and the object which excites the desire.
If having explained desire, as Locke does, by reference to the good, we then allow ourselves to explain the good by reference to desire, it will indeed be true that no man can be mistaken as to his present good, but only in the sense of the identical proposition that every man most desires what he does most desire; and true also, that every attained good is pleasure, but only in the sense that what satisfies desire does satisfy it. The man of whom it could be truly said, in any other sense than that of the above identical proposition, that his only objects of desire--the only objects which he ‘takes to make a necessary part of his happiness’--were pleasures, would be a man, as we say, of no interests. He would be a man who either lived simply for pleasures incidental to the satisfaction of animal appetite, or one who, having been interested in certain objects in which reason alone enables us to be interested--_e.g._, persons, pursuits, or works of art--and having found consequent pleasure, afterwards vainly tries to get the pleasure without the interests. To the former type of character, of course, the approximations are numerous enough, though it may be doubted whether such an ideal of sensuality is often fully realised.
The latter in its completeness, which would mean a perfect misery that could only issue in suicide, would seem to be an impossibility, though it is constantly being approached in proportion to the unworthiness and fleetingness of the interests by which men allow themselves to be governed, and which, after stimulating an indefinite hunger for good, leave it without an object to satisfy it; in proportion, too, to the modern habit of hugging and poring over the pleasures which our higher interests cause us till these interests are vitiated, and we find ourselves in restless and hopeless pursuit of the pleasure when the interest which might alone produce it is gone. No real object of human desire can ever be just as it appears.
9. Just as it is untrue, then, of the object of desire, as ‘taken to be part of one’s happiness’ or determined by the conception of self, that it is always a pleasure, so it is untrue that it is always really just as it appears, except in the trifling sense that what is most strongly desired is most strongly desired. Rather it is never really what it appears. It is least of all so to the professed pleasure-seeker. Obviously, to the man who seeks the pleasure incidental to interests which he has lost, there is a contradiction in his quest which for ever prevents what seems to him desirable from satisfying his desire. And even the man who lives for merely animal pleasure, just because he seeks it as part of a happiness, never finds it to be that which he sought. There is no mistake about the pleasure, but he seeks it as that which shall satisfy him, and satisfy him, since he is not an animal, it cannot. Nor are our higher objects of desire ever what they seem. That is too old a topic with poets and moralizers to need enforcing. Each in its turn, we know, promises happiness when it shall have been attained, but when it is attained the happiness has not come. The craving for an object adequate to oneself, which is the source of the desire, is still not quenched; and because it is not, nor can be, even ‘the joy of success’ has its own bitterness.
Can Locke consistently allow the distinction between true happiness and false? Or responsibility? 10. The case, then, stands thus. Locke, having too much ‘common sense’ to reduce all objects of desire to the pleasures incidental to satisfactions of appetite, takes for granted any number of objects which only reason can constitute (or, in other words, which can only exist for a self-conscious subject) without any question as to their origin. It is enough for him that they are not conscious inventions of the individual, and that they are related to feeling--though related as determining it. This being so, they are to him no more the work of thought than are the satisfactions of appetite. The conception of them is of a kind with the simple remembrance or imagination of pleasures caused by such satisfactions. The question how, if only pleasure is the object of desire, they came to be desired before there had been experience of the pleasures incidental to their attainment, is virtually shelved by treating these latter pleasures as if they were themselves the objects originally desired. So far consistency at least is saved. No object but feeling, present or remembered, is ostensibly admitted within human experience.
But meanwhile, alongside of this view, comes the account of the strongest motive as determined by the conception of self--as something which a man ‘takes to be a necessary part of his happiness,’ and which he is ‘answerable to himself’ for so taking. The inconsistency of such language with the view that every desired object must needs be a pleasure, would have been less noticeable if Locke himself had not frankly admitted, as the corollary of this view that the desired good ‘is really just as it appears.’ The necessity of this admission has always been the rock on which consistent Hedonism has broken. Locke himself has scarcely made it when he becomes aware of its dangerous consequences, and great part of the chapter on Power is taken up by awkward attempts to reconcile it with the distinction between true happiness and false, and with the existence of moral responsibility. If greatest pleasure is the only possible object, and the production of such pleasure the only possible criterion of action, and if ‘as to present pleasure and pain the mind never mistakes that which is really good or evil,’ with what propriety can any one be told that he might or that he ought to have chosen otherwise than he has done? ‘He has missed the true good,’ we say, ‘which he might and should have found’; but ‘good,’ according to Locke, is only pleasure, and pleasure, as Locke in any other connexion would be eager to tell us, must mean either some actual present pleasure or a series of pleasures of which each in turn is present. If every one without possibility of mistake has on each occasion chosen the greatest present pleasure, how can the result for him at any time be other than the true good, _i.e._, the series of greatest pleasures, each in its turn present, that have been hitherto possible for him?
Objections to the Utilitarian answer to these questions. 11. A modern utilitarian, if faithful to the principle which excludes any test of pleasure but pleasure itself, will probably answer that every one does attain the maximum of pleasure possible for him, his character and circumstances being what they are; but that with a change in these his choice would be different. He would still choose on each occasion the greatest pleasure of which he was then capable, but this pleasure would be one ‘truer’--in the sense of being more intense, more durable, and compatible with a greater quantity of other pleasures--than is that which he actually chooses. But admitting that this answer justifies us in speaking of any sort of pleasure as ‘truer’ than that at any time chosen by any one--which is a very large admission, for of the intensity of any pleasure we have no test but its being actually preferred, and of durability and compatibility with other pleasures the tests are so vague that a healthy and unrepentant voluptuary would always have the best of it in an attempt to strike the balance between the pleasures he has actually chosen and any truer sort--it still only throws us back on a further question.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.