A Treatise of Human Nature · David Hume
GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. II.
44. We are now in a position to review the possible motives of human action according to Hume. Reason, constituting no objects, affords no motives. ‘It is only the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’ [1] To any logical thinker who accepted Locke’s doctrine of reason, as having no other function but to ‘lay in order intermediate ideas,’ this followed of necessity. It is the clearness with which Hume points out that, as it cannot move, so neither can it restrain, action, that in this regard chiefly distinguishes him from Locke. The check to any passion, he points out, can only proceed from some counter-motive, and such a motive reason, ‘having no original influence,’ cannot give. Strictly speaking, then, a passion can only be called unreasonable, as accompanied by some false judgment, which on its part must consist in ‘disagreement of ideas, considered as copies, with those objects which they represent;’ and ‘even then it is not the passion, properly speaking, which is unreasonable, but the judgment.’ It is nothing against reason--not, as Locke had inadvertently said, a wrong judgment--‘to prefer my own acknowledged lesser good to my greater.’
The only unreasonableness would lie in supposing that ‘my own acknowledged lesser good,’ being preferred, could be attained by means that would not really lead to it. Hence ‘we speak not strictly when we talk of the combat of reason and passion.’ They can in truth never oppose each other. The supposition. that they do so arises from a confusion between ‘calm passions’ and reason--a confusion founded on the fact that the former ‘produce little emotion in the mind, while the operation of reason produces none at all.’ [2] Calm passions, undoubtedly, do often conflict with the violent ones and even prevail over them, and thus, as the violent passion causes most uneasiness, it is untrue to say with Locke [3] that it is the most pressing uneasiness which always determines action. The calmness of a passion is not to be confounded with weakness, nor its violence with strength. A desire may be calm either because its object is remote, or because it is customary. In the former case, it is true, the desire is likely to be relatively weak; but in the latter case, the calmer the desire, the greater is likely to be its strength, since the repetition of a desire has the twofold effect, on the one hand of diminishing the ‘sensible emotion’ that accompanies it, on the other hand of ‘bestowing a facility in the performance of the action’ corresponding to the desire, which in turn creates a new inclination or tendency that combines with the original desire. [4]
45. The distinction, then, between ‘reasonable’ and ‘unreasonable’ desires--and it is only _desires_ that can be referred to when will, or the determination to action, is in question--in the only sense in which Hume can admit it, is a distinction not of objects but of our situation in regard to them. The object of desire in every case--whether near or remote, whether either by its novelty or by its contrariety to other passions it excites more or less ‘sensible emotion’--is still ‘good,’ _i.e._ pleasure. The greater the pleasure in prospect, the stronger the desire. [1] The only proper question, then, according to Hume, as to the pleasure which in any particular case is an object of desire will be whether it is _(a)_ an immediate impression of sense, or _(b)_ a pleasure of pride, or _(c)_ one of sympathy. Under the first head, apparently, he would include pleasures incidental to the satisfaction of appetite, and pleasures corresponding to the several senses--not only the smells and tastes we call ‘sweet,’ but the sights and sounds we call ‘beautiful.’ [2] Pleasures of this sort, we must suppose, are the _ultimate_ ‘exciting causes’ [3] of all those secondary ones, which are distinguished from their ‘exciting causes’ as determined by the ideas either of self or of another thinking person--the pleasures, namely, of pride and sympathy. Sympathetic pleasure, again, will be of two kinds, according as the pleasure in the pleasure of another does or does not excite the further pleasure of love for the other person. If the object desired is none of these pleasures, nor the means to them, it only remains for the follower of Hume to suppose that it is ‘pleasure in general’--the object of ‘self love.’
46. Anyone reading the ‘Treatise on Human Nature’ alongside of Shaftesbury or Butler would be surprised to find that while sympathy and benevolence fill a very large place in it, self-love ‘eo nomine’ has a comparatively small one. At first, perhaps, he would please himself with thinking that he had come upon a more ‘genial’ system of morals. The true account of the matter, however, he will find to be that, whereas with Shaftesbury and his followers the notion of self-love was really determined by opposition to those desires for other objects than pleasure, in the existence of which they really believed, however much the current psychology may have embarrassed their belief, on the other hand with Hume’s explicit reduction of all desire to desire for pleasure self-love loses the significance which this opposition gave it, and can have no meaning except as desire for ‘pleasure in general’ in distinction from this or that particular pleasure. Passages from the Essays may be adduced, it is true, where self-love is spoken of under the same opposition under which Shaftesbury and Hutcheson conceived of it, but in these, it will be found, advantage is taken of the ambiguity between ‘emotion’ and ‘desire,’ covered by the term ‘passion.’
That there are sympathetic _emotions_--pleasures occasioned by the pleasure of others--is, no doubt, as cardinal a point in Hume’s system as that all _desire_ is for pleasure to self; but between such emotions and self-love there is no co-ordination. No emotion, as he points out, determines action directly, but only by exciting desire; which with him can only mean that the image of the pleasant emotion excites desire for its renewal. In other words, no emotion amounts to volition or will. Self-love, on the other hand, if it means anything, means desire and a possibly strongest desire, or will. It can thus be no more determined by opposition to generous or sympathetic _emotions_ than can these by opposition to hunger and thirst. Hume, however, when he insists on the existence of generous ‘passions’ as showing that self-love is not our uniform motive, though he cannot consistently mean more than that desire for ‘pleasure in general,’ or desire for the satisfaction of desire, is not the uniform motive--which might equally be shown (as he admits) by pointing to such self-regarding ‘passions’ as love of fame, or such appetites as hunger--is yet apt, through the reader’s interpretation of ‘generous passions’ as _desires_ for something other than pleasure, to gain credit for recognising a possibility of living for others, in distinction from living for pleasure, which was in truth as completely excluded by his theory as by that of Hobbes. If he himself meant to convey any other distinction between self-love and the generous passions than one which would hold no less between it and every emotion whatever, it was through a fresh intrusion upon him of that notion of benevolence, as a ‘desire not founded on pleasure,’ which was in too direct contradiction to the first principles of his theory to be acquiesced in. [1]
This amounts, in fact, to a complete withdrawal from Hume’s original position and the adoption of one which is most clearly stated in Hutcheson’s posthumous treatise--the position, namely, that we begin with a multitude of ‘particular’ or ‘violent’ desires, severally ‘terminating upon objects’ which are not pleasures at all, and that, as reason developes, these gradually blend with, or are superseded by, the ‘calm’ desire for pleasure; so that moral growth means the access of conscious pleasure-seeking. This in effect seems to be Butler’s view, and Hutcheson reckons it ‘a lovely representation of human nature,’ though he himself holds that benevolence may exist, not merely as one of the ‘particular desires’ controlled by self-love, but as itself a ‘calm’ and controlling principle, co-ordinate with self-love. (‘System of Moral Philosophy,’ Vol. I. p. 51, &c.) How Hume gives meaning to this otherwise unmeaning definition: ‘Interest,’ like other motives described, implies determination by reason.
47. Such desire, then, being excluded, what other motive than ‘interest’ remains, by contrast with which the latter may be defined? It has been explained above (§7) that since pleasure as such, or as a feeling, does not admit of generality, ‘pleasure in general’ is an impossible object. When the motive of an action is said to be ‘pleasure in general,’ what is really meant is that the action is determined by the conception of pleasure, or, more properly, of self as a subject to be pleased. Such determination, again, is distinguished by opposition to two other kinds--_(a)_ to that sort of determination which is not by conception, but either by animal want, or by the animal _imagination_ of pleasure, and _(b)_ to determination by the conception of other objects than pleasure. By an author, however, who expressly excluded the latter sort of determination, and who did not recognise any distinction between the thinking and the animal subject, the motive in question could not thus be defined. Hence the difficulty of extracting from Hume himself any clear and consistent account of that which he variously describes as the ‘general appetite for good, considered merely as such,’ as ‘interest,’ and as ‘self-love.’
To say that he understood by it a desire for pleasure which is yet not a desire for any pleasure in particular, may seem a strange interpretation to put on one who regarded himself as a great liberator from abstractions, but there is no other which his statements, taken together, would justify. This desire for nothing, however, he converts into a desire for something by identifying it on occasion, (1) with any desire for a pleasure of which the attainment is regarded as sufficiently remote to allow of calmness in the desire, and (2) with desire for the means of having all pleasures indifferently at command. It is in one or other of these senses--either as desire for some particular pleasure distinguished only by its calmness, or as desire for power--that he always understands ‘interest’ or ‘self-love,’ except where he gains a more precise meaning for it by the admission of desires, not for pleasure at all, to which it may be opposed. Now taken in the former sense, its difference from the desires for the several pleasures of ‘sense,’ ‘pride,’ and ‘sympathy,’ of which Hume’s account has already been examined, cannot lie in the object, but--as he himself says of the distinction, which he regarded as an equivalent one, between ‘reasonable and unreasonable’ desires--in our situation with regard to it. If then the object of each of these desires, as we have shown to be implied in Hume’s account of them, is one which only reason, as self-consciousness, can constitute, it cannot be less so when the desire is calm enough to be called self-love. Still more plainly is the desire in question determined by reason--by the conception of self as a permanent susceptibility of pleasure--if it is understood to be desire for power.
Thus Hume, having degraded morality for the sake of consistency, after all is not consistent. 48. Having now before us a complete view of the possible motives to human action which Hume admits, we find that while he has carried to its furthest limit, and with the least verbal inconsistency possible, the effort to make thought deny its own originativeness in action, he has yet not succeeded. He has made abstraction of everything in the objects of human interest but their relation to our nervous irritability--he has left nothing of the beautiful in nature or art but that which it has in common with a sweetmeat, nothing of that which is lovely and of good report to the saint or statesman but what they share with the dandy or diner-out--yet he cannot present even this poor residuum of an object, by which all action is to be explained, except under the character it derives from the thinking soul, which looks before and after, and determines everything by relation to itself. Thus if, as he says, the distinction between reasonable and unreasonable desires does not lie in the object, this will not be because reason has never anything to do with the constitution of the object, but because it has always so much to do with it as renders selfishness--the self-conscious pursuit of pleasure--possible. Sensuality then will have been vindicated, the distinction between the ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ modes of life will have been erased, and after all the theoretic consistency--for the sake of which, and not, of course, to gratify any sinister interest, Hume made his philosophic venture--will not have been attained. Man will still not be ultimately passive, nor human action natural. Reason may be the ‘slave of the passions,’ but it will be a self-imposed subjection.
If all good is pleasure, what is _moral_ good? Ambiguity in Locke’s view. 49. We have still, however, to explain how Hume himself completes the assimilation of the moral to the natural; how, on the supposition that the ‘good’ can only mean the ‘pleasant,’ he accounts for the apparent distinction between moral and other good, for the intrusion of the ‘ought and ought not’ of ethical propositions upon the ‘is and is not’ of truth concerning nature. [1] Here again he is faithful to his _rôle_ as the expander and expurgator of Locke. With Locke, it will be remembered, the distinction of _moral_ good lay in the channel through which the pleasure, that constitutes it, is derived. It was pleasure accruing through the intervention of law, as opposed to the operation of nature: and from the pleasure thus accruing the term ‘morally good’ was transferred to the act which, as ‘conformable to some law,’ occasions it. [2] This view Hume retains, merely remedying Locke’s omissions and inconsistencies. Locke, as we saw, not only neglected to derive the existence of the laws, whose intervention he counted necessary to constitute the morally good, from the operation of that desire for pleasure which he pronounced the only motive of man; in speaking of moral goodness as consisting in conformity to law, he might, if taken at his word, be held to admit something quite different from pleasure alike as the standard and the motive of morality. Hume then had, in the first place, to account for the laws in question, and so account for them as to remove that absolute opposition between them and the operation of nature which Locke had taken for granted; secondly, to exhibit that conformity to law, in which the moral goodness of an act was held to consist, as itself a mode of pleasure--pleasure, namely, to the contemplator of the act; and thirdly, to show that not the moral goodness of the act, even thus understood, but pleasure to himself was the motive to the doer of it. [3]
51. So far, however, there is nothing to distinguish the moral act either from any ‘inanimate object,’ which may equally excite immediate pleasure, or from actions which have no character, as virtuous or vicious, at all. Some further limitation, then, must be found for the immediate pleasure which constitutes the goodness called ‘moral,’ and of which praise is the expression. This Hume finds in the exciting object which must be _(a)_ ‘considered in general and without reference to our particular interest,’ and _(b)_ an object so ‘related’ (in the sense above [1] explained) to oneself or to another as that the pleasure which it excites shall cause the further pleasure either of pride or love. [2] The precise effect of such limitation he does not explain in detail. A man’s pictures, gardens, and clothes, we have been told, tend to excite pride in himself and love in others. If then we can ‘consider them in general and without reference to our particular interest,’ and in such ‘mere survey’ find pleasure, this pleasure, according to Hume’s showing, will constitute them morally good. [3] He usually takes for granted, however, a further limitation of the pleasure in question, as excited only by ‘actions, sentiments, and characters,’ and thus finds virtue to consist in the ‘satisfaction produced to the spectator of an act or character by the mere view of it.’ [4] Virtues and vices then mean, as Locke well said, the usual likes and dislikes of society. If we choose with him to call that virtue of an act, which really consists in the pleasure experienced by the spectator of it, ‘conformity to the law of their opinion,’ we may do so, provided we do not suppose that there is some other law, which this imperfectly reflects, and that the virtue is something other than the pleasure, but to be inferred from it. ‘We do not infer a character to be virtuous, because it pleases; but in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in effect feel that it is virtuous.’ [5]
Again, though remote situation or the state of one’s temper may at any time modify or suppress sympathy with the pleasure caused by the good qualities of any particular person, we may still apply to him terms expressive of our liking. ‘External beauty is determined merely by pleasure; and ‘tis evident a beautiful countenance cannot give so much pleasure, when seen at a distance of twenty paces, as when it is brought nearer to us. We say not, however, that it appears to us less beautiful; because we know what effect it will have in such a position, and by that reflection we correct its momentary appearance.’ As with the beautiful, so with the morally good. ‘In order to correct the continual contradictions’ in our judgment of it, that would arise from changes in personal temper or situation, ‘we fix on some steady and general points of view, and always in our thoughts place ourselves in them, whatever may be our present situation.’ Such a point of view is furnished by the consideration of ‘the interest or pleasure of the person himself whose character is examined, and of the persons who have a connection with him,’ as distinct from the spectator’s own. The imagination in time learns to ‘adhere to these general views, and distinguishes the feelings they produce from those which arise from our particular and momentary situation.’ Thus a certain constancy is introduced into sentiments of blame and praise, and the variations, to which they continue subject, do not appear in language, which ‘experience teaches us to correct, even where our sentiments are more stubborn and unalterable.’ [1]
Can the distinction between the ‘moral’ and ‘natural’ be maintained by Hume? What is ‘artificial virtue’? 55. To a generation which has sufficiently freed itself from all ‘mystical’ views of law--which is aware that ‘natural right,’ if it means a right that existed in a ‘state of nature,’ is a contradiction in terms; that, since contracts could not be made, or property exist apart from social convention, any question about a primitive obligation to respect them is unmeaning--the negative side of this part of the treatise can have little interest. That all rights and obligations are in some sense ‘artificial,’ we are as much agreed as that without experience there can be no knowledge. The question is, how the artifice, which constitutes them, is to be understood, and what are its conditions. If we ask what Hume understood by it, we can get no other answer than that the artificial is the opposite of the natural. If we go on to ask for the meaning of the natural, we only learn that we must distinguish the senses in which it is opposed to the miraculous and to the unusual from that in which it is opposed to the artificial, [1] but not what the latter sense is.
The truth is that, if the first book of Hume’s treatise has fulfilled its purpose, the only conception of the natural, which can give meaning to the doctrine that the obligation to observe contracts and respect property is artificial, must disappear. There are, we shall find, two different negations which in different contexts this doctrine conveys. Sometimes it means that such an obligation did not exist for man in a ‘state of nature,’ _i.e._, as man was to begin with. But in that sense the law of cause and effect, without which there would be no nature at all, is, according to Hume, not natural, for it--not merely our recognition of it, but the law itself--is a habit of imagination, gradually formed. Sometimes it conveys an opposition to Clarke’s doctrine of obligation as constituted by certain ‘eternal relations and proportions,’ which also form the order of nature, and are other than, though regulative of, the succession of our feelings. Nature, however, having been reduced by Hume to the succession of our feelings, the ‘artifice,’ by which he supposes obligations to be formed, cannot be determined by opposition to it, unless the operation of motives, which explains the artifice, is something else than a succession of feelings. But that it is nothing else is just what it is one great object of the moral part of his treatise to show.
Reflection on the general loss caused by such instability leads to a ‘tacit convention, entered into by all the members of a society, to abstain from each other’s possessions;’ and thereupon ‘immediately arise the ideas of justice and injustice; as also those of property, right, and obligation.’ It is not to be supposed, however, that the ‘convention’ is of the nature of a promise, for all promises presuppose it. ‘It is only a general sense of common interest; which sense all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules;’ and this ‘general sense of common interest,’ it need scarcely be said, is every man’s sense of his own interest, as in fact coinciding with that of his neighbours. In short, ‘’tis only from the selfishness and confined generosity of man, along with the scanty provision nature has made for his wants, that justice derives its origin.’ [7] [1] Book III. part 2, sec. 2. [2] Cf. sec. 54. [3] Cf. secs. 42, 43, and 46. [4] Vol. II. p. 255. [Book III., part II., sec. I.] [5] For the sense in which Hume did admit a ‘general benevolence,’ see sec. 41, note. [6] Vol. II. pp. 256 and 260. [Book III., part II., sec. II.] [7] Vol. II. pp. 261, 263, 268. [Book III., part II., sec. II.]
How artificial virtues become moral. 58. Thus the origin of rules of justice is explained, but the obligation to observe them so far appears only as ‘interested,’ not as ‘moral.’ In order that it may become ‘moral,’ a pleasure must be generally experienced in the spectacle of their observance, and a pain in that of their breach, apart from reference to any gain or loss likely to arise to the spectator himself from that observance or breach. In accounting for this experience Hume answers the second of the questions, proposed above. ‘To the imposition and observance of these rules, both in general and in every particular instance, men are at first induced only by a regard to interest; and this motive, on the first formation of society, is sufficiently strong and forcible. But when society has become numerous, and has increased to a tribe or nation, this interest is more remote; nor do men so readily perceive that disorder and confusion follow upon each breach of these rules, as in a more narrow and contracted society. But though, in our own actions, we may frequently lose sight of that interest which we have in maintaining order, and may follow a lesser and more present interest, we never fail to observe the prejudice we receive, either mediately or immediately, from the injustice of others....
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