2 possible perfections; he is free, though freedom can only be predicated of him in the sense of his not being subject to any external compulsion. Neither is man any exception to the universal action of the Deity. Hartley denied that he was a materialist, in the sense of believing the materiality of the soul. When arguing for a future state, he leaves it doubtful whether the soul is an immaterial substance or an elementary infinitesimal body,' a germ or atom which receives the sensation, and whose existence survives that of the organism within which it is placed. His system, however, clearly renders a soul a superfluity, if not an anomaly. The will, the thoughts, and the emotions, not only result from, but, as it would seem, are vibratiuncles,' that is, miniature vibrations set up in our bodies. Like all other material motions, they are therefore due-it matters not whether directly or indirectly to the Divine Impulse. God is the one efficient cause, and all the phenomena of human life are but the waves stirred by him in the infinite ocean of existence. Hartley is, so far, a materialist Spinoza; nor, it would seem, does it make very great difference whether we call that substance which is the medium transmitting the divine impulses matter or spirit. In either case we are equally ignorant of its ultimate essence. There are, indeed, with Hartley, two substances; but matter is merely the senseless mass tossed hither and thither by the omnipresent and omnipotent force which we call God. 68. Further, it necessarily follows from this conception that Hartley is a consistent optimist. The universe being but the raw material provided for the display of the divine energy, corresponds to the perfection of its Creator. It is the cast moulded in its minutest details upon infinite beneficence. The infinite happiness and perfection of God is a 'pledge of the ultimate happiness and perfection of all his creatures.' 3 Assuming the Calvinist doctrine of the supreme will of God, he rejects the Calvinist conclusion that some men can have Hartley, ii. 35; part ii. prop. ix. 2 lb. ii. 383, &c.; part ii. prop. 86, and see his comparison of his own system with those of Leibnitz and Malebranche (i. 111; part i. prop. 21, cor. 3). Ib. ii. 421; part ii. prop. 94. VOL. II. F 2 been made for eternal happiness and others for eternal misery. Nay, he even ventures to maintain, though some of his terms require a special interpretation, a doctrine 'which at first sight seemed not only contrary to obvious experience, but even impossible-viz. that all individuals are actually and always infinitely happy.' The theory sounds like optimism run mad. It is curious that Hartley should have persuaded himself that such opinions were consistent with the Christian dogmas, elastic as those dogmas had become in the hands of the rationalist school. The explanation is partly that a philosophy resting exclusively upon experience can adapt itself easily to a religion resting upon evidence. Hartley, for example, is ready to accept miracles which Spinoza declared upon a priori grounds to be irrational. The difference between Hartley and the older metaphysicians may be described by saying that with them the type of all reasoning is to be found in pure mathematics, whilst with him it is to be found in applied mathematics. He seeks to do for human nature what Newton did for the solar system. Association is for man what gravitation is for the planets; and as Newton imagined that God's will must be the efficient cause of gravitation, so Hartley imagined the same will to be the cause of those movements in the human organism which are the immediate cause of all mental phenomena.3 He is about the last writer who affects the mathematical form common to the metaphysicians of the previous generation, but in his mind the analogy is not with the pure mathematics which, dealing with ideas of space and time, seem to have an a priori validity, but with those laws of motion which he would have asserted (as indeed he would have asserted of all axiomatic truths) to be derived from experience. 69. Dropping the peculiar theory of vibratiuncles which Priestley afterwards excised from his system with small injury to its coherency, the theory, so far as morality is concerned, 'Hartley, ii. 421. 2 Ib. ii. 29; part ii. prop. 4. See i. 351, where he says that all enquiries may ultimately be put into mathematical forms, and all categories be reduced to quantity alone. His classification of the sciences, part i. prop. 88, evidently implies this conception. All 'natural philosophy' is with him reducible to laws such as those of gravitation. Hume also compares association to gravitation (see Works, i. 321). * See The Theory of the Human Mind,' by Priestley, 1775. may be pretty simply stated. He holds, in opposition to Locke, that all ideas are derived from sensation, the remaining ideas of reflection being simply the residuum which Locke was incapable of sufficiently analysing. The ideas which thus enter the mind are gradually transformed by force of association into more complex products. The pleasures and pains which are compounded of the primary sensations may be divided into seven classes: (1) sensation; (2) imagination; (3) ambition; (4) self-interest; (5) sympathy; (6) theopathy; and (7) the moral sense. The pleasures and pains of sensation are the ultimate irresoluble facts. From them are generated the pleasures and pains of the imagination. From these two, again, in various combinations, arise the pleasures and pains of ambition. From the three thus obtained, the pleasures and pains of self-interest, and so on. But, again, each class of pleasures and pains reacts upon the previous classes; and thus we have wholes too complex to admit of complete analysis. In mathematical language it may be said that six equations arise from stating each of the latter six classes in terms of all the others; and thus it is possible to determine every one of the other classes as functions of the primitive sensations. The problem is ingeniously worked out in each case; but the process is too complicated and too unsatisfactory to be worth following. 70. Upon this foundation Hartley erects his theory of the rule of life. The innumerable pains and pleasures, as they strike upon our sense, cause vibrations which tend to coalesce. Association thus converts a state in which both pleasure and pain are felt by turns into a state in which pure pleasure and pure pain are alone perceived. But as pleasures are more numerous than pains, the resulting state will be generally one of pleasure alone; and thus, ultimately, association has ‘a tendency to reduce the state of those who have eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil back again to a paradisaical one.' The painful element is gradually absorbed in the pleasurable, until at last it is altogether eliminated. By a similar process we may trace the proper course to be pursued 2 Ib. i. 369; part i. prop. 89. Hartley, i. 360; part i. prop. 88. by each individual. Mankind is endued with a desire of obtaining happiness;' but this desire, when properly regulated, leads not to selfishness, but to an utter annihilation of self. Analysing each of the classes of the pleasure, Hartley discovers that in each case the purest enjoyment is derived from those pleasures which border upon the higher class. The sensual and the purely selfish pleasures should be sought only in strict subordination to the love of man and the love of God. By a process of successive approximations (the mathematical analogy is always present to his mind) the lower desires will thus be gradually merged in the higher, till we arrive at 'perfect self-annihilation and the pure love of God.' The moral sense in Hartley's classification lies above theopathy; but the moral sense is the 'sum total' of all the others, and not a distinct faculty. It represents the state of mind which results when the whole nature is brought into its final harmony. We begin as animals, with nothing but sensations; we should end as angels rapt in the beatific vision of the all-perfect Creator. Hartley expresses his conclusion in that queer mathematical mysticism which is characteristic of the strange contrasts of his system. Let W., he says, represent the love of the world; F, the fear, and L, the love of God. Then we may say that W: F::F: L or W=. In our initial state we fear God infinitely more than we love him; and love the world infinitely more than we fear God. In our final state, the ratios should be reversed, and the love of the world be swallowed up in the fear, and that again in the love of God. W, that is, should approach indefinitely to zero; and L must, therefore, be indefinitely greater than F. The good Hartley smiles complacently at the 'new and compendious light' which he has thus thrown upon the most important of all problems. He has compressed religion into a pocket formula. 71. The kernel of his system of course lies in that theory of association which provides the machinery for this curious transformation, by which vibratiuncles set up in the medullary substance of the brain are ultimately converted into the pure Hartley, ii. 197; part ii. prop. 46. 2 Ib. ii. 282; part ii. prop. 67. Ib. i. 497; part i. prop. 99. Ib. ii. 329; part ii. prop. 72 (Scholium). love of God. The general doctrine is familiar enough. The miser loves money as an end, because he has associated it with the pleasures produced by money. As we thus learn to value the cause from first valuing the thing caused, we are led by the necessity of our natures to rest at last upon him who is the inexhaustible fountain of all power, knowledge, goodness, majesty, glory, property, &c.' By the same process children learn to love the parents, attendants, or playfellows, who are the cause of most of their pleasures. The amusements which we share with others have the same tendency; the honour procured by benevolence, and the pleasures of religion and the moral sense, tend to strengthen the early associations, and thus, without any direct expectation of reward, or even of subsidiary pleasure, benevolence becomes an ultimate object for its own sake. 'And this,' says Hartley, 'I take to be a proof from the doctrine of association, that there is, and must be, such a thing as pure disinterested benevolence; also a just account of the origin and nature of it.' 2 72. This is Hartley's contribution to a moral theory. Its value and its limitations are tolerably clear. The great problem of contemporary moralists was to solve an apparent contradiction. The purely selfish solution-the doctrine, that is, that the man neither does nor can act except from a regard to his own interests-has a terrible plausibility, especially when all philosophy is obliged to start from the consideration of the individual mind, instead of contemplating the social organism. The very existence of altruistic' sentiments appears to be contradictory, from this point of view. Some writers denied, with Mandeville, that they existed, or, with Butler and Hutcheson, regarded the faculty which sanctions them as in some sense supernatural. Hartley still retains the conception of final causes, but endeavours to lay bare the machinery by which they work. The process by which a regard for self is gradually refined into pure love of God or our neighbours is still the work of a divine hand, but it may be studied, analysed, and shown to conform to certain 'Hartley, i. 463; part i. prop. 96. 2 Ib. i. 474; part i, prop. 97. |