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To obtain actually the accord of feeling that we desire, some effort is often required both on the part of the spectator to enter into the sentiments of the person principally concerned, and also on the part of the person principally concerned to "bring down his emotions"—or at least their outward expression-to "what the spectator can go along with." To persons who exhibit the latter effort in a degree which surprises as well as pleases, we attribute the "awful and respectable virtues of self-denial and self-government"; while the "amiable virtue of humanity" consists in that degree of sympathy "which surprises by its exquisite and unexpected delicacy and tenderness." In the case, however, of this amiable virtue, the spectator sympathises not merely with. the emotion of the humane person, but with (1) the pleasure that humanity gives to its object, and (2) the gratitude that it excites.

It is to this last operation of sympathy that our sense of merit in virtuous actions is due. We attribute merit to an act or an agent, when it or he appears to be the "proper and approved object of gratitude"; that is, when we as "indifferent bystanders" sympathise with the gratitude which the act excites or would normally excite-in the persons benefited by it. But we do not heartily sympathise with gratitude, unless we also sympathise with the motives of the action that excites it: hence the sense of merit "seems to be a compounded sentiment, made up of two distinct emotions," (1) a direct sympathy with the sentiments of the agent, and (2) an indirect sympathy with the gratitude of those who receive the benefit of his actions,-the latter being the predominant element. Similarly the sense of demerit is made up of a direct antipathy to the feelings of the misdoer and an indirect sympathy with the resentment of the

sufferer. This sympathetic indignation, impelling us to approve and demand the punishment of an injury done to another, is the primary constituent of what we call the sense of justice; reflections on the importance of such punishment for the preservation of social order are only a secondary and supplementary source of this sentiment.

So far we have been considering the origin and foundation of our judgments concerning the sentiments and conduct of others. When, however, such judgments are passed on our own conduct, a further complication of the fundamental element is required to explain them. In the process of conscience I "divide myself, as it were, into two persons," and endeavour to enter into the feelings of an imaginary spectator looking at my conduct. Real spectators are liable to praise and blame wrongly, from incomplete knowledge of our actions and motives; but esteem and admiration mistakenly bestowed afford a very incomplete and superficial satisfaction; and when they are mistakenly withheld, we gain real comfort by appealing to a "supposed well-informed and impartial spectator." Thus a desire of being "praiseworthy" is developed, distinct from our desire of praise; and similarly a dread of blameworthiness distinct from dread of blame. It is to be remarked, however, that our sensitiveness to mistaken blame is ordinarily greater than our capacity of deriving satisfaction from mistaken praise; partly because we know that a frank confession would destroy mistaken praise, while we have no similar means of getting rid of mistaken blame: accordingly, in this latter case the ideal spectator, the "man within the breast," seems sometimes to be "astonished and confounded by the violence and clamour of the man without." On the other hand, it ought to be recognised that "the man within the

breast requires often to be awakened and put in mind of his duty by the presence of the real spectator"; and when the real spectator at hand is indulgent and partial, while impartial ones are at a distance, the propriety of moral sentiments is apt to be corrupted. Hence the low state of international morality, and of the morality of party-warfare, as compared with ordinary private morality.

Again, the report of the "man within the breast" is liable to be perverted from truth by the internal influence of passion and self-regard, as well as by the opinions of the "man without." But against such self-deceit a valuable remedy has been provided by Nature in the "general rules of morality"; which are not to be regarded as original intuitions, but as "ultimately founded upon experience of what, in particular instances, our moral faculties, our natural sense of merit and propriety, approve or disapprove of." Regard for these general rules is what is properly called a sense of duty; and without this regard "there is no man whose conduct can be much depended upon," owing to "the inequalities of humour to which all men are subject." Adam Smith, indeed, goes so far as to say that this regard for general rules "is the only principle by which the bulk of mankind are capable of directing their actions"; but it is somewhat difficult to reconcile this with his general theory; --especially as, in the case of most virtues, the general rules are said to be "in many respects so loose and inaccurate," that our conduct should rather be directed "by a certain taste" than by precise maxims. The rules of Justice, however, he holds to be "accurate in the highest degree," so that they "determine with the greatest exactness any external action which it requires." He further takes care to assure us that the general rules of morality are

§ 10. Moral Sentiments

ciation.

"justly to be regarded as the laws of the Deity," and that the voice of "the man within the breast, the supposed impartial spectator," if we listen to it with "diligent and reverential attention," will " never deceive us": but it can hardly be said that his theory affords any cogent arguments for these conclusions.1

The theories of Hume and Adam Smith taken together compound- anticipate, to an important extent, the explanations of the ed by Asso- origin of moral sentiments which have been more recently current in the utilitarian school. But both of them err in underrating the complexity of the moral sentiments, and in not recognising that, however these sentiments may have originated, they are now, as introspectively examined, different from mere sympathy with the feelings and impulses of others; they are compounds that cannot be directly analysed into the simple element of sympathy, however complicated and combined. In these respects both Hume's and Adam Smith's methods of explanation compare unHartley favourably with that of Hartley, whose Observations on Man (1749) come in time before Hume's Inquiry.

(17051757).

Hartley's importance lies mainly in his original and comprehensive application of the laws of association of ideas to the explanation of all our more complex and refined emotions; he shows elaborately how, by the repeated and combined effects of such association, the pleasures and pains of "(1) imagination, (2) ambition, (3) self-interest, (4) sympathy, (5) theopathy, and (6) the moral sense" are developed out of the elementary pleasures and pains of sensation. He was

1 It is especially difficult to reconcile these statements with what Adam Smith elsewhere says of the variations of moral sentiments from age to age and from country to country, and of the destructive influence exercised on "good morals" by particular usages.

not indeed the first among English writers to draw attention to the importance of association in modifying mental phenomena; some of its more striking effects were noticed by Locke, and its operation was made a cardinal point in the metaphysical doctrine of Hume; who also referred to the principle slightly in his account of justice and other "artificial" virtues. And some years earlier, Gay,1 admitting Hutcheson's proof of the present disinterestedness of moral and benevolent impulses, had maintained that these (like the desires of knowledge or fame, the delight of reading, hunting, and planting, etc.) were derived from self-love by "the power of association." But a thorough and systematic application of the principle to ethical psychology is first found in Hartley's work; he also was the first definitely to conceive association as producing, instead of mere cohesion of mental phenomena, a quasi-chemical combination of them into a compound apparently different from its elements. His theory is primarily physiological, and assumes the complete correspondence of mind and body; he explains how "compound vibratiuncles" in the "medullary substance" are formed from the original vibrations that arise in the organ of sense; and how, correspondingly, the repetition of sensations, contemporaneously or in immediate succession, tends to produce cohering groups of the "miniatures" or traces of the original feelings, which thus coalesce into emotions and ideas really complex but apparently simple. Each of the six classes of pleasures and pains before mentioned is both later and more complex than those which precede it in the list, being due to the combined operation of the preceding classes; accordingly

1 In an essay prefixed to Law's translation of King's Origin of Evil (1731).

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