sufficient, no explanation can be given except the divine. ordinance. God enters his system, not as the supreme judge and awarder of rewards and penalties, but as the skilful contriver of a harmonious system. Man is a machine of vast complexity, so put together that the resultant of its various forces always points in that direction which is most beneficial to society. The origin of our moral sentiments remains, as with Butler, a mystery; but the end to which they point is no longer mysterious. The moral sense is a kind of Ithuriel's spear, which, when brought into contact with our affections, reveals their true quality, showing the angelic nature of those which are conducive to the public good and the diabolical character of those which are opposed to it. Or it resembles the fabulous cups which detected the poison lurking in any drink poured into them; and enables us to reject the antisocial, and accept the social emotions. When utility was thus recognised as the criterion of virtue, it required but one step to admit that it was also the cause of moral approbation. That step was taken by Hume, who had some personal relations with Hutcheson; but Hutcheson explicitly declined to accept an explanation which appeared to be equivalent to resolving virtue into selfishness.

64. The ethical speculations of Reid, the most eminent writer of the Common-Sense school, are contained in his 'Essays on the Active Powers,' but would scarcely justify a prolonged analysis. They may be described briefly as a combination of the views of Clarke and Shaftesbury, though most resembling those of Butler. Recognising the nugatory character of Clarke's theory,' he also thinks that to adopt Shaftesbury's theory would be to make morality arbitrary, as dependent upon a 'natural or acquired taste.'2 The conscience, therefore, which guides our moral judgments, is at once, in his language, an intellectual and an active power, and its supremacy is, as with Butler, an ultimate and self-evident fact.3 This power, which is simply common sense applied to moral questions, is, of course, capable of laying down as many first principles as may be required. Here, as elsewhere, the difficulty of finding an ultimate justification for axioms is evaded

1 Reid's Works, p. 676.

2 Ib. p. 534.

Ib. pp. 597, 598.

Ib. p. 637, &c.

by simply declaring that no justification is needed; but there is nothing in Reid's ethical doctrine which had not been more articulately worked out by his predecessors, except that his facility in multiplying first principles is, perhaps, more marked and his philosophy proportionally weaker.

V. HARTLEY AND ADAM SMITH.

65. Two remarkable attempts were made at explaining the mechanism of the mysterious power postulated by the Common-Sense school. Hutcheson had spoken slightingly of sympathy, and of the association of ideas as means of explaining our moral judgments. Sympathy was, in his eyes, merely a variety of selfishness. We dislike seeing pain in others because it produces a sympathetic pain in ourselves. And such a feeling would not account for a moral sentiment in cases where this sympathetic action could not be set up. A brave man dying is interested in the fate of his family, though he would know that their suffering after his death could inflict no pain upon him.' Association again is briefly noticed as useful in many ways, but also as exciting a disturbing influence. It leads us, for example, to dislike or admire certain actions, without asking whether our feelings are justified by reason, or produced only by an accidental collocation of circumstances. Hartley endeavoured to make association the fundamental law of our intellectual and emotional nature; and Adam Smith tried to resolve all our moral sentiments into sympathy.

66. David Hartley published his 'Observations on Man' in 1749. He had been a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, but being deterred by some scruples from taking orders, became a physician. To the writings of Sir Isaac Newton and Locke he owed, as his son tells us, the first stimulant to his intellect, but the hint which immediately suggested his peculiar theory came from a Mr. Gay, who afterwards published his sentiments in a dissertation prefixed to Law's translation of King's 'Origin of Evil.' The candour which prompted this avowal is in harmony with the admirable simplicity, truthful

''System,' i. 48.

2 See Life prefixed to vol. iii. of Works.

ness, and elevation which animated his book and his life. Anyone who should read the last pages of his treatise, in which he prophesies, with singular insight, the approach of a terrible revolution,' might probably declare that Hartley's peculiar characteristic was his opposition to the materialising tendencies of his age. And yet Hartley was philosophically a materialist. He was preaching substantially the same doctrines which were advocated by his contemporary Condillac. Man, according to him, is nothing but a bundle of 'vibratiuncles'-a kind of barrel-organ set in motion by the external forces of the world. Yet turn over a few pages and Hartley appears in the character of a Christian advocate, refuting the infidel by the same arguments, though not with the same brutality, as his friend Warburton. Go a little further, and it might appear that Hartley is a disciple of Spinoza, to whom the highest good is self-annihilation and absorption in the Deity. Certainly, a strange combination; and yet it must be added that Hartley is a consecutive reasoner, whose theory sins rather by excessive simplicity than by undue complication. The explanation of the paradox is partly to be sought in the ease with which the phraseology of any system may be pressed into the service of any other; partly in a real inconsistency due to his desire to satisfy his moral instinct even at the price of his logic; but partly, also, in the fact that the inconsistency is not so great as appears at first sight.

2

67. The doctrine which lies at the bottom of Hartley's scheme is the belief in necessity. He realises almost as clearly as Spinoza the truth that all events in the universe, including the phenomena of human action, are links in an eternal chain of causes and effects. The cause of the cause,' he says, is also 'the cause of the thing caused '—a truism which many people allow to lie in their minds without really affecting their conceptions. Now 'God is the cause of all things'-matter is a 'mere passive thing,' and therefore every motion comes ultimately from a divinely-communicated impulse. God is eternal, omnipresent, immutable, and has all

See the very remarkable passage, Hartley 'On Man,' vol. ii. 440 et seq. 2 Ib. ii. 423; part ii. prop. 94.

Ib. ii. 31; part ii. prop. 6.

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

1 Hartley, ii. 35; part ii. prop. ix.

2 Ib. ii. 383, &c. ; part ii. prop. 86, and see his comparison of his own system with those of Leibnitz and Malebranche (i. III; part i. prop. 21, cor. 3).

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 shcool. 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. 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,

1 Hartley, ii. 421.

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.