to represent this tendency to produce happiness, not as a case of preordained harmony, but as a simple case of cause and effect. Those actions are good, said Hume, which are useful, and are good because and in so far as they are useful, not useful because they are good. The inversion was very simple, but so fruitful as to justify the complacency with which Hume concludes the enquiry. His doctrine seems to him so obvious, that it must have been long ago accepted, were there not some hidden objection to it. It explains the various puzzles which had led some to reject morality, and others to regard it as a mystery. Locke and Mandeville, for example, had insisted upon the variability of the moral standard in different ages and countries. Locke cuts the knot by introducing the divine law; Mandeville accepts the conclusion that the taste for chastity is as arbitrary as the taste for big buttons. Hume considers the same problem in the Dialogue which follows the 'Enquiry.' After pointing out with ingenious exaggeration the difference between the standard accepted in ancient Greece, in France, and in England, he asks how any fixed standard is discoverable? The answer is simple. By tracing matters a little higher, and examining the first principles which each nation establishes of blame and censure. The Rhine flows north, the Rhône south, yet both spring from the same mountain, and are also actuated in their opposite directions by the same principle of gravity.' Utility

is the moral force of gravitation. Qualities are admired as useful or agreeable. The many qualities admired by Greeks and Frenchmen were admired because useful both in Athens and Paris: the qualities approved by one nation and condemned by the other were differently judged because the different circumstances of distant regions and periods made qualities valuable in one country which were prejudicial in the other. The military virtues are more admired because more essential in times of disorder than in times of peace; and customs, such as those which determine the relations between the senses, will lead to corresponding varieties of moral sentiment.

99. The 'Enquiry' is devoted to an analysis of the moral qualities, with the object of showing that, in every case, ap1 Hume's Works, iv. 297.

probation follows the useful or the agreeable qualities-the meaning of 'useful' and 'agreeable,' it must be noticed, being assumed instead of defined. Happiness ceases to be the reward of virtue, except in the sense in which the end is the reward of the means. The mysterious element vanishes. With Adam Smith our respect for wealth is a divinely implanted instinct; with Hume it is the natural effect of association and sympathy. So, with Butler, resentment is a 'weapon put into our hands by nature against injury, injustice, and cruelty,' and justified because human nature, 'considered as the divine workmanship, should be considered sacred; for in the image of God made he man.' 2 With Hume, resentment would be simply a form of self-love, justified so far as conducive to happiness. Butler tells us that nature has caused us to disapprove falsehood, injustice, and cruelty more distinctly than folly and imprudence, because the punishment follows the fault more obviously in the latter case, and therefore additional punishment would be superfluous.3 Hume would transfer the reason from 'nature' to man. Superfluous suffering being an evil, superfluous punishment is necessarily immoral. This change in the point of view is equivalent to that which takes place in science when the fins of a fish are regarded as developed by the conditions of life, instead of proofs of intelligent design. Their utility is equally obvious to all observers. The interpretation may be teleological or scientific.

100. The explanation given by Hume may be admitted in the case of the qualities immediately profitable to the individual; but how does it come to pass that we admire qualities, such as justice, which are profitable to our neighbours? It seems natural that we should be grateful to the benefactor who has supplied our wants; but why do we respect the judge who may punish our faults? The difference corresponds to a distinction which occupies a prominent place in the third book of the Treatise between the 'natural' and the artificial' virtues. Hume argues, in sufficient correspondence with modern methods of enquiry, that the artificial virtues, of which justice is the great type, take their origin in the gradual development 'Hume's Works, iv. 228.

2 Sermon viii. 'Dissertation on Nature of Virtue.'

of society, which is not, as earlier writers had supposed, based upon a contract, but which gradually generates a common understanding which may be compared to a contract. Men feel the necessity of living in society, common rules are essential to the social life, and their real or supposed utility is in all cases the cause of their adoption. The necessity of having some rule induces lawyers to catch at the most superficial analogies in order to justify particular modes of distributing property, and these analogies are then represented as implying some metaphysical reason; but in all cases the ultimate ground of justice is simply the convenience of the society. The reasonings, again, by which we may prove the utility of certain arrangements, may appear to be too complex to have actually operated upon mankind; but they are worked out by the experience of the race. 'Speculative reasonings,' he says, in speaking of the theories of chastity, which cost so much pains to philosophers, are often formed by the world. naturally and without reflection,' and he proceeds to show how in this case a public opinion has been formed by the sense of immediate utility in persons directly interested. Though his doctrine, in short, is imperfect, Hume has a general conception of the method by which general rules may be blindly worked out through the conflict of opposing passions and the co-operation of common interests. Men, forced to live together, under fixed conditions, with limited means, have framed certain conventions under the mingled influences of sympathy and selfishness.3

2

IOI. The distinction of virtues into 'natural' and 'artificial' was calculated to give offence, as perhaps it was meant to excite attention, by the apparent implication that 'artificial' virtues were in some sense unreal. Hume, however, is careful to state distinctly that 'artificial' does not mean ‘arbitrary.' ' The laws of justice may even be called 'laws of nature,' meaning that they result from the qualities belonging to the species. 'Natural,' as he says in the 'Enquiry,' is taken in so many meanings that its application to justice may or may not be proper. If self-love, if benevolence, be natural to man; if reason and forethought be also natural, then may the same

1 Works, ii. 279.

2 Ib. p. 332.

See Treatise, part ii. sec. 2; ii. 258, &c. ♦ Ib. p. 258.

epithet be applied to justice, order, fidelity, property, society."1 His meaning is, in short, that these virtues are derivative not primary; that they result from the operation of certain primary instincts working under given conditions; and are therefore as natural a product as any other qualities, though not due to the immediate teaching of a supernatural instinct or derivable from a priori reasoning.

102. The doctrine thus stated contains the germs of all later moral speculation which acknowledges the derivative character of morality. It expresses as accurately as the state of enquiry would admit the mode in which we must suppose the moral standard to have been actually formed. Moreover, it contains statements which, when their bearing is fully considered, may serve to correct some characteristic failings of the earlier utilitarians. If the process of building up a moral sense be such as Hume has indicated, it is obvious that instincts, for which it is difficult to assign any tangible reason, may yet deserve the highest respect. Men in past times felt the advantage of certain rules before they could prove their utility. That body of traditional prejudice or instinctive sentiment which is still the sole guide for most men should be treated with respect by philosophers as being, possibly at least, reason in the making. It represents a mass of inherited experience, which may, it is true, correspond to extinct needs, but which may also represent permanent and valuable truths. Utilitarians who were anxious to obtain a definite and tangible test generally treated such sentiment with simple contempt, especially if allied with the old theology. Hume, as we have seen, admits the value of rules which are designed for the protection of chastity, and explains how the experience of the race has felt out truths which a speculative philosopher could hardly have discovered by meditation. And yet Hume, like most of his contemporaries, speaks rather slightingly of the virtue, partly from undervaluing the importance of this very process, and partly because theologians had connected the doctrine of chastity with a narrow asceticism. A more curious, though less important, case is considered in the remarkable posthumous Essay on Suicide. Hume shows, with his usual acuteness, the futility of the reasoning by which it is

1 See Treatise, iv. 275.

generally condemned, and having exploded the theological objections, shows easily that suicide may frequently produce a balance of happiness. Why, then, should life be preserved when life means hopeless agony? This is one of the points upon which it is probable that some revision of existing morality is desirable. But a competent enquirer at the present day would see a class of difficulties which Hume ignores. He would have to trace out the true philosophy of the modern aversion to suicide, and to discover whether it is rooted in some exploded theological doctrine, or whether it may not be closely connected with sentiments of the sanctity of life with which it is dangerous to tamper. For the direct application of the test of utility he would have to substitute a more refined method of enquiry, recognising the principle of the complex correlations between the growth of particular sentiments, the social order, and the intellectual conceptions of the race. In other words, utilitarian calculations of the good and evil produced to the individual or to his neighbours would have to be supplemented by a careful consideration of the laws of growth of the social organism.

103. The full meaning of this criticism will appear more fully in considering a further characteristic of Hume's moral system. It is often said, as against utilitarians, that the happiness of which they speak is too vague a term to supply a sufficient criterion of morality. To this it may be replied that the moralists who argue—and what moralists do not argue? -that virtue produces happiness must understand the term distinctly enough to allow some meaning to the definition that actions which produce happiness are virtuous. It may be replied, again, that, whatever latitude is allowed to the word, the great moral rules may all be established by this mode of reasoning. Nobody can doubt that justice, benevolence, and temperance do in fact make the race happier in any admissible sense of happiness. The utilitarian, indeed, is forced to start from the postulate that there is a certain agreement as to what constitutes happiness in any society which has a common moral code. If so fundamental a difference existed that the pleasures of half the race were the pains of the other, there would be a moral anarchy, and one half would be sooner or later converted or extirpated. But the