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Title: The Essays of Adam Smith
Author: Smith, Adam
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Essays of Adam Smith" ***
THE
ESSAYS
OF
ADAM SMITH
ESSAYS
ON
_I. MORAL SENTIMENTS;
II. ASTRONOMICAL INQUIRIES;
III. FORMATION OF LANGUAGES;
IV. HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHYSICS;
V. ANCIENT LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS;
VI. THE IMITATIVE ARTS;
VII. MUSIC, DANCING, POETRY;
VIII. THE EXTERNAL SENSES;
IX. ENGLISH AND ITALIAN VERSES._
BY
ADAM SMITH, LL.D. F.R.S.,
_Author of the 'Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations.'_
-----
LONDON:
ALEX. MURRAY & CO., 30, QUEEN SQUARE, W.C.
1872.
LONDON:
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE.
-----
ADAM SMITH, the author of these Essays and of the 'Inquiry into the
Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,' was born at Kirkaldy,
June 5, 1723, a few months after the death of his father. He was a
sickly child, and indulged by his mother, who was the object of his
filial gratitude for sixty years. When about three years old, and at
the house of Douglass of Strathenry, his mother's brother, he was
carried off by tinkers or gipsies, but soon recovered from them. At
the burgh school of his native town he made rapid progress, and soon
attracted notice by his passion for books, and by the extraordinary
powers of his memory. His weakness of body prevented him joining in
athletic sports, but his generous and friendly temperament made him a
favourite with his schoolmates; and he was noted then, as through
after life, for absence in company and a habit of speaking to himself
when alone. From the grammar school of Kirkaldy, he was sent, in 1737,
to the University of Glasgow, whence, in 1740, he went to Baliol
College, Oxford, enjoying an exhibition on the Snell foundation. When
at Glasgow College, his favourite studies were mathematics and natural
philosophy, but that did not long divert his mind from pursuits more
congenial to him, more particularly the political history of mankind,
which gave scope to the power of his comprehensive genius, and
gratified his ruling passion of contributing to the happiness and the
improvement of society. To his early taste for Greek generally, may be
due the clearness and fulness with which he states his political
reasonings. At Oxford he employed himself frequently in the practice
of translation, with a view to the improvement of his own style, and
used to commend such exercises to all who cultivate the art of
composition. He also cultivated with the greatest care the study of
languages; and his knowledge of them led him to a peculiar experience
in everything that could illustrate the institutions, the manners, and
the ideas of different ages and nations.
After a residence at Oxford of seven years, he returned to Kirkaldy,
and lived two years with his mother, engaged in studies, but without
any fixed plan for his future life. He had been originally destined
for the Church of England; but not finding the ecclesiastical
profession suitable to his taste, he took chance of obtaining some of
those moderate preferments, to which literary attainments lead in
Scotland. Removing to Edinburgh in 1748, he read lectures on rhetoric
and belles lettres, under the patronage of Lord Kames; and when in
Edinburgh became intimate with David Hume.
In 1751 he was elected Professor of Logic in the University of
Glasgow; and, the year following, he became Professor of Moral
Philosophy there; a situation he held for thirteen years, and used to
look back on as the most useful and happy of his life; and, though but
a narrow scene for his ambition, may have led to the future eminence
of his literary character. In delivering his lectures, Mr. Smith
trusted {2} almost entirely to extemporary elocution. His manner,
though not graceful, was plain and unaffected, and he never failed to
interest his hearers. Each discourse consisted commonly of several
distinct propositions, which he successively endeavoured to prove and
illustrate. At first he often appeared to speak with hesitation; but,
as he advanced, the matter seemed to crowd upon him, his manner became
warm and animated, and his expression easy and fluent. His reputation
as a philosopher attracted a multitude of students from a great
distance to the University; and those branches of science which he
taught became fashionable, and his opinions were the chief topics of
discussion in the clubs and literary societies of Glasgow. While Adam
Smith became thus eminent as a public lecturer, he was gradually
laying the foundation of a more extensive reputation by preparing for
the press his System of Morals; and the first edition of his Essays
appeared in **1759, under the title of THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS.
Of this essay, Dugald Stewart remarks, 'that whatever opinion we may
entertain of the justness of its conclusions, it must be allowed to be
a singular effort of invention, ingenuity, and subtilty; that it
contains a large mixture of important truth, and has had the merit of
directing the attention of philosophers to a view of human nature,
which had formerly in a great measure escaped their notice; and no
work, undoubtedly, can be mentioned, ancient or modern, which exhibits
so complete a view of those facts with respect to our moral
perceptions, which it is one great object of this branch of science to
refer to their general laws; and well deserves the careful study of
all whose taste leads them to prosecute similar enquiries. These facts
are presented in the most happy and beautiful lights; and when the
subject leads him to address the imagination and the heart, the
variety and felicity of his illustrations, the richness and fluency of
his eloquence; and the skill with which he wins the attention and
commands the passions of his readers, leave him, among our English
moralists, without a rival. Towards the close of 1763, Mr. Smith
arranged to visit the continent with the Duke of Buccleugh, returning
to London in 1766. For the next ten years he lived quietly with his
mother at Kirkaldy; and in 1776, accounted to the world for his long
retreat, by the publication of his 'INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES
OF THE WEALTH OF NATIONS.' In 1778, Mr. Smith was appointed a
Commissioner of Customs in Scotland, the pecuniary emoluments of which
were considerable. In 1784, he lost his mother. In 1788, his cousin,
Miss Douglass, died, to whom he had been strongly attached; and in
July, 1790, he died, having, a short while before, in conversation
with his friend Riddell, regretted that 'HE HAD DONE SO LITTLE.'
[Above biographic notes and literary opinions have been abridged from
a paper on 'The Life and Writings of Adam Smith,' by Professor Dugald
Stewart, of Edinburgh, 1793--A. M.]
ADVERTISEMENT
TO THE SIXTH EDITION.
-----
SINCE the first publication of the THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS, which
was in the beginning of the year 1759, several corrections, and a good
many illustrations of the doctrines contained in it, have occurred to
me. But the various occupations in which the different accidents of my
life necessarily involved me, have till now prevented me from
revising this work with the care and attention which I always
intended. The reader will find the principal alterations which I have
made in this New Edition, in the last Chapter of the third Section of
Part First; and in the four first Chapters of Part Third. Part Sixth,
as it stands in this New Edition, is altogether new. In Part Seventh,
I have brought together the greater part of the different passages
concerning the Stoical Philosophy, which, in the former Editions, had
been scattered about in different parts of the work. I have likewise
endeavoured to explain more fully, and examine more distinctly, some
of the doctrines of that famous sect. In the fourth and last Section
of the same Part, I have thrown together a few additional observations
concerning the duty and the principle of veracity. There are, besides,
in other parts of the work, a few other alterations and corrections of
no great moment.
In the last paragraph of the first Edition of the present work, I said
that I should in another discourse endeavour to give an account of the
general principles of law and government, and of the different
revolutions which they had undergone in the different ages and periods
of society; not only in what concerns justice, but in what concerns
police, revenue, and arms, and whatever else is the object of law. In
the _Inquiry concerning the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations_, I have partly executed this promise; at least so far as
concerns police, revenue, and arms. What remains, the theory of
jurisprudence, which I have long projected, I have hitherto been
hindered from executing, by the same occupations which had till now
prevented me from revising the present work. Though my very advanced
age leaves me, I acknowledge, very little expectation of ever being
able to execute this great work to my own satisfaction; yet, as I have
not altogether abandoned the design, and as I wish still to continue
under the obligation of doing what I can, I have allowed the paragraph
to remain as it was published more than thirty years ago, when I
entertained no doubt of being able to execute every thing which it
announced.
ESSAYS BY ADAM SMITH
ON
PHILOSOPHICAL SUBJECTS
-----
ADVERTISEMENT BY THE EDITORS.
THE much lamented author of these Essays left them in the hands of his
friends to be disposed of as they thought proper, having immediately
before his death destroyed many other manuscripts which he thought
unfit for being made public. When these were inspected, the greater
number of them appeared to be parts of a plan he once had formed, for
giving a connected history of the liberal sciences and elegant arts.
It is long since he found it necessary to abandon that plan as far too
extensive; and these parts of it lay beside him neglected until his
death. His friends are persuaded, however, that the reader will find
in them that happy connection, that full and accurate expression, and
that clear illustration which are conspicuous in the rest of his
works; and that though it is difficult to add much to the great fame
he so justly acquired by his other writings, these will be read with
satisfaction and pleasure.
JOSEPH BLACK.
JAMES HUTTON.
CONTENTS.
-----
THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS.
PART I.
OF THE PROPRIETY OF ACTIONS.
PAGE
SEC. I. Of the Sense of Propriety . . . . 9
CH. I. Of Sympathy . . . . . . 9-13
CH. II. Of the Pleasure of Mutual Sympathy . . 13-16
CH. III., IV. Of the manner in which we judge of the
Propriety or Impropriety of the Affections of
other Men, by their Concord or Dissonance with
our own . . . . . . . 16-23
CH. V. Of the amiable and respectable Virtues . 23-26
SEC. II. Of the Degrees of the different Passions
which are consistent with Propriety . . 26
CH. I. Of the Passions which take their Origin from
the Body . . . . . . . 26-30
CH. II. Of those Passions which take their Origin
from a particular Turn or Habit of the
Imagination . . . . . . 30-32
CH. III. Of the unsocial Passions . . . 32-37
CH. IV. Of the social Passions . . . . 37-39
CH. V. Of the selfish Passions . . . . 39-41
SEC. III. Of the Effects of Prosperity and Adversity
upon the Judgment of Mankind with regard to the
Propriety of Action; and why it is more easy to
obtain their Approbation in the one State than
in the other . . . . . . 42
CH. I. That though our Sympathy with Sorrow is
generally a more lively Sensation than our
Sympathy with Joy, it commonly falls much more
short of the Violence of what is naturally felt
by the Person principally concerned . . 42-47
CH. II. Of the Origin of Ambition, and of the
Distinction of Ranks . . . . 47-56
CH. III. Of the Corruption of our Moral Sentiments,
which is occasioned by this Disposition to admire
the Rich and the Great, and to despise or neglect
Persons of poor and mean Condition . . 56-60
-----
PART II.
OF MERIT AND DEMERIT; OR, OF THE OBJECTS OF REWARD AND PUNISHMENT.
SEC. I. Of the Sense of Merit and Demerit--Introduction 61
CH. I. That whatever appears to be the proper Object
of Gratitude, appears to deserve Reward; and that,
in the same Manner, whatever appears to be the
proper Object of Resentment, appears to deserve
Punishment . . . . . . 61-63 {6}
CH. II. Of the proper Objects of Gratitude and
Resentment . . . . . . 63-65
CH. III. That where there is no Approbation of the
Conduct of the Person who confers the Benefit,
there is little Sympathy with the Gratitude of
him who receives it: and that, on the contrary,
where there is no Disapprobation of the Motives
of the Person who does the Mischief, there is
no sort of Sympathy with the Resentment of him
who suffers it . . . . . . 65-67
CH. IV. Recapitulation of the foregoing Chapters . 67-68
CH. V. The Analysis of the Sense of Merit and Demerit 68-70
SEC. II. Of Justice and Beneficence
CH. I. Comparison of those two Virtues . . 70-75
CH. II. Of the sense of Justice, of Remorse, and of
the Consciousness of Merit . . . . 75-78
CH. III. Of the Utility of this Constitution of Nature 78-84
SEC. III. Of the Influence of Fortune upon the Sentiments
of Mankind, with regard to the Merit or Demerit
of Actions--Introduction . . . . 84-85
CH. I. Of the Causes of this Influence of Fortune . 85-88
CH. II. Of the Extent of this Influence of Fortune 88-95
CH. III. Of the final Cause of this Irregularity of
Sentiments . . . . . . 96-99
-----
PART III.
OF THE FOUNDATION OF OUR JUDGMENTS CONCERNING OUR OWN SENTIMENTS AND
CONDUCT, AND OF THE SENSE OF DUTY.
CH. I. Of the Principle of Self-approbation and of
Self-disapprobation . . . . . 99-102
CH. II. Of the Love of Praise, and of that of
Praise-worthiness; and of the Dread of Blame,
and of that of Blame-worthiness. . . . 102-118
CH. III. Of the Influence and Authority of
Conscience . . . . . . 118-137
CH. IV. Of the Nature of Self-deceit, and of the
Origin and Use of general Rules . . . 137-142
CH. V. Of the Influence and Authority of the general
Rules of Morality, and that they are justly
regarded as the Laws of the Deity . . 142-150
CH. VI. In what Cases the Sense of Duty ought to be
the sole Principle of our Conduct; and in what
Cases it ought to concur with other Motives . 150-158
-----
PART IV.
OF THE EFFECT OF UTILITY UPON THE SENTIMENT OF APPROBATION.
CH. I. Of the Beauty which the Appearance of Utility
bestows upon all the Productions of Art, and of
the extensive Influence of this Species
of Beauty . . . . . . 158-165
CH. II. Of the Beauty which the Appearance of
Utility bestows upon the Characters and Actions
of Men; and how far the Perception of this
Beauty may be regarded as one of the original
Principles of Approbation . . . . 165-171 {7}
-----
PART V.
OF THE INFLUENCE OF CUSTOM AND FASHION UPON THE SENTIMENTS OF MORAL
APPROBATION AND DISAPPROBATION.
CH. I. Of the Influence of Custom and Fashion upon
our Notions of Beauty and Deformity . . 171-176
CH. II. Of the Influence of Custom and Fashion upon
Moral Sentiments . . . . . 176-187
-----
PART VI.
OF THE CHARACTER OF VIRTUE.--INTRODUCTION, 187.
SEC. I. Of the Character of the Individual, so far as
it affects his own Happiness; or of Prudence . 187-192
SEC. II. Of the Character of the Individual, so far as
it can affect the Happiness of other
People--Introduction . . . . 192-193
CH. I. Of the Order in which Individuals are
recommended by Nature to our Care and Attention 193-201
CH. II. Of the Order in which Societies are by
Nature recommended to our Beneficence . . 201-208
CH. III. Of universal Benevolence . . . 208-210
SEC. III. Of Self-command . . . . 210-233
Conclusion of the Sixth Part . . . . 233-236
-----
PART VII.
OF SYSTEMS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY.
SEC. I. Of the Questions which ought to be examined
in a Theory of Moral Sentiments . . . 236-237
SEC. II. Of the different Accounts which have been
given of the Nature of Virtue--Introduction . 237
CH. I. Of those Systems which make Virtue consist
in Propriety . . . . . 237-260
CH. II. Of those Systems which make Virtue consist
in Prudence . . . . . 260-265
CH. III. Of those Systems which make Virtue consist
in Benevolence . . . . . 265-271
CH. IV. Of licentious Systems . . . 271-278
SEC. III. Of the different Systems which have been
formed concerning the Principle of
Approbation--Introduction . . . 279
CH. I. Of those Systems which deduce the Principle
of Approbation from Self-love . . . 279-281
CH. II. Of those Systems which make Reason
the Principle of Approbation . . . 282-284
CH. III. Of those Systems which make Sentiment
the Principle of Approbation . . . 285-290
SEC. IV. Of the Manner in which different Authors
have treated of the practical Rules of Morality 290-304 {8}
-----
CONSIDERATIONS CONCERNING THE FORMATION OF LANGUAGES. 305-325
-----
ESSAYS ON PHILOSOPHICAL SUBJECTS.
THE PRINCIPLES WHICH LEAD AND DIRECT PHILOSOPHICAL
INQUIRIES, AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE HISTORY OF ASTRONOMY 325-326
SEC. I. Of the Effects of Unexpectedness, or of
Surprise . . . . . 326-329
SEC. II. Of Wonder, or the Effects of Novelty . 329-337
SEC. III. Of the Origin of Philosophy . . 338-342
SEC. IV. The History of Astronomy . . . 342-384
-----
THE PRINCIPLES WHICH LEAD AND DIRECT PHILOSOPHICAL
INQUIRIES, ILLUSTRATED BY THE HISTORY OF THE ANCIENT
PHYSICS . . . . . 385-395
-----
THE PRINCIPLES WHICH LEAD AND DIRECT PHILOSOPHICAL
INQUIRIES, ILLUSTRATED BY THE HISTORY OF ANCIENT
LOGICS AND METAPHYSICS . . . . 395-405
-----
OF THE NATURE OF THAT IMITATION WHICH TAKES PLACE IN
WHAT ARE CALLED THE IMITATIVE ARTS . . . 405
Part I., 405-415. Part II., 415-432. Part III . 432-434
-----
OF THE AFFINITY BETWEEN MUSIC, DANCING, AND POETRY 435-438
-----
OF THE EXTERNAL SENSES . . . . 438-439
Of the Sense of Touching, 439-444. Of the Sense of
Tasting, 444-445. Of the Sense of Smelling, 445.
Of the Sense of Hearing, 445-450. Of the Sense of
Seeing . . . . . . 450-468
-----
OF THE AFFINITY BETWEEN CERTAIN ENGLISH AND ITALIAN
VERSES . . . . . . 468-473
THE
THEORY
OF
MORAL SENTIMENTS
-----
_Part I.--Of the Propriety of Action._
SEC. I.--OF THE SENSE OF PROPRIETY.
CHAP. I.--_Of Sympathy._
HOW selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some
principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others,
and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing
from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or
compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when
we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner.
That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of
fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this
sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by
no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may
feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the
most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether
without it.
As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form
no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving
what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our
brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our
senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and
never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the
imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his
sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way,
than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his
case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his,
which our imaginations copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in
his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments,
we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same
person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even
feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether
unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to
ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at
last to affect us, {10} and we then tremble and shudder at the thought
of what he feels. For as to be in pain or distress of any kind excites
the most excessive sorrow, so to conceive or to imagine that we are in
it, excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the
vivacity or dulness of the conception.
That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of
others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that
we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels, may be
demonstrated by many obvious observations, if it should not be thought
sufficiently evident of itself. When we see a stroke aimed and just
ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally
shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does
fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the
sufferer. The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope,
naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they see
him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in his
situation. Persons of delicate fibres and a weak constitution of body
complain, that in looking on the sores and ulcers which are exposed by
beggars in the streets, they are apt to feel an itching or uneasy
sensation in the corresponding part of their own bodies. The horror
which they conceive at the misery of those wretches affects that
particular part in themselves more than any other; because that horror
arises from conceiving what they themselves would suffer, if they
really were the wretches whom they are looking upon, and if that
particular part in themselves was actually affected in the same
miserable manner. The very force of this conception is sufficient, in
their feeble frames, to produce that itching or uneasy sensation
complained of. Men of the most robust make, observe that in looking
upon sore eyes they often feel a very sensible soreness in their own,
which proceeds from the same reason; that organ being in the strongest
man more delicate, than any other part of the body is in the weakest.
Neither is it those circumstances only, which create pain or sorrow,
that call forth our fellow-feeling. Whatever is the passion which
arises from any object in the person principally concerned, an
analogous emotion springs up, at the thought of his situation, in the
breast of every attentive spectator. Our joy for the deliverance of
those heroes of tragedy or romance who interest us, is as sincere as
our grief for their distress, and our fellow-feeling with their misery
is not more real than that with their happiness. We enter into their
gratitude towards those faithful friends who did not desert them in
their difficulties; and we heartily go along with their resentment
against those perfidious traitors who injured, abandoned, or deceived
them. In every passion of which the mind of man is susceptible, the
emotions of the by-stander always correspond to what, by bringing the
case home to himself, he imagines should be the sentiments of the
sufferer.
{11} Pity and compassion are words appropriated to signify our
fellow-feeling with the sorrow of others. Sympathy, though its meaning
was, perhaps, originally the same, may now, however, without much
impropriety, be made use of to denote our fellow-feeling with any
passion whatever.
Upon some occasions sympathy may seem to arise merely from the view of
a certain emotion in another person. The passions, upon some
occasions, may seem to be transfused from one man to another,
instantaneously, and antecedent to any knowledge of what excited them
in the person principally concerned. Grief and joy, for example,
strongly expressed in the look and gestures of any one, at once affect
the spectator with some degree of a like painful or agreeable emotion.
A smiling face is, to everybody that sees it, a cheerful object; as a
sorrowful countenance, on the other hand, is a melancholy one.
This, however, does not hold universally, or with regard to every
passion. There are some passions of which the expressions excite no
sort of sympathy, but before we are acquainted with what gave occasion
to them, serve rather to disgust and provoke us against them. The
furious behaviour of an angry man is more likely to exasperate us
against himself than against his enemies. As we are unacquainted with
his provocation, we cannot bring his case home to ourselves, nor
conceive anything like the passions which it excites. But we plainly
see what is the situation of those with whom he is angry, and to what
violence they may be exposed from so enraged an adversary. We readily,
therefore, sympathise with their fear or resentment, and are
immediately disposed to take part against the man from whom they
appear to be in so much danger.
If the very appearances of grief and joy inspire us with some degree
of the like emotions, it is because they suggest to us the general
idea of some good or bad fortune that has befallen the person in whom
we observe them: and in these passions this is sufficient to have some
little influence upon us. The effects of grief and joy terminate in
the person who feels those emotions, of which the expressions do not,
like those of resentment, suggest to us the idea of any other person
for whom we are concerned, and whose interests are opposite to his.
The general idea of good or bad fortune, therefore, creates some
concern for the person who has met with it, but the general idea of
provocation excites no sympathy with the anger of the man who has
received it. Nature, it seems, teaches us to be more averse to enter
into this passion, and, till informed of its cause, to be disposed
rather to take part against it.
Even our sympathy with the grief or joy of another, before we are
informed of the cause of either, is always extremely imperfect.
General lamentations, which express nothing but the anguish of the
sufferer, create rather a curiosity to inquire into his situation,
along with some {12} disposition to sympathize with him, than any
actual sympathy that is very sensible. The first question which we ask
is, What has befallen you? Till this be answered, though we are uneasy
both from the vague idea of his misfortune, and still more from
torturing ourselves with conjectures about what it may be, yet our
fellow-feeling is not very considerable.
Sympathy, therefore, does not arise so much from the view of the
passion, as from that of the situation which excites it. We sometimes
feel for another, a passion of which he himself seems to be altogether
incapable; because, when we put ourselves in his case, that passion
arises in our breast from the imagination, though it does not in his
from the reality. We blush for the impudence and rudeness of another,
though he himself appears to have no sense of the impropriety of his
own behaviour; because we cannot help feeling with what confusion we
ourselves should be covered, had we behaved in so absurd a manner.
Of all the calamities to which the condition of mortality exposes
mankind, the loss of reason appears, to those who have the least spark
of humanity, by far the most dreadful, and they behold that last stage
of human wretchedness, with deeper commiseration than any other. But
the poor wretch, who is in it, laughs and sings perhaps, and is
altogether insensible of his own misery. The anguish which humanity
feels, therefore, at the sight of such an object cannot be the
reflection of any sentiment of the sufferer. The compassion of the
spectator must arise altogether from the consideration of what he
himself would feel if he was reduced to the same unhappy situation,
and, what perhaps is impossible, was at the same time able to regard
it with his present reason and judgment.
What are the pangs of a mother, when she hears the moanings of her
infant that during the agony of disease cannot express what it feels?
In her idea of what it suffers, she joins, to its real helplessness,
her own consciousness of that helplessness, and her own terrors for
the unknown consequences of its disorder; and out of all these, forms,
for her own sorrow, the most complete image of misery and distress.
The infant, however, feels only the uneasiness of the present instant,
which can never be great. With regard to the future, it is perfectly
secure, and in its thoughtlessness and want of foresight, possesses an
antidote against fear and anxiety, the great tormentors of the human
breast, from which, reason and philosophy will, in vain, attempt to
defend it when it grows up to a man.
We sympathize even with the dead, and overlooking what is of real
importance in their situation, that awful futurity which awaits them,
we are chiefly affected by those circumstances which strike our
senses, but can have no influence upon their happiness. It is
miserable, we think, to be deprived of the light of the sun; to be
shut out from life and {13} conversation; to be laid in the cold
grave, a prey to corruption and the reptiles of the earth; to be no
more thought of in this world, but to be obliterated, in a little
time, from the affections, and almost from the memory, of their
dearest friends and relations. Surely, we imagine, we can never feel
too much for those who have suffered so dreadful a calamity. The
tribute of our fellow-feeling seems doubly due to them now, when they
are in danger of being forgot by every body; and, by the vain honours
which we pay to their memory, we endeavour, for our own misery,
artificially to keep alive our melancholy remembrance of their
misfortune. That our sympathy can afford them no consolation seems to
be an addition to their calamity; and to think that all we can do is
unavailing, and that, what alleviates all other distress, the regret,
the love, and the lamentations of their friends, can yield no comfort
to them, serves only to exasperate our sense of their misery. The
happiness of the dead, however, most assuredly, is affected by none of
these circumstances; nor is it the thought of these things which can
ever disturb the profound security of their repose. The idea of that
dreary and endless melancholy, which the fancy naturally ascribes to
their condition, arises altogether from our joining to the change
which has been produced upon them, our own consciousness of that
change, from our putting ourselves in their situation, and from our
lodging, if I may be allowed to say so, our own living souls in their
inanimated bodies, and thence conceiving what would be our emotions in
this case. It is from this very illusion of the imagination, that the
foresight of our own dissolution is so terrible to us, and that the
idea of those circumstances, which undoubtedly can give us no pain
when we are dead, makes us miserable while we are alive. And from
thence arises one of the most important principles in human nature,
the dread of death, the great poison to the happiness, but the great
restraint upon the injustice of mankind, which, while it afflicts and
mortifies the individual, guards and protects the society.
-----
CHAP. II.--_Of the Pleasure of mutual Sympathy._
BUT whatever may be the cause of sympathy, or however it may be
excited, nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a
fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast; nor are we ever
so much shocked as by the appearance of the contrary. Those who are
fond of deducing all our sentiments from certain refinements of
self-love, think themselves at no loss to account, according to their
own principles, both for this pleasure and this pain. Man, say they,
conscious of his own weakness, and of the need which he has for the
assistance of others, rejoices whenever he observes that they adopt
his own passions, because he is then assured of that assistance; and
{14} grieves whenever he observes the contrary, because he is then
assured of their opposition. But both the pleasure and the pain are
always felt so instantaneously, and often upon such frivolous
occasions, that it seems evident that neither of them can be derived
from any such self-interested consideration. A man is mortified when,
after having endeavoured to divert the company, he looks round and
sees that nobody laughs at his jests but himself. On the contrary, the
mirth of the company is highly agreeable to him, and he regards this
correspondence of their sentiments with his own as the greatest
applause.
Neither does his pleasure seem to arise altogether from the additional
vivacity which his mirth may receive from sympathy with theirs, nor
his pain from the disappointment he meets with when he misses this
pleasure; though both the one and the other, no doubt, do in some
measure. When we have read a book or poem so often that we can no
longer find any amusement in reading it by ourselves, we can still
take pleasure in reading it to a companion. To him it has all the
graces of novelty; we enter into the surprise and admiration which it
naturally excites in him, but which it is no longer capable of
exciting in us; we consider all the ideas which it presents rather in
the light in which they appear to him, than in that in which they
appear to ourselves, and we are amused by sympathy with his amusement
which thus enlivens our own. On the contrary, we should be vexed if he
did not seem to be entertained with it, and we could no longer take
any pleasure in reading it to him. It is the same case here. The mirth
of the company, no doubt, enlivens our own mirth, and their silence,
no doubt, disappoints us. But though this may contribute both to the
pleasure which we derive from the one, and to the pain which we feel
from the other, it is by no means the sole cause of either; and this
correspondence of the sentiments of others with our own appears to be
a cause of pleasure, and the want of it a cause of pain, which cannot
be accounted for in this manner. The sympathy, which my friends
express with my joy, might, indeed, give me pleasure by enlivening
that joy: but that which they express with my grief could give me
none, if it served only to enliven that grief. Sympathy, however,
enlivens joy and alleviates grief. It enlivens joy by presenting
another source of satisfaction; and it alleviates grief by insinuating
into the heart almost the only agreeable sensation which it is at that
time capable of receiving.
It is to be observed accordingly, that we are still more anxious to
communicate to our friends our disagreeable than our agreeable
passions, that we derive still more satisfaction from their sympathy
with the former than from that with the latter, and that we are still
more shocked by the want of it.
How are the unfortunate relieved when they have found out a person to
whom they can communicate the cause of their sorrow? Upon his sympathy
they seem to disburthen themselves of a part of their {15} distress:
he is not improperly said to share it with them. He not only feels a
sorrow of the same kind with that which they feel, but, as if he had
derived a part of it to himself, what he feels seems to alleviate the
weight of what they feel. Yet by relating their misfortunes they in
some measure renew their grief. They awaken in their memory the
remembrance of those circumstances which occasion their affliction.
Their tears accordingly flow faster than before, and they are apt to
abandon themselves to all the weakness of sorrow. They take pleasure,
however, in all this, and, it is evident, are sensibly relieved by it;
because the sweetness of his sympathy more than compensates the
bitterness of that sorrow, which, in order to excite this sympathy,
they had thus enlivened and renewed. The cruellest insult, on the
contrary, which can be offered to the unfortunate, is to appear to
make light of their calamities. To seem not to be affected with the
joy of our companions is but want of politeness; but not to wear a
serious countenance when they tell us their afflictions, is real and
gross inhumanity.
Love is an agreeable, resentment a disagreeable, passion; and
accordingly we are not half so anxious that our friends should adopt
our friendships, as that they should enter into our resentments. We
can forgive them though they seem to be little affected with the
favours which we may have received, but lose all patience if they seem
indifferent about the injuries which may have been done to us: nor are
we half so angry with them for not entering into our gratitude, as for
not sympathizing with our resentment. They can easily avoid being
friends to our friends, but can hardly avoid being enemies to those
with whom we are at variance. We seldom resent their being at enmity
with the first, though upon that account we may sometimes affect to
make an awkward quarrel with them; but we quarrel with them in good
earnest if they live in friendship with the last. The agreeable
passions of love and joy can satisfy and support the heart without any
auxiliary pleasure. The bitter and painful emotions of grief and
resentment more strongly require the healing consolation of sympathy.
As the person who is principally interested in any event is pleased
with our sympathy, and hurt by the want of it, so we, too, seem to be
pleased when we are able to sympathize with him, and to be hurt when
we are unable to do so. We run not only to congratulate the
successful, but to condole with the afflicted; and the pleasure which
we find in the conversation of one whom in all the passions of his
heart we can entirely sympathize with, seems to do more than
compensate the painfulness of that sorrow with which the view of his
situation affects us. On the contrary, it is always disagreeable to
feel that we cannot sympathize with him, and instead of being pleased
with this exemption from sympathetic pain, it hurts us to find that we
cannot share his uneasiness. If we hear a person loudly lamenting his
misfortunes, which however, upon bringing the case home to ourselves,
we feel, can produce {16} no such violent effect upon us, we are
shocked at his grief; and, because we cannot enter into it, call it
pusillanimity and weakness. It gives us the spleen, on the other hand,
to see another too happy or too much elevated, as we call it, with any
little piece of good fortune. We are disobliged even with his joy;
and, because we cannot go along with it, call it levity and folly. We
are even put out of humour if our companion laughs louder or longer at
a joke than we think it deserves; that is, than we feel that we
ourselves could laugh at it.
-----
CHAP. III.--_Of the Manner in which we judge of the Propriety or
Impropriety of the Affections of other Men, by their Concord or
Dissonance with our own._
WHEN the original passions of the person principally concerned are in
perfect concord with the sympathetic emotions of the spectator, they
necessarily appear to this last just and proper, and suitable to their
objects; and, on the contrary, when, upon bringing the case home to
himself, he finds that they do not coincide with what he feels, they
necessarily appear to him unjust and improper, and unsuitable to the
causes which excite them. To approve of the passions of another,
therefore, as suitable to their objects, is the same thing as to
observe that we entirely sympathize with them; and not to approve of
them as such, is the same thing as to observe that we do not entirely
sympathize with them. The man who resents the injuries that have been
done to me, and observes that I resent them precisely as he does,
necessarily approves of my resentment. The man whose sympathy keeps
time to my grief, cannot but admit the reasonableness of my sorrow. He
who admires the same poem, or the same picture, and admires them
exactly as I do, must surely allow the justness of my admiration. He
who laughs at the same joke, and laughs along with me, cannot well
deny the propriety of my laughter. On the contrary, the person who,
upon these different occasions, either feels no such emotion as that
which I feel, or feels none that bears any proportion to mine, cannot
avoid disapproving my sentiments on account of their dissonance with
his own. If my animosity goes beyond what the indignation of my friend
can correspond to; if my grief exceeds what his most tender compassion
can go along with; if my admiration is either too high or too low to
tally with his own; if I laugh loud and heartily when he only smiles,
or, on the contrary, only smile when he laughs loud and heartily; in
all these cases, as soon as he comes from considering the object, to
observe how I am affected by it, according as there is more or less
disproportion between his sentiments and mine, I must incur a greater
or less degree of his disapprobation: and upon all occasions his own
sentiments are the standards and measures by which he judges of mine.
{17} To approve of another man's opinions is to adopt those opinions,
and to adopt them is to approve of them. If the same arguments which
convince you convince me likewise, I necessarily approve of your
conviction; and if they do not, I necessarily disapprove of it:
neither can I possibly conceive that I should do the one without the
other. To approve or disapprove, therefore, of the opinions of others
is acknowledged, by every body, to mean no more than to observe their
agreement or disagreement with our own. But this is equally the case
with regard to our approbation or disapprobation of the sentiments or
passions of others.
There are, indeed, some cases in which we seem to approve without any
sympathy or correspondence of sentiments, and in which, consequently,
the sentiment of approbation would seem to be different from the
perception of this coincidence. A little attention, however, will
convince us that even in these cases our approbation is ultimately
founded upon a sympathy or correspondence of this kind. I shall give
an instance in things of a very frivolous nature, because in them the
judgments of mankind are less apt to be perverted by wrong systems. We
may often approve of a jest, and think the laughter of the company
quite just and proper, though we ourselves do not laugh, because,
perhaps, we are in a grave humour, or happen to have our attention
engaged with other objects. We have learned, however, from experience,
what sort of pleasantry is upon most occasions capable of making us
laugh, and we observe that this is one of that kind. We approve,
therefore, of the laughter of the company, and feel that it is natural
and suitable to its object; because, though in our present mode we
cannot easily enter into it, we are sensible that upon most occasions
we should very heartily join in it.
The same thing often happens with regard to all the other passions. A
stranger passes by us in the street with all the marks of the deepest
affliction; and we are immediately told that he has just received the
news of the death of his father. It is impossible that, in this case,
we should not approve of his grief. Yet it may often happen, without
any defect of humanity on our part, that, so far from entering into
the violence of his sorrow, we should scarce conceive the first
movements of concern upon his account. Both he and his father,
perhaps, are entirely unknown to us, or we happen to be employed about
other things, and do not take time to picture out in our imagination
the different circumstances of distress which must occur to him. We
have learned, however, from experience, that such a misfortune
naturally excites such a degree of sorrow, and we know that if we took
time to consider his situation, fully in all its parts, we should,
without doubt, most sincerely sympathize with him. It is upon the
consciousness of this conditional sympathy, that our approbation of
his sorrow is founded, even in those cases in which that sympathy does
not actually take place; {18} and the general rules derived from our
preceding experience of what our sentiments would commonly correspond
with, correct upon this, as upon many other occasions, the impropriety
of our present emotions.
The sentiment or affection of the heart from which any action
proceeds, and upon which its whole virtue or vice must ultimately
depend, may be considered under two different aspects, or in two
different relations; first, in relation to the cause which excites it,
or the motive which gives occasion to it; and secondly, in relation to
the end which it proposes, or the effect which it tends to produce.
In the suitableness or unsuitableness, in the proportion or
disproportion which the affection seems to bear to the cause or object
which excites it, consists the propriety or impropriety, the decency
or ungracefulness of the consequent action.
In the beneficial or hurtful nature of the effects which the affection
aims at, or tends to produce, consists the merit or demerit of the
action, the qualities by which it is entitled to reward, or is
deserving of punishment.
Philosophers have, of late years, considered chiefly the tendency of
affections, and have given little attention to the relation which they
stand in to the cause which excites them. In common life, however,
when we judge of any person's conduct, and of the sentiments which
directed it, we constantly consider them under both these aspects.
When we blame in another man the excesses of love, of grief, of
resentment, we not only consider the ruinous effect which they tend to
produce, but the little occasion which was given for them. The merit
of his favourite, we say, is not so great, his misfortune is not so
dreadful, his provocation is not so extraordinary, as to justify so
violent a passion. We should have indulged, we say, perhaps, have
approved of the violence of his emotion, had the cause been in any
respect proportioned to it.
When we judge in this manner of any affection as proportioned or
disproportioned to the cause which excites it, it is scarce possible
that we should make use of any other rule or canon but the
correspondent affection in ourselves. If, upon bringing the case home
to our own breast, we find that the sentiments which it gives occasion
to, coincide and tally with our own, we necessarily approve of them as
proportioned and suitable to their objects; if otherwise, we
necessarily disapprove of them, as extravagant and out of proportion.
Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges of the like
faculty in another. I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by
my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my
resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any
other way of judging about them.
{19}
CHAP. IV.--_The same Subject continued._
WE may judge of the propriety or impropriety of the sentiments of
another person by their correspondence or disagreement with our own,
upon two different occasions; either, first, when the objects which
excite them are considered without any peculiar relation, either to
ourselves or to the person whose sentiments we judge of; or, secondly,
when they are considered as peculiarly affecting one or other of us.
1. With regard to those objects which are considered without any
peculiar relation either to ourselves or to the person whose
sentiments we judge of; wherever his sentiments entirely correspond
with our own, we ascribe to him the qualities of taste and good
judgment. The beauty of a plain, the greatness of a mountain, the
ornaments of a building, the expression of a picture, the composition
of a discourse, the conduct of a third person, the proportions of
different quantities and numbers, the various appearances which the
great machine of the universe is perpetually exhibiting, with the
secret wheels and springs which produce them; all the general subjects
of science and taste, are what we and our companions regard as having
no peculiar relation to either of us. We both look at them from the
same point of view, and we have no occasion for sympathy, or for that
imaginary change of situations from which it arises, in order to
produce, with regard to these, the most perfect harmony of sentiments
and affections. If, notwithstanding, we are often differently
affected, it arises either from the different degrees of attention,
which our different habits of life allow us to give easily to the
several parts of those complex objects, or from the different degrees
of natural acuteness in the faculty of the mind to which they are
addressed.
When the sentiments of our companion coincide with our own in things
of this kind, which are obvious and easy, and in which, perhaps, we
never found a single person who differed from us, though we, no doubt,
must approve of them, yet he seems to deserve no praise or admiration
on account of them. But when they not only coincide with our own, but
lead and direct our own; when in forming them he appears to have
attended to many things which we had overlooked, and to have adjusted
them to all the various circumstances of their objects; we not only
approve of them, but wonder and are surprised at their uncommon and
unexpected acuteness and comprehensiveness, and he appears to deserve
a very high degree of admiration and applause. For approbation
heightened by wonder and surprise, constitutes the sentiment which is
properly called admiration, and of which applause is the natural
expression. The decision of the man who judges that exquisite beauty
is preferable to the grossest deformity, or that twice two are equal
to four, must certainly be approved of by {20} all the world, but will
not, surely, be much admired. It is the acute and delicate discernment
of the man of taste, who distinguishes the minute, and scarce
perceptible differences of beauty and deformity; it is the
comprehensive accuracy of the experienced mathematician, who unravels,
with ease, the most intricate and perplexed proportions; it is the
great leader in science and taste, the man who directs and conducts
our own sentiments, the extent and superior justness of whose
talents astonish us with wonder and surprise, who excites our
admiration, and seems to deserve our applause; and upon this
foundation is grounded the greater part of the praise which is
bestowed upon what are called the intellectual virtues.
The utility of those qualities, it may be thought, is what first
recommends them to us; and, no doubt, the consideration of this, when
we come to attend to it, gives them a new value. Originally, however,
we approve of another man's judgment, not as something useful, but as
right, as accurate, as agreeable to truth and reality: and it is
evident we attribute those qualities to it for no other reason but
because we find that it agrees with our own. Taste, in the same
manner, is originally approved of, not as useful, but as just, as
delicate, and as precisely suited to its object. The idea of the
utility of all qualities of this kind, is plainly an afterthought, and
not what first recommends them to our approbation.
2. With regard to those objects, which affect in a particular manner
either ourselves or the person whose sentiments we judge of, it is at
once more difficult to preserve this harmony and correspondence, and
at the same time, vastly more important. My companion does not
naturally look at the misfortune that has befallen me, or the injury
that has been done me, from the same point of view in which I consider
them. They affect me much more nearly. We do not view them from the
same station, as we do a picture, or a poem, or a system of
philosophy, and are, therefore, apt to be very differently affected by
them. But I can much more easily overlook the want of this
correspondence of sentiments with regard to such indifferent objects
as concern neither me nor my companion, than with regard to what
interests me so much as the misfortune that has befallen me, or the
injury that has been done me. Though you despise that picture, or that
poem, or even that system of philosophy, which I admire, there is
little danger of our quarrelling upon that account. Neither of us can
reasonably be much interested about them. They ought all of them to be
matters of great indifference to us both; so that, though our opinions
may be opposite, our affections may still be very nearly the same. But
it is quite otherwise with regard to those objects by which either you
or I are particularly affected. Though your judgments in matters of
speculation, though your sentiments in matters of taste, are quite
opposite to mine, I can easily overlook this opposition; and if I {21}
have any degree of temper, I may still find some entertainment in your
conversation, even upon those very subjects. But if you have either no
fellow-feeling for the misfortunes I have met with, or none that bears
any proportion to the grief which distracts me; or if you have either
no indignation at the injuries I have suffered, or none that bears any
proportion to the resentment which transports me, we can no longer
converse upon these subjects. We become intolerable to one another. I
can neither support your company, nor you mine. You are confounded at
my violence and passion, and I am enraged at your cold insensibility
and want of feeling.
In all such cases, that there may be some correspondence of sentiments
between the spectator and the person principally concerned, the
spectator must, first of all, endeavour, as much as he can, to put
himself in the situation of the other, and to bring home to himself
every little circumstance of distress which can possibly occur to the
sufferer. He must adopt the whole case of his companion with all its
minutest incidents; and strive to render as perfect as possible, that
imaginary change of situation upon which his sympathy is founded.
After all this, however, the emotions of the spectator will still be
very apt to fall short of the violence of what is felt by the
sufferer. Mankind, though naturally sympathetic, never conceive, for
what has befallen another, that degree of passion which naturally
animates the person principally concerned. That imaginary change of
situation, upon which their sympathy is founded, is but momentary. The
thought of their own safety, the thought that they themselves are not
really the sufferers, continually intrudes itself upon them; and
though it does not hinder them from conceiving a passion somewhat
analogous to what is felt by the sufferer, hinders them from
conceiving any thing that approaches to the same degree of violence.
The person principally concerned is sensible of this, and at the same
time passionately desires a more complete sympathy. He longs for that
relief which nothing can afford him but the entire concord of the
affections of the spectators with his own. To see the emotions of
their hearts, in every respect, beat time to his own, in the violent
and disagreeable passions, constitutes his sole consolation. But he
can only hope to obtain this by lowering his passion to that pitch, in
which the spectators are capable of going along with him. He must
flatten, if I may be allowed to say so, the sharpness of its natural
tone, in order to reduce it to harmony and concord with the emotions
of those who are about him. What they feel, will, indeed, always be,
in some respects, different from what he feels, and compassion can
never be exactly the same with original sorrow; because the secret
consciousness that the change of situations, from which the
sympathetic sentiment arises, is but imaginary, not only lowers it in
degree, but, in some measure, varies it in kind, and gives it a quite
different modification. These two {22} sentiments, however, may, it is
evident, have such a correspondence with one another, as is sufficient
for the harmony of society. Though they will never be unisons, they
may be concords, and this is all that is wanted or required.
In order to produce this concord, as nature teaches the spectators to
assume the circumstance of the person principally concerned, so she
teaches this last in some measure to assume those of the spectators.
As they are continually placing themselves in his situation, and
thence conceiving emotions similar to what he feels; so he is as
constantly placing himself in theirs, and thence conceiving some
degree of that coolness about his own fortune, with which he is
sensible that they will view it. As they are constantly considering
what they themselves would feel, if they actually were the sufferers,
so he is as constantly led to imagine in what manner he would be
affected if he was only one of the spectators of his own situation. As
their sympathy makes them look at it, in some measure, with his eyes,
so his sympathy makes him look at it, in some measure, with theirs,
especially when in their presence and acting under their observation:
and as the reflected passion, which he thus conceives, is much weaker
than the original one, it necessarily abates the violence of what he
felt before he came into their presence, before he began to recollect
in what manner they would be affected by it, and to view his situation
in this candid and impartial light.
The mind, therefore, is rarely so disturbed, but that the company of a
friend will restore it to some degree of tranquillity and sedateness.
The breast is, in some measure, calmed and composed the moment we come
into his presence. We are immediately put in mind of the light in
which he will view our situation, and we begin to view it ourselves in
the same light; for the effect of sympathy is instantaneous. We expect
less sympathy from a common acquaintance than from a friend: we cannot
open to the former all those little circumstances which we can unfold
to the latter: we assume, therefore, more tranquillity before him, and
endeavour to fix our thoughts upon those general outlines of our
situation which he is willing to consider. We expect still less
sympathy from an assembly of strangers, and we assume, therefore,
still more tranquillity before them, and always endeavour to bring
down our passion to that pitch, which the particular company we are in
may be expected to go along with. Nor is this only an assumed
appearance: for if we are at all masters of ourselves, the presence of
a mere acquaintance will really compose us, still more than that of a
friend; and that of an assembly of strangers still more than that of
an acquaintance.
Society and conversation, therefore, are the most powerful remedies
for restoring the mind to its tranquillity, if, at any time, it has
unfortunately lost it; as well as the best preservatives of that equal
and {23} happy temper, which is so necessary to self-satisfaction and
enjoyment. Men of retirement and speculation, who are apt to sit
brooding at home over either grief or resentment, though they may
often have more humanity, more generosity, and a nicer sense of
honour, yet seldom possess that equality of temper which is so common
among men of the world.
-----
CHAP. V.--_Of the amiable and respectable Virtues._
UPON these two different efforts, upon that of the spectator to enter
into the sentiments of the person principally concerned, and upon that
of the person principally concerned to bring down his emotions to what
the spectator can go along with, are founded two different sets of
virtues. The soft, the gentle, the amiable virtues, the virtues of
candid condescension and indulgent humanity, are founded upon the one:
the great, the awful and respectable, the virtues of self-denial, of
self-government, of that command of the passions which subjects all
the movements of our nature to what our own dignity and honour, and
the propriety of our own conduct require, take their origin from the
other.
How amiable does he appear to be, whose sympathetic heart seems to
re-echo all the sentiments of those with whom he converses, who
grieves for their calamities, who resents their injuries, and who
rejoices at their good fortune! When we bring home to ourselves the
situation of his companions, we enter into their gratitude, and feel
what consolation they must derive from the tender sympathy of so
affectionate a friend. And for a contrary reason, how disagreeable
does he appear to be, whose hard and obdurate heart feels for himself
only, but is altogether insensible to the happiness or misery of
others! We enter, in this case, too, into the pain which his presence
must give to every mortal with whom he converses, to those especially
with whom we are most apt to sympathize, the unfortunate and the
injured.
On the other hand, what noble propriety and grace do we feel in the
conduct of those who, in their own case, exert that recollection and
self-command which constitute the dignity of every passion, and which
bring it down to what others can enter into? We are disgusted with
that clamorous grief, which, without any delicacy, calls upon our
compassion with sighs and tears and importunate lamentations. But we
reverence that reserved, that silent and majestic sorrow, which
discovers itself only in the swelling of the eyes, in the quivering of
the lips and cheeks, and in the distant, but affecting, coldness of
the whole behaviour. It imposes the like silence upon us. We regard it
with respectful attention, and watch with anxious concern over our
whole behaviour, lest by any impropriety we should disturb that
concerted tranquillity, which it requires so great an effort to
support.
The insolence and brutality of anger, in the same manner, when we {24}
indulge its fury without check or restraint, is of all objects the
most detestable. But we admire that noble and generous resentment
which governs its pursuit of the greatest injuries, not by the rage
which they are apt to excite in the breast of the sufferer, but by the
indignation which they naturally call forth in that part of the
impartial spectator; which allows no word, no gesture, to escape it
beyond what this more equitable sentiment would dictate; which never,
even in thought, attempts any greater vengeance, nor desires to
inflict any greater punishment, than what every indifferent person
would rejoice to see executed.
And hence it is, that to feel much for others and little for
ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent
affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature; and can alone
produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which
consists their whole grace and propriety. As to love our neighbour as
we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity, so it is the great
precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbour, or
what comes to the same thing, as our neighbour is found capable of
loving us.
As taste and good judgment, when they are considered as qualities
which deserve praise and admiration, are supposed to imply a delicacy
of sentiment and an acuteness of understanding not commonly to be met
with; so the virtues of sensibility and self-command are not
apprehended to consist in the ordinary, but in the uncommon degrees of
those qualities. The amiable virtue of humanity requires, surely, a
sensibility much beyond what is possessed by the rude vulgar of
mankind. The great and exalted virtue of magnanimity undoubtedly
demands much more than that degree of self-command, which the weakest
of mortals is capable of exerting. As in the common degree of the
intellectual qualities, there is no ability; so in the common degree
of the moral, there is no virtue. Virtue is excellence, something
uncommonly great and beautiful, which rises far above what is vulgar
and ordinary. The amiable virtues consist in that degree of
sensibility which surprises by its exquisite and unexpected delicacy
and tenderness. The awful and respectable, in that degree of
self-command which astonishes by its amazing superiority over the most
ungovernable passions of human nature.
There is, in this respect, a considerable difference between virtue
and mere propriety; between those qualities and actions which deserve
to be admired and celebrated, and those which simply deserve to be
approved of. Upon many occasions, to act with the most perfect
propriety, requires no more than that common and ordinary degree of
sensibility or self-command which the most worthless of mankind are
possest of, and sometimes even that degree is not necessary. Thus, to
give a very low instance, to eat when we are hungry, is certainly,
upon {25} ordinary occasions, perfectly right and proper, and cannot
miss being approved of as such by every body. Nothing, however, could
be more absurd than to say it was virtuous.
On the contrary, there may frequently be a considerable degree of
virtue in those actions which fall short of the most perfect
propriety; because they may still approach nearer to perfection than
could well be expected upon occasions in which it was so extremely
difficult to attain it: and this is very often the case upon those
occasions which require the greatest exertions of self-command. There
are some situations which bear so hard upon human nature, that the
greatest degree of self-government, which can belong to so imperfect a
creature as man, is not able to stifle altogether the voice of human
weakness, or reduce the violence of the passions to that pitch of
moderation, in which the impartial spectator can entirely enter into
them. Though in those cases, therefore, the behaviour of the sufferer
fall short of the most perfect propriety, it may still deserve some
applause, and even in a certain sense may be denominated virtuous. It
may still manifest an effort of generosity and magnanimity of which
the greater part of men are wholly incapable; and though it fails of
absolute perfection, it may be a much nearer approximation towards
perfection, than what, upon such trying occasions, is commonly either
to be found or to be expected.
In cases of this kind, when we are determining the degree of blame or
applause which seems due to any action, we very frequently make use of
two different standards. The first is the idea of complete propriety
and perfection, which, in those difficult situations, no human conduct
ever did, or ever can come up to; and in comparison with which the
actions of all men must for ever appear blamable and imperfect. The
second is the idea of that degree of proximity or distance from this
complete perfection, which the actions of the greater part of men
commonly arrive at. Whatever goes beyond this degree, how far soever
it may be removed from absolute perfection, seems to deserve applause;
and whatever falls short of it, to deserve blame.
It is in the same manner that we judge of the productions of all the
arts which address themselves to the imagination. When a critic
examines the work of any of the great masters in poetry or painting,
he may sometimes examine it by an idea of perfection, in his own mind,
which neither that nor any other human work will ever come up to; and
as long as he compares it with this standard, he can see nothing in
it but faults and imperfections. But when he comes to consider the
rank which it ought to hold among other works of the same kind, he
necessarily compares it with a very different standard, the common
degree of excellence which is usually attained in this particular art;
and when he judges of it by this new measure, it may often appear to
deserve the highest applause, upon account of its approaching {26}
much nearer to perfection than the greater part of those works which
can be brought into competition with it.
-----
SEC. II.--OF THE DEGREES OF THE DIFFERENT PASSIONS WHICH ARE
CONSISTENT WITH PROPRIETY.
INTRODUCTION.--The propriety of every passion excited by objects
peculiarly related to ourselves, the pitch which the spectator can go
along with, must lie, it is evident, in a certain mediocrity. If the
passion is too high, or if it is too low, he cannot enter into it.
Grief and resentment for private misfortunes and injuries may easily,
for example, be too high, and in the greater part of mankind they are
so. They may likewise, though this more rarely happens, be too low. We
denominate the excess weakness and fury: and we call the defect
stupidity, insensibility, and want of spirit. We can enter into
neither of them, but are astonished and confounded to see them.
This mediocrity, however, in which the point of propriety consists, is
different in different passions. It is high in some, and low in
others. There are some passions which it is indecent to express very
strongly, even upon those occasions, in which it is acknowledged that
we cannot avoid feeling them in the highest degree. And there are
others of which the strongest expressions are upon many occasions
extremely graceful, even though the passions themselves do not,
perhaps, arise so necessarily. The first are those passions with
which, for certain reasons, there is little or no sympathy: the second
are those with which, for other reasons, there is the greatest. And if
we consider all the different passions of human nature, we shall find
that they are regarded as decent, or indecent, just in proportion as
mankind are more or less disposed to sympathize with them.
-----
CHAP. I.--_Of the Passions which take their Origin from the
Body._
1. IT is indecent to express any strong degree of those passions which
arise from a certain situation or disposition of the body; because the
company, not being in the same disposition, cannot be expected to
sympathize with them. Violent hunger, for example, though upon many
occasions not only natural, but unavoidable, is always indecent, and
to eat voraciously is universally regarded as a piece of ill manners.
There is, however, some degree of sympathy, even with hunger. It is
agreeable to see our companions eat with a good appetite, and all
expressions of loathing are offensive. The disposition of body which
is habitual to a man in health, makes his stomach easily keep time, if
I may be allowed so coarse an expression, with the one, and not with
the other. {27} We can sympathize with the distress which excessive
hunger occasions when we read the description of it in the journal of
a siege, or of a sea voyage. We imagine ourselves in the situation of
the sufferers, and thence readily conceive the grief, the fear, and
consternation, which must necessarily distract them. We feel,
ourselves, some degree of those passions, and therefore sympathize
with them: but as we do not grow hungry by reading the description, we
cannot properly, even in this case, be said to sympathize with their
hunger.
It is the same case with the passion by which Nature unites the two
sexes. Though naturally the most furious of all the passions, all
strong expressions of it are upon every occasion indecent, even
between persons in whom its most complete indulgence is acknowledged
by all laws, both human and divine, to be perfectly innocent. There
seems, however, to be some degree of sympathy even with this passion.
To talk to a woman as we should to a man is improper: it is expected
that their company should inspire us with more gaiety, more
pleasantry, and more attention; and an entire insensibility to the
fair sex, renders a man contemptible in some measure even to the men.
Such is our aversion for all the appetites which take their origin
from the body; all strong expressions of them are loathsome and
disagreeable. According to some ancient philosophers, these are the
passions which we share in common with the brutes, and which, having
no connexion with the characteristical qualities of human nature, are
upon that account beneath its dignity. But there are many other
passions which we share in common with the brutes, such as resentment,
natural affection, even gratitude, which do not, upon that account,
appear to be so brutal. The true cause of the peculiar disgust which
we conceive for the appetites of the body when we see them in other
men, is that we cannot enter into them. To the person himself who
feels them, as soon as they are gratified, the object that excited
them ceases to be agreeable: even its presence often becomes offensive
to him; he looks round to no purpose for the charm which transported
him the moment before, and he can now as little enter into his own
passion as another person. When we have dined, we order the covers to
be removed; and we should treat in the same manner the objects of the
most ardent and passionate desires, if they were the objects of no
other passions but those which take their origin from the body.
In the command of those appetites of the body consists that virtue
which is properly called temperance. To restrain them within those
bounds which regard to health and fortune prescribes, is the part of
prudence. But to confine them within those limits which grace, which
propriety, which delicacy, and which modesty, require, is the office
of temperance.
2. It is for the same reason that to cry out with bodily pain, how
intolerable soever, appears always unmanly and unbecoming. There {28}
is, however, a good deal of sympathy even with bodily pain. If, as has
already been observed, I see a stroke aimed, and just ready to fall
upon the leg, or arm, of another person, I naturally shrink and draw
back my own leg, or my own arm: and when it does fall, I feel it in
some measure, and am hurt by it as well as the sufferer. My hurt,
however, is, no doubt, excessively slight, and, upon that account, if
he makes any violent outcry, as I cannot go along with him, I never
fail to despise him. And this is the case of all the passions which
take their origin from the body: they excite either no sympathy at
all, or such a degree of it, as is altogether disproportioned to the
violence of what is felt by the sufferer.
It is quite otherwise with those passions which take their origin from
the imagination. The frame of my body can be but little affected by
the alterations which are brought about upon that of my companion: but
my imagination is more ductile, and more readily assumes, if I may say
so, the shape and configuration of the imaginations of those with whom
I am familiar. A disappointment in love, or ambition, will, upon this
account, call forth more sympathy than the greatest bodily evil. Those
passions arise altogether from the imagination. The person who has
lost his whole fortune, if he is in health, feels nothing in his body.
What he suffers is from the imagination only, which represents to him
the loss of his dignity, neglect from his friends, contempt from his
enemies, dependence, want, and misery, coming fast upon him; and we
sympathize with him the more strongly upon this account, because our
imaginations can the more readily mould themselves upon his
imagination, than our bodies can mould themselves upon his body.
The loss of a leg may generally be regarded as a more real calamity
than the loss of a mistress. It would be a ridiculous tragedy,
however, of which the catastrophe was to turn upon a loss of that
kind. A misfortune of the other kind, how frivolous soever it may
appear to be, has given occasion to many a fine one.
Nothing is so soon forgot as pain. The moment it is gone the whole
agony of it is over, and the thought of it can no longer give us any
sort of disturbance. We ourselves cannot then enter into the anxiety
and anguish which we had before conceived. An unguarded word from a
friend will occasion a more durable uneasiness. The agony which this
creates is by no means over with the word. What at first disturbs us
is not the object of the senses, but the idea of the imagination. As
it is an idea, therefore, which occasions our uneasiness, till time
and other accidents have in some measure effaced it from our memory,
the imagination continues to fret and rankle within, from the thought
of it.
Pain never calls forth any very lively sympathy unless it is
accompanied with danger. We sympathize with the fear, though not with
the agony of the sufferer. Fear, however, is a passion derived
altogether {29} from the imagination, which represents, with an
uncertainty and fluctuation that increases our anxiety, not what we
really feel, but what we may hereafter possibly suffer. The gout or
the tooth-ache, though exquisitely painful, excite very little
sympathy; more dangerous diseases, though accompanied with very little
pain, excite the highest.
Some people faint and grow sick at the sight of a chirurgical
operation, and that bodily pain which is occasioned by tearing the
flesh, seems, in them, to excite the most excessive sympathy. We
conceive in a much more lively and distinct manner the pain which
proceeds from an external cause, than we do that which arises from an
internal disorder. I can scarce form an idea of the agonies of my
neighbour when he is tortured with the gout, or the stone; but I have
the clearest conception of what he must suffer from an incision, a
wound, or a fracture. The chief cause, however, why such objects
produce such violent effects upon us, is their novelty. One who has
been witness to a dozen dissections, and as many amputations, sees,
ever after, all operations of this kind with great indifference, and
often with perfect insensibility. Though we have read or seen
represented more than five hundred tragedies, we shall seldom feel so
entire an abatement of our sensibility to the objects which they
represent to us.
In some of the Greek tragedies there is an attempt to excite
compassion, by the representation of the agonies of bodily pain.
Philoctetes cries out and faints from the extremity of his sufferings.
Hippolytus and Hercules are both introduced as expiring under the
severest tortures, which, it seems, even the fortitude of Hercules was
incapable of supporting. In all these cases, however, it is not the
pain which interests us, but some other circumstance. It is not the
sore foot, but the solitude, of Philoctetes which affects us, and
diffuses over that charming tragedy, that romantic wildness, which is
so agreeable to the imagination. The agonies of Hercules and
Hippolytus are interesting only because we foresee that death is to be
the consequence. If those heroes were to recover, we should think the
representation of their sufferings perfectly ridiculous. What a
tragedy would that be of which the distress consisted in a colic! Yet
no pain is more exquisite. These attempts to excite compassion by the
representation of bodily pain, may be regarded as among the greatest
breaches of decorum of which the Greek theatre has set the example.
The little sympathy which we feel with bodily pain, is the foundation
of the propriety of constancy and patience in enduring it. The man,
who under the severest tortures allows no weakness to escape him,
vents no groan, gives way to no passion which we do not entirely enter
into, commands our highest admiration. His firmness enables him to
keep time with our indifference and insensibility. We admire and
entirely go along with the magnanimous effort which he makes for this
purpose. We approve of his behaviour, and from our experience of the
common {30} weakness of human nature, we are surprised, and wonder how
he should be able to act so as to deserve approbation. Approbation,
mixed and animated by wonder and surprise, constitutes the sentiment
which is properly called admiration, of which, applause is the natural
expression, as has already been observed.
-----
CHAP. II.--_Of those Passions which take their Origin from a
particular Turn or Habit of the Imagination._
EVEN of the passions derived from the imagination, those which take
their origin from a peculiar turn or habit it has acquired, though
they may be acknowledged to be perfectly natural, are, however, but
little sympathized with. The imaginations of mankind, not having
acquired that particular turn, cannot enter into them; and such
passions, though they may be allowed to be almost unavoidable in some
part of life, are always, in some measure, ridiculous. This is the
case with that strong attachment which naturally grows up between two
persons of different sexes, who have long fixed their thoughts upon
one another. Our imagination not having run in the same channel with
that of the lover, we cannot enter into the eagerness of his emotions.
If our friend has been injured, we readily sympathize with his
resentment, and grow angry with the very person with whom he is angry.
If he has received a benefit, we readily enter into his gratitude, and
have a very high sense of the merit of his benefactor. But if he is in
love, though we may think his passion just as reasonable as any of the
kind, yet we never think ourselves bound to conceive a passion of the
same kind, and for the same person for whom he has conceived it. The
passion appears to every body, but the man who feels it, entirely
disproportioned to the value of the object; and love, though it is
pardoned in a certain age because we know it is natural, is always
laughed at, because we cannot enter into it. All serious and strong
expressions of it appear ridiculous to a third person; and though a
lover may be good company to his mistress, he is so to nobody else. He
himself is sensible of this; and as long as he continues in his sober
senses, endeavours to treat his own passion with raillery and
ridicule. It is the only style in which we care to hear of it; because
it is the only style in which we ourselves are disposed to talk of it.
We grow weary of the grave, pedantic, and long-sentenced love of
Cowley and Petrarca, who never have done with exaggerating the
violence of their attachments; but the gaiety of Ovid, and the
gallantry of Horace, are always agreeable.
But though we feel no proper sympathy with an attachment of this kind,
though we never approach even in imagination towards conceiving a
passion for that particular person, yet as we either have conceived,
or may be disposed to conceive, passions of the same kind, we readily
{31} enter into those high hopes of happiness which are proposed from
its gratification, as well as into that exquisite distress which is
feared from its disappointment. It interests us not as a passion, but
as a situation that gives occasion to other passions which interest
us; to hope, to fear, and to distress of every kind: in the same
manner as in a description of a sea voyage, it is not the hunger which
interests us, but the distress which that hunger occasions. Though we
do not properly enter into the attachment of the lover, we readily go
along with those expectations of romantic happiness which he derives
from it. We feel how natural it is for the mind, in a certain
situation, relaxed with indolence, and fatigued with the violence of
desire, to long for serenity and quiet, to hope to find them in the
gratification of that passion which distracts it, and to frame to
itself the idea of that life of pastoral tranquillity and retirement
which the elegant, the tender, and the passionate Tibullus takes so
much pleasure in describing; a life like what the poets describe in
the Fortunate Islands, a life of friendship, liberty, and repose; free
from labour, and from care, and from all the turbulent passions which
attend them. Even scenes of this kind interest us most, when they are
painted rather as what is hoped, than as what is enjoyed. The
grossness of that passion, which mixes with, and is, perhaps, the
foundation of love, disappears when its gratification is far off and
at a distance; but renders the whole offensive, when described as what
is immediately possessed. The happy passion, upon this account,
interests us much less than the fearful and the melancholy. We tremble
for whatever can disappoint such natural and agreeable hopes: and thus
enter into all the anxiety, and concern, and distress of the lover.
Hence it is, that, in some modern tragedies and romances, this passion
appears so wonderfully interesting. It is not so much the love of
Castalio and Monimia which attaches us in the orphan, as the distress
which that love occasions. The author who should introduce two lovers,
in a scene of perfect security, expressing their mutual fondness for
one another, would excite laughter, and not sympathy. If a scene of
this kind is ever admitted into a tragedy, it is always, in some
measure, improper, and is endured, not from any sympathy with the
passion that is expressed in it, but from concern for the dangers and
difficulties with which the audience foresee that its gratification is
likely to be attended.
The reserve which the laws of society impose upon the fair sex, with
regard to this weakness, renders it more peculiarly distressful in
them, and, upon that very account, more deeply interesting. We are
charmed with the love of Phædra, as it is expressed in the French
tragedy of that name, notwithstanding all the extravagance and guilt
which attend it. That very extravagance and guilt may be said, in some
measure, to recommend it to us. Her fear, her shame, her remorse, her
horror, her despair, become thereby more natural and interesting. All
the {32} secondary passions, if I may be allowed to call them so,
which arise from the situation of love, become necessarily more
furious and violent; and it is with these secondary passions only that
we can properly be said to sympathize.
Of all the passions, however, which are so extravagantly
disproportioned to the value of their objects, love is the only one
that appears, even to the weakest minds, to have any thing in it that
is either graceful or agreeable. In itself, first of all, though it
may be ridiculous, it is not naturally odious; and though its
consequences are often fatal and dreadful, its intentions are seldom
mischievous. And then, though there is little propriety in the passion
itself, there is a good deal in some of those which always accompany
it. There is in love a strong mixture of humanity, generosity,
kindness, friendship, esteem; passions with which, of all others, for
reasons which shall be explained immediately, we have the greatest
propensity to sympathize, even notwithstanding we are sensible that
they are, in some measure, excessive. The sympathy which we feel with
them, renders the passion which they accompany less disagreeable, and
supports it in our imagination, notwithstanding all the vices which
commonly go along with it; though in the one sex it necessarily leads
to the last ruin and infamy; and though in the other, where it is
apprehended to be least fatal, it is almost always attended with an
incapacity for labour, a neglect of duty, a contempt of fame, and even
of common reputation. Notwithstanding all this, the degree of
sensibility and generosity with which it is supposed to be
accompanied, renders it to many the object of vanity; and they are
fond of appearing capable of feeling what would do them no honour if
they had really felt it.
It is for a reason of the same kind, that a certain reserve is
necessary when we talk of our own friends, our own studies, our own
professions. All these are objects which we cannot expect should
interest our companions in the same degree in which they interest us.
And it is for want of this reserve, that the one half of mankind make
bad company to the other. A philosopher is company to a philosopher
only; the member of a club, to his own little knot of companions.
-----
CHAP. III.--_Of the unsocial Passions._
THERE is another set of passions, which, though derived from the
imagination, yet before we can enter into them, or regard them as
graceful or becoming, must always be brought down to a pitch much
lower than that to which undisciplined nature would raise them. These
are, hatred and resentment, with all their different modifications.
With regard to all such passions, our sympathy is divided between the
person who feels them, and the person who is the object of them. The
{33} interests of these two are directly opposite. What our sympathy
with the person who feels them would prompt us to wish for, our
fellow-feeling with the other would lead us to fear. As they are both
men, we are concerned for both, and our fear for what the one may
suffer, damps our resentment for what the other has suffered. Our
sympathy, therefore, with the man who has received the provocation,
necessarily falls short of the passion which naturally animates him,
not only upon account of those general causes which render all
sympathetic passions inferior to the original ones, but upon account
of that particular cause which is peculiar to itself, our opposite
sympathy with another person. Before resentment, therefore, can become
graceful and agreeable, it must be more humbled and brought down below
that pitch to which it would naturally rise, than almost any other
passion.
Mankind, at the same time, have a very strong sense of the injuries
that are done to another. The villain, in a tragedy or romance, is as
much the object of our indignation, as the hero is that of our
sympathy and affection. We detest Iago as much as we esteem Othello;
and delight as much in the punishment of the one, as we are grieved at
the distress of the other. But though mankind have so strong a
fellow-feeling with the injuries that are done to their brethren, they
do not always resent them the more that the sufferer appears to resent
them. Upon most occasions, the greater his patience, his mildness, his
humanity, provided it does not appear that he wants spirit, or that
fear was the motive of his forbearance, the higher the resentment
against the person who injured him. The amiableness of the character
exasperates their sense of the atrocity of the injury.
These passions, however, are regarded as necessary parts of the
character of human nature. A person becomes contemptible who tamely
sits still, and submits to insults, without attempting either to repel
or to revenge them. We cannot enter into his indifference and
insensibility: we call his behaviour mean-spiritedness, and are as
really provoked by it as by the insolence of his adversary. Even the
mob are enraged to see any man submit patiently to affronts and ill
usage. They desire to see this insolence resented, and resented by the
person who suffers from it. They cry to him with fury, to defend or to
revenge himself. If his indignation rouses at last, they heartily
applaud, and sympathize with it. It enlivens their own indignation
against his enemy, whom they rejoice to see him attack in turn, and
are as really gratified by his revenge, provided it is not immoderate,
as if the injury had been done to themselves.
But though the utility of those passions to the individual, by
rendering it dangerous to insult or to injure him, be acknowledged;
and though their utility to the public, as the guardians of justice,
and of the equality of its administration, be not less considerable,
as shall be shewn hereafter; yet there is still something disagreeable
in the {34} passions themselves, which makes the appearance of them in
other men the natural object of our aversion. The expression of anger
towards any body present, if it exceeds a bare intimation that we are
sensible of his ill usage, is regarded not only as an insult to that
particular person, but as a rudeness to the whole company. Respect for
them ought to have restrained us from giving way to so boisterous and
offensive an emotion. It is the remote effects of these passions which
are agreeable; the immediate effects are mischief to the person
against whom they are directed. But it is the immediate, and not the
remote effects of objects which render them agreeable or disagreeable
to the imagination. A prison is certainly more useful to the public
than a palace; and the person who founds the one is generally directed
by a much juster spirit of patriotism, than he who builds the other.
But the immediate effects of a prison, the confinement of the wretches
shut up in it, are disagreeable; and the imagination either does not
take time to trace out the remote ones, or sees them at too great a
distance to be much affected by them. A prison, therefore, will always
be a disagreeable object; and the fitter it is for the purpose for
which it was intended, it will be the more so. A palace, on the
contrary, will always be agreeable; yet its remote effects may often
be inconvenient to the public. It may serve to promote luxury, and set
the example of the dissolution of manners. Its immediate effects,
however, the conveniency, the pleasure, and the gaiety of the people
who live in it, being all agreeable, and suggesting to the imagination
a thousand agreeable ideas, that faculty generally rests upon them,
and seldom goes further in tracing its more distant consequences.
Trophies of the instruments of music or of agriculture, imitated in
painting or in stucco, make a common and an agreeable ornament of our
halls and dining rooms. A trophy of the same kind, composed of the
instruments of surgery, of dissecting and amputation-knives, of saws
for cutting the bones, of trepanning instruments, &c., would be absurd
and shocking. Instruments of surgery, however, are always more finely
polished, and generally more nicely adapted to the purposes for which
they are intended, than instruments of agriculture. The remote effects
of them too, the health of the patient, is agreeable; yet as the
immediate effect of them is pain and suffering, the sight of them
always displeases us. Instruments of war are agreeable, though their
immediate effect may seem to be in the same manner pain and suffering.
But then it is the pain and suffering of our enemies, with whom we
have no sympathy. With regard to us, they are immediately connected
with the agreeable ideas of courage, victory, and honour. They are
themselves, therefore, supposed to make one of the noblest parts of
dress, and the imitation of them one of the finest ornaments of
architecture. It is the same case with the qualities of the mind. The
ancient stoics were of opinion, that as the world was governed by the
{35} all-ruling providence of a wise, powerful, and good God, every
single event ought to be regarded, as making a necessary part of the
plan of the universe, and as tending to promote the general order and
happiness of the whole: that the vices and follies of mankind,
therefore, made as necessary a part of this plan as their wisdom or
their virtue; and by that eternal art which educes good from ill, were
made to tend equally to the prosperity and perfection of the great
system of nature. No speculation of this kind, however, how deeply
soever it might be rooted in the mind, could diminish our natural
abhorrence for vice, whose immediate effects are so destructive, and
whose remote ones are too distant to be traced by the imagination.
It is the same case with those passions we have been just now
considering. Their immediate effects are so disagreeable, that even
when they are most justly provoked, there is still something about
them which disgusts us. These, therefore, are the only passions of
which the expressions, as I formerly observed, do not dispose and
prepare us to sympathize with them, before we are informed of the
cause which excites them. The plaintive voice of misery, when heard at
a distance, will not allow us to be indifferent about the person from
whom it comes. As soon as it strikes our ear, it interests us in his
fortune, and, if continued, forces us almost involuntarily to fly to
his assistance. The sight of a smiling countenance, in the same
manner, elevates even the pensive into that gay and airy mood, which
disposes him to sympathize with, and share the joy which it expresses;
and he feels his heart, which with thought and care was before that
shrunk and depressed, instantly expanded and elated. But it is quite
otherwise with the expressions of hatred and resentment. The hoarse,
boisterous, and discordant voice of anger, when heard at a distance,
inspires us either with fear or aversion. We do not fly towards it, as
to one who cries out with pain and agony. Women, and men of weak
nerves, tremble and are overcome with fear, though sensible that
themselves are not the objects of the anger. They conceive fear,
however, by putting themselves in the situation of the person who is
so. Even those of stouter hearts are disturbed; not indeed enough to
make them afraid, but enough to make them angry; for anger is the
passion which they would feel in the situation of the other person. It
is the same case with hatred. Mere expressions of spite inspire it
against nobody, but the man who uses them. Both these passions are by
nature the objects of our aversion. Their disagreeable and boisterous
appearance never excites, never prepares, and often disturbs our
sympathy. Grief does not more powerfully engage and attract us to the
person in whom we observe it, than these, while we are ignorant of
their cause, disgust and detach us from him. It was, it seems, the
intention of Nature, that those rougher and more unamiable emotions,
which drive men from one another, should be less easily and more
rarely communicated.
{36} When music imitates the modulations of grief or joy, it either
actually inspires us with those passions, or at least puts us in the
mood which disposes us to conceive them. But when it imitates the
notes of anger, it inspires us with fear. Joy, grief, love,
admiration, devotion, are all of them passions which are naturally
musical. Their natural tones are all soft, clear, and melodious; and
they naturally express themselves in periods which are distinguished
by regular pauses, and which upon that account are easily adapted to
the regular returns of the correspondent airs of a tune. The voice of
anger, on the contrary, and of all the passions which are akin to it,
is harsh and discordant. Its periods too are all irregular, sometimes
very long, and sometimes very short, and distinguished by no regular
pauses. It is with difficulty therefore, that music can imitate any of
those passions; and the music which does imitate them is not the most
agreeable. A whole entertainment may consist, without any impropriety,
of the imitation of the social and agreeable passions. It would be a
strange entertainment which consisted altogether of the imitations of
hatred and resentment.
If those passions are disagreeable to the spectator, they are not less
so to the person who feels them. Hatred and anger are the greatest
poison to the happiness of a good mind. There is, in the very feeling
of those passions, something harsh, jarring, and convulsive, something
that tears and distracts the breast, and is altogether destructive of
that composure and tranquillity of mind which is so necessary to
happiness, and which is best promoted by the contrary passions of
gratitude and love. It is not the value of what they lose by the
perfidy and ingratitude of those they live with, which the generous
and humane are most apt to regret. Whatever they may have lost, they
can generally be very happy without it. What most disturbs them is the
idea of perfidy and ingratitude exercised towards themselves; and the
discordant and disagreeable passions which this excites, constitute,
in their own opinion, the chief part of the injury which they suffer.
How many things are requisite to render the gratification of
resentment completely agreeable, and to make the spectator thoroughly
sympathize with our revenge? The provocation must first of all be such
that we should become contemptible, and be exposed to perpetual
insults, if we did not, in some measure, resent it. Smaller offences
are always better neglected; nor is there anything more despicable
than that froward and captious humour which takes fire upon every
slight occasion of quarrel. We should resent more from a sense of the
propriety of resentment, from a sense, that mankind expect and require
it of us, than because we feel in ourselves the furies of that
disagreeable passion. There is no passion, of which the human mind is
capable, concerning whose justness we ought to be so doubtful,
concerning whose indulgence we ought so carefully to consult our
natural sense of {37} propriety, or so diligently to consider what
will be the sentiments of the cool and impartial spectator.
Magnanimity, or a regard to maintain our own rank and dignity in
society, is the only motive which can ennoble the expressions of this
disagreeable passion. This motive must characterize our whole style
and deportment. These must be plain, open, and direct; determined
without positiveness, and elevated without insolence; not only free
from petulance and low scurrility, but generous, candid, and full of
all proper regards, even for the person who has offended us. It must
appear, in short, from our whole manner, without our labouring
affectedly to express it, that passion has not extinguished our
humanity; and that if we yield to the dictates of revenge, it is with
reluctance, from necessity, and in consequence of great and repeated
provocations. When resentment is guarded and qualified in this manner,
it may be admitted to be even generous and noble.
-----
CHAP. IV.--_Of the Social Passions._
AS it is a divided sympathy which renders the whole set of passions
just now mentioned, upon most occasions, so ungraceful and
disagreeable: so there is another set opposite to these, which a
redoubled sympathy renders almost always peculiarly agreeable and
becoming. Generosity, humanity, kindness, compassion, mutual
friendship and esteem, all the social and benevolent affections, when
expressed in the countenance or behaviour, even towards those who are
not peculiarly connected with ourselves, please the indifferent
spectator upon almost every occasion. His sympathy with the person who
feels those passions, exactly coincides with his concern for the
person who is the object of them. The interest, which, as a man, he is
obliged to take in the happiness of this last, enlivens his
fellow-feeling with the sentiments of the other, whose emotions are
employed about the same object. We have always, therefore, the
strongest disposition to sympathize with the benevolent affections.
They appear in every respect agreeable to us. We enter into the
satisfaction both of the person who feels them, and of the person who
is the object of them. For as to be the object of hatred and
indignation gives more pain than all the evil which a brave man can
fear from his enemies: so there is a satisfaction in the consciousness
of being beloved, which, to a person of delicacy and sensibility, is
of more importance to happiness, than all the advantage which he can
expect to derive from it. What character is so detestable as that of
one who takes pleasure to sow dissention among friends, and to turn
their most tender love into mortal hatred? Yet wherein does the
atrocity of this so much abhorred injury consist? Is it in depriving
them of the frivolous good offices, which, had their friendship
continued, they might have expected from one another? It is in {38}
depriving them of that friendship itself, in robbing them of each
other's affections, from which both derived so much satisfaction; it
is in disturbing the harmony of their hearts, and putting an end to
that happy commerce which had before subsisted between them. These
affections, that harmony, this commerce, are felt, not only by the
tender and the delicate, but by the rudest vulgar of mankind, to be of
more importance to happiness than all the little services which could
be expected to flow from them.
The sentiment of love is, in itself, agreeable to the person who feels
it. It soothes and composes the breast, seems to favour the vital
motions, and to promote the healthful state of the human constitution;
and it is rendered still more delightful by the consciousness of the
gratitude and satisfaction which it must excite in him who is the
object of it. Their mutual regard renders them happy in one another,
and sympathy, with this mutual regard, makes them agreeable to every
other person. With what pleasure do we look upon a family, through the
whole of which reign mutual love and esteem, where the parents and
children are companions for one another, without any other difference
than what is made by respectful affection on the one side, and kind
indulgence on the other; where freedom and fondness, mutual raillery
and mutual kindness, show that no opposition of interest divides the
brothers, nor any rivalship of favour sets the sisters at variance,
and where every thing presents us with the idea of peace,
cheerfulness, harmony, and contentment? On the contrary, how uneasy
are we made when we go into a house in which jarring contention sets
one half of those who dwell in it against the other; where, amidst
affected smoothness and complaisance, suspicious looks and sudden
starts of passion betray the mutual jealousies which burn within them,
and which are every moment ready to burst out through all the
restraints which the presence of the company imposes?
Those amiable passions, even when they are acknowledged to be
excessive, are never regarded with aversion. There is something
agreeable even in the weakness of friendship and humanity. The too
tender mother, the too indulgent father, the too generous and
affectionate friend, may sometimes, perhaps, on account of the
softness of their natures, be looked upon with a species of pity, in
which, however, there is a mixture of love, but can never be regarded
with hatred and aversion, nor even with contempt, unless by the most
brutal and worthless of mankind. It is always with concern, with
sympathy and kindness, that we blame them for the extravagance of
their attachment. There is a helplessness in the character of extreme
humanity which more than any thing interests our pity. There is
nothing in itself which renders it either ungraceful or disagreeable.
We only regret that it is unfit for the world, because the world is
unworthy of it, and because it must expose the person who is endowed
with it as a prey to the perfidy {39} and ingratitude of insinuating
falsehood, and to a thousand pains and uneasinesses, which, of all
men, he the least deserves to feel, and which generally too he is, of
all men, the least capable of supporting. It is quite otherwise with
hatred and resentment. Too violent a propensity to those detestable
passions, renders a person the object of universal dread and
abhorrence, who, like a wild beast, ought, we think, to be hunted out
of all civil society.
-----
CHAP. V.--_Of the Selfish Passions._
BESIDES those two opposite sets of passions, the social and unsocial,
there is another which holds a sort of middle place between them; is
never either so graceful as is sometimes the one set, nor is ever so
odious as is sometimes the other. Grief and joy, when conceived upon
account of our own private good or bad fortune, constitute this third
set of passions. Even when excessive, they are never so disagreeable
as excessive resentment, because no opposite sympathy can ever
interest us against them: and when most suitable to their objects,
they are never so agreeable as impartial humanity and just
benevolence; because no double sympathy can ever interest us for them.
There is, however, this difference between grief and joy, that we are
generally most disposed to sympathize with small joys and great
sorrows. The man who, by some sudden revolution of fortune, is lifted
up all at once into a condition of life, greatly above what he had
formerly lived in, may be assured that the congratulations of his best
friends are not all of them perfectly sincere. An upstart, though of
the greatest merit, is generally disagreeable, and a sentiment of envy
commonly prevents us from heartily sympathizing with his joy. If he
has any judgment, he is sensible of this, and instead of appearing to
be elated with his good fortune, he endeavours, as much as he can, to
smother his joy, and keep down that elevation of mind with which his
new circumstances naturally inspire him. He affects the same plainness
of dress, and the same modesty of behaviour, which became him in his
former station. He redoubles his attention to his old friends, and
endeavours more than ever to be humble, assiduous, and complaisant.
And this is the behaviour which in his situation we most approve of;
because we expect, it seems, that he should have more sympathy with
our envy and aversion to his happiness, than we have with his
happiness. It is seldom that with all this he succeeds. We suspect
the sincerity of his humility, and he grows weary of this constraint.
In a little time, therefore, he generally leaves all his old friends
behind him, some of the meanest of them excepted, who may, perhaps,
condescend to become his dependents: nor does he always acquire any
new ones; the {40} pride of his new connections is as much affronted
at finding him their equal, as that of his old ones had been by his
becoming their superior; and it requires the most obstinate and
persevering modesty to atone for this modification to either. He
generally grows weary too soon, and is provoked, by the sullen and
suspicious pride of the one, and by the saucy contempt of the other,
to treat the first with neglect, and the second with petulance, till
at last he grows habitually insolent, and forfeits the esteem of all.
If the chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of
being beloved, as I believe it does, those sudden changes of fortune
seldom contribute much to happiness. He is happiest who advances more
gradually to greatness, whom the public destines to every step of his
preferment long before he arrives at it, in whom, upon that account,
when it comes, it can excite no extravagant joy, and with regard to
whom it cannot reasonably create either any jealousy in those he
overtakes, or envy in those he leaves behind.
Mankind, however, more readily sympathize with those smaller joys
which flow from less important causes. It is decent to be humble
amidst great prosperity; but we can scarce express too much
satisfaction in all the little occurrences of common life, in the
company with which we spent the evening last night, in the
entertainment that was set before us, in what was said and what was
done, in all the little incidents of the present conversation, and in
all those frivolous nothings which fill up the void of human life.
Nothing is more graceful than habitual cheerfulness, which is always
founded upon a peculiar relish for all the little pleasures which
common occurrences afford. We readily sympathize with it: it inspires
us with the same joy, and makes every trifle turn up to us in the same
agreeable aspect in which it presents itself to the person endowed
with this happy disposition. Hence it is that youth, the season of
gaiety, so easily engages our affections. That propensity to joy which
seems even to animate the bloom, and to sparkle from the eyes of youth
and beauty, though in a person of the same sex, exalts, even the aged,
to a more joyous mood than ordinary. They forget, for a time, their
infirmities, and abandon themselves to those agreeable ideas and
emotions to which they have long been strangers, but which, when the
presence of so much happiness recalls them to their breast, take their
place there, like old acquaintance, from whom they are sorry to have
ever been parted, and whom they embrace more heartily upon account of
this long separation.
It is quite otherwise with grief. Small vexations excite no sympathy,
but deep affliction calls forth the greatest. The man who is made
uneasy by every little disagreeable incident, who is hurt if either
the cook or the butler have failed in the least article of their duty,
who feels every defect in the highest ceremonial of politeness,
whether it be shown to himself or to any other person, who takes it
amiss that his intimate friend did not bid him good-morrow when they
met in the {41} forenoon, and that his brother hummed a tune all the
time he himself was telling a story; who is put out of humour by the
badness of the weather when in the country, by the badness of the
roads when upon a journey, and by the want of company and dulness of
all public diversions when in town; such a person, I say, though he
should have some reason, will seldom meet with much sympathy. Joy is a
pleasant emotion, and we gladly abandon ourselves to it upon the
slightest occasion. We readily, therefore, sympathize with it in
others, whenever we are not prejudiced by envy. But grief is painful,
and the mind, even when it is our own misfortune, naturally resists
and recoils from it. We would endeavour either not to conceive it at
all, or to shake it off as soon as we have conceived it. Our aversion
to grief will not, indeed, always hinder us from conceiving it in our
own case upon very trifling occasions, but it constantly prevents us
from sympathizing with it in others when excited by the like frivolous
causes: for our sympathetic passions are always less irresistible than
our original ones. There is, besides, a malice in mankind, which not
only prevents all sympathy with little uneasinesses, but renders them
in some measure diverting. Hence the delight which we all take in
raillery, and in the small vexation which we observe in our companion,
when he is pushed, and urged, and teased upon all sides. Men of the
most ordinary good-breeding dissemble the pain which any little
incident may give them; and those who are more thoroughly formed to
society, turn of their own accord, all such incidents into raillery,
as they know their companions will do for them. The habit which a man,
who lives in the world, has acquired of considering how every thing
that concerns himself will appear to others, makes those frivolous
calamities turn up in the same ridiculous light to him, in which he
knows they will certainly be considered by them.
Our sympathy, on the contrary, with deep distress, is very strong and
very sincere. It is unnecessary to give an instance. We weep even at
the feigned representation of a tragedy. If you labour, therefore,
under any signal calamity, if by some extraordinary misfortune you are
fallen into poverty, into diseases, into disgrace and disappointment;
even though your own fault may have been, in part, the occasion, yet
you may generally depend upon the sincerest sympathy of all your
friends, and, as far as interest and honour will permit, upon their
kindest assistance too. But if your misfortune is not of this dreadful
kind, if you have only been a little baulked in your ambition, if you
have only been jilted by your mistress, or are only hen-pecked by your
wife, lay your account with the raillery of all your acquaintance.
-----
{42}
SEC. III.--OF THE EFFECTS OF PROSPERITY AND ADVERSITY UPON THE JUDGMENT
OF MANKIND WITH REGARD TO THE PROPRIETY OF ACTION; AND WHY IT IS MORE
EASY TO OBTAIN THEIR APPROBATION IN THE ONE STATE THAN IN THE OTHER.
CHAP. I.--_That though our Sympathy with Sorrow is generally a more
lively Sensation than our Sympathy with Joy, it commonly falls much
more Short of the Violence of what is naturally felt by the Person
principally concerned._
OUR sympathy with sorrow, though not more real, has been more taken
notice of than our sympathy with joy. The word sympathy, in its most
proper and primitive signification, denotes our fellow-feeling with
the sufferings, not that with the enjoyments, of others. A late
ingenious and subtile philosopher thought it necessary to prove, by
arguments, that we had a real sympathy with joy, and that
congratulation was a principle of human nature. Nobody, I believe,
ever thought it necessary to prove that compassion was such.
First of all, our sympathy with sorrow is, in some sense, more
universal than that with joy. Though sorrow is excessive, we may still
have some fellow-feeling with it. What we feel does not, indeed, in
this case, amount to that complete sympathy, to that perfect harmony
and correspondence of sentiments, which constitutes approbation. We do
not weep, and exclaim, and lament, with the sufferer. We are sensible,
on the contrary, of his weakness and of the extravagance of his
passion, and yet often feel a very sensible concern upon his account.
But if we do not entirely enter into, and go along with, the joy of
another, we have no sort of regard or fellow feeling for it. The man
who skips and dances about with that intemperate and senseless joy
which we cannot accompany him in, is the object of our contempt and
indignation.
Pain besides, whether of mind or body, is a more pungent sensation
than pleasure, and our sympathy with pain, though it falls greatly
short of what is naturally felt by the sufferer, is generally a more
lively and distinct perception than our sympathy with pleasure, though
this last often approaches more nearly, as I shall show immediately,
to the natural vivacity of the original passion.
Over and above all this, we often struggle to keep down our sympathy
with the sorrow of others. Whenever we are not under the observation
of the sufferer, we endeavour, for our own sake, to suppress it as
much as we can, and we are not always successful. The opposition which
we make to it, and the reluctance with which we yield to it,
necessarily oblige us to take more particular notice of it. But we
never have occasion to make this opposition to our sympathy with joy.
{43} If there is any envy in the case, we never feel the least
propensity towards it; and if there is none, we give way to it without
any reluctance. On the contrary, as we are always ashamed of our own
envy, we often pretend, and sometimes really wish to sympathize with
the joy of others, when by that disagreeable sentiment we are
disqualified from doing so. We are glad, we say, on account of our
neighbour's good fortune, when in our hearts, perhaps, we are really
sorry. We often feel a sympathy with sorrow when we would wish to be
rid of it; and we often miss that with joy when we would be glad to
have it. The obvious observation, therefore, which it naturally falls
in our way to make, is, that our propensity to sympathize with sorrow
must be very strong, and our inclination to sympathize with joy very
weak.
Notwithstanding this prejudice, however, I will venture to affirm,
that, when there is no envy in the case, our propensity to sympathize
with joy is much stronger than our propensity to sympathize with
sorrow; and that our fellow-feeling for the agreeable emotion
approaches much more nearly to the vivacity of what is naturally felt
by the persons principally concerned, than that which we conceive for
the painful one.
We have some indulgence for that excessive grief which we cannot
entirely go along with. We know what a prodigious effort is requisite
before the sufferer can bring down his emotions to complete harmony
and concord with those of the spectator. Though he fails, therefore,
we easily pardon him. But we have no such indulgence for the
intemperance of joy; because we are not conscious that any such vast
effort is requisite to bring it down to what we can entirely enter
into. The man who, under the greatest calamities, can command his
sorrow, seems worthy of the highest admiration; but he who, in the
fulness of prosperity, can in the same manner master his joy, seems
hardly to deserve any praise. We are sensible that there is a much
wider interval in the one case than in the other, between what is
naturally felt by the person principally concerned, and what the
spectator can entirely go along with.
What can be added to the happiness of the man who is in health, who is
out of debt, and has a clear conscience? To one in this situation, all
accessions of fortune may properly be said to be superfluous; and if
he is much elevated on account of them, it must be the effect of the
most frivolous levity. This situation, however, may very well be
called the natural and ordinary state of mankind. Notwithstanding the
present misery and depravity of the world, so justly lamented, this
really is the state of the greater part of men. The greater part of
men, therefore, cannot find any great difficulty in elevating
themselves to all the joy which any accession to this situation can
well excite in their companion.
But though little can be added to this state, much may be taken from
{44} it. Though between this condition and the highest pitch of human
prosperity, the interval is but a trifle; between it and the lowest
depth of misery the distance is immense and prodigious. Adversity, on
this account, necessarily depresses the mind of the sufferer much more
below its natural state, than prosperity can elevate him above it. The
spectator, therefore, must find it much more difficult to sympathize
entirely, and keep perfect time, with his sorrow, than thoroughly to
enter into his joy, and must depart much further from his own natural
and ordinary temper of mind in the one case than in the other. It is
on this account, that though our sympathy with sorrow is often a more
pungent sensation than our sympathy with joy, it always falls much
more short of the violence of what is naturally felt by the person
principally concerned.
It is agreeable to sympathize with joy; and wherever envy does not
oppose it, our heart abandons itself with satisfaction to the highest
transports of that delightful sentiment. But it is painful to go along
with grief, and we always enter into it with reluctance.[1] When we
attend to the representation of a tragedy, we struggle against that
sympathetic sorrow which the entertainment inspires as long as we can,
and we give way to it at last only when we can no longer avoid it; we
even then endeavour to cover our concern from the company. If we shed
any tears, we carefully conceal them, and are afraid, lest the
spectators, not entering into this excessive tenderness, should regard
it as effeminacy and weakness. The wretch whose misfortunes call upon
our compassion feels with what reluctance we are likely to enter into
his sorrow, and therefore proposes his grief to us with fear and
hesitation: he even smothers the half of it, and is ashamed, upon
account of this hard-heartedness of mankind, to give vent to the
fulness of his affliction. It is otherwise with the man who riots in
joy and success. Wherever envy does not interest us against him, he
expects our completest sympathy. He does not fear, therefore, to
announce himself with shouts of exultation, in full confidence that we
are heartily disposed to go along with him.
[Footnote 1: It has been objected to me that as I found the sentiment
of approbation, which is always agreeable, upon sympathy, it is
inconsistent with my system to admit any disagreeable sympathy. I
answer, that in the sentiment of approbation there are two things to
be taken notice of; first, the sympathetic passion of the spectator;
and secondly, the emotion which arises from his observing the perfect
coincidence between this sympathetic passion in himself, and the
original passion in the person principally concerned. This last
emotion, in which the sentiment of approbation properly consists, is
always agreeable and delightful. The other may either be agreeable or
disagreeable, according to the nature of the original passion, whose
features it must always, in some measure, retain.]
Why should we be more ashamed to weep than to laugh before company? We
may often have as real occasion to do the one as to do the other; but
we always feel that the spectators are more likely to go along with us
in the agreeable, than in the painful emotion. It is {45} always
miserable to complain, even when we are oppressed by the most dreadful
calamities. But the triumph of victory is not always ungraceful.
Prudence, indeed, would often advise us to bear our prosperity with
more moderation; because prudence would teach us to avoid that envy
which this very triumph is, more than any thing, apt to excite.
How hearty are the acclamations of the mob, who never bear any envy to
their superiors, at a triumph or a public entry? And how sedate and
moderate is commonly their grief at an execution? Our sorrow at a
funeral generally amounts to no more than an affected gravity; but our
mirth at a christening or a marriage, is always from the heart, and
without any affectation. Upon these, and all such joyous occasions,
our satisfaction, though not so durable, is often as lively as that of
the persons principally concerned. Whenever we cordially congratulate
our friends, which, however, to the disgrace of human nature, we do
but seldom, their joy literally becomes our joy: we are, for the
moment, as happy as they are: our heart swells and overflows with real
pleasure: joy and complacency sparkle from our eyes, and animate every
feature of our countenance, and every gesture of our body.
But on the contrary, when we condole with our friends in their
afflictions, how little do we feel, in comparison of what they feel?
We sit down by them, we look at them, and while they relate to us the
circumstances of their misfortune, we listen to them with gravity and
attention. But while their narration is every moment interrupted by
those natural bursts of passion which often seem almost to choke them
in the midst of it; how far are the languid emotions of our hearts
from keeping time to the transports of theirs? We may be sensible, at
the same time, that their passion is natural, and no greater than what
we ourselves might feel upon the like occasion. We may even inwardly
reproach ourselves with our own want of sensibility, and perhaps, on
that account, work ourselves up into an artificial sympathy, which
however, when it is raised, is always the slightest and most
transitory imaginable; and generally, as soon as we have left the
room, vanishes, and is gone for ever. Nature, it seems, when she
loaded us with our own sorrows, thought they were enough, and
therefore did not command us to take any further share in those of
others, than what was necessary to prompt us to relieve them.
It is on account of this dull sensibility to the afflictions of
others, that magnanimity amidst great distress appears always so
divinely graceful. His behaviour is genteel and agreeable who can
maintain his cheerfulness amidst a number of frivolous disasters. But
he appears to be more than mortal who can support in the same manner
the most dreadful calamities. We feel what an immense effort is
requisite to silence those violent emotions which naturally agitate
and distract those in his situation. We are amazed to find that he can
command himself so entirely. His firmness at the same time, perfectly
{46} coincides with our insensibility. He makes no demand upon us for
that more exquisite degree of sensibility which we find, and which we
are mortified to find, that we do not possess. There is the most
perfect correspondence between his sentiments and ours, and on that
account the most perfect propriety in his behaviour. It is a propriety
too, which, from our experience of the usual weakness of human nature,
we could not reasonably have expected he should be able to maintain.
We wonder with surprise and astonishment at that strength of mind
which is capable of so noble and generous an effort. The sentiment of
complete sympathy and approbation, mixed and animated with wonder and
surprise, constitutes what is properly called admiration, as has
already been more than once take notice of. Cato, surrounded on all
sides by his enemies, unable to resist them, disdaining to submit to
them, and reduced, by the proud maxims of that age, to the necessity
of destroying himself; yet never shrinking from his misfortunes, never
supplicating with the lamentable voice of wretchedness, those
miserable sympathetic tears which we are always so unwilling to give;
but on the contrary, arming himself with manly fortitude, and the
moment before he executes his fatal resolution, giving, with his usual
tranquillity, all necessary orders for the safety of his friends;
appears to Seneca, that great preacher of insensibility, a spectacle
which even the gods themselves might behold with pleasure and
admiration.
Whenever we meet, in common life, with any examples of such heroic
magnanimity, we are always extremely affected. We are more apt to weep
and shed tears for such as, in this manner, seem to feel nothing for
themselves, than for those who give way to all the weakness of sorrow
and in this particular case, the sympathetic grief of the spectator
appears to go beyond the original passion in the person principally
concerned. The friends of Socrates all wept when he drank the last
potion, while he himself expressed the gayest and most cheerful
tranquillity. Upon all such occasions the spectator makes no effort,
and has no occasion to make any, in order to conquer his sympathetic
sorrow. He is under no fear that it will transport him to any thing
that is extravagant and improper; he is rather pleased with the
sensibility of his own heart, and gives way to it with complacence and
self-approbation. He gladly indulges, therefore, the most melancholy
views which can naturally occur to him, concerning the calamity of his
friend, for whom, perhaps, he never felt so exquisitely before, the
tender and tearful passion of love. But it is quite otherwise with the
person principally concerned. He is obliged, as much as possible, to
turn away his eyes from whatever is either naturally terrible or
disagreeable in his situation. Too serious an attention to those
circumstances, he fears, might make so violent an impression upon him,
that he could no longer keep within the bounds of moderation, or
render himself the object of the complete sympathy and approbation of
the spectators. {47} He fixes his thoughts, therefore, upon those only
which are agreeable, the applause and admiration which he is about to
deserve by the heroic magnanimity of his behaviour. To feel that he is
capable of so noble and generous an effort, to feel that in this
dreadful situation he can still act as he would desire to act,
animates and transports him with joy, and enables him to support that
triumphant gaiety which seems to exult in the victory he thus gains
over his misfortunes.
On the contrary, he always appears, in some measure, mean and
despicable, who is sunk in sorrow and dejection upon account of any
calamity of his own. We cannot bring ourselves to feel for him what he
feels for himself, and what, perhaps, we should feel for ourselves if
in his situation: we, therefore, despise him; unjustly perhaps, if any
sentiment could be regarded as unjust, to which we are by nature
irresistibly determined. The weakness of sorrow never appears in any
respect agreeable, except when it arises from what we feel for
ourselves. A son, upon the death of an indulgent and respectable
father, may give way to it without much blame. His sorrow is chiefly
founded upon a sort of sympathy with his departed parent; and we
readily enter into his humane emotion. But if he should indulge the
same weakness upon account of any misfortune which affected himself
only, he would no longer meet with any such indulgence. If he should
be reduced to beggary and ruin, if he should be exposed to the most
dreadful dangers, if he should even be led out to a public execution,
and there shed one single tear upon the scaffold, he would disgrace
himself for ever in the opinion of all the gallant and generous part
of mankind. Their compassion for him, however, would be very strong,
and very sincere; but as it would still fall short of this excessive
weakness, they would have no pardon for the man who could thus expose
himself in the eyes of the world. His behaviour would affect them with
shame rather than with sorrow; and the dishonour which he had thus
brought upon himself would appear to them the most lamentable
circumstance in his misfortune. How did it disgrace the memory of the
intrepid Duke of Biron, who had so often braved death in the field,
that he wept upon the scaffold, when he beheld the state to which he
was fallen, and remembered the favour and the glory from which his own
rashness had so unfortunately thrown him?
-----
CHAP. II.--_Of the Origin of Ambition, and of the Distinction of
Ranks._
IT is because mankind are disposed to sympathize more entirely with
our joy than with our sorrow, that we make parade of our riches, and
conceal our poverty. Nothing is so mortifying as to be obliged to
expose our distress to the view of the public, and to feel, that
though {48} our situation is open to the eyes of all mankind, no
mortal conceives for us the half of what we suffer. Nay, it is chiefly
from this regard to the sentiments of mankind, that we pursue riches
and avoid poverty. For to what purpose is all the toil and bustle of
this world? what is the end of avarice and ambition, of the pursuit of
wealth, of power, and pre-eminence? Is it to supply the necessities of
nature? The wages of the meanest labourer can supply them. We see that
they can afford him food and clothing, the comfort of a house and of a
family. If we examine his oeconomy with rigour, we should find that he
spends a great part of them upon conveniences, which may be regarded
as superfluities, and that, upon extraordinary occasions, he can give
something even to vanity and distinction. What then is the cause of
our aversion to his situation, and why should those who have been
educated in the higher ranks of life, regard it as worse than death,
to be reduced to live, even without labour, upon the same simple fare
with him, to dwell under the same lowly roof, and to be clothed in the
same humble attire? Do they imagine that their stomach is better or
their sleep sounder in a palace than in a cottage? The contrary has
been so often observed, and, indeed, is so very obvious, though it had
never been observed, that there is nobody ignorant of it. From whence,
then arises that emulation which runs through all the different ranks
of men, and what are the advantages which we propose by the great
purpose of human life which we call bettering our condition? To be
observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy,
complacency, and approbation, arc all the advantages which we can
propose to derive from it. It is the vanity, not the ease or the
pleasure, which interests us. But vanity is always founded upon the
belief of our being the object of attention and approbation. The rich
man glories in his riches, because he feels that they naturally draw
upon him the attention of the world, and that mankind are disposed to
go along with him in all those agreeable emotions with which the
advantages of his situation so readily inspire him. At the thought of
this, his heart seems to swell and dilate itself within him, and he is
fonder of his wealth upon this account, than for all the other
advantages it procures him. The poor man, on the contrary, is ashamed
of his poverty. He feels that it either places him out of the sight of
mankind, or, that if they take any notice of him, they have, however,
scarce any fellow-feeling with the misery and distress which he
suffers. He is mortified upon both accounts; for though to be
overlooked, and to be disapproved of, are things entirely different,
yet as obscurity covers us from the daylight of honour and
approbation, to feel that we are taken no notice of, necessarily damps
the most agreeable hope, and disappoints the most ardent desire, of
human nature. The poor man goes out and comes in unheeded, and when in
the midst of a crowd is in the same obscurity as if shut up in his own
hovel. Those humble {49} cares and painful attentions which occupy
those in his situation, afford no amusement to the dissipated and the
gay. They turn away their their eyes from him, if the extremity of his
distress forces them to look at him, it is only to spurn so
disagreeable an object from among them. The fortunate and the proud
wonder at the insolence of human wretchedness, that it should dare to
present itself before them, and with the loathsome aspect of its
misery presume to disturb the serenity of their happiness. The man of
rank and distinction, on the contrary, is observed by all the world.
Every body is eager to look at him, and to conceive, at least by
sympathy, that joy and exultation with which his circumstances
naturally inspire him. His actions are the objects of the public care.
Scarce a word, scarce a gesture, can fall from him that is altogether
neglected. In a great assembly he is the person upon whom all direct
their eyes; it is upon him that their passions seem to wait with
expectation, in order to receive that movement and direction which he
shall impress upon them; and if his behaviour is not altogether
absurd, he has, every moment, an opportunity of interesting mankind,
and of rendering himself the object of the observation and fellow
feeling of every body about him. It is this, which, notwithstanding
the restraint it imposes, notwithstanding the loss of liberty with
which it is attended, renders greatness the object of envy, and
compensates, in the opinion of mankind, all that toil, all that
anxiety, all those mortifications which must be undergone in the
pursuit of it; and what is of yet more consequence, all that leisure,
all that ease, all that careless security, which are forfeited for
ever by the acquisition.
When we consider the condition of the great, in those delusive colours
in which the imagination is apt to paint it, it seems to be almost the
abstract idea of a perfect and happy state. It is the very state
which, in all our waking dreams and idle reveries, we had sketched out
to ourselves as the final object of our desires. We feel, therefore, a
peculiar sympathy with the satisfaction of those who are in it. We
favour all their inclinations, and forward all their wishes. What
pity, we think, that any thing should spoil and corrupt so agreeable a
situation. We could even wish them immortal; and it seems hard to us,
that death should at last put an end to such perfect enjoyment. It is
cruel, we think, in Nature to compel them from their exalted stations
to that humble, but hospitable home, which she has provided for all
her children. Great king, live for ever! is the compliment which,
after the manner of eastern adulation, we should readily make them,
if experience did not teach us its absurdity. Every calamity that
befals them, every injury that is done them, excites in the breast of
the spectator ten times more compassion and resentment than he would
have felt, had the same things happened to other men. It is the
misfortune of kings only which afford the proper subjects for tragedy.
They resemble {50} in this respect, the misfortunes of lovers. Those
two situations are the chief which interest us upon the theatre;
because, in spite of all that reason and experience can tell us to the
contrary, the prejudices of the imagination attach to these two states
a happiness superior to any other. To disturb, or to put an end to
such perfect enjoyment, seems to be the most atrocious of all
injuries. The traitor who conspires against the life of his monarch,
is thought a greater monster than any other murderer. All the innocent
blood that was shed in the civil wars provoked less indignation than
the death of Charles I. A stranger to human nature, who saw the
indifference of men about the misery of their inferiors, and the
regret and indignation which they feel for the misfortunes and
sufferings of those above them, would be apt to imagine, that pain
must be more agonizing, and the convulsions of death more terrible to
persons of higher rank, than they are to those of meaner stations.
Upon this disposition of mankind, to go along with all the passions of
the rich and the powerful, is founded the distinction of ranks, and
the order of society. Our obsequiousness to our superiors more
frequently arises from our admiration for the advantages of their
situation, than from any private expectations of benefit from their
goodwill. Their benefits can extend but to a few; but their fortunes
interest almost every body. We are eager to assist them in completing
a system of happiness that approaches so near to perfection; and we
desire to serve them for their own sake, without any recompense but
the vanity or the honour of obliging them. Neither is our deference to
the inclinations founded chiefly, or altogether, upon a regard to the
utility of such submission, and to the order of society, which is best
supported by it. Even when the order of society seems to require that
we should oppose them, we can hardly bring ourselves to do it. That
kings are servants of the people, to be obeyed, resisted, deposed, or
punished, as the public conveniency may require, is the doctrine of
reason and philosophy; but it is not the doctrine of nature. Nature
would teach us to submit to them for their own sake, to tremble and
bow down before their exalted station, to regard their smile as a
reward sufficient to compensate any services, and to dread their
displeasure, though no other evil were to follow from it, as the
severest of all mortifications. To treat them in any respect as men,
to reason and dispute with them upon ordinary occasions, requires such
resolution, that there are few men whose magnanimity can support them
in it, unless they are likewise assisted by similarity and
acquaintance. The strongest motives, the most furious passions, fear,
hatred, and resentment, are scarce sufficient to balance this natural
disposition to respect them: and their conduct must, either justly or
unjustly, have excited the highest degree of those passions, before
the bulk of the people can be brought to oppose them with violence, or
to desire to see them {51} either punished or deposed. Even when the
people have been brought this length, they are apt to relent every
moment, and easily relapse into their habitual state of deference to
those whom they have been accustomed to look upon as their natural
superiors. They cannot stand the mortification of their monarch.
Compassion soon takes the place of resentment, they forget all past
provocations, their old principles of loyalty revive, and they run to
re-establish the ruined authority of their old masters, with the same
violence with which they had opposed it. The death of Charles I.
brought about the restoration of the royal family. Compassion for
James II., when he was seized by the populace in making his escape on
ship-board, had almost prevented the Revolution, and made it go on
more heavily than before.
Do the great seem insensible of the easy price at which they may
acquire the public admiration; or do they seem to imagine that to
them, as to other men, it must be the purchase either of sweat or of
blood? By what important accomplishments is the young nobleman
instructed to support the dignity of his rank, and to render himself
worthy of that superiority over his fellow citizens, to which the
virtue of his ancestors had raised them: Is it by knowledge, by
industry, by patience, by self-denial, or by virtue of any kind? As
all his words, as all his motions are attended to, he learns an
habitual regard to every circumstance of ordinary behaviour, and
studies to perform all those small duties with the most exact
propriety. As he is conscious how much he is observed, and how much
mankind are disposed to favour all his inclinations, he acts, upon the
most indifferent occasions, with that freedom and elevation which the
thought of this naturally inspires. His air, his manner, his
deportment, all mark that elegant and graceful sense of his own
superiority, which those who are born to inferior stations can hardly
ever arrive at. These are the arts by which he proposes to make
mankind more easily submit to his authority, and to govern their
inclinations according to his own pleasure: and in this he is seldom
disappointed. These arts, supported by rank and pre-eminence, are,
upon ordinary occasions, sufficient to govern the world. Lewis XIV.
during the greater part of his reign, was regarded, not only in
France, but over all Europe, as the most perfect model of a great
prince. But what were the talents and virtues by which he acquired
this great reputation? Was it by the scrupulous and inflexible justice
of all his undertakings, by the immense dangers and difficulties with
which they were attended, or by the unwearied and unrelenting
application with which he pursued them? Was it by his extensive
knowledge, by his exquisite judgment, or by his heroic valour? It was
by none of these qualities. But he was, first of all, the most
powerful prince in Europe, and consequently held the highest rank
among kings; and then says his historian, 'he surpassed all his
courtiers in the gracefulness of his shape, and the majestic beauty of
his features. The {52} sound of his voice, noble and affecting, gained
those hearts which his presence intimidated. He had a step and a
deportment which could suit only him and his rank, and which would
have been ridiculous in any other person. The embarrassment which he
occasioned to those who spoke to him, flattered that secret
satisfaction with which he felt his own superiority. The old officer,
who was confounded and faltered in asking him a favour, and not being
able to conclude his discourse, said to him: "Sir, your majesty, I
hope, will believe that I do not tremble thus before your enemies:"
had no difficulty to obtain what he demanded.' These frivolous
accomplishments, supported by his rank, and, no doubt too, by a degree
of other talents and virtues, which seems, however, not to have been
much above mediocrity, established this prince in the esteem of his
own age, and have drawn, even from posterity, a good deal of respect
for his memory. Compared with these, in his own times, and in his own
presence, no other virtue, it seems, appeared to have any merit.
Knowledge, industry, valour, and beneficence trembled, were abashed,
and lost all dignity before them.
But it is not by accomplishments of this kind, that the man of
inferior rank must hope to distinguish himself. Politeness is so much
the virtue of the great, that it will do little honour to any body but
themselves. The coxcomb, who imitates their manner, and affects to be
eminent by the superior propriety of his ordinary behaviour, is
rewarded with a double share of contempt for his folly and
presumption. Why should the man, whom nobody thinks it worth while to
look at, be very anxious about the manner in which he holds up his
head, or disposes of his arms while he walks through a room? He is
occupied surely with a very superfluous attention, and with an
attention too that marks a sense of his own importance, which no other
mortal can go along with. The most perfect modesty and plainness,
joined to as much negligence as is consistent with the respect due to
the company, ought to be the chief characteristics of the behaviour of
a private man. If ever he hopes to distinguish himself, it must be by
more important virtues. He must acquire dependants to balance the
dependants of the great, and he has no other fund to pay them from,
but the labour of his body and the activity of his mind. He must
cultivate these therefore: he must acquire superior knowledge in his
profession and superior industry in the exercise of it. He must be
patient in labour, resolute in danger, and firm in distress. These
talents he must bring into public view, by the difficulty, importance,
and at the same time, good judgment of his undertakings, and by the
severe and unrelenting application, with which he pursues them.
Probity and prudence, generosity and frankness, must characterize his
behaviour upon all ordinary occasions; and he must, at the same time,
be forward to engage in all those situations, in which it requires the
greatest talents and virtues to act with propriety, but in which the
greatest applause is to be acquired by those who can {53} acquit
themselves with honour. With what impatience does the man of spirit
and ambition, who is depressed by his situation, look round for some
great opportunity to distinguish himself? No circumstances, which can
afford this, appear to him undesirable. He even looks forward with
satisfaction to the prospect of foreign war or civil dissension; and,
with secret transport and delight, sees through all the confusion and
bloodshed which attend them, the probability of those wished-for
occasions presenting themselves, in which he may draw upon himself the
attention and admiration of mankind. The man of rank and distinction,
on the contrary, whose whole glory consists in the propriety of his
ordinary behaviour, who is contented with the humble renown which this
can afford him, and has no talents to acquire any other, is unwilling
to embarrass himself with what can be attended either with difficulty
or distress. To figure at a ball is his great triumph, and to succeed
in an intrigue of gallantry, his highest exploit. He has an aversion
to all public confusions, not from the love of mankind, for the great
never look upon their inferiors as their fellow-creatures; nor yet
from want of courage, for in that he is seldom defective; but from a
consciousness that he possesses none of the virtues which are required
in such situations, and that the public attention will certainly be
drawn away from him by others. He may be willing to expose himself to
some little danger, and to make a campaign when it happens to be the
fashion. But he shudders with horror at the thought of any situation
which demands the continual and long exertion of patience, industry,
fortitude, and application of thought. These virtues are hardly ever
to be met with in men who are born to those high stations. In all
governments, accordingly, even in monarchies, the highest offices are
generally possessed, and the whole detail of the administration
conducted, by men who were educated in the middle and inferior ranks
of life, who have been carried forward by their own industry and
abilities, though loaded with the jealousy, and opposed by the
resentment, of all those who were born their superiors, and to whom
the great, after having regarded them first with contempt, and
afterwards with envy, are at last contented to truckle with the same
abject meanness with which they desire that the rest of mankind should
behave to themselves.
It is the loss of this easy empire over the affections of mankind
which renders the fall from greatness so insupportable. When the
family of the king of Macedon was led in triumph by Paulus Æmilius,
their misfortunes, it is said, made them divide with their conqueror
the attention of the Roman people. The sight of the royal children,
whose tender age rendered them insensible of their situation, struck
the spectators, amidst the public rejoicings and prosperity, with the
tenderest sorrow and compassion. The king appeared next in the
procession; and seemed like one confounded and astonished, and bereft
of all {54} sentiment, by the greatness of his calamities. His friends
and ministers followed after him. As they moved along, they often cast
their eyes upon their fallen sovereign, and always burst into tears at
the sight; their whole behaviour demonstrating that they thought not
of their own misfortunes, but were occupied entirely by the superior
greatness of his. The generous Romans, on the contrary, beheld him
with disdain and indignation, and regarded as unworthy of all
compassion the man who could be so mean-spirited as to bear to live
under such calamities. Yet what did those calamities amount to?
According to the greater part of historians, he was to spend the
remainder of his days, under the protection of a powerful and humane
people, in a state which in itself should seem worthy of envy, a state
of plenty, ease, leisure, and security, from which it was impossible
for him even by his own folly to fall. But he was no longer to be
surrounded by that admiring mob of fools, flatterers, and dependants,
who had formerly been accustomed to attend upon all his motions. He
was no longer to be gazed upon by multitudes, nor to have it in his
power to render himself the object of their respect, their gratitude,
their love, their admiration. The passions of nations were no longer
to mould themselves upon his inclinations. This was that insupportable
calamity which bereaved the king of all sentiment; which made his
friends forget their own misfortunes; and which the Roman magnanimity
could scarce conceive how any man could be so mean-spirited as to bear
to survive.
'Love,' says my Lord Rochefaucault, 'is commonly succeeded by
ambition; but ambition is hardly ever succeeded by love.' That
passion, when once it has got entire possession of the breast, will
admit neither a rival nor a successor. To those who have been
accustomed to the possession, or even to the hope of public
admiration, all other pleasures sicken and decay. Of all the discarded
statesmen who for their own ease have studied to get the better of
ambition, and to despise those honours which they could no longer
arrive at, how few have been able to succeed? The greater part have
spent their time in the most listless and insipid indolence, chagrined
at the thoughts of their own insignificancy, incapable of being
interested in the occupations of private life, without enjoyment
except when they talked of their former greatness, and without
satisfaction except when they were employed in some vain project to
recover it. Are you in earnest resolved never to barter your liberty
for the lordly servitude of a court, but to live free, fearless, and
independent? There seems to be one way to continue in that virtuous
resolution; and perhaps but one. Never enter the place from whence so
few have been able to return; never come within the circle of
ambition; nor ever bring yourself into comparison with those masters
of the earth who have already engrossed the attention of half mankind
before you.
Of such mighty importance does it appear to be, in the imaginations
{55} of men, to stand in that situation which sets them most in the
view of general sympathy and attention. And thus, place, that great
object which divides the wives of aldermen, is the end of half the
labours of human life; and is the cause of all the tumult and bustle,
all the rapine and injustice, which avarice and ambition have
introduced into this world. People of sense, it is said, indeed
despise place; that is, they despise sitting at the head of the table,
and are indifferent who it is that is pointed out to the company by
that frivolous circumstance, which the smallest **advantage is capable
of overbalancing. But rank, distinction, pre-eminence, no man
despises, unless he is either raised very much above, or sunk very
much below, the ordinary standard of human nature; unless he is either
so confirmed in wisdom and real philosophy, as to be satisfied that,
while the propriety of his conduct renders him the just object of
approbation, it is of little consequence though he be neither attended
to, nor approved of; or so habituated to the idea of his own meanness,
so sunk in slothful and sottish indifference, as entirely to have
forgot the desire and almost the very wish for superiority over his
fellows.
As to become the natural object of the joyous congratulations and
sympathetic attentions of mankind is, in this manner, the circumstance
which gives to prosperity all its dazzling splendour; so nothing
darkens so much the gloom of adversity as to feel that our misfortunes
are the objects, not of the fellow-feeling, but of the contempt and
aversion of our brethren. It is upon this account that the most
dreadful calamities are not always those which it is most difficult to
support. It is often more mortifying to appear in public under small
disasters, than under great misfortunes. The first excite no sympathy;
but the second, though they may excite none that approaches to the
anguish of the sufferer, call forth, however, a very lively
compassion. The sentiments of the spectators are, in this last case,
less wide of those of the sufferer, and their imperfect fellow-feeling
lends him some assistance in supporting his misery. Before a gay
assembly, a gentleman would be more mortified to appear covered with
filth and rags than with blood and wounds. This last situation would
interest their pity; the other would provoke their laughter. The judge
who orders a criminal to be set in the pillory, dishonours him more
than if he had condemned him to the scaffold. The great prince, who,
some years ago, caned a general officer at the head of his army,
disgraced him irrecoverably. The punishment would have been much less
had he shot him through his body. By the laws of honour, to strike
with a cane dishonours, to strike with a sword does not, for an
obvious reason. Those slighter punishments, when inflicted on a
gentleman, to whom dishonour is the greatest of all evils, come to be
regarded among a humane and generous people, as the most dreadful of
any. With regard to persons of that rank, therefore, they are
universally laid aside, and the law, while {56} it takes their life
upon many occasions, respects their honour upon almost all. To scourge
a person of quality, or to set him in the pillory, upon account of any
crime whatever, is a brutality of which no European government, except
that of Russia, is capable.
A brave man is not rendered contemptible by being brought to the
scaffold; he is, by being set in the pillory. His behaviour in the one
situation may gain him universal esteem and admiration. No behaviour
in the other can render him agreeable. The sympathy of the spectators
supports him in the one case, and saves him from that shame, that
consciousness that his misery is felt by himself only, which is of all
sentiments the most unsupportable. There is no sympathy in the other;
or, if there is any, it is not with his pain, which is a trifle, but
with his consciousness of the want of sympathy with which this pain is
attended. It is with his shame, not with his sorrow. Those who pity
him, blush and hang down their heads for him. He droops in the same
manner, and feels himself irrecoverably degraded by the punishment,
though not by the crime. The man, on the contrary, who dies with
resolution, as he is naturally regarded with the erect aspect of
esteem and approbation, so he wears himself the same undaunted
countenance; and, if the crime does not deprive him of the respect of
others, the punishment never will. He has no suspicion that his
situation is the object of contempt or derision to any body, and he
can, with propriety, assume the air, not only of perfect serenity, but
of triumph and exultation.
'Great dangers.' says the Cardinal de Retz, 'have their charms,
because there is some glory to be got, even when we miscarry. But
moderate dangers have nothing but what is horrible, because the loss
of reputation always attends the want of success.' His maxim has the
same foundation with what we have been just now observing with regard
to punishments.
Human virtue is superior to pain, to poverty, to danger, and to death;
nor does it even require its utmost efforts to despise them. But to
have its misery exposed to insult and derision, to be led in triumph,
to be set up for the hand of scorn to point at, is a situation in
which its constancy is much more apt to fail. Compared with the
contempt of mankind, all other external evils are easily supported.
-----
CHAP. III.--_ Of the Corruption of our Moral Sentiments, which is
occasioned by this Disposition to admire the Rich and the Great, and
to despise or neglect Persons of poor and mean Condition._
THIS disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the
powerful, and to despise or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and
mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the
{57} distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same
time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our
moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with
the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue;
and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper
objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness,
has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.
We desire both to be respectable and to be respected. We dread both to
be contemptible and to be contemned. But, upon coming into the world,
we soon find that wisdom and virtue are by no means the sole objects
of respect; nor vice and folly, of contempt. We frequently see the
respectful attentions of the world more strongly directed towards the
rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous. We see
frequently the vices and follies of the powerful much less despised
than the poverty and weakness of the innocent. To deserve, to acquire,
and to enjoy the respect and admiration of mankind, are the great
objects of ambition and emulation. Two different roads are presented
to us, equally leading to the attainment of this so much desired
object; the one, by the study of wisdom and the practice of virtue;
the other, by the acquisition of wealth and greatness. Two different
characters are presented to our emulation; the one, of proud ambition
and ostentatious avidity; the other, of humble modesty and equitable
justice. Two different models, two different pictures, are held out
to us, according to which we may fashion our own character and
behaviour; the one more gaudy and glittering in its colouring; the
other more correct and more exquisitely beautiful in its outline: the
one forcing itself upon the notice of every wandering eye; the
other, attracting the attention of scarce any body but the most
studious and careful observer. They are the wise and the virtuous
chiefly, a select, though, I am afraid, but a small party, who are the
real and steady admirers of wisdom and virtue. The great mob of
mankind are the admirers and worshippers, and, what may seem more
extraordinary, most frequently the disinterested admirers and
worshippers, of wealth and greatness.
The respect which we feel for wisdom and virtue is, no doubt,
different from that which we conceive for wealth and greatness; and it
requires no very nice discernment to distinguish the difference. But,
notwithstanding this difference, those sentiments bear a very
considerable resemblance to one another. In some particular features
they are, no doubt, different, but, in the general air of the
countenance, they seem to be so very nearly the same, that inattentive
observers are very apt to mistake the one for the other.
In equal degrees of merit there is scarce any man who does not respect
more the rich and the great, than the poor and the humble. With most
men the presumption and vanity of the former are much more admired,
than the real and solid merit of the latter. It is scarce {58}
agreeable to good morals, or even to good language, perhaps, to say,
that mere wealth and greatness, abstracted from merit and virtue,
deserve our respect. We must acknowledge, however, that they almost
constantly obtain it; and that they may, therefore, be considered as,
in some respects, the natural objects of it. Those exalted stations
may, no doubt, be completely degraded by vice and folly. But, the vice
and folly must be very great, before they can operate this complete
degradation. The profligacy of a man of fashion is looked upon with
much less contempt and aversion, than that of a man of meaner
condition. In the latter, a single transgression of the rules of
temperance and propriety, is commonly more resented, than the constant
and avowed contempt of them ever is in the former.
In the middling and inferior stations of life, the road to virtue and
that to fortune, to such fortune, at least, as men in such stations
can reasonably expect to acquire, are, happily, in most cases, very
nearly the same. In all the middling and inferior professions, real
and solid professional abilities, joined to prudent, just, firm, and
temperate conduct, can very seldom fail of success. Abilities will
even sometimes prevail where the conduct is by no means correct.
Either habitual imprudence, however, or injustice, or weakness, or
profligacy, will always cloud, and sometimes depress altogether, the
most splendid professional abilities. Men in the inferior and middling
stations of life, besides, can never be great enough to be above the
law, which must generally overawe them into some sort of respect for,
at least, the more important rules of justice. The success of such
people, too, almost always depends upon the favour and good opinion of
their neighbours and equals; and without a tolerably regular conduct
these can very seldom be obtained. The good old proverb, therefore,
that honesty is the best policy, holds, in such situations, almost
always perfectly true. In such situations, therefore, we may generally
expect a considerable degree of virtue; and, fortunately for the good
morals of society, these are the situations of the greater part of
mankind.
In the superior stations of life the case is unhappily not always the
same. In the courts of princes, in the drawing-rooms of the great,
where success and preferment depend, not upon the esteem of
intelligent and well-informed equals, but upon the fanciful and
foolish favour of ignorant, presumptuous, and proud superiors;
flattery and falsehood too often prevail over merit and abilities. In
such societies the abilities to please, are more regarded than the
abilities to serve. In quiet and peaceable times, when the storm is at
a distance, the prince, or great man, wishes only to be amused, and is
even apt to fancy that he has scarce any occasion for the service of
any body, or that those who amuse him are sufficiently able to serve
him. The external graces, the frivolous accomplishments of that
impertinent and foolish thing called a man of fashion, are commonly
more admired than the solid and {59} masculine virtues of a warrior, a
statesman, a philosopher, or a legislator. All the great and awful
virtues, all the virtues which can fit, either for the council, the
senate, or the field, are, by the insolent and insignificant
flatterers, who commonly figure the most in such corrupted societies,
held in the utmost contempt and derision. When the Duke of Sully was
called upon by Louis the Thirteenth, to give his advice in some great
emergency, he observed the favourites and courtiers whispering to one
another, and smiling at his unfashionable appearance. 'Whenever your
Majesty's father,' said the old warrior and statesman, 'did me the
honour to consult me, he ordered the buffoons of the court to retire
into the antechamber.'
It is from our disposition to admire, and consequently to imitate, the
rich and the great, that they are enabled to set, or to lead, what is
called the fashion. Their dress is the fashionable dress; the language
of their conversation, the fashionable style; their air and
deportment, the fashionable behaviour. Even their vices and follies
are fashionable; and the greater part of men are proud to imitate and
resemble them in the very qualities which dishonour and degrade them.
Vain men often give themselves airs of a fashionable profligacy,
which, in their hearts, they do not approve of, and of which, perhaps,
they are really not guilty. They desire to be praised for what they
themselves do not think praiseworthy, and are ashamed of unfashionable
virtues which they sometimes practise in secret, and for which they
have secretly some degree of real veneration. There are hypocrites of
wealth and greatness, as well as of religion and virtue; and a vain
man is as apt to pretend to be what he is not, in the one way, as a
cunning man is in the other. He assumes the equipage and splendid way
of living of his superiors, without considering that whatever may be
praiseworthy in any of these, derives its whole merit and propriety
from its suitableness to that situation and fortune which both require
and can easily support the expense. Many a poor man places his glory
in being thought rich, without considering that the duties (if one may
call such follies by so venerable a name) which that reputation
imposes upon him, must soon reduce him to beggary, and render his
situation still more unlike that of those whom he admires and
imitates, than it had been originally.
To attain to this envied situation, the candidates for fortune too
frequently abandon the paths of virtue; for unhappily, the road which
leads to the one, and that which leads to the other, lie sometimes in
very opposite directions. But the ambitious man flatters himself that,
in the splendid situation to which he advances, he will have so many
means of commanding the respect and admiration of mankind, and will be
enabled to act with such superior propriety and grace, that the lustre
of his future conduct will entirely cover, or efface, the foulness of
the steps by which he arrived at that elevation. In many governments
the candidates for the highest stations are above the law; and, if
they {60} can attain the object of their ambition, they have no fear
of being called to account for the means by which they acquired it.
They often endeavour, therefore, not only by fraud and falsehood, the
ordinary and vulgar arts of intrigue and cabal; but sometimes by the
perpetration of the most enormous crimes, by murder and assassination,
by rebellion and civil war, to supplant and destroy those who oppose
or stand in the way of their greatness. They more frequently miscarry
than succeed; and commonly gain nothing but the disgraceful punishment
which is due to their crimes. But, though they should be so lucky as
to attain that wished-for greatness, they are always most miserably
disappointed in the happiness which they expect to enjoy in it. It is
not ease or pleasure, but always honour, of one kind or another,
though frequently an honour very ill understood, that the ambitious
man really pursues. But the honour of his exalted station appears,
both in his own eyes and in those of other people, polluted and denied
by the baseness of the means through which he rose to it. Though by
the profusion of every liberal expense; though by excessive indulgence
in every profligate pleasure, the wretched, but usual, resource of
ruined characters; though by the hurry of public business, or by the
prouder and more dazzling tumult of war, he may endeavour to efface,
both from his own memory and from that of other people, the
remembrance of what he has done; that remembrance never fails to
pursue him. He invokes in vain the dark and dismal powers of
forgetfulness and oblivion. He remembers himself what he has done, and
that remembrance tells him that other people must likewise remember
it. Amidst all the gaudy pomp of the most ostentatious greatness;
amidst the venal and vile adulation of the great and of the learned;
amidst the more innocent, though more foolish, acclamations of the
common people; amidst all the pride of conquest and the triumph of
successful war, he is still secretly pursued by the avenging furies of
shame and remorse; and, while glory seems to surround him on all
sides, he himself, in his own imagination, sees black and foul infamy
fast pursuing him, and every moment ready to overtake him from behind.
Even the great Cæsar, though he had the magnanimity to dismiss his
guards, could not dismiss his suspicions. The remembrance of Pharsalia
still haunted and pursued him. When, at the request of the senate, he
had the generosity to pardon Marcellus, he told that assembly, that he
was not unaware of the designs which were carrying on against his
life; but that, as he had lived long enough both for nature and for
glory, he was contented to die, and therefore despised all
conspiracies. He had, perhaps, lived long enough for nature. But the
man who felt himself the object of such deadly resentment from those
whose favour he wished to gain, and whom he still wished to consider
as his friends, had certainly lived too long for real glory; or for
all the happiness which he could ever hope to enjoy in the love and
esteem of his equals. {61}
_Part II.--Of Merit and Demerit; or, of the Objects of Reward and
Punishment._
SEC. I.--OF THE SENSE OF MERIT AND DEMERIT.
INTRODUCTION.--There is another set of qualities ascribed to the
actions and conduct of mankind, distinct from their propriety or
impropriety, their decency or ungracefulness, and which are the
objects of a distinct species of approbation and disapprobation. These
are Merit and Demerit, the qualities of deserving reward and of
deserving punishment.
It has already been observed, that the sentiment or affection of the
heart, from which any action proceeds, and upon which its whole virtue
or vice depends, may be considered under two different aspects, or in
two different relations: first, in relation to the cause or object
which excites it; and, secondly, in relation to the end which it
proposes, or to the effect which it tends to produce: that upon the
suitableness or unsuitableness, upon the proportion or disproportion,
which the affection seems to bear to the cause or object which excites
it, depends the propriety or impropriety, the decency or
ungracefulness of the consequent action; and that upon the beneficial
or hurtful effects which the affection proposes or tends to produce,
depends the merit or demerit, the good or ill desert of the action to
which it gives occasion. Wherein consists our sense of the propriety
or impropriety of actions, has been explained in the former part of
this discourse. We come now to consider, wherein consists that of
their good or ill desert.
-----
CHAP. I.--_That whatever appears to be the proper Object of Gratitude,
appears to deserve Reward; and that, in the same Manner, whatever
appears to be the proper Object of Resentment, appears to deserve
Punishment._
TO us, therefore, that action must appear to deserve reward, which
appears to be the proper and approved object of that sentiment, which
most immediately and directly prompts us to reward, or to do good to
another. And in the same manner, that action must appear to deserve
punishment, which appears to be the proper and approved object of that
sentiment which most immediately and directly prompts us to punish, or
to inflict evil upon another.
The sentiment which most immediately and directly prompts us to
reward, is gratitude; that which most immediately and directly prompts
us to punish, is resentment.
{62} To us, therefore, that action must appear to deserve reward,
which appears to be the proper and approved object of gratitude; as,
on the other hand, that action must appear to deserve punishment,
which appears to be the proper and approved object of resentment.
To reward, is to recompense, to remunerate, to return good for good
received. To punish, too, is to recompense, to remunerate, though in a
different manner; it is to return evil for evil that has been done.
There are some other passions, besides gratitude and resentment, which
interest us in the happiness or misery of others; but there are none
which so directly excite us as to be instruments of either. The love
and esteem which grow upon acquaintance and habitual approbation,
necessarily lead us to be pleased with the good fortune of the man who
is the object of such agreeable emotions, and consequently to be
willing to lend a hand to promote it. Our love, however, is fully
satisfied, though his good fortune should be brought about without our
assistance. All that this passion desires is to see him happy, without
regarding who was the author of his prosperity. But gratitude is not
to be satisfied in this manner. If the person to whom we owe many
obligations, is made happy without our assistance, though it pleases
our love, it does not content our gratitude. Till we have recompensed
him, till we ourselves have been instrumental in promoting his
happiness, we feel ourselves still loaded with that debt which his
past services have laid upon us.
The hatred and dislike, in the same manner, which grow upon the
habitual disapprobation, would often lead us to take a malicious
pleasure in the misfortune of the man whose conduct and character
excite so painful a passion. But though dislike and hatred harden us
against all sympathy, and sometimes dispose us even to rejoice at the
distress of another, yet, if there is no resentment in the case, if
neither we nor our friends have received any great personal
provocation, these passions would not naturally lead us to wish to be
instrumental in bringing it about. Though we could fear no punishment
in consequence of our having had some hand in it, we would rather that
it should happen by other means. To one under the dominion of violent
hatred it would be agreeable, perhaps, to hear, that the person whom
he abhorred and detested was killed by some accident. But if he had
the least spark of justice, which, though this passion is not very
favourable to virtue, he might still have, it would hurt him
excessively to have been himself, even without design, the occasion of
this misfortune. Much more would the very thought of voluntarily
contributing to it shock him beyond all measure. He would reject with
horror even the imagination of so execrable a design; and if he could
imagine himself capable of such an enormity, he would begin to regard
to himself in the same odious light in which he had considered the
person who was the object of his dislike. But it is quite otherwise
with resentment: if the person {63} who had done us some great injury,
who had murdered our father or our brother, for example, should soon
afterwards die of a fever, or even be brought to the scaffold upon
account of some other crime, though it might soothe our hatred, it
would not fully gratify our resentment. Resentment would prompt us to
desire, not only that he should be punished, but that he should be
punished by our means, and upon account of that particular injury
which he had done to us. Resentment cannot be fully gratified, unless
the offender is not only made to grieve in his turn, but to grieve for
that particular wrong which we have suffered from him. He must be made
to repent and be sorry for this very action, that others, through fear
of the like punishment, may be terrified from being guilty of the like
offence. The natural gratification of this passion tends, of its own
accord, to produce all the political ends of punishment; the
correction of the criminal, and example to the public.
Gratitude and resentment, therefore, are the sentiments which most
immediately and directly prompt to reward and to punish. To us,
therefore, he must appear to deserve reward, who appears to be the
proper and approved object of gratitude; and he to deserve punishment,
who appears to be that of resentment.
-----
CHAP. II.--_Of the proper Objects of Gratitude and Resentment._
To be the proper and approved object either of gratitude or
resentment, can mean nothing but to be the object of that gratitude
and of that resentment which naturally seems proper, and is approved
of.
But these, as well as all the other passions of human nature, seem
proper and are approved of, when the heart of every impartial
spectator entirely sympathizes with them, when every indifferent
by-stander entirely enters into and goes along with them.
He, therefore, appears to deserve reward, who, to some person or
persons, is the natural object of a gratitude which every human heart
is disposed to beat time to, and thereby applaud: and he, on the other
hand, appears to deserve punishment, who in the same manner is to some
person or persons the natural object of a resentment which the breast
of every reasonable man is ready to adopt and sympathize with. To us,
surely, that action must appear to deserve reward, which every body
who knows of it would wish to reward, and therefore delights to see
rewarded: and that action must as surely appear to deserve punishment,
which every body who hears of it is angry with, and upon that account
rejoices to see punished.
1. As we sympathize with the joy of our companions, when in
prosperity, so we join with them in the complacency and satisfaction
with which they naturally regard whatever is the cause of their good
fortune. {64} We enter into the love and affection which they conceive
for it, and begin to love it too. We should be sorry for their sakes
if it was destroyed, or even if it was placed at too great a distance
from them, and out of the reach of their care and protection, though
they should lose nothing by its absence except the pleasure of seeing
it. If it is man who has thus been the fortunate instrument of the
happiness of his brethren, this is still more peculiarly the case.
When we see one man assisted, protected, relieved by another, our
sympathy with the joy of the person who receives the benefit serves
only to animate our fellow-feeling with his gratitude towards him who
bestows it. When we look upon the person who is the cause of his
pleasure with the eyes with which we imagine he must look upon him,
his benefactor seems to stand before us in the most engaging and
amiable light. We readily therefore sympathize with the grateful
affection which he conceives for a person to whom he has been so much
obliged; and consequently applaud the returns which he is disposed to
make for the good offices conferred upon him. As we entirely enter
into the affection from which these returns proceed, they necessarily
seem every way proper and suitable to their object.
2. In the same manner, as we sympathize with the sorrow of our
fellow-creature whenever we see his distress, so we likewise enter
into his abhorrence and aversion for whatever has given occasion to
it. Our heart, as it adopts and beats time to his grief, so is it
likewise animated with that spirit by which he endeavours to drive
away or destroy the cause of it. The indolent and passive
fellow-feeling, by which we accompany him in his sufferings, readily
gives way to that more vigorous and active sentiment by which we go
along with him in the effort he makes, either to repeal them, or to
gratify his aversion to what has given occasion to them. This is still
more peculiarly the case, when it is man who has caused them. When we
see one man oppressed or injured by another, the sympathy which we
feel with the distress of the sufferer seems to serve only to animate
our fellow-feeling with his resentment against the offender. We are
rejoiced to see him attack his adversary in his turn, and are eager
and ready to assist him whenever he exerts himself for defence, or
even for vengeance within a certain degree. If the injured should
perish in the quarrel, we not only sympathize with the real resentment
of his friends and relations, but with the imaginary resentment which
in fancy we lend to the dead, who is no longer capable of feeling that
or any other human sentiment. But as we put ourselves in his
situation, as we enter, as it were, into his body, and in our
imaginations, in some measure, animate anew the deformed and mangled
carcass of the slain, when we bring home in this manner his case to
our own bosoms, we feel upon this, as upon many other occasions, an
emotion which the person principally concerned is incapable of
feeling, and which yet we feel by an illusive {65} sympathy with him.
The sympathetic tears which we shed for that immense and irretrievable
loss, which in our fancy he appears to have sustained, seem to be but
a small part of the duty which we owe him. The injury which he has
suffered demands, we think, a principal part of our attention. We feel
that resentment which we imagine he ought to feel, and which he would
feel, if in his cold and lifeless body there remained any
consciousness of what passes upon earth. His blood, we think, calls
aloud for vengeance. The very ashes of the dead seem to be disturbed
at the thought that his injuries are to pass unrevenged. The horrors
which are supposed to haunt the bed of the murderer, the ghosts which
superstition imagines rise from their graves to demand vengeance upon
those who brought them to an untimely end, all take their origin from
this natural sympathy with the imaginary resentment of the slain. And
with regard, at least, to this most dreadful of all crimes, Nature,
antecedent to all reflection upon the utility of punishment, has in
this manner stamped upon the human heart, in the strongest and most
indelible characters, an immediate and instinctive approbation of the
sacred and necessary law of retaliation.
-----
CHAP. III.--_That where there is no Approbation of the Conduct of the
Person who confers the Benefit, there is little Sympathy with the
Gratitude of him who receives it: and that, on the Contrary, where
there is no Disapprobation of the Motives of the Person who does the
Mischief, there is no Sort of Sympathy with the Resentment of him who
suffers it._
IT is to be observed, however, that, how beneficial soever on the one
hand, or hurtful soever on the other, the actions or intentions of the
person who acts may have been to the person who is, if I may say so,
acted upon, yet if in the one case there appears to have been no
propriety in the motives of the agent, if we cannot enter into the
affections which influenced his conduct, we have little sympathy with
the gratitude of the person who receives the benefit: or if, in the
other case, there appears to have been no impropriety in the motives
of the agent, if, on the contrary, the affections which influenced his
conduct are such as we must necessarily enter into, we can have no
sort of sympathy with the resentment of the person who suffers. Little
gratitude seems due in the one case, and all sort of resentment seems
unjust in the other. The one action seems to merit little reward, the
other to deserve no punishment.
1. First, I say, that wherever we cannot sympathize with the
affections of the agent, wherever there seems to be no propriety in
the motives which influenced his conduct, we are less disposed to
enter into the {66} gratitude of the person who received the benefit
of his actions. A very small return seems due to that foolish and
profuse generosity which confers the greatest benefits from the most
trivial motives, and gives an estate to a man merely because his name
and surname happen to be the same with those of the giver. Such
services do not seem to demand any proportionable recompense. Our
contempt for the folly of the agent hinders us from thoroughly
entering into the gratitude of the person to whom the good office has
been done. His benefactor seems unworthy of it. As when we place
ourselves in the situation of the person obliged, we feel that we
could conceive no great reverence for such a benefactor, we easily
absolve him from a great deal of that submissive veneration and esteem
which we should think due to a more respectable character; and
provided he always treats his weak friend with kindness and humanity,
we are willing to excuse him from many attentions and regards which we
should demand to a worthier patron. Those princes who have heaped,
with the greatest profusion, wealth, power and honours, upon their
favourites, have seldom excited that degree of attachment to their
persons which has often been experienced by those who were more frugal
of their favours. The well-natured, but injudicious prodigality of
James the First of Great Britain seems to have attached nobody to his
person; and that prince, notwithstanding his social and harmless
disposition, appears to have lived and died without a friend. The
whole gentry and nobility of England exposed their lives and fortunes
in the cause of Charles I., his more frugal and distinguishing son,
notwithstanding the coldness and distant severity of his ordinary
deportment.
2. Secondly, I say, That wherever the conduct of the agent appears to
have been entirely directed by motives and affections which we
thoroughly enter into and approve of, we can have no sort of sympathy
with the resentment of the sufferer, how great soever the mischief
which may have been done to him. When two people quarrel, if we take
part with, and entirely adopt the resentment of one of them, it is
impossible that we should enter into that of the other. Our sympathy
with the person whose motives we go along with, and whom therefore we
look upon as in the right, cannot but harden us against all
fellow-feeling with the other, whom we necessarily regard as in the
wrong. Whatever this last, therefore, may have suffered, while it is
no more than what we ourselves should have wished him to suffer, while
it is no more than what our own sympathetic indignation would have
prompted us to inflict upon him, it cannot either displease or provoke
us. When an inhuman murderer is brought to the scaffold, though we
have some compassion for his misery, we can have no sort of
fellow-feeling with his resentment, if he should be so absurd as to
express any against either his prosecutor or his judge. The natural
tendency of their just indignation against so vile a criminal is
indeed the most fatal and {67} ruinous to him. But it is impossible
that we should be displeased with the tendency of a sentiment, which,
when we bring the case home to ourselves, we feel that we cannot avoid
adopting.
-----
CHAP. IV.--_Recapitulation of the foregoing Chapters._
1. WE do not therefore thoroughly and heartily sympathize with the
gratitude of one man towards another, merely because this other has
been the cause of his good fortune, unless he has been the cause of it
from motives which we entirely go along with. Our heart must adopt the
principles of the agent, and go along with all the affections which
influenced his conduct, before it can entirely sympathize with and
beat time to, the gratitude of the person who has been benefited by
his actions. If in the conduct of the benefactor there appears to have
been no propriety, how beneficial soever its effects, it does not seem
to demand, or necessarily to require, any proportionable recompense.
But when to the beneficent tendency of the action is joined the
propriety of the affection from which it proceeds, when we entirely
sympathize and go along with the motives of the agent, the love which
we conceive for him upon his own account enhances and enlivens our
fellow-feeling with the gratitude of those who owe their prosperity to
his good conduct. His actions seem then to demand, and, if I may say
so, to call aloud for a proportionable recompense. We then entirely
enter into that gratitude which prompts to bestow it. The benefactor
seems then to be the proper object of reward, when we thus entirely
sympathize with, and approve of, that sentiment which prompts to
reward him. When we approve of, and go along with, the affection from
which the action proceeds, we must necessarily approve of the action,
and regard the person towards whom it is directed, as its proper and
suitable object.
2. In the same manner, we cannot at all sympathize with the resentment
of one man against another, merely because this other has been the
cause of his misfortune, unless he has been the cause of it from
motives which we cannot enter into. Before we can adopt the resentment
of the sufferer, we must disapprove of the motives of the agent, and
feel that our heart renounces all sympathy with the affections which
influenced his conduct. If there appears to have been no impropriety
in these, how fatal soever the tendency of the action which proceeds
from them to those against whom it is directed, it does not seem to
deserve any punishment, or to be the proper object of any resentment.
But when to the hurtfulness of the action is joined the impropriety of
the affection from whence it proceeds, when our heart rejects with
{68} abhorrence all fellow-feeling with the motives of the agent, we
then heartily and entirely sympathize with the resentment of the
sufferer. Such actions seem then to deserve, and, if I may say so, to
call aloud for, a proportionable punishment; and we entirely enter
into, and thereby approve of, that resentment which prompts to inflict
it. The offender necessarily seems then to be the proper object of
punishment, when we thus entirely sympathize with, and thereby approve
of, that sentiment which prompts to punish. In this case too, when we
approve, and go along with, the affection from which the action
proceeds, we must necessarily approve the action, and regard the
person against whom it is directed, as its proper and suitable object.
-----
CHAP. V.--_The Analysis of the Sense of Merit and Demerit._
1. As our sense, therefore, of the propriety of conduct arises from
what I shall call a direct sympathy with the affections and motives of
the person who acts, so our sense of its merit arises from what I
shall call an indirect sympathy with the gratitude of the person who
is, if I may say so, acted upon.
As we cannot indeed enter thoroughly into the gratitude of the person
who receives the benefit, unless we beforehand approve of the motives
of the benefactor, so, upon this account, the sense of merit seems to
be a compounded sentiment, and to be made up of two distinct emotions;
a direct sympathy with the sentiments of the agents, and an indirect
sympathy with the gratitude of those who receive the benefit of his
actions.
We may, upon many different occasions, plainly distinguish those two
different emotions combining and uniting together in our sense of the
good desert of a particular character or action. When we read in
history concerning actions of proper and beneficent greatness of mind,
how eagerly do we enter into such designs? How much are we animated by
that high-spirited generosity which directs them? How keen are we for
their success? How grieved at their disappointment? In imagination we
become the very person whose actions are represented to us: we
transport ourselves in fancy to the scenes of those distant and
forgotten adventures, and imagine ourselves acting the part of a
Scipio or a Camillus, a Timoleon or an Aristides. So far our
sentiments are founded upon the direct sympathy with the person who
acts. Nor is the indirect sympathy with those who receive the benefit
of such actions less sensibly felt. Whenever we place ourselves in the
situation of these last, with what warm and affectionate
fellow-feeling do we enter into their gratitude towards those who
served them so essentially? We embrace, as it were, their benefactor
along with them. Our heart {69} readily sympathizes with the highest
transports of their grateful affection. No honours, no rewards, we
think, can be too great for them to bestow upon him. When they make
this proper return for his services, we heartily applaud and go along
with them; but are shocked beyond, all measure, if by their conduct
they appear to have little sense of the obligations conferred upon
them. Our whole sense, in short, of the merit and good desert of such
actions, of the propriety and fitness of recompensing them, and making
the person who performed them rejoice in his turn, arises from the
sympathetic emotions of gratitude and love, with which, when we bring
home to our own breast the situation of those principally concerned,
we feel ourselves naturally transported towards the man who could act
with such proper and noble beneficence.
2. In the same manner as our sense of the impropriety of conduct
arises from a want of sympathy, or from a direct antipathy to the
affections and motives of the agent, so our sense of its demerit
arises from what I shall here too call an indirect sympathy with the
resentment of the sufferer.
As we cannot indeed enter into the resentment of the sufferer, unless
our heart beforehand disapproves the motives of the agent, and
renounces all fellow-feeling with them; so upon this account the sense
of demerit, as well as that of merit, seems to be a compounded
sentiment, and to be made up of two distinct emotions; a direct
antipathy to the sentiments of the agent, and an indirect sympathy
with the resentment of the sufferer.
We may here too, upon many different occasions, plainly distinguish
those two different emotions combining and uniting together in our
sense of the ill desert of a particular character or action. When we
read in history concerning the perfidy and cruelty of a Borgia or a
Nero, our heart rises up against the detestable sentiments which
influenced their conduct, and renounces with horror and abomination
all fellow-feeling with such execrable motives. So far our sentiments
are founded upon the direct antipathy to the affections of the agent:
and the indirect sympathy with the resentment of the sufferers is
still more sensibly felt. When we bring home to ourselves the
situation of the persons whom those scourges of mankind insulted,
murdered, or betrayed, what indignation do we not feel against such
insolent and inhuman oppressors of the earth? Our sympathy with the
unavoidable distress of the innocent sufferers is not more real nor
more lively, than our fellow-feeling with their just and natural
resentment. The former sentiment only heightens the latter, and the
idea of their distress serves only to inflame and blow up our
animosity against those who occasioned it. When we think of the
anguish of the sufferers, we take part with them more earnestly
against their oppressors; we enter with more eagerness into all their
schemes of vengeance, and feel ourselves every {70} moment wreaking,
in imagination, upon such violators of the laws of society, that
punishment which our sympathetic indignation tells us is due to their
crimes. Our sense of the horror and dreadful atrocity of such conduct,
the delight which we take in hearing that it was properly punished,
the indignation which we feel when it escapes this due retaliation,
our whole sense and feeling, in short, of its ill desert, of the
propriety and fitness of inflicting evil upon the person who is guilty
of it, and of making him grieve in his turn, arises from the
sympathetic indignation which naturally boils up in the breast of the
spectator, whenever he thoroughly brings home to himself the case of
the sufferer.[2]
[Footnote 2: To ascribe in this manner our natural sense of the ill
desert of human actions to a sympathy with the resentment of the
sufferer, may seem, to the greater part of the people, to be a
degradation of that sentiment. Resentment is commonly regarded as so
odious a passion, that they will be apt to think it impossible that so
laudable a principle, as the sense of the ill desert of vice, should
in any respect be founded upon it. They will be more willing, perhaps,
to admit that our sense of the merit of good actions is founded upon a
sympathy with the gratitude of the persons who receive the benefit of
them; because gratitude, as well as all the other benevolent passions,
is regarded as an amiable principle, which can take nothing from the
worth of whatever is founded upon it. Gratitude and resentment,
however, are in every respect, it is evident, counterparts to one
another; and if our sense of merit arises from a sympathy with the
one, our sense of demerit can scarce miss to proceed from a
fellow-feeling with the other.
Let it be considered, too, that resentment, though in the degree in
which we too often see it, the most odious, perhaps, of all the
passions, is not disapproved of when properly humbled and entirely
brought down to the level of the sympathetic indignation of the
spectator. When we who are the bystanders, feel that our own animosity
entirely corresponds with that of the sufferer, when the resentment of
this last does not in any respect go beyond our own, when no word, no
gesture, escapes him that denotes an emotion more violent than what we
can keep time to, and when he never aims at inflicting any punishment
beyond what we should rejoice to see inflicted, or what we ourselves
would upon this account even desire to be the instruments of
inflicting, it is impossible that we should not entirely approve of
his sentiment. Our own emotion in this case must, in our eyes,
undoubtedly justify his. And as experience teaches us how much the
greater part of mankind are incapable of this moderation, and how
great an effort must be made in order to bring down the rude and
undisciplined impulse of resentment to this suitable temper, we cannot
avoid conceiving a considerable degree of esteem and admiration for
one who appears capable of exerting so much self-command over one of
the most ungovernable passions of his nature. When indeed the
animosity of the sufferer exceeds, as it almost always does, that we
can go along with, as we cannot enter into it, we necessarily
disapprove of it. We even disapprove of it more than we should of an
equal excess of almost any other passion derived from the imagination.
And this too violent resentment, instead of carrying us along with it
becomes itself the object of our resentment and indignation. We enter
into the opposite resentment of the person who is the object of this
unjust emotion, and who is in danger of suffering from it. Revenge,
therefore, the excess of resentment, appears to be the most detestable
of all the passions, and is the object of the horror and indignation
of every body. And as in the way in which this passion commonly
discovers itself among mankind, it is excessive a hundred times for
once that it is immoderate, we are very apt to consider it as
altogether odious and detestable, because in its most ordinary
appearances it is so. Nature, however, even in the present depraved
state of mankind, does not seem to have dealt so unkindly with us, as
to have endowed us with any principle which is wholly and in every
respect evil, or which, in no degree and in no direction, can be the
proper object of praise and approbation. Upon some occasions we are
sensible that this passion, which is generally too strong, may
likewise be too weak. We sometimes complain that a particular person
shows too little spirit, and has too little sense of the injuries that
have been done to him; and we are as ready to despise him for the
defect, as to hate him for the excess of this passion.
The inspired writers would not surely have talked so frequently or so
strongly of the wrath and anger of God, if they had regarded every
degree of those passions as vicious and evil, even in so weak and
imperfect a creature as man.
Let it be considered too, that the present inquiry is not concerning a
matter of right, if I may say so, but concerning a matter of fact. We
are not at present examining upon what principles a perfect being
would approve of the punishment of bad actions; but upon what
principles so weak and imperfect a creature as man actually and in
fact approves of it. The principles which I have just now mentioned,
it is evident, have a very great effect upon his sentiments; and it
seems wisely ordered that it should be so. The very existence of
society requires that unmerited and unprovoked malice should be
restrained by proper punishments; and consequently, that to inflict
those punishments should be regarded as a proper and laudable action.
Though man, therefore, be naturally endowed with a desire of the
welfare and preservation of society, yet the Author of nature has not
entrusted it to his reason to find out that a certain application of
punishments is the proper means of attaining this end; but has endowed
him with an immediate and instinctive approbation of that very
application which is most proper to attain it. The oeconomy of nature
is in this respect exactly of a piece with what it is upon many other
occasions. With regard to all those ends which, upon account of their
peculiar importance, may be regarded, if such an expression is
allowable, as the favourite ends of nature, she has constantly in this
manner not only endowed mankind with an appetite for the end which she
proposes, but likewise with an appetite for the means by which alone
this end can be brought about, for their own sakes, and independent of
their tendency to produce it. Thus self-preservation, and the
propagation of the species, are the great ends which Nature seems to
have proposed in the formation of all animals. Mankind are endowed
with a desire of those ends, and an aversion to the contrary; with a
love of life, and a dread of dissolution; with a desire of the
continuance and perpetuity of the species, and with an aversion to the
thoughts of its entire extinction. But though we are in this manner
endowed with a very strong desire of those ends, it has not been
intrusted to the slow and uncertain determinations of our reason to
find out the proper means of bringing them about. Nature has directed
us to the greater part of these by original and immediate instincts.
Hunger, thirst, the passion which unites the two sexes, the love of
pleasure, and the dread of pain, prompt us to apply those means for
their own sakes, and without any consideration of their tendency to
those beneficent ends which the great Director of nature intended to
produce by them.
Before I conclude this note, I must take notice of a difference
between the approbation of propriety and that of merit or beneficence.
Before we approve of the sentiments of any person as proper and
suitable to their objects, we must not only be affected in the same
manner as he is, but we must perceive this harmony and correspondence
of sentiments between him and ourselves. Thus, though upon hearing of
a misfortune that had befallen my friend, I should conceive precisely
that degree of concern which he gives way to; yet till I am informed
of the manner in which he behaves, till I perceive the harmony between
his emotions and mine, I cannot be said to approve of the sentiments
which influence his behaviour. The approbation of propriety therefore
requires, not only that we should entirely sympathize with the person
who acts, but that we should perceive this perfect concord between his
sentiments and our own. On the contrary, when I hear of a benefit that
has been bestowed upon another person, let him who has received it be
affected in what manner he pleases, if, by bringing his case home to
myself, I feel gratitude arise in my own breast, I necessarily approve
of the conduct of his benefactor, and regard it as meritorious, and
the proper object of reward. Whether the person who has received the
benefit conceives gratitude or not, cannot, it is evident, in any
degree alter our sentiments with regard to the merit of him who has
bestowed it. No actual correspondence of sentiments, therefore, is
here required. It is sufficient that if he was grateful, they would
correspond; and our sense of merit is often founded upon one of those
illusive sympathies, by which, when we bring home to ourselves the
case of another, we are often affected in a manner in which the person
principally concerned is incapable of being affected. There is a
similar difference between our disapprobation of demerit, and that of
impropriety.]
-----
SECT. II.--OF JUSTICE AND BENEFICENCE.
CHAP. I.--_Comparison of those two Virtues._
ACTIONS of a beneficent tendency, which proceed from proper motives,
seem alone to require reward; because such alone are the approved
objects of gratitude, or excite the sympathetic gratitude of the
spectator.
Actions of a hurtful tendency, which proceed from improper motives,
seem alone to deserve punishment; because such alone are the approved
objects of resentment, or excite the sympathetic resentment of the
spectator.
Beneficence is always free, it cannot be extorted by force, the mere
{71} want of it exposes to no punishment; because the mere want of
beneficence tends to do no real positive evil. It may disappoint of
the {72} good which might reasonably have been expected, and upon
that account it may justly excite dislike and disapprobation: it
cannot, however, provoke any resentment which mankind will go along
with. The man who does not recompense his benefactor, when he has it
in his power, and when his benefactor needs his assistance, is, no
doubt, guilty of the blackest ingratitude. The heart of every
impartial spectator rejects all fellow-feeling with the selfishness of
his motives, and he is the proper object of the highest
disapprobation. But still he does no positive hurt to any body. He
only does not do that good which in propriety he ought to have done.
He is the object of hatred, a passion which is naturally excited by
impropriety of sentiment and behaviour; not of resentment, a passion
which is never properly called forth but by actions which tend to do
real and positive hurt to some particular persons. His want of
gratitude, therefore, cannot be punished. To oblige him by force to
perform, what in gratitude he ought to perform, and what every
impartial spectator would approve of him for performing, would, if
possible, be still more improper than his neglecting to perform it.
His benefactor would dishonour himself if he attempted by violence to
constrain him to gratitude, and it would be impertinent for any third
person, who was not the superior of either, to intermeddle. But of all
the duties of beneficence, those which gratitude recommends to us
approach nearest to what is called a perfect and complete obligation.
What friendship, what generosity, what charity, would prompt us to do
with universal approbation, is still more free, and can still less be
extorted by force than the duties of gratitude. We talk of the debt of
gratitude, not of charity, or generosity, nor even of friendship, when
friendship is mere esteem, and has not been enhanced and complicated
with gratitude for good offices.
Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for defence, and for
defence only. It is the safeguard of justice and the security of
innocence. It prompts us to beat off the mischief which is attempted
to be done to us, and to retaliate that which is already done; that
the {73} offender may be made to repent of his injustice, and that
others, through fear of the like punishment, may be terrified from
being guilty of the like offence. It must be reserved therefore for
these purposes, nor can the spectator ever go along with it when it is
exerted for any other. But the mere want of the beneficent virtues,
though it may disappoint us of the good which might reasonably be
expected, neither does, nor attempts to do, any mischief from which we
can have occasion to defend ourselves.
There is however another virtue, of which the observance is not left
to the freedom of our own wills, which may be extorted by force, and
of which the violation exposes to resentment, and consequently to
punishment. This virtue is justice: the violation of justice is
injury: it does real and positive hurt to some particular persons,
from motives which are naturally disapproved of. It is, therefore, the
proper object of resentment, and of punishment, which is the natural
consequence of resentment. As mankind go along with and approve of the
violence employed to avenge the hurt which is done by injustice, so
they much more go along with, and approve of, that which is employed
to prevent and beat off the injury, and to restrain the offender from
hurting his neighbours. The person himself who meditates an injustice
is sensible of this, and feels that force may, with the utmost
propriety, be made use of, both by the person whom he is about to
injure, and by others, either to obstruct the execution of his crime,
or to punish him when he has executed it. And upon this is founded
that remarkable distinction between justice and all the other social
virtues, which has of late been particularly insisted upon by an
author of very great and original genius, that we feel ourselves to be
under a stricter obligation to act according to justice, than
agreeably to friendship, charity, or generosity; that the practice of
these last mentioned virtues seems to be left in some measure to our
own choice, but that, somehow or other, we feel ourselves to be in a
peculiar manner tied, bound, and obliged to the observation of
justice. We feel, that is to say, that force may, with the utmost
propriety, and with the approbation of all mankind, be made use of to
constrain us to observe the rules of the one, but not to follow the
precepts of the other.
We must always, however, carefully distinguish what is only blamable,
or the proper object of disapprobation, from what force may be
employed either to punish or to prevent. That seems blamable which
falls short of that ordinary degree of proper beneficence which
experience teaches us to expect of every body; and on the contrary,
that seems praise-worthy which goes beyond it. The ordinary degree
itself seems neither blamable nor praise-worthy. A father, a son, a
brother, who behaves to the correspondent relation neither better nor
worse than the greater part of men commonly do, seems properly to
deserve neither praise nor blame. He who surprises us by extraordinary
and {74} unexpected, though still proper and suitable kindness, or on
the contrary, by extraordinary and unexpected as well as unsuitable
unkindness, seems praise-worthy in the one case, and blamable in the
other.
Even the most ordinary degree of kindness or beneficence, however,
cannot among equals, be extorted by force. Among equals each
individual is naturally, and antecedent to the institution of civil
government, regarded as having a right both to defend himself from
injuries, and to exact a certain degree of punishment for those which
have been done to him. Every generous spectator not only approves of
his conduct when he does this, but enters so far into his sentiments
as often to be willing to assist him. When one man attacks, or robs,
or attempts to murder another, all the neighbours take the alarm, and
think that they do right when they run, either to revenge the person
who has been injured, or to defend him who is in danger of being so.
But when a father fails in the ordinary degree of parental affection
towards a son; when a son seems to want that filial reverence which
might be expected to his father; when brothers are without the usual
degree of brotherly affection; when a man shuts his breast against
compassion, and refuses to relieve the misery of his fellow-creatures,
when he can with the greatest ease; in all these cases, though every
body blames the conduct, nobody imagines that those who might have
reason, perhaps, to expect more kindness, have any right to extort it
by force. The sufferer can only complain, and the spectator can
intermeddle no other way than by advice and persuasion. Upon all such
occasions, for equals to use force against one another, would be
thought the highest degree of insolence and presumption.
A superior may, indeed, sometimes, with universal approbation, oblige
those under his jurisdiction to behave, in this respect, with a
certain degree of propriety to one another. The laws of all civilized
nations oblige parents to maintain their children, and children to
maintain their parents, and impose upon men many other duties of
beneficence. The civil magistrate is entrusted with the power not only
of preserving the public peace by restraining injustice, but of
promoting the prosperity of the commonwealth, by establishing good
discipline, and by discouraging every sort of vice and impropriety; he
may prescribe rules, therefore, which not only prohibit mutual
injuries among fellow-citizens, but command mutual good offices to a
certain degree. When the sovereign commands what is merely
indifferent, and what, antecedent to his orders, might have been
omitted without any blame, it becomes not only blamable but punishable
to disobey him. When he commands, therefore, what, antecedent to any
such order, could not have been omitted without the greatest blame, it
surely becomes much more punishable to be wanting in obedience. Of all
the duties of a lawgiver, however, this perhaps is that which it
requires the greatest delicacy and reserve to execute with propriety
and judgment. To {75} neglect it altogether exposes the commonwealth
to many gross disorders and shocking enormities, and to push it too
far is destructive of all liberty, security, and justice.
Though the mere want of beneficence seems to merit no punishment from
equals, the greater exertions of that virtue appear to deserve the
highest reward. By being productive of the greatest good, they are the
natural and approved objects of the liveliest gratitude. Though the
breach of justice, on the contrary, exposes to punishment, the
observance of the rules of that virtue seems scarce to deserve any
reward. There is, no doubt, a propriety in the practice of justice,
and it merits, upon that account, all the approbation which is due to
propriety. But as it does no real positive good, it is entitled to
very little gratitude. Mere justice is, upon most occasions, but a
negative virtue, and only hinders us from hurting our neighbour. The
man who barely abstains from violating either the person, or the
estate, or the reputation of his neighbours, has surely very little
positive merit. He fulfils, however, all the rules of what is
peculiarly called justice, and does every thing which his equals can
with propriety force him to do, or which they can punish him for not
doing. We may often fulfil all the rules of justice by sitting still
and doing nothing.
As every man doth, so shall it be done to him, and retaliation seems
to be the great law which is dictated to us by Nature. Beneficence and
generosity we think due to the generous and beneficent. Those whose
hearts never open to the feelings of humanity, should, we think, be
shut out in the same manner, from the affections of all their
fellow-creatures, and be allowed to live in the midst of society, as
in a great desert where there is nobody to care for them, or to
inquire after them. The violator of the laws of justice ought to be
made to feel himself that evil which he has done to another; and since
no regard to the sufferings of his brethren is capable of restraining
him, he ought to be over-awed by the fear of his own. The man who is
barely innocent, who only observes the laws of justice with regard to
others, and merely abstains from hurting his neighbours, can merit
only that his neighbours in their turn should respect his innocence,
and that the same laws should be religiously observed with regard to
him.
-----
CHAP. II.--_Of the Sense of Justice, of Remorse, and of the
Consciousness of Merit._
THERE can be no proper motive for hurting our neighbour, there can be
no incitement to do evil to another, which mankind will go along with,
except just indignation for evil which that other has done to us. To
disturb his happiness merely because it stands in the way of our own,
to take from him what is of real use to him merely because it {76} may
be of equal or of more use to us, or to indulge, in this manner, at
the expense of other people, the natural preference which every man
has for his own happiness above that of other people, is what no
impartial spectator can go along with. Every man is, no doubt, by
nature, first and principally recommended to his own care; and as he
is fitter to take care of himself than of any other person, it is fit
and right that it should be so. Every man, therefore, is much more
deeply interested in whatever immediately concerns himself, than in
what concerns any other man: and to hear, perhaps, of the death of
another person, with whom we have no particular connexion, will give
us less concern, will spoil our stomach or break our rest much less,
than a very insignificant disaster which has befallen ourselves. But
though the ruin of our neighbour may affect us much less than a very
small misfortune of our own, we must not ruin him to prevent that
small misfortune, nor even to prevent our own ruin. We must, here, as
in all other cases, view ourselves not so much according to that light
in which we may naturally appear to ourselves, as according to that in
which we naturally appear to others. Though every man may, according
to the proverb, be the whole world to himself, to the rest of mankind
he is a most insignificant part of it. Though his own happiness may be
of more importance to him than that of all the world besides, to every
other person it is of no more consequence than that of any other man.
Though it may be true, therefore, that every individual, in his own
breast, naturally prefers himself to all mankind, yet he dares not
look mankind in the face, and avow that he acts according to this
principle. He feels that in this preference they can never go along
with him, and that how natural soever it may be to him, it must always
appear excessive and extravagant to them. When he views himself in the
light in which he is conscious that others will view him, he sees that
to them he is but one of the multitude in no respect better than any
other in it. If he would act so as that the impartial spectator may
enter into the principles of his conduct, which is what of all things
he has the greatest desire to do, he must, upon this, as upon all
other occasions, humble the arrogance of his self-love, and bring it
down to something which other men can go along with. They will indulge
it so far as to allow him to be more anxious about, and to pursue with
more earnest assiduity, his own happiness than that of any other
person. Thus far, whenever they place themselves in his situation,
they will readily go along with him. In the race for wealth, for
honours, and preferments, he may run as hard as he can, and strain
every nerve and every muscle, in order to outstrip all his
competitors. But if he should justle, or throw down any of them, the
indulgence of the spectators is entirely at an end. It is a violation
of fair play, which they cannot admit of. This man is to them, in
every respect, as good as he: they do not enter into that self-love by
which he prefers himself so {77} much to this other, and cannot go
along with the motive from which he hurt him. They readily, therefore,
sympathize with the natural resentment of the injured, and the
offender becomes the object of their hatred and indignation. He is
sensible that he becomes so, and feels that those sentiments are ready
to burst out against him.
As the greater and more irreparable the evil that is done, the
resentment of the sufferer runs naturally the higher; so does likewise
the sympathetic indignation of the spectator, as well as the sense of
guilt in the agent. Death is the greatest evil which one man can
inflict upon another, and excites the highest degree of resentment in
those who are immediately connected with the slain. Murder, therefore,
is the most atrocious of all crimes which affect individuals only, in
the sight both of mankind, and of the person who has committed it. To
be deprived of that which we are possessed of, is a greater evil than
to be disappointed of what we have only the expectation. Breach of
property, therefore, theft and robbery, which take from us what we are
possessed of, are greater crimes than breach of contract, which only
disappoints us of what we expected. The most sacred laws of justice,
therefore, those whose violation seems to call loudest for vengeance
and punishment, are the laws which guard the life and person of our
neighbour; the next are those which guard his property and
possessions; and last of all come those which guard what are called
his personal rights, or what is due to him from the promises of
others.
The violator of the more sacred laws of justice can never reflect on
the sentiments which mankind must entertain with regard to him,
without seeing all the agonies of shame, and horror, and
consternation. When his passion is gratified, and he begins coolly to
reflect on his past conduct, he can enter into none of the motives
which influenced it. They appear now as detestable to him as they did
always to other people. By sympathizing with the hatred and abhorrence
which other men must entertain for him, he becomes in some measure the
object of his own hatred and abhorrence. The situation of the person,
who suffered by his injustice, now calls upon his pity. He is grieved
at the thought of it; regrets the unhappy effects of his own conduct,
and feels at the same time that they have rendered him the proper
object of the resentment and indignation of mankind, and of what is
the natural consequence of resentment, vengeance and punishment. The
thought of this perpetually haunts him, and fills him with terror and
amazement. He dares no longer look society in the face, but imagines
himself as it were rejected, and thrown out from the affections of all
mankind. He cannot hope for the consolation of sympathy in this his
greatest and most dreadful distress. The remembrance of his crimes has
shut out all fellow-feeling with him from the hearts of his
fellow-creatures. The sentiments which they entertain with regard to
him, are the very thing which he is most afraid of. Every thing seems
{78} hostile, and he would be glad to fly to some inhospitable desert,
where he might never more behold the face of a human creature, nor
read in the countenance of mankind the condemnation of his crimes. But
solitude is still more dreadful than society. His own thoughts can
present him with nothing but what is black, unfortunate, and
disastrous, the melancholy forebodings of incomprehensible misery and
ruin. The horror of solitude drives him back into society, and he
comes again into the presence of mankind, astonished to appear before
them, loaded with shame and distracted with fear, in order to
supplicate some little protection from the countenance of those very
judges, who he knows have already all unanimously condemned him. Such
is the nature of that sentiment, which is properly called remorse; of
all the sentiments which can enter the human heart the most dreadful.
It is made up of shame from the sense of the impropriety of past
conduct; of grief for the effects of it; of pity for those who suffer
by it; and of the dread and terror of punishment from the
consciousness of the justly provoked resentment of all rational
creatures.
The opposite behaviour naturally inspires the opposite sentiment. The
man who, not from frivolous fancy, but from proper motives, has
performed a generous action, when he looks forward to those whom he
has served, feels himself to be the natural object of their love and
gratitude, and, by sympathy with them, of the esteem and approbation
of all mankind. And when he looks backward to the motive from which he
acted, and surveys it in the light in which the indifferent spectator
will survey it, he still continues to enter into it, and applauds
himself by sympathy with the approbation of this supposed impartial
judge. In both these points of view his own conduct appears to him
every way agreeable. His mind, at the thought of it, is filled with
cheerfulness, serenity, and composure. He is in friendship and harmony
with all mankind, and looks upon his fellow-creatures with confidence
and benevolent satisfaction, secure that he has rendered himself
worthy of their most favourable regards. In the combination of all
these sentiments consists the consciousness of merit, or of deserved
reward.
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CHAP. III.--_Of the Utility of this Constitution of Nature._
IT is thus that man, who can subsist only in society, was fitted by
nature to that situation for which he was made. All the members of
human society stand in need of each others assistance, and are
likewise exposed to mutual injuries. Where the necessary assistance is
reciprocally afforded from love, from gratitude, from friendship, and
esteem, the society flourishes and is happy. All the different members
of it are bound together by the agreeable bands of love and affection,
{79} and are, as it were, thereby drawn to one common centre of mutual
good offices.
But though the necessary assistance should not be afforded from such
generous and disinterested motives, though among the different members
of the society there should be no mutual love and affection, the
society, though less happy and agreeable, will not necessarily be
dissolved. Society may subsist among different men, as among different
merchants, from a sense of its utility, without any mutual love or
affection; and though no man in it should owe any obligation, or be
bound in gratitude to any other, it may still be upheld by a mercenary
exchange of good offices according to an agreed valuation.
Society, however, cannot subsist among those who are at all times
ready to hurt and injure one another. The moment that injury begins,
the moment that mutual resentment and animosity take place, all the
bands of it are broke asunder, and the different members of which it
consisted are, as it were, dissipated and scattered abroad by the
violence and opposition of their discordant affections. If there is
any society among robbers and murderers, they must at least, according
to the trite observation, abstain from robbing and murdering one
another. Beneficence, therefore, is less essential to the existence of
society than justice. Society may subsist, though not in the most
comfortable state, without beneficence; but the prevalence of
injustice must utterly destroy it.
Though Nature, therefore, exhorts mankind to acts of beneficence, by
the pleasing consciousness of deserved reward, she has not thought it
necessary to guard and enforce the practice of it by the terrors of
merited punishment in case it should be neglected. It is the ornament
which embellishes, not the foundation which supports, the building,
and which it was, therefore, sufficient to recommend, but by no means
necessary to impose. Justice, on the contrary, is the main pillar that
upholds the whole edifice. If it is removed, the great, the immense
fabric of human society, that fabric which to raise and support seems
in this world, if I may say so, to have been the peculiar and darling
care of Nature, must in a moment crumble into atoms. In order to
enforce the observation of justice, therefore, Nature has implanted in
the human breast that consciousness of ill-desert, those terrors of
merited punishment which attend upon its violation, as the great
safeguards of the association of mankind, to protect the weak, to curb
the violent, and to chastise the guilty. Men, though naturally
sympathetic, feel so little for another, with whom they have no
particular connexion, in comparison of what they feel for themselves;
the misery of one, who is merely their fellow-creature, is of so
little importance to them in comparison even of a small conveniency of
their own; they have it so much in their power to hurt him, and may
have so many temptations to do so, that if this principle did not
stand up within them in his {80} defence, and overawe them into a
respect for his innocence, they would, like wild beasts, be at all
times ready to fly upon him; and a man would enter an assembly of men
as he enters a den of lions.
In every part of the universe we observe means adjusted with the
nicest artifice to the ends which they are intended to produce; and in
the mechanism of a plant, or animal body, admire how every thing is
contrived for advancing the two great purposes of nature, the support
of the individual, and the propagation of the species. But in these,
and in all such objects, we still distinguish the efficient from the
final cause of their several motions and organizations. The digestion
of the food, the circulation of the blood, and the secretion of the
several juices which are drawn from it, are operations all of them
necessary for the great purposes of animal life. Yet we never
endeavour to account for them from those purposes as from their
efficient causes, nor imagine that the blood circulates, or that the
food digests of its own accord, and with a view or intention to the
purposes of circulation or digestion. The wheels of the watch are all
admirably adjusted to the end for which it was made, the pointing of
the hour. All their various motions conspire in the nicest manner to
produce this effect. If they were endowed with a desire and intention
to produce it, they could not do it better. Yet we never ascribe any
such desire or intention to them, but to the watch-maker, and we know
that they are put into motion by a spring, which intends the effect it
produces as little as they do. But though, in accounting for the
operations of bodies, we never fail to distinguish in this manner the
efficient from the final cause, in accounting for those of the mind we
are very apt to confound these two different things with one another.
When by natural principles we are led to advance those ends which a
refined and enlightened reason would recommend to us, we are very apt
to impute to that reason, as to their efficient cause, the sentiments
and actions by which we advance those ends, and to imagine that to be
the wisdom of man, which in reality is the wisdom of God. Upon a
superficial view, this cause seems sufficient to produce the effects
which are ascribed to it; and the system of human nature seems to be
more simple and agreeable when all its different operations are thus
deduced from a single principle.
As society cannot subsist unless the laws of justice are tolerably
observed, as no social intercourse can take place among men who do not
generally abstain from injuring one another; the consideration of this
necessity, it has been thought, was the ground upon which we approved
of the enforcement of the laws of justice by the punishment of those
who violated them. Man, it has been said, has a natural love for
society, and desires that the union of mankind should be preserved for
its own sake, and though he himself was to derive no benefit from it.
The orderly and flourishing state of society is agreeable to him, and
he takes delight in contemplating it. Its disorder and confusion, on
the {81} contrary, is the object of his aversion, and he is chagrined
at whatever tends to produce it. He is sensible too that his own
interest is connected with the prosperity of society, and that the
happiness, perhaps the preservation of his existence, depends upon its
preservation. Upon every account, therefore, he has an abhorrence at
whatever can tend to destroy society, and is willing to make use of
every means, which can hinder so hated and so dreadful an event.
Injustice necessarily tends to destroy it. Every appearance of
injustice, therefore, alarms him, and he runs (if I may say so), to
stop the progress of what, if allowed to go on, would quickly put an
end to every thing that is dear to him. If he cannot restrain it by
gentle and fair means, he must bear it down by force and violence, and
at any rate must put a stop to its further progress. Hence it is, they
say, that he often approves of the enforcement of the laws of justice
even by the capital punishment of those who violate them. The
disturber of the public peace is hereby removed out of the world, and
others are terrified by his fate from imitating his example.
Such is the account commonly given of our approbation of the
punishment of injustice. And so far this account is undoubtedly true,
that we frequently have occasion to confirm our natural sense of the
propriety and fitness of punishment, by reflecting how necessary it is
for preserving the order of society. When the guilty is about to
suffer that just retaliation, which the natural indignation of mankind
tells them is due to his crimes; when the insolence of his injustice
is broken and humbled by the terror of his approaching punishment;
when he ceases to be an object of fear, with the generous and humane
he begins to be an object of pity. The thought of what he is about to
suffer extinguishes their resentment for the sufferings of others to
which he has given occasion. They are disposed to pardon and forgive
him, and to save him from that punishment, which in all their cool
hours they had considered as the retribution due to such crimes. Here,
therefore, they have occasion to call to their assistance the
consideration of the general interest of society. They counterbalance
the impulse of this weak and partial humanity by the dictates of a
humanity that is more generous and comprehensive. They reflect that
mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent, and oppose to the
emotions of compassion which they feel for a particular person, a more
enlarged compassion which they feel for mankind.
Sometimes too we have occasion to defend the propriety of observing
the general rules of justice by the consideration of their necessity
to the support of society. We frequently hear the young and the
licentious ridiculing the most sacred rules of morality, and
professing, sometimes from the corruption, but more frequently from
the vanity of their hearts, the most abominable maxims of conduct. Our
indignation rouses, and we are eager to refute and expose such
detestable {82} principles. But though it is their intrinsic
hatefulness and detestableness, which originally inflames us against
them, we are unwilling to assign this as the sole reason why we
condemn them, or to pretend that it is merely because we ourselves
hate and detest them. The reason, we think, would not appear to be
conclusive. Yet why should it not, if we hate and detest them because
they are the natural and proper objects of hatred and detestation? But
when they are asked why we should not act in such or such a manner,
the very question seems to suppose that, to those who ask it, this
manner of acting does not appear to be for its own sake the natural
and proper object of those sentiments. We must show them, therefore,
that it ought to be so for the sake of something else. Upon this
account we generally cast about for other arguments, and the
consideration which first occurs to us, is the disorder and confusion
of society which would result from the universal prevalence of such
practices. We seldom fail, therefore, to insist upon this topic.
But though it commonly requires no great discernment to see the
destructive tendency of all licentious practices to the welfare of
society, it is seldom this consideration which first animates us
against them. All men, even the most stupid and unthinking, abhor
fraud, perfidy and injustice, and delight to see them punished. But
few men have reflected upon the necessity of justice to the existence
of society, how obvious soever that necessity may appear to be.
That it is not a regard to the preservation of society, which
originally interests us in the punishment of crimes committed against
individuals, may be demonstrated by many obvious considerations. The
concern which we take in the fortune and happiness of individuals does
not, in common cases, arise from that which we take in the fortune and
happiness of society. We are no more concerned for the destruction or
loss of a single man, because this man is a member or part of society,
and because we should be concerned for the destruction of society,
than we are concerned for the loss of a single guinea, because this
guinea is a part of a thousand guineas, and because we should be
concerned for the loss of the whole sum. In neither case does our
regard for the individuals arise from our regard for the multitude:
but in both cases our regard for the multitude is compounded and made
up of the particular regards which we feel for the different
individuals of which it is composed. As when a small sum is unjustly
taken from us, we do not so much prosecute the injury from a regard to
the preservation of our whole fortune, as from a regard to that
particular sum which we have lost; so when a single man is injured or
destroyed, we demand the punishment of the wrong that has been done to
him, not so much from a concern for the general interest of society,
as from a concern for that very individual who has been injured. It is
to be observed, however, that this concern does not necessarily
include {83} in it any degree of those exquisite sentiments which are
commonly called love, esteem, and affection, and by which we
distinguish our particular friends and acquaintance. The concern which
is requisite for this, is no more than the general fellow-feeling
which we have with every man merely because he is our fellow-creature.
We enter into the resentment even of an odious person, when he is
injured by those to whom he has given no provocation. Our
disapprobation of his ordinary character and conduct does not in this
case altogether prevent our fellow-feeling with his natural
indignation; though with those who are not either extremely candid, or
who have not been accustomed to correct and regulate their natural
sentiments by general rules, it is very apt to damp it.
Upon some occasions, indeed, we both punish and approve of punishment,
merely from a view to the general interest of society, which, we
imagine, cannot otherwise be secured. Of this kind are all the
punishments inflicted for breaches of what is called either civil
police, or military discipline. Such crimes do not immediately or
directly hurt any particular person; but their remote consequences, it
is supposed, do produce, or might produce, either a considerable
inconveniency, or a great disorder in the society. A sentinel, for
example, who falls asleep upon his watch, suffers death by the laws of
war, because such carelessness might endanger the whole army. This
severity may, upon many occasions, appear necessary, and, for that
reason, just and proper. When the preservation of an individual is
inconsistent with the safety of a multitude, nothing can be more just
than that the many should be preferred to the one. Yet this
punishment, how necessary soever, always appears to be excessively
severe. The natural atrocity of the crime seems to be so little, and
the punishment so great, that it is with great difficulty that our
heart can reconcile itself to it. Though such carelessness appears
very blamable, yet the thought of this crime does not naturally excite
any such resentment as would prompt us to take such dreadful revenge.
A man of humanity must recollect himself, must make an effort, and
exert his whole firmness and resolution, before he can bring himself
either to inflict it, or to go along with it when it is inflicted by
others. It is not, however, in this manner, that he looks upon the
just punishment of an ungrateful murderer or parricide. His heart, in
this case, applauds with ardour, and even with transport, the just
retaliation which seems due to such detestable crimes, and which, if,
by any accident, they should happen to escape, he would be highly
enraged and disappointed. The very different sentiments with which the
spectator views those different punishments, is a proof that his
approbation of the one is far from being founded upon the same
principles with that of the other. He looks upon the sentinel as an
unfortunate victim, who, indeed, must, and ought to be, devoted to the
safety of numbers, but whom still, in his heart, he would {84} be glad
to save; and he is only sorry, that the interest of the many should
oppose it. But if the murderer should escape from punishment, it would
excite his highest indignation, and he would call upon God to avenge,
in another world, that crime which the injustice of mankind had
neglected to chastise upon earth.
For it well deserves to be taken notice of, that we are so far from
imagining that injustice ought to be punished in this life, merely on
account of the order of society, which cannot otherwise be maintained,
that Nature teaches us to hope, and religion, we suppose, authorises
us to expect, that it will be punished, even in a life to come. Our
sense of its ill desert pursues it, if I may say so, even beyond the
grave, though the example of its punishment there cannot serve to
deter the rest of mankind, who see it not, who know it not, from being
guilty of the like practices here. The justice of God, however, we
think, still requires, that he should hereafter avenge the injuries of
the widow and the fatherless, who are here so often insulted with
impunity. In every religion, and in every superstition that the world
has ever beheld, accordingly, there has been a Tartarus as well as an
Elysium; a place provided for the punishment of the wicked, as well as
one for the reward of the just.
-----
SECT. III.--OF THE INFLUENCE OF FORTUNE UPON THE SENTIMENTS OF MANKIND,
WITH REGARD TO THE MERIT OR DEMERIT OF THEIR ACTIONS.
INTRODUCTION.--Whatever praise or blame can be due to any action, must
belong either, first, to the intention or affection of the heart, from
which it proceeds, or, secondly, to the external action or movement of
the body, which this affection gives occasion to; or, lastly, to the
good or bad consequences, which actually, and in fact, proceed from
it. These three different things constitute the whole nature and
circumstances of the action, and must be the foundation of whatever
quality can belong to it.
That the two last of these three circumstances cannot be the
foundation of any praise or blame, is abundantly evident; nor has the
contrary ever been asserted by any body. The external action or
movement of the body is often the same in the most innocent and in the
most blamable actions. He who shoots a bird, and he who shoots a man,
both of them perform the same external movement: each of them draws
the trigger of a gun. The consequences which actually, and in fact,
happen to proceed from any action, are, if possible, still more
indifferent either to praise or blame, than even the external movement
of the body. As they depend, not upon the agent, but upon fortune,
they cannot be {85} the proper foundation for any sentiment, of which
his character and conduct are the objects.
The only consequences for which he can be answerable, or by which he
can deserve either approbation or disapprobation of any kind, are
those which were some way or other intended, or those which, at least,
show some agreeable or disagreeable quality in the intention of the
heart, from which he acted. To the intention or affection of the
heart, therefore, to the propriety or impropriety, to the beneficence
or hurtfulness of the design, all praise or blame, all approbation or
disapprobation, of any kind, which can justly be bestowed upon any
action must ultimately belong.
When this maxim is thus proposed, in abstract and general terms, there
is nobody who does not agree to it. Its self-evident justice is
acknowledged by all the world, and there is not a dissenting voice
among all mankind. Every body allows, that how different soever the
accidental, the unintended and unforeseen consequences of different
actions, yet, if the intentions or affections from which they arose
were, on the one hand, equally proper and equally beneficent, or, on
the other, equally improper and equally malevolent, the merit or
demerit of the actions is still the same, and the agent is equally the
suitable object either of gratitude or of resentment.
But how well soever we may seem to be persuaded of the truth of this
equitable maxim, when we consider it after this manner, in abstract,
yet when we come to particular cases, the actual consequences which
happen to proceed from any action, have a very great effect upon our
sentiments concerning its merit or demerit, and almost always either
enhance or diminish our sense of both. Scarce, in any one instance,
perhaps, will our sentiments be found, after examination, to be
entirely regulated by this rule, which we all acknowledge ought
entirely to regulate them.
This irregularity of sentiment, which every body feels, which scarce
any body is sufficiently aware of, and which nobody is willing to
acknowledge, I proceed now to explain; and I shall consider, first,
the cause which gives occasion to it, or the mechanism by which Nature
produces it; secondly, the extent of its influence; and, last of all,
the end which it answers, or the purpose which the Author of nature
seems to have intended by it.
-----
CHAP. I.--_Of the Causes of this Influence of Fortune._
THE causes of pain and pleasure, whatever they are, or however they
operate, seem to be the objects, which, in all animals, immediately
excite those two passions of gratitude and resentment. They are
excited by inanimated, as well as by animated objects. We are angry,
for a {86} moment, even at the stone that hurts us. A child beats it,
a dog barks at it, a choleric man is apt to curse it. The least
reflection, indeed, corrects this sentiment, and we soon become
sensible, that what has no feeling is a very improper object of
revenge. When the mischief, however, is very great, the object which
caused it becomes disagreeable to us ever after, and we take pleasure
to burn or destroy it. We should treat, in this manner, the instrument
which had accidentally been the cause of the death of a friend, and we
should often think ourselves guilty of a sort of inhumanity, if we
neglected to vent this absurd sort of vengeance upon it.
We conceive, in the same manner, a sort of gratitude for those
inanimated objects, which have been the causes of great or frequent
pleasure to us. The sailor, who, as soon as he got ashore, should mend
his fire with the plank upon which he had just escaped from a
shipwreck, would seem to be guilty of an unnatural action. We should
expect that he would rather preserve it with care and affection, as a
monument that was, in some measure, dear to him. A man grows fond of a
snuffbox, of a pen-knife, of a staff which he has long made use of,
and conceives something like a real love and affection for them. If he
breaks or loses them, he is vexed out of all proportion to the value
of the damage. The house which we have long lived in, the tree, whose
verdure and shade we have long enjoyed, are both looked upon with a
sort of respect that seems due to such benefactors. The decay of the
one, or the ruin of the other, affects us with a kind of melancholy,
though we should sustain no loss by it. The Dryads and the Lares of
the ancients, a sort of genii of trees and houses, were probably first
suggested by this sort of affection, which the authors of those
superstitions felt for such objects, and which seemed unreasonable, if
there was nothing animated about them.
But, before any thing can be the proper object of gratitude or
resentment, it must not only be the cause of pleasure or pain, it must
likewise be capable of feeling them. Without this other quality, those
passions cannot vent themselves with any sort of satisfaction upon it.
As they are excited by the causes of pleasure and pain, so their
gratification consists in retaliating those sensations upon what gave
occasion to them; which it is to no purpose to attempt upon what has
no sensibility. Animals, therefore, are less improper objects of
gratitude and resentment than animated objects. The dog that bites,
the ox that gores, are both of them punished. If they have been the
causes of the death of any person, neither the public, nor the
relations of the slain, can be satisfied, unless they are put to death
in their turn: nor is this merely for the security of the living, but,
in some measure, to revenge the injury of the dead. Those animals, on
the contrary, that have been remarkably serviceable to their masters,
become the objects of a very lively gratitude. We are shocked at the
brutality of that officer, {87} mentioned in the Turkish Spy, who
stabbed the horse that had carried him across an arm of the sea, lest
that animal should afterwards distinguish some other person by a
similar adventure.
But, though animals are not only the causes of pleasure and pain, but
are also capable of feeling those sensations, they are still far from
being complete and perfect objects, either of gratitude or resentment;
and those passions still feel, that there is something wanting to
their entire gratification. What gratitude chiefly desires, is not
only to make the benefactor feel pleasure in his turn, but to make him
conscious that he meets with this reward on account of his past
conduct, to make him pleased with that conduct, and to satisfy him
that the person upon whom he bestowed his good offices was not
unworthy of them. What most of all charms us in our benefactor, is the
concord between his sentiments and our own, with regard to what
interests us so nearly as the worth of our own character, and the
esteem that is due to us. We are delighted to find a person who values
us as we value ourselves, and distinguishes us from the rest of
mankind, with an attention not unlike that with which we distinguish
ourselves. To maintain in him these agreeable and flattering
sentiments, is one of the chief ends proposed by the returns we are
disposed to make to him. A generous mind often disdains the interested
thought of extorting new favours from its benefactor, by what may be
called the importunities of its gratitude. But to preserve and to
increase his esteem, is an interest which the greatest mind does not
think unworthy of its attention. And this is the foundation of what I
formerly observed, and when we cannot enter into the motives of our
benefactor, when his conduct and character appear unworthy of our
approbation, let his services have been ever so great, our gratitude
is always sensibly diminished. We are less flattered by the
distinction; and to preserve the esteem of so weak, or so worthless a
patron, seems to be an object which does not deserve to be pursued for
its own sake.
The object, on the contrary, which resentment is chiefly intent upon,
is not so much to make our enemy feel pain in his turn, as to make him
conscious that he feels it upon account of his past conduct, to make
him repent of that conduct, and to make him sensible, that the person
whom he injured did not deserve to be treated in that manner. What
chiefly enrages us against the man who injures or insults us, is the
little account which he seems to make of us, the unreasonable
preference which he gives to himself above us, and that absurd
self-love, by which he seems to imagine, that other people may be
sacrificed at any time, to his conveniency or his humour. The glaring
impropriety of his conduct, the gross insolence and injustice which it
seems to involve in it, often shock and exasperate us more than all
the mischief which we have suffered. To bring him back to a more just
sense of what is due to other people, to make him sensible of what he
owes us, and of the wrong that he has {88} done to us, is frequently
the principal end proposed in our revenge, which is always imperfect
when it cannot **accomplish this. When our enemy appears to have done us
no injury, when we are sensible that he acted quite properly, that, in
his situation, we should have done the same thing, and that we
deserved from him all the mischief we met with; in that case, if we
have the least spark either of candour or justice, we can entertain no
sort of resentment.
Before any thing, therefore, can be the complete and proper object,
either of gratitude or resentment, it must possess three different
qualifications. First, it must be the cause of pleasure in the one
case, and of pain in the other. Secondly, it must be capable of
feeling those sensations. And, thirdly, it must not only have produced
those sensations, but it must have produced them from design, and from
a design that is approved of in the one case, and disapproved of in
the other. It is by the first qualification, that any object is
capable of exciting those passions: it is by the second, that it is in
any respect capable of gratifying them: the third qualification is not
only necessary for their complete satisfaction, but as it gives a
pleasure or pain that is both exquisite and peculiar, it is likewise
an additional exciting cause of those passions.
As what gives pleasure or pain, therefore, either in one way or
another, is the sole exciting cause of gratitude and resentment;
though the intentions of any person should be ever so proper and
beneficent, on the one hand, or ever so improper and malevolent on the
other; yet, if he has failed in producing either the good or the evil
which he intended, as one of the exciting causes is wanting in both
cases, less gratitude seems due to him in the one, and less resentment
in the other. And, on the contrary, though in the intentions of any
person, there was either no laudable degree of benevolence on the one
hand, or no blamable degree of malice on the other; yet, if his
actions should produce either great good or great evil, as one of the
exciting causes takes place upon both these occasions, some gratitude
is apt to arise towards him in the one, and some resentment in the
other. A shadow of merit seems to fall upon him in the first, a shadow
of demerit in the second. And, as the consequences of actions are
altogether under the empire of Fortune, hence arises her influence
upon the sentiments of mankind with regard to merit and demerit.
-----
CHAP. II.--_Of the Extent of this Influence of Fortune._
THE effect of this influence of fortune is, first, to diminish our
sense of the merit or demerit of those actions which arose from the
most laudable or blamable intentions, when they fail of producing
their proposed effects: and, secondly, to increase our sense of the
merit or demerit of {89} actions, beyond what is due to the motives or
affections from which they proceed, when they accidentally give
occasion either to extraordinary pleasure or pain.
1. First, I say, though the intentions of any person should be ever so
proper and beneficent, on the one hand, or ever so improper and
malevolent, on the other, yet, if they fail in producing their
effects, his merit seems imperfect in the one case, and his demerit
incomplete in the other. Nor is this irregularity of sentiment felt
only by those who are immediately affected by the consequence of any
action. It is felt, in some measure, even by the impartial spectator.
The man who solicits an office for another, without obtaining it, is
regarded as his friend, and seems to deserve his love and affection.
But the man who not only solicits, but procures it, is more peculiarly
considered as his patron and benefactor, and is entitled to his
respect and gratitude. The person obliged, we are apt to think, may,
with some justice, imagine himself on a level with the first: but we
cannot enter into his sentiments, if he does not feel himself inferior
to the second. It is common indeed to say, that we are equally obliged
to the man who has endeavoured to serve, as to him who actually did
so. It is the speech which we constantly make upon every unsuccessful
attempt of this kind; but which, like all other fine speeches, must be
understood with a grain of allowance. The sentiments which a man of
generosity entertains for the friend who fails, may often indeed be
nearly the same with those which he conceives for him who succeeds:
and the more generous he is, the more nearly will those sentiments
approach to an exact level. With the truly generous, to be beloved, to
be esteemed by those whom they themselves think worthy of esteem,
gives more pleasure, and thereby excites more gratitude, than all the
advantages which they can ever expect from those sentiments. When they
lose those advantages therefore, they seem to lose but a trifle, which
is scarce worth regarding. They still however lose something. Their
pleasure therefore, and consequently their gratitude, is not perfectly
complete: and accordingly if, between the friend who fails and the
friend who succeeds, all other circumstances are equal, there will,
even in the noblest and best mind, be some little difference of
affection in favour of him who succeeds. Nay, so unjust are mankind in
this respect, that though the intended benefit should be procured, yet
if it is not procured by the means of a particular benefactor, they
are apt to think that less gratitude is due to the man, who with the
best intentions in the world could do no more than help it a little
forward. As their gratitude is in this case divided among the
different persons who contributed to their pleasure, a smaller share
of it seems due to any one. Such a person, we hear men commonly say,
intended no doubt to serve us; and we really believe exerted himself
to the utmost of his abilities for that purpose. We are not, however,
obliged to him for this benefit; {90} since, had it not been for the
concurrence of others, all that he could have done would never have
brought it about. This consideration, they imagine, should, even in
the eyes of the impartial spectator, diminish the debt which they owe
to him. The person himself who has unsuccessfully endeavoured to
confer a benefit, has by no means the same dependency upon the
gratitude of the man whom he meant to oblige, nor the same sense of
his own merit towards him, which he would have had in the case of
success.
Even the merit of talents and abilities which some accident has
hindered from producing their effects, seems in some measure
imperfect, even to those who are fully convinced of their capacity to
produce them. The general who has been hindered by the envy of
ministers from gaining some great advantage over the enemies of his
country, regrets the loss of the opportunity for ever after. Nor is it
only upon account of the public that he regrets it. He laments that he
was hindered from performing an action which would have added a new
lustre to his character in his own eyes, as well as in those of every
other person. It satisfies neither himself nor others to reflect that
the plan or design was all that depended on him, that no greater
capacity was required to execute it than what was necessary to concert
it: that he was allowed to be every way capable of executing it, and
that had he been permitted to go on, success was infallible. He still
did not execute it; and though he might deserve all the approbation
which is due to a magnanimous and great design, he still wanted the
actual merit of having performed a great action. To take the
management of any affair of public concern from the man who has almost
brought it to a conclusion, is regarded as the most invidious
injustice. As he had done so much, he should, we think, have been
allowed to acquire the complete merit of putting an end to it. It was
objected to Pompey, that he came in upon the victories of Lucullus,
and gathered those laurels which were due to the fortune and valour of
another. The glory of Lucullus, it seems, was less complete even in
the opinion of his own friends, when he was not permitted to finish
that conquest which his conduct and courage had put in the power of
almost any man to finish. It mortifies an architect when his plans are
either not executed at all, or when they are so far altered as to
spoil the effect of the building. The plan, however, is all that
depends upon the architect. The whole of his genius is, to good
judges, as completely discovered in that as in the actual execution.
But a plan does not, even to the most intelligent, give the same
pleasure as a noble and magnificent building. They may discover as
much both of taste and genius in the one as in the other. But their
effects are still vastly different, and the amusement derived from the
first, never approaches to the wonder and admiration which are
sometimes excited by the second. We may believe of many men, that
their talents are {91} superior to those of Cæsar and Alexander; and
that in the same situations they would perform still greater actions.
In the mean time, however, we do not behold them with that
astonishment and admiration with which those two heroes have been
regarded in all ages and nations. The calm judgments of the mind may
approve of them more, but they want the splendour of great actions to
dazzle and transport it. The superiority of virtues and talents has
not, even upon those who acknowledge that superiority, the same effect
with the superiority of achievements.
As the merit of an unsuccessful attempt to do good seems thus, in the
eyes of ungrateful mankind, to be diminished by the miscarriage, so
does likewise the demerit of an unsuccessful attempt to do evil. The
design to commit a crime, how clearly soever it may be proved, is
scarce ever punished with the same severity as the actual commission
of it. The case of treason is perhaps the only exception. That crime
immediately affecting the being of the government itself, the
government is naturally more jealous of it than of any other. In the
punishment of treason, the sovereign resents the injuries which are
immediately done to himself: in the punishment of other crimes he
resents those which are done to other men. It is his own resentment
which he indulges in the one case; it is that of his subjects which by
sympathy he enters into in the other. In the first case, therefore, as
he judges in his own cause, he is very apt to be more violent and
sanguinary in his punishments than the impartial spectator can approve
of. His resentment too rises here upon smaller occasions, and does not
always, as in other cases, wait for the perpetration of the crime, or
even for the attempt to commit it. A treasonable concert, though
nothing has been done, or even attempted in consequence of it, nay, a
treasonable conversation, is in many countries punished in the same
manner as the actual commission of treason. With regard to all other
crimes, the mere design, upon which no attempt has followed, is seldom
punished at all, and is never punished severely. A criminal design,
and a criminal action, it may be said indeed, do not necessarily
suppose the same degree of depravity, and ought not therefore to be
subjected to the same punishment. We are capable, it may be said, of
resolving, and even of taking measures to execute, many things which,
when it comes to the point, we feel ourselves altogether incapable of
executing. But this reason can have no place when the design has been
carried the length of the last attempt. The man, however, who fires a
pistol at his enemy but misses him, is punished with death by the laws
of scarce any country. By the old law of Scotland, though he should
wound him, yet, unless death ensues within a certain time, the
assassin is not liable to the last punishment. The resentment of
mankind, however, runs so high against this crime, their terror for
the man who shows himself capable of committing it is so great, that
the mere attempt to {92} commit it ought in all countries to be
capital. The attempt to commit smaller crimes is almost always
punished very lightly, and sometimes is not punished at all. The
thief, whose hand has been caught in his neighbour's pocket before he
had taken any thing out of it, is punished with ignominy only. If he
had got time to take away an handkerchief, he might have been put to
death. The house-breaker, who has been found setting a ladder to his
neighbour's window, but had not got into it, is not exposed to the
capital punishment. The attempt to ravish is not punished as a rape.
The attempt to seduce a married woman is not punished at all, though
seduction is punished severely. Our resentment against the person who
only attempted to do a mischief, is seldom so strong as to bear us out
in inflicting the same punishment upon him, which we should have
thought due if he had actually done it. In the one case, the joy of
our deliverance alleviates our sense of the atrocity of his conduct;
in the other, the grief of our misfortune increases it. His real
demerit, however, is undoubtedly the same in both cases, since his
intentions were equally criminal; and there is in this respect,
therefore an irregularity in the sentiments of all men, and a
consequent relaxation of discipline in the laws of, I believe, all
nations of the most civilized, as well as of the most barbarous. The
humanity of a civilized people disposes them either to dispense with,
or to mitigate punishments, wherever their natural indignation is not
goaded on by the consequences of the crime. Barbarians, on the other
hand, when no actual consequence has happened from any action, are not
apt to be very delicate or inquisitive about the motives.
The person himself who either from passion, or from the influence of
bad company, has resolved, and perhaps taken measures to perpetrate
some crime, but who has fortunately been prevented by an accident
which put it out of his power, is sure, if he has any remains of
conscience, to regard this event all his life after as a great and
signal deliverance. He can never think of it without returning thanks
to Heaven, for having been thus graciously pleased to save him from
the guilt in which he was just ready to plunge himself, and to hinder
him from rendering all the rest of his life a scene of horror,
remorse, and repentance. But though his hands are innocent, he is
conscious that his heart is equally guilty as if he had actually
executed what he was so fully resolved upon. It gives great ease to
his conscience, however, to consider that the crime was not executed,
though he knows that the failure arose from no virtue in him. He still
considers himself as less deserving of punishment and resentment; and
this good fortune either diminishes, or takes away altogether, all
sense of guilt. To remember how much he was resolved upon it, has no
other effect than to make him regard his escape as the greater and
more miraculous: for he still fancies that he has escaped, and he
looks back upon the danger to which his peace of mind was exposed,
with that terror, with which one {93} who is in safety may sometimes
remember the hazard he was in of falling over a precipice, and shudder
with horror at the thought.
2. The second effect of this influence of fortune, is to increase our
sense of the merit or demerit of actions beyond what is due to the
motives or affection from which they proceed, when they happen to give
occasion to extraordinary pleasure or pain. The agreeable or
disagreeable effects of the action often throw a shadow of merit or
demerit upon the agent, though in his intention there was nothing that
deserved either praise or blame, or at least that deserved them in the
degree in which we are apt to bestow them. Thus, even the messenger of
bad news is disagreeable to us, and, on the contrary, we feel a sort
of gratitude for the man who brings us good tidings. For a moment we
look upon them both as the authors, the one of our good, the other of
our bad fortune, and regard them in some measure as if they had really
brought about the events which they only give an account of. The first
author of our joy is naturally the object of a transitory gratitude:
we embrace him with warmth and affection, and should be glad, during
the instant of our prosperity, to reward him as for some signal
service. By the custom of all courts, the officer, who brings the news
of a victory, is entitled to considerable preferments, and the general
always chooses one of his principal favourites to go upon so agreeable
an errand. The first author of our sorrow is, on the contrary, just as
naturally the object of a transitory resentment. We can scarce avoid
looking upon him with chagrin and uneasiness; and the rude and brutal
are apt to vent upon him that spleen which his intelligence gives
occasion to. Tigranes, King of Armenia, struck off the head of the man
who brought him the first account of the approach of a formidable
enemy. To punish in this manner the author of bad tidings, seems
barbarous and inhuman: yet, to reward the messenger of good news, is
not disagreeable to us; we think it suitable to the bounty of kings.
But why do we make this difference, since, if there is no fault in the
one, neither is there any merit in the other? It is because any sort
of reason seems sufficient to authorize the exertion of the social and
benevolent affections; but it requires the most solid and substantial
to make us enter into that of the unsocial and malevolent.
But though in general we are averse to enter into the unsocial and
malevolent affections, though we lay it down for a rule that we ought
never to approve of their gratification, unless so far as the
malicious and unjust intention of the person, against whom they are
directed, renders him their proper object; yet, upon some occasions,
we relax of this severity. When the negligence of one man has
occasioned some unintended damage to another, we generally enter so
far into the resentment of the sufferer, as to approve of his
inflicting a punishment upon the offender much beyond what the offence
would have appeared to deserve, had no such unlucky consequence
followed from it.
{94} There is a degree of negligence, which would appear to deserve
some chastisement though it should occasion no damage to any body.
Thus, if a person should throw a large stone over a wall into a public
street without giving warning to those who might be passing by, and
without regarding where it was likely to fall, he would undoubtedly
deserve some chastisement. A very accurate police would punish so
absurd an action, even though it had done no mischief. The person who
has been guilty of it, shows an insolent contempt of the happiness and
safety of others. There is real injustice in his conduct. He wantonly
exposes his neighbour to what no man in his senses would choose to
expose himself, and evidently wants that sense of what is due to his
fellow-creatures, which is the basis of justice and of society. Gross
negligence therefore is, in the law, said to be almost equal to
malicious design. (Lata culpa prope dolum est.) When any unlucky
consequences happen from such carelessness, the person who has been
guilty of it, is often punished as if he had really intended those
consequences; and his conduct, which was only thoughtless and
insolent, and what deserved some chastisement, is considered as
atrocious, and as liable to the severest punishment. Thus if, by the
imprudent action above-mentioned, he should accidentally kill a man,
he is, by the laws of many countries, particularly by the old law of
Scotland, liable to the last punishment. And though this is no doubt
excessively severe, it is not altogether inconsistent with our natural
sentiments. Our just indignation against the folly and inhumanity of
his conduct is exasperated by our sympathy with the unfortunate
sufferer. Nothing, however, would appear more shocking to our natural
sense of equity, than to bring a man to the scaffold merely for having
thrown a stone carelessly into the street without hurting any body.
The folly and inhumanity of his conduct, however, would in this case
be the same; but still our sentiments would be very different. The
consideration of this difference may satisfy us how much the
indignation, even of the spectator, is apt to be animated by the
actual consequences of the action. In cases of this kind there will,
if I am not mistaken, be found a great degree of severity in the laws
of almost all nations; as I have already observed that in those of an
opposite kind there was a very general relaxation of discipline.
There is another degree of negligence which does not involve in it any
sort of injustice. The person who is guilty of it treats his neighbour
as he treats himself, means no harm to any body, and is far from
entertaining any insolent contempt for the safety and happiness of
others. He is not, however, so careful and circumspect in his conduct
as he ought to be, and deserves upon this account some degree of blame
and censure, but no sort of punishment. Yet if, by a negligence (Culpa
levis) of this kind he should occasion some damage to another person,
he is by the laws of, I believe, all countries, obliged to compensate
it. {95} And though this is, no doubt, a real punishment, and what no
mortal would have thought of inflicting upon him, had it not been for
the unlucky accident which his conduct gave occasion to; yet this
decision of the law is approved of by the natural sentiments of all
mankind. Nothing, we think, can be more just than that one man should
not suffer by the carelessness of another; and that the damage
occasioned by blamable negligence, should be made up by the person who
was guilty of it.
There is another species of negligence (Culpa levissima), which
consists merely in a want of the most anxious timidity and
circumspection, with regard to all the possible consequences of our
actions. The want of this painful attention, when no bad consequences
follow from it, is so far from being regarded as blamable, that the
contrary quality is rather considered as such. That timid
circumspection which is afraid of every thing, is never regarded as a
virtue, but as a quality which more than any other incapacitates for
action and business. Yet when, from a want of this excessive care, a
person happens to occasion some damage to another, he is often by the
law obliged to compensate it. Thus, by the Aquilian law, the man, who
not being able to manage a horse that had accidentally taken fright,
should happen to ride down his neighbour's slave, is obliged to
compensate the damage. When an accident of this kind happens, we are
apt to think that he ought not to have rode such a horse, and to
regard his attempting it as an unpardonable levity; though without
this accident we should not only have made no such reflection, but
should have regarded his refusing it as the effect of timid weakness,
and of an anxiety about merely possible events, which it is to no
purpose to be aware of. The person himself, who by an accident even of
this kind has involuntarily hurt another, seems to have some sense of
his own ill desert, with regard to him. He naturally runs up to the
sufferer to express his concern for what has happened, and to make
every acknowledgment in his power. If he has any sensibility, he
necessarily desires to compensate the damage, and to do every thing he
can to appease that animal resentment which he is sensible will be apt
to arise in the breast of the sufferer. To make no apology, to offer
no atonement, is regarded as the highest brutality. Yet why should he
make an apology more than any other person? Why should he, since he
was equally innocent with any other by-stander, be thus singled out
from among all mankind, to make up for the bad fortune of another?
This task would surely never be imposed upon him, did not even the
impartial spectator feel some indulgence for what may be regarded as
the unjust resentment of that other.
-----
{96}
CHAP. III.--_Of the final Cause of this Irregularity of
Sentiments._
SUCH is the effect of the good or bad consequence of actions upon the
sentiments both of the person who performs them, and of others; and
thus, Fortune, which governs the world, has some influence where we
should be least willing to allow her any, and directs in some measure
the sentiments of mankind, with regard to the character and conduct
both of themselves and others. That the world judges by the event, and
not by the design, has been in all ages the complaint, and is the
great discouragement of virtue. Every body agrees to the general
maxim, that as the event does not depend on the agent, it ought to
have no influence upon our sentiments, with regard to the merit or
propriety of his conduct. But when we come to particulars, we find
that our sentiments are scarce in any one instance exactly conformable
to what this equitable maxim would direct. The happy or unprosperous
event of any action, is not only apt to give us a good or bad opinion
of the prudence with which it was conducted, but almost always too
animates our gratitude or resentment, our sense of the merit or
demerit of the design.
Nature, however, when she implanted the seeds of this irregularity in
the human breast, seems, as upon all other occasions, to have intended
the happiness and perfection of the species. If the hurtfulness of the
design, if the malevolence of the affection, were alone the causes
which excited our resentment, we should feel all the furies of that
passion against any person in whose breast we suspected or believed
such designs or affections were harboured, though they had never broke
out into any actions. Sentiments, thoughts, intentions, would become
the objects of punishment; and if the indignation of mankind run as
high against them as against actions; if the baseness of the thought
which had given birth to no action, seemed in the eyes of the world as
much to call aloud for vengeance as the baseness of the action, every
court of judicature would become a real inquisition. There would be no
safety for the most innocent and circumspect conduct. Bad wishes, bad
views, bad designs, might still be suspected: and while these excited
the same indignation with bad conduct, while bad intentions were as
much resented as bad actions, they would equally expose the person to
punishment and resentment. Actions, therefore, which either produce
actual evil, or attempt to produce it, and thereby put us in the
immediate fear of it, are by the Author of nature rendered the only
proper and approved objects of human punishment and resentment.
Sentiments, designs, affections, though it is from these that
according to cool reason human actions derive their whole merit or
demerit, are placed by the great Judge of hearts beyond the limits of
every human jurisdiction, and are reserved for the cognisance of his
own unerring tribunal. That necessary rule of justice, therefore, that
{97} men in this life are liable to punishment for their actions only,
not for their designs and intentions, is founded upon this salutary
and useful irregularity in human sentiments concerning merit or
demerit, which at first sight appears so absurd and unaccountable. But
every part of nature, when attentively surveyed, equally demonstrates
the providential care of its Author, and we may admire the wisdom and
goodness of God even in the weakness and folly of men.
Nor is that irregularity of sentiments altogether without its utility,
by which the merit of an unsuccessful attempt to serve, and much more
that of mere good inclinations and kind wishes, appears to be
imperfect. Man was made for action, and to promote by the exertion of
his faculties such changes in the external circumstances both of
himself and others, as may seem most favourable to the happiness of
all. He must not be satisfied with indolent benevolence, nor fancy
himself the friend of mankind, because in his heart he wishes well to
the prosperity of the world. That he may call forth the whole vigour
of his soul, and strain every nerve, in order to produce those ends
which it is the purpose of his being to advance, Nature has taught
him, that neither himself nor mankind can be fully satisfied with his
conduct, nor bestow upon it the full measure of applause, unless he
has actually produced them. He is made to know, that the praise of
good intentions, without the merit of good offices, will be but of
little avail to excite either the loudest acclamations of the world,
or even the highest degree of self applause. The man who has performed
no single action of importance, but whose whole conversation and
deportment express the justest, the noblest, and most generous
sentiments, can be entitled to demand no very high reward, even though
his inutility should be owing to nothing but the want of an
opportunity to serve. We can still refuse it him without blame. We can
still ask him, What have you done? What actual service can you
produce, to entitle you to so great a recompense? We esteem you, and
love you; but we owe you nothing. To reward indeed that latent virtue
which has been useless only for want of an opportunity to serve, to
bestow upon it those honours and preferments, which, though in some
measure it may be said to deserve them, it could not with propriety
have insisted upon, is the effect of the most divine benevolence. To
punish, on the contrary, for the affections of the heart only, where
no crime has been committed, is the most insolent and barbarous
tyranny. The benevolent affections seem to deserve most praise, when
they do not wait till it becomes almost a crime for them not to exert
themselves. The malevolent, on the contrary, can scarce be too tardy,
too slow, or deliberate.
It is even of considerable importance, that the evil which is done
without design should be regarded as a misfortune to the doer as well
as to the sufferer. Man is thereby taught to reverence the happiness
of his brethren, to tremble lest he should, even unknowingly, do any
thing {98} that can hurt them, and to dread that animal resentment
which, he feels, is ready to burst out against him, if he should,
without design, be the unhappy instrument of their calamity. As in the
ancient heathen religion, that holy ground which had been consecrated
to some god, was not to be trod upon but upon solemn and necessary
occasions, and the man who had even ignorantly violated it, became
piacular from that moment, and, until proper atonement should be made,
incurred the vengeance of that powerful and invisible being to whom it
had been set apart; so by the wisdom of nature, the happiness of every
innocent man is, in the same manner, rendered holy, consecrated, and
hedged round against the approach of every other man; not to be
wantonly trod upon, not even to be, in any respect, ignorantly and
involuntarily violated, without requiring some expiation, some
atonement in proportion to the greatness of such undesigned violation.
A man of humanity, who accidentally, and without the smallest degree
of blamable negligence, has been the cause of the death of another
man, feels himself piacular, though not guilty. During his whole life
he considers this accident as one of the greatest misfortunes that
could have befallen him. If the family of the slain is poor, and he
himself in tolerable circumstances, he immediately takes them under
his protection, and, without any other merit, thinks them entitled to
every degree of favour and kindness. If they are in better
circumstances, he endeavours by every submission, by every expression
of sorrow, by rendering them every good office which he can devise or
they accept of, to atone for what has happened, and to propitiate, as
much as possible, their, perhaps natural, though no doubt most unjust
resentment, for the great, though involuntary, offence which he has
given unto them.
The distress which an innocent person feels, who, by some accident,
has been led to do something which, if it had been done with knowledge
and design, would have justly exposed him to the deepest reproach, has
given occasion to some of the finest and most interesting scenes both
of the ancient and of the modern drama. It is this fallacious sense of
guilt, if I may call it so, which constitutes the whole distress of
Oedipus and Jocasta upon the Greek, of Monimia and Isabella upon the
English, theatre. They are all in the highest degree piacular, though
not one of them is in the smallest degree guilty.
Notwithstanding, however, all these seeming irregularities of
sentiment, if man should unfortunately either give occasion to those
evils which he did not intend, or fail in producing that good which he
intended, Nature has not left his innocence altogether without
consolation, nor his virtue altogether without reward. He then calls
to his assistance that just and equitable maxim, That those events
which did not depend upon our conduct, ought not to diminish the
esteem that is due to us. He summons up his whole magnanimity and
firmness of {99} soul, and strives to regard himself, not in the light
in which he at present appears, but in that in which he ought to
appear, in which he would have appeared had his generous designs been
crowned with success, and in which he would still appear,
notwithstanding their miscarriage, if the sentiments of mankind were
either altogether candid and equitable, or even perfectly consistent
with themselves. The more candid and humane part of mankind entirely
go along with the efforts which he thus makes to support himself in
his own opinion. They exert their whole generosity and greatness of
mind, to correct in themselves this irregularity of human nature, and
endeavour to regard his unfortunate magnanimity in the same light in
which, had it been successful, they would, without any such generous
exertion, have naturally been disposed to consider it.
-----
_Part III. Of the Foundation of our Judgments concerning our own
Sentiments and Conduct, and of the Sense of Duty._
CHAP. I.--_Of the Principle of Self-approbation and of Self
-disapprobation._
IN the two foregoing parts of this discourse, I have chiefly
considered the origin and foundation of our judgments concerning the
sentiments and conduct of others. I come now to consider more
particularly the origin of those concerning our own.
The principle by which we naturally either approve or disapprove of
our own conduct, seems to be altogether the same with that by which we
exercise the like judgments concerning the conduct of other people. We
either approve or disapprove of the conduct of another man according
as we feel that, when we bring his case home to ourselves, we either
can or cannot entirely sympathize with the sentiments and motives
which directed it. And, in the same manner, we either approve or
disapprove of our own conduct, according as we feel that, when we
place ourselves in the situation of another man, and view it, as it
were, with his eyes and from his station, we either can or cannot
entirely enter into and sympathize with the sentiments and motives
which influenced it. We can never survey our own sentiments and
motives, we can never form any judgment concerning them; unless we
remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and
endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us. But we can do
this in no other way than by endeavouring to view them with the eyes
of other people, or as other people are likely to view them. Whatever
judgment we can form concerning them, accordingly, must always bear
some secret reference, either to what are, or to what, upon a certain
condition, {100} would be, or to what, we imagine, ought to be the
judgment of others. We endeavour to examine our own conduct as we
imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it. If,
upon placing ourselves in his situation, we thoroughly enter into all
the passions and motives which influenced it, we approve of it, by
sympathy with the approbation of this supposed equitable judge. If
otherwise, we enter into his disapprobation, and condemn it.
Were it possible that a human creature could grow up to manhood in
some solitary place, without any communication with his own species,
he could no more think of his own character, of the propriety or
demerit of his own sentiments and conduct, of the beauty or deformity
of his own mind, than of the beauty or deformity of his own face. All
these are objects which he cannot easily see, which naturally he does
not look at, and with regard to which he is provided with no mirror
which can present them to his view. Bring him into society, and he is
immediately provided with the mirror which he wanted before. It is
placed in the countenance and behaviour of those he lives with, which
always mark when they enter into, and when they disapprove of his
sentiments; and it is here that he first views the propriety and
impropriety of his own passions, the beauty and deformity of his own
mind. To a man who from his birth was a stranger to society, the
objects of his passions, the external bodies which either pleased or
hurt him, would occupy his whole attention. The passions themselves,
the desires or aversions, the joys or sorrows, which those objects
excited, though of all things the most immediately present to him,
could scarce ever be the objects of his thoughts. The idea of them
could never interest him so much as to call upon his attentive
consideration. The consideration of his joy could in him excite no new
joy, nor that of his sorrow any new sorrow, though the consideration
of the causes of those passions might often excite both. Bring him
into society and all his own passions will immediately become the
causes of new passions. He will observe that mankind approve of some
of them, and are disgusted by others. He will be elevated in the one
case, and cast down in the other; his desires and aversions, his joys
and sorrows, will now often become the causes of new desires and new
aversions, new joys and new sorrows: they will now, therefore,
interest him deeply, and often call upon his most attentive
consideration.
Our first ideas of personal beauty and deformity, are drawn from the
shape and appearance of others, not from our own. We soon become
sensible, however, that others exercise the same criticism upon us. We
are pleased when they approve of our figure, and are disobliged when
they seem to be disgusted. We become anxious to know how far our
appearance deserves either their blame or approbation. We examine our
persons limb by limb, and by placing ourselves before a looking-glass,
or by some such expedient, endeavour as much as {101} possible, to
view ourselves at the distance and with the eyes of other people. If,
after this examination, we are satisfied with our own appearance, we
can more easily support the most disadvantageous judgments of others.
If, on the contrary, we are sensible that we are the natural objects
of distaste, every appearance of their disapprobation mortifies us
beyond all measure. A man who is tolerably handsome, will allow you to
laugh at any little irregularity in his person; but all such jokes are
commonly unsupportable to one who is really deformed. It is evident,
however, that we are anxious about our own beauty and deformity, only
upon account of its effect upon others. If we had no connexion with
society, we should be altogether indifferent about either.
In the same manner our first moral criticisms are exercised upon the
characters and conduct of other people; and we are all very forward to
observe how each of these affects us. But we soon learn, that other
people are equally frank with regard to our own. We become anxious to
know how far we deserve their censure or applause, and whether to them
we must necessarily appear those agreeable or disagreeable creatures
which they represent us. We begin, upon this account, to examine our
own passions and conduct, and to consider how these must appear to
them; by considering how they would appear to us if in their
situation. We suppose ourselves the spectators of our own behaviour,
and endeavour to imagine what effect it would, in this light, produce
upon us. This is the only looking-glass by which we can, in some
measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of
our own conduct. If in this view it pleases us, we are tolerably
satisfied. We can be more indifferent about the applause, and, in some
measure, despise the censure of the world; secure that, however
misunderstood or misrepresented, we are the natural and proper objects
of approbation. On the contrary, if we are doubtful about it, we are
often, upon that very account, more anxious to gain their approbation,
and, provided we have not already, as they say, shaken hands with
infamy, we are altogether distracted at the thoughts of their censure,
which then strikes us with double severity.
When I endeavour to examine my own conduct, when I endeavour to pass
sentence upon it, and either to approve or condemn it, it is evident
that, in all such cases, I divide myself, as it were, into two
persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different
character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined into
and judged of. The first is the spectator, whose sentiments with
regard to my own conduct I endeavour to enter into, by placing myself
in his situation, and by considering how it would appear to me, when
seen from that particular point of view. The second is the agent, the
person whom I properly call myself, and of whose conduct, under the
character of a spectator, I was endeavouring to form some opinion. The
first is the judge; the second the person judged of. But that the
{102} judge should, in every respect, be the same with the person
judged of, is as impossible, as that the cause should, in every
respect, be the same with the effect.
To be amiable and to be meritorious; that is, to deserve love and to
deserve reward, are the great characters of virtue; and to be odious
and punishable, of vice. But all these characters have an immediate
reference to the sentiments of others. Virtue is not said to be
amiable, or to be meritorious, because it is the object of its own
love, or of its own gratitude; but because it excites those sentiments
in other men. The consciousness that it is the object of such
favourable regards, is the source of that inward tranquillity and
self-satisfaction with which it is naturally attended, as the
suspicion of the contrary gives occasion to the torments of vice. What
so great happiness as to be beloved, and to know that we deserve to be
beloved? What so great misery as to be hated, and to know that we
deserve to be hated?
-----
CHAP. II.--_Of the Love of Praise, and of that of Praise-worthiness;
and of the dread of Blame, and of that of Blame-worthiness._
MAN naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to
be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He
naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be
that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred. He
desires, not only praise, but praise-worthiness; or to be that thing
which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural
and proper object of praise. He dreads, not only blame, but
blame-worthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be
blamed by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of blame.
The love of praise-worthiness is by no means derived altogether from
the love of praise. Those two principles, though they resemble one
another, though they are connected, and often blended with one
another, are yet, in many respects, distinct and independent of one
another.
The love and admiration which we naturally conceive for those whose
character and conduct we approve of, necessarily dispose us to desire
to become ourselves the objects of the like agreeable sentiments, and
to be as amiable and as admirable as those whom we love and admire the
most. Emulation, the anxious desire that we ourselves should excel, is
originally founded in our admiration of the excellence of others.
Neither can we be satisfied with being merely admired for what other
people are admired. We must at least believe ourselves to be admirable
for what they are admirable. But, in order to attain this
satisfaction, we must become the impartial spectators of our own
character and conduct. We must endeavour to view them with the eyes of
other {103} people, or as other people are likely to view them. When
seen in this light, if they appear to us as we wish, we are happy and
contented. But it greatly confirms this happiness and contentment when
we find that other people, viewing them with those very eyes with
which we, in imagination only, were endeavouring to view them, see
them precisely in the same light in which we ourselves had seen them.
Their approbation necessarily confirms our own self-approbation. Their
praise necessarily strengthens our own sense of our own
praise-worthiness. In this case, so far is the love of
praise-worthiness from being derived altogether from that of praise;
that the love of praise seems, at least in a great measure, to be
derived from that of praise-worthiness.
The most sincere praise can give little pleasure when it cannot be
considered as some sort of proof of praise-worthiness. It is by no
means sufficient that, from ignorance or mistake, esteem and
admiration should, in some way or other, be bestowed upon us. If we
are conscious that we do not deserve to be so favourably thought of,
and that if the truth were known, we should be regarded with very
different sentiments, our satisfaction is far from being complete. The
man who applauds us either for actions which we did not perform, or
for motives which had no sort of influence upon our conduct, applauds
not us, but another person. We can derive no sort of satisfaction from
his praises. To us they should be more mortifying than any censure,
and should perpetually call to our minds, the most humbling of all
reflections, the reflection of what we ought to be, but what we are
not. A woman who paints, could derive, one should imagine, but little
vanity from the compliments that are paid to her complexion. These, we
should expect, ought rather to put her in mind of the sentiments which
her real complexion would excite, and mortify her the more by the
contrast. To be pleased with such groundless applause is a proof of
the most superficial levity and weakness. It is what is properly
called vanity, and is the foundation of the most ridiculous and
contemptible vices, the vices of affectation and common lying; follies
which, if experience did not teach us how common they are, one should
imagine the least spark of common sense would save us from. The
foolish liar, who endeavours to excite the admiration of the company
by the relation of adventures which never had any existence; the
important coxcomb, who gives himself airs of rank and distinction
which he well knows he has no just pretensions to; are both of them,
no doubt, pleased with the applause which they fancy they meet with.
But their vanity arises from so gross an illusion of the imagination,
that it is difficult to conceive how any rational creature should be
imposed upon by it. When they place themselves in the situation of
those whom they fancy they have deceived, they are struck with the
highest admiration for their own persons. They look upon themselves,
not in that light in which, they know, they ought to appear to their
companions, but in that in which they believe their {104} companions
actually look upon them. Their superficial weakness and trivial folly
hinder them from ever turning their eyes inwards, or from seeing
themselves in that despicable point of view in which their own
consciences must tell them that they would appear to every body, if
the real truth should ever come to be known.
As ignorant and groundless praise can give no solid joy, no
satisfaction that will bear any serious examination, so, on the
contrary, it often gives real comfort to reflect, that though no
praise should actually be bestowed upon us, our conduct, however, has
been such as to deserve it, and has been in every respect suitable to
those measures and rules by which praise and approbation are naturally
and commonly bestowed. We are pleased, not only with praise, but with
having done what is praise-worthy. We are pleased to think that we
have rendered ourselves the natural objects of approbation, though no
approbation should ever actually be bestowed upon us: and we are
mortified to reflect that we have justly merited the blame of those we
live with, though that sentiment should never actually be exerted
against us. The man who is conscious to himself that he has exactly
observed those measures of conduct which experience informs him are
generally agreeable, reflects with satisfaction on the propriety of
his own behaviour. When he views it in the light in which the
impartial spectator would view it, he thoroughly enters into all the
motives which influenced it. He looks back upon every part of it with
pleasure and approbation, and though mankind should never be
acquainted with what he has done, he regards himself, not so much
according to the light in which they actually regard him, as according
to that in which they would regard him if they were better informed.
He anticipates the applause and admiration which in this case would be
bestowed upon him, and he applauds and admires himself by sympathy
with sentiments, which do not indeed actually take place, but which
the ignorance of the public alone hinders from taking place, which he
knows are the natural and ordinary effects of such conduct, which his
imagination strongly connects with it, and which he has acquired a
habit of conceiving as something that naturally and in propriety ought
to follow from it. Men have voluntarily thrown away life to acquire
after death a renown which they could no longer enjoy. Their
imagination, in the mean time, anticipated that fame which was in
future times to be bestowed upon them. Those applauses which they were
never to hear rung in their ears; the thoughts of that admiration,
whose effects they were never to feel, played about their hearts,
banished from their breasts the strongest of all natural fears, and
transported them to perform actions which seem almost beyond the reach
of human nature. But in point of reality there is surely no great
difference between that approbation which is not to be bestowed till
we can no longer enjoy it, and that which, indeed, is never to be
bestowed, but which would be bestowed, if the world was ever made to
{105} understand properly the real circumstances of our behaviour. If
the one often produces such violent effects, we cannot wonder that the
other should always be highly regarded.
Nature, when she formed man for society, endowed him with an original
desire to please, and an original aversion to offend his brethren. She
taught him to feel pleasure in their favourable, and pain in their
unfavourable regard. She rendered their approbation most flattering
and most agreeable to him for its own sake; and their disapprobation
most mortifying and most offensive.
But this desire of the approbation, and this aversion to the
disapprobation of his brethren, would not alone have rendered him fit
for that society for which he was made. Nature, accordingly, has
endowed him, not only with a desire of being approved of, but with a
desire of being what ought to be approved of; or of being what he
himself approves of in other men. The first desire could only have
made him wish to appear to be fit for society. The second was
necessary in order to render him anxious to be really fit. The first
could only have prompted him to the affectation of virtue, and to the
concealment of vice. The second was necessary in order to inspire him
with the real love of virtue, and with the real abhorrence of vice. In
every well-formed mind this second desire seems to be the strongest of
the two. It is only the weakest and most superficial of mankind who
can be much delighted with that praise which they themselves know to
be altogether unmerited. A weak man may sometimes be pleased with it,
but a wise man rejects it upon all occasions. But, though a wise man
feels little pleasure from praise where he knows there is no
praise-worthiness, he often feels the highest in doing what he knows
to be praise-worthy, though he knows equally well that no praise is
ever to be bestowed upon it. To obtain the approbation of mankind,
where no approbation is due, can never be an object of any importance
to him. To obtain that approbation where it is really due, may
sometimes be an object of no great importance to him. But to be that
thing which deserves approbation, must always be an object of the
highest.
To desire, or even to accept of praise, where no praise is due, can be
the effect only of the most contemptible vanity. To desire it where it
is really due is to desire no more than that a most essential act of
justice should be done to us. The love of just fame, of true glory,
even for its own sake, and independent of any advantage which he can
derive from it, is not unworthy even of a wise man. He sometimes,
however, neglects, and even despises it; and he is never more apt to
do so than when he has the most perfect assurance of the perfect
propriety of every part of his own conduct. His self-approbation, in
this case, stands in need of no confirmation from the approbation of
other men. It is alone sufficient, and he is contented with it. This
self-approbation, if not the only, is at least the principal object,
{106} about which he can or ought to be anxious. The love of it is the
love of virtue.
As the love and admiration which we naturally conceive for some
characters, dispose us to wish to become ourselves the proper objects
of such agreeable sentiments; so the hatred and contempt which we as
naturally conceive for others, dispose us, perhaps still more
strongly, to dread the very thought of resembling them in any respect.
Neither is it, in this case, too, so much the thought of being hated
and despised that we are afraid of, as that of being hateful and
despicable. We dread the thought of doing any thing which can render
us the just and proper objects of the hatred and contempt of our
fellow-creatures; even though we had the most perfect security that
those sentiments were never actually to be exerted against us. The man
who has broke through all those measures of conduct, which can alone
render him agreeable to mankind, though he should have the most
perfect assurance that what he had done was for ever to be concealed
from every human eye, it is all to no purpose. When he looks back upon
it, and views it in the light in which the impartial spectator would
view it, he finds that he can enter into none of the motives which
influenced it. He is abashed and confounded at the thoughts of it, and
necessarily feels a very high degree of that shame which he would be
exposed to, if his actions should ever come to be generally known. His
imagination, in this case too, anticipates the contempt and derision
from which nothing saves him but the ignorance of those he lives with.
He still feels that he is the natural object of these sentiments, and
still trembles at the thought of what he would suffer, if they were
ever actually exerted against him. But if what he had been guilty of
was not merely one of those improprieties which are the objects of
simple disapprobation, but one of those enormous crimes which excite
detestation and resentment, he could never think of it, as long as he
had any sensibility left, without feeling all the agony of horror and
remorse; and though he could be assured that no man was ever to know
it, and could even bring himself to believe that there was no God to
revenge it, he would still feel enough of both these sentiments to
embitter the whole of his life: he would still regard himself as the
natural object of the hatred and indignation of all his
fellow-creatures; and, if his heart was not grown callous by the habit
of crimes, he could not think without terror and astonishment even of
the manner in which mankind would look upon him, of what would be the
expression of their countenance and of their eyes, if the dreadful
truth should ever come to be known. These natural pangs of an
affrighted conscience are the dæmons, the avenging furies, which, in
this life, haunt the guilty, which allow them neither quiet nor
repose, which often drive them to despair and distraction, from which
no assurance of secrecy can protect them, from which no principles of
irreligion can entirely deliver them, and from which {107} nothing can
free them but the vilest and most abject of all states, a complete
insensibility to honour and infamy, to vice and virtue. Men of the
most detestable characters, who, in the execution of the most dreadful
crimes, had taken their measures so coolly as to avoid even the
suspicion of guilt, have sometimes been driven, by the horror of their
situation, to discover, of their own accord, what no human sagacity
could ever have investigated. By acknowledging their guilt, by
submitting themselves to the resentment of their offended
fellow-citizens, and, by thus satiating that vengeance of which they
were sensible that they had become the proper objects, they hoped, by
their death to reconcile themselves, at least in their own
imagination, to the natural sentiments of mankind; to be able to
consider themselves as less worthy of hatred and resentment; to atone,
in some measure, for their crimes, and, by thus becoming the objects
rather of compassion than of horror, if possible, to die in peace and
with the forgiveness of all their fellow-creatures. Compared to what
they felt before the discovery, even the thought of this, it seems was
happiness.
In such cases, the horror of blame-worthiness seems, even in persons
who cannot be suspected of any extraordinary delicacy or sensibility
of character, completely to conquer the dread of blame. In order to
allay that horror, in order to pacify, in some degree, the remorse of
their own consciences, they voluntarily submitted themselves both to
the reproach and to the punishment which they knew were due to their
crimes, but which, at the same time, they might easily have avoided.
They are the most frivolous and superficial of mankind only who can be
much delighted with that praise which they themselves know to be
altogether unmerited. Unmerited reproach, however, is frequently
capable of mortifying very severely even men of more than ordinary
constancy. Men of the most ordinary constancy, indeed, easily learn to
despise those foolish tales which are so frequently circulated in
society, and which, from their own absurdity and falsehood, never fail
to die away in the course of a few weeks, or of a few days. But an
innocent man, though of more than ordinary constancy, is often, not
only shocked, but most severely mortified by the serious, though
false, imputation of a crime; especially when that imputation happens
unfortunately to be supported by some circumstances which gave it an
air of probability. He is humbled to find that any body should think
so meanly of his character as to suppose him capable of being guilty
of it. Though perfectly conscious of his own innocence, the very
imputation seems often, even in his own imagination, to throw a shadow
of disgrace and dishonour upon his character. His just indignation,
too, at so very gross an injury, which, however, it may frequently be
improper and sometimes even impossible to revenge, is itself a very
painful sensation. There is no greater tormentor of the human breast
than violent resentment which cannot be gratified. An innocent man,
brought to {108} the scaffold by the false imputation of an infamous
or odious crime, suffers the most cruel misfortune which it is
possible for innocence to suffer. The agony of his mind may, in this
case, frequently be greater than that of those who suffer for the like
crimes, of which they have been actually guilty. Profligate criminals,
such as common thieves and highwaymen, have frequently little sense of
the baseness of their own conduct, and consequently no remorse.
Without troubling themselves about the justice or injustice of the
punishment, they have always been accustomed to look upon the gibbet
as a lot very likely to fall to them. When it does fall to them,
therefore, they consider themselves only as not quite so lucky as some
of their companions, and submit to their fortune, without any other
uneasiness than what may arise from the fear of death; a fear which,
even by such worthless wretches, we frequently see, can be so easily,
and so very completely conquered. The innocent man, on the contrary,
over and above the uneasiness which this fear may occasion, is
tormented by his own indignation at the injustice which has been done
to him. He is struck with horror at the thoughts of the infamy which
the punishment may shed upon his memory, and foresees, with the most
exquisite anguish, that he is hereafter to be remembered by his
dearest friends and relations, not with regret and affection, but with
shame, and even with horror for his supposed disgraceful conduct: and
the shades of death appear to close round him with a darker and more
melancholy gloom than naturally belongs to them. Such fatal accidents,
for the tranquillity of mankind, it is to be hoped, happen very rarely
in any country; but they happen sometimes in all countries, even in
those where justice is in general very well administered. The
unfortunate Calas, a man of much more than ordinary constancy (broke
upon the wheel and burnt at Tholouse for the supposed murder of his
own son, of which he was perfectly innocent), seemed, with his last
breath, to deprecate, not so much the cruelty of the punishment, as
the disgrace which the imputation might bring upon his memory. After
he had been broke, and was just going to be thrown into the fire, the
monk, who attended the execution, exhorted him to confess the crime
for which he had been condemned. 'My father,' said Calas, 'can you
yourself bring yourself to believe that I am guilty?'
To persons in such unfortunate circumstances, that humble philosophy
which confines its views to this life, can afford, perhaps, but little
consolation. Every thing that could render either life or death
respectable is taken from them. They are condemned to death and to
everlasting infamy. Religion can alone afford them any effectual
comfort. She alone can tell them that it is of little importance what
man may think of their conduct, while the all-seeing Judge of the
world approves of it. She alone can present to them the view of
another world; a world of more candour, humanity, and justice, than
the present; where their {109} innocence is in due time to be
declared, and their virtue to be finally rewarded: and the same great
principle which can alone strike terror into triumphant vice, affords
the only effectual consolation to disgraced and insulted innocence.
In smaller offences, as well as in greater crimes, it frequently
happens that a person of sensibility is much more hurt by the unjust
imputation, than the real criminal is by the actual guilt. A woman of
gallantry laughs even at the well-founded surmises which are
circulated concerning her conduct. The worst founded surmise of the
same kind is a mortal stab to an innocent virgin. The person who is
deliberately guilty of a disgraceful action, we may lay it down, I
believe, as a general rule, can seldom have much sense of the
disgrace; and the person who is habitually guilty of it, can scarce
ever have any.
When every man, even of middling understanding, so readily despises
unmerited applause, how it comes to pass that unmerited reproach
should often be capable of mortifying so severely men of the soundest
and best judgment, may, perhaps, deserve some consideration.
Pain, I have already had occasion to observe, is, in almost all cases,
a more pungent sensation than the opposite and correspondent pleasure.
The one, almost always, depresses us much more below the ordinary, or
what may be called the natural, state of our happiness, than the other
ever raises us above it. A man of sensibility is apt to be more
humiliated by just censure than he is ever elevated by just applause.
Unmerited applause a wise man rejects with contempt upon all
occasions; but he often feels very severely the injustice of unmerited
censure. By suffering himself to be applauded for what he has not
performed, by assuming a merit which does not belong to him, he feels
that he is guilty of a mean falsehood, and deserves, not the
admiration, but the contempt of those very persons who, by mistake,
had been led to admire him. It may, perhaps, give him some
well-founded pleasure to find that he has been, by many people,
thought capable of performing what he did not perform. But, though he
may be obliged to his friends for their good opinion, he would think
himself guilty of the greatest baseness if he did not immediately
undeceive them. It gives him little pleasure to look upon himself in
the light in which other people actually look upon him, when he is
conscious that, if they knew the truth, they would look upon him in a
very different light. A weak man, however, is often much delighted
with viewing himself in this false and delusive light. He assumes the
merit of every laudable action that is ascribed to him, and pretends
to that of many which nobody ever thought of ascribing to him. He
pretends to have done what he never did, to have written what another
wrote, to have invented what another discovered; and is led into all
the miserable vices of plagiarism and common lying. But though no man
of {110} middling good sense can derive much pleasure from the
imputation of a laudable action which he never performed, yet a wise
man may suffer great pain from the serious imputation of a crime which
he never committed. Nature, in this case, has rendered the pain, not
only more pungent than the opposite and correspondent pleasure, but
she has rendered it so in a much greater than the ordinary degree. A
denial rids a man at once of the foolish and ridiculous pleasure; but
it will not always rid him of the pain. When he refuses the merit
which is ascribed to him, nobody doubts his veracity. It may be
doubted when he denies the crime which he is accused of. He is at once
enraged at the falsehood of the imputation, and mortified to find that
any credit should be given to it. He feels that his character is not
sufficient to protect him. He feels that his brethren, far from
looking upon him in that light in which he anxiously desires to be
viewed by them, think him capable of being guilty of what he is
accused of. He knows perfectly that he has not been guilty. He knows
perfectly what he has done; but, perhaps, scarce any man can know
perfectly what he himself is capable of doing. What the peculiar
constitution of his own mind may or may not admit of, is, perhaps,
more or less a matter of doubt to every man. The trust and good
opinion of his friends and neighbours, tends more than any thing to
relieve him from this most disagreeable doubt; their distrust and
unfavourable opinion to increase it. He may think himself very
confident that their unfavourable judgment is wrong: but this
confidence can seldom be so great as to hinder that judgment from
making some impression upon him; and the greater his sensibility, the
greater his delicacy, the greater his worth in short, this impression
is likely to be the greater.
The agreement or disagreement both of the sentiments and judgments of
other people with our own, is, in all cases, it must be observed, of
more or less importance to us, exactly in proportion as we ourselves
are more or less uncertain about the propriety of our own sentiments,
about the accuracy of our own judgments.
A man of sensibility may sometimes feel great uneasiness lest he
should have yielded too much even to what may be called an honourable
passion; to his just indignation, perhaps, at the injury which may
have been done either to himself or to his friend. He is anxiously
afraid lest, meaning only to act with spirit, and to do justice, he
may, from the too great vehemence of his emotion, have done a real
injury to some other person; who, though not innocent, may not have
been altogether so guilty as he at first apprehended. The opinion of
other people becomes, in this case, of the utmost importance to him.
Their approbation is the most healing balsam; their disapprobation,
the bitterest and most tormenting poison that can be poured into his
uneasy mind. When he is perfectly satisfied with every part of his own
conduct, the judgment of other people is often of less importance to
him.
{111} There are some very noble and beautiful arts, in which the
degree of excellence can be determined only by a certain nicety of
taste, of which the decisions, however, appear always, in some
measure, uncertain. There are others, in which the success admits,
either of clear demonstration, or very satisfactory proof. Among the
candidates for excellence in those different arts, the anxiety about
the public opinion is always much greater in the former than in the
latter.
The beauty of poetry is a matter of such nicety, that a young beginner
can scarce ever be certain that he has attained it. Nothing delights
him so much, therefore, as the favourable judgments of his friends and
of the public; and nothing mortifies him so severely as the contrary.
The one establishes, the other shakes, the good opinion which he is
anxious to entertain concerning his own performances. Experience and
success may in time give him a little more confidence in his own
judgment. He is at all times, however, liable to be most severely
mortified by the unfavourable judgments of the public. Racine was so
disgusted by the indifferent success of his Phædra, the finest
tragedy, perhaps, that is extant in any language, that, though in the
vigour of his life, and at the height of his abilities, he resolved to
write no more for the stage. That great poet used frequently to tell
his son, that the most paltry and impertinent criticism had always
given him more pain than the highest and justest eulogy had ever given
him pleasure. The extreme sensibility of Voltaire to the slightest
censure of the same kind is well known to every body. The Dunciad of
Mr. Pope is an everlasting monument of how much the most correct, as
well as the most elegant and harmonious of all the English poets, had
been hurt by the criticisms of the lowest and most contemptible
authors. Gray (who joins to the sublimity of Milton the elegance and
harmony of Pope, and to whom nothing is wanting to render him,
perhaps, the first poet in the English language, but to have written a
little more) is said to have been so much hurt by a foolish and
impertinent parody of two of his finest odes, that he never afterwards
attempted any considerable work. Those men of letters who value
themselves upon what is called fine writing in prose, approach
somewhat to the sensibility of poets.
Mathematicians, on the contrary, who may have the most perfect
assurance, both of the truth and of the importance of their
discoveries, are frequently very indifferent about the reception which
they may meet with from the public. The two greatest mathematicians
that I ever had the honour to be known to, and I believe, the two
greatest that have lived in my time, Dr. Robert Simpson of Glasgow,
and Dr. Matthew Stewart of Edinburgh, never seemed to feel even the
slightest uneasiness from the neglect with which the ignorance of the
public received some of their most valuable works. The great work of
Sir Isaac Newton, _his Mathematical Principles of Natural
Philosophy_, I {112} have been told, was for several years
neglected by the public. The tranquillity of that great man, it is
probable, never suffered, upon that account, the interruption of a
single quarter of an hour. Natural philosophers, in their independency
upon the public opinion, approach nearly to mathematicians, and, in
their judgments concerning the merit of their own discoveries and
observations, enjoy some degree of the same security and tranquillity.
The morals of those different classes of men of letters are, perhaps,
sometimes somewhat affected by this very great difference in their
situation with regard to the public.
Mathematicians and natural philosophers, from their independency upon
the public opinion, have little temptation to form themselves into
factions and cabals, either for the support of their own reputation,
or for the depression of that of their rivals. They are almost always
men of the most amiable simplicity of manners, who live in good
harmony with one another, are the friends of one another's reputation,
enter into no intrigue in order to secure the public applause, but are
pleased when their works are approved of, without being either much
vexed or very angry when they are neglected.
It is not always the same case with poets, or with those who value
themselves upon what is called fine writing. They are very apt to
divide themselves into a sort of literary faction; each cabal being
often avowedly, and almost always secretly, the mortal enemy of the
reputation of every other, and employing all the mean arts of intrigue
and solicitation to pre-occupy the public opinion in favour of the
works of its own members, and against those of its enemies and rivals.
In France, Despreaux and Racine did not think it below them to set
themselves at the head of a literary cabal, in order to depress the
reputation, first of Quinault and Perreault, and afterwards of
Fontenelle and La Motte, and even to treat the good La Fontaine with a
species of most disrespectful kindness. In England, the amiable Mr.
Addison did not think it unworthy of his gentle and modest character
to set himself at the head of a little cabal of the same kind, in
order to keep down the rising reputation of Mr. Pope. Mr. Fontenelle,
in writing the lives and characters of the members of the academy of
sciences, a society of mathematicians and natural philosophers, has
frequent opportunities of celebrating the amiable simplicity of their
manners; a quality which, he observes, was so universal among them as
to be characteristical, rather of that whole class of men of letters,
than of any individual. Mr. D'Alembert, in writing the lives and
characters of the members of the French Academy, a society of poets
and fine writers, or of those who are supposed to be such, seems not
to have had such frequent opportunities of making any remark of this
kind, and no where pretends to represent this amiable quality as
characteristical of that class of men of letters whom he celebrates.
{113} Our uncertainty concerning our own merit, and our anxiety to
think favourably of it, should together naturally enough make us
desirous to know the opinion of other people concerning it; to be more
than ordinarily elevated when that opinion is favourable, and to be
more than ordinarily mortified when it is otherwise: but they should
not make us desirous either of obtaining the favourable, or of
avoiding the unfavourable opinion, by intrigue and cabal. When a man
has bribed all the judges, the most unanimous decision of the court,
though it may gain him his law-suit, cannot give him any assurance
that he was in the right: and had he carried on his law-suit merely to
satisfy himself that he was in the right, he never would have bribed
the judges. But though he wished to find himself in the right, he
wished likewise to gain his law-suit; and therefore he bribed the
judges. If praise were of no consequence to us, but as a proof of our
own praise-worthiness, we never should endeavour to obtain it by
unfair means. But, though to wise men it is, at least in doubtful
cases, of principal consequence upon this account; it is likewise of
some consequence upon its own account: and therefore (we cannot,
indeed, upon such occasions, call them wise men), but men very much
above the common level have sometimes attempted both to obtain praise,
and to avoid blame, by very unfair means.
Praise and blame express what actually are, praise-worthiness and
blame-worthiness what naturally ought to be, the sentiments of other
people with regard to our character and conduct. The love of praise is
the desire of obtaining the favourable sentiments of our brethren. The
love of praise-worthiness is the desire of rendering ourselves the
proper objects of those sentiments. So far those two principles
resemble and are akin to one another. The like affinity and
resemblance take place between dread of blame and that of
blame-worthiness.
The man who desires to do, or who actually does, a praise-worthy
action, may likewise desire the praise which is due to it, and
sometimes, perhaps, more than is due to it. The two principles are in
this case blended together. How far his conduct may have been
influenced by the one, and how far by the other, may frequently be
unknown even to himself. It must almost always be so to other people.
They who are disposed to lessen the merit of his conduct, impute it
chiefly or altogether to the mere love of praise, or to what they call
mere vanity. They who are disposed to think more favourably of it,
impute it chiefly or altogether to the love of praise-worthiness; to
the love of what is really honourable and noble in human conduct; to
the desire, not merely of obtaining, but of deserving the approbation
and applause of his brethren. The imagination of the spectator throws
upon it either the one colour or the other, according either to his
habits of thinking, or to the favour or dislike which he may bear to
the person whose conduct he is considering.
{114} Some splenetic philosophers, in judging of human nature, have
done as peevish individuals are apt to do in judging of the conduct of
one another, and have imputed to the love of praise, or to what they
call vanity, every action which ought to be ascribed to that of
praise-worthiness. I shall hereafter have occasion to give an account
of some of their systems, and shall not at present stop to examine
them.
Very few men can be satisfied with their own private consciousness
that they have attained those qualities, or performed those actions,
which they admire and think praise-worthy in other people; unless it
is, at the same time, generally acknowledged that they possess the
one, or have performed the other; or, in other words, unless they have
actually obtained that praise which they think due both to the one and
to the other. In this respect, however, men differ considerably from
one another. Some seem indifferent about the praise, when, in their
own minds, they are perfectly satisfied that they have attained the
praise-worthiness. Others appear much less anxious about the
praise-worthiness than about the praise.
No man can be completely, or even tolerably satisfied, with having
avoided every thing blame-worthy in his conduct, unless he has
likewise avoided the blame or the reproach. A wise man may frequently
neglect praise, even when he has best deserved it; but, in all matters
of serious consequence, he will most carefully endeavour so to
regulate his conduct as to avoid, not only blame-worthiness, but, as
much as possible, every probable imputation of blame. He will never,
indeed, avoid blame by doing any thing which he judges blame-worthy;
by omitting any part of his duty, or by neglecting any opportunity of
doing any thing which he judges to be really and greatly
praise-worthy. But, with these modifications, he will most anxiously
and carefully avoid it. To show much anxiety about praise, even for
praise-worthy actions, is seldom a mark of great wisdom, but generally
of some degree of weakness. But, in being anxious to avoid the shadow
of blame or reproach, there may be no weakness, but frequently there
may be the most praise-worthy prudence.
'Many people,' says Cicero, 'despise glory, who are yet most severely
mortified by unjust reproach; and that most inconsistently.' This
inconsistency, however, seems to be founded in the unalterable
principles of human nature.
The all-wise Author of Nature has, in this manner, taught man to
respect the sentiments and judgments of his brethren; to be more or
less pleased when they approve of his conduct, and to be more or less
hurt when they disapprove of it. He has made man, if I may say so, the
immediate judge of mankind; and has, in this respect, as in many
others, created him after his own image, and appointed him his
vicegerent upon earth, to superintend the behaviour of his brethren.
They are taught by nature, to acknowledge that power and jurisdiction
which {115} has thus been conferred upon him, to be more or less
humbled and mortified when they have incurred his censure, and to be
more or less elated when they have obtained his applause.
But though man has, in this manner, been rendered the immediate judge
of mankind, he has been rendered so only in the first instance; and an
appeal lies from his sentence to a much higher tribunal, to the
tribunal of their own consciences, to that of the supposed impartial
and well-informed spectator, to that of the man within the breast, the
great judge and arbiter of their conduct The jurisdictions of those
two tribunals are founded upon principles which, though in some
respects resembling and akin, are, however, in reality different and
distinct. The jurisdiction of the man without, is founded altogether
in the desire of actual praise, and in the aversion to actual blame.
The jurisdiction of the man within, is founded altogether in the
desire of praise-worthiness, and in the aversion to blame-worthiness;
in the desire of possessing those qualities, and performing those
actions, which we love and admire in other people; and in the dread of
possessing those qualities, and performing those actions, which we
hate and despise in other people. If the man without should applaud
us, either for actions which we have not performed, or for motives
which had no influence upon us; the man within can immediately humble
that pride and elevation of mind which such groundless acclamations
might otherwise occasion, by telling us, that as we know that we do
not deserve them, we render ourselves despicable by accepting them.
If, on the contrary, the man without should reproach us, either for
actions which we never performed, or for motives which had no
influence upon those which we may have performed, the man within may
immediately correct this false judgment, and assure us, that we are by
no means the proper objects of that censure which has so unjustly been
bestowed upon us. But in this and in some other cases, the man within
seems sometimes, as it were, astonished and confounded by the
vehemence and clamour of the man without. The violence and loudness
with which blame is sometimes poured out upon us, seems to stupify and
benumb our natural sense of praise-worthiness and blame-worthiness;
and the judgments of the man within, though not, perhaps, absolutely
altered or perverted, are, however, so much shaken in the steadiness
and firmness of their decision, that their natural effect, in securing
the tranquillity of the mind, is frequently in a great measure
destroyed. We scarce dare to absolve ourselves, when all our brethren
appear loudly to condemn us. The supposed impartial spectator of our
conduct seems to give his opinion in our favour with fear and
hesitation; when that of all the real spectators, when that of all
those with whose eyes and from whose station he endeavours to consider
it, is unanimously and violently against us. In such cases, this
demigod within the breast appears, like the demigods of the poets,
though {116} partly of immortal, yet partly too of mortal extraction.
When his judgments are steadily and firmly directed by the sense of
praise-worthiness and blame-worthiness, he seems to act suitably to
his divine extraction: but when he suffers himself to be astonished
and confounded by the judgments of ignorant and weak man, he discovers
his connexion with mortality, and appears to act suitably, rather to
the human, than to the divine, part of his origin.
In such cases, the only effectual consolation of humbled and afflicted
man lies in an appeal to a still higher tribunal, to that of the
all-seeing Judge of the world, whose eye can never be deceived, and
whose judgments can never be perverted. A firm confidence in the
unerring rectitude of this great tribunal, before which his innocence
is in due time to be declared, and his virtue to be finally rewarded,
can alone support him under the weakness and despondency of his own
mind, under the perturbation and astonishment of the man within the
breast, whom nature has set up as, in this life, the great guardian,
not only of his innocence, but of his tranquillity. Our happiness in
this life is thus, upon many occasions, dependent upon the humble hope
and expectation of a life to come: a hope and expectation deeply
rooted in human nature; which can alone support its lofty ideas of its
own dignity; can alone illumine the dreary prospect of its continually
approaching mortality, and maintain its cheerfulness under all the
heaviest calamities to which, from the disorders of this life, it may
sometimes be exposed. That there is a world to come, where exact
justice will be done to every man, where every man will be ranked with
those who, in the moral and intellectual qualities, are really his
equals; where the owner of those humble talents and virtues which,
from being depressed by fortunes, had, in this life, no opportunity of
displaying themselves; which were unknown, not only to the public, but
which he himself could scarce be sure that he possessed, and for which
even the man within the breast could scarce venture to afford him any
distinct and clear testimony; where that modest, silent, and unknown
merit, will be placed upon a level, and sometimes above those who, in
this world, had enjoyed the highest reputation, and who, from the
advantage of their situation, had been enabled to perform the most
splendid and dazzling actions; is a doctrine, in every respect so
venerable, so comfortable to the weakness, so flattering to the
grandeur of human nature, that the virtuous man who has the misfortune
to doubt of it, cannot possibly avoid wishing most earnestly and
anxiously to believe it. It could never have been exposed to the
derision of the scoffer, had not the distribution of rewards and
punishments, which some of its most zealous assertors have taught us
was to be made in that world to come, been too frequently in direct
opposition to all our moral sentiments.
That the assiduous courtier is often more favoured than the faithful
and active servant; that attendance and adulation are often shorter
{117} and surer roads to preferment than merit or service; and that a
campaign at Versailles or St. James's is often worth two either in
Germany or Flanders, is a complaint which we have all heard from many
a venerable, but discontented, old officer. But what is considered as
the greatest reproach even to the weakness of earthly sovereigns, has
been ascribed, as an act of justice, to divine perfection; and the
duties of devotion, the public and private worship of the Deity, have
been represented, even by men of virtue and abilities, as the sole
virtues which can either entitle to reward or exempt from punishment
in the life to come. They were the virtues perhaps, most suitable to
their station, and in which they themselves chiefly excelled; and we
are all naturally disposed to over-rate the excellencies of our own
characters. In the discourse which the eloquent and philosophical
Massillon pronounced, on giving his benediction to the standards of
the regiment of Catinat, there is the following address to the
officers: 'What is most deplorable in your situation, gentlemen, is,
that in a life hard and painful, in which the services and the duties
sometimes go beyond the rigour and severity of the most austere
cloisters; you suffer always in vain for the life to come, and
frequently even for this life. Alas! the solitary monk in his cell,
obliged to mortify the flesh and to subject it to the spirit, is
supported by the hope of an assured recompense, and by the secret
unction of that grace which softens the yoke of the Lord. But you, on
the bed of death, can you dare to represent to Him your fatigues and
the daily hardships of your employment? can you dare to solicit Him
for any recompense? and in all the exertions that you have made, in
all the violences that you have done to yourselves, what is there that
He ought to place to His own account? The best days of your life,
however, have been sacrificed to your profession, and ten years'
service has more worn out your body, than would, perhaps, have done a
whole life of repentance and mortification. Alas! my brother, one
single day of those sufferings, consecrated to the Lord, would,
perhaps, have obtained you an eternal happiness. One single action,
painful to nature, and offered up to Him, would, perhaps, have secured
to you the inheritance of the saints. And you have done all this, and
in vain, for this world.'
To compare, in this manner, the futile mortifications of a monastery,
to the ennobling hardships and hazards of war; to suppose that one
day, or one hour, employed in the former should, in the eye of the
great Judge of the world, have more merit than a whole life spent
honourably in the latter, is surely contrary to all our moral
sentiments: to all the principles by which nature has taught us to
regulate our contempt or admiration. It is this spirit, however,
which, while it has reserved the celestial regions for monks and
friars, or for those whose conduct and conversation resembled those of
monks and friars, has condemned to the infernal all the heroes, all
the statesmen and lawgivers, all the poets {118} and philosophers of
former ages; all those who have invented, improved, or excelled in the
arts, which contribute to the subsistence, to the conveniency, or to
the ornament of human life; all the great protectors, instructors, and
benefactors of mankind; all those to whom our natural sense of
praise-worthiness forces us to ascribe the highest merit and most
exalted virtue. Can we wonder that so strange an application of this
most respectable doctrine should sometimes have exposed it to contempt
and derision; with those at least who had themselves, perhaps, no
great taste or turn for the devout and contemplative virtues?[3]
[Footnote 3: Vous y grillez sage et docte Platon,
Divin Homere, eloquent Ciceron, etc. _See_ Voltaire.]
-----
CHAP. III.--_Of the Influence and Authority of Conscience._
BUT though the approbation of his own conscience can scarce, upon some
extraordinary occasions, content the weakness of man; though the
testimony of the supposed impartial spectator of the great inmate of
the breast, cannot always alone support him; yet the influence and
authority of this principle is, upon all occasions, very great; and it
is only by consulting this judge within, that we can ever see what
relates to ourselves in its proper shape and dimensions; or that we
can ever make any proper comparison between our own interests and
those of other people.
As to the eye of the body, objects appear great or small, not so much
according to their real dimensions, as according to the nearness or
distance of their situation; so do they likewise to what may be called
the natural eye of the mind: and we remedy the defects of both these
organs pretty much in the same manner. In my present situation an
immense landscape of lawns, and woods, and distant mountains, seems to
do no more than cover the little window which I write by, and to be
out of all proportion less than the chamber in which I am sitting. I
can form a just comparison between those great objects and the little
objects around me, in no other way, than by transporting myself, at
least in fancy, to a different station, from whence I can survey both
at nearly equal distances, and thereby form some judgment of their
real proportions. Habit and experience have taught me to do this so
easily and so readily, that I am scarce sensible that I do it; and a
man must be, in some measure, acquainted with the philosophy of
vision, before he can be thoroughly convinced, how little those
distant objects would appear to the eye, if the imagination, from a
knowledge of their real magnitudes, did not swell and dilate them.
In the same manner, to the selfish and original passions of human
nature, the loss or gain of a very small interest of our own, appears
to be of vastly more importance, excites a much more passionate joy or
{119} sorrow, a much more ardent desire or aversion, than the greatest
concern of another with, whom we have no particular connexion. His
interests, as long as they are surveyed from this station, can never
be put into the balance with our own, can never restrain us from doing
whatever may tend to promote our own, how ruinous so ever to him.
Before we can make any proper comparison of those opposite interests,
we must change our position. We must view them, neither from our own
place nor yet from his, neither with our own eyes nor yet with his,
but from the place and with the eyes of a third person, who has no
particular connexion with either, and who judges with impartiality
between us. Here, too, habit and experience have taught us to do this
so easily and so readily, that we are scarce sensible that we do it;
and it requires, in this case too, some degree of reflection, and even
of philosophy, to convince us, how little interest we should take in
the greatest concerns of our neighbour, how little we should be
affected by whatever relates to him, if the sense of propriety and
justice did not correct the otherwise natural inequality of our
sentiments.
Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of
inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us
consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion
with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving
intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of
all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that
unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the
precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of
man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would, too,
perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings
concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the
commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in
general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these
humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his
business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the
same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The
most frivolous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a
more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow,
he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will
snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred
millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense
multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this
paltry misfortune of his own. To prevent, therefore, this paltry
misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice
the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never
seen them? Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the
world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a
villain as could be capable of entertaining it. But what makes this
{120} difference? When our passive feelings are almost always so
sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should
often be so generous and so noble? When we are always so much more
deeply affected by whatever concerns ourselves than by whatever
concerns other men, what is it which prompts the generous, upon all
occasions, and the mean upon many, to sacrifice their own interests to
the greater interests of others? It is not the soft power of humanity,
it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up
in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the
strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more
forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is
reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man
within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. It is he who,
whenever we are about to act so as to affect the happiness of others,
calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous
of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect
better than any other in it; and when we prefer ourselves so
shamefully and so blindly to others, we become the proper objects of
resentment, abhorrence, and execration. It is from him only that we
learn the real littleness of ourselves, and of whatever relates to
ourselves, and the natural misrepresentations of self-love can be
corrected only by the eye of this impartial spectator. It is he who
shows us the propriety of generosity and the deformity of injustice;
the propriety of resigning the greatest interests of our own, for the
yet greater interests of others, and the deformity of doing the
smallest injury to another, in order to obtain the greatest benefit to
ourselves. It is not the love of our neighbour, it is not the love of
mankind, which upon many occasions prompts us to the practice of those
divine virtues. It is a stronger love, a more powerful affection,
which generally takes place upon such occasions; the love of what is
honourable and noble, of the grandeur, and dignity, and superiority of
our own characters.
When the happiness or misery of others depends in any respect upon our
conduct, we dare not, as self-love might suggest to us, prefer the
interest of one to that of many. The man within immediately calls to
us, that we value ourselves too much and other people too little, and
that, by doing so, we render ourselves the proper object of the
contempt and indignation of our brethren. Neither is this sentiment
confined to men of extraordinary magnanimity and virtue. It is deeply
impressed upon every tolerably good soldier, who feels that he would
become the scorn of his companions, if he could be supposed capable of
shrinking from danger, or of hesitating, either to expose or to throw
away his life, when the good of the service required it.
One individual must never prefer himself so much even to any other
individual, as to hurt or injure that other, in order to benefit
himself, though the benefit to the one should be much greater than the
hurt or {121} injury to the other. The poor man must neither defraud
nor steal from the rich, though the acquisition might be much more
beneficial to the one than the loss could be hurtful to the other. The
man within immediately calls to him in this case too, that he is no
better than his neighbour, and that by his unjust preference he
renders himself the proper object of the contempt and indignation of
mankind; as well as of the punishment which that contempt and
indignation must naturally dispose them to inflict, for having thus
violated one of those sacred rules, upon the tolerable observation of
which depend the whole security and peace of human society. There is
no commonly honest man who does not more dread the inward disgrace of
such an action, the indelible stain which it would for ever stamp upon
his own mind, than the greatest external calamity which, without any
fault of his own, could possibly befal him; and who does not inwardly
feel the truth of that great stoical maxim, that for one man to
deprive another unjustly of any thing, or unjustly to promote his own
advantage by the loss or disadvantage of another, is more contrary to
nature, than death, than poverty, than pain, than all the misfortunes
which can affect him, either in his body, or in his external
circumstances.
When the happiness or misery of others, indeed, in no respect depends
upon our conduct, when our interests are altogether separated and
detached from theirs, so that there is neither connexion nor
competition between them, we do not always think it so necessary to
restrain, either our natural and, perhaps, improper anxiety about our
own affairs, or our natural and, perhaps, equally improper
indifference about those of other men. The most vulgar education
teaches us to act, upon all important occasions, with some sort of
impartiality between ourselves and others, and even the ordinary
commerce of the world is capable of adjusting our active principles to
some degree of propriety. But it is the most artificial and refined
education only, it has been said, which can correct the inequalities
of our passive feelings; and we must for this purpose, it has been
pretended, have recourse to the severest, as well as to the
profoundest philosophy.
Two different sets of philosophers have attempted to teach us this
hardest of all the lessons of morality. One set have laboured to
increase our sensibility to the interests of others; another, to
diminish that to our own. The first would have us feel for others as
we naturally feel for ourselves. The second would have us feel for
ourselves as we naturally feel for others. Both, perhaps, have carried
their doctrines a good deal beyond the just standard of nature and
propriety.
The first are those whining and melancholy moralists, who are
perpetually reproaching us with our happiness, while so many of our
brethren are in misery,[1*] who regard as impious the natural joy of
{122} prosperity, which does not think of the many wretches that are
at every instant labouring under all sorts of calamities, in the
languor of poverty, in the agony of disease, in the horrors of death,
under the insults and oppressions of their enemies. Commiseration for
those miseries which we never saw, which we never heard of, but which
we may be assured are at all times infesting such numbers of our
fellow-creatures, ought, they think, to damp the pleasures of the
fortunate, and to render a certain melancholy dejection habitual to
all men. But first of all, this extreme sympathy with misfortunes
which we know nothing about, seems altogether absurd and unreasonable.
Take the whole earth at an average, for one man who suffers pain or
misery, you will find twenty in prosperity and joy, or at least in
tolerable circumstances. No reason, surely, can be assigned why we
should rather weep with the one than rejoice with the twenty. This
artificial commiseration, besides, is not only absurd, but seems
altogether unattainable; and those who affect this character have
commonly nothing but a certain affected and sentimental sadness,
which, without reaching the heart, serves only to render the
countenance and conversation impertinently dismal and disagreeable.
And last of all, this disposition of mind, though it could be
attained, would be perfectly useless, and could serve no other purpose
than to render miserable the person who possessed it. Whatever
interest we take in the fortune of those with whom we have no
acquaintance or connexion, and who are placed altogether out of the
sphere of our activity, can produce only anxiety to ourselves without
any manner of advantage to them. To what purpose should we trouble
ourselves about the world in the moon? All men, even those at the
greatest distance, are no doubt entitled to our good wishes, and our
good wishes we naturally give them. But if, notwithstanding, they
should be unfortunate, to give ourselves any anxiety upon that
account, seems to be no part of our duty. That we should be but little
interested, therefore, in the fortune of those whom we can neither
serve nor hurt, and who are in every respect so very remote from us,
seems wisely ordered by nature; and if it were possible to alter in
this respect the original constitution of our frame, we could yet gain
nothing by the change.
[Footnote 1*: "Ah! little think the gay licentious proud," &c. See
Thomson's Seasons, Winter. See also Pascal.]
It is never objected to us that we have too little fellow-feeling with
the joy of success. Wherever envy does not prevent it, the favour
which we bear to prosperity is rather apt to be too great; and the
same moralists who blame us for want of sufficient sympathy with the
miserable, reproach us for the levity with which we are too apt to
admire and almost to worship the fortunate and the powerful.
Among the moralists who endeavour to correct the natural inequality of
our passive feelings by diminishing our sensibility to what peculiarly
concerns ourselves, we may count all the ancient sects of
philosophers, but particularly the ancient Stoics. Man, according to
the Stoics, {123} ought to regard himself, not as something separated
and detached, but as a citizen of the world, a member of the vast
commonwealth of nature. To the interest of this great community, he
ought at all times to be willing that his own little interest should
be sacrificed. Whatever concerns himself, ought to affect him no more
than whatever concerns any other equally important part of this
immense system. We should view ourselves, not in the light in which
our own selfish passions are apt to place us, but in the light in
which any other citizen of the world would view us. What befalls
ourselves we should regard as what befalls our neighbour, or, what
comes to the same thing, as our neighbour regards what befalls us.
'When our neighbour,' says Epictetus, 'loses his wife, or his son,
there is nobody who is not sensible that this is a human calamity, a
natural event altogether according to the ordinary course of things;
but when the same thing happens to ourselves, then we cry out, as if
we had suffered the most dreadful misfortune. We ought, however, to
remember how we were affected when this accident happened to another,
and such as we were in his case, such ought we to be in our own.'
Those private misfortunes, for which our feelings are apt to go beyond
the bounds of propriety, are of two different kinds. They are either
such as affect us only indirectly, by affecting, in the first place,
some other persons who are particularly dear to us; such as our
parents, our children, our brothers and sisters, our intimate friends;
or they are such as affect ourselves immediately and directly, either
in our body, in our fortune, or in our reputation; such as pain,
sickness, approaching death, poverty, disgrace, etc.
In misfortunes of the first kind, our emotions may, no doubt, go very
much beyond what exact propriety will admit of; but they may likewise
fall short of it, and they frequently do so. The man who should feel
no more for the death or distress of his own father, or son, than for
those of any other man's father or son, would appear neither a good
son nor a good father. Such unnatural indifference, far from exciting
our applause, would incur our highest disapprobation. Of these
domestic affections, however, some are most apt to offend by their
excess, and others by their defect. Nature, for the wisest purposes,
has rendered, in most men, perhaps in all men, parental tenderness a
much stronger affection than filial piety. The continuance and
propagation of the species depend altogether upon the former, and not
upon the latter. In ordinary cases, the existence and preservation
of the child depend altogether upon the care of the parents. Those of
the parents seldom depend upon that of the child. Nature, therefore,
has rendered the former affection so strong, that it generally
requires not to be excited, but to be moderated; and moralists seldom
endeavour to teach us how to indulge, but generally how to restrain
our fondness, our excessive attachment, the unjust preference which we
{124} are disposed to give to our own children above those of other
people. They exhort us, on the contrary, to an affectionate attention
to our parents, and to make a proper return to them, in their old age,
for the kindness which they had shown to us in our infancy and youth.
In the Decalogue we are commanded to honour our fathers and mothers.
No mention is made of the love of our children. Nature has
sufficiently prepared us for the performance of this latter duty. Men
are seldom accused of affecting to be fonder of their children than
they really are. They have sometimes been suspected of displaying
their piety to their parents with too much ostentation. The
ostentatious sorrow of widows has, for a like reason, been suspected
of insincerity. We should respect, could we believe it sincere, even
the excess of such kind affections; and though we might not perfectly
approve, we should not severely condemn it. That it appears
praise-worthy, at least in the eyes of those who affect it, the very
affectation is a proof.
Even the excess of those kind affections which are most apt to offend
by their excess, though it may appear blamable, never appears odious.
We blame the excessive fondness and anxiety of a parent, as something
which may, in the end, prove hurtful to the child, and which, in the
mean time, is excessively inconvenient to the parent; but we easily
pardon it, and never regard it with hatred and detestation. But the
defect of this usually excessive affection appears always peculiarly
odious. The man who appears to feel nothing for his own children, but
who treats them upon all occasions with unmerited severity and
harshness, seems of all brutes the most detestable. The sense of
propriety, so far from requiring us to eradicate altogether that
extraordinary sensibility which we naturally feel for the misfortunes
of our nearest connections, is always much more offended by the
defect, than it ever is by the excess of that sensibility. The stoical
apathy is, in such cases, never agreeable, and all the metaphysical
sophism by which it is supported can seldom serve any other purpose
than to blow up the hard insensibility of a coxcomb to ten times its
native impertinence. The poets and romance writers, who best paint the
refinements and delicacies of love and friendship, and of all other
private and domestic affections, Racine and Voltaire; Richardson,
Maurivaux, and Riccoboni; are, in such cases, much better instructors
than the philosophers Zeno, Chrysippus, or Epictetus.
That moderated sensibility to the misfortunes of others, which does
not disqualify us for the performance of any duty; the melancholy and
affectionate remembrance of our departed friends; _the pang_, as
Gray says, _to secret sorrow dear_; are by no means undelicious
sensations. Though they outwardly wear the features of pain and grief,
they are all inwardly stamped with the ennobling characters of virtue
and of self-approbation.
It is otherwise in the misfortunes which affect ourselves immediately
{125} and directly, either in our body, in our fortune, or in our
reputation. The sense of propriety is much more apt to be offended by
the excess, than by the defect of our sensibility, and there are but
few cases in which we can approach too near to the stoical apathy and
indifference.
That we have very little fellow-feeling with any of the passions which
take their origin from the body, has already been observed. That pain
which is occasioned by an evident cause; such as, the cutting or
tearing of the flesh; is, perhaps, the affection of the body with
which the spectator feels the most lively sympathy. The approaching
death of his neighbour, too, seldom fails to affect him a good deal.
In both cases, however, he feels so very little in comparison of what
the person principally concerned feels, that the latter can scarce
ever offend the former by appearing to suffer with too much ease.
The mere want of fortune, mere poverty, excites little compassion. Its
complaints are too apt to be the objects rather of contempt than of
fellow-feeling. We despise a beggar; and, though his importunities may
extort an alms from us, he is scarce ever the object of any serious
commiseration. The fall from riches to poverty, as it commonly
occasions the most real distress to the sufferer, so it seldom fails
to excite the most sincere commiseration in the spectator. Though, in
the present state of society, this misfortune can seldom happen
without some misconduct, and some very considerable misconduct too, in
the sufferer; yet he is almost always so much pitied that he is scarce
ever allowed to fall into the lowest state of poverty; but by the
means of his friends, frequently by the indulgence of those very
creditors who have much reason to complain of his imprudence, is
almost always supported in some degree of decent, though humble,
mediocrity. To persons under such misfortunes, we could, perhaps,
easily pardon some degree of weakness; but at the same time, they who
carry the firmest countenance, who accommodate themselves with the
greatest ease to their new situation, who seem to feel no humiliation
from the change, but to rest their rank in the society, not upon their
fortune, but upon their character and conduct, are always the most
approved of, and command our highest and most affectionate admiration.
As, of all the external misfortunes which can affect an innocent man
immediately and directly, the undeserved loss of reputation is
certainly the greatest; so a considerable degree of sensibility to
whatever can bring on so great a calamity, does not always appear
ungraceful or disagreeable. We often esteem a young man the more, when
he resents, though with some degree of violence, any unjust reproach
that may have been thrown upon his character or his honour. The
affliction of an innocent young lady, on account of the groundless
surmises which may have been circulated concerning her conduct,
appears often perfectly amiable. Persons of an advanced age, whom long
experience of the folly and injustice of the world has taught to pay
little regard, {126} either to its censure or to its applause, neglect
and despise obloquy, and do not even deign to honour its futile
authors with any serious resentment. This indifference, which is
founded altogether on a firm confidence in their own well-tried and
well-established characters, would be disagreeable in young people,
who neither can nor ought to have any such confidence. It might in
them be supposed to forebode, in their advancing years, a most
improper insensibility to real honour and infamy of character.
In all other private misfortunes which affect ourselves immediately
and directly, we can very seldom offend by appearing to be too little
affected. We frequently remember our sensibility to the misfortunes of
others with pleasure and satisfaction. We can seldom remember that to
our own, without some degree of shame and humiliation.
If we examine the different shades and gradations of weakness and
self-command, as we meet with them in common life, we shall very
easily satisfy ourselves that this control of our passive feeling must
be acquired, not from the abstruse syllogisms of a quibbling
dialectic, but from that great discipline which Nature has established
for the acquisition of this and of every other virtue; a regard to the
sentiments of the real or supposed spectator of our conduct.
A very young child has no self-command; but, whatever are its
emotions, whether fear, or grief, or anger, it endeavours always, by
the violence of his outcries, to alarm, as much as it can, the
attention of its nurse or of its parents. While it remains under the
custody of such partial protectors, its anger is the first and,
perhaps, the only passion which it is taught to moderate. By noise and
threatening they are, for their own ease, often obliged to frighten it
into good temper; and the passion which incites it to attack, is
restrained by that which teaches it to attend to its own safety. When
it is old enough to go to school, or to mix with its equals, it soon
finds that they have no such indulgent partiality. It naturally wishes
to gain their favour, and to avoid their hatred or contempt. Regard
even to its own safety teaches it to do so; and it soon finds that it
can do so in no other way than by moderating not only its anger, but
all its other passions, to the degree which its play-fellows and
companions are likely to be pleased with. It thus enters into the
great school of self-command, it studies to be more and more master of
itself, and begins to exercise over its own feelings a discipline
which the practice of the longest life is very seldom sufficient to
bring to complete perfection.
In all private misfortunes, in pain, in sickness, in sorrow, the
weakest man, when his friend, and still more when a stranger visits
him, is immediately impressed with the view in which they are likely
to look upon his situation. Their view calls off his attention from
his own view; and his breast is, in some measure, becalmed the moment
they come into his presence. This effect is produced instantaneously
and, {127} as it were, mechanically; but, with a weak man, it is not
of long continuance. His own view of his situation immediately recurs
upon him. He abandons himself, as before, to sighs and tears and
lamentations; and endeavours, like a child that has not yet gone to
school, to produce some sort of harmony between his own grief and the
compassion of the spectator, not by moderating the former, but by
importunately calling upon the latter.
With a man of a little more firmness, the effect is somewhat more
permanent. He endeavours, as much as he can, to fix his attention upon
the view which the company are likely to take of his situation. He
feels, at the same time, the esteem and approbation which they
naturally conceive for him when he thus preserves his tranquillity;
and, though under the pressure of some recent and great calamity,
appears to feel for himself no more than what they really feel for
him. He approves and applauds himself by sympathy with their
approbation, and the pleasure which he derives from this sentiment
supports and enables him more easily to continue this generous effort.
In most cases he avoids mentioning his own misfortune; and his
company, if they are tolerably well bred, are careful to say nothing
which can put him in mind of it. He endeavours to entertain them, in
his usual way, upon indifferent subjects, or, if he feels himself
strong enough to venture to mention his misfortune, he endeavours to
talk of it as, he thinks, they are capable of talking of it, and even
to feel it no further than they are capable of feeling it. If he has
not, however, been well inured to the hard discipline of self-command,
he soon grows weary of this restraint. A long visit fatigues him; and,
towards the end of it, he is constantly in danger of doing, what he
never fails to do the moment it is over, of abandoning himself to all
the weakness of excessive sorrow. Modern good manners, which are
extremely indulgent to human weakness, forbid, for some time, the
visits of strangers to persons under great family distress, and permit
those only of the nearest relations and most intimate friends. The
presence of the latter, it is thought, will impose less restraint than
that of the former; and the sufferers can more easily accommodate
themselves to the feelings of those, from whom they have reason to
expect a more indulgent sympathy. Secret enemies, who fancy that they
are not known to be such, are frequently fond of making those
charitable visits as early as the most intimate friends. The weakest
man in the world, in this case, endeavours to support his manly
countenance, and, from indignation and contempt of their malice to
behave with as much gaiety and ease as he can.
The man of real constancy and firmness, the wise and just man who has
been thoroughly bred in the great school of self-command, in the
bustle and business of the world, exposed, perhaps, to the violence
and injustice of faction, and to the hardships and hazards of war,
maintains this control of his passive feelings upon all occasions; and
whether in {128} solitude or in society, wears nearly the same
countenance, and is affected very nearly in the same manner. In
success and in disappointment, in prosperity and in adversity, before
friends and before enemies, he has often been under the necessity of
supporting this manhood. He has never dared to forget for one moment
the judgment which the impartial spectator would pass upon his
sentiments and conduct. He has never dared to suffer the man within
his breast to be absent one moment from his attention. With the eyes
of this great inmate he has always been accustomed to regard whatever
relates to himself. This habit has become perfectly familiar to him.
He has been in the constant practice, and, indeed, under the constant
necessity, of modelling, or of endeavouring to model, not only his
outward conduct and behaviour, but, as much as he can, even his inward
sentiments and feelings, according to those of this awful and
respectable judge. He does not merely affect the sentiments of the
impartial spectator. He really adopts them. He almost identifies
himself with, he almost becomes himself that impartial spectator, and
scarce even feels but as that great arbiter of his conduct directs him
to feel.
The degree of the self-approbation with which every man, upon such
occasions, surveys his own conduct, is higher or lower, exactly in
proportion to the degree of self-command which is necessary in order
to obtain that self-approbation. Where little self-command is
necessary, little self-approbation is due. The man who has only
scratched his ringer, cannot much applaud himself, though he should
immediately appear to have forgot this paltry misfortune. The man who
has lost his leg by a cannon shot, and who, the moment after, speaks
and acts with his usual coolness and tranquillity, as he exerts a much
higher degree of self-command, so he naturally feels a much higher
degree of self-approbation. With most men, upon such an accident,
their own natural view of their own misfortune would force itself upon
them with such a vivacity and strength of colouring, as would entirely
efface all thought of every other view. They would feel nothing, they
could attend to nothing, but their own pain and their own fear; and
not only the judgment of the ideal man within the breast, but that of
the real spectators who might happen to be present, would be entirely
overlooked and disregarded.
The reward which Nature bestows upon good behaviour under misfortune,
is thus exactly proportioned to the degree of that good behaviour. The
only compensation she could possibly make for the bitterness of pain
and distress is thus, too, in equal degrees of good behaviour, exactly
proportioned to the degree of that pain and distress. In proportion to
the degree of self-command which is necessary in order to conquer our
natural sensibility, the pleasure and pride of the conquest are so
much the greater; and this pleasure and pride are so great that no man
can be altogether unhappy who completely enjoys them. Misery {129} and
wretchedness can never enter the breast in which dwells complete
self-satisfaction; and though it may be too much, perhaps, to say,
with the Stoics, that, under such an accident as that above mentioned,
the happiness of a wise man is in every respect equal to what it could
have been under any other circumstances; yet it must be acknowledged,
at least, that this complete enjoyment of his own self-applause,
though it may not altogether extinguish, must certainly very much
alleviate his sense of his own sufferings.
In such paroxysms of distress, if I may be allowed to call them so,
the wisest and firmest man, in order to preserve his equanimity, is
obliged, I imagine, to make a considerable, and even a painful
exertion. His own natural feeling of his own distress, his own natural
view of his own situation, presses hard upon him, and he cannot,
without a very great effort, fix his attention upon that of the
impartial spectator. Both views present themselves to him at the same
time. His sense of honour, his regard to his own dignity, directs him
to fix his whole attention upon the one view. His natural, his
untaught, and undisciplined feelings, are continually calling it off
to the other. He does not, in this case, perfectly identify himself
with the ideal man within the breast, he does not become himself the
impartial spectator of his own conduct. The different views of both
characters exist in his mind separate and distinct from one another,
and each directing him to a behaviour different from that to which the
other directs him. When he follows that view which honour and dignity
point out to him, Nature does not, indeed, leave him without a
recompense. He enjoys his own complete self-approbation, and the
applause of every candid and impartial spectator. By her unalterable
laws, however, he still suffers; and the recompense which she bestows,
though very considerable, is not sufficient completely to compensate
the sufferings which those laws inflict. Neither is it fit that it
should. If it did completely compensate them, he could, from
self-interest, have no motive for avoiding an accident which must
necessarily diminish his utility both to himself and to society; and
Nature, from her parental care of both, meant that he should anxiously
avoid all such accidents. He suffers, therefore; and though in the
agony of the paroxysm, he maintains, not only the manhood of his
countenance, but sedateness and sobriety of judgment, it requires his
utmost and most fatiguing exertions to do so.
By the constitution of human nature, however, agony can never be
permanent; and, if he survives the paroxysm, he soon comes, without
any effort, to enjoy his ordinary tranquillity. A man with a wooden
leg suffers, no doubt, and foresees that he must continue to suffer
during the remainder of his life, a very considerable inconveniency.
He soon comes to view it, however, exactly as every impartial
spectator views it; as an inconveniency under which he can enjoy all
the ordinary pleasures both of solitude and of society. He soon
identifies {130} himself with the ideal man within the breast, he soon
becomes himself the impartial spectator of his own situation. He no
longer weeps, he no longer laments, he no longer grieves over it, as a
weak man may sometimes do in the beginning. The view of the impartial
spectator becomes so perfectly habitual to him, that, without effort,
without exertion, he never thinks of surveying his misfortune in any
other view.
The never-failing certainty with which all men, sooner or later,
accommodate themselves to whatever becomes their permanent situation,
may, perhaps, induce us to think that the Stoics were, at least, thus
far very nearly in the right; that, between one permanent situation
and another, there was, with regard to real happiness, no essential
difference: or that, if there were any difference, it was no more than
just sufficient to render some of them the objects of simple choice or
preference; but not of any earnest or anxious desire: and others, of
simple rejection, as being fit to be set aside or avoided; but not of
any earnest or anxious aversion. Happiness consists in tranquillity
and enjoyment. Without tranquillity there can be no enjoyment; and
where there is perfect tranquillity there is scarce any thing which is
not capable of amusing. But in every permanent situation, where there
is no expectation of change, the mind of every man, in a longer or
shorter time, returns to its natural and usual state of tranquillity.
In prosperity, after a certain time, it falls back to that state; in
adversity, after a certain time, it rises up to it. In the confinement
and solitude of the Bastile, after a certain time, the fashionable and
frivolous Count de Lauzun recovered tranquillity enough to be capable
of amusing himself with feeding a spider. A mind better furnished
would, perhaps, have both sooner recovered its tranquillity, and
sooner found, in its own thoughts, a much better amusement.
The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems
to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent
situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between
poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public
station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation.
The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions,
is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed
to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he
so foolishly admires. The slightest observation, however, might
satisfy him, that, in all the ordinary situations of human life, a
well-disposed mind may be equally calm, equally cheerful, and equally
contented. Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be
preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with
that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of
prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our
minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by
remorse from the horror of our own injustice. Wherever prudence does
not direct, {131} wherever justice does not permit, the attempt to
change our situation, the man who does attempt it, plays at the most
unequal of all games of hazard, and stakes every thing against scarce
any thing. What the favourite of the King of Epirus said to his
master, may be applied to men in all the ordinary situations of human
life. When the king had recounted to him, in their proper order, all
the conquests which he proposed to make, and had come to the last of
them; And what does your Majesty propose to do then? said the
favourite:--I propose then, said the king, to enjoy myself with my
friends, and endeavour to be good company over a bottle.--And what
hinders your Majesty from doing so now? replied the favourite. In the
most glittering and exalted situation that our idle fancy can hold out
to us, the pleasures from which we propose to derive our real
happiness, are almost always the same with those which, in our actual,
though humble station, we have at all times at hand, and in our power.
Except the frivolous pleasures of vanity and superiority, we may find,
in the most humble station, where there is only personal liberty,
every other which the most exalted can afford; and the pleasures of
vanity and superiority are seldom consistent with perfect
tranquillity, the principle and foundation of all real and
satisfactory enjoyment. Neither is it always certain that, in the
splendid situation which we aim at, those real and satisfactory
pleasures can be enjoyed with the same security as in the humble one
which we are so very eager to abandon. Examine the records of history,
recollect what has happened within the circle of your own experience,
consider with attention what has been the conduct of almost all the
greatly unfortunate, either in private or public life, whom you may
have either read of, or heard of, or remember; and you will find that
the misfortunes of by far the greater part of them have arisen from
their not knowing when they were well, when it was proper for them to
sit still and to be contented. The inscription upon the tomb-stone of
the man who had endeavoured to mend a tolerable constitution by taking
physic; '_I was well; I wished to be better; here I am_;' may
generally be applied with great justness to the distress of
disappointed avarice and ambition.
It may be thought a singular, but I believe it to be a just,
observation, that, in the misfortunes which admit of some remedy, the
greater part of men do not either so readily or so universally recover
their natural and usual tranquillity, as in those which plainly admit
of none. In misfortunes of the latter kind, it is chiefly in what may
be called the paroxysm, or in the first attack, that we can discover
any sensible difference between the sentiments and behaviour of the
wise and those of the weak man. In the end, Time, the great and
universal comforter, gradually composes the weak man to the same
degree of tranquillity which a regard to his own dignity, which
manhood teaches the wise man to assume in the beginning. The case of
the man with the wooden {132} leg is an obvious example of this. In
the irreparable misfortunes occasioned by the death of children, or of
friends and relations, even a wise man may for some time indulge
himself in some degree of moderated sorrow. An affectionate, but weak
woman, is often, upon such occasions, almost perfectly distracted.
Time, however, in a longer or shorter period, never fails to compose
the weakest woman to the same degree of tranquillity as the strongest
man. In all the irreparable calamities which affect himself
immediately and directly, a wise man endeavours, from the beginning,
to anticipate and to enjoy before-hand, that tranquillity which he
foresees the course of a few months, or a few years, will certainly
restore to him in the end.
In the misfortunes for which the nature of things admits, or seems to
admit, of a remedy, but in which the means of applying that remedy are
not within the reach of the sufferer, his vain and fruitless attempts
to restore himself to his former situation, his continual anxiety for
their success, his repeated disappointments upon their miscarriage,
are what chiefly hinder him from resuming his natural tranquillity,
and frequently render miserable, during the whole of his life, a man
to whom a greater misfortune, but which plainly admitted of no remedy,
would not have given a fortnight's disturbance. In the fall from royal
favour to disgrace, from power to insignificancy, from riches to
poverty, from liberty to confinement, from strong health to some,
lingering, chronical, and perhaps incurable disease, the man who
struggles the least, who most easily and readily acquiesces in the
fortune which has fallen to him, very soon recovers his usual and
natural tranquillity, and surveys the most disagreeable circumstances
of his actual situation in the same light, or, perhaps, in a much less
unfavourable light, than that in which the most indifferent spectator
is disposed to survey them. Faction, intrigue, and cabal, disturb the
quiet of the unfortunate statesman. Extravagant projects, visions of
gold mines, interrupt the repose of the mined bankrupt. The prisoner,
who is continually plotting to escape from his confinement, cannot
enjoy that careless security which even a prison can afford him. The
medicines of the physician are often the greatest torment of the
incurable patient. The monk who, in order to comfort Joanna of
Castile, upon the death of her husband Philip, told her of a king,
who, fourteen years after his decease, had been restored to life
again, by the prayers of his afflicted queen, was not likely, by his
legendary tale, to restore sedateness to the distempered mind of that
unhappy princess. She endeavoured to repeat the same experiment in
hopes of the same success; resisted for a long time the burial of her
husband, soon after raised his body from the grave, attended it almost
constantly herself, and watched, with all the impatient anxiety of
frantic expectation, the happy moment when her wishes were to be
gratified by the revival of her beloved Philip.[4]
[Footnote 4: See Robertson's Charles V. vol. ii. pp. 14 and 15, first
edit.]
{133} Our sensibility to the feelings of others, so far from being
inconsistent with the manhood of self-command, is the very principle
upon which that manhood is founded. The very same principle or
instinct which, in the misfortune of our neighbour, prompts us to
compassionate his sorrow; in our own misfortune, prompts us to
restrain the abject and miserable lamentations of our own sorrow. The
same principle or instinct which, in his prosperity and success,
prompts us to congratulate his joy; in our own prosperity and success,
prompts us to restrain the levity and intemperance of our own joy. In
both cases, the propriety of our own sentiments and feelings seems to
be exactly in proportion to the vivacity and force with which we enter
into and conceive his sentiments and feelings.
The man of the most perfect virtue, the man whom we naturally love and
revere the most, is he who joins, to the most perfect command of his
own original and selfish feelings, the most exquisite sensibility both
to the original and sympathetic feelings of others. The man who, to
all the soft, the amiable, and the gentle virtues, joins all the
great, the awful, and the respectable, must surely be the natural and
proper object of our highest love and admiration.
The person best fitted by nature for acquiring the former of those two
sets of virtues, is likewise necessarily best fitted for acquiring the
latter. The man who feels the most for the joys and sorrows of others,
is best fitted for acquiring the most complete control of his own joys
and sorrows. The man of the most exquisite humanity, is naturally the
most capable of acquiring the highest degree of self-command. He may
not, however, always have acquired it; and it very frequently happens
that he has not. He may have lived too much in ease and tranquillity.
He may have never been exposed to the violence of faction, or to the
hardships and hazards of war. He may have never experienced the
insolence of his superiors, the jealous and malignant envy of his
equals, or the pilfering injustice of his inferiors. When, in an
advanced age, some accidental change of fortune exposes him to all
these, they all make too great an impression upon him. He has the
disposition which fits him for acquiring the most perfect
self-command; but he has never had the opportunity of acquiring it.
Exercise and practice have been wanting; and without these no habit
can ever be tolerably established. Hardships, dangers, injuries,
misfortunes, are the only masters under whom we can learn the exercise
of this virtue. But these are all masters to whom nobody willingly
puts himself to school.
The situations in which the gentle virtue of humanity can be most
happily cultivated, are by no means the same with those which are best
fitted for forming the austere virtue of self-command. The man who is
himself at ease can best attend to the distress of others. The man who
is himself exposed to hardships is most immediately called {134} upon
to attend to, and to control his own feelings. In the mild sunshine of
undisturbed tranquillity, in the calm retirement of undissipated and
philosophical leisure, the soft virtue of humanity flourishes the
most, and is capable of the highest improvement. But, in such
situations, the greatest and noblest exertions of self-command have
little exercise. Under the boisterous and stormy sky of war and
faction, of public tumult and confusion, the sturdy severity of
self-command prospers the most, and can be the most successfully
cultivated. But, in such situations, the strongest suggestions of
humanity must frequently be stifled or neglected; and every such
neglect necessarily tends to weaken the principle of humanity. As it
may frequently be the duty of a soldier not to take, so it may
sometimes be his duty not to give quarter; and the humanity of the man
who has been several times under the necessity of submitting to this
disagreeable duty, can scarce fail to suffer a considerable
diminution. For his own ease, he is too apt to learn to make light of
the misfortunes which he is so often under the necessity of
occasioning; and the situations which call forth the noblest exertions
of self-command, by imposing the necessity of violating sometimes the
property, and sometimes the life of our neighbour, always tend to
diminish, and too often to extinguish altogether, that sacred regard
to both, which is the foundation of justice and humanity. It is upon
this account, that we so frequently find in the world men of great
humanity who have little self-command, but who are indolent and
irresolute, and easily disheartened, either by difficulty or danger,
from the most honourable pursuits; and, on the contrary, men of the
most perfect self-command, whom no difficulty can discourage, no
danger appal, and who are at all times ready for the most daring and
desperate enterprises, but who, at the same time, seem to be hardened
against all sense either of justice or humanity.
In solitude, we are apt to feel too strongly whatever relates to
ourselves: we are apt to over-rate the good offices we may have done,
and the injuries we may have suffered: we are apt to be too much
elated by our own good, and too much dejected by our own bad fortune.
The conversation of a friend brings us to a better, that of a stranger
to a still better, temper. The man within the breast, the abstract and
ideal spectator of our sentiments and conduct, requires often to be
awakened and put in mind of his duty, by the presence of the real
spectator: and it is always from that spectator, from whom we can
expect the least sympathy and indulgence, that we are likely to learn
the most complete lesson of self-command.
Are you in adversity? Do not mourn in the darkness of solitude, do not
regulate your sorrow according to the indulgent sympathy of your
intimate friends; return, as soon as possible, to the daylight of the
world and of society. Live with strangers, with those who know
nothing, or care nothing about your misfortune; do not even shun the
{135} company of enemies; but give yourself the pleasure of mortifying
their malignant joy, by making them feel how little you are affected
by your calamity, and how much you are above it.
Are you in prosperity? Do not confine the enjoyment of your good
fortune to your own house, to the company of your own friends, perhaps
of your flatterers, of those who build upon your fortune the hopes of
mending their own; frequent those who are independent of you, who can
value you only for your character and conduct, and not for your
fortune. Neither seek nor shun, neither intrude yourself into nor run
away from the society of those who were once your superiors, and who
may be hurt at finding you their equal, or, perhaps, even their
superior. The impertinence of their pride may, perhaps, render their
company too disagreeable: but if it should not, be assured that it is
the best company you can possibly keep; and if, by the simplicity of
your unassuming demeanour, you can gain their favour and kindness, you
may rest satisfied that you are modest enough, and that your head has
been in no respect turned by your good fortune.
The propriety of our moral sentiments is never so apt to be corrupted,
as when the indulgent and partial spectator is at hand, while the
indifferent and impartial one is at a great distance.
Of the conduct of one independent nation towards another, neutral
nations are the only indifferent and impartial spectators. But they
are placed at so great a distance that they are almost quite out of
sight. When two nations are at variance, the citizen of each pays
little regard to the sentiments which foreign nations may entertain
concerning his conduct. His whole ambition is to obtain the
approbation of his own fellow-citizens; and as they are all animated
by the same hostile passions which animate himself, he can never
please them so much as by enraging and offending their enemies. The
partial spectator is at hand: the impartial one at a great distance.
In war and negotiation, therefore, the laws of justice are very seldom
observed. Truth and fair dealing are almost totally disregarded.
Treaties are violated; and the violation, if some advantage is gained
by it, sheds scarce any dishonour upon the violator. The ambassador
who dupes the minister of a foreign nation, is admired and applauded.
The just man who disdains either to take or to give any advantage, but
who would think it less dishonourable to give than to take one; the
man who, in all private transactions, would be the most beloved and
the most esteemed; in those public transactions is regarded as a fool
and an idiot, who does not understand his business; and he incurs
always the contempt, and sometimes even the detestation of his
fellow-citizens. In war, not only what are called the laws of nations,
are frequently violated, without bringing (among his own
fellow-citizens, whose judgments he only regards) any considerable
dishonour upon the violator; but those laws themselves are, the
greater part of them, laid down with {136} very little regard to the
plainest and most obvious rules of justice. That the innocent, though
they may have some connexion or dependency upon the guilty (which,
perhaps, they themselves cannot help), should not, upon that account,
suffer or be punished for the guilty, is one of the plainest and most
obvious rules of justice. In the most unjust war, however, it is
commonly the sovereign or the rulers only who are guilty. The subjects
are almost always perfectly innocent. Whenever it suits the
conveniency of a public enemy, however, the goods of the peaceable
citizens are seized both at land and at sea; their lands are laid
waste, their houses are burnt, and they themselves, if they presume to
make any resistance, are murdered or led into captivity; and all this
in the most perfect conformity to what are called the laws of nations.
The animosity of hostile factions, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is
often still more furious than that of hostile nations; and their
conduct towards one another is often still more atrocious. What may be
called the laws of faction have often been laid down by grave authors
with still less regard to the rules of justice than what are called
the laws of nations. The most ferocious patriot never stated it as a
serious question, Whether faith ought to be kept with public
enemies?--Whether faith ought to be kept with rebels? Whether faith
ought to be kept with heretics? are questions which have been often
furiously agitated by celebrated doctors both civil and
ecclesiastical. It is needless to observe, I presume, that both rebels
and heretics are those unlucky persons, who, when things have come to
a certain degree of violence, have the misfortune to be of the weaker
party. In a nation distracted by faction, there are, no doubt, always
a few, though commonly but a very few, who preserve their judgment
untainted by the general contagion. They seldom amount to more than,
here and there, a solitary individual, without any influence,
excluded, by his own candour, from the confidence of either party, and
who, though he may be one of the wisest, is necessarily, upon that
very account, one of the most insignificant men in the society. All
such people are held in contempt and derision, frequently in
detestation, by the zealots of both parties.
A true party-man hates and despises candour; and, in reality, there is
no vice which could so effectually disqualify him for the trade of a
party-man as that single virtue. The real, revered, and impartial
spectator, therefore, is, upon no occasion, at a greater distance than
amidst the violence and rage of contending parties. To them, it may be
said, that such a spectator scarce exists any where in the universe.
Even to the great Judge of the universe, they impute all their own
prejudices, and often view that Divine Being as animated by all their
own vindictive and implacable passions. Of all the corrupters of moral
sentiments, therefore, faction and fanaticism have always been by far
the greatest.
{137} Concerning the subject of self-command, I shall only observe
further, that our admiration for the man who, under the heaviest and
most unexpected misfortunes, continues to behave with fortitude and
firmness, always supposes that his sensibility to those misfortunes is
very great, and such as it requires a very great effort to conquer or
command. The man who was altogether insensible to bodily pain, could
deserve no applause from enduring the torture with the most perfect
patience and equanimity. The man who had been created without the
natural fear of death, could claim no merit from preserving his
coolness and presence of mind in the midst of the most dreadful
dangers. It is one of the extravagancies of Seneca, that the Stoical
wise man was, in this respect, superior even to a god; that the
security of the god was altogether the benefit of nature, which had
exempted him from suffering; but that the security of the wise man was
his own benefit, and derived altogether from himself and from his own
exertions.
The sensibility of some men, however, to some of the objects which
immediately affect themselves, is sometimes so strong as to render all
self-command impossible. No sense of honour can control the fears of
the man who is weak enough to faint, or to fall into convulsions, upon
the approach of danger. Whether such weakness of nerves, as it has
been called, may not, by gradual exercise and proper discipline, admit
of some cure, may, perhaps, be doubtful. It seems certain that it
ought never to be trusted or employed.
-----
CHAP. IV.--_Of the Nature of Self-deceit, and of the Origin and Use
of general Rules._
IN order to pervert the rectitude of our own judgments concerning the
propriety of our own conduct, it is not always necessary that the real
and impartial spectator should be at a great distance. When he is at
hand, when he is present, the violence and injustice of our own
selfish passions are sometimes sufficient to induce the man within the
breast to make a report very different from what the real
circumstances of the case are capable of authorising.
There are two different occasions upon which we examine our own
conduct, and endeavour to view it in the light in which the impartial
spectator would view it: first, when we are about to act; and
secondly, after we have acted. Our views are apt to be very partial in
both cases; but they are apt to be most partial when it is of most
importance that they should be otherwise.
When we are about to act, the eagerness of passion will seldom allow
us to consider what we are doing, with the candour of an indifferent
person. The violent emotions which at that time agitate us, discolour
our views of things, even when we are endeavouring to place ourselves
{138} in the situation of another, and to regard the objects that
interest us in the light in which they will naturally appear to him.
The fury of our own passions constantly calls us back to our own
place, where every thing appears magnified and misrepresented by
self-love. Of the manner in which those objects would appear to
another, of the view which he would take of them, we can obtain, if I
may say so, but instantaneous glimpses, which vanish in a moment, and
which, even while they last, are not altogether just. We cannot even
for that moment divest ourselves entirely of the heat and keenness
with which our peculiar situation inspires us, nor consider what we
are about to do with the complete impartiality of an equitable judge.
The passions, upon this account, as Father Malebranche says, all
justify themselves, and seem reasonable and proportioned to their
objects, as long as we continue to feel them.
When the action is over, indeed, and the passions which prompted it
have subsided, we can enter more coolly into the sentiments of the
indifferent spectator. What before interested us is now become almost
as indifferent to us as it always was to him, and we can now examine
our own conduct with his candour and impartiality. The man of today is
no longer agitated by the same passions which distracted the man of
yesterday: and when the paroxysm of emotion, in the same manner as
when the paroxysm of distress, is fairly over, we can identify
ourselves, as it were, with the ideal man within the breast, and, in
our own character, view, as in the one case, our own situation, so in
the other, our own conduct, with the severe eyes of the most impartial
spectator. But our judgments now are often of little importance in
comparison of what they were before; and can frequently produce
nothing but vain regret and unavailing repentance; without always
securing us from the like errors in time to come. It is seldom,
however, that they are quite candid even in this case. The opinion
which we entertain of our own character depends entirely on our
judgment concerning our past conduct. It is so disagreeable to think
ill of ourselves, that we often purposely turn away our view from
those circumstances which might render that judgment unfavourable. He
is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he
performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally
bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of
self-delusion, which covers from his view the deformities of his own
conduct. Rather than see our own behaviour under so disagreeable an
aspect, we too often, foolishly and weakly, endeavour to exasperate
anew those unjust passions which had formerly misled us; we endeavour
by artifice to awaken our old hatreds, and irritate afresh our almost
forgotten resentments: we even exert ourselves for this miserable
purpose, and thus persevere in injustice, merely because we once were
unjust, and because we are ashamed and afraid to see that we were so.
{139} So partial are the views of mankind with regard to the propriety
of their own conduct, both at the time of action and after it; and so
difficult is it for them to view it in the light in which any
indifferent spectator would consider it. But if it was by a peculiar
faculty, such as the moral sense is supposed to be, that they judged
of their own conduct, if they were endued with a particular power of
perception which distinguished the beauty or deformity of passions and
affections; as then passions would be more immediately exposed to the
view of this faculty, it would judge more accurately concerning them,
than concerning those of other men, of which it had only a more
distant prospect.
This self-deceit, this fatal weakness of mankind, is the source of
half the disorders of human life. If we saw ourselves in the light in
which others see us, or in which they would see us if they knew all, a
reformation would generally be unavoidable. We could not otherwise
endure the sight exposed to us.
Nature, however, has not left this weakness, which is of so much
importance, altogether without a remedy; nor has she abandoned us
entirely to the delusions of self-love. Our continual observations
upon the conduct of others, insensibly lead us to form to ourselves
certain general rules concerning what is fit and proper either to be
done or to be avoided. Some of their actions shock all our natural
sentiments. We hear every body about us express the like detestation
against them. This still further confirms, and even exasperates our
natural sense of their deformity. It satisfies us that we view them in
the proper light, when we see other people view them in the same
light. We resolve never to be guilty of the like, nor ever, upon any
account, to render ourselves in this manner the objects of universal
disapprobation. We thus naturally lay down to ourselves a general
rule, that all such actions are to be avoided, as tending to render us
odious, contemptible, or punishable, the objects of all those
sentiments for which we have the greatest dread and aversion. Other
actions, on the contrary, call forth our approbation, and we hear
every body around us express the same favourable opinion concerning
them. Every body is eager to honour and reward them. They excite all
those sentiments for which we have by nature the strongest desire; the
love, the gratitude, the admiration of mankind. We become ambitious of
performing the like; and thus naturally lay down to ourselves a rule
of another kind, that every opportunity of acting in this manner is to
be sought after.
It is thus that the general rules of morality are formed. They are
ultimately founded upon experience of what, in particular instances,
our moral faculties, our natural sense of merit and propriety,
approve, or disapprove of. We do not originally approve or condemn
particular actions; because, upon examination, they appear to be
agreeable or inconsistent with a certain general rule. The general
rule, on the contrary, is formed, by finding from experience, that all
actions of a {140} certain kind, or circumstanced in a certain manner,
are approved or disapproved of. To the man who first saw an inhuman
murder, committed from avarice, envy, or unjust resentment, and upon
one too that loved and trusted the murderer, who beheld the last
agonies of the dying person, who heard him, with his expiring breath,
complain more of the perfidy and ingratitude of his false friend, than
of the violence which had been done to him, there could be no
occasion, in order to conceive how horrible such an action was, that
he should reflect, that one of the most sacred rules of conduct was
what prohibited the taking away the life of an innocent person, that
this was a plain violation of that rule, and consequently a very
blamable action. His detestation of this crime, it is evident, would
arise instantaneously and antecedent to his having formed to himself
any such general rule. The general rule, on the contrary, which he
might afterwards form, would be founded upon the detestation which he
felt necessarily arise in his own breast, at the thought of this and
every other particular action of the same kind.
When we read in history or romance, the account of actions either of
generosity or of baseness, the admiration which we conceive for the
one, and the contempt which we feel for the other, neither of them
arise from reflecting that there are certain general rules which
declare all actions of the one kind admirable, and all actions of the
other contemptible. Those general rules, on the contrary, are all
formed from the experience we have had of the effects which actions of
all different kinds naturally produce upon us.
An amiable action, a respectable action, an horrid action, are all of
them actions which naturally excite for the person who performs them,
the love, the respect, or the horror of the spectator. The general
rules which determine what actions are, and what are not, the objects
of each of those sentiments, can be formed no other way than by
observing what actions actually and in fact excite them.
When these general rules, indeed, have been formed, when they are
universally acknowledged and established, by the concurring sentiments
of mankind, we frequently appeal to them as to the standards of
judgment, in debating concerning the degree of praise or blame that is
due to certain actions of a complicated and dubious nature. They are
upon these occasions commonly cited as the ultimate foundations of
what is just and unjust in human conduct; and this circumstance seems
to have misled several very eminent authors, to draw up their systems
in such a manner, as if they had supposed that the original judgments
of mankind with regard to right and wrong, were formed like the
decisions of a court of judicatory, by considering first the general
rule, and then, secondly, whether the particular action under
consideration fell properly within its comprehension.
Those general rules of conduct, when they have been fixed in our mind
by habitual reflection, are of great use in correcting the {141}
misrepresentations of self-love concerning what is fit and proper to
be done in our particular situation. The man of furious resentment, if
he was to listen to the dictates of that passion, would perhaps regard
the death of his enemy, as but a small compensation for the wrong, he
imagines, he has received; which, however, may be no more than a very
slight provocation. But his observations upon the conduct of others,
have taught him how horrible all such sanguinary revenges appear.
Unless his education has been very singular, he has laid it down to
himself as an inviolable rule, to abstain from them upon all
occasions. This rule preserves its authority with him, and renders him
incapable of being guilty of such a violence. Yet the fury of his own
temper may be such, that had this been the first time in which he
considered such an action, he would undoubtedly have determined it to
be quite just and proper, and what every impartial spectator would
approve of. But that reverence for the rule which past experience has
impressed upon him, checks the impetuosity of his passion, and helps
him to correct the too partial views which self-love might otherwise
suggest, of what was proper to be done in his situation. If he should
allow himself to be so far transported by passion as to violate this
rule, yet, even in this case, he cannot throw off altogether the awe
and respect with which he has been accustomed to regard it. At the
very time of acting, at the moment in which passion mounts the
highest, he hesitates and trembles at the thought of what he is about
to do: he is secretly conscious to himself that he is breaking through
those measures of conduct which, in all his cool hours, he had
resolved never to infringe, which he had never seen infringed by
others without the highest disapprobation, and of which the
infringement, his own mind forebodes, must soon render him the object
of the same disagreeable sentiments. Before he can take the last fatal
resolution, he is tormented with all the agonies of doubt and
uncertainty; he is terrified at the thought of violating so sacred a
rule, and at the same time is urged and goaded on by the fury of his
desires to violate it. He changes his purpose every moment; sometimes
he resolves to adhere to his principle, and not indulge a passion
which may corrupt the remaining part of his life with the horrors of
shame and repentance; and a momentary calm takes possession of his
breast, from the prospect of that security and tranquillity which he
will enjoy when he thus determines not to expose himself to the hazard
of a contrary conduct. But immediately the passion rouses anew, and
with fresh fury drives him on to commit what he had the instant before
resolved to abstain from. Wearied and distracted with those continual
irresolutions, he at length, from a sort of despair, makes the last
fatal and irrecoverable step; but with that terror and amazement with
which one flying from an enemy, throws himself over a precipice, where
he is sure of meeting with more certain destruction than from any
thing that pursues him from behind. Such {142} are his sentiments even
at the time of acting; though he is then, no doubt, less sensible of
the impropriety of his own conduct than afterwards, when his passion
being gratified and palled, he begins to view what he has done in the
light in which others are apt to view it; and actually feels, what he
had only foreseen very imperfectly before, the stings of remorse and
repentance begin to agitate and torment him.
-----
CHAP. V.--_Of the Influence and Authority of the general Rules of
Morality, and that they are justly regarded as the Laws of the
Deity._
THE regard of those general rules of conduct, is what is properly
called a sense of duty, a principle of the greatest consequence in
human life, and the only principle by which the bulk of mankind are
capable of directing their actions. Many men behave very decently, and
through the whole of their lives avoid any considerable degree of
blame, who yet, perhaps, never felt the sentiment upon the propriety
of which we found our approbation of their conduct, but acted merely
from a regard to what they saw were the established rules of
behaviour. The man who has received great benefits from another
person, may, by the natural coldness of his temper, feel but a very
small degree of the sentiment of gratitude. If he has been virtuously
educated, however, he will often have been made to observe how odious
those actions appear which denote a want of this sentiment, and how
amiable the contrary. Though his heart therefore is not warmed with
any grateful affection, he will strive to act as if it was, and will
endeavour to pay all those regards and attentions to his patron which
the liveliest gratitude could suggest. He will visit him regularly; he
will behave to him respectfully; he will never talk of him but with
expressions of the highest esteem, and of the many obligations which
he owes to him. And what is more, he will carefully embrace every
opportunity of making a proper return for past services. He may do all
this too without any hypocrisy or blamable dissimulation, without any
selfish intention of obtaining new favours, and without any design of
imposing either upon his benefactor or the public. The motive of his
actions may be no other than a reverence for the established rule of
duty, a serious and earnest desire of acting, in every respect,
according to the law of gratitude. A wife, in the same manner, may
sometimes not feel that tender regard for her husband which is
suitable to the relation that subsists between them. If she has been
virtuously educated, however, she will endeavour to act as if she felt
it, to be careful, officious, faithful, and sincere, and to be
deficient in none of those attentions which the sentiment of conjugal
affection could have prompted her to perform. Such a friend, and such
a wife, are neither of them, undoubtedly, the very best of their {143}
kinds; and though both of them may have the most serious and earnest
desire to fulfil every part of their duty, yet they will fail in many
nice and delicate regards, they will miss many opportunities of
obliging, which they could never have overlooked if they had possessed
the sentiment that is proper to their situation. Though not the very
first of their kinds, however, they are perhaps the second; and if the
regard to the general rules of conduct has been very strongly
impressed upon them, neither of them will fail in any very essential
part of their duty. None but those of the happiest mould are capable
of suiting, with exact justness, their sentiments and behaviour to the
smallest difference of situation, and of acting upon all occasions
with the most delicate and accurate propriety. The coarse clay of
which the bulk of mankind are formed, cannot be wrought up to such
perfection. There is scarce any man, however, who by discipline,
education, and example, may not be so impressed with a regard to
general rules, as to act upon almost every occasion with tolerable
decency, and through the whole of his life to avoid any considerable
degree of blame.
Without this sacred regard to general rules, there is no man whose
conduct can be much depended upon. It is this which constitutes the
most essential difference between a man of principle and honour and a
worthless fellow. The one adheres, on all occasions, steadily and
resolutely to his maxims, and preserves through the whole of his life
one even tenor of conduct. The other, acts variously and accidentally,
as humour, inclination, or interest chance to be uppermost. Nay, such
are the inequalities of humour to which all men are subject, that
without this principle, the man who, in all his cool hours, had the
most delicate sensibility to the propriety of conduct, might often be
led to act absurdly upon the most frivolous occasions, and when it was
scarce possible to assign any serious motive for his behaving in this
manner. Your friend makes you a visit when you happen to be in a
humour which makes it disagreeable to receive him: in your present
mood his civility is very apt to appear an impertinent intrusion; and
if you were to give way to the views of things which at this time
occur, though civil in your temper, you would behave to him with
coldness and contempt. What renders you incapable of such a rudeness,
is nothing but a regard to the general rules of civility and
hospitality, which prohibit it. That habitual reverence which your
former experience has taught you for these, enables you to act, upon
all such occasions, with nearly equal propriety, and hinders those
inequalities of temper, to which all men are subject, from influencing
your conduct in any very sensible degree. But if without regard to
these general rules, even the duties of politeness, which are so
easily observed, and which one can scarce have any serious motive to
violate, would yet be so frequently violated, what would become of the
duties of justice, of truth, of chastity, of fidelity, which it is
often so difficult to observe, and which there may be so {144} many
strong motives to violate? But upon the tolerable observance of these
duties depends the very existence of human society, which would
crumble into nothing if mankind were not generally impressed with a
reverence for those important rules of conduct.
This reverence is still further enhanced by an opinion which is first
impressed by nature, and afterwards confirmed by reasoning and
philosophy, that those important rules of morality are the commands
and laws of the Deity, who will finally reward the obedient and punish
the transgressors of their duty.
This opinion or apprehension, I say, seems first to be impressed by
nature. Men are naturally led to ascribe to those mysterious beings,
whatever they are, which happen, in any country to be the objects of
religious fear, all their own sentiments and passions. They have no
other, they can conceive no other to ascribe to them. Those unknown
intelligences which they imagine but see not, must necessarily be
formed with some sort of resemblance to those intelligences of which
they have experience. During the ignorance and darkness of pagan
superstition, mankind seem to have formed the ideas of their
divinities with so little delicacy, that they ascribed to them,
indiscriminately, all the passions of human nature, those not excepted
which do the least honour to our species, such as lust, hunger,
avarice, envy, revenge. They could not fail, therefore, to ascribe to
those beings, for the excellence of whose nature they still conceived
the highest admiration, those sentiments and qualities which are the
great ornaments of humanity, and which seem to raise it to a
resemblance of divine perfection, the love of virtue and beneficence,
and the abhorrence of vice and injustice. The man who was injured,
called upon Jupiter to be witness of the wrong that was done to him,
and could not doubt, but that divine being would behold it with the
same indignation which would animate the meanest of mankind, who
looked on when injustice was committed. The man who did the injury,
felt himself to be the proper object of the detestation and resentment
of mankind; and his natural fears led him to impute the same
sentiments to those awful beings, whose presence he could not avoid,
and whose power he could not resist. These natural hopes, and fears,
and suspicions, were propagated by sympathy, and confirmed by
education; and the gods were universally represented and believed to
be the rewarders of humanity and mercy, and the avengers of perfidy
and injustice. And thus religion, even in its rudest form, gave a
sanction to the rules of morality, long before the age of artificial
reasoning and philosophy. That the terrors of religion should thus
enforce the natural sense of duty, was of too much importance to the
happiness of mankind, for nature to leave it dependent upon the
slowness and uncertainty of philosophical researches.
These researches, however, when they came to take place, confirmed
those original anticipations of nature. Upon whatever we suppose that
{145} moral faculties are founded, whether upon a certain modification
of reason, upon an original instinct, called a moral sense, or upon
some other principle of our nature, it cannot be doubted, that they
were given us for the direction of our conduct in this life. They
carry along with them the most evident badges of this authority, which
denote that they were set up within us to be the supreme arbiters of
all our actions, to superintend all our senses, passions, and
appetites, and to judge how each of them was either to be indulged or
restrained. Our moral faculties are by no means, as some have
pretended, upon a level in this respect with the other faculties and
appetites of our nature, endowed with no more right to restrain these
last, than these last are to restrain them. No other faculty or
principle of action judges of any other. Love does not judge of
resentment, nor resentment of love. Those two passions may be opposite
to one another, but cannot, with any propriety, be said to approve or
disapprove of one another. But it is the peculiar office of those
faculties now under our consideration to judge, to bestow censure or
applause upon all the other principles of our nature. They may be
considered as a sort of senses of which those principles are the
objects. Every sense is supreme over its own objects. There is no
appeal from the eye with regard to the beauty of colours, nor from the
ear with regard to the harmony of sounds, nor from the taste with
regard to the agreeableness of flavours. Each of those senses judges
in the last resort of its own objects. Whatever gratifies the taste is
sweet, whatever pleases the eye is beautiful, whatever soothes the ear
is harmonious. The very essence of each of those qualities consists in
its being fitted to please the sense to which it is addressed. It
belongs to our moral faculties, in the same manner to determine when
the ear ought to be soothed, when the eye ought to be indulged, when
the taste ought to be gratified, when and how far every other
principle of our nature ought either to be indulged or restrained.
What is agreeable to our moral faculties, is fit, and right, and
proper to be done; the contrary wrong, unfit, and improper. The
sentiments which they approve of, are graceful and becoming: the
contrary, ungraceful and unbecoming. The very words, right, wrong,
fit, improper, graceful, unbecoming, mean only what pleases or
displeases those faculties.
Since these, therefore, were plainly intended to be the governing
principles of human nature, the rules which they prescribe are to be
regarded as the commands and laws of the Deity, promulgated by those
vicegerents which he has thus set up within us. All general rules are
commonly denominated laws: thus the general rules which bodies observe
in the communication of motion, are called the laws of motion. But
those general rules which our moral faculties observe in approving or
condemning whatever sentiment or action is subjected to their
examination, may much more justly be denominated such. They have a
much greater resemblance to what are properly called laws, those {146}
general rules which the sovereign lays down to direct the conduct of
his subjects. Like them they are rules to direct the free actions of
men: they are prescribed most surely by a lawful superior, and are
attended too with the sanction of rewards and punishments. Those
vicegerents of God within us, never fail to punish the violation of
them, by the torments of inward shame, and self-condemnation; and on
the contrary, always reward obedience with tranquillity of mind, with
full contentment and self-satisfaction.
There are innumerable other considerations which serve to confirm the
same conclusion. The happiness of mankind, as well as of all other
rational creatures, seems to have been the original purpose intended
by the Author of nature, when he brought them into existence. No other
end seems worthy of that supreme wisdom and divine benignity which we
necessarily ascribe to him; and this opinion, which we are led to by
the abstract consideration of his infinite perfections, is still more
confirmed by the examination of the works of nature, which seem all
intended to promote happiness, and to guard against misery. But by
acting accordingly to the dictates of our moral faculties, we
necessarily pursue the most effectual means for promoting the
happiness of mankind, and may therefore be said, in some sense, to
co-operate with the Deity, and to advance as far as in our power the
plan of Providence. By acting otherwise, on the contrary, we seem to
obstruct, in some measure, the scheme which the Author of nature has
established for the happiness and perfection of the world, and to
declare ourselves, if I may say so, in some measure the enemies of
God. Hence we are naturally encouraged to hope for his extraordinary
favour and reward in the one case, and to dread his sure vengeance and
punishment in the other.
There are besides many other reasons, and many other natural
principles, which all tend to confirm and inculcate the same salutary
doctrine. If we consider the general rules by which external
prosperity and adversity are commonly distributed in this life, we
shall find, that notwithstanding the disorder in which all things
appear to be in this world, yet even here every virtue naturally meets
with its proper reward, with the recompense which is most fit to
encourage and promote it; and this too so surely, that it requires a
very extraordinary concurrence of circumstances entirely to disappoint
it. What is the reward most proper for encouraging industry, prudence,
and circumspection? Success in every sort of business. And is it
possible that in the whole of life these virtues should fail of
attaining it? Wealth and external honours are their proper recompense,
and the recompense which they can seldom fail of acquiring. What
reward is most proper for promoting the practice of truth, justice,
and humanity? The confidence, the esteem, the love of those we live
with. Humanity does not desire to be great, but to be beloved. It is
not in being rich that truth {147} and justice would rejoice, but in
being trusted and believed, recompenses which those virtues must
almost always acquire. By some very extraordinary and unlucky
circumstance, a good man may come to be suspected of a crime of which
he was altogether incapable, and upon that account be most unjustly
exposed for the remaining part of his life to the horror and aversion
of mankind. By an accident of this kind he may be said to lose his
all, notwithstanding his integrity and justice; in the same manner as
a cautious man, notwithstanding his utmost circumspection, may be
ruined by an earthquake or an inundation. Accidents of the first kind,
however, are perhaps still more rare, and still more contrary to the
common course of things than those of the second; and it still remains
true, that the practice of truth, justice, and humanity is a certain
and almost infallible method of acquiring what these virtues chiefly
aim at, the confidence and love of those we live with. A person may be
very easily misrepresented with regard to a particular action; but it
is scarce possible that he should be so with regard to the general
tenor of his conduct. An innocent man may be believed to have done
wrong: this, however, will rarely happen. On the contrary, the
established opinion of the innocence of his manners, will often lead
us to absolve him where he has really been in the fault,
notwithstanding very strong presumptions. A knave, in the same manner,
may escape censure, or even meet with applause, for a particular
knavery, in which his conduct is not understood. But no man was ever
habitually such, without being almost universally known to be so, and
without being even frequently suspected of guilt, when he was in
reality perfectly innocent. And so far as vice and virtue can be
either punished or rewarded by the sentiments and opinions of mankind,
they both, according to the common course of things meet even here
with something more than exact and impartial justice.
But though the general rules by which prosperity and adversity are
commonly distributed, when considered in this cool and philosophical
light, appear to be perfectly suited to the situation of mankind in
this life, yet they are by no means suited to some of our natural
sentiments. Our natural love and admiration for some virtues is such,
that we should wish to bestow on them all sorts of honours and
rewards, even those which we must acknowledge to be the proper
recompenses of other qualities, with which those virtues are not
always accompanied. Our detestation, on the contrary, for some vices
is such, that we should desire to heap upon them every sort of
disgrace and disaster, those not excepted which are the natural
consequences of very different qualities. Magnanimity, generosity, and
justice, command so high a degree of admiration, that we desire to see
them crowned with wealth, and power, and honours of every kind, the
natural consequences of prudence, industry, and application; qualities
with which those virtues are not inseparably connected. Fraud,
falsehood, brutality, and {148} violence, on the other hand, excite in
every human breast such scorn and abhorrence, that our indignation
rouses to see them possess those advantages which they may in some
sense be said to have merited, by the diligence and industry with
which they are sometimes attended. The industrious knave cultivates
the soil, the indolent man leaves it uncultivated. Who ought to reap
the harvest? Who starve, and who live in plenty? The natural course of
things decides it in favour of the knave: the natural sentiments of
mankind in favour of the man of virtue. Man judges, that the good
qualities of the one are greatly over-recompensed by those advantages
which they tend to procure him, and that the omissions of the other
are by far too severely punished by the distress which they naturally
bring upon him; and human laws, the consequences of human sentiments,
forfeit the life and the estate of the industrious and cautious
traitor, and reward, by extraordinary recompenses, the fidelity and
public spirit of the improvident and careless good citizen. Thus man
is by Nature directed to correct, in some measure, that distribution
of things which she herself would otherwise have made. The rules which
for this purpose she prompts him to follow, are different from those
which she herself observes. She bestows upon every virtue, and upon
every vice, that precise reward or punishment which is best fitted to
encourage the one, or to restrain the other. She is directed by this
sole consideration, and pays little regard to the different degrees of
merit and demerit, which they may seem to possess in the sentiments
and passions of man. Man, on the contrary, pays regard to this only,
and would endeavour to render the state of every virtue precisely
proportioned to that degree of love and esteem, and of every vice to
that degree of contempt and abhorrence, which he himself conceives for
it. The rules which she follows are fit for her, as, those which he
follows are for him: but both are calculated to promote the same great
end, the order of the world, and the perfection and happiness of human
nature.
But though man is thus employed to alter that distribution of things
which natural events would make, if left to themselves; though, like
the gods of the poets, he is perpetually interposing, by extraordinary
means, in favour of virtue, and in opposition to vice, and, like them,
endeavours to turn away the arrow that is aimed at the head of the
righteous, but to accelerate the sword of destruction that is lifted
up against the wicked; yet he is by no means able to render the
fortune of either quite suitable to his own sentiments and wishes. The
natural course of things cannot be entirely controlled by the impotent
endeavours of man: the current is too rapid and too strong for him to
stop it; and though the rules which direct it appear to have been
established for the wisest and best purposes, they sometimes produce
effects which shock all his natural sentiments. That a great
combination of men should prevail over a small one; that those who
engage in an {149} enterprise with forethought and all necessary
preparation, should prevail over such as oppose them without any; and
that every end should be acquired by those means only which nature has
established for acquiring it, seems to be a rule not only necessary
and unavoidable in itself, but even useful and proper for rousing the
industry and attention of mankind. Yet, when, in consequence of this
rule, violence and artifice prevail over sincerity and justice, what
indignation does it not excite in the breast of every human spectator?
What sorrow and compassion for the sufferings of the innocent, and
what furious resentment against the success of the oppressor? We are
equally grieved and enraged at the wrong that is done, but often find
it altogether out of our power to redress it. When we thus despair of
finding any force upon earth which can check the triumph of injustice,
we naturally appeal to heaven, and hope that the great Author of our
nature will himself execute hereafter what all the principles which he
has given us for the direction of our conduct prompt us to attempt
even here; that he will complete the plan which he himself has thus
taught us to begin; and will, in a life to come, render to every one
according to the works which he has performed in this world. And thus
we are led to the belief of a future state, not only by the
weaknesses, by the hopes and fears of human nature, but by the noblest
and best principles which belong to it, by the love of virtue, and by
the abhorrence of vice and injustice.
'Does it suit the greatness of God,' says the eloquent and
philosophical bishop of Clermont, with that passionate and
exaggerating force of imagination, which seems sometimes to exceed the
bounds of decorum; 'does it suit the greatness of God, to leave the
world which he has created in so universal a disorder? To see the
wicked prevail almost always over the just; the innocent dethroned by
the usurper; the father become the victim of the ambition of an
unnatural son; the husband expiring under the stroke of a barbarous
and faithless wife? From the height of his greatness ought God to
behold those melancholy events as a fantastical amusement, without
taking any share in them? Because he is great, should he be weak, or
unjust, or barbarous? Because men are little, ought they to be allowed
either to be dissolute without punishment or virtuous without reward?
O God! if this is the character of your Supreme Being; if it is you
whom we adore under such dreadful ideas; I can no longer acknowledge
you for my father, for my protector, for the comforter of my sorrow,
the support of my weakness, the rewarder of my fidelity. You would
then be no more than an indolent and fantastical tyrant, who
sacrifices mankind to his vanity, and who has brought them out of
nothing only to make them serve for the sport of his leisure and of
his caprice.'
When the general rules which determine the merit and demerit of
actions, come thus to be regarded as the laws of an all-powerful
Being, who watches over our conduct and, who, in a life to come, will
reward {150} the observance, and punish the breach of them; they
necessarily acquire a new sacredness from this consideration. That our
regard to the will of the Deity ought to be the supreme rule of our
conduct, can be doubted of by nobody who believes his existence. The
very thought of disobedience appears to involve in it the most
shocking impropriety. How vain, how absurd would it be for man, either
to oppose or to neglect the commands that were laid upon him by
Infinite Wisdom, and Infinite Power! How unnatural, how impiously
ungrateful, not to reverence the precepts that were prescribed to him
by the infinite goodness of his Creator, even though no punishment was
to follow their violation. The sense of propriety too is here well
supported by the strongest motives of self-interest. The idea that,
however we may escape the observation of man, or be placed above the
reach of human punishment, yet we are always acting under the eye, and
exposed to the punishment of God, the great avenger of injustice, is a
motive capable of restraining the most headstrong passions, with those
at least who, by constant reflection, have rendered it familiar to
them.
It is in this manner that religion enforces the natural sense of duty:
and hence it is, that mankind are generally disposed to place great
confidence in the probity of those who seem deeply impressed with
religious sentiments. Such persons, they imagine, act under an
additional tie, besides those which regulate the conduct of other men.
The regard to the propriety of action, as well as to reputation, the
regard to the applause of his own breast, as well as to that of
others, are motives which they suppose have the influence over the
religious man, as over the man of the world. But the former lies under
another restraint, and never acts deliberately but as in the presence
of that Great Superior who is finally to recompense him according to
his deeds. A greater trust is reposed, upon this account, in the
regularity and exactness of his conduct. And wherever the natural
principles of religion are not corrupted by the factious and party
zeal of some worthless cabal; wherever the first duty which it
requires, is to fulfil all the obligations of morality; wherever men
are not taught to regard frivolous observances, as more immediate
duties of religion than acts of justice and beneficence; and to
imagine, that by sacrifices, and ceremonies, and vain supplications,
they can bargain with the Deity for fraud, and perfidy, and violence,
the world undoubtedly judges right in this respect, and justly places
a double confidence in the rectitude of the religious man's behaviour.
-----
CHAP. VI.--_In what Cases the Sense of Duty ought to be the sole
Principle of our Conduct; and in what Cases it ought to concur with
other Motives._
RELIGION affords such strong motives to the practice of virtue, and
{151} guards us by such powerful restraints from the temptations of
vice, that many have been led to suppose, that religious principles
were the sole laudable motives of action. We ought neither, they said,
to reward from gratitude, nor punish from resentment; we ought neither
to protect the helplessness of our children, nor afford support to the
infirmities of our parents, from natural affection. All affections for
particular objects, ought to be extinguished in our breast, and one
great affection take the place of all others, the love of the Deity,
the desire of rendering ourselves agreeable to him, and of directing
our conduct, in every respect, according to his will. We ought not to
be grateful from gratitude, we ought not to be charitable from
humanity, we ought not to be public-spirited from the love of our
country, nor generous and just from the love of mankind. The sole
principle and motive of our conduct in the performance of all those
different duties, ought to be a sense that God has commanded us to
perform them. I shall not at present take time to examine this opinion
particularly; I shall only observe, that we should not have expected
to have found it entertained by any sect, who professed themselves of
a religion in which, as it is the first precept to love the Lord our
God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our strength,
so it is the second to love our neighbour as we love ourselves; and we
love ourselves surely for our own sakes, and not merely because we are
commanded to do so. That the sense of duty should be the sole
principle of our conduct, is no where the precept of Christianity; but
that it should be the ruling and the governing one, as philosophy, and
as, indeed, common sense directs. It may be a question, however, in
what cases our actions ought to arise chiefly or entirely from a sense
of duty, or from a regard to general rules; and in what cases some
other sentiment or affection ought to concur, and have a principal
influence on our conduct.
The decision of this question, which cannot, perhaps, be given with
any very great accuracy, will depend upon two different circumstances;
first, upon the natural agreeableness or deformity of the sentiment or
affection which would prompt us to any action independent of all
regard to general rules; and, secondly, upon the precision and
exactness, or the looseness and inaccuracy, of the rules themselves.
I. First, I say, it will depend upon the natural agreeableness or
deformity of the affection itself, how far our actions ought to arise
from it, or entirely proceed from a regard to the general rule.
All those graceful and admired actions, to which the benevolent
affections would prompt us, ought to proceed as much from the passions
themselves, as from any regard to the general rules of conduct. A
benefactor thinks himself but ill requited, if the person upon whom he
has bestowed his good offices, repays them merely from a cold sense of
duty, and without any affection to his person. A husband is
dissatisfied with the most obedient wife, when he imagines her conduct
is animated {152} by no other principle besides her regard to what the
relation she stands in requires. Though a son should fail in none of
the offices of filial duty, yet if he wants that affectionate
reverence which it so well becomes him to feel, the parent may justly
complain of his indifference. Nor could a son be quite satisfied with
a parent who, though he performed all the duties of his situation, had
nothing of that fatherly fondness which might have been expected from
him. With regard to all such benevolent and social affections, it is
agreeable to see the sense of duty employed rather to restrain than to
enliven them, rather to hinder us from doing too much, than to prompt
us to do what we ought. It gives us pleasure to see a father obliged
to check his own fondness for his children, a friend obliged to set
bounds to his natural generosity, a person who has received a benefit,
obliged to restrain the too sanguine gratitude of his own temper.
The contrary maxim takes place with regard to the malevolent and
unsocial passions. We ought to reward from the gratitude and
generosity of our own hearts, without any reluctance, and without
being obliged to reflect how great the propriety of rewarding: but we
ought always to punish with reluctance, and more from a sense of the
propriety of punishing, than from any savage disposition to revenge.
Nothing is more graceful than the behaviour of the man who appears to
resent the greatest injuries, more from a sense that they deserve, and
are the proper objects of resentment, than from feeling himself the
furies of that disagreeable passion; who, like a judge, considers only
the general rule, which determines what vengeance is due for each
particular offence; who, in executing that rule, feels less for what
himself has suffered, than for what the offender is about to suffer;
who, though in wrath, does ever remember mercy, and is disposed to
interpret the rule in the most gentle and favourable manner, and to
allow all the alleviations which the most candid humanity could,
consistently with good sense, admit of.
As the selfish passions, according to what has formerly been observed,
hold, in other respects, a sort of middle place, between the social
and unsocial affections, so do they likewise in this. The pursuit of
the objects of private interest, in all common, little, and ordinary
cases, ought to flow rather from a regard to the general rules which
prescribe such conduct, than from any passion for the objects
themselves; but upon more important and extraordinary occasions, we
should be awkward, insipid, and ungraceful, if the objects themselves
did not appear to animate us with a considerable degree of passion. To
be anxious, or to be laying a plot either to gain or to save a single
shilling, would degrade the most vulgar tradesman in the opinion of
all his neighbours. Let his circumstances be ever so mean, no
attention to any such small matters, for the sake of the things
themselves, must appear in his conduct. His situation may require the
most severe oeconomy and the {153} most exact assiduity: but each
particular exertion of that oeconomy and assiduity must proceed, not
so much from a regard for that particular saving or gain, as for the
general rule which to him prescribes, with the utmost rigour, such a
tenor of conduct. His parsimony to-day must not arise from a desire of
the particular three-pence which he will save by it, nor his
attendance in his shop from a passion for the particular ten-pence
which he will acquire by it: both the one and the other ought to
proceed solely from a regard to the general rule, which prescribes,
with the most unrelenting severity, this plan of conduct to all
persons in his way of life. In this consists the difference between
the character of a miser and that of a person of exact oeconomy and
assiduity. The one is anxious about small matters for their own sake;
the other attends to them only in consequence of the scheme of life
which he has laid down to himself.
It is quite otherwise with regard to the more extraordinary and
important objects of self-interest. A person appears mean-spirited,
who does not pursue these with some degree of earnestness for their
own sake. We should despise a prince who was not anxious about
conquering or defending a province. We should have little respect for
a private gentleman who did not exert himself to gain an estate, or
even a considerable office, when he could acquire them without either
meanness or injustice. A member of parliament who shews no keenness
about his own election, is abandoned by his friends, as altogether
unworthy of their attachment. Even a tradesman is thought a
poor-spirited fellow among his neighbours, who does not bestir himself
to get what they call an extraordinary job, or some uncommon
advantage. This spirit and keenness constitutes the difference between
the man of enterprise and the man of dull regularity. Those great
objects of self-interest, of which the loss or acquisition quite
changes the rank of the person, are the objects of the passion
properly called ambition; a passion, which when it keeps within the
bounds of prudence and justice, is always admired in the world, and
has even sometimes a certain irregular greatness, which dazzles the
imagination, when it passes the limits of both these virtues, and is
not only unjust but extravagant. Hence the general admiration for
heroes and conquerors, and even for statesmen, whose projects have
been very daring and extensive though altogether devoid of justice,
such as those of the Cardinals of Richlieu and of Retz. The objects of
avarice and ambition differ only in their greatness. A miser is as
furious about a halfpenny, as a man of ambition about the conquest of
a kingdom.
II. Secondly, I say, it will depend partly upon the precision and upon
the exactness, or the looseness and the inaccuracy of the general
rules themselves, how far our conduct ought to proceed entirely from a
regard to them.
The general rules of almost all the virtues, the general rules which
{154} determine what are the offices of prudence, of charity, of
generosity, of gratitude, of friendship, are in many respects loose
and inaccurate, admit of many exceptions, and require so many
modifications, that it is scarce possible to regulate our conduct
entirely by a regard to them. The common proverbial maxims of
prudence, being founded in universal experience, are perhaps the best
general rules which can be given about it. To affect, however, a very
strict and literal adherence to them would evidently be the most
absurd and ridiculous pedantry. Of all the virtues I have just now
mentioned, gratitude is that, perhaps, of which the rules are the most
precise, and admit of the fewest exceptions. That as soon as we can we
should make a return of equal, and if possible of superior, value to
the services we have received, would seem to be a pretty plain rule,
and one which admitted of scarce any exceptions. Upon the most
superficial examination, however, this rule will appear to be in the
highest degree loose and inaccurate, and to admit of ten thousand
exceptions. If your benefactor attended you in your sickness, ought
you to attend him in his? or can you fulfil the obligation of
gratitude, by making a return of a different kind? If you ought to
attend him, how long ought you to attend him? The same time which he
attended you, or longer, and how much longer? If your friend lent you
money in your distress, ought you to lend him money in his? How much
ought you to lend him? When ought you to lend him? Now, or to-morrow,
or next month? And for how long a time? It is evident, that no general
rule can be laid down, by which a precise answer can, in all cases, be
given to any of these questions. The difference between his character
and yours, between his circumstances and yours, may be such, that you
may be perfectly grateful, and justly refuse to lend him a half-penny:
and, on the contrary, you may be willing to lend, or even to give him
ten times the sum which he lent you, and yet justly be accused of the
blackest ingratitude, and of not having fulfilled the hundredth part
of the obligation you lie under. As the duties of gratitude, however,
are perhaps the most sacred of all those which the beneficent virtues
prescribe to us, so the general rules which determine them are, as I
said before, the most accurate. Those which ascertain the actions
required by friendship, humanity, hospitality, generosity, are still
more vague and indeterminate.
There is, however, one virtue of which the general rules determine
with the greatest exactness every external action which it requires.
This virtue is justice. The rules of justice are accurate in the
highest degree, and admit of no exceptions or modifications, but such
as may be ascertained as accurately as the rules themselves, and which
generally, indeed, flow from the very same principles with them. If I
owe a man ten pounds, justice requires that I should precisely pay him
ten pounds, either at the time agreed upon, or when he demands it.
What I ought to perform, how much I ought to perform, when and where I
{155} ought to perform it, the whole nature and circumstances of the
action prescribed, are all of them precisely fixed and determined.
Though it may be awkward and pedantic, therefore, to affect too strict
an adherence to the common rules of prudence or generosity, there is
no pedantry in sticking fast by the rules of justice. On the contrary,
the most sacred regard is due to them; and the actions which this
virtue requires are never so properly performed, as when the chief
motive for performing them is a reverential and religious regard to
those general rules which require them. In the practice of the other
virtues, our conduct should rather be directed by a certain idea of
propriety, by a certain taste for a particular tenor of conduct, than
by any regard to a precise maxim or rule; and we should consider the
end and foundation of the rule, more than the rule itself. But it is
otherwise with regard to justice: the man who in that refines the
least, and adheres with the most obstinate steadfastness to the
general rules themselves, is the most commendable, and the most to be
depended upon. Though the end of the rules of justice be, to hinder us
from hurting our neighbour, it may frequently be a crime to violate
them, though we could pretend with some pretext of reason, that this
particular violation could do no hurt. A man often becomes a villain
the moment he begins, even in his own heart, to chicane in this
manner. The moment he thinks of departing from the most staunch and
positive adherence to what those inviolable precepts prescribe to him,
he is no longer to be trusted, and no man can say what degree of guilt
he may not arrive at. The thief imagines he does no evil, when he
steals from the rich, what he supposes they may easily want, and what
possibly they may never even know has been stolen from them. The
adulterer imagines he does no evil, when he corrupts the wife of his
friend, provided he covers his intrigue from the suspicion of the
husband, and does not disturb the peace of the family. When once we
begin to give way to such refinements, there is no enormity so gross
of which we may not be capable.
The rules of justice may be compared to the rules of grammar; the
rules of the other virtues, to the rules which critics lay down for
the attainment of what is sublime and elegant in composition. The one,
are precise, accurate, and indispensable. The other, are loose, vague,
and indeterminate, and present us rather with a general idea of the
perfection we ought to aim at, than afford us any certain and
infallible directions for acquiring it. A man may learn to write
grammatically by rule, with the most absolute infallibility; and so,
perhaps, he may be taught to act justly. But there are no rules whose
observance will infallibly lead us to the attainment of elegance or
sublimity in writing; though there are some which may help us, in some
measure, to correct, and ascertain the vague ideas which we might
otherwise have entertained of those perfections. And there are no
rules by the knowledge of which we can infallibly be taught to act
upon all occasions with {156} prudence, with just magnanimity, or
proper beneficence: though there are some which may enable us to
correct and ascertain, in several respects, the imperfect ideas which
we might otherwise have entertained of those virtues--the rules of
justice.
It may sometimes happen, that with the most serious and earnest desire
of acting so as to deserve approbation, we may mistake the proper
rules of conduct, and thus be misled by that very principle which
ought to direct us. It is in vain to expect, that in this case mankind
should entirely approve of our behaviour. They cannot enter into that
absurd idea of duty which influenced us, nor go along with any of the
actions which follow from it. There is still, however, something
respectable in the character and behaviour of one who is thus betrayed
into vice, by a wrong sense of duty, or by what is called an erroneous
conscience. How fatally soever he maybe misled by it, he is still,
with the generous and humane, more the object of commiseration than of
hatred or resentment. They lament the weakness of human nature, which
exposes us to such unhappy delusions, even while we are most sincerely
labouring after perfection, and endeavouring to act according to the
best principle which can possibly direct us. False notions of religion
are almost the only causes which can occasion any very gross
perversion of our natural sentiments in this way; and that principle
which gives the greatest authority to the rules of duty, is alone
capable of distorting our ideas of them in any considerable degree. In
all other cases, common sense is sufficient to direct us, if not to
the most exquisite propriety of conduct, yet to something which is not
very far from it; and provided we are in earnest desirous to do well,
our behaviour will always, upon the whole, be praiseworthy. That to
obey the will of the Deity, is the first rule of duty, all men are
agreed. But concerning the particular commandments which that will may
impose upon us, they differ widely from one another. In this,
therefore, the greatest mutual forbearance and toleration is due; and
though the defence of society requires that crimes should be punished,
from whatever motives they proceed, yet a good man will always punish
them with reluctance, when they evidently proceed from false notions
of religious duty. He will never feel against those who commit them
that indignation which he feels against other criminals, but will
rather regret, and sometimes even admire their unfortunate firmness
and magnanimity, at the very time that he punishes their crime. In the
tragedy of Mahomet, one of the finest of Mr. Voltaire's, it is well
represented, what ought to be our sentiments for crimes which proceed
from such motives. In that tragedy, two young people of different
sexes, of the most innocent and virtuous dispositions, and without any
other weakness except what endears them the more to us, a mutual
fondness for one another, are instigated by the strongest motives of a
false religion, to commit a horrid murder, that shocks all the
principles of human nature. A {157} venerable old man, who had
expressed the most tender affection for them both, for whom,
notwithstanding he was the avowed enemy of their religion, they had
both conceived the highest reverence and esteem, and who was in
reality their father, though they did not know him to be such, is
pointed out to them as a sacrifice which God had expressly required at
their hands, and they are commanded to kill him. While about executing
this crime, they are tortured with all the agonies which can arise
from the struggle between the idea of the indispensableness of
religious duty on the one side, and compassion, gratitude, reverence
for the age, and love for the humanity and virtue of the person whom
they are going to destroy, on the other. The representation of this
exhibits one of the most interesting, and perhaps the most instructive
spectacle that was ever introduced upon any theatre. The sense of
duty, however, at last prevails over all the amiable weaknesses of
human nature. They execute the crime imposed upon them; but
immediately discover their error, and the fraud which had deceived
them, and are distracted with horror, remorse, and resentment. Such as
are our sentiments for the unhappy Seid and Palmira, such ought we to
feel for every person who is in this manner misled by religion, when
we are sure that it is really religion which misleads him, and not the
pretence of it, which is made too often a cover to some of the worst
of human passions.
As a person may act wrong by following a wrong sense of duty, so
nature may sometimes prevail, and lead him to act right in opposition
to it. We cannot in this case be displeased to see that motive
prevail, which we think ought to prevail though the person himself is
so weak as to think otherwise. As his conduct, however, is the effect
of weakness, not principle, we are far from bestowing upon it any
thing that approaches to complete approbation. A bigoted Roman
Catholic, who, during the massacre of St. Bartholomew, had been so
overcome by compassion, as to save some unhappy Protestants, whom he
thought it his duty to destroy, would not seem to be entitled to that
high applause which we should have bestowed upon him, had he exerted
the same generosity with complete self-approbation. We might be
pleased with the humanity of his temper, but we should still regard
him with a sort of pity which is altogether inconsistent with the
admiration that is due to perfect virtue. It is the same case with all
the other passions. We do not dislike to see them exert themselves
properly, even when a false notion of duty would direct the person to
restrain them. A very devout Quaker, who upon being struck upon one
cheek, instead of turning up the other, should so far forget his
literal interpretation of our Saviour's precept, as to bestow some
good discipline upon the brute that insulted him, would not be
disagreeable to us. We should laugh and be diverted with his spirit,
and rather like him the better for it. But we should by no means
regard him with that respect and esteem which would seem due to one
{158} who, upon a like occasion, had acted properly from a just sense
of what was proper to be done. No action can properly be called
virtuous, which is not accompanied with the sentiment of
self-approbation.
-----
_Part IV. Of the Effect of Utility upon the Sentiment of
Approbation._
CHAP. I.--_ Of the Beauty which the Appearance of Utility bestows
upon all the Productions of Art, and of the extensive Influence of
this Species of Beauty._
THAT utility is one of the principal sources of beauty has been
observed by every body, who has considered with any attention what
constitutes the nature of beauty. The conveniency of a house gives
pleasure to the spectator as well as its regularity, and he is as much
hurt when he observes the contrary defect, as when he sees the
correspondent windows of different forms, or the door not placed
exactly in the middle of the building. That the fitness of any system
or machine to produce the end for which it was intended, bestows a
certain propriety and beauty upon the whole, and renders the very
thought and contemplation of it agreeable, is so obvious that nobody
has over-looked it.
The cause too, why utility pleases, has of late been assigned by an
ingenious and agreeable philosopher, who joins the greatest depth of
thought to the greatest elegance of expression, and possesses the
singular and happy talent of treating the abstrusest subjects not only
with the most perfect perspicuity, but with the most lively eloquence.
The utility of any object, according to him, pleases the master by
perpetually suggesting to him the pleasure or conveniency which it is
fitted to promote. Every time he looks at it, he is put in mind of
this pleasure; and the object in this manner becomes a source of
perpetual satisfaction and enjoyment. The spectator enters by sympathy
into the sentiments of the master, and necessarily views the object
under the same agreeable aspect. When we visit the palaces of the
great, we cannot help conceiving the satisfaction we should enjoy if
we ourselves were the masters, and were possessed of so much artful
and ingeniously contrived accommodation. A similar account is given
why the appearance of inconveniency should render any object
disagreeable both to the owner and to the spectator.
But that this fitness, this happy contrivance of any production of
art, should often be more valued, than the very end for which it was
intended; and that the exact adjustment of the means for attaining any
conveniency or pleasure, should frequently be more regarded, than that
very conveniency or pleasure, in the attainment of which their whole
merit would seem to consist, has not, so far as I know, been yet taken
{159} notice of by any body. That this, however, is very frequently
the case, may be observed in a thousand instances, both in the most
frivolous and in the most important concerns of human life.
When a person comes into his chamber, and finds the chairs all
standing in the middle of the room, he is angry with his servant, and
rather than see them continue in that disorder, perhaps takes the
trouble himself to set them all in their places with their backs to
the wall. The whole propriety of this new situation arises from its
superior conveniency in leaving the floor free and disengaged. To
attain this conveniency he voluntarily puts himself to more trouble
than all he could have suffered from the want of it; since nothing was
more easy, than to have set himself down upon one of them, which is
probably what he does when his labour is over. What he wanted,
therefore, it seems, was not so much this conveniency, as that
arrangement of things which promotes it. Yet it is this conveniency
alone which may ultimately recommend that arrangement, and bestows
upon it the whole of its propriety and beauty.
A watch, in the same manner, that falls behind above two minutes in a
day, is despised by one curious in watches. He sells it perhaps for a
couple of guineas, and purchases another at fifty, which will not lose
above a minute in a fortnight. The sole use of watches, however, is to
tell us what o'clock it is, and to hinder us from breaking any
engagement, or suffering any other inconveniency by our ignorance in
that particular point. But the person so nice with regard to this
machine, will not always be found either more scrupulously punctual
than other men, or more anxiously concerned upon any other account, to
know precisely what time of day it is. What interests him is not so
much the attainment of this piece of knowledge, as the perfection of
the machine which enables him to attain it.
How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of
frivolous utility? What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much
the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to
promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniences.
They contrive new pockets, unknown in the clothes of other people, in
order to carry a greater number. They walk about loaded with a
multitude of baubles, in weight and sometimes in value not inferior to
an ordinary Jew's-box, some of which may sometimes be of some little
use, but all of which might at all times be very well spared, and of
which the whole utility is not worth the fatigue of bearing the
burden.
Nor is it only with regard to such frivolous objects that our conduct
is influenced by this principle; it is often the secret motive of the
most serious and important pursuits of both private and public life.
The poor man's son, whom Heaven in its anger has visited with
ambition, when he begins to look around him, admires the condition of
the rich. He finds the cottage of his father too small for his {160}
accommodation, and fancies he should be lodged more at his ease in a
palace. He is displeased with being obliged to walk a-foot, or to
endure the fatigue of riding on horseback. He sees his superiors
carried about in machines, and imagines that in one of these he could
travel with less inconveniency. He feels himself naturally indolent,
and willing to serve himself with his own hands as little as possible;
and judges, that a numerous retinue of servants would save him from a
great deal of trouble. He thinks if he had attained all these, he
would sit still contentedly, and be quiet, enjoying himself in the
thought of the happiness and tranquillity of his situation. He is
enchanted with the distant idea of this felicity. It appears in his
fancy like the life of some superior rank of beings, and, in order to
arrive at it, he devotes himself for ever to the pursuit of wealth and
greatness. To obtain the conveniences which these afford, he submits
in the first year, nay, in the first month of his application, to more
fatigue of body and more uneasiness of mind than he could have
suffered through the whole of his life from the want of them. He
studies to distinguish himself in some laborious profession. With the
most unrelenting industry he labours night and day to acquire talents
superior to all his competitors. He endeavours next to bring those
talents into public view, and with equal assiduity solicits every
opportunity of employment. For this purpose he makes his court to all
mankind; he serves those whom he hates, and is obsequious to those
whom he despises. Through the whole of his life he pursues the idea of
a certain artificial and elegant repose which he may never arrive at,
for which he sacrifices a real tranquillity that is at all times in
his power, and which, if in the extremity of old age he should at last
attain to it, he will find to be in no respect preferable to that
humble security and contentment which he had abandoned for it. It is
then, in the last dregs of life, his body wasted with toil and
diseases, his mind galled and ruffled by the memory of a thousand
injuries and disappointments which he imagines he has met with from
the injustice of his enemies, or from the perfidy and ingratitude of
his friends, that he begins at last to find that wealth and greatness
are mere trinkets of frivolous utility, no more adapted for procuring
ease of body or tranquillity of mind than the tweezer-cases of the
lover of toys; and, like them too, more troublesome to the person who
carries them about with him than all the advantages they can afford
him are commodious. There is no other real difference between them,
except that the conveniences of the one are somewhat more observable
than those of the other. The palaces, the gardens, the equipage, the
retinue of the great, are objects of which the obvious conveniency
strikes every body. They do not require that their masters should
point out to us wherein consists their utility. Of our own accord we
readily enter into it, and by sympathy enjoy and thereby applaud the
satisfaction which they are fitted to afford him. But the {161}
curiosity of a tooth-pick, of an ear-picker, of a machine for cutting
the nails, or of any other trinket of the same kind, is not so
obvious. Their conveniency may perhaps be equally great, but it is not
so striking, and we do not so readily enter into the satisfaction of
the man who possesses them. They are therefore less reasonable
subjects of vanity than the magnificence of wealth and greatness; and
in this consists the sole advantage of these last. They more
effectually gratify that love of distinction so natural to man. To one
who was to live alone in a desolate island it might be a matter of
doubt, perhaps, whether a palace, or a collection of such small
conveniencies as are commonly contained in a tweezer-case, would
contribute most to his happiness and enjoyment. If he is to live in
society, indeed, there can be no comparison, because in this, as in
all other cases, we constantly pay more regard to the sentiments of
the spectator, than to those of the person principally concerned, and
consider rather how his situation will appear to other people, than
how it will appear to himself. If we examine, however, why the
spectator distinguishes with such admiration the condition of the rich
and the great, we shall find that is is not so much upon account of
the superior ease or pleasure which they are supposed to enjoy, as of
the numberless artificial and elegant contrivances for promoting this
ease or pleasure. He does not even imagine that they are really
happier than other people: but he imagines that they possess more
means of happiness. And it is the ingenious and artful adjustment of
those means to the end for which they were intended, that is the
principal source of his admiration. But in the languor of disease and
the weariness of old age, the pleasures of the vain and empty
distinctions of greatness disappear. To one, in this situation, they
are no longer capable of recommending those toilsome pursuits in which
they had formerly engaged him. In his heart he curses ambition, and
vainly regrets the ease and the indolence of youth, pleasures which
are fled for ever, and which he has foolishly sacrificed for what,
when he has got it, can afford him no real satisfaction. In this
miserable aspect does greatness appear to every man when reduced
either by spleen or disease to observe with attention his own
situation, and to consider what it is that is really wanting to his
happiness. Power and riches appear then to be, what they are, enormous
and operose machines contrived to produce a few trifling conveniencies
to the body, consisting of springs the most nice and delicate, which
must be kept in order with the most anxious attention, and which in
spite of all our care are ready every moment to burst into pieces, and
to crush in their ruins their unfortunate possessor. They are immense
fabrics, which it requires the labour of a life to raise, which
threaten every moment to overwhelm the person that dwells in them, and
which while they stand, though they may save him from some smaller
inconveniencies, can protect him from none of the severer {162}
inclemencies of the season. They keep off the summer shower, not the
winter storm, but leave him always as much, and sometimes more,
exposed than before, to anxiety, to fear, and to sorrow; to diseases,
to danger, and to death.
But though this splenetic philosophy, which in time of sickness or low
spirits is familiar to every man, thus entirely depreciates those
great objects of human desire, when in better health and in better
humour, we never fail to regard them under a more agreeable aspect.
Our imagination, which in pain and sorrow seems to be confined and
cooped up within our own persons, in times of ease and prosperity
expands itself to every thing around us. We are then charmed with the
beauty of that accommodation which reigns in the palaces and
oeconomy of the great: and admire how every thing is adapted to
promote their ease, to prevent their wants, to gratify their wishes,
and to amuse and entertain their most frivolous desires. If we
consider the real satisfaction which all these things are capable of
affording, by itself and separated from the beauty of that arrangement
which is fitted to promote it, it will always appear in the highest
degree contemptible and trifling. But we rarely view it in this
abstract and philosophical light. We naturally confound it in our
imagination with the order, the regular and harmonious movement of the
system, the machine or oeconomy by means of which it is produced.
The pleasures of wealth and greatness, when considered in this complex
view, strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and
noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety
which we are so apt to bestow upon it.
And it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this
deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of
mankind. It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground,
to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and
improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human
life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have
turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains,
and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence, and
the great high road of communication to the different nations of the
earth. The earth by these labours of mankind has been obliged to
redouble her natural fertility, and to maintain a greater multitude of
inhabitants. It is to no purpose, that the proud and unfeeling
landlord views his extensive fields, and without a thought for the
wants of his brethren, in imagination consumes himself the whole
harvest that grows upon them. The homely and vulgar proverb, that the
eye is larger than the belly, never was more fully verified than with
regard to him. The capacity of his stomach bears no proportion to the
immensity of his desires, and will receive no more than that of the
meanest peasant. The rest he is obliged to distribute among those,
{163} who prepare, in the nicest manner, that little which he himself
makes use of, among those who fit up the palace in which this little
is to be consumed, among those who provide and keep in order all the
different baubles and trinkets which are employed in the oeconomy of
greatness; all of whom thus derive from his luxury and caprice, that
share of the necessaries of life, which they would in vain have
expected from his humanity or his justice. The produce of the soil
maintains at all times nearly that number of inhabitants which it is
capable of maintaining. The rich only select from the heap what is
most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor,
and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they
mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they
propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the
gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide
with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by
an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the
necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been
divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus
without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the
society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. When
Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither
forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the
partition. These last, too, enjoy their share of all that it produces.
In what constitutes the real happiness of human life, they are in no
respect inferior to those who would seem so much above them. In ease
of the body and peace of the mind, all the different ranks of life are
nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of
the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.
The same principle, the same love of system, the same regard to the
beauty of order, of art and contrivance, frequently serves to
recommend those institutions which tend to promote the public welfare.
When a patriot exerts himself for the improvement of any part of the
public police, his conduct does not always arise from pure sympathy
with the happiness of those who are to reap the benefit of it. It is
not commonly from a fellow-feeling with carriers and waggoners that a
public-spirited man encourages the mending of high roads. When the
legislature establishes premiums and other encouragements to advance
the linen or woollen manufactures, its conduct seldom proceeds from
pure sympathy with the wearer of cheap or fine cloth, and much less
from that with the manufacturer or merchant. The perfection of police,
the extension of trade and manufactures, are noble and magnificent
objects. The contemplation of them pleases us, and we are interested
in whatever can tend to advance them. They make part of the great
system of government, and the wheels of the political machine seem to
move with more harmony and ease by means of them. We {164} take
pleasure in beholding the perfection of so beautiful and grand a
system, and we are uneasy till we remove any obstruction that can in
the least disturb or encumber the regularity of its motions. All
constitutions of government, however, are valued only in proportion as
they tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them. This
is their sole use and end. From a certain spirit of system, however,
from a certain love of art and contrivance, we sometimes seem to value
the means more than the end, and to be eager to promote the happiness
of our fellow-creatures, rather from a view to perfect and improve a
certain beautiful and orderly system, than from any immediate sense or
feeling of what they either suffer or enjoy. There have been men of
the greatest public spirit, who have shown themselves in other
respects not very sensible to the feelings of humanity. And on the
contrary, there have been men of the greatest humanity, who seem to
have been entirely devoid of public spirit. Every man may find in the
circle of his acquaintance instances both of the one kind and the
other. Who had ever less humanity, or more public spirit, than the
celebrated legislator of Muscovy? The social and well-natured James
the First of Great Britain seems, on the contrary, to have had scarce
any passion, either for the glory or the interest of his country.
Would you awaken the industry of the man who seems almost dead to
ambition, it will often be to no purpose to describe to him the
happiness of the rich and the great; to tell him that they are
generally sheltered from the sun and the rain, that they are seldom
hungry, that they are seldom cold, and that they are rarely exposed to
weariness, or to want of any kind. The most eloquent exhortation of
this kind will have little effect upon him. If you would hope to
succeed, you must describe to him the conveniency and arrangement of
the different apartments in their palaces; you must explain to him the
propriety of their equipages, and point out to him the number, the
order, and the different offices of all their attendants. If any thing
is capable of making impression upon him, this will. Yet all these
things tend only to keep off the sun and the rain, and save them from
hunger and cold, from want and weariness. In the same manner, if you
would implant public virtue in the breast of him who seems heedless of
the interest of his country, it will often be to no purpose to tell
him, what superior advantages the subjects of a well-governed state
enjoy; that they are better lodged, that they are better clothed, that
they are better fed. These considerations will commonly make no great
impression. You will be more likely to persuade, if you describe the
great system of public police which procures these advantages, if you
explain the connexions and dependencies of its several parts, their
mutual subordination to one another, and their general subserviency to
the happiness of the society; if you show how this system might be
introduced into his own country, what it is that hinders it from
taking place there at present, how those {165} obstructions might be
removed, and all the several wheels of the machine of government be
made to move with more harmony and smoothness, without grating upon
one another, or mutually retarding one another's motions. It is scarce
possible that a man should listen to a discourse of this kind, and not
feel himself animated to some degree of public spirit. He will, at
least for a moment, feel some desire to remove those obstructions, and
to put into motion so beautiful and so orderly a machine. Nothing
tends so much to promote public spirit as the study of politics, of
the several systems of civil government, their advantages and
disadvantages, of the constitution of our own country, its situation,
and interest with regard to foreign nations, its commerce, its
defence, the disadvantages it labours under, the dangers to which it
may be exposed, how to remove the one, and how to guard against the
other. Upon this account political disquisition, if just and
reasonable and practicable, are of all the works of speculation the
most useful. Even the weakest and the worst of them are not altogether
without their utility. They serve at least to animate the public
passions of men, and rouse them to seek out the means of promoting the
happiness of the society.
-----
CHAP. II.--_Of the Beauty which the Appearance of Utility bestows
upon the Characters and the Actions of Men; and how far the Perception
of this Beauty may be regarded as one of the original Principles of
Approbation._
THE characters of men, as well as the contrivances of art, or the
institutions of civil government, may be fitted either to promote or
to disturb the happiness both of the individual and of the society.
The prudent, the equitable, the active, resolute, and sober character
promises prosperity and satisfaction, both to the person himself and
to every one connected with him. The rash, the insolent, the slothful,
effeminate, and voluptuous, on the contrary, forebodes ruin to the
individual, and misfortune to all who have any thing to do with him.
The first turn of mind has at least all the beauty which can belong to
the most perfect machine that was ever invented for promoting the most
agreeable purpose: and the second, all the deformity of the most
awkward and clumsy contrivance. What institution of government could
tend so much to promote the happiness of mankind as the general
prevalence of wisdom and virtue? All government is but an imperfect
remedy for the deficiency of these. Whatever beauty, therefore, can
belong to civil government upon account of its utility, must in a far
superior degree belong to these. On the contrary, what civil policy
can be so ruinous and destructive as the vices of men? The fatal
effects of bad government arise from nothing, but that it does not
{166} sufficiently guard against the mischiefs which human wickedness
so often gives occasion to.
This beauty and deformity which characters appear to derive from their
usefulness or inconveniency, are apt to strike, in a peculiar manner,
those who consider, in an abstract and philosophical light, the
actions and conduct of mankind. When a philosopher goes to examine why
humanity is approved of, or cruelty condemned, he does not always form
to himself, in a very clear and distinct manner, the conception of any
one particular action either of cruelty or of humanity, but is
commonly contented with the vague and indeterminate idea which the
general names of those qualities suggest to him. But it is in
particular instances only that the propriety or impropriety, the merit
or demerit of actions is very obvious and discernible. It is only when
particular examples are given that we perceive distinctly either the
concord or disagreement between our two affections and those of the
agent, or feel a social gratitude arise towards him in the one case,
or a sympathetic resentment in the other. When we consider virtue and
vice in an abstract and general manner, the qualities by which they
excite these several sentiments seem in a great measure to disappear,
and the sentiments themselves become less obvious and discernible. On
the contrary, the happy effects of the one and the fatal consequences
of the other seem then to rise up to the view, and as it were to stand
out and distinguish themselves from all the other qualities of either.
The same ingenious and agreeable author who first explained why
utility pleases, has been so struck with this view of things, as to
resolve our whole approbation of virtue into a perception of this
species of beauty which results from the appearance of utility. No
qualities of the mind, he observes, are approved of as virtuous, but
such as are useful or agreeable either to the person himself or to
others; and no qualities are disapproved of as vicious but such as
have a contrary tendency. And Nature, indeed, seems to have so happily
adjusted our sentiments of approbation and disapprobation, to the
conveniency both of the individual and of the society, that after the
strictest examination it will be found, I believe, that this is
universally the case. But still I affirm, that it is not the view of
this utility or hurtfulness which is either the first or principal
source of our approbation and disapprobation. These sentiments are no
doubt enhanced and enlivened by the perception of the beauty or
deformity which results from this utility or hurtfulness. But still, I
say, that they were originally and essentially different from this
perception.
For first of all, it seems impossible that the approbation of virtue
should be a sentiment of the same kind with that by which we approve
of a convenient and well-contrived building; or that we should have no
other reason for praising a man than that for which we commend a chest
of drawers.
{167} And secondly, it will be found, upon examination, that the
usefulness of any disposition of mind is seldom the first ground of
our approbation; and that the sentiment of approbation always involves
in it a sense of propriety quite distinct from the perception of
utility. We may observe this with regard to all the qualities which
are approved of as virtuous, both those which, according to this
system, are originally valued as useful to ourselves, as well as those
which are esteemed on account of their usefulness to others.
The qualities most useful to ourselves are, first of all, superior
reason and understanding, by which we are capable of discerning the
remote consequences of all our actions, and of fore-seeing the
advantage or detriment which is likely to result from them: and
secondly, self-command, by which we are enabled to abstain from
present pleasure or to endure present pain, in order to obtain a
greater pleasure, or to avoid a greater pain in some future time. In
the union of those two qualities consists the virtue of prudence, of
all the virtues that which is the most useful to the individual.
With regard to the first of those qualities, it has been observed on a
former occasion, that superior reason and understanding are originally
approved of as just and right and accurate, and not merely as useful
or advantageous. It is in the abstruser sciences, particularly in the
higher parts of mathematics, that the greatest and most admired
exertions of human reason have been displayed. But the utility of
those sciences, either to the individual or to the public, is not very
obvious, and to prove it, requires a discussion which is not always
very easily comprehended. It was not, therefore, their utility which
first recommended them to the public admiration. This quality was but
little insisted upon, till it became necessary to make some reply to
the reproaches of those, who, having themselves no taste for such
sublime discoveries, endeavoured to depreciate them as useless.
That self-command, in the same manner, by which we restrain our
present appetites, in order to gratify them more fully upon another
occasion, is approved of, as much under the aspect of propriety, as
under that of utility. When we act in this manner, the sentiments
which influence our conduct seem exactly to coincide with those of the
spectator. The spectator, however, does not feel the solicitations of
our present appetites.
To him the pleasure which we are to enjoy a week hence, or a year
hence, is just as interesting as that which we are to enjoy this
moment. When for the sake of the present, therefore, we sacrifice the
future, our conduct appears to him absurd and extravagant in the
highest degree, and he cannot enter into the principles which
influence it. On the contrary, when we abstain from present pleasure,
in order to secure greater pleasure to come, when we act as if the
remote object interested us as much as that which immediately presses
upon the senses, as our {168} affections exactly correspond with his
own, he cannot fail to approve of our behaviour: and as he knows from
experience, how few are capable of this self-command, he looks upon
our conduct with a considerable degree of wonder and admiration. Hence
arises that eminent esteem with which all men naturally regard a
steady perseverance in the practice of frugality, industry, and
application, though directed to no other purpose than the acquisition
of fortune. The resolute firmness of the person who acts in this
manner, and in order to obtain a great though remote advantage, not
only gives up all present pleasures, but endures the greatest labour
both of mind and body, necessarily commands our approbation. That view
of his interest and happiness which appears to regulate his conduct,
exactly tallies with the idea which we naturally form of it. There is
the most perfect correspondence between his sentiments and our own,
and at the same time, from our experience of the common weakness of
human nature, it is a correspondence which we could not reasonably
have expected. We not only approve, therefore, but in some measure
admire his conduct, and think it worthy of a considerable degree of
applause. It is the consciousness of this merited approbation and
esteem which is alone capable of supporting the agent in this tenor of
conduct. The pleasure which we are to enjoy ten years hence interests
us so little in comparison with that which we may enjoy today, the
passion which the first excites, is naturally so weak in comparison
with that violent emotion which the second is apt to give occasion to,
that the one could never be any balance to the other, unless it was
supported by the sense of propriety, by the consciousness that we
merited the esteem and approbation of every body, by acting in the one
way, and that we became the proper objects of their contempt and
derision by behaving in the other.
Humanity, justice, generosity, and public spirit, are the qualities
most useful to others. Wherein consists the propriety of humanity and
justice has been explained upon a former occasion, where it was shown
how much our esteem and approbation of those qualities depended upon
the concord between the affections of the agent and those of the
spectators.
The propriety of generosity and public spirit is founded upon the same
principle with that of justice. Generosity is different from humanity.
Those two qualities, which at first sight seem so nearly allied, do
not always belong to the same person. Humanity is the virtue of a
woman, generosity of a man. The fair sex, who have commonly much more
tenderness than ours, have seldom so much generosity. That women
rarely make considerable donations, is an observation of the civil
law. (Raro mulieres donare solent.) Humanity consists merely in the
exquisite fellow-feeling which the spectator entertains with the
sentiments of the persons principally concerned, so as to grieve for
their sufferings, to resent their injuries, and to rejoice at their
good {169} fortune. The most humane actions require no self-denial, no
self-command, no great exertion of the sense of propriety. They
consist only in doing what this exquisite sympathy would of its own
accord prompt us to do. But it is otherwise with generosity. We never
are generous except when in some respect we prefer some other person
to ourselves, and sacrifice some great and important interest of our
own to an equal interest of a friend or of a superior. The man who
gives up his pretensions to an office that was the great object of his
ambition, because he imagines that the services of another are better
entitled to it; the man who exposes his life to defend that of his
friend, which he judges to be of more importance, neither of them act
from humanity, or because they feel more exquisitely what concerns
that other person that what concerns themselves. They both consider
those opposite interests, not in the light in which they naturally
appear to themselves, but in that in which they appear to others. To
every bystander, the success or preservation of this other person may
justly be more interesting than their own; but it cannot be so to
themselves. When to the interest of this other person, therefore, they
sacrifice their own, they accommodate themselves to the sentiments of
the spectator, and by an effort of magnanimity act according to those
views of things which they feel must naturally occur to any third
person. The soldier who throws away his life in order to defend that
of his officer, would perhaps be but little affected by the death of
that officer, if it should happen without any fault of his own; and a
very small disaster which had befallen himself might excite a much
more lively sorrow. But when he endeavours to act so as to deserve
applause, and to make the impartial spectator enter into the
principles of his conduct, he feels, that to every body but himself,
his own life is a trifle compared with that of his officer, and that
when he sacrifices the one to the other, he acts quite properly and
agreeably to what would be the natural apprehensions of every
impartial bystander.
It is the same case with the greater exertions of public spirit. When
a young officer exposes his life to acquire some inconsiderable
addition to the dominions of his sovereign, it is not because the
acquisition of the new territory is, to himself, an object more
desirable than the preservation of his own life. To him his own life
is of infinitely more value than the conquest of a whole kingdom for
the state which he serves. But when he compares those two objects with
one another, he does not view them in the light in which they
naturally appear to himself, but in that in which they appear to the
nation he fights for. To them the success of the war is of the highest
importance; the life of a private person of scarce any consequence.
When he puts himself in their situation, he immediately feels that he
cannot be too prodigal of his blood, if, by shedding it, he can
promote so valuable a purpose. In thus thwarting, from a sense of duty
and propriety, the strongest of {170} all natural propensities,
consists the heroism of his conduct. There is many an honest
Englishman, who, in his private station, would be more seriously
disturbed by the loss of a guinea, than by the national loss of
Minorca, who yet, had it been in his power to defend that fortress,
would have sacrificed his life a thousand times rather than, through
his fault, have let it fall into the hands of the enemy. When the
first Brutus led forth his own sons to a capital punishment, because
they had conspired against the rising liberty of Rome, he sacrificed
what, if he had consulted his own breast only, would appear to be the
stronger to the weaker affection. Brutus ought naturally to have felt
much more for the death of his own sons, than for all that probably
Rome could have suffered from the want of so great an example. But he
viewed them, not with the eyes of a father, but with those of a Roman
citizen. He entered so thoroughly into the sentiments of this last
character, that he paid no regard to that tie, by which he himself was
connected with them; and to a Roman citizen, the sons even of Brutus
seemed contemptible, when put into the balance with the smallest
interest of Rome. In these and in all other cases of this kind, our
admiration is not so much founded upon the utility, as upon the
unexpected, and on that account the great, the noble, and exalted
propriety of such actions. This utility, when we come to view it,
bestows upon them, undoubtedly a new beauty, and upon that account
still further recommends them to our approbation. This new beauty,
however, is chiefly perceived by men of reflection and speculation,
and it is by no means the quality which first recommends such actions
to the natural sentiments of the bulk of mankind.
It is to be observed, that so far as the sentiment of approbation
arises from the perception of this beauty of utility, it has no
reference of any kind to the sentiments of others. If it was possible,
therefore, that a person should grow up to manhood without any
communication with society, his own actions might, notwithstanding, be
agreeable or disagreeable to him on account of their tendency to his
happiness or disadvantage. He might perceive a beauty of this kind in
prudence, temperance, and good conduct, and a deformity in the
opposite behaviour: he might view his own temper and character with
that sort of satisfaction with which we consider a well-contrived
machine, in the one case: or with that sort of distaste and
dissatisfaction with which we regard a very awkward and clumsy
contrivance, in the other. As these perceptions, however, are merely a
matter of taste, and have all the feebleness and delicacy of that
species of perceptions, upon the justness of which what is properly
called taste is founded, they probably would not be much attended to
by one in his solitary and miserable condition. Even though they
should occur to him, they would by no means have the same effect upon
him, antecedent to his connexion with society, which they would have
in consequence of that connexion. He {171} would not be cast down with
inward shame at the thought of this deformity; nor would he be
elevated with secret triumph of mind from the consciousness of the
contrary beauty. He would not exult from the notion of deserving
reward in the one case, nor tremble from the suspicion of meriting
punishment in the other. All such sentiments suppose the idea of some
other being, who is the natural judge of the person that feels them;
and it is only by sympathy with the decisions of this arbiter of his
conduct, that he can conceive, either the triumph of self-applause, or
the shame of self-condemnation.
-----
_Part V.--Of the Influence of Custom and Fashion upon the Sentiments
of Moral Approbation and Disapprobation._
CHAP. I.--_Of the Influence of Custom and Fashion upon our notions
of Beauty and Deformity._
THERE are other principles besides those already enumerated, which
have a considerable influence upon the moral sentiments of mankind,
and are the chief causes of the many irregular and discordant opinions
which prevail in different ages and nations concerning what is
blamable or praise-worthy. These principles are custom and fashion,
principles which extend their dominion over our judgments concerning
beauty of every kind.
When two objects have frequently been seen together, the imagination
acquires a habit of passing easily from the one to the other. If the
first appear, we lay our account that the second is to follow. Of
their own accord they put us in mind of one another, and the attention
glides easily along them. Though, independent of custom, there should
be no real beauty in their union, yet when custom has thus connected
them together, we feel an impropriety in their separation. The one we
think is awkward when it appears without its usual companion. We miss
something which we expected to find, and the habitual arrangement of
our ideas is disturbed by the disappointment. A suit of clothes, for
example, seems to want something if they are without the most
insignificant ornament which usually accompanies them, and we find a
meanness or awkwardness in the absence even of a haunch button. When
there is any natural propriety in the union, custom increases our
sense of it, and makes a different arrangement appear still more
disagreeable than it would otherwise seem to be. Those who have been
accustomed to see things in a good taste, are more disgusted by
whatever is clumsy or awkward. Where the conjunction is improper,
custom either diminishes, or takes away altogether, our sense of the
impropriety. Those who have been accustomed to slovenly disorder lose
all sense of neatness or elegance. The modes of furniture or dress
which {172} seem ridiculous to strangers, give no offence to the
people who have been used to them.
Fashion is different from custom, or rather is a particular species of
it. That is not the fashion which every body wears, but which those
wear who are of a high rank, or character. The graceful, the easy, and
commanding manners of the great, joined to the usual richness and
magnificence of their dress, give a grace to the very form which they
happen to bestow upon it. As long as they continue to use this form,
it is connected in our imaginations with the idea of something that is
genteel and magnificent, and though in itself it should be
indifferent, it seems, on account of this relation, to have something
about it that is genteel and magnificent too. As soon as they drop it,
it loses all the grace, which it had appeared to possess before, and
being now used only by the inferior ranks of people, seems to have
something of their meanness and their awkwardness.
Dress and furniture are allowed by all the world to be entirely under
the dominion of custom and fashion. The influence of those principles,
however, is by no means confined to so narrow a sphere, but extends
itself to whatever is in any respect the object of taste, to music, to
poetry, to architecture. The modes of dress and furniture are
continually changing, and that fashion appearing ridiculous to-day
which was admired five years ago, we are experimentally convinced that
it owed its vogue chiefly or entirely to custom and fashion. Clothes
and furniture are not made of very durable materials. A well-fancied
coat is done in a twelve-month, and cannot continue longer to
propagate, as the fashion, that form according to which it was made.
The modes of furniture change less rapidly than those of dress;
because furniture is commonly more durable. In five or six years,
however, it generally undergoes an entire revolution, and every man in
his own time sees the fashion in this respect change many different
ways. The productions of the other arts are much more lasting, and,
when happily imagined, may continue to propagate the fashion of their
make for a much longer time. A well-contrived building may endure many
centuries: a beautiful air may be delivered down by a sort of
tradition, through many successive generations: a well-written poem
may last as long as the world; and all of them continue for ages
together, to give the vogue to that particular style, to that
particular taste or manner, according to which each of them was
composed. Few men have an opportunity of seeing in their own times the
fashion in any of these arts change very considerably. Few men have so
much experience and acquaintance with the different modes which have
obtained in remote ages and nations, as to be thoroughly reconciled to
them, or to judge with impartiality between them and what takes place
in their own age and country. Few men therefore are willing to allow,
that custom or fashion have much influence upon their judgments
concerning what is beautiful {173} or otherwise, in the productions of
any of those arts; but imagine that all the rules, which they think
ought to be observed in each of them, are founded upon reason and
nature, not upon habit or prejudice. A very little attention may
convince them of the contrary, and satisfy them, that the influence of
custom and fashion over dress and furniture, is not more absolute than
over architecture, poetry, and music.
Can any reason, for example, be assigned why the Doric capital should
be appropriated to a pillar, whose height is equal to eight diameters;
the Ionic volute to one of nine; and the Corinthian foliage to one of
ten? The propriety of each of those appropriations can be founded upon
nothing but habit and custom. The eye having been used to see a
particular proportion connected with a particular ornament, would be
offended if they were not joined together. Each of the five orders has
its peculiar ornaments, which cannot be changed for any other, without
giving offence to all those who know any thing of the rules of
architecture. According to some architects, indeed, such is the
exquisite judgment with which the ancients have assigned to each order
its proper ornaments, that no others can be found which are equally
suitable. It seems, however, a little difficult to be conceived that
these forms, though, no doubt, extremely agreeable, should be the only
forms which can suit those proportions, or that there should not be
five hundred others which, antecedent to established custom, would
have fitted them equally well. When custom, however, has established
particular rules of building, provided they are not absolutely
unreasonable, it is absurd to think of altering them for others which
are only equally good, or even for others which, in point of elegance
and beauty, have naturally some little advantage over them. A man
would be ridiculous who should appear in public with a suit of clothes
quite different from those which are commonly worn, though the new
dress should in itself be ever so graceful or convenient. And there
seems to be an absurdity of the same kind in ornamenting a house after
a quite different manner from that which custom and fashion have
prescribed; though the new ornaments should in themselves be somewhat
superior to the common ones in use.
According to the ancient rhetoricians, a certain measure or verse was
by nature appropriated to each particular species of writing, as being
naturally expressive of that character, sentiment, or passion, which
ought to predominate in it. One verse, they said, was fit for grave
and another for gay works, which could not, they thought, be
interchanged without the greatest impropriety. The experience of
modern times, however, seems to contradict this principle, though in
itself it would appear to be extremely probable. What is the burlesque
verse in English, is the heroic verse in French. The tragedies of
Racine and the Henriad of Voltaire, are nearly in the same verse with,
Let me have your advice in a weighty affair.
{174} The burlesque verse in French, on the contrary, is pretty much
the same with the heroic verse of ten syllables in English. Custom has
made the one nation associate the ideas of gravity, sublimity, and
seriousness, to that measure which the other has connected with
whatever is gay, flippant, and ludicrous. Nothing would appear more
absurd in English, than a tragedy written in the Alexandrine verses of
the French; or in French, than a work of the same kind in hexametery,
or verses of ten syllables.
An eminent artist will bring about a considerable change in the
established modes of each of those arts, and introduce a new fashion
of writing, music, or architecture. As the dress of an agreeable man
of high rank recommends itself, and how peculiar and fantastical
soever, comes soon to be admired and imitated; so the excellencies of
an eminent master recommend his peculiarities, and his manner becomes
the fashionable style in the art which he practises. The taste of the
Italians in music and architecture has, within these fifty years,
undergone a considerable change, from imitating the peculiarities of
some eminent masters in each of those arts. Seneca is accused by
Quintilian of having corrupted the taste of the Romans, and of having
introduced a frivolous prettiness in the room of majestic reason and
masculine eloquence. Sallust and Tacitus have by others been charged
with the same accusation, though in a different manner. They gave
reputation, it is pretended, to a style, which though in the highest
degree concise, elegant, expressive, and even poetical, wanted,
however, ease, simplicity, and nature, and was evidently the
production of the most laboured and studied affectation. How many
great qualities must that writer possess, who can thus render his very
faults agreeable? After the praise of refining the taste of a nation,
the highest eulogy, perhaps, which can be bestowed upon any author, is
to say, that he corrupted it. In our own language, Mr. Pope and Dr.
Swift have each of them introduced a manner different from what was
practised before, into all works that are written in rhyme, the one in
long verses, the other in short. The quaintness of Butler has given
place to the plainness of Swift. The rambling freedom of Dryden, and
the correct but often tedious and prosaic languor of Addison, are no
longer the objects of imitation, but all long verses are now written
after the manner of the nervous precision of Mr. Pope.
Neither is it only over the productions of the arts, that custom and
fashion exert their dominion. They influence our judgments, in the
same manner, with regard to the beauty of natural objects. What
various and opposite forms are deemed beautiful in different species
of things? The proportions which are admired in one animal, are
altogether different from those which are esteemed in another. Every
class of things has its own peculiar conformation, which is approved
of, and has a beauty of its own, distinct from that of every other
species. {175} It is upon this account that a learned Jesuit, Father
Buffier, has determined that the beauty of every object consists in
that form and colour, which is most usual among things of that
particular sort to which it belongs. Thus, in the human form, the
beauty of each feature lies in a certain middle, equally removed from
a variety of other forms that are ugly. A beautiful nose, for example,
is one that is neither very long, nor very short, neither very
straight, nor very crooked, but a sort of middle among all these
extremes, and less different from any one of them, than all of them
are from one another. It is the form which nature seems to have aimed
at in them all, which, however, she deviates from in a great variety
of ways, and very seldom hits exactly; but to which all those
deviations still bear a very strong resemblance. When a number of
drawings are made after one pattern, though they may all miss it in
some respects, yet they will all resemble it more than they resemble
one another; the general character of the pattern will run through
them all; the most singular and odd will be those which are most wide
of it; and though very few will copy it exactly, yet the most accurate
delineations will bear a greater resemblance to the most careless,
than the careless ones will bear to one another. In the same manner,
in each species of creatures, what is most beautiful bears the
strongest characters of the general fabric of the species, and has the
strongest resemblance to the greater part of the individuals with
which it is classed. Monsters, on the contrary, or what is perfectly
deformed, are always most singular and odd, and have the least
resemblance to the generality of that species to which they belong.
And thus the beauty of each species, though in one sense the rarest of
all things, because few individuals hit this middle form exactly, yet
in another, is the most common, because all the deviations from it
resemble it more than they resemble one another. The most customary
form, therefore, is in each species of things, according to him, the
most beautiful. And hence it is that a certain practice and experience
in contemplating each species of objects is requisite before we can
judge of its beauty, or know wherein the middle and most usual form
consists. The nicest judgment concerning the beauty of the human
species will not help us to judge of that of flowers, or horses, or
any other species of things. It is for the same reason that in
different climates, and where different customs and ways of living
take place, as the generality of any species receives a different
conformation from those circumstances, so different ideas of its
beauty prevail. The beauty of a Moorish is not exactly the same with
that of an English horse. What different ideas are formed in different
nations concerning the beauty of the human shape and countenance? A
fair complexion is a shocking deformity upon the coast of Guinea.
Thick lips and a flat nose are a beauty. In some nations long ears
that hang down upon the shoulders are the objects of universal
admiration. In China if a lady's foot is so {176} large as to be fit
to walk upon, she is regarded as a monster of ugliness. Some of the
savage nations in North America tie four boards round the heads of
their children, and thus squeeze them, while the bones are tender and
gristly, into a form that is almost perfectly square. Europeans are
astonished at the absurd barbarity of this practice, to which some
missionaries have imputed the singular stupidity of those nations
among whom it prevails. But when they condemn those savages, they do
not reflect that the ladies in Europe had, till within these very few
years, been endeavouring, for near a century past, to squeeze the
beautiful roundness of their natural shape into a square form of the
same kind. And that, notwithstanding the many distortions and diseases
which this practice was known to occasion, custom had rendered it
agreeable among some of the most civilized nations which, perhaps, the
world has ever beheld.
Such is the system of this learned and ingenious father, concerning
the nature of beauty; of which the whole charm, according to him,
would thus seem to arise from its falling in with the habits which
custom had impressed upon the imagination, with regard to things of
each particular kind. I cannot, however, be induced to believe that
our sense even of external beauty is founded altogether on custom. The
utility of any form, its fitness for the useful purposes for which it
was intended evidently recommends it, and renders it agreeable to us,
independent of custom. Certain colours are more agreeable than
others, and give more delight to the eye the first time it ever
beholds them. A smooth surface is more agreeable than a rough one.
Variety is more pleasing than a tedious undiversified uniformity.
Connected variety, in which each new appearance seems to be introduced
by what went before it, and in which all the adjoining parts seem to
have some natural relation to one another, is more agreeable than a
disjointed and disorderly assemblage of unconnected objects. But
though I cannot admit that custom is the sole principle of beauty, yet
I can so far allow the truth of this ingenious system as to grant,
that there is scarce any one external form so beautiful as to please,
if quite contrary to custom and unlike whatever we have ever been used
to in that particular species of things: or so deformed as not to be
agreeable, if custom uniformly supports it, and habituates us to see
it in every single individual of the kind.
-----
CHAP. II.--_Of the Influence of Custom and Fashion upon Moral
Sentiments._
SINCE our sentiments concerning beauty of every kind, are so much
influenced by custom and fashion, it cannot be expected, that those,
concerning the beauty of conduct, should be entirely exempted from
{177} the dominion of those principles. Their influence here, however,
seems to be much less than it is every where else. There is, perhaps,
no form of external objects, how absurd and fantastical soever, to
which custom will not reconcile us, or which fashion will not render
even agreeable. But the characters and conduct of a Nero, or a
Claudius, are what no custom will ever reconcile us to, what no
fashion will ever render agreeable; but the one will always be the
object of dread and hatred; the other of scorn and derision. The
principles of the imagination, upon which our sense of beauty depends,
are of a very nice and delicate nature, and may easily be altered by
habit and education: but the sentiments of moral approbation and
disapprobation, are founded on the strongest and most vigorous
passions of human nature; and though they may be warped, cannot be
entirely perverted.
But though the influence of custom and fashion upon moral sentiments,
is not altogether so great, it is however perfectly similar to what it
is every where else. When custom and fashion coincide with the natural
principles of right and wrong, they heighten the delicacy of our
sentiments, and increase our abhorrence for every thing which
approaches to evil. Those who have been educated in what is really
good company, not in what is commonly called such, who have been
accustomed to see nothing in the persons whom they esteemed and lived
with, but justice, modesty, humanity, and good order; are more shocked
with whatever seems to be inconsistent with the rules which those
virtues prescribe. Those, on the contrary, who have had the misfortune
to be brought up amidst violence, licentiousness, falsehood, and
injustice, lose, though not all sense of the impropriety of such
conduct, yet all sense of its dreadful enormity, or of the vengeance
and punishment due to it. They have been familiarized with it from
their infancy, custom has rendered it habitual to them, and they are
very apt to regard it as, what is called, the way of the world,
something which either may, or must be practised, to hinder us from
being made the dupes of our own integrity.
Fashion, too, will sometimes give reputation to a certain degree of
disorder, and, on the contrary, discountenance qualities which deserve
esteem. In the reign of Charles II. a degree of licentiousness was
deemed the characteristic of a liberal education. It was connected,
according to the notions of those times, with generosity, sincerity,
magnanimity, loyalty, and proved that the person who acted in this
manner, was a gentleman, and not a puritan. Severity of manners, and
regularity of conduct, on the other hand, were altogether
unfashionable, and were connected, in the imagination of that age,
with cant, cunning, hypocrisy, and low manners. To superficial minds,
the vices of the great seem at all times agreeable. They connect them,
not only with the splendour of fortune, but with many superior
virtues, which they ascribe to their superiors; with the spirit of
freedom and {178} independency, with frankness, generosity, humanity,
and politeness. The virtues of the inferior ranks of people, on the
contrary, their parsimonious frugality, their painful industry, and
rigid adherence to rules, seems to them mean and disagreeable. They
connect them, both with the meanness of the station to which those
qualities do commonly belong, and with many great vices which, they
suppose, very usually accompany them; such as an abject, cowardly,
ill-natured, lying, and pilfering disposition.
The objects with which men in the different professions and states of
life are conversant, being very different, and habituating them to
very different passions, naturally form in them very different
characters and manners. We expect in each rank and profession, a
degree of those manners, which, experience has taught us, belong to
it. But as in each species of things, we are particularly pleased with
the middle conformation, which, in every part and feature, agrees most
exactly with the general standard which nature seems to have
established for things of that kind; so in each rank, or, if I may say
so, in each species of men, we are particularly pleased, if they have
neither too much, nor too little of the character which usually
accompanies their particular condition and situation. A man, we say,
should look like his trade and profession; yet the pedantry of every
profession is disagreeable. The different periods of life have, for
the same reason, different manners assigned to them. We expect in old
age, that gravity and sedateness which its infirmities, its long
experience, and its worn-out sensibility seem to render both natural
and respectable; and we lay our account to find in youth that
sensibility, that gaiety and sprightly vivacity which experience
teaches us to expect from the lively impressions that all interesting
objects are apt to make upon the tender and unpractised senses of that
early period of life. Each of those two ages, however, may easily have
too much of these peculiarities which belong to it. The flirting
levity of youth, and the immovable insensibility of old age, are
equally disagreeable. The young, according to the common saying, are
most agreeable when in their behaviour there is something of the
manners of the old, and the old, when they retain something of the
gaiety of the young. Either of them, however, may easily have too much
of the manners of the other. The extreme coldness, and the dull
formality, which are pardoned in old age, make youth ridiculous. The
levity, the carelessness, and the vanity, which are indulged in youth,
will render old age contemptible.
The peculiar character and manners which we are led by custom to
appropriate to each rank and profession, have sometimes perhaps a
propriety independent of custom; and are what we should approve of
for their own sakes, if we took into consideration all the different
circumstances which naturally affect those in each different state of
life. The propriety of a person's behaviour, depends not upon its
{179} suitableness to any one circumstance of his situation, but to
all the circumstances, which, when we bring his case home to
ourselves, we feel, should naturally call upon his attention. If he
appears to be so much occupied by any one of them, as entirely to
neglect the rest, we disapprove of his conduct, as something which we
cannot entirely go along with, because not properly adjusted to all
the circumstances of his situation: yet, perhaps, the emotion he
expresses for the object which principally interests him, does not
exceed what we should entirely sympathize with, and approve of, in one
whose attention was not required by any other thing. A parent in
private life might, upon the loss of an only son, express without
blame a degree of grief and tenderness, which would be unpardonable in
a general at the head of an army, when glory, and the public safety,
demanded so great a part of his attention. As different objects ought,
upon common occasions, to occupy the attention of men of different
professions, so different passions ought naturally to become habitual
to them; and when we bring home to ourselves their situation in this
particular respect, we must be sensible, that every occurrence should
naturally affect them more or less, according as the emotion which it
excites, coincides or disagrees with the fixed habit and temper of
their minds. We cannot expect the same sensibility to the gay
pleasures and amusements of life in a clergyman, which we lay our
account with in an officer. The man whose peculiar occupation it is to
keep the world in mind of that awful futurity which awaits him, who is
to announce what may be the fatal consequences of every deviation from
the rules of duty, and who is himself to set the example of the most
exact conformity, seems to be the messenger of tidings, which cannot,
in propriety, be delivered either with levity or indifference. His
mind is supposed to be continually occupied with what is too grand and
solemn, to leave any room for the impressions of those frivolous
objects, which fill up the attention of the dissipated and the gay. We
readily feel therefore, that, independent of custom, there is a
propriety in the manners which custom has allotted to this profession;
and that nothing can be more suitable to the character of a clergyman,
than that grave, that austere and abstracted severity, which we are
habituated to expect in his behaviour. These reflections are so very
obvious, that there is scarce any man so inconsiderate, as not, at
some time, to have made them, and to have accounted to himself in this
manner for his approbation of the useful character of the clerical
order.
The foundation of the customary character of some other professions is
not so obvious, and our approbation of it is founded entirely in the
habit, without being either confirmed or enlivened by any reflections
of this kind. We are led by custom, for example, to annex the
character of gaiety, levity, and sprightly freedom, as well as of some
degree of dissipation, to the military profession. Yet, if we were
{180} to consider what mood or tone of temper would be most suitable
to this situation, we should be apt to determine, perhaps, that the
most serious and thoughtful turn of mind would best become those whose
lives are continually exposed to uncommon danger, and who should
therefore be more constantly occupied with the thoughts of death and
its consequences than other men. It is this very circumstance,
however, which is not improbably the occasion why the contrary turn of
mind prevails so much among men of this profession. It requires so
great an effort to conquer the fear of death, when we survey it with
steadiness and attention, that those who are constantly exposed to it,
find it easier to turn away their thoughts from it altogether, to wrap
themselves up in careless security and indifference, and to plunge
themselves, for this purpose, into every sort of amusement and
dissipation. A camp is not the element of a thoughtful or a melancholy
man: persons of that cast, indeed, are often abundantly determined,
and are capable, by a great effort, of going on with inflexible
resolution to the most unavoidable death. But to be exposed to
continual, though less imminent danger, to be obliged to exert, for a
long time, a degree of this effort, exhausts and depresses the mind,
and renders it incapable of all happiness and enjoyment. The gay and
careless, who have occasion to make no effort at all, who fairly
resolve never to look before them, but to lose in continual pleasures
and amusements all anxiety about their situation, more easily support
such circumstances. Whenever, by any peculiar circumstances, an
officer has no reason to lay his account with being exposed to any
uncommon danger, he is very apt to lose the gaiety and dissipated
thoughtlessness of his character. The captain of a city guard is
commonly as sober, careful, and penurious an animal as the rest of his
fellow-citizens. A long peace is, for the same reason, very apt to
diminish the difference between the civil and the military character.
The ordinary situation, however, of men of this profession, renders
gaiety, and a degree of dissipation, so much their usual character;
and custom has, in our imagination, so strongly connected this
character with this state of life, that we are very apt to despise any
man, whose peculiar humour or situation renders him incapable of
acquiring it. We laugh at the grave and careful faces of a city guard,
which so little resemble those of their profession. They themselves
seem often to be ashamed of the regularity of their own manners, and,
not to be out of the fashion of their trade, are fond of affecting
that levity, which is by no means natural to them. Whatever is the
deportment which we have been accustomed to see in a respectable order
of men, it comes to be so associated in our imagination with that
order, that whenever we see the one, we lay our account that we are to
meet with the other, and when disappointed, miss something which we
expected to find. We are embarrassed, and put to a stand, and know not
how to address ourselves to a character, which plainly {181} affects
to be of a different species from those with which we should have been
disposed to class it.
The different situations of different ages and countries are apt, in
the same manner, to give different characters to the generality of
those who live in them, and their sentiments concerning the particular
degree of each quality, that is either blamable or praise-worthy, vary
according to that degree which is usual in their own country, and in
their own times. That degree of politeness which would be highly
esteemed, perhaps would be thought effeminate adulation, in Russia,
would be regarded as rudeness and barbarism at the court of France.
That degree of order and frugality, which, in a Polish nobleman, would
be considered as excessive parsimony, would be regarded as
extravagance in a citizen of Amsterdam. Every age and country look
upon that degree of each quality, which is commonly to be met with in
those who are esteemed among themselves, as the golden mean of that
particular talent or virtue. And as this varies, according as their
different circumstances render different qualities more or less
habitual to them, their sentiments concerning the exact propriety of
character and behaviour vary accordingly.
Among civilized nations, the virtues which are founded upon humanity,
are more cultivated than those which are founded upon self-denial and
the command of the passions. Among rude and barbarous nations, it is
quite otherwise, the virtues of self-denial are more cultivated than
those of humanity. The general security and happiness which prevail in
ages of civility and politeness, afford little exercise to the
contempt of danger, to patience in enduring labour, hunger, and pain.
Poverty may easily be avoided, and the contempt of it therefore almost
ceases to be a virtue. The abstinence from pleasure becomes less
necessary, and the mind is more at liberty to unbend and to indulge
its natural inclinations in all those particular respects.
Among savages and barbarians it is quite otherwise. Every savage
undergoes a sort of Spartan discipline, and by the necessity of his
situation is inured to every sort of hardship. He is in continual
danger: he is often exposed to the greatest extremities of hunger, and
frequently dies of pure want. His circumstances not only habituate him
to every sort of distress, but teach him to give way to none of the
passions which that distress is apt to excite. He can expect from his
countrymen no sympathy or indulgence for such weakness. Before we can
feel much for others, we must in some measure be at ease ourselves. If
our own misery pinches us very severely, we have no leisure to attend
to that of our neighbour: and all savages are too much occupied with
their own wants and necessities, to give much attention to those of
another person. A savage, therefore, whatever be the nature of his
distress, expects no sympathy from those about him, and disdains, upon
that account, to expose himself, by allowing the least weakness to
escape {182} him. His passions, how furious and violent soever, are
never permitted to disturb the serenity of his countenance or the
composure of his conduct and behaviour. The savages in North America,
we are told, assume upon all occasions the greatest indifference, and
would think themselves degraded if they should ever appear in any
respect to be overcome, either by love, or grief, or resentment. Their
magnanimity and self-command, in this respect, are almost beyond the
conception of Europeans. In a country in which all men are upon a
level, with regard to rank and fortune, it might be expected that the
mutual inclinations of the two parties should be the only thing
considered in marriages, and should be indulged without any sort of
control. This, however, is the country in which all marriages, without
exception, are made up by the parents, and in which a young man would
think himself disgraced for ever, if he showed the least preference of
one woman above another, or did not express the most complete
indifference, both about the time when, and the person to whom, he was
to be married. The weakness of love, which is so indulged in ages of
humanity and politeness, is regarded among savages as the most
unpardonable effeminacy. Even after the marriage, the two parties seem
to be ashamed of a connexion which is founded upon so sordid a
necessity. They do not live together. They see one another by stealth
only. They both continue to dwell in the houses of their respective
fathers, and the open cohabitation of the two sexes, which is
permitted without blame in all other countries, is here considered as
the most indecent and unmanly sensuality. Nor is it only over this
agreeable passion that they exert this absolute self-command. They
often bear, in the sight of all their countrymen, with injuries,
reproach, and the grossest insults, with the appearance of the
greatest insensibility, and without expressing the smallest
resentment. When a savage is made prisoner of war, and receives, as is
usual, the sentence of death from his conquerors, he hears it without
expressing any emotion, and afterwards submits to the most dreadful
torments, without ever bemoaning himself, or discovering any other
passion but contempt of his enemies. While he is hung by the shoulders
over a slow fire, he derides his tormentors, and tells them with how
much more ingenuity he himself had tormented such of their countrymen
as had fallen into his hands. After he has been scorched and burnt,
and lacerated in all the most tender and sensible parts of his body
for several hours together, he is often allowed, in order to prolong
his misery, a short respite, and is taken down from the stake: he
employs this interval in talking upon all indifferent subjects,
inquires after the news of the country, and seems indifferent about
nothing but his own situation. The spectators express the same
insensibility; the sight of so horrible an object seems to make no
impression upon them; they scarce look at the prisoner, except when
they lend a hand to torment him. At other times they smoke tobacco,
and amuse themselves {183} with any common object, as if no such
matter was going on. Every savage is said to prepare himself from his
earliest youth for this dreadful end. He composes, for this purpose,
what they call the song of death, a song which he is to sing when he
has fallen into the hands of his enemies, and is expiring under the
tortures which they inflict upon him. It consists of insults upon his
tormentors, and expresses the highest contempt of death and pain. He
sings this song upon all extraordinary occasions, when he goes out to
war, when he meets his enemies in the field, or whenever he has a mind
to show that he has familiarised his imagination to the most dreadful
misfortunes, and that no human event can daunt his resolution or alter
his purpose. The same contempt of death and torture prevails among all
other savage nations. There is not a negro from the coast of Africa,
who does not in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which
the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of
conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over
mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse
of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of
the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and
whose levity, brutality, and baseness, expose them to the contempt of
the vanquished.
This heroic and unconquerable firmness, which the custom and education
of his country demand of every savage, is not required of those who
are brought up to live in civilized societies. If these last complain
when they are in pain, if they grieve when they are in distress, if
they allow themselves either to be overcome by love, or to be
discomposed by anger, they are easily pardoned. Such weaknesses are
not apprehended to affect the essential parts of their character. As
long as they do not allow themselves to be transported to do anything
contrary to justice or humanity, they lose but little reputation,
though the serenity of their countenance, or the composure of their
discourse and behaviour should be somewhat ruffled and disturbed. A
humane and polished people, who have more sensibility to the passions
of others, can more readily enter into an animated and passionate
behaviour, and can more easily pardon some little excess. The person
principally concerned is sensible of this; and being assured of the
equity of his judges, indulges himself in stronger expressions of
passion, and is less afraid of exposing himself to their contempt by
the violence of his emotions. We can venture to express more emotion
in the presence of a friend than in that of a stranger, because we
expect more indulgence from the one than from the other. And in the
same manner the rules of decorum amongst civilized nations, admit of a
more animated behaviour, than is approved of among barbarians. The
first converse together with the openness of friends; the second with
the reserve of strangers. The emotion and vivacity with which the
French and the Italians, the two most polished nations upon the
continent, express {184} themselves on occasions that are at all
interesting, surprise at first those strangers who happen to be
travelling among them, and who, having been educated among a people of
duller sensibility, cannot enter into this passionate behaviour, of
which they have never seen any example in their own country. A young
French nobleman will weep in the presence of the whole court upon
being refused a regiment. An Italian, says the Abbot Du Bos, expresses
more emotion on being condemned in a fine of twenty shillings, than an
Englishman on receiving the sentence of death. Cicero, in the times of
the highest Roman politeness, could, without degrading himself, weep
with all the bitterness of sorrow in the sight of the whole senate and
the whole people; as it is evident he must have done in the end of
almost every oration. The orators of the earlier and ruder ages of
Rome could not probably, consistent with the manners of the times,
have expressed themselves with so much emotion. It would have been
regarded, I suppose, as a violation of nature and propriety in the
Scipios, in the Leliuses, and in the elder Cato, to have exposed so
much tenderness to the view of the public. Those ancient warriors
could express themselves with order, gravity, and good judgment: but
are said to have been strangers to that sublime and passionate
eloquence which was first introduced into Rome, not many years before
the birth of Cicero, by the two Gracchi, by Crassus, and by Sulpitius.
This animated eloquence, which has been long practised, with or
without success, both in France and Italy, is but just beginning to be
introduced into England. So wide is the difference between the degrees
of self-command which are required in civilized and in barbarous
nations, and by such different standards do they judge of the
propriety of behaviour.
This difference gives occasion to many others that are not less
essential. A polished people being accustomed to give way, in some
measure, to the movements of nature, become frank, open, and sincere.
Barbarians, on the contrary, being obliged to smother and conceal the
appearance of every passion, necessarily acquire the habits of
falsehood and dissimulation. It is observed by all those who have been
conversant with savage nations, whether in Asia, Africa, or America,
that they are equally impenetrable, and that, when they have a mind to
conceal the truth, no examination is capable of drawing it from them.
They cannot be trepanned by the most artful questions. The torture
itself is incapable of making them confess any thing which they have
no mind to tell. The passions of a savage too, though they never
express themselves by an outward emotion, but lie concealed in the
breast of the sufferer, are, notwithstanding, all mounted to the
highest pitch of fury. Though he seldom shows any symptoms of anger,
yet his vengeance, when he comes to give way to it, is always
sanguinary and dreadful. The least affront drives him to despair. His
countenance and discourse indeed, are still sober and composed, and
express nothing {185} but the most perfect tranquillity of mind: but
his actions are often the most furious and violent. Among the North
Americans it is not uncommon for persons of the tenderest age and more
fearful sex to drown themselves upon receiving only a slight reprimand
from their mothers, and this too without expressing any passion, or
saying any thing, except, _you shall no longer have a daughter_.
In civilized nations the passions of men are not commonly so furious
or so desperate. They are often clamorous and noisy, but are seldom
very hurtful; and seem frequently to aim at no other satisfaction, but
that of convincing the spectator, that they are in the right to be so
much moved, and of procuring his sympathy and approbation.
All these effects of custom and fashion, however, upon the moral
sentiments of mankind, are inconsiderable, in comparison of those
which they give occasion to in some other cases; and it is not
concerning the general style of character and behaviour, that those
principles produce the greatest perversion of judgment, but concerning
the propriety or impropriety of particular usages.
The different manners which custom teaches us to approve of in the
different professions and states of life, do not concern things of the
greatest importance. We expect truth and justice from an old man as
well as from a young, from a clergyman as well as from an officer; and
it is in matters of small moment only that we look for the
distinguishing marks of their respective characters. With regard to
these, too, there is often some unobserved circumstance which, if it
was attended to, would show us, that, independent of custom, there was
a propriety in the character which custom had taught us to allot to
each profession. We cannot complain, therefore, in this case, that the
perversion of natural sentiment is very great. Though the manners of
different nations require different degrees of the same quality, in
the character which they think worthy of esteem, yet the worst that
can be said to happen even here, is that the duties of one virtue are
sometimes extended so as to encroach a little upon the precincts of
some other. The rustic hospitality that is in fashion among the Poles
encroaches, perhaps, a little upon oeconomy and good order; and the
frugality that is esteemed in Holland, upon generosity and
good-fellowship. The hardiness demanded of savages diminishes their
humanity; and, perhaps, the delicate sensibility required in civilized
nations, sometimes destroys the masculine firmness of the character.
In general, the style of manners which takes place in any nation, may
commonly upon the whole be said to be that which is most suitable to
its situation. Hardiness is the character most suitable to the
circumstances of a savage; sensibility to those of one who lives in a
very civilized country. Even here, therefore, we cannot complain that
the moral sentiments of men, as displayed by them, are very grossly
perverted.
It is not therefore in the general style of conduct or behaviour that
{186} custom authorises the widest departure from what is the natural
propriety of action. With regard to particular usages, its influence
is often much more destructive of good morals, and it is capable of
establishing, as lawful and blameless, particular actions, which shock
the very plainest principles of right and wrong.
Can there be greater barbarity, for example, than to hurt an infant?
Its helplessness, its innocence, its amiableness, call forth the
compassion, even of an enemy, and not to spare that tender age is
regarded as the most furious effort of an enraged and cruel conqueror.
What then should we imagine must be the heart of a parent who could
injure that weakness which even a furious enemy is afraid to violate?
Yet the exposition, that is, the murder of new-born infants, was a
practice allowed of in almost all the states of Greece, even among the
polite and civilized Athenians; and whenever the circumstances of the
parent rendered it inconvenient to bring up the child, to abandon it
to hunger or to wild beasts was regarded without blame or censure.
This practice had probably begun in times of the most savage
barbarity. The imaginations of men had been first made familiar with
it in that earliest period of society, and the uniform continuance of
the custom had hindered them afterwards from perceiving its enormity.
We find, at this day, that this practice prevails among all savage
nations; and in that rudest and lowest state of society it is
undoubtedly more pardonable than in any other. The extreme indigence
of a savage is often such that he himself is frequently exposed to the
greatest extremity of hunger, he often dies of pure want, and it is
frequently impossible for him to support both himself and his child.
We cannot wonder, therefore, that in this case he should abandon it.
One who, in flying from an enemy, whom it was impossible to resist,
should throw down his infant, because it retarded his flight, would
surely be excusable; since, by attempting to save it, he could only
hope for the consolation of dying with it. That in this state of
society, therefore, a parent should be allowed to judge whether he can
bring up his child, ought not to surprise us so greatly. In the latter
ages of Greece, however, the same thing was permitted from views of
remote interest or conveniency, which could by no means excuse it.
Uninterrupted custom had by this time so thoroughly authorised the
practice, that not only the loose maxims of the world tolerated this
barbarous prerogative, but even the doctrine of philosophers, which
ought to have been more just and accurate, was led away by the
established custom, and upon this, as upon many other occasions,
instead of censuring, supported the horrible abuse, by far-fetched
considerations of public utility. Aristotle talks of it as of what the
magistrate ought upon many occasions to encourage. The humane Plato is
of the same opinion, and, with all that love of mankind which seems to
animate all his writings, no where marks this practice with
disapprobation. When custom can give sanction to so dreadful a
violation of humanity; we {187} may well imagine that there is scarce
any particular practice so gross which it cannot authorise. Such a
thing, we hear men every day saying, is commonly done, and they seem
to think this a sufficient apology for what, in itself, is the most
unjust and unreasonable conduct.
There is an obvious reason why custom should never pervert our
sentiments with regard to the general style and character of conduct
and behaviour, in the same degree as with regard to the propriety or
unlawfulness of particular usages. There never can be any such custom.
No society could subsist a moment, in which the usual strain of men's
conduct and behaviour was of a piece with the horrible practice I have
just now mentioned.
-----
_Part VI.--Of the Character of Virtue._
INTRODUCTION.--When we consider the character of any individual, we
naturally view it under two different aspects; first, as it may affect
his own happiness; and secondly, as it may affect that of other
people.
-----
SEC. I.--OF THE CHARACTER OF THE INDIVIDUAL, SO FAR AS IT AFFECTS HIS
OWN HAPPINESS; OR OF PRUDENCE.
THE preservation and healthful state of the body seem to be the
objects which Nature first recommends to the care of every individual.
The appetites of hunger and thirst, the agreeable or disagreeable
sensations of pleasure and pain, of heat and cold, &c., may be
considered as lessons delivered by the voice of Nature herself,
directing him what he ought to choose, and what he ought to avoid, for
this purpose. The first lessons which he is taught by those to whom
his childhood is entrusted, tend, the greater part of them, to the
same purpose. Their principal object is to teach him how to keep out
of harm's way.
As he grows up, he soon learns that some care and foresight are
necessary for providing the means of gratifying those natural
appetites, of procuring pleasure and avoiding pain, of procuring the
agreeable and avoiding the disagreeable temperature of heat and cold.
In the proper direction of this care and foresight consists the art of
preserving and increasing what is called his external fortune.
Though it is in order to supply the necessities and conveniencies of
the body, that the advantages of external fortune are originally
recommended to us, yet we cannot live long in the world without
perceiving that the respect of our equals, our credit and rank in the
society we live in, depend very much upon the degree in which we
possess, or are supposed to possess, those advantages. The desire of
becoming the {188} proper objects of this respect, of deserving and
obtaining this credit and rank among our equals, is, perhaps, the
strongest of all our desires, and our anxiety to obtain the advantages
of fortune is accordingly much more excited and irritated by this
desire, than by that of supplying all the necessities and
conveniencies of the body, which are always very easily supplied to
us.
Our rank and credit among our equals, too, depend very much upon,
what, perhaps, a virtuous man would wish them to depend entirely, our
character and conduct, or upon the confidence, esteem, and good-will,
which these naturally excite in the people we live with.
The care of the health, of the fortune, of the rank and reputation of
the individual, the objects upon which his comfort and happiness in
this life are supposed principally to depend, is considered as the
proper business of that virtue which is commonly called Prudence.
We suffer more, it has already been observed, when we fall from a
better to a worse situation, than we ever enjoy when we rise from a
worse to a better. Security, therefore, is the first and the principal
object of prudence. It is averse to expose our health, our fortune,
our rank, or reputation, to any sort of hazard. It is rather cautious
than enterprising, and more anxious to preserve the advantages which
we already possess, than forward to prompt us to the acquisition of
still greater advantages. The methods of improving our fortune, which
it principally recommends to us, are those which expose to no loss or
hazard; real knowledge and skill in our trade or profession, assiduity
and industry in the exercise of it, frugality, and even some degree of
parsimony, in all our expenses.
The prudent man always studies seriously and earnestly to understand
whatever he professes to understand, and not merely to persuade other
people that he understands it; and though his talents may not always
be very brilliant, they are always perfectly genuine. He neither
endeavours to impose upon you by the cunning devices of an artful
impostor, nor by the arrogant airs of an assuming pedant, nor by the
confident assertions of a superficial and impudent pretender. He is
not ostentatious even of the abilities which he really possesses. His
conversation is simple and modest, and he is averse to all the
quackish arts by which other people so frequently thrust themselves
into public notice and reputation. For reputation in his profession he
is naturally disposed to rely a good deal upon the solidity of his
knowledge and abilities; and he does not always think of cultivating
the favour of those little clubs and cabals, who, in the superior arts
and sciences, so often erect themselves into the supreme judges of
merit; and who make it their business to celebrate the talents and
virtues of one another, and to decry whatever can come into
competition with them. If he ever connects himself with any society of
this kind, it is merely in self-defence, not with a view to impose
upon the public, but to {189} hinder the public from being imposed
upon, to his disadvantage, by the clamours, the whispers, or the
intrigues, either of that particular society, or of some other of the
same kind.
The prudent man is always sincere, and feels horror at the very
thought of exposing himself to the disgrace which attends upon the
detection of falsehood. But though always sincere, he is not always
frank and open; and though he never tells any thing but the truth, he
does not always think himself bound, when not properly called upon, to
tell the whole truth. As he is cautious in his actions, so he is
reserved in his speech; and never rashly or unnecessarily obtrudes his
opinion concerning either things or persons.
The prudent man, though not always distinguished by the most exquisite
sensibility, is always very capable of friendship. But his friendship
is not that ardent and passionate, but too often transitory affection,
which appears so delicious to the generosity of youth and
inexperience. It is a sedate, but steady and faithful attachment to a
few well-tried and well-chosen companions; in the choice of whom he is
not guided by the giddy admiration of shining accomplishments, but by
the sober esteem of modesty, discretion, and good conduct. But though
capable of friendship, he is not always much disposed to general
sociality. He rarely frequents, and more rarely figures in those
convivial societies which are distinguished for the jollity and gaiety
of their conversation. Their way of life might too often interfere
with the regularity of his temperance, might interrupt the steadiness
of his industry, or break in upon the strictness of his frugality.
But though his conversation may not always be very sprightly or
diverting, it is always perfectly inoffensive. He hates the thought of
being guilty of any petulance or rudeness. He never assumes
impertinently over any body, and, upon all common occasions, is
willing to place himself rather below than above his equals. Both in
his conduct and conversation, he is an exact observer of decency, and
respects with an almost religious scrupulosity, all the established
decorums and ceremonials of society. And, in this respect, he sets a
much better example than has frequently been done by men of much more
splendid talents and virtues, who, in all ages, from that of Socrates
and Aristippus, down to that of Dr. Swift and Voltaire, and from that
of Philip and Alexander the Great, down to that of the great Czar
Peter of Muscovy, have too often distinguished themselves by the most
improper and even insolent contempt of all the ordinary decorums of
life and conversation, and who have thereby set the most pernicious
example to those who wish to resemble them, and who too often content
themselves with imitating their follies, without even attempting to
attain their perfections.
In the steadiness of his industry and frugality, in his steadily
sacrificing the ease and enjoyment of the present moment for the
probable {190} expectation of the still greater ease and enjoyment of
a more distant but more lasting period of time, the prudent man is
always both supported and rewarded by the entire approbation of the
impartial spectator, and of the representative of the impartial
spectator, the man within the breast. The impartial spectator does not
feel himself worn out by the present labour of those whose conduct he
surveys; nor does he feel himself solicited by the importunate calls
of their present appetites. To him their present, and what is likely
to be their future, situation, are very nearly the same: he sees them
nearly at the same distance, and is affected by them very nearly in
the same manner. He knows, however, that to the persons principally
concerned, they are very far from being the same, and that they
naturally affect _them_ in a very different manner. He cannot
therefore but approve, and even applaud, that proper exertion of
self-command, which enables them to act as if their present and their
future situation affected them nearly in the same manner in which they
affect him.
The man who lives within his income, is naturally contented with his
situation, which, by continual, though small accumulations, is growing
better and better every day. He is enabled gradually to relax, both in
the rigour of his parsimony and in the severity of his application;
and he feels with double satisfaction this gradual increase of ease
and enjoyment, from having felt before the hardship which attended the
want of them. He has no anxiety to change so comfortable a situation
and does not go in quest of new enterprises and adventures, which
might endanger, but could not well increase the secure tranquillity
which he actually enjoys. If he enters into any new projects or
enterprises, they are likely to be well concerted and well prepared.
He can never be hurried or driven into them by any necessity, but has
always time and leisure to deliberate soberly and coolly concerning
what are likely to be their consequences.
The prudent man is not willing to subject himself to any
responsibility which his duty does not impose upon him. He is not a
bustler in business where he has no concern; is not a meddler in other
people's affairs; is not a professed counsellor or adviser, who
obtrudes his advice where nobody is asking it. He confines himself, as
much as his duty will permit, to his own affairs, and has no taste for
that foolish importance which many people wish to derive from
appearing to have some influence in the management of those of other
people. He is averse to enter into any party disputes, hates faction,
and is not always very forward to listen to the voice even of noble
and great ambition. When distinctly called upon, he will not decline
the service of his country, but he will not cabal in order to force
himself into it, and would be much better pleased that the public
business were well managed by some other person, than that he himself
should have the trouble, and incur the **responsibility, of managing
it. In the bottom of his heart he {191} would prefer the undisturbed
enjoyment of secure tranquillity, not only to all the vain splendour
of successful ambition, but to the real and solid glory of performing
the greatest and most magnanimous actions.
Prudence, in short, when directed merely to the care of the health, of
the fortune, and the rank and reputation of the individual, though it
is regarded as a most respectable, and even in some degree, as an
amiable and agreeable quality, yet it never is considered as one,
either of the most endearing, or of the most ennobling of the virtues.
It commands a certain cold esteem, but does not seem entitled to any
very ardent love or admiration.
Wise and judicious conduct, when directed to greater and nobler
purposes than the care of the health, the fortune, the rank and
reputation of the individual, is frequently and very properly called
prudence. We talk of the prudence of the great general, of the great
statesman, of the great legislator. Prudence is, in all these cases,
combined with many greater and more splendid virtues, with valour,
with extensive and strong benevolence, with a sacred regard to the
rules of justice, and all these supported by a proper degree of
self-command. This superior prudence, when carried to the highest
degree of perfection, necessarily supposes the art, the talent, and
the habit or disposition of acting with the most perfect propriety in
every possible circumstance and situation. It necessarily supposes the
utmost perfection of all the intellectual and of all the moral
virtues. It is the best head joined to the best heart. It is the most
perfect wisdom combined with the most perfect virtue. It constitutes
very nearly the character of the Academical or Peripatetic sage, as
the superior prudence does that of the Epicurean.
Mere imprudence, or the mere want of the capacity to take care of
one's-self, is, with the generous and humane, the object of
compassion; with those of less delicate sentiments, of neglect, or, at
worst, of contempt, but never of hatred or indignation. When combined
with other vices, however, it aggravates in the highest degree the
infamy and disgrace which would otherwise attend them. The artful
knave, whose dexterity and address exempt him, though not from strong
suspicions, yet from punishment or distinct detection, is too often
received in the world with an indulgence which he by no means
deserves. The awkward and foolish one, who, for want of this dexterity
and address, is convicted and brought to punishment, is the object of
universal hatred, contempt, and derision. In countries where great
crimes frequently pass unpunished, the most atrocious actions become
almost familiar, and cease to impress the people with that horror
which is universally felt in countries where an exact administration
of justice takes place. The injustice is the same in both countries;
but the imprudence is often very different. In the latter, great
crimes are evidently great follies. In the former, they are not always
considered as {192} such. In Italy, during the greater part of the
sixteenth century, assassinations, murders, and even murders under
trust, seem to have been almost familiar among the superior ranks of
people. Cæsar Borgia invited four of the little princes in his
neighbourhood, who all possessed little sovereignties, and commanded
little armies of their own, to a friendly conference at Senigaglia,
where, as soon as they arrived, he put them all to death. This
infamous action, though certainly not approved of even in that age of
crimes, seems to have contributed very little to the discredit, and
not in the least to the ruin of the perpetrator. That ruin happened a
few years after from causes altogether disconnected with this crime.
Machiavel, not indeed a man of the nicest morality even for his own
times, was resident, as minister from the republic of Florence, at the
court of Cæsar Borgia when this crime was committed. He gives a very
particular account of it, and in that pure, elegant, and simple
language which distinguishes all his writings. He talks of it very
coolly; is pleased with the address with which Cæsar Borgia conducted
it; has much contempt for the dupery and weakness of the sufferers;
but no compassion for their miserable and untimely death, and no sort
of indignation at the cruelty and falsehood of their murderer. The
violence and injustice of great conquerors are often regarded with
foolish wonder and admiration; those of petty thieves, robbers, and
murderers, with contempt, hatred, and even horror upon all occasions.
The former, though they are a hundred times more mischievous and
destructive, yet when successful, they often pass for deeds of the
most heroic magnanimity. The latter are always viewed with hatred and
aversion, as the follies, as well as the crimes, of the lowest and
most worthless of mankind. The injustice of the former is certainly,
at least, as great as that of the latter; but the folly and imprudence
are not near so great. A wicked and worthless man of parts often goes
through the world with much more credit than he deserves. A wicked and
worthless fool appears always, of all mortals, the most hateful, as
well as the most contemptible. As prudence combined with other
virtues, constitutes the noblest; so imprudence combined with other
vices, constitutes the vilest of all characters.
-----
SECT. II.--OF THE CHARACTER OF THE INDIVIDUAL, SO FAR AS IT CAN
AFFECT THE HAPPINESS OF OTHER PEOPLE.
INTRODUCTION.--The character of every individual, so far as it can
affect the happiness of other people, must do so by its disposition
either to hurt or to benefit them.
Proper resentment for injustice attempted, or actually committed, is
the only motive which, in the eyes of the impartial spectator, can
justify our hurting or disturbing in any respect the happiness of our
neighbour. {193} To do so from any other motive is itself a violation
of the laws of justice, which force ought to be employed either to
restrain or to punish. The wisdom of every state or commonwealth
endeavours, as well as it can, to employ the force of the society to
restrain those who are subject to its authority from hurting or
disturbing the happiness of one another. The rules which it
establishes for this purpose, constitute the civil and criminal law of
each particular state or country. The principles upon which those
rules either are, or ought to be founded, are the subject of a
particular science, of all sciences by far the most important, but
hitherto, perhaps, the least cultivated, that of natural
jurisprudence; concerning which it belongs not to our present subject
to enter into any detail. A sacred and religious regard not to hurt or
disturb in any respect the happiness of our neighbour, even in those
cases where no law can properly protect him, constitutes the character
of the perfectly innocent and just man; a character which, when
carried to a certain delicacy of attention, is always highly
respectable and even venerable for its own sake, and can scarce ever
fail to be accompanied with many other virtues, with great feeling for
other people, with great humanity and great benevolence. It is a
character sufficiently understood, and requires no further
explanation. In the present section I shall only endeavour to
explain the foundation of that order which nature seems to have traced
out for the distribution of our good offices, or for the direction and
employment of our very limited powers of beneficence: first, towards
individuals; and secondly, towards societies.
The same unerring wisdom, it will be found, which regulates every
other part of her conduct, directs, in this respect too, the order of
her recommendations; which are always stronger or weaker in proportion
as our beneficence is more or less necessary, or can be more or less
useful.
-----
CHAP. I.--_Of the Order in which Individuals are recommended by
Nature to our Care and Attention._
EVERY man, as the Stoics used to say, is first and principally
recommended to his own care; and every man is certainly, in every
respect, fitter and abler to take care of himself than of any other
person. Every man feels his own pleasures and his own pains more
sensibly than those of other people. The former are the original
sensations; the latter the reflected or sympathetic images of those
sensations. The former may be said to be the substance; the latter the
shadow.
After himself, the members of his own family, those who usually live
in the same house with him, his parents, his children, his brothers
and sisters, are naturally the objects of his warmest affections. They
are naturally and usually the persons upon whose happiness or misery
his conduct must have the greatest influence. He is more habituated to
{194} sympathize with them. He knows better how every thing is likely
to affect them, and his sympathy with them is more precise and
determinate, than it can be with the greater part of other people. It
approaches nearer, in short, to what he feels for himself.
This sympathy too, and the affections which are founded on it, are by
nature more strongly directed towards his children than towards his
parents, and his tenderness for the former seems generally a more
active principle, than his reverence and gratitude towards the latter.
In the natural state of things, it has already been observed, the
existence of the child, for some time after it comes into the world,
depends altogether upon the care of the parent; that of the parent
does not naturally depend upon the care of the child. In the eye of
nature, it would seem, a child is a more important object than an old
man; and excites a much more lively, as well as a much more universal
sympathy. It ought to do so. Every thing may be expected, or at least
hoped, from the child. In ordinary cases, very little can be either
expected or hoped from the old man. The weakness of childhood
interests the affections of the most brutal and hard-hearted. It is
only to the virtuous and humane, that the infirmities of old age are
not the objects of contempt and aversion. In ordinary cases, an old
man dies without being much regretted by any body. Scarce a child can
die without rending asunder the heart of somebody.
The earliest friendships, the friendships which are naturally
contracted when the heart is most susceptible of that feeling, are
those among brothers and sisters. Their good agreement, while they
remain in the same family, is necessary for its tranquillity and
happiness. They are capable of giving more pleasure or pain to one
another than to the greater part of other people. Their situation
renders their mutual sympathy of the utmost importance to their common
happiness; and, by the wisdom of nature, the same situation, by
obliging them to accommodate to one another, renders that sympathy
more habitual, and thereby more lively, more distinct, and more
determinate.
The children of brothers and sisters are naturally connected by the
friendship which, after separating into different families, continues
to take place between their parents. Their good agreement improves the
enjoyment of that friendship; their discord would disturb it. As they
seldom live in the same family, however, though of more importance to
one another than to the greater part of other people, they are of much
less than brothers and sisters. As their mutual sympathy is less
necessary, so it is less habitual, and therefore proportionally
weaker.
The children of cousins, being still less connected, are of still less
importance to one another; and the affection gradually diminishes as
the relation grows more and more remote.
What is called affection, is in reality nothing but habitual sympathy.
Our concern in the happiness or misery of those who are the objects of
{195} what we call our affections; our desire to promote the one, and
to prevent the other; are either the actual feeling of that habitual
sympathy, or the necessary consequences of that feeling. Relations
being usually placed in situations which naturally create this
habitual sympathy, it is expected that a suitable degree of affection
should take place among them. We generally find that it actually does
take place; we therefore naturally expect that it should; and we are,
upon that account, more shocked when, upon any occasion, we find that
it does not. The general rule is established, that persons related to
one another in a certain degree, ought always to be affected towards
one another in a certain manner, and that there is always the highest
impropriety, and sometimes even a sort of impiety, in their being
affected in a different manner. A parent without parental tenderness,
a child devoid of all filial reverence, appear monsters, the objects,
not of hatred only, but of horror to their neighbours.
Though in a particular instance, the circumstances which usually
produce those natural affections, as they are called, may, by some
accident, not have taken place, yet respect for the general rule will
frequently, in some measure, supply their place, and produce something
which, though not altogether the same, may bear, however, a very
considerable resemblance to those affections. A father is apt to be
less attached to a child, who, by some accident, has been separated
from him in its infancy, and who does not return to him till it is
grown up to manhood. The father is apt to feel less paternal
tenderness for the child; the child, less filial reverence for the
father. Brothers and sisters, when they have been educated in distant
countries, are apt to feel a similar diminution of affection. With the
dutiful and the virtuous, however, respect for the general rule will
frequently produce something which, though by no means the same, yet
may very much resemble those natural affections. Even during the
separation, the father and the child, the brothers or the sisters, are
by no means indifferent to one another. They all consider one another
as persons to and from whom certain affections are due, and they live
in the hopes of being some time or another in a situation to enjoy
that friendship which ought naturally to have taken place among
persons so nearly connected. Till they meet, the absent son, the
absent brother, are frequently the favourite son, the favourite
brother. They have never offended, or, if they have, it is so long
ago, that the offence is forgotten, as some childish trick not worth
the remembering. Every account they have heard of one another, if
conveyed by people of any tolerable good nature, has been, in the
highest degree, flattering and favourable. The absent son, the absent
brother, is not like other ordinary sons and brothers; but an
all-perfect son, an all-perfect brother; and the most romantic hopes
are entertained of the happiness to be enjoyed in the friendship and
conversation of such persons. When they meet, it is {196} often with
so strong a disposition to conceive that habitual sympathy which
constitutes the family affection, that they are very apt to fancy they
have actually conceived it, and to behave to one another as if they
had. Time and experience, however, I am afraid, too frequently
undeceive them. Upon a more familiar acquaintance, they frequently
discover in one another habits, humours, and inclinations, different
from what they expected, to which, from want of habitual sympathy,
from want of the real principle and foundation of what is properly
called family-affection, they cannot now easily accommodate
themselves. They have never lived in the situation which almost
necessarily forces that easy accommodation, and though they may now be
sincerely desirous to assume it, they have really become incapable of
doing so. Their familiar conversation and intercourse soon become less
pleasing to them, and, upon that account, less frequent. They may
continue to live with one another in the mutual exchange of all
essential good offices, and with every other external appearance of
decent regard. But that cordial satisfaction, that delicious sympathy,
that confidential openness and ease, which naturally take place in the
conversation of those who have lived long and familiarly with one
another, it seldom happens that they can completely enjoy.
It is only, however, with the dutiful and the virtuous, that the
general rule has even this slender authority. With the dissipated, the
profligate, and the vain, it is entirely disregarded. They are so far
from respecting it, that they seldom talk of it but with the most
indecent derision; and an early and long separation of this kind never
fails to estrange them most completely from one another. With such
persons, respect for the general rule can at best produce only a cold
and affected civility (a very slender semblance of real regard); and
even this, the slightest offence, the smallest opposition of interest,
commonly puts an end to altogether.
The education of boys at distant great schools, of young men at
distant colleges, of young ladies in distant nunneries and
boarding-schools, seems, in the higher ranks of life, to have hurt
most essentially the domestic morals, and consequently the domestic
happiness, both of France and England. Do you wish to educate your
children to be dutiful to their parents, to be kind and affectionate
to their brothers and sisters? put them under the necessity of being
dutiful children, of being kind and affectionate brothers and sisters:
educate them in your own house. From their parent's house, they may,
with propriety and advantage, go out every day to attend public
schools: but let their dwelling be always at home. Respect for you
must always impose a very useful restraint upon their conduct; and
respect for them may frequently impose no useless restraint upon your
own. Surely no acquirement, which can possibly be derived from what is
called a public education, can make any sort of compensation for what
{197} is almost certainly and necessarily lost by it. Domestic
education is the institution of nature; public education, the
contrivance of man. It is surely unnecessary to say, which is likely
to be the wisest.
In some tragedies and romances, we meet with many beautiful and
interesting scenes, founded upon what is called, the force of blood,
or upon the wonderful affection which near relations are supposed to
conceive for one another, even before they know that they have any
such connection. This force of blood, however, I am afraid, exists no
where but in tragedies and romances. Even in tragedies and romances,
it is never supposed to take place between any relations, but those
who are naturally bred up in the same house; between parents and
children, between brothers and sisters. To imagine any such mysterious
affection between cousins, or even between aunts or uncles, and
nephews or nieces, would be too ridiculous.
In pastoral countries, and in all countries where the authority of law
is not alone sufficient to give perfect security to every member of
the state, all the different branches of the same family commonly
choose to live in the neighbourhood of one another. Their association
is frequently necessary for their common defence. They are all, from
the highest to the lowest, of more or less importance to one another.
Their concord strengthens their necessary association: their discord
always weakens, and might destroy it. They have more intercourse with
one another, than with the members of any other tribe. The remotest
members of the same tribe claim some connection with one another; and,
where all other circumstances are equal, expect to be treated with
more distinguished attention than is due to those who have no such
pretensions. It is not many years ago that, in the Highlands of
Scotland, the chieftain used to consider the poorest man of his clan,
as his cousin and relation. The same extensive regard to kindred is
said to take place among the Tartars, the Arabs, the Turkomans, and, I
believe, among all other nations who are nearly in the same state of
society in which the Scots Highlanders were about the beginning of the
present century.
In commercial countries, where the authority of law is always
perfectly sufficient to protect the meanest man in the state, the
descendants of the same family, having no such motive for keeping
together, naturally separate and disperse, as interest or inclination
may direct. They soon cease to be of importance to one another; and,
in a few generations, not only lose all care about one another, but
all remembrance of their common origin, and of the connection which
took place among their ancestors. Regard for remote relations becomes,
in every country, less and less, according as this state of
civilization has been longer and more completely established. It has
been longer and more completely established in England than in
Scotland; and remote relations are, accordingly, more considered in
the latter country than in the {198} former, though, in this respect,
the difference between the two countries is growing less and less
every day. Great lords, indeed, are, in every country, proud of
remembering and acknowledging their connection with one another,
however remote. The remembrance of such illustrious relations flatters
not a little the family pride of them all; and it is neither from
affection, nor from any thing which resembles affection, but from the
most frivolous and childish of all vanities, that this remembrance is
so carefully kept up. Should some more humble, though, perhaps, much
nearer kinsman, presume to put such great men in mind of his relation
to their family, they seldom fail to tell him that they are bad
genealogists, and miserably ill-informed concerning their own family
history. It is not in that order that we are to expect any
extraordinary extension of, what is called, natural affection.
I consider what is called natural affection as more the effect of the
moral than of the supposed physical connection between the parent and
the child. A jealous husband, indeed, notwithstanding the moral
connection, notwithstanding the child's having been educated in his
own house, often regards, with hatred and aversion, that unhappy child
which he supposes to be the offspring of his wife's infidelity. It is
the lasting monument of a most disagreeable adventure; of his own
dishonour, and of the disgrace of his family.
Among well-disposed people, the necessity or conveniency of mutual
accommodation, very frequently produces a friendship not unlike that
which takes place among those who are born to live in the same family.
Colleagues in office, partners in trade, call one another brothers;
and frequently feel towards one another as if they really were so.
Their good agreement is an advantage to all; and, if they are
tolerably reasonable people, they are naturally disposed to agree. We
expect that they should do so; and their disagreement is a sort of a
small scandal. The Romans expressed this sort of attachment by the
word _necessitudo_, which, from the etymology, seems to denote
that it was imposed by the necessity of the situation.
Even the trifling circumstance of living in the same neighbourhood,
has some effect of the same kind. We respect the face of a man whom we
see every day, provided he has never offended us. Neighbours can be
very convenient, and they can be very troublesome, to one another. If
they are good sort of people, they are naturally disposed to agree. We
expect their good agreement; and to be a bad neighbour is a very bad
character. There are certain small good offices, accordingly, which
are universally allowed to be due to a neighbour in preference to any
other person who has no such connection.
This natural disposition to accommodate and to assimilate, as much as
we can, our own sentiments, principles, and feelings, to those which
we see fixed and rooted in the persons whom we are obliged to live and
converse a great deal with, is the cause of the contagious effects of
both {199} good and bad company. The man who associates chiefly with
the wise and the virtuous, though he may not himself become either
wise or virtuous, cannot help conceiving a certain respect at least
for wisdom and virtue; and the man who associates chiefly with the
profligate and the dissolute, though he may not himself become
profligate and dissolute, must soon lose, at least, all his original
abhorrence of profligacy and dissolution of manners. The similarity of
family characters, which we so frequently see transmitted through
several successive generations, may, perhaps, be partly owing to this
disposition to assimilate ourselves to those whom we are obliged to
live and converse a great deal with. The family character, however,
like the family countenance, seems to be owing, not altogether to the
moral, but partly too to the physical connection. The family
countenance is certainly altogether owing to the latter.
But of all attachments to an individual, that which is founded
altogether upon esteem and approbation of his good conduct and
behaviour, confirmed by much experience and long acquaintance, is, by
far, the most respectable. Such friendships, arising not from a
constrained sympathy, not from a sympathy which has been assumed and
rendered habitual for the sake of convenience and accommodation; but
from a natural sympathy, from an involuntary feeling that the persons
to whom we attach ourselves are the natural and proper objects of
esteem and approbation; can exist only among men of virtue. Men of
virtue only can feel that entire confidence in the conduct and
behaviour of one another, which can, at all times, assure them that
they can never either offend or be offended by one another. Vice is
always capricious: virtue only is regular and orderly. The attachment
which is founded upon the love of virtue, as it is certainly, of all
attachments, the most virtuous; so it is likewise the happiest, as
well as the most permanent and secure. Such friendships need not be
confined to a single person, but may safely embrace all the wise and
virtuous, with whom we have been long and intimately acquainted, and
upon whose wisdom and virtue we can, upon that account, entirely
depend. They who would confine friendship to two persons, seem to
confound the wise security of friendship with the jealousy and folly
of love. The hasty, fond, and foolish intimacies of young people,
founded, commonly, upon some slight similarity of character,
altogether unconnected with good conduct, upon a taste, perhaps, for
the same studies, the same amusements, the same diversions, or upon
their agreement in some singular principle or opinion, not commonly
adopted; those intimacies which a freak begins, and which a freak puts
an end to, how agreeable soever they may appear while they last, can
by no means deserve the sacred and the venerable name of friendship.
Of all the persons, however, whom nature points out for our peculiar
beneficence, there are none to whom it seems more properly directed
{200} than to those whose beneficence we have ourselves already
experienced. Nature, which formed men for that mutual kindness so
necessary for their happiness, renders every man the peculiar object
of kindness to the persons to whom he himself has been kind. Though
their gratitude should not always correspond to his beneficence, yet
the sense of his merit, the sympathetic gratitude of the impartial
spectator, will always correspond to it. The general indignation of
other people against the baseness of their ingratitude will even,
sometimes, increase the general sense of his merit. No benevolent man
ever lost altogether the fruits of his benevolence. If he does not
always gather them from the persons from whom he ought to have
gathered them, he seldom fails to gather them, and with a tenfold
increase, from other people. Kindness is the parent of kindness; and
if to be beloved by our brethren be the great object of our ambition,
the surest way of obtaining it is, by our conduct to show that we
really love them.
After the persons who are recommended to our beneficence, either their
connection with ourselves, by their personal qualities, or by their
past services, come those who are pointed out, not indeed to, what is
called, our friendship, but to our benevolent attention and good
offices; those who are distinguished by their extraordinary situation;
the greatly fortunate and the greatly unfortunate, the rich and the
powerful, the poor and the wretched. The distinction of ranks, the
peace and order of society, are, in a great measure, founded upon the
respect which we naturally conceive for the former. The relief and
consolation of human misery depend altogether upon our compassion for
the latter. The peace and order of society, is of more importance than
even the relief of the miserable. Our respect for the great,
accordingly, is most apt to offend by its excess; our fellow-feeling
for the miserable, by its defect. Moralists exhort us to charity and
compassion. They warn us against the fascination of greatness. This
fascination, indeed, is so powerful, that the rich and the great are
too often preferred to the wise and the virtuous. Nature has wisely
judged that the distinction of ranks, the peace and order of society,
would rest more securely upon the plain and palpable difference of
birth and fortune, than upon the invisible and often uncertain
difference of wisdom and virtue. The undistinguishing eyes of the
great mob of mankind can well enough perceive the former: it is with
difficulty that the nice discernment of the wise and the virtuous can
sometimes distinguish the latter. In the order of all those
recommendations to virtue, the benevolent wisdom of nature is equally
evident.
It may, perhaps, be unnecessary to observe, that the combination of
two or more of those exciting causes of kindness, increases the
kindness. The favour and partiality which, when there is no envy in
the case, we naturally bear to greatness, are much increased when it
is joined with wisdom and virtue. If, notwithstanding that wisdom and
{201} virtue, the great man should fall into those misfortunes, those
dangers and distresses, to which the most exalted stations are often
the most exposed, we are much more deeply interested in his fortune
than we should be in that of a person equally virtuous, but in a more
humble situation. The most interesting subjects of tragedies and
romances are the misfortunes of virtuous and magnanimous kings and
princes. If, by the wisdom and manhood of their exertions, they should
extricate themselves from those misfortunes, and recover completely
their former superiority and security, we cannot help viewing them
with the most enthusiastic and even extravagant admiration. The grief
which we felt for their distress, the joy which we feel for their
prosperity, seem to combine together in enhancing that partial
admiration which we naturally conceive both for the station and the
character.
When those different beneficent affections happen to draw different
ways, to determine by any precise rules in what cases we ought to
comply with the one, and in what with the other, is, perhaps,
altogether impossible. In what cases friendship ought to yield to
gratitude, or gratitude to friendship; in what cases the strongest of
all natural affections ought to yield to a regard for the safety of
those superiors upon whose safety often depends that of the whole
society; and in what cases natural affection may, without impropriety,
prevail over that regard; must be left altogether to the decision of
the man within the breast, the supposed impartial spectator, the great
judge and arbiter of our conduct. If we place ourselves completely in
his situation, if we really view ourselves with his eyes, and as he
views us, and listen with diligent and reverential attention to what
he suggests to us, his voice will never deceive us. We shall stand in
need of no casuistic rules to direct our conduct. These it is often
impossible to accommodate to all the different shades and gradations
of circumstance, character, and situation, to differences and
distinctions which, though not imperceptible, are, by their nicety and
delicacy, often altogether undefinable. In that beautiful tragedy of
Voltaire, the Orphan of China, while we admire the magnanimity of
Zamti, who is willing to sacrifice the life of his own child, in order
to preserve that of the only feeble remnant of his ancient sovereigns
and masters; we not only pardon, but love the maternal tenderness of
Idame, who, at the risk of discovering the important secret of her
husband, reclaims her infant from the cruel hands of the Tartars,
into which it had been delivered.
-----
CHAP. II.--_Of the Order in which Societies are by Nature
recommended to our Beneficence._
THE same principles that direct the order in which individuals are
recommended to our beneficence, direct that likewise in which
societies {202} are recommended to it. Those to which it is, or may be
of most importance, are first and principally recommended to it.
The state or sovereignty in which we have been born and educated, and
under the protection of which we continue to live, is, in ordinary
cases, the greatest society upon whose happiness or misery our good or
bad conduct can have much influence. It is accordingly, by nature,
most strongly recommended to us. Not only we ourselves, but all the
objects of our kindest affections, our children, our parents, our
relations, our friends, our benefactors, all those whom we naturally
love and revere the most, are commonly comprehended within it; and
their prosperity and safety depend in some measure upon its prosperity
and safety. It is by nature, therefore, endeared to us, not only by
all our selfish, but by all our private benevolent affections. Upon
account of our own connexion with it, its prosperity and glory seem to
reflect some sort of honour upon ourselves. When we compare it with
other societies of the same kind, we are proud of its superiority, and
mortified in some degree if it appears in any respect below them. All
the illustrious characters which it has produced in former times (for
against those of our own times envy may sometimes prejudice us a
little), its warriors, its statesmen, its poets, its philosophers, and
men of letters of all kinds; we are disposed to view with the most
partial admiration, and to rank them (sometimes most unjustly) above
those of all other nations. The patriot who lays down his life for the
safety, or even for the vain-glory of this society, appears to act
with the most exact propriety. He appears to view himself in the light
in which the impartial spectator naturally and necessarily views him,
as but one of the multitude, in the eye of that equitable judge, of no
more consequence than any other in it, but bound at all times to
sacrifice and devote himself to the safety, to the service, and even
to the glory of the greater number. But though this sacrifice appears
to be perfectly just and proper, we know how difficult it is to make
it, and how few people are capable of making it. His conduct,
therefore, excites not only our entire approbation, but our highest
wonder and admiration, and seems to merit all the applause which can
be due to the most heroic virtue. The traitor, on the contrary, who,
in some peculiar situation, fancies he can promote his own little
interest by betraying to the public enemy that of his native country;
who, regardless of the judgment of the man within the breast, prefers
himself, in this respect so shamefully and so basely, to all those
with whom he has any connexion; appears to be of all villains the most
detestable.
The love of our own nation often disposes us to view, with the most
malignant jealousy and envy, the prosperity and aggrandisement of any
other neighbouring nation. Independent and neighbouring nations,
having no common superior to decide their disputes, all live in
continual dread and suspicion of one another. Each sovereign,
expecting {203} little justice from his neighbours, is disposed to
treat them with as little as he expects from them. The regard for the
laws of nations, or for those rules which independent states profess
or pretend to think themselves bound to observe in their dealings with
one another, is often very little more than mere pretence and
profession. From the smallest interest, upon the slightest
provocation, we see those rules every day, either evaded or directly
violated without shame or remorse. Each nation foresees, or imagines
it foresees, its own subjugation in the increasing power and
aggrandisement of any of its neighbours; and the mean principle of
national prejudice is often founded upon the noble one of the love of
our own country. The sentence with which the elder Cato is said to
have concluded every speech which he made in the senate, whatever
might be the subject, '_It is my opinion likewise that Carthage
ought to be destroyed_,' was the natural expression of the savage
patriotism of a strong but coarse mind, enraged almost to madness
against a foreign nation from which his own had suffered so much. The
more humane sentence with which Scipio Nasica is said to have
concluded all his speeches, '_It is my opinion likewise that
Carthage ought not to be destroyed_,' was the liberal expression of
a more enlarged and enlightened mind, who felt no aversion to the
prosperity even of an old enemy, when reduced to a state which could
no longer be formidable to Rome. France and England may each of them
have some reason to dread the increase of the naval and military power
of the other; but for either of them to envy the internal happiness
and prosperity of the other, the cultivation of its lands, the
advancement of its manufactures, the increase of its commerce, the
security and number of its ports and harbours, its proficiency in all
the liberal arts and sciences, is surely beneath the dignity of two
such great nations. These are all real improvements of the world we
live in. Mankind are benefited, human nature is ennobled by them. In
such improvements each nation ought, not only to endeavour itself to
excel, but from the love of mankind, to promote, instead of
obstructing the excellence of its neighbours. These are all proper
objects of national emulation, not of national prejudice or envy.
The love of our own country seems not to be derived from the love of
mankind. The former sentiment is altogether independent of the latter,
and seems sometimes even to dispose us to act inconsistently with it.
France may contain, perhaps, near three times the number of
inhabitants which Great Britain contains. In the great society of
mankind, therefore, the prosperity of France should appear to be an
object of much greater importance than that of Great Britain. The
British subject, however, who, upon that account, should prefer upon
all occasions the prosperity of the former to that of the latter
country, would not be thought a good citizen of Great Britain. We do
not love our country merely as a part of the great society of mankind:
we love {204} it for its own sake, and independently of any such
consideration. That wisdom which contrived the system of human
affections, as well as that of every other part of nature, seems to
have judged that the interest of the great society of mankind would be
best promoted by directing the principal attention of each individual
to that particular portion of it, which was most within the sphere
both of his abilities and of his understanding.
National prejudices and hatreds seldom extend beyond neighbouring
nations. We very weakly and foolishly, perhaps, call the French our
natural enemies; and they perhaps, as weakly and foolishly, consider
us in the same manner. Neither they nor we bear any sort of envy to
the prosperity of China or Japan. It very rarely happens, however,
that our good-will towards such distant countries can be exerted with
much effect.
The most extensive public benevolence which can commonly be exerted
with any considerable effect, is that of the statesmen, who project
and form alliances among neighbouring or not very distant nations, for
the preservation either of, what is called, the balance of power, or
of the general peace and tranquillity of the states within the circle
of their negotiations. The statesmen, however, who plan and execute
such treaties, have seldom anything in view, but the interest of their
respective countries. Sometimes, indeed, their views are more
extensive. The Count d'Avaux, the plenipotentiary of France, at the
treaty of Munster, would have been willing to sacrifice his life
(according to the Cardinal de Retz, a man not over-credulous in the
virtue of other people) in order to have restored, by that treaty, the
general tranquillity of Europe. King William seems to have had a zeal
for the liberty and independency of the greater part of the sovereign
states of Europe; which, perhaps, might be a good deal stimulated by
his particular aversion to France, the state from which, during his
time, that liberty and independency were principally in danger. Some
share of the same spirit seems to have descended to the first ministry
of Queen Anne.
Every independent state is divided into many different orders and
societies, each of which has its own particular powers, privileges,
and immunities. Every individual is naturally more attached to his own
particular order or society, than to any other. His own interest, his
own vanity, the interest and vanity of many of his friends and
companions, are commonly a good deal connected with it. He is
ambitious to extend its privileges and immunities. He is zealous to
defend them against the encroachments of every other order of society.
Upon the manner in which any state is divided into the different
orders and societies which compose it, and upon the particular
distribution which has been made of their respective powers,
privileges, and immunities, depends, what is called, the constitution
of that particular state.
{205} Upon the ability of each particular order or society to maintain
its own powers, privileges, and immunities, against the encroachments
of every other, depends the stability of that particular constitution.
That particular constitution is necessarily more or less altered,
whenever any of its subordinate parts is either raised above or
depressed below whatever had been its former rank and condition.
All those different orders and societies are dependent upon the state
to which they owe their security and protection. That they are all
subordinate to that state, and established only in subserviency to its
prosperity and preservation, is a truth acknowledged by the most
partial member of every one of them. It may often, however, be hard to
convince him that the prosperity and preservation of the state
requires any diminution of the powers, privileges, and immunities of
his own particular order of society. This partiality, though it may
sometimes be unjust, may not, upon that account, be useless. It checks
the spirit of innovation. It tends to preserve whatever is the
established balance among the different orders and societies into
which the state is divided; and while it sometimes appears to obstruct
some alterations of government which may be fashionable and popular at
the time, it contributes in reality to the stability and permanency of
the whole system.
The love of our country seems, in ordinary cases, to involve in it two
different principles; first, a certain respect and reverence for that
constitution or form of government which is actually established; and
secondly, an earnest desire to render the condition of our
fellow-citizens as safe, respectable, and happy as we can. He is not a
citizen who is not disposed to respect the laws and to obey the civil
magistrate; and he is certainly not a good citizen who does not wish
to promote, by every means in his power, the welfare of the whole
society of his fellow citizens.
In peaceable and quiet times, those two principles generally coincide
and lead to the same conduct. The support of the established
government seems evidently the best expedient for maintaining the
safe, respectable, and happy situation of our fellow-citizens; when we
see that this government actually maintains them in that situation.
But in times of public discontent, faction, and disorder, those two
different principles may draw different ways, and even a wise man may
be disposed to think some alteration necessary in that constitution or
form of government, which, in its actual condition, appears plainly
unable to maintain the public tranquillity. In such cases, however, it
often requires, perhaps, the highest effort of political wisdom to
determine when a real patriot ought to support and endeavour to
re-establish the authority of the old system, and when we ought to
give way to the more daring, but often dangerous, spirit of
innovation.
Foreign war and civil faction are the two situations which afford the
most splendid opportunities for the display of public spirit. The hero
{206} who serves his country successfully in foreign war gratifies the
wishes of the whole nation, and is, upon that account, the object of
universal gratitude and admiration. In times of civil discord, the
leaders of the contending parties, though they may be admired by one
half of their fellow-citizens, are commonly execrated by the other.
Their characters and the merit of their respective services appear
commonly more doubtful. The glory which is acquired by foreign war is,
upon this account, almost always more pure and more splendid than that
which can be acquired in civil faction.
The leader of the successful party, however, if he has authority
enough to prevail upon his own friends to act with proper temper and
moderation (which he frequently has not), may sometimes render to his
country a service much more essential and important than the greatest
victories and the most extensive conquests. He may re-establish and
improve the constitution, and from the very doubtful and ambiguous
character of the leader of a party, he may assume the greatest and
noblest of all characters, that of the reformer and legislator of a
great state; and, by the wisdom of his institutions, secure the
internal tranquillity and happiness of his fellow-citizens for many
succeeding generations.
Amidst the turbulence and disorder of faction, a certain spirit of
system is apt to mix itself with that public spirit which is founded
upon the love of humanity, upon a real fellow-feeling with the
inconveniencies and distresses to which some of our fellow-citizens
may be exposed. This spirit of system commonly takes the direction of
that more gentle public spirit, always animates it, and often inflames
it even to the madness of fanaticism. The leaders of the discontented
party seldom fail to hold out some plausible plan of reformation
which, they pretend, will not only remove the inconveniencies and
relieve the distresses immediately complained of, but will prevent, in
all time coming, any return of the like inconveniencies and
distresses. They often propose, upon this account, to new model the
constitution, and to alter, in some of its most essential parts, that
system of government under which the subjects of a great empire have
enjoyed, perhaps, peace, security, and even glory, during the course
of several centuries together. The great body of the party are
commonly intoxicated with the imaginary beauty of this ideal system,
of which they have no experience, but which has been represented to
them in all the most dazzling colours in which the eloquence of their
leaders could paint it. Those leaders themselves, though they
originally may have meant nothing but their own aggrandisement, become
many of them in time the dupes of their own sophistry, and are as
eager for this great reformation as the weakest and most foolish of
their followers. Even though the leaders should have preserved their
own heads, as indeed they commonly do, free from this fanaticism, yet
they dare not always disappoint the expectation of their {207}
followers; but are often obliged, though contrary to their principle
and their conscience, to act as if they were under the common
delusion. The violence of the party, refusing all palliatives, all
temperaments, all reasonable accommodations, by requiring too much
frequently obtains nothing; and those inconveniencies and distresses
which, with a little moderation, might in a great measure have been
removed and relieved, are left altogether without the hope of a
remedy.
The man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and
benevolence, will respect the established powers and privileges even
of individuals, and still more those of the great orders and
societies, into which the state is divided. Though he should consider
some of them as in some measure abusive, he will content himself with
moderating what he often cannot annihilate without great violence.
When he cannot conquer the rooted prejudices of the people by reason
and persuasion, he will not attempt to subdue them by force; but will
religiously observe what, by Cicero, is justly called the divine maxim
of Plato, never to use violence to his country no more than to his
parents. He will accommodate, as well as he can, his public
arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people; and
will remedy, as well as he can, the inconveniencies which may flow
from the want of those regulations which the people are averse to
submit to. When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to
ameliorate the wrong; but like Solon, when he cannot establish the
best system of laws, he will try to establish the best that the people
can bear.
The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own
conceit: and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own
ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation
from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all
its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the
strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can
arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as
the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not
consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle
of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that,
in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a
principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which
the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two
principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human
society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be
happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will
go on miserably, and human society must be at all times in the highest
degree of disorder.
Some general, and even systematical, idea of the perfection of policy
and law, may no doubt be necessary for directing the views of the
statesman. But to insist upon establishing, and upon establishing all
{208} at once, and in spite of all opposition, every thing which that
idea may seem to require, must often be the highest degree of
arrogance. It is to erect his own judgment into the supreme standard
of right and wrong. It is to fancy himself the only wise and worthy
man in the commonwealth, and that his fellow-citizens should
accommodate themselves to him and not he to them. It is upon this
account, that of all political speculators, sovereign princes are by
far the most dangerous. This arrogance is perfectly familiar to them.
They entertain no doubt of the immense superiority of their own
judgment. When such imperial and royal reformers, therefore,
condescend to contemplate the constitution of the country which is
committed to their government, they seldom see any thing so wrong in
it as the obstructions which it may sometimes oppose to the execution
of their own will. They hold in contempt the divine maxim of Plato,
and consider the state as made for themselves, not themselves for the
state. The great object of their reformation, therefore, is to remove
those obstructions; to reduce the authority of the nobility; to take
away the privileges of cities and provinces, and to render both the
greatest individuals and the greatest orders of the state, as
incapable of opposing their commands, as the weakest and most
insignificant.
-----
CHAP. III.--_Of Universal Benevolence._
THOUGH our effectual good offices can very seldom be extended to any
wider society than that of our country; our good-will is circumscribed
by no boundary, but may embrace the immensity of the universe. We
cannot form the idea of any innocent and sensible being, whose
happiness we should not desire, or to whose misery, when distinctly
brought home to the imagination, we should not have some degree of
aversion. The idea of a mischievous, though sensible, being, indeed,
naturally provokes our hatred: but the ill-will which, in this case,
we bear to it, is really the effect of our universal benevolence. It
is the effect of the sympathy which we feel with the misery and
resentment of those other innocent and sensible beings, whose
happiness is disturbed by its malice.
This universal benevolence, how noble and generous soever, can be the
source of no solid happiness to any man who is not thoroughly
convinced that all the inhabitants of the universe, the meanest as
well as the greatest, are under the immediate care and protection of
that great, benevolent, and all-wise Being, who directs all the
movements of nature; and who is determined, by his own unalterable
perfections, to maintain in it, at all times, the greatest possible
quantity of happiness. To this universal benevolence, on the contrary,
the very suspicion of a fatherless world, must be the most melancholy
of all reflections; from the {209} thought that all the unknown
regions of infinite and incomprehensible space may be filled with
nothing but endless misery and wretchedness. All the splendour of the
highest prosperity can never enlighten the gloom with which so
dreadful an idea must necessarily overshadow the imagination; nor, in
a wise and virtuous man, can all the sorrow of the most afflicting
adversity ever dry up the joy which necessarily springs from the
habitual and thorough conviction of the truth of the contrary system.
The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private
interest should be sacrificed to the public interest of his own
particular order or society. He is at all times willing, too, that the
interest of this order or society should be sacrificed to the greater
interest of the state or sovereignty, of which it is only a
subordinate part. He should, therefore, be equally willing that all
those inferior interests should be sacrificed to the greater interest
of the universe, to the interest of that great society of all sensible
and intelligent beings, of which God himself is the immediate
administrator and director. If he is deeply impressed with the
habitual and thorough conviction that this benevolent and all-wise
Being can admit into the system of his government, no partial evil
which is not necessary for the universal good, he must consider all
the misfortunes which may befal himself, his friends, his society, or
his country, as necessary for the prosperity of the universe, and
therefore as what he ought, not only to submit to with resignation,
but as what he himself, if he had known all the connexions and
dependencies of things, ought sincerely and devoutly to have wished
for.
Nor does this magnanimous resignation to the will of the great
Director of the universe, seem in any respect beyond the reach of
human nature. Good soldiers, who both love and trust their general,
frequently march with more gaiety and alacrity to the forlorn station,
from which they never expect to return, than they would to one where
there was neither difficulty nor danger. In marching to the latter,
they could feel no other sentiment than that of the dulness of
ordinary duty; in marching to the former, they feel that they are
making the noblest exertion which it is possible for man to make. They
know that their general would not have ordered them upon this station,
had it not been necessary for the safety of the army, for the success
of the war. They cheerfully sacrifice their own little systems to the
prosperity of a greater system. They take an affectionate leave of
their comrades, to whom they wish all happiness and success; and march
out, not only with submissive obedience, but often with shouts of the
most joyful exultation, to that fatal, but splendid and honourable
station to which they are appointed. No conductor of an army can
deserve more unlimited trust, more ardent and zealous affection, than
the great Conductor of the universe. In the greatest public as well as
private disasters, a wise man ought to consider that he himself, his
friends and countrymen, {210} have only been ordered upon the forlorn
station of the universe; that had it not been necessary for the good
of the whole, they would not have been so ordered; and that it is
their duty, not only with humble resignation to submit to this
allotment, but to endeavour to embrace it with alacrity and joy. A
wise man should surely be capable of doing what a good soldier holds
himself at all times in readiness to do.
The idea of that divine Being, whose benevolence and wisdom have, from
all eternity, contrived and conducted the immense machine of the
universe, so as at all times to produce the greatest possible quantity
of happiness, is certainly of all the objects of human contemplation
by far the most sublime. Every other thought necessarily appears mean
in the comparison. The man whom we believe to be principally occupied
in this sublime contemplation, seldom fails to be the object of our
highest veneration; and though his life should be altogether
contemplative, we often regard him with a sort of religious respect
much superior to that with which we look upon the most active and
useful servant of the commonwealth. The Meditations of Marcus
Antoninus, which turn principally upon this subject, have contributed
more, perhaps, to the general admiration of his character, than all
the different transactions of his just, merciful, and beneficent
reign.
The administration of the great system of the universe, however, the
care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings,
is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much
humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his
powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension; the care of his
own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country: that
he is occupied in contemplating the more sublime, can never be an
excuse for his neglecting the more humble department; and he must not
expose himself to the charge which Avidius Cassius is said to have
brought, perhaps unjustly, against Marcus Antoninus; that while he
employed himself in philosophical speculations, and contemplated the
prosperity of the universe, he neglected that of the Roman empire. The
most sublime speculation of the contemplative philosopher can scarce
compensate the neglect of the smallest active duty.
-----
SEC. III.--OF SELF-COMMAND.
THE man who acts according to the rules of perfect prudence, of strict
justice, and of proper benevolence, may be said to be perfectly
virtuous. But the most perfect knowledge of those rules will not alone
enable him to act in this manner: his own passions are very apt to
mislead him: sometimes to drive him and sometimes to seduce him to
violate all the rules which he himself, in all his sober and cool
hours, approves of. The most perfect knowledge, if it is not supported
by the most perfect self-command, will not always enable him to do his
duty.
{211} Some of the best of the ancient moralists seem to have
considered those passions as divided into two different classes:
first, into those which it requires a considerable exertion of
self-command to restrain even for a single moment; and secondly, into
those which it is easy to restrain for a single moment, or even for a
short period of time; but which, by their continual and almost
incessant solicitations, are, in the course of a life, very apt to
mislead into great deviations.
Fear and anger, together with some other passions which are mixed or
connected with them, constitute the first class. The love of ease, of
pleasure, of applause, and of many other selfish gratifications,
constitute the second. Extravagant fear and furious anger, it is often
difficult to restrain even for a single moment. The love of ease, of
pleasure, of applause, and other selfish gratifications, it is always
easy to restrain for a single moment, or even for a short period of
time; but, by their continual solicitations, they often mislead us
into many weaknesses which we have afterwards much reason to be
ashamed of. The former set of passions may often be said to drive, the
latter to seduce us, from our duty. The command of the former was, by
the ancient moralists above alluded to, denominated fortitude,
manhood, and strength of mind; that of the latter, temperance,
decency, modesty, and moderation.
The command of each of those two sets of passions, independent of the
beauty which it derives from its utility; from its enabling us upon
all occasions to act according to the dictates of prudence, of
justice, and of proper benevolence; has a beauty of its own, and seems
to deserve for its own sake a certain degree of esteem and admiration.
In the one case, the strength and greatness of the exertion excites
some degree of that esteem and admiration. In the other, the
uniformity, the equality and unremitting steadiness of that exertion.
The man who, in danger, in torture, upon the approach of death,
preserves his tranquillity unaltered, and suffers no word, no gesture
to escape him which does not perfectly accord with the feelings of the
most indifferent spectator, necessarily commands a very high degree of
admiration. If he suffers in the cause of liberty and justice, for the
sake of humanity and the love of his country, the most tender
compassion for his sufferings, the strongest indignation against the
injustice of his persecutors, the warmest sympathetic gratitude for
his beneficent intentions, the highest sense of his merit, all join
and mix themselves with the admiration of his magnanimity, and often
inflame that sentiment into the most enthusiastic and rapturous
veneration. The heroes of ancient and modern history, who are
remembered with the most peculiar favour and affection, are many of
them those who, in the cause of truth, liberty, and justice, have
perished upon the scaffold, and who behaved there with that ease and
dignity which became them. Had the enemies of Socrates suffered him to
die quietly in his bed, the {212} glory even of that great philosopher
might possibly never have acquired that dazzling splendour in which it
has been beheld in all succeeding ages. In the English history, when
we look over the illustrious heads which have been engraven by Vertue
and Howbraken, there is scarce any body, I imagine, who does not feel
that the axe, the emblem of having been beheaded, which is engraved
under some of the most illustrious of them, under those of the Sir
Thomas Mores, of the Raleighs, the Russels, the Sydneys, &c., sheds a
real dignity and depth of interest over the characters to which it is
affixed, much superior to what they can derive from all the futile
ornaments of heraldry, with which they are sometimes accompanied.
Nor does this magnanimity give lustre only to the characters of
innocent and virtuous men. It draws some degree of favourable regard
even upon those of the greatest criminals; and when a robber or
highwayman is brought to the scaffold, and behaves there with decency
and firmness, though we perfectly approve of his punishment, we often
cannot help regretting that a man who possessed such great and noble
powers should have been capable of such mean enormities.
War is the great school both for acquiring and exercising this species
of magnanimity. Death, as we say, is the king of terrors; and the man
who has conquered the fear of death, is not likely to lose his
presence of mind at the approach of any other natural evil. In war,
men become familiar with death, and are thereby necessarily cured of
that superstitious horror with which it is viewed by the weak and
inexperienced. They consider it merely as the loss of life, and as no
further the object of aversion than as life may happen to be that of
desire. They learn from experience, too, that many seemingly great
dangers are not so great as they appear; and that, with courage,
activity, and presence of mind, there is often a good probability of
extricating themselves with honour from situations where at first they
could see no hope. The dread of death is thus greatly diminished; and
the confidence or hope of escaping it, augmented. They learn to expose
themselves to danger with less reluctance. They are less anxious to
get out of it, and less apt to lose their presence of mind while they
are in it. It is this habitual contempt of danger and death which
ennobles the profession of a soldier, and bestows upon it, in the
natural apprehensions of mankind, a rank and dignity superior to that
of any other profession; and the skilful and successful exercise of
this profession, in the service of their country, seems to have
constituted the most distinguishing feature in the character of the
favourite heroes of all ages.
Great warlike exploit, though undertaken contrary to every principle
of justice, and carried on without any regard to humanity, sometimes
interests us, and commands even some degree of a certain sort of
esteem for the very worthless characters which conduct it. We are
{213} interested even in the exploits of the buccaneers; and read with
some sort of esteem and admiration, the history of the most worthless
men, who, in pursuit of the most criminal purposes, endured greater
hardships, surmounted greater difficulties, and encountered greater
dangers, than perhaps any which the course of history gives an account
of.
The command of anger appears upon many occasions not less generous and
noble than that of fear. The proper expression of just indignation
composes many of the most splendid and admired passages both of
ancient and modern eloquence. The Philippics of Demosthenes, the
Catalinarians of Cicero, derive their whole beauty from the noble
propriety with which this passion is expressed. But this just
indignation is nothing but anger restrained and properly attempered to
what the impartial spectator can enter into. The blustering and noisy
passion which goes beyond this, is always odious and offensive, and
interests us, not for the angry man, but for the man with whom he is
angry. The nobleness of pardoning appears, upon many occasions,
superior even to the most perfect propriety of resenting. When either
proper acknowledgments have been made by the offending party, or even
without any such acknowledgments, when the public interest requires
that the most mortal enemies should unite for the discharge of some
important duty, the man who can cast away all animosity, and act with
confidence and cordiality towards the person who had most grievously
offended him, does seem most justly to merit our highest admiration.
The command of anger, however, does not always appear in such splendid
colours. Fear is contrary to anger, and is often the motive which
restrains it; and in such cases the meanness of the motive takes away
all the nobleness of the restraint. Anger prompts to attack, and the
indulgence of it seems sometimes to show a sort of courage and
superiority to fear. The indulgence of anger is sometimes an object of
vanity. That of fear never is. Vain and weak men, among their
inferiors, or those who dare not resist them, often affect to be
ostentatiously passionate, and fancy that they show, what is called,
spirit in being so. A bully tells many stories of his own insolence,
which are not true, and imagines that he thereby renders himself, if
not more amiable and respectable, at least more formidable to his
audience. Modern manners, which, by favouring the practice of
duelling, may be said, in some cases, to encourage private revenge,
contribute, perhaps, a good deal to render, in modern times, the
restraint of anger by fear still more contemptible than it might
otherwise appear to be. There is always something dignified in the
command of fear, whatever may be the motive upon which it is founded.
It is not so with the command of anger. Unless it is founded
altogether in the sense of decency, of dignity, and propriety, it
never is perfectly agreeable.
To act according to the dictates of prudence, of justice, and proper
{214} beneficence, seems to have no great merit where there is no
temptation to do otherwise. But to act with cool deliberation in the
midst of the greatest dangers and difficulties; to observe religiously
the sacred rules of justice in spite both of the greatest interests
which might tempt, and the greatest injuries which might provoke us to
violate them; never to suffer the benevolence of our temper to be
damped or discouraged by the malignity and ingratitude of the
individuals towards whom it may have been exercised; is the character
of the most exalted wisdom and virtue. Self-command is not only itself
a great virtue, but from it all the other virtues seem to derive their
principal lustre.
The command of fear, the command of anger, are always great and noble
powers. When they are directed by justice and benevolence, they are
not only great virtues, but increase the splendour of those other
virtues. They may, however, sometimes be directed by very different
motives; and in this case, though still great and respectable, they
may be excessively dangerous. The most intrepid valour may be employed
in the cause of the greatest injustice. Amidst great provocations,
apparent tranquillity and good humour may sometimes conceal the most
determined and cruel resolution to revenge. The strength of mind
requisite for such dissimulation, though always and necessarily
contaminated by the baseness of falsehood, has, however, been often
much admired by many people of no contemptible judgment. The
dissimulation of Catherine of Medicis is often celebrated by the
profound historian Davila; that of Lord Digby, afterwards Earl of
Bristol, by the grave and conscientious Lord Clarendon; that of the
first Ashley Earl of Shaftesbury, by the judicious Mr. Locke. Even
Cicero seems to consider this deceitful character, not indeed as of
the highest dignity, but as not unsuitable to a certain flexibility of
manners, which, he thinks may, notwithstanding, be, upon the whole,
both agreeable and respectable. He exemplifies it by the characters of
Homer's Ulysses, of the Athenian Themistocles, of the Spartan
Lysander, and of the Roman Marcus Crassus. This character of dark and
deep dissimulation occurs most commonly in times of great public
disorder; amidst the violence of faction and civil war. When law has
become in a great measure impotent, when the most perfect innocence
cannot alone insure safety, regard to self-defence obliges the
greatest part of men to have recourse to dexterity, to address, and to
apparent accommodation to whatever happens to be, at the moment, the
prevailing party. This false character, too, is frequently accompanied
with the coolest and most determined courage. The proper exercise of
it supposes that courage, as death is commonly the certain consequence
of detection. It may be employed indifferently, either to exasperate
or to allay those furious animosities of adverse factions which impose
the necessity of assuming it; and though it may sometimes be useful,
it is at least equally liable to be excessively pernicious.
{215} The command of the less violent and turbulent passions seems
much less liable to be abused to any pernicious purpose. Temperance,
decency, modesty, and moderation, are always amiable, and can seldom
be directed to any bad end. It is from the unremitting steadiness of
those gentler exertions of self-command, that the amiable virtue of
chastity, that the respectable virtues of industry and frugality,
derive all that sober lustre which attends them. The conduct of all
those who are contented to walk in the humble paths of private and
peaceable life, derives from the same principle the greater part of
the beauty and grace which belong to it; a beauty and grace, which,
though much less dazzling, is not always less pleasing than those
which accompany the more splendid actions of the hero, the statesman,
or the legislator.
After what has already been said, in several different parts of this
discourse, concerning the nature of self-command, I judge it
unnecessary to enter into any further detail concerning those virtues.
I shall only observe at present, that the point of propriety, the
degree of any passion which the impartial spectator approves of, is
differently situated in different passions. In some passions the
excess is less disagreeable than the defect; and in such passions the
point of propriety seems to stand high, or nearer to the excess than
to the defect. In other passions, the defect is less disagreeable than
the excess; and in such passions the point of propriety seems to stand
low, or nearer to the defect than to the excess. The former are the
passions which the spectator is most, the latter, those which he is
least disposed to sympathize with. The former, too, are the passions
of which the immediate feeling or sensation is agreeable to the person
principally concerned; the latter, those of which it is disagreeable.
It may be laid down as a general rule, that the passions which the
spectator is most disposed to sympathize with, and in which, upon that
account, the point of propriety may be said to stand high, are those
of which the immediate feeling or sensation is more or less agreeable
to the person principally concerned: and that, on the contrary, the
passions which the spectator is least disposed to sympathize with, and
in which, upon that account, the point of propriety may be said to
stand low, are those of which the immediate feeling or sensation is
more or less disagreeable, or even painful, to the person principally
concerned. This general rule, so far as I have been able to observe,
admits not of a single exception. A few examples will at once both
sufficiently explain it and demonstrate the truth of it.
The disposition to the affections which tend to unite men in society
to humanity, kindness, natural affection, friendship, esteem, may
sometimes be excessive. Even the excess of this disposition, however,
renders a man interesting to every body. Though we blame it, we still
regard it with compassion, and even with kindness, and never with
dislike. We are more sorry for it than angry at it. To the person
{216} himself, the indulgence even of such excessive affections is,
upon many occasions, not only agreeable, but delicious. Upon some
occasions, indeed, especially when directed, as is too often the case,
towards unworthy objects, it exposes him to much real and heartfelt
distress. Even upon such occasions, however, a well-disposed mind
regards him with the most exquisite pity, and feels the highest
indignation against those who affect to despise him for his weakness
and imprudence. The defect of this disposition, on the contrary, what
is called hardness of heart, while it renders a man insensible to the
feelings and distresses of other people, renders other people equally
insensible to his; and, by excluding him from the friendship of all
the world, excludes him from the best and most comfortable of all
social enjoyments.
The disposition to the affections which drive men from one another,
and which tend, as it were, to break the bands of human society; the
disposition to anger, hatred, envy, malice, revenge; is, on the
contrary, much more apt to offend by its excess than by its defect.
The excess renders a man wretched and miserable in his own mind, and
the object of hatred, and sometimes even of horror, to other people.
The defect is very seldom complained of. It may, however, be
defective. The want of proper indignation is a most essential defect
in the manly character, and, upon many occasions, renders a man
incapable of protecting either himself or his friends from insult and
injustice. Even that principle, in the excess and improper direction
of which consists the odious and detestable passion of envy, may be
defective. Envy is that passion which views with malignant dislike the
superiority of those who are really entitled to all the superiority
they possess. The man, however, who, in matters of consequence, tamely
suffers other people, who are entitled to no such superiority, to rise
above him or get before him, is justly condemned as mean-spirited.
This weakness is commonly founded in indolence, sometimes in good
nature, in an aversion to opposition, to bustle and solicitation, and
sometimes, too, in a sort of ill-judged magnanimity, which fancies
that it can always continue to despise the advantage which it then
despises, and, therefore, so easily gives up. Such weakness, however,
is commonly followed by much regret and repentance; and what had some
appearance of magnanimity in the beginning frequently gives place to a
most malignant envy in the end, and to a hatred of that superiority,
which those who have once attained it, may often become really
entitled to, by the very circumstance of having attained it. In order
to live comfortably in the world, it is, upon all occasions, as
necessary to defend our dignity and rank, as it is to defend our life
or our fortune.
Our sensibility to personal danger and distress, like that to personal
provocation, is much more apt to offend by its excess than by its
defect. No character is more contemptible than that of a coward; no
character is more admired than that of the man who faces death with
intrepidity, {217} and maintains his tranquillity and presence of mind
amidst the most dreadful dangers. We esteem the man who supports pain
and even torture with manhood and firmness; and we can have little
regard for him who sinks under them, and abandons himself to useless
outcries and womanish lamentations. A fretful temper, which feels,
with too much sensibility, every little cross accident, renders a man
miserable in himself and offensive to other people. A calm one, which
does not allow its tranquillity to be disturbed, either by the small
injuries, or by the little disasters incident to the usual course of
human affairs; but which, amidst the natural and moral evils infesting
the world, lays its account and is contented to suffer a little from
both, is a blessing to the man himself, and gives ease and security to
all his companions.
Our sensibility, however, both to our own injuries and to our own
misfortunes, though generally too strong, may likewise be too weak.
The man who feels little for his own misfortunes, must always feel
less for those of other people, and be less disposed to relieve them.
The man who has little resentment for the injuries which are done to
himself, must always have less for those which are done to other
people, and be less disposed either to protect or to avenge them. A
stupid insensibility to the events of human life necessarily
extinguishes all that keen and earnest attention to the propriety of
our own conduct, which constitutes the real essence of virtue. We can
feel little anxiety about the propriety of our own actions, when we
are indifferent about the events which may result from them. The man
who feels the full distress of the calamity which has befallen him,
who feels the whole baseness of the injustice which has been done to
him, but who feels still more strongly what the dignity of his own
character requires; who does not abandon himself to the guidance of
the undisciplined passions which his situation might naturally
inspire; but who governs his whole behaviour and conduct according to
those restrained and corrected emotions which the great inmate, the
great demi-god within the breast prescribes and approves of; is alone
the real man of virtue, the only real and proper object of love,
respect, and admiration. Insensibility and that noble firmness, that
exalted self-command, which is founded in the sense of dignity and
propriety, are so far from being altogether the same, that in
proportion as the former takes place, the merit of the latter is, in
many cases, entirely taken away.
But though the total want of sensibility to personal injury, to
personal danger and distress, would, in such situations, take away the
whole merit of self-command, that sensibility, however, may very
easily be too exquisite, and it frequently is so. When the sense of
propriety, when the authority of the judge within the breast, can
control this extreme sensibility, that authority must no doubt appear
very noble and very great. But the exertion of it may be too
fatiguing; it may have too much to do. The individual, by a great
effort, may behave perfectly {218} well. But the contest between the
two principles, the warfare within the breast, may be too violent to
be at all consistent with internal tranquillity and happiness. The
wise man whom Nature has endowed with this too exquisite sensibility,
and whose too lively feelings have not been sufficiently blunted and
hardened by early education and proper exercise, will avoid, as much
as duty and propriety will permit, the situations for which he is not
perfectly fitted. The man whose feeble and delicate constitution
renders him too sensible to pain, to hardship, and to every sort of
bodily distress, should not wantonly embrace the profession of a
soldier. The man of too much sensibility to injury, should not rashly
engage in the contests of faction. Though the sense of propriety
should be strong enough to command all those sensibilities, the
composure of the mind must always be disturbed in the struggle. In
this disorder the judgment cannot always maintain its ordinary
acuteness and precision; and though he may always mean to act
properly, he may often act rashly and imprudently, and in a manner
which he himself will, in the succeeding part of his life, be for ever
ashamed of. A certain intrepidity, a certain firmness of nerves and
hardiness of constitution, whether natural or acquired, are
undoubtedly the best preparatives for all the great exertions of
self-command.
Though war and faction are certainly the best schools for forming
every man to this hardiness and firmness of temper, though they are
the best remedies for curing him of the opposite weaknesses, yet, if
the day of trial should happen to come before he has completely
learned his lesson, before the remedy has had time to produce its
proper effect, the consequences might not be agreeable.
Our sensibility to the pleasures, to the amusements, and enjoyments of
human life, may offend, in the same manner, either by its excess or by
its defect. Of the two, however, the excess seems less disagreeable
than the defect. Both to the spectator and to the person principally
concerned, a strong propensity to joy is certainly more pleasing than
a dull insensibility to the objects of amusement and diversion. We are
charmed with the gaiety of youth, and even with the playfulness of
childhood: but we soon grow weary of the flat and tasteless gravity
which too frequently accompanies old age. When this propensity,
indeed, is not restrained by the sense of propriety, when it is
unsuitable to the time or to the place, to the age or to the situation
of the person, when, to indulge it, he neglects either his interest or
his duty; it is justly blamed as excessive, and as hurtful both to the
individual and to the society. In the greater part of such cases,
however, what is chiefly to be found fault with is, not so much the
strength of the propensity to joy, as the weakness of the sense of
propriety and duty. A young man who has no relish for the diversions
and amusements that are natural and suitable to his age, who talks of
nothing but his book or his business, is disliked as formal and
pedantic; and we give him no credit {219} for his abstinence even from
improper indulgences, to which he seems to have so little inclination.
The principle of self-estimation may be too high, and it may likewise
be too low. It is so very agreeable to think highly, and so very
disagreeable to think meanly of ourselves, that, to the person
himself, it cannot well be doubted, but that some degree of excess
must be much less disagreeable than any degree of defect. But to the
impartial spectator, it may perhaps be thought, things must appear
quite differently, and that to him, the defect must always be less
disagreeable than the excess. And in our companions, no doubt, we much
more frequently complain of the latter than of the former. When they
assume upon us, or set themselves before us, their self-estimation
mortifies our own. Our own pride and vanity prompt us to accuse them
of pride and vanity, and we cease to be the impartial spectators of
their conduct. When the same companions, however, suffer any other man
to assume over them a superiority which does not belong to him, we not
only blame them, but often despise them as mean-spirited. When, on the
contrary, among other people, they push themselves a little more
forward, and scramble to an elevation disproportioned, as we think, to
their merit, though we may not perfectly approve of their conduct, we
are often, upon the whole, diverted with it; and, where there is no
envy in the case, we are almost always much less displeased with them,
than we should have been, had they only suffered themselves to sink
below their proper station.
In estimating our own merit, in judging of our own character and
conduct, there are two different standards to which we naturally
compare them. The one is the idea of exact propriety and perfection,
so far as we are each of us capable of comprehending that idea. The
other is that degree of approximation to this idea which is commonly
attained in the world, and which the greater part of our friends and
companions, of our rivals and competitors, may have actually arrived
at. We very seldom (I am disposed to think, we never) attempt to judge
of ourselves without giving more or less attention to both these
different standards. But the attention of different men, and even of
the same man at different times, is often very unequally divided
between them; and is sometimes principally directed towards the one,
and sometimes towards the other.
So far as our attention is directed towards the first standard, the
wisest and best of us all, can, in his own character and conduct, see
nothing but weakness and imperfection; can discover no ground for
arrogance and presumption, but a great deal for humility, regret, and
repentance. So far as our attention is directed towards the second, we
may be affected either in the one way or in the other, and feel
ourselves, either really above, or really below, the standard with
which we seek to compare ourselves.
{220} The wise and virtuous man directs his principal attention to the
first standard; the idea of exact propriety and perfection. There
exists in the mind of every man, an idea of this kind, gradually
formed from his observations upon the character and conduct both of
himself and of other people. It is the slow, gradual, and progressive
work of the great demigod within the breast, the great judge and
arbiter of conduct. This idea is in every man more or less accurately
drawn, its colouring is more or less just, its outlines are more or
less exactly designed, according to the delicacy and acuteness of that
sensibility, with which those observations were made, and according to
the care and attention employed in making them. In the wise and
virtuous man they have been made with the most acute and delicate
sensibility, and the utmost care and attention have been employed in
making them. Every day some feature is improved; every day some
blemish is corrected. He has studied this idea more than other people,
he comprehends it more distinctly, he has formed a much more correct
image of it, and is much more deeply enamoured of its exquisite and
divine beauty. He endeavours, as well as he can, to assimilate his own
character to this archetype of perfection. But he imitates the work of
a divine artist, which can never be equalled. He feels the imperfect
success of all his best endeavours, and sees, with grief and
affliction, in how many different features the mortal copy falls short
of the immortal original. He remembers, with concern and humiliation,
how often, from want of attention, from want of judgment, from want of
temper, he has, both in words and actions, both in conduct and
conversation, violated the exact rules of perfect propriety; and has
so far departed from that model, according to which he wished to
fashion his own character and conduct. When he directs his attention
towards the second standard, indeed, that degree of excellence which
his friends and acquaintances have commonly arrived at, he may be
sensible of his own superiority. But, as his principal attention is
always directed towards the first standard, he is necessarily much
more humbled by the one comparison, than he ever can be elevated by
the other. He is never so elated as to look down with insolence even
upon those who are really below him. He feels so well his own
imperfection, he knows so well the difficulty with which he attained
his own distant approximation to rectitude, that he cannot regard with
contempt the still greater imperfections of other people. Far from
insulting over their inferiority, he views it with the most indulgent
commiseration, and, by his advice as well as example, is at all times
willing to promote their further advancement. If, in any particular
qualification, they happen to be superior to him (for who is so
perfect as not to have many superiors in many different
qualifications?), far from envying their superiority, he, who knows
how difficult it is to excel, esteems and honours their excellence,
and never fails to bestow upon it the full measure of applause {221}
which it deserves. His whole mind, in short, is deeply impressed, his
whole behaviour and deportment are distinctly stamped with the
character of real modesty; with that of a very moderate estimation of
his own merit, and, at the same time, with a very full sense of the
merit of other people.
In all the liberal and ingenious arts, in painting, in poetry, in
music, in eloquence, in philosophy, the great artist feels always the
real imperfection of his own best works, and is more sensible than any
man how much they fall short of that ideal perfection of which he has
formed some conception, which he imitates as well as he can, but which
he despairs of ever equalling. It is the inferior artist only, who is
ever perfectly satisfied with his own performances. He has little
conception of this ideal perfection, about which he has little
employed his thoughts; and it is chiefly to the works of other
artists, of, perhaps, a still lower order, that he deigns to compare
his own works. Boileau, the great French poet (in some of his works,
perhaps not inferior to the greatest poet of the same kind, either
ancient or modern), used to say, that no great man was ever completely
satisfied with his own works. His acquaintance Santeuil (a writer of
Latin verses, and who, on account of that school-boy accomplishment,
had the weakness to fancy himself a poet), assured him that he himself
was always completely satisfied with _his_ own. Boileau replied,
with, perhaps, an arch ambiguity, that he certainly was the only great
man that ever was so. Boileau, in judging of his own works, compared
them with the standard of ideal perfection, which, in his own
particular branch of the poetic art, he had, I presume, meditated as
deeply, and conceived as distinctly, as it is possible for man to
conceive it. Santeuil, in judging of _his_ own works, compared
them, I suppose, chiefly to those of the other Latin poets of his own
time, to the great part of whom he was certainly very far from being
inferior. But to support and finish off, if I may say so, the conduct
and conversation of a whole life to some resemblance of this ideal
perfection, is surely much more difficult than to work up to an equal
resemblance any of the productions of any of the ingenious arts. The
artist sits down to his work undisturbed, at leisure, in the full
possession and recollection of all his skill, experience, and
knowledge. The wise man must support the propriety of his own conduct
in health and sickness, in success and in disappointment, in the hour
of fatigue and drowsy indolence, as well as in that of the most
awakened attention. The most sudden and unexpected assaults of
difficulty and distress must never surprise him. The injustice of
other people must never provoke him to injustice. The violence of
faction must never confound him. All the hardships and hazards of war
must never either dishearten or appal him.
Of the persons who, in estimating their own merit, in judging of their
own character and conduct, direct by far the greater part of their
{222} attention to the second standard, to that ordinary degree of
excellence which is commonly attained by other people, there are some
who really and justly feel themselves very much above it, and who, by
every intelligent and impartial spectator, are acknowledged to be so.
The attention of such persons, however, being always principally
directed, not to the standard of ideal, but to that of ordinary
perfection, they have little sense of their own weaknesses and
imperfections; they have little modesty; and are often assuming,
arrogant, and presumptuous; great admirers of themselves, and great
contemners of other people. Though their characters are in general
much less correct, and their merit much inferior to that of the man of
real and modest virtue; yet their excessive presumption, founded upon
their own excessive self-admiration, dazzles the multitude, and often
imposes even upon those who are much superior to the multitude. The
frequent, and often wonderful, success of the most ignorant quacks and
impostors, both civil and religious, sufficiently demonstrate how
easily the multitude are imposed upon by the most extravagant and
groundless pretensions. But when those pretensions are supported by a
very high degree of real and solid merit, when they are displayed with
all the splendour which ostentation can bestow upon them, when they
are supported by high rank and great power, when they have often been
successfully exerted, and are, upon that account, attended by the loud
acclamations of the multitude; even the man of sober judgment often
abandons himself to the general admiration. The very noise of those
foolish acclamations often contributes to confound his understanding,
and while he sees those great men only at a certain distance, he is
often disposed to worship them with a sincere admiration, superior
even to that with which they appear to worship themselves. When there
is no envy in the case, we all take pleasure in admiring, and are,
upon that account, naturally disposed, in our own fancies, to render
complete and perfect in every respect the characters which, in many
respects, are so very worthy of admiration. The excessive
self-admiration of those great men is well understood, perhaps, and
even seen through, with some degree of derision, by those wise men who
are much in their familiarity, and who secretly smile at those lofty
pretensions, which, by people at a distance, are often regarded with
reverence, and almost with adoration. Such, however, have been, in all
ages, the greater part of those men who have procured to themselves
the most noisy fame, the most extensive reputation; a fame and
reputation, too, which have too often descended to the remotest
posterity.
Great success in the world, great authority over the sentiments and
opinions of mankind, have very seldom been acquired without some
degree of this excessive self-admiration. The most splendid
characters, the men who have performed the most illustrious actions,
who have brought about the greatest revolutions, both in the
situations and {223} opinions of mankind; the most successful
warriors, the greatest statesmen and legislators, the eloquent
founders and leaders of the most numerous and most successful sects
and parties; have many of them been, not more distinguished for their
very great merit, than for a degree of presumption and self-admiration
altogether disproportioned even to that very great merit. This
presumption was, perhaps, necessary, not only to prompt them to
undertakings which a more sober mind would never have thought of, but
to command the submission and obedience of their followers to support
them in such undertakings. When crowned with success, accordingly,
this presumption has often betrayed them into a vanity that approached
almost to insanity and folly. Alexander the Great appears, not only to
have wished that other people should think him a god, but to have been
at least very well-disposed to fancy himself such. Upon his deathbed,
the most ungodlike of all situations, he requested of his friends
that, to the respectable list of deities, into which himself had long
before been inserted, his old mother Olympia might likewise have the
honour of being added. Amidst the respectful admiration of his
followers and disciples, amidst the universal applause of the public,
after the oracle, which probably had followed the voice of that
applause, had pronounced him the wisest of men, the great wisdom of
Socrates, though it did not suffer him to fancy himself a god, yet was
not great enough to hinder him from fancying that he had secret and
frequent intimations from some invisible and divine being. The sound
head of Cæsar was not so perfectly sound as to hinder him from being
much pleased with his divine genealogy from the goddess Venus; and,
before the temple of this pretended great-grandmother, to receive,
without rising from his seat, the Roman senate, when that illustrious
body came to present him with some decrees conferring upon him the
most extravagant honours. This insolence, joined to some other acts of
an almost childish vanity, little to be expected from an understanding
at once so very acute and comprehensive, seems, by exasperating the
public jealousy, to have emboldened his assassins, and to have
hastened the execution of their conspiracy. The religion and manners
of modern times give our great men little encouragement to fancy
themselves either gods or even prophets. Success, however, joined to
great popular favour, has often so far turned the heads of the
greatest of them, as to make them ascribe to themselves both an
importance and an ability much beyond what they really possessed; and,
by this presumption, to precipitate themselves into many rash and
sometimes ruinous adventures. It is a characteristic almost peculiar
to the great Duke of Marlborough, that ten years of such uninterrupted
and such splendid success as scarce any other general could boast of,
never betrayed him into a a single rash action, scarce into a single
rash word or expression. The same temperate coolness and self-command
cannot, I think, be ascribed to any other great warrior of later
times; not to Prince Eugene, not to {224} the late King of Prussia,
not **the great Prince of Condé, not even to Gustavus Adolphus.
Turenne seems to have approached the nearest to it; but several
different transactions of his life sufficiently demonstrate that it
was in him by no means so perfect as it was in the great Duke of
Marlborough.
In the humble projects of private life, as well as in the ambitious
and proud pursuits of high stations, great abilities and successful
enterprise, in the beginning, have frequently encouraged to
undertakings which necessarily led to bankruptcy and ruin in the end.
The esteem and admiration which every impartial spectator conceives
for the real merit of those spirited, magnanimous, and high-minded
persons, as it is a just and well-founded sentiment, so it is a steady
and permanent one, and altogether independent of their good or bad
fortune. It is otherwise with that admiration which he is apt to
conceive for their excessive self-estimation and presumption. While
they are successful, indeed, he is often perfectly conquered and
overborne by them. Success covers from his eyes, not only the great
imprudence, but frequently the great injustice of their enterprises;
and far from blaming this defective part of their character, he often
views it with the most enthusiastic admiration. When they are
unfortunate, however, things change their colours and their names.
What was before heroic magnanimity, resumes its proper appellation of
extravagant rashness and folly; and the blackness of that avidity and
injustice, which was before hid under the splendour of prosperity,
comes full into view, and blots the whole lustre of their enterprise.
Had Cæsar, instead of gaining, lost the battle of Pharsalia, his
character would, at this hour, have ranked a little above that of
Cataline, and the weakest man would have viewed his enterprise against
the laws of his country in blacker colours, than, perhaps even Cato,
with all the animosity of a party-man, ever viewed it at the time. His
real merit, the justness of his taste, the simplicity and elegance of
his writings, the propriety of his eloquence, his skill in war, his
resources in distress, his cool and sedate judgment in danger, his
faithful attachment to his friends, his unexampled generosity to his
enemies, would all have been acknowledged; as the real merit of
Cataline, who had many great qualities, is acknowledged at this day.
But the insolence and injustice of his all-grasping ambition would
have darkened and extinguished the glory of all that real merit.
Fortune has in this, as well as in some other respects already
mentioned, great influence over the moral sentiments of mankind, and,
according as she is either favourable or adverse, can render the same
character the object, either of general love and admiration, or of
universal hatred and contempt. This great disorder in our moral
sentiments is by no means, however, without its utility; and we may on
this, as well as on many other occasions, admire the wisdom of God
even in the weakness and folly of man. Our admiration of {225} success
is founded upon the same principle with our respect for wealth and
greatness, and is equally necessary for establishing the distinction
of ranks and the order of society. By this admiration of success we
are taught to submit more easily to those superiors, whom the course
of human affairs may assign to us; to regard with reverence, and
sometimes even with a sort of respectful affection, that fortunate
violence which we are no longer capable of resisting; not only the
violence of such splendid characters as those of a Cæsar or an
Alexander, but often that of the most brutal and savage barbarians, of
an Attila, a Gengis, or a Tamerlane. To all such mighty conquerors the
great mob of mankind are naturally disposed to look up with a
wondering, though, no doubt, with a very weak and foolish admiration.
By this admiration, however, they are taught to acquiesce with less
reluctance under that government which an irresistible force imposes
upon them, and from which no reluctance could deliver them.
Though in prosperity, however, the man of excessive self-estimation
may sometimes appear to have some advantage over the man of correct
and modest virtue; though the applause of the multitude, and of those
who see them both only at a distance, is often much louder in favour
of the one than it ever is in favour of the other; yet, all things
fairly computed, the real balance of advantage is, perhaps in all
cases, greatly in favour of the latter and against the former. The man
who neither ascribes to himself, nor wishes that other people should
ascribe to him, any other merit besides that which really belongs to
him, fears no humiliation, dreads no detection; but rests contented
and secure upon the genuine truth and solidity of his own character.
His admirers may neither be very numerous nor very loud in their
applauses; but the wisest man who sees him the nearest and who knows
him the best, admires him the most. To a real wise man the judicious
and well-weighed approbation of a single wise man, gives more
heartfelt satisfaction than all the noisy applauses of ten thousand
ignorant though enthusiastic admirers. He may say with Parmenides,
who, upon reading a philosophical discourse before a public assembly
at Athens, and observing, that, except Plato, the whole company had
left him, continued, notwithstanding, to read on, and said that Plato
alone was audience sufficient for him.
It is otherwise with the man of excessive self-estimation. The wise
men who see him the nearest, admire him the least. Amidst the
intoxication of prosperity, their sober and just esteem falls so far
short of the extravagance of his own self-admiration, that he regards
it as mere malignity and envy. He suspects his best friends. Their
company becomes offensive to him. He drives them from his presence,
and often rewards their services, not only with ingratitude, but with
cruelty and injustice. He abandons his confidence to flatterers and
traitors, who pretend to idolize his vanity and presumption; and that
{226} character which in the beginning, though in some respects
defective, was, upon the whole, both amiable and respectable, becomes
contemptible and odious in the end. Amidst the intoxication of
prosperity, Alexander killed Clytus, for having preferred the exploits
of his father Philip to his own; put Calisthenes to death in torture,
for having refused to adore him in the Persian manner; and murdered
the great friend of his father, the venerable Parmenio, after having,
upon the most groundless suspicions, sent first to the torture and
afterwards to the scaffold the only remaining son of that old man, the
rest having all before died in his own service. This was that Parmenio
of whom Philip used to say, that the Athenians were very fortunate who
could find ten generals every year, while he himself, in the whole
course of his life, could never find one but Parmenio. It was upon the
vigilance and attention of this Parmenio that he reposed at all times
with confidence and security, and, in his hours of mirth and jollity,
used to say, 'Let us drink, my friends: we may do it with safety, for
Parmenio never drinks.' It was this same Parmenio, with whose presence
and counsel, it had been said, Alexander had gained all his victories;
and without his presence and counsel, he had never gained a single
victory. The humble, admiring, and flattering friends, whom Alexander
left in power and authority behind him, divided his empire among
themselves, and after having thus robbed his family and kindred of
their inheritance, put, one after another, every single surviving
individual of them, whether male or female, to death.
We frequently, not only pardon, but thoroughly enter into and
sympathize with the excessive self-estimation of those splendid
characters in which we observe a great and distinguished superiority
above the common level of mankind. We call them spirited, magnanimous,
and high-minded; words which all involve in their meaning a
considerable degree of praise and admiration. But we cannot enter into
and sympathize with the excessive self-estimation of those characters
in which we can discern no such distinguished superiority. We are
disgusted and revolted by it; and it is with some difficulty that we
can either pardon or suffer it. We call it pride or vanity; two words,
of which the latter always, and the former for the most part, involve
in their meaning a considerable degree of blame.
Those two vices, however, though resembling, in some respects, as
being both modifications of excessive self-estimation, are yet, in
many respects, very different from one another.
The proud man is sincere, and, in the bottom of his heart, is
convinced of his own superiority; though it may sometimes be difficult
to guess upon what that conviction is founded. He wishes you to view
him in no other light than that in which, when he places himself in
your situation, he really views himself. He demands no more of you
than, what he thinks, justice. If you appear not to respect him as he
{227} respects himself, he is more offended than mortified, and feels
the same indignant resentment as if he had suffered a real injury. He
does not even then, however, deign to explain the grounds of his own
pretensions. He disdains to court your esteem. He affects even to
despise it, and endeavours to maintain his assumed station, not so
much by making you sensible of his superiority, as of your own
meanness. He seems to wish not so much to excite your esteem for
_himself_, as to mortify _that_ for _yourself_.
The vain man is not sincere, and, in the bottom of his heart, is very
seldom convinced of that superiority which he wishes you to ascribe to
him. He wishes you to view him in much more splendid colours than
those in which, when he places himself in your situation, and supposes
you to know all that he knows, he can really view himself. When you
appear to view him, therefore, in different colours, perhaps in his
proper colours, he is much more mortified than offended. The grounds
of his claim to that character which he wishes you to ascribe to him,
he takes every opportunity of displaying, both by the most
ostentatious and unnecessary exhibition of the good qualities and
accomplishments which he possesses in some tolerable degree, and
sometimes even by false pretensions to those which he either possesses
in no degree, or in so very slender a degree that he may well enough
be said to possess them in no degree. Far from despising your esteem,
he courts it with the most anxious assiduity. Far from wishing to
mortify your self-estimation, he is happy to cherish it, in hopes that
in return you will cherish his own. He flatters in order to be
flattered. He studies to please, and endeavours to bribe you into a
good opinion of him by politeness and complaisance, and sometimes even
by real and essential good offices, though often displayed, perhaps,
with unnecessary ostentation.
The vain man sees the respect which is paid to rank and fortune, and
wishes to usurp this respect, as well as that for talents and virtues.
His dress, his equipage, his way of living, accordingly, all announce
both a higher rank and a greater fortune than really belong to him;
and in order to support this foolish imposition for a few years in the
beginning of his life, he often reduces himself to poverty and
distress long before the end of it. As long as he can continue his
expense, however, his vanity is delighted with viewing himself, not in
the light in which you would view him if you knew all that he knows;
but in that in which, he imagines, he has, by his own address, induced
you actually to view him. Of all the illusions of vanity that is,
perhaps, the most common. Obscure strangers who visit foreign
countries, or who, from a remote province, come to visit, for a short
time, the capital of their own country, most frequently attempt to
practise it. The folly of the attempt, though always very great and
most unworthy of a man of sense, may not be altogether so great upon
such as upon most other {228} occasions. If their stay is short, they
may escape any disgraceful detection; and, after indulging their
vanity for a few months or a few years, they may return to their own
homes, and repair, by future parsimony, the waste of their past
profusion.
The proud man can very seldom be accused of this folly. His sense of
his own dignity renders him careful to preserve his independency, and,
when his fortune happens not to be large, though he wishes to be
decent, he studies to be frugal and attentive in all his expenses. The
ostentatious expense of the vain man is highly offensive to him. It
outshines, perhaps, his own. It provokes his indignation as an
insolent assumption of a rank which is by no means due; and he never
talks of it without loading it with the harshest and severest
reproaches.
The proud man does not always feel himself at his ease in the company
of his equals, and still less in that of his superiors. He cannot lay
down his lofty pretensions, and the countenance and conversation of
such company Overawe him so much that he dare not display them. He has
recourse to humbler company, for which he has little respect, which he
would not willingly choose, and which is by no means agreeable to him;
that of his inferiors, his flatterers, and dependants. He seldom
visits his superiors, or, if he does, it is rather to show that he is
entitled to live in such company, than for any real satisfaction that
he enjoys in it. It is as Lord Clarendon says of the Earl of Arundel,
that he sometimes went to court, because he could there only find a
greater man than himself; but that he went very seldom, because he
found there a greater man than himself.
It is quite otherwise with the vain man. He courts the company of his
superiors as much as the proud man shuns it. Their splendour, he seems
to think, reflects a splendour upon those who are much about them. He
haunts the courts of kings and the levees of ministers, and gives
himself the air of being a candidate for fortune and preferment, when
in reality he possesses the much more precious happiness, if he knew
how to enjoy it, of not being one. He is fond of being admitted to the
tables of the great, and still more fond of magnifying to other people
the familiarity with which he is honoured there. He associates
himself, as much as he can, with fashionable people, with those who
are supposed to direct the public opinion, with the witty, with the
learned, with the popular; and he shuns the company of his best
friends whenever the very uncertain current of public favour happens
to run in any respect against them. With the people to whom he wishes
to recommend himself, he is not always very delicate about the means
which he employs for that purpose; unnecessary ostentation, groundless
pretensions, constant assentation, frequently flattery, though for the
most part a pleasant and sprightly flattery, and very seldom the gross
and fulsome flattery of a parasite. The proud man, on the contrary,
never flatters, and is frequently scarce civil to any body.
{229} Notwithstanding all its groundless pretensions, however, vanity
is almost always a sprightly and a gay, and very often a good-natured
passion. Pride is always a grave, a sullen, and a severe one. Even the
falsehoods of the vain man are all innocent falsehoods, meant to raise
himself, not to lower other people. To do the proud man justice he
very seldom stoops to the baseness of falsehood. When he does,
however, his falsehoods are by no means so innocent. They are all
mischievous, and meant to lower other people. He is full of
indignation at the unjust superiority, as he thinks it, which is given
to them. He views them with malignity and envy, and, in talking of
them, often endeavours, as much as he can, to extenuate and lessen
whatever are the grounds upon which their superiority is supposed to
be founded. Whatever tales are circulated to their disadvantage,
though he seldom forges them himself, yet he often takes pleasure in
believing them, is by no means unwilling to repeat them, and even
sometimes with some degree of exaggeration. The worst falsehoods of
vanity are what we call white lies: those of pride, whenever it
condescends to falsehood, are all of the opposite complexion.
Our dislike to pride and vanity generally disposes us to rank the
persons whom we accuse of those vices rather below than above the
common level. In this judgment however, I think, we are most
frequently in the wrong, and that both the proud and the vain man are
often (perhaps for the most part) a good deal above it; though not
near so much as either the one really thinks himself, or as the other
wishes you to think him. If we compare them with their own
pretensions, they may appear the just objects of contempt. But when we
compare them with what the greater part of their rivals and
competitors really are, they may appear quite otherwise, and very much
above the common level. Where there is this real superiority, pride is
frequently attended with many respectable virtues; with truth, with
integrity, with a high sense of honour, with cordial and steady
friendship, with the most inflexible firmness and resolution. Vanity,
with many amiable ones; with humanity, with politeness, with a desire
to oblige in all little matters, and sometimes with a real generosity
in great ones; a generosity, however, which it often wishes to display
in the most splendid colours that it can. By their rivals and enemies,
the French, in the last century, were accused of vanity; the
Spaniards, of pride; and foreign nations were disposed to consider the
one as the more amiable; the other, as the more respectable people.
The words _vain_ and _vanity_ are never taken in a good
sense. We sometimes say of a man, when we are talking of him in good
humour, that he is the better for his vanity, or that his vanity is
more diverting than offensive; but we still consider it as a foible
and a ridiculous feature in his character.
The words _proud_ and _pride_, on the contrary, are
sometimes taken in {230} a good sense. We frequently say of a man,
that he is too proud, or that he has too much noble pride, ever to
suffer himself to do a mean thing. Pride is, in this case, confounded
with magnanimity. Aristotle, a philosopher who certainly knew the
world, in drawing the character of the magnanimous man, paints him
with many features which, in the two last centuries, were commonly
ascribed to the Spanish character: that he was deliberate in all his
resolutions; slow, and even tardy, in all his actions; that his voice
was grave, his speech deliberate, his step and motion slow; that he
appeared indolent and even slothful, not at all disposed to bustle
about little matters, but to act with the most determined and vigorous
resolution upon all great and illustrious occasions: that he was not a
lover of danger, or forward to expose himself to little dangers, but
to great dangers; and that, when he exposed himself to danger, he was
altogether regardless of his life.
The proud man is commonly too well contented with himself to think
that his character requires any amendment. The man who feels himself
all-perfect, naturally enough despises all further improvement. His
self-sufficiency and absurd conceit of his own superiority, commonly
attend him from his youth to his most advanced age; and he dies, as
Hamlet says, 'with all his sins upon his head, unanointed, unanealed.'
It is frequently quite otherwise with the vain man. The desire of the
esteem and admiration of other people, when for qualities and talents
which are the natural and proper objects of esteem and admiration, is
the real love of true glory; a passion which, if not the very best
passion of human nature, is certainly one of the best. Vanity is very
frequently no more than an attempt prematurely to usurp that glory
before it is due. Though your son, under five-and-twenty years of age,
should be but a coxcomb; do not, upon that account, despair of his
becoming, before he is forty, a very wise and worthy man, and a real
proficient in all those talents and virtues to which, at present, he
may only be an ostentatious and empty pretender. The great secret of
education is to direct vanity to proper objects. Never suffer him to
value himself upon trivial accomplishments. But do not always
discourage his pretensions to those that are of real importance. He
would not pretend to them if he did not earnestly desire to possess
them. Encourage this desire; afford him every means to facilitate the
acquisition; and do not take too much offence, although he should
sometimes assume the air of having attained it a little before the
time.
Such, I say, are the distinguishing characteristics of pride and
vanity, when each of them acts according to its proper character. But
the proud man is often vain; and the vain man is often proud. Nothing
can be more natural than that the man, who thinks much more highly of
himself than he deserves, should wish that other people should think
still more highly of him: or that the man, who wishes that other
people {231} should think more highly of him than he thinks of
himself, should, at the same time, think much more highly of himself
than he deserves. Those two vices being frequently blended in the same
character, the characteristics of both are necessarily confounded; and
we sometimes find the superficial and impertinent ostentation of
vanity joined to the most malignant and derisive insolence of pride.
We are sometimes, upon that account, at a loss how to rank a
particular character, or whether to place it among the proud or among
the vain.
Men of merit considerably above the common level, sometimes underrate
as well as over-rate themselves. Such characters, though not very
dignified, are often, in private society, far from being disagreeable.
His companions all feel themselves much at their ease in the society
of a man so perfectly modest and unassuming. If those companions,
however, have not both more discernment and more generosity than
ordinary, though they may have some kindness for him, they have seldom
much respect; and the warmth of their kindness is very seldom
sufficient to compensate the coldness of their respect. Men of no more
than ordinary discernment never rate any person higher than he appears
to rate himself. He seems doubtful himself, they say, whether he is
perfectly fit for such a situation or such an office; and immediately
give the preference to some impudent blockhead who entertains no doubt
about his own qualifications. Though they should have discernment,
yet, if they want generosity, they never fail to take advantage of his
simplicity, and to assume over him an impertinent superiority which
they are by no means entitled to. His good nature may enable him to
bear this for some time; but he grows weary at last, and frequently
when it is too late, and when that rank, which he ought to have
assumed, is lost irrecoverably, and usurped, in consequence of his own
backwardness, by some of his more forward, though much less
meritorious companions. A man of this character must have been very
fortunate in the early choice of his companions, if, in going through
the world, he meets always with fair justice, even from those whom,
from his own past kindness, he might have some reason to consider as
his best friends; and a youth, who may be too unassuming and too
unambitious, is frequently followed by an insignificant, complaining,
and discontented old age.
Those unfortunate persons whom nature has formed a good deal below the
common level, seem oftentimes to rate themselves still more below it
than they really are. This humility appears sometimes to sink them
into idiotism. Whoever has taken the trouble to examine idiots with
attention, will find that, in many of them, the faculties of the
understanding are by no means weaker than in several other people,
who, though acknowledged to be dull and stupid, are not, by any body,
accounted idiots. Many idiots, with no more than ordinary education,
have been taught to read, write, and account tolerably well. Many
{232} persons, never accounted idiots, notwithstanding the most
careful education, and notwithstanding that, in their advanced age,
they have had spirit enough to attempt to learn what their early
education had not taught them, have never been able to acquire, in any
tolerable degree, any one of those three accomplishments. By an
instinct of pride, however, they set themselves upon a level with
their equals in age and situation; and, with courage and firmness,
maintain their proper station among their companions. By an opposite
instinct, the idiot feels himself below every company into which you
can introduce him. Ill-usage, to which he is extremely liable, is
capable of throwing him into the most violent fits of rage and fury.
But no good usage, no kindness or indulgence, can ever raise him to
converse with you as your equal. If you can bring him to converse with
you at all, however, you will frequently find his answers sufficiently
pertinent, and even sensible. But they are always stamped with a
distinct consciousness of his own great inferiority. He seems to
shrink and, as it were, to retire from your look and conversation; and
to feel, when he places himself in your situation, that,
notwithstanding your apparent condescension, you cannot help
considering him as immensely below you. Some idiots, perhaps the
greater part, seem to be so, chiefly or altogether, from a certain
numbness or torpidity in the faculties of the understanding. But there
are others, in whom those faculties do not appear more torpid or
benumbed than in many other people who are not accounted idiots. But
that instinct of pride, necessary to support them upon an equality
with their brethren, seems to be totally wanting in the former and not
in the latter.
That degree of self-estimation, therefore, which contributes most to
the happiness and contentment of the person himself, seems likewise
most agreeable to the impartial spectator.
The man who esteems himself as he ought, and no more than he ought,
seldom fails to obtain from other people all the esteem that he
himself thinks due. He desires no more than is due to him, and he
rests upon it with complete satisfaction.
The proud and the vain man, on the contrary, are constantly
dissatisfied. The one is tormented with indignation at the unjust
superiority, as he thinks it, of other people. The other is in
continual dread of the shame, which, he foresees, would attend upon
the detection of his groundless pretensions. Even the extravagant
pretensions of the man of real magnanimity, though, when supported by
splendid abilities and virtues, and, above all, by good fortune, they
impose upon the multitude, whose applauses he little regards, do not
impose upon those wise men whose approbation he can only value, and
whose esteem he is most anxious to acquire. He feels that they see
through, and suspects that they despise his excessive presumption; and
he often suffers the cruel misfortune of becoming, first the jealous
{233} and secret, and at last the open, furious, and vindictive enemy
of those very persons, whose friendship it would have given him the
greatest happiness to enjoy with unsuspicious security.
Though our dislike to the proud and the vain often disposes us to rank
them rather below than above their proper station, yet, unless we are
provoked by some particular and personal impertinence, we very seldom
venture to use them ill. In common cases, we endeavour, for our own
ease, rather to acquiesce, and, as well as we can, to accommodate
ourselves to their folly. But, to the man who under-rates himself,
unless we have both more discernment and more generosity than belong
to the greater part of men, we seldom fail to do, at least, all the
injustice which he does to himself, and frequently a great deal more.
He is not only more unhappy in his own feelings than either the proud
or the vain, but he is much more liable to every sort of ill-usage
from other people. In almost all cases, it is better to be a little
too proud, than, in any respect, too humble; and, in the sentiment of
self-estimation, some degree of excess seems, both to the person
himself and to the impartial spectator, to be less disagreeable than
any degree of defect of that feeling.
In this, therefore, as well as in every other emotion, passion, and
habit, the degree that is most agreeable to the impartial spectator is
likewise most agreeable to the person himself; and according as either
the excess or the defect is least offensive to the former, so, either
the one or the other is in proportion least disagreeable to the
latter.
-----
CONCLUSION OF THE SIXTH PART.
CONCERN for our own happiness recommends to us the virtue of prudence:
concern for that of other people, the virtues of justice and
beneficence; of which, the one restrains us from hurting, the other
prompts us to promote that happiness. Independent of any regard either
to what are, or to what ought to be, or to what upon a certain
condition would be, the sentiments of other people, the first of those
three virtues is originally recommended to us by our selfish, the
other two by our benevolent affections. Regard to the sentiments of
other people, however, comes afterwards both to enforce and to direct
the practice of all those virtues; and no man during, either the whole
course of his life, or that of any considerable part of it, ever trod
steadily and uniformly in the paths of prudence, of justice, or of
proper beneficence, whose conduct was not principally directed by a
regard to the sentiments of the supposed impartial spectator, of the
great inmate of the breast, the great judge and arbiter of conduct. If
in the course of the day we have swerved in any respect from the rules
which he prescribes to us; if we have either exceeded or relaxed in
our frugality; {234} if we have either exceeded or relaxed in our
industry; if through passion or inadvertency, we have hurt in any
respect the interest or happiness of our neighbour; if we have
neglected a plain and proper opportunity of promoting that interest
and happiness; it is this inmate who, in the evening, calls us to an
account for all those omissions and violations, and his reproaches
often make us blush inwardly both for our folly and inattention to our
own happiness, and for our still greater indifference and inattention,
perhaps, to that of other people.
But though the virtues of prudence, justice, and beneficence, may,
upon different occasions, be recommended to us almost equally by two
different principles; those of self-command are, upon most occasions,
principally and almost entirely recommended to us by one; by the sense
of propriety, by regard to the sentiments of the supposed impartial
spectator. Without the restraint which this principle imposes, every
passion would, upon most occasions, rush headlong, if I may say so, to
its own gratification. Anger would follow the suggestions of its own
fury; fear those of its own violent agitations. Regard to no time or
place would induce vanity to refrain from the loudest and most
impertinent ostentation; or voluptuousness from the most open,
indecent, and scandalous indulgence. Respect for what are, or for what
ought to be, or for what upon a certain condition would be, the
sentiments of other people, is the sole principle which, upon most
occasions, over-awes all those mutinous and turbulent passions into
that tone and temper which the impartial spectator can enter into and
cordially sympathize with.
Upon some occasions, indeed, those passions are restrained, not so
much by a sense of their impropriety, as by prudential considerations
of the bad consequences which might follow from their indulgence. In
such cases, the passions, though restrained, are not always subdued,
but often remain lurking in the breast with all their original fury.
The man whose anger is restrained by fear, does not always lay aside
his anger, but only reserves its gratification for a more safe
opportunity. But the man who, in relating to some other person the
injury which has been done to him, feels at once the fury of his
passion cooled and becalmed by sympathy with the more moderate
sentiments of his companion, who at once adopts those more moderate
sentiments, and comes to view that injury, not in the black and
atrocious colours in which he had originally beheld it, but in the
much milder and fairer light in which his companion naturally views
it; not only restrains, but in some measure subdues, his anger. The
passion becomes really less than it was before, and less capable of
exciting him to the violent and bloody revenge which at first,
perhaps, he might have thought of inflicting on his enemy.
Those passions which are restrained by the sense of propriety, are all
in some degree moderated and subdued by it. But those which are {235}
restrained only by prudential considerations of any kind, are, on the
contrary, frequently inflamed by the restraint, and sometimes (long
after the provocation given, and when nobody is thinking about it)
burst out absurdly and unexpectedly, and that with tenfold fury and
violence.
Anger, however, as well as every other passion, may, upon many
occasions, be very properly restrained by prudential considerations.
Some exertion of manhood and self-command is even necessary for this
sort of restraint; and the impartial spectator may sometimes view it
with that sort of cold esteem due to that species of conduct which he
considers as a mere matter of vulgar prudence; but never with that
affectionate admiration with which he surveys the same passions, when,
by the sense of propriety, they are moderated and subdued to what he
himself can readily enter into. In the former species of restraint, he
may frequently discern some degree of propriety, and, if you will,
even of virtue; but it is a propriety and virtue of a much inferior
order to those which he always feels with transport and admiration in
the latter.
The virtues of prudence, justice, and beneficence, have no tendency to
produce any but the most agreeable effects. Regard to those effects,
as it originally recommends them to the actor, so does it afterwards
to the impartial spectator. In our approbation of the character of the
prudent man, we feel, with peculiar complacency, the security which he
must enjoy while he walks under the safeguard of that sedate and
deliberate virtue. In our approbation of the character of the just
man, we feel, with equal complacency, the security which all those
connected with him, whether in neighbourhood, society, or business
must derive from his scrupulous anxiety never either to hurt or
offend. In our approbation of the character of the beneficent man, we
enter into the gratitude of all those who are within the sphere of his
good offices, and conceive with them the highest sense of his merit.
In our approbation of all those virtues, our sense of their agreeable
effects, of their utility, either to the person who exercises them, or
to some other persons, joins with our sense of their propriety, and
constitutes always a considerable, frequently the greater part of that
approbation.
But in our approbation of the virtues of self-command, complacency
with their effects sometimes constitutes no part, and frequently but a
small part, of that approbation. Those effects may sometimes be
agreeable, and sometimes disagreeable; and though our approbation is
no doubt stronger in the former case, it is by no means altogether
destroyed in the latter. The most heroic valour may be employed
indifferently in the cause either of justice or of injustice; and
though it is no doubt much more loved and admired in the former case,
it still appears a great and respectable quality even in the latter.
In that, and in all the other Virtues of self-command, the splendid
and dazzling {236} quality seems always to be the greatness and
steadiness of the exertion, and the strong sense of propriety which is
necessary in order to make and to maintain that exertion. The effects
are too often but too little regarded.
-----
_Part VII.--Of Systems of Moral Philosophy._
SEC. I.--OF THE QUESTIONS WHICH OUGHT TO BE EXAMINED IN A THEORY OF
MORAL SENTIMENTS.
IF we examine the most celebrated and remarkable of the different
theories which have been given concerning the nature and origin of our
moral sentiments, we shall find that almost all of them coincide with
some part or other of that which I have been endeavouring to give an
account of; and that if every thing which has already been said be
fully considered, we shall be at no loss to explain what was the view
or aspect of nature which led each particular author to form his
particular system. From some one or other of those principles which I
have been endeavouring to unfold, every system of morality that ever
had any reputation in the world has, perhaps, ultimately been derived.
As they are all of them, in this respect, founded upon natural
principles, they are all of them in some measure in the right. But as
many of them are derived from a partial and imperfect view of nature,
there are many of them too in some respects in the wrong.
In treating of the principles of morals there are two questions to be
considered. First, wherein does virtue consist? Or what is the tone of
temper, and tenor of conduct, which constitutes the excellent and
praise-worthy character, the character which is the natural object of
esteem, honour, and approbation? And, secondly, by what power or
faculty in the mind is it, that this character, whatever it be, is
recommended to us? Or in other words, how and by what means does it
come to pass, that the mind prefers one tenor of conduct to another,
denominates the one right and the other wrong; considers the one as
the object of approbation, honour, and reward, and the other of blame,
censure, and punishment?
We examine the first question when we consider whether virtue consists
in benevolence, as Dr. Hutcheson imagines; or in acting suitably to
the different relations we stand in, as Dr. Clark supposes; or in the
wise and prudent pursuit of our own real and solid happiness, as has
been the opinion of others.
We examine the second question, when we consider, whether the virtuous
character, whatever it consists in, be recommended to us by self-love,
which makes us perceive that this character, both in ourselves and
others, tends most to promote our own private interest; or by reason,
which points out to us the difference between one-character and {237}
another, in the same manner as it does that between truth and
falsehood; or by a peculiar power of perception, called a moral sense,
which this virtuous character gratifies and pleases, as the contrary
disgusts and displeases it; or last of all, by some other principle in
human nature, such as a modification of sympathy, or the like.
I shall begin with considering the systems which have been formed
concerning the first of these questions, and shall proceed afterwards
to examine those concerning the second.
-----
SEC. II.--OF THE DIFFERENT ACCOUNTS WHICH HAVE BEEN GIVEN OF THE
NATURE OF VIRTUE.
INTRODUCTION. The different accounts which have been given of the
nature of virtue, or of the temper of mind which constitutes the
excellent and praise-worthy character, may be reduced to three
different classes. According to some, the virtuous temper of mind does
not consist in any one species of affections, but in the proper
government and direction of all our affections, which may be either
virtuous or vicious according to the objects which they pursue, and
the degree of vehemence with which they pursue them. According to
these authors, therefore, virtue consists in propriety.
According to others, virtue consists in the judicious pursuit of our
own private interest and happiness, or in the proper government and
direction of those selfish affections which aim solely at this end. In
the opinion of these, therefore, virtue consists in prudence.
Another set of authors make virtue consist in those affections only
which aim at the happiness of others, not in those which aim at our
own. According to them, therefore, disinterested benevolence is the
only motive which can stamp upon actions the character of virtue.
The character of virtue, it is evident, must either be ascribed
indifferently to all our affections, when under proper government and
direction; or be confined to some one class or division of them.
The great division of our affections is into the selfish and the
benevolent. If the character of virtue, therefore, cannot be ascribed
indifferently to all our affections, when under proper government and
direction, it must be confined either to those which aim directly at
our own private happiness, or to those which aim directly at that of
others. If virtue, therefore, does not consist in propriety, it must
consist either in prudence or in benevolence. Besides these three, it
is scarce possible to imagine that any other account can be given of
the nature of virtue. I shall endeavour to show hereafter how all the
other accounts, which are seemingly different from any of these,
coincide at bottom with some one or other of them.
{238}
CHAP. I.--_Of those Systems which make Virtue consist in
Propriety._
ACCORDING to Plato, to Aristotle, and to Zeno, virtue consists in the
propriety of conduct, or in the suitableness of the affection from
which we act to the object which excites it.
I. In the system of Plato (See Plato de Rep. lib. iv.) the soul is
considered as something like a little state or republic, composed of
three different faculties or orders.
The first is the judging faculty, the faculty which determines not
only what are the proper means for attaining any end, but also what
ends are fit to be pursued, and what degree of relative value we ought
to put upon each. This faculty Plato called, as it is very properly
called, reason, and considered it as what had a right to be the
governing principle of the whole. Under this appellation, it is
evident, he comprehended not only that faculty by which we judge of
truth and falsehood, but that by which we judge of the propriety or
the impropriety of our desires and affections.
The different passions and appetites, the natural subjects of this
ruling principle, but which are so apt to rebel against their master,
he reduced to two different classes or orders. The first consisted of
those passions, which are founded in pride and resentment, or in what
the schoolmen called the irascible part of the soul; ambition,
animosity, the love of honour, and the dread of shame, the desire of
victory, superiority, and revenge; all those passions, in short, which
are supposed either to rise from, or to denote what, by a metaphor in
our language, we commonly call spirit or natural fire. The second
consisted of those passions which are founded in the love of pleasure,
or in what the schoolmen called the concupiscible part of the soul. It
comprehended all the appetites of the body, the love of ease and of
security, and of all the sensual gratifications.
It rarely happens that we break in upon that plan of conduct, which
the governing principle prescribes, and which in all our cool hours we
had laid down to ourselves as what was most proper for us to pursue,
but when prompted by one or other of those two different sets of
passions; either by ungovernable ambition and resentment, or by the
importunate solicitations of present ease and pleasure. But though
these two orders of passions are so apt to mislead us, they are still
considered as necessary parts of human nature: the first having been
given to defend us against injuries, to assert our rank and dignity in
the world, to make us aim at what is noble and honourable, and to make
us distinguish those who act in the same manner; the second, to
provide for the support and necessities of the body.
In the strength, acuteness, and perfection of the governing principle
was placed the essential virtue of prudence, which, according to
Plato, {239} consisted in a just and clear discernment, founded upon
general and scientific ideas, of the ends which were proper to be
pursued, and of the means which were proper for attaining them.
When the first set of passions, those of the irascible part of the
soul, had that degree of strength and firmness, which enabled them,
under the direction of reason, to despise all dangers in the pursuit
of what was honourable and noble; it constituted the virtue of
fortitude and magnanimity. This order of passions, according to this
system, was of a more generous and noble nature than the other. They
were considered upon many occasions as the auxiliaries of reason, to
check and restrain the inferior and brutal appetites. We are often
angry at ourselves, it was observed, we often become the objects of
our own resentment and indignation, when the love of pleasure prompts
to do what we disapprove of; and the irascible part of our nature is
in this manner called in to assist the rational against the
concupiscible.
When all those three different parts of our nature were in perfect
concord with one another, when neither the irascible nor concupiscible
passions ever aimed at any gratification which reason did not approve
of, and when reason never commanded any thing, but what these of their
own accord were willing to perform: this happy composure, this perfect
and complete harmony of soul, constituted that virtue which in their
language is expressed by a word which we commonly translate
temperance, but which might more properly be translated good temper,
or sobriety and moderation of mind.
Justice, the last and greatest of the four cardinal virtues, took
place, according to this system, when each of those three faculties of
the mind confined itself to its proper office, without attempting to
encroach upon that of any other; when reason directed and passion
obeyed, and when each passion performed its proper duty, and exerted
itself towards its proper object easily and without reluctance, and
with that degree of force and energy, which was suitable to the value
of what it pursued. In this consisted that complete virtue, that
perfect propriety of conduct, which Plato, after some of the ancient
Pythagoreans, has well denominated Justice.
The word, it is to be observed, which expresses justice in the Greek
language, has several different meanings; and as the correspondent
word in all other languages, so far as I know, has the same, there
must be some natural affinity among those various significations. In
one sense we are said to do justice to our neighbour when we abstain
from doing him any positive harm, and do not directly hurt him, either
in his person, or in his estate, or in his reputation. This is that
justice which I have treated of above, the observance of which may be
extorted by force, and the violation of which exposes to punishment.
In another sense we are said not to do justice to our neighbour unless
we conceive for him all that love, respect, and esteem, which his
character, his {240} situation, and his connexion with ourselves,
render suitable and proper for us to feel, and unless we act
accordingly. It is in this sense that we are said to do injustice to a
man of merit who is connected with us, though we abstain from hurting
him in every respect, if we do not exert ourselves to serve him and to
place him in that situation in which the impartial spectator would be
pleased to see him. The first sense of the word coincides with what
Aristotle and the Schoolmen call commutative justice, and with what
Grotius calls the _justitia expletrix_, which consists in
abstaining from what is another's, and in doing voluntarily whatever
we can with propriety be forced to do. The second sense of the word
coincides with what some have called distributive justice,[5] and with
the _justitia attributrix_ of Grotius, which consists in proper
beneficence, in the becoming use of what is our own, and in the
applying it to those purposes, either of charity or generosity, to
which it is most suitable, in our situation, that it should be
applied. In this sense justice comprehends all the social virtues.
There is yet another sense in which the word justice is sometimes
taken, still more extensive than either of the former, though very
much akin to the last; and which runs too, so far as I know, through
all languages. It is in this last sense that we are said to be unjust,
when we do not seem to value any particular object with that degree of
esteem, or to pursue it with that degree of ardour which to the
impartial spectator it may appear to deserve or to be naturally fitted
for exciting. Thus we are said to do injustice to a poem or a picture,
when we do not admire them enough, and we are said to do them more
than justice when we admire them too much. In the same manner we are
said to do injustice to ourselves when we appear not to give
sufficient attention to any particular object of self-interest. In
this last sense, what is called justice means the same thing with
exact and perfect propriety of conduct and behaviour, and comprehends
in it, not only the offices of both commutative and distributive
justice, but of every other virtue, of prudence, of fortitude, of
temperance. It is in this last sense that Plato evidently understands
what he calls justice, and which, therefore, according to him,
comprehends in it the perfection of every sort of virtue.
[Footnote 5: The distributive justice of Aristotle is somewhat
different. It consists in the proper distribution of rewards from the
public stock of a community. See Aristotle Ethic. Nic. 1. 5. c. 2.]
Such is the account given by Plato of the nature of virtue, or of that
temper of mind which is the proper object of praise and approbation.
It consists, according to him, in that state of mind in which every
faculty confines itself within its proper sphere without encroaching
upon that of any other, and performs its proper office with that
precise degree of strength and vigour which belongs to it. His
account, it is evident, coincides in every respect with what we have
said above concerning the propriety of conduct.
II. Virtue, according to Aristotle (Ethic. Nic. 1. 2. c. 5. et seq. et
1. 3. {241} c. 4. et seq.), consists in the habit of mediocrity
according to right reason. Every particular virtue, according to him,
lies in a kind of middle between two opposite vices, of which the one
offends from being too much, the other from being too little affected
by a particular species of objects. Thus the virtue of fortitude or
courage lies in the middle between the opposite vices of cowardice and
of presumptuous rashness, of which the one offends from being too
much, and the other from being too little affected by the objects of
fear. Thus too the virtue of frugality lies in a middle between
avarice and profusion, of which the one consists in an excess, the
other in a defect of the proper attention to the objects of
self-interest. Magnanimity, in the same manner, lies in a middle
between the excess of arrogance and the defect of pusillanimity, of
which the one consists in too extravagant, the other in too weak a
sentiment of our own worth and dignity. It is unnecessary to observe
that this account of virtue corresponds, too, pretty exactly with what
has been said above concerning the propriety and impropriety of
conduct.
According to Aristotle (Ethic. Nic. lib. ii. ch. 1, 2, 3, and 4.),
indeed, virtue did not so much consist in those moderate and right
affections, as in the habit of this moderation. In order to understand
this, it is to be observed, that virtue may be considered either as
the quality of an action, or the quality of a person. Considered as
the quality of an action, it consists, even according to Aristotle, in
the reasonable moderation of the affection from which the action
proceeds, whether this disposition be habitual to the person or not.
Considered as the quality of a person, it consists in the habit of
this reasonable moderation, in its having become the customary and
usual disposition of the mind. Thus the action which proceeds from an
occasional fit of generosity is undoubtedly a generous action, but the
man who performs it, is not necessarily a generous person, because it
may be the single action of the kind which he ever performed. The
motive and disposition of heart, from which this action was performed,
may have been quite just and proper: but as this happy mood seems to
have been the effect rather of accidental humour than of any thing
steady or permanent in the character, it can reflect no great honour
on the performer. When we denominate a character generous or
charitable, or virtuous in any respect, we mean to signify that the
disposition expressed by each of those appellations is the usual and
customary disposition of the person. But single actions of any kind,
how proper and suitable soever, are of little consequence to show that
this is the case. If a single action was sufficient to stamp the
character of any virtue upon the person who performed it, the most
worthless of mankind might lay claim to all the virtues; since there
is no man who has not, upon some occasions, acted with prudence,
justice, temperance, and fortitude. But though single actions, how
laudable soever, reflect very little praise upon the {242} person who
performs them, a single vicious action performed by one whose conduct
is usually pretty regular, greatly diminishes and sometimes destroys
altogether our opinion of his virtue. A single action of this kind
sufficiently shows that his habits are not perfect, and that he is
less to be depended upon, than, from the usual train of his behaviour,
we might have been apt to imagine.
Aristotle too (Mag. Mor. lib. i. ch. 1.) when he made virtue to
consist in practical habits, had it probably in his view to oppose the
doctrine of Plato, who seems to have been of opinion that just
sentiments and reasonable judgments concerning what was fit to be done
or to be avoided, were alone sufficient to constitute the most perfect
virtue. Virtue, according to Plato, might be considered as a species
of science, and no man, he thought, could see clearly and
demonstratively what was right and what was wrong, and not act
accordingly. Passion might make us act contrary to doubtful and
uncertain opinions, not to plain and evident judgments. Aristotle, on
the contrary, was of opinion that no conviction of the understanding
was capable of getting the better of inveterate habits, and that our
good morals arose not from knowledge but from action.
III. According to Zeno,[6] the founder of the Stoical doctrine, every
animal was by nature recommended to its own care, and was endowed with
the principle of self-love, that it might endeavour to preserve, not
only its existence, but all the different parts of its nature, in the
best and most perfect state of which they were capable.
[Footnote 6: See Cicero de finibus, lib. iii.; also Diogenes Laertius
in Zenone, lib. vii. segment 84.]
The self-love of man embraced, if I may say so, his body and all its
different members, his mind and all its different faculties and
powers, and desired the preservation and maintenance of them all in
their best and most perfect condition. Whatever tended to support this
state of existence was, therefore, by nature pointed out to him as fit
to be chosen; and whatever tended to destroy it, as fit to be
rejected. Thus health, strength, agility, and ease of body as well as
the external conveniences which could promote these; wealth, power,
honours, the respect and esteem of those we live with; were naturally
pointed out to us as things eligible, and of which the possession was
preferable to the want. On the other hand, sickness, infirmity,
unwieldiness, pain of body, as well as all the external
inconveniences which tend to occasion or bring on any of them;
poverty, the want of authority, the contempt or hatred of those we
live with; were, in the same manner, pointed out to us as things to be
shunned and avoided. In each of those two opposite classes of objects,
there were some which appeared to be more the objects either of choice
or rejection, than others in the same class. Thus, in the first class,
health appeared evidently preferable to strength, and strength to
agility; reputation to power, and power to riches. And thus too, in
the second class, sickness was more to be avoided than {243}
unwieldiness of body, ignominy than poverty, and poverty than the loss
of power. Virtue and the propriety of conduct consisted in choosing
and rejecting all different objects and circumstances according as
they were by nature rendered more or less the objects of choice or
rejection; in selecting always from among the several objects of
choice presented to us, that which must be chosen, when we could not
obtain them all; and in selecting, too, out of the several objects of
rejection offered to us, that which was least to be avoided, when it
was not in our power to avoid them all. By choosing and rejecting with
this just and accurate discernment, by thus bestowing upon every
object the precise degree of attention it deserved, according to the
place which it held in this natural scale of things, we maintained,
**according to the Stoics, that perfect rectitude of conduct which
constituted the essence of virtue. This was what they called to live
consistently, to live according to nature, and to obey those laws and
directions which nature, or the Author of nature, had prescribed for
our conduct.
So far the Stoical idea of propriety and virtue is not very different
from that of Aristotle and the ancient Peripatetics.
Among those primary objects which nature had recommended to us as
eligible, was the prosperity of our family, of our relations, of our
friends, of our country, of mankind, and of the universe in general.
Nature too, had taught us, that as the prosperity of two was
preferable to that of one, that of many, or of all, must be infinitely
more so. That we ourselves were but one, and that consequently
wherever our prosperity was inconsistent with that, either of the
whole, or of any considerable part of the whole, it ought, even in our
own choice, to yield to what was so vastly preferable. As all the
events in this world were conducted by the providence of a wise,
powerful, and good God, we might be assured that whatever happened
tended to the prosperity and perfection of the whole. If we ourselves,
therefore, were in poverty, in sickness, or in any other calamity, we
ought, first of all, to use our utmost endeavours, so far as justice
and our duty to others will allow, to rescue ourselves from this
disagreeable circumstance. But if, after all we could do, we found
this impossible, we ought to rest satisfied that the order and
perfection of the universe required that we should in the mean time
continue in this situation. And as the prosperity of the whole should,
even to us, appear preferable to so insignificant a part as ourselves,
our situation, whatever it was, ought from that moment to become the
object of our liking, if we would maintain that complete propriety and
rectitude of sentiment and conduct in which consisted the perfection
of our nature. If, indeed, any opportunity of extricating ourselves
should offer, it became our duty to embrace it. The order of the
universe, it was evident, no longer required our continuance in this
situation, and the great Director of the world plainly called upon us
to leave it, by so clearly pointing out {244} the road which we were
to follow. It was the same case with the adversity of our relations,
our friends, our country. If, without violating any more sacred
obligation, it was in our power to prevent or put an end to their
calamity, it undoubtedly was our duty to do so. The propriety of
action, the rule which Jupiter had given us for the direction of our
conduct, evidently required this of us. But if it was altogether out
of our power to do either, we ought then to consider this event as the
most fortunate which could possibly have happened: because we might be
assured that it tended most to the prosperity and order of the whole,
which was that we ourselves, if we were wise and equitable, ought most
of all to desire. It was our own final interest considered as a part
of that whole, of which the prosperity ought to be, not only the
principal, but the sole object of our desire.
'In what sense,' says Epictetus, 'are some things said to be according
to our nature, and others contrary to it? It is in that sense in which
we consider ourselves as separated and detached from all other things.
For thus it may be said to be according to the nature of the foot to
be always clean. But if you consider it as a foot, and not as
something detached from the rest of the body, it must behove it some
times to trample in the dirt, and sometimes to tread upon thorns, and
sometimes, too, to be cut off for the sake of the whole body; and if
it refuses this, it is no longer a foot. Thus, too, ought we to
conceive with regard to ourselves. What are you? A man. If you
consider yourself as something separated and detached, it is agreeable
to your nature to live to old age, to be rich, to be in health. But if
you consider yourself as a man, and as a part of a whole, upon account
of that whole, it will behove you sometimes to be in sickness,
sometimes to be exposed to the inconveniency of a sea voyage,
sometimes to be in want, and at last perhaps to die before your time.
Why then do you complain? Do not you know that by doing so, as the
foot ceases to be a foot, so you cease to be man?'
A wise man never complains of the destiny of Providence, nor thinks
the universe in confusion when he is out of order. He does not look
upon himself as a whole, separated and detached from every other part
of nature, to be taken care of by itself and for itself. He regards
himself in the light in which he imagines the great genius of human
nature, and of the world, regards him. He enters, if I may say so,
into the sentiments of that divine Being, and considers himself as an
atom, a particle, of an immense and infinite system, which must and
ought to be disposed of according to the conveniency of the whole.
Assured of the wisdom which directs all the events of human life,
whatever lot befalls him, he accepts it with joy, satisfied that, if
he had known all the connections and dependencies of the different
parts of the universe, it is the very lot which he himself would have
wished for. If it is life, he is contented to live; and if it is
death, as nature must have no further {245} occasion for his presence
here, he willingly goes where he is appointed. I accept, said a
cynical philosopher, whose doctrines were in this respect the same as
those of the Stoics, I accept, with equal joy and satisfaction,
whatever fortune can befall me. Riches or poverty, pleasure or pain,
health or sickness, all is alike: nor would I desire that the gods
should in any respect change my destination. If I was to ask of them
any thing beyond what their bounty has already bestowed, it should be
that they would inform me beforehand what it was their pleasure should
be done with me, that I might of my own accord place myself in this
situation, and demonstrate the cheerfulness with which I embraced
their allotment. If I am going to sail, says Epictetus, I choose the
best ship and the best pilot, and I wait for the fairest weather that
my circumstances and duty will allow. Prudence and propriety, the
principles which the gods have given me for the direction of my
conduct, require this of me; but they require no more: and if,
notwithstanding, a storm arises, which neither the strength of the
vessel nor the skill of the pilot are likely to withstand, I give
myself no trouble about the consequence. All that I had to do is done
already. The directors of my conduct never command me to be miserable,
to be anxious, desponding, or afraid. Whether we are to be drowned, or
to come to a harbour, is the business of Jupiter, not mine. I leave it
entirely to his determination, nor ever break my rest with considering
which way he is likely to decide it, but receive whatever may come
with equal indifference and security.
From this perfect confidence in that benevolent wisdom which governs
the universe, and from this entire resignation to whatever order that
wisdom might think proper to establish, it necessarily followed, that
to the Stoical wise man, all the events of human life must be in a
great measure indifferent. His happiness consisted altogether, first,
in the contemplation of the happiness and perfection of the great
system of the universe, of the good government of the great republic
of gods and men, of all rational and sensible beings; and, secondly,
in discharging his duty, in acting properly in the affairs of this
great republic whatever little part that wisdom had assigned to him.
The propriety or impropriety of his endeavours might be of great
consequence to him. Their success or disappointment could be of none
at all; could excite no passionate joy or sorrow, no passionate desire
or aversion. If he preferred some events to others, if some situations
were the objects of his choice and others of his rejection, it was not
because he regarded the one as in themselves in any respect better
than the other, or thought that his own happiness would be more
complete in what is called the fortunate than in what is regarded as
the distressful situation; but because the propriety of action, the
rule which the gods had given him for the direction of his conduct,
required him to choose and reject in this manner. All his affections
were absorbed and swallowed up in {246} two great affections; in that
for the discharge of his own duty, and in that for the greatest
possible happiness of all rational and sensible beings. For the
gratification of this latter affection, he rested with the most
perfect security upon the wisdom and power of the great Superintendent
of the universe. His sole anxiety was about the gratification of the
former; not about the event, but about the propriety of his own
endeavours. Whatever the event might be, he trusted to a superior
power and wisdom for turning it to promote that great end which he
himself was most desirous of promoting.
This propriety of choosing and rejecting, though originally pointed
out to us, and as it were recommended and introduced to our
acquaintance by the things, and for the sake of the things, chosen and
rejected; yet when we had once become thoroughly acquainted with it,
the order, the grace, the beauty which we discerned in this conduct,
the happiness which we felt resulted from it, necessarily appeared to
us of much greater value than the actual obtaining of all the
different objects of choice, or the actual avoiding of all those of
rejection. From the observation of this propriety arose the happiness
and the glory; from the neglect of it, the misery and the disgrace of
human nature.
But to a wise man, to one whose passions were brought under perfect
subjection to the ruling principles of his nature, the exact
observation of this propriety was equally easy upon all occasions. Was
he in prosperity, he returned thanks to Jupiter for having joined him
with circumstances which were easily mastered, and in which there was
little temptation to do wrong. Was he in adversity, he equally
returned thanks to the director of this spectacle of human life, for
having opposed to him a vigorous athlete, over whom, though the
contest was likely to be more violent, the victory was more glorious,
and equally certain. Can there be any shame in that distress which is
brought upon us without any fault of our own, and in which we behave
with perfect propriety? There can, therefore, be no evil, but, on the
contrary, the greatest good and advantage. A brave man exults in those
dangers in which, from no rashness of his own, his fortune has
involved him. They afford an opportunity of exercising that heroic
intrepidity, whose exertion gives the exalted delight which flows from
the consciousness of superior propriety and deserved admiration. One
who is master of all his exercises has no aversion to measure his
strength and activity with the strongest. And, in the same manner, one
who is master of all his passions, does not dread any circumstance in
which the Superintendent of the universe may think proper to place
him. The bounty of that divine Being has provided him with virtues
which render him superior to every situation. If it is pleasure, he
has temperance to refrain from it; if it is pain, he has constancy to
bear it; if it is danger or death, he has magnanimity and fortitude to
despise it. The events of human life can never find him unprepared, or
at a loss how to maintain that {247} propriety of sentiment and
conduct which, in his own apprehension, constitutes at once his glory
and his happiness.
Human life the Stoics appear to have considered as a game of great
skill; in which, however, there was a mixture of chance, or of what is
vulgarly understood to be chance. In such games the stake is commonly
a trifle, and the whole pleasure of the game arises from playing well,
from playing fairly, and playing skilfully. If notwithstanding all his
skill, however, the good player should, by the influence of chance,
happen to lose, the loss ought to be a matter, rather of merriment,
than of serious sorrow. He has made no false stroke; he has done
nothing which he ought to be ashamed of; he has enjoyed completely the
whole pleasure of the game. If, on the contrary, the bad player
notwithstanding all his blunders, should, in the same manner, happen
to win, his success can give him but little satisfaction. He is
mortified by the remembrance of all the faults which he committed.
Even during the play he can enjoy no part of the pleasure which it is
capable of affording. From ignorance of the rules of the game, fear
and doubt and hesitation are the disagreeable sentiments that precede
almost every stroke which he plays; and when he has played it, the
mortification of finding it a gross blunder, commonly completes the
unpleasing circle of his sensations. Human life, with all the
advantages which can possibly attend it, ought, according to the
Stoics, to be regarded but as a mere twopenny stake; a matter by far
too insignificant to merit any anxious concern. Our only anxious
concern ought to be, not about the stake, but about the proper method
of playing. If we placed our happiness in winning the stake, we placed
it in what depended upon causes beyond our power and out of our
direction. We necessarily exposed ourselves to perpetual fear and
uneasiness, and frequently to grievous and mortifying disappointments.
If we placed it in playing well, in playing fairly, in playing wisely
and skilfully; in the propriety of our own conduct in short; we placed
it in what, by proper discipline, education, and attention, might be
altogether in our own power, and under our own direction. Our
happiness was perfectly secure, and beyond the reach of fortune. The
event of our actions, if it was out of our power, was equally out of
our concern, and we could never feel either fear or anxiety about it;
nor ever suffer any grievous, or even any serious disappointment.
Human life itself, as well as every different advantage or
disadvantage which can attend it, might, they said, according to
different circumstances, be the proper object either of our choice or
of our rejection. If, in our actual situation, there were more
circumstances agreeable to nature than contrary to it; more
circumstances which were the objects of choice than of rejection;
life, in this case, was, upon the whole, the proper object of choice,
and the propriety of conduct required that we should remain in it. If,
on the other hand, there {248} were, in our actual situation, without
any probable hope of amendment, more circumstances contrary to nature
than agreeable to it; more circumstances which were the objects of
rejection than of choice; life itself, in this case, became, to a wise
man, the object of rejection, and he was not only at liberty to remove
out of it, but the propriety of conduct, the rule which the gods had
given him for the direction of his conduct, required him to do so. I
am ordered, says Epictetus, not to dwell at Nicopolis. I do not dwell
there. I am ordered not to dwell at Athens. I do not dwell at Athens.
I am ordered not to dwell in Rome. I do not dwell in Rome. I am
ordered to dwell in the little and rocky island of Gyaræ. I go and
dwell there. But the house smokes in Gyaræ. If the smoke is moderate,
I will bear it, and stay there. If it is excessive, I will go to a
house from whence no tyrant can remove me. I keep in mind always that
the door is open, that I can walk out when I please, and retire to
that hospitable house which is at all times open to all the world; for
beyond my undermost garment, beyond my body, no man living has any
power over me. If your situation is upon the whole disagreeable; if
your house smokes too much for you, said the Stoics, walk forth by all
means. But walk forth without repining; without murmuring or
complaining. Walk forth calm, contented, rejoicing, returning thanks
to the gods, who, from their infinite bounty, have opened the safe and
quiet harbour of death, at all times ready to receive us from the
stormy ocean of human life; who have prepared this sacred, this
inviolable, this great asylum, always open, always accessible;
altogether beyond the reach of human rage and injustice; and large
enough to contain both all those who wish, and all those who do not
wish to retire to it: an asylum which takes away from every man every
pretence of complaining, or even of fancying that there can be any
evil in human life, except such as he may suffer from his own folly
and weakness.
The Stoics, in the few fragments of their philosophy which have come
down to us, sometimes talk of leaving life with a gaiety, and even
with a levity, which, were we to consider those passages by
themselves, might induce us to believe that they imagined we could
with propriety leave it whenever we had a mind, wantonly and
capriciously, upon the slightest disgust or uneasiness. 'When you sup
with such a person,' says Epictetus, 'you complain of the long stories
which he tells you about his Mysian wars. "Now my friend," says he,
"having told you how I took possession of an eminence at such a place,
I will tell you how I was besieged in such another place." But if you
have a mind not to be troubled with his long stories, do not accept of
his supper. If you accept of his supper, you have not the least
pretence to complain of his long stories. It is the same case with
what you call the evils of human life. Never complain of that of which
it is at all times in your power to rid yourself.' Notwithstanding
this gaiety and even {249} levity of expression, however, the
alternative of leaving life, or of remaining in it, was, according to
the Stoics, a matter of the most serious and important deliberation.
We ought never to leave it till we were distinctly called upon to do
so by that superintending Power which had originally placed us in it.
But we were to consider ourselves as called upon to do so, not merely
at the appointed and unavoidable term of human life. Whenever the
providence of that superintending Power had rendered our condition in
life upon the whole the proper object rather of rejection than of
choice; the great rule which he had given us for the direction of our
conduct, then required us to leave it. We might then be said to hear
the awful and benevolent voice of that divine Being distinctly calling
upon us to do so.
It was upon this account that, according to the Stoics, it might be
the duty of a wise man to remove out of life though he was perfectly
happy; while, on the contrary, it might be the duty of a weak man to
remain in it, though he was necessarily miserable. If, in the
situation of the wise man, there were more circumstances which were
the natural objects of rejection than of choice, the whole situation
became the object of rejection, and the rule which the gods had given
him for the direction of his conduct, required that he should remove
out of it as speedily as particular circumstances might render
convenient. He was, however, perfectly happy even during the time that
he might think proper to remain in it. He had placed his happiness,
not in obtaining the objects of his choice, or in avoiding those of
his rejection; but in always choosing and rejecting with exact
propriety; not in the success, but in the fitness of his endeavours
and exertions. If, in the situation of the weak man, on the contrary,
there were more circumstances which were the natural objects of choice
than of rejection; his whole situation became the proper object of
choice, and it was his duty to remain in it. He was unhappy, however,
from not knowing how to use those circumstances. Let his cards be ever
so good, he did not know how to play them, and could enjoy no sort of
real satisfaction, either in the progress, or in the event of the
game, in whatever manner it might happen to turn out. (Cicero de
finibus, lib. 3. c. 13.)
The propriety, upon some occasions, of voluntary death, though it was,
perhaps, more insisted upon by the Stoics, than by any other sect of
ancient philosophers, was, however, a doctrine common to them all,
even to the peaceable and indolent Epicureans. During the age in which
flourished the founders of all the principal sects of ancient
philosophy; during the Peloponnesian war and for many years after its
conclusion, all the different republics of Greece were, at home,
almost always distracted by the most furious factions; and abroad,
involved in the most sanguinary wars, in which each fought, not merely
for superiority or dominion, but either completely to extirpate all
its enemies, or, what was not less cruel, to reduce them into the
vilest of {250} all states, that of domestic slavery, and to sell
them, man, woman, and child, like so many herds of cattle, to the
highest bidder in the market. The smallness of the greater part of
those states, too, rendered it, to each of them, no very improbable
event, that it might itself fall into that very calamity which it had
so frequently, either, perhaps, actually inflicted, or at least
attempted to inflict upon some of its neighbours. In this disorderly
state of things, the most perfect innocence, joined to both the
highest rank and the greatest public services, could give no security
to any man that, even at home and among his own relations and
fellow-citizens, he was not, at some time or another, from the
prevalence of some hostile and furious faction, to be condemned to the
most cruel and ignominious punishment. If he was taken prisoner in
war, or if the city of which he was a member was conquered, he was
exposed, if possible, to still greater injuries and insults. But every
man naturally, or rather necessarily, familiarizes his imagination
with the distresses to which he foresees that his situation may
frequently expose him. It is impossible that a sailor should not
frequently think of storms and shipwrecks and foundering at sea, and
of how he himself is likely both to feel and to act upon such
occasions. It was impossible, in the same manner, that a Grecian
patriot or hero should not familiarize his imagination with all the
different calamities to which he was sensible his situation must
frequently, or rather constantly, expose him. As an American savage
prepares his death-song, and considers how he should act when he has
fallen into the hands of his enemies, and is by them put to death in
the most lingering tortures, and amidst the insults and derision of
all the spectators; so a Grecian patriot or hero could not avoid
frequently employing his thoughts in considering what he ought both to
suffer and to do in banishment, in captivity, when reduced to slavery,
when put to the torture, when brought to the scaffold. But the
philosophers of all the different sects very justly represented
virtue; that is, wise, just, firm and temperate conduct; not only as
the most probable, but as the certain and infallible road to happiness
even in this life. This conduct, however, could not always exempt, and
might even sometimes expose the person who followed it to all the
calamities which were incident to that unsettled situation of public
affairs. They endeavoured, therefore, to show that happiness was
either altogether, or at least in a great measure, independent of
fortune; the Stoics, that it was so altogether; the Academic and
Peripatetic philosophers, that it was so in a great measure. Wise,
prudent, and good conduct was, in the first place, the conduct most
likely to ensure success in every species of undertaking; and
secondly, though it should fail of success, yet the mind was not left
without consolation. The virtuous man might still enjoy the complete
approbation of his own breast; and might still feel that, how untoward
soever things might be without, all was calm and peace and {251}
concord within. He might generally comfort himself, too, with the
assurance that he possessed the love and esteem of every intelligent
and impartial spectator, who could not fail both to admire his
conduct, and to regret his misfortune.
Those philosophers endeavoured, at the same time, to show, that the
greatest misfortunes to which human life was liable, might be
supported more easily than was commonly imagined. They endeavoured to
point out the comforts which a man might still enjoy when reduced to
poverty, when driven into banishment, when exposed to the injustice of
popular clamour, when labouring under blindness, under deafness, in
the extremity of old age, upon the approach of death. They pointed
out, too, the considerations which might contribute to support his
constancy under the agonies of pain and even of torture, in sickness,
in sorrow for the loss of children, for the death of friends and
relations, etc. The few fragments which have come down to us of what
the ancient philosophers had written upon these subjects, form,
perhaps, one of the most instructive, as well as one of the most
interesting remains of antiquity. The spirit and manhood of their
doctrines make a wonderful contrast with the desponding, plaintive,
and whining tone of some modern systems.
But while those ancient philosophers endeavoured in this manner to
suggest every consideration which could, as Milton says, arm the
obdured breast with stubborn patience, as with triple steel; they, at
the same time, laboured above all to convince their followers that
there neither was nor could be any evil in death; and that, if their
situation became at any time too hard for their constancy to support,
the remedy was at hand, the door was open, and they might, without
fear, walk out when they pleased. If there was no world beyond the
present, death, they said, could be no evil; and if there was another
world, the gods must likewise be in that other, and a just man could
fear no evil while under their protection. Those philosophers, in
short, prepared a death-song, if I may say so, which the Grecian
patriots and heroes might make use of upon the proper occasions; and,
of all the different sects, the Stoics, I think it must be
acknowledged, had prepared by far the most animated and most spirited
song.
Suicide, however, never seems to have been very common among the
Greeks. Excepting Cleomenes, I cannot at present recollect any very
illustrious either patriot or hero of Greece, who died by his own
hand. The death of Aristomenes is as much beyond the period of true
history as that of Ajax. The common story of the death of
Themistocles, though within that period, bears upon its face all the
marks of a most romantic fable. Of all the Greek heroes whose lives
have been written by Plutarch, Cleomenes appears to have been the only
one who perished in this manner. Theramines, Socrates, and Phocion,
who certainly did not want courage, suffered themselves to be sent to
prison, and {252} submitted patiently to that death to which the
injustice of their fellow-citizens had condemned them. The brave
Eumenes allowed himself to be delivered up, by his own mutinous
soldiers, to his enemy Antigonus, and was starved to death, without
attempting any violence. The gallant Philopoe men suffered himself to
be taken prisoner by the Messenians, was thrown into a dungeon, and
was supposed to have been privately poisoned. Several of the
philosophers, indeed, are said to have died in this manner; but their
lives have been so very foolishly written, that very little credit is
due to the greater part of the tales which are told of them. Three
different accounts have been given of the death of Zeno the Stoic. One
is, that after enjoying, for ninety-eight years, the most perfect
state of health, he happened, in going out of his school, to fall; and
though he suffered no other damage than that of breaking or
dislocating one of his fingers, he struck the ground with his hand,
and, in the words of the Niobe of Euripides, said, _I come, why
doest thou call me?_ and immediately went home and hanged himself.
At that great age, one should think, he might have had a little more
patience. Another account is, that, at the same age, and in
consequence of a like accident, he starved himself to death. The third
account is, that, at seventy-two years of age, he died in the natural
way; by far the most probable account of the three, and supported too
by the authority of a cotemporary, who must have had every opportunity
of being well-informed; of Persæus, originally the slave, and
afterwards the friend and disciple of Zeno. The first account is given
by Apollonius of Tyre, who flourished about the time of Augustus
Cæsar, between two and three hundred years after the death of Zeno. I
know not who is the author of the second account. Apollonius, who was
himself a Stoic, had probably thought it would do honour to the
founder of a sect which talked so much about voluntary death, to die
in this manner by his own hand. Men of letters, though, after their
death, they are frequently more talked of than the greatest princes or
statesmen of their times, are generally, during their life, so obscure
and insignificant that their adventures are seldom recorded by
cotemporary historians. Those of after-ages, in order to satisfy the
public curiosity, and having no authentic documents either to support
or to contradict their narratives, seem frequently to have fashioned
them according to their own fancy; and almost always with a great
mixture of the marvellous. In this particular case the marvellous,
though supported by no authority, seems to have prevailed over the
probable, though supported by the best. Diogenes Laertius plainly
gives the preference to the story of Apollonius. Lucian and Lactantius
appear both to have given credit to that of the great age and of the
violent death.
This fashion of voluntary death appears to have been much more
prevalent among the proud Romans, than it ever was among the lively,
ingenious, and accommodating Greeks. Even among the Romans, the {253}
fashion seems not to have been established in the early and, what are
called, the virtuous ages of the republic. The common story of the
death of Regulus, though probably a fable, could never have been
invented, had it been supposed that any dishonour could fall upon that
hero, from patiently submitting to the tortures which the
Carthaginians are said to have inflicted upon him. In the later ages
of the republic, some dishonour, I apprehend, would have attended this
submission. In the different civil wars which preceded the fall of the
commonwealth, many of the eminent men of all the contending parties
chose rather to perish by their own hands, than to fall into those of
their enemies. The death of Cato, celebrated by Cicero, and censured
by Cæsar, and become the subject of a very serious controversy
between, perhaps, the two most illustrious advocates that the world
had ever beheld, stamped a character of splendour upon this method of
dying which it seems to have retained for several ages after. The
eloquence of Cicero was superior to that of Cæsar. The admiring
prevailed greatly over the censuring party, and the lovers of liberty,
for many ages afterwards, looked up to Cato as to the most venerable
martyr of the republican party. The head of a party, the Cardinal de
Retz observes, may do what he pleases; as long as he retains the
confidence of his own friends, he can never do wrong; a maxim of which
his eminence had himself, upon several occasions, an opportunity of
experiencing the truth. Cato, it seems, joined to his other virtues
that of an excellent bottle companion. His enemies accused him of
drunkenness, but, says Seneca, whoever objected this vice to Cato,
will find it easier to prove that drunkenness is a virtue, than that
Cato could be addicted to any vice.
Under the Emperors this method of dying seems to have been, for a long
time, perfectly fashionable. In the epistles of Pliny we find an
account of several persons who chose to die in this manner, rather
from vanity and ostentation, it would seem, than from what would
appear, even to a sober and judicious Stoic, any proper or necessary
reason. Even the ladies, who are seldom behind in following the
fashion, seem frequently to have chosen, most unnecessarily, to die in
this manner; and, like the ladies in Bengal, to accompany, upon some
occasions, their husbands to the tomb. The prevalence of this fashion
certainly occasioned many deaths which would not otherwise have
happened. All the havoc, however, which this, perhaps the highest
exertion of human vanity and impertinence, could occasion, would,
probably, at no time, be very great.
The principle of suicide, the principle which would teach us, upon
some occasions, to consider that violent action as an object of
applause and approbation, seems to be altogether a refinement of
philosophy. Nature, in her sound and healthful state, seems never to
prompt us to suicide. There is, indeed, a species of melancholy (a
disease to which human nature, among its other calamities, is
unhappily subject) which {254} seems to be accompanied with, what one
may call, an irresistible appetite for self-destruction. In
circumstances often of the highest external prosperity, and sometimes
too, in spite even of the most serious and deeply impressed sentiments
of religion, this disease has frequently been known to drive its
wretched victims to this fatal extremity. The unfortunate persons who
perish in this miserable manner, are the proper objects, not of
censure, but of commiseration. To attempt to punish them, when they
are beyond the reach of all human punishment, is not more absurd than
it is unjust. That punishment can fall only on their surviving friends
and relations, who are always perfectly innocent, and to whom the loss
of their friend, in this disgraceful manner, must always be alone a
very heavy calamity. Nature, in her sound and healthful state, prompts
us to avoid distress upon all occasions; upon many occasions to defend
ourselves against it, though at the hazard, or even with the certainty
of perishing in that defence. But, when we have neither been able to
defend ourselves from it, nor have perished in that defence, no
natural principle, no regard to the approbation of the supposed
impartial spectator, to the judgment of the man within the breast,
seems to call upon us to escape from it by destroying ourselves. It is
only the consciousness of our own weakness, of our own incapacity to
support the calamity with proper manhood and firmness, which can drive
us to this resolution. I do not remember to have either read or heard
of any American savage, who, upon being taken prisoner by some hostile
tribe, put himself to death, in order to avoid being afterwards put to
death in torture, and amidst the insults and mockery of his enemies.
He places his glory in supporting those torments with manhood, and in
retorting those insults with tenfold contempt and derision.
This contempt of life and death, however, and, at the same time, the
most entire submission to the order of Providence; the most complete
contentment with every event which the current of human affairs could
possibly cast up, may be considered as the two fundamental doctrines
upon which rested the whole fabric of Stoical morality. The
independent and spirited, but often harsh Epictetus, may be considered
as the great apostle of the first of those doctrines: the mild, the
humane, the benevolent Antoninus, of the second.
The emancipated slave of Epaphroditus, who, in his youth, had been
subjected to the insolence of a brutal master, who, in his riper
years, was, by the jealousy and caprice of Domitian, banished from
Rome and Athens, and obliged to dwell at Nicopolis, and who, by the
same tyrant, might expect every moment to be sent to Gyaræ, or,
perhaps, to be put to death; could preserve his own tranquillity only
by fostering in his mind the most sovereign contempt of human life. He
never exults so much, accordingly; his eloquence is never so animated
as when he represents the futility and nothingness of all its
pleasures and all its pains.
{255} The good-natured emperor, the absolute sovereign of the whole
civilized part of the world, who certainly had no peculiar reason to
complain of his own allotment, delights in expressing his contentment
with the ordinary course of things, and in pointing out beauties even
in those parts of it where vulgar observers are not apt to see any.
There is a propriety and even an engaging grace, he observes, in old
age as well as in youth; and the weakness and decrepitude of the one
state are as suitable to nature as the bloom and vigour of the other.
Death, too, is just as proper a termination of old age, as youth is of
childhood, or manhood of youth. 'As we frequently say,' he remarks
upon another occasion, 'that the physician has ordered to such a man
to ride on horseback, or to use the cold bath, or to walk barefooted;
so ought we to say, that Nature, the great conductor and physician of
the universe, has ordered to such a man a disease, or the amputation
of a limb, or the loss of a child.' By the prescriptions of ordinary
physicians the patient swallows many a bitter potion, undergoes many a
painful operation. From the very uncertain hope, however, that health
may be the consequence, he gladly submits to all. The harshest
prescriptions of the great Physician of nature, the patient may, in
the same manner, hope will contribute to his own health, to his own
final prosperity and happiness: and he may be perfectly assured that
they not only contribute, but are indispensably necessary to the
health, to the prosperity and happiness of the universe, to the
furtherance and advancement of the great plan of Jupiter. Had they not
been so, the universe would never have produced them; its all-wise
Architect and Conductor would never have suffered them to happen. As
all, even the smallest of the co-existent parts of the universe, are
exactly fitted to one another, and all contribute to compose one
immense and connected system, so all, even apparently the most
insignificant of the successive events which follow one another, make
parts, and necessary parts, of that great chain of causes and effects
which had no beginning, and which will have no end; and which, as they
all necessarily result from the original arrangement and contrivance
of the whole; so they are all essentially necessary, not only to its
prosperity, but to its continuance and preservation. Whoever does not
cordially embrace whatever befalls him, whoever is sorry that it has
befallen him, whoever wishes that it had not befallen him, wishes, so
far as in him lies, to stop the motion of the universe, to break that
great chain of succession, by the progress of which that system can
alone be continued and preserved, and, for some little conveniency of
his own, to disorder and discompose the whole machine of the world. 'O
world,' says he, in another place, 'all things are suitable to me
which are suitable to thee. Nothing is too early or too late to me
which is seasonable for thee. All is fruit to me which thy seasons
bring forth. From thee are all things; in thee are all things; for
thee are all things. One man {256} says, O beloved city of Cecrops.
Wilt not thou say, O beloved city of God?'
From these very sublime doctrines the Stoics, or at least some of the
Stoics, attempted to deduce all their paradoxes.
The Stoical wise man endeavoured to enter into the views of the great
Superintendent of the universe, and to see things in the same light in
which that divine Being beheld them. But, to the great Superintendent
of the universe, all the different events which the course of his
providence may bring forth, what to us appear the smallest and the
greatest, the bursting of a bubble, as Mr. Pope says, and that of a
world, for example, were perfectly equal, were equally parts of that
great chain which he had predestined from all eternity, were equally
the effects of the same unerring wisdom, of the same universal and
boundless benevolence. To the Stoical wise man, in the same manner,
all those different events were perfectly equal. In the course of
those events, indeed, a little department, in which he had himself
some little management and direction, had been assigned to him. In
this department he endeavoured to act as properly as he could, and to
conduct himself according to those orders which, he understood, had
been prescribed to him. But he took no anxious or passionate concern
either in the success, or in the disappointment of his own most
faithful endeavours. The highest prosperity and the total destruction
of that little department, of that little system which had been in
some measure committed to his charge, were perfectly indifferent to
him. If those events had depended upon him, he would have chosen the
one, and he would have rejected the other. But as they did not depend
upon him, he trusted to a superior wisdom, and was perfectly satisfied
that the event which happened, whatever it might be, was the very
event which he himself, had he known all the connections and
dependencies of things, would most earnestly and devoutly have wished
for. Whatever he did under the influence and direction of those
principles was equally perfect; and when he stretched out his finger,
to give the example which they commonly made use of, he performed an
action in every respect as meritorious, as worthy of praise and
admiration, as when he laid down his life for the service of his
country. As, to the great Superintendent of the universe, the greatest
and the smallest exertions of his power, the formation and dissolution
of a world, the formation and dissolution of a bubble, were equally
easy, were equally admirable, and equally the effects of the same
divine wisdom and benevolence; so, to the Stoical wise man, what we
would call the great action required no more exertion than the little
one, was equally easy, proceeded from exactly the same principles, was
in no respect more meritorious, nor worthy of any higher degree of
praise and admiration.
As all those who had arrived at this state of perfection were equally
{257} happy, so all those who fell in the smallest degree short of it,
how nearly soever they might approach to it, were equally miserable.
As the man, they said, who was but an inch below the surface of the
water, could no more breathe than he who was an hundred yards below
it; so the man who had not completely subdued all his private,
partial, and selfish passions, who had any other earnest desire but
that for the universal happiness, who had not completely emerged from
that abyss of misery and disorder into which his anxiety for the
gratification of those private, partial, and selfish passions had
involved him, could no more breathe the free air of liberty and
independency, could no more enjoy the security and happiness of the
wise man, than he who was most remote from that situation. As all the
actions of the wise man were perfect and equally perfect; so all those
of the man who had not arrived at this supreme wisdom were faulty,
and, as some Stoics pretended, equally faulty. As one truth, they
said, could not be more true, nor one falsehood more false than
another; so an honourable action could not be more honourable, nor a
shameful one more shameful than another. As in shooting at a mark, the
man who missed it by an inch had equally missed it with him who had
done so by a hundred yards; so the man who, in what to us appears the
most insignificant action, had acted improperly and without a
sufficient reason, was equally faulty with him who had done so in,
what to us appears, the most important; the man who has killed a cock,
for example, improperly and without a sufficient reason, was as
criminal as he who had murdered his father.
If the first of those two paradoxes should appear sufficiently
violent, the second is evidently too absurd to deserve any serious
consideration. It is, indeed, so very absurd that one can scarce help
suspecting that it must have been in some measure misunderstood or
misrepresented. At any rate, I cannot allow myself to believe that
such men as Zeno or Cleanthes, men, it is said, of the most simple as
well as of the most sublime eloquence, could be the authors, either of
these, or of the greater part of the other Stoical paradoxes, which
are in general mere impertinent quibbles, and do so little honour to
their system that I shall give no further account of them. I am
disposed to impute them rather to Chrysippus, the disciple and
follower, indeed, of Zeno and Cleanthes, but who, from all that has
been delivered down to us concerning him, seems to have been a mere
dialectical pedant, without taste or elegance of any kind. He may have
been the first who reduced their doctrines into a scholastic or
technical system of artificial definitions, divisions, and
subdivisions; one of the most effectual expedients, perhaps, for
extinguishing whatever degree of good sense there may be in any moral
or metaphysical doctrine. Such a man may very easily be supposed to
have understood too literally some animated expressions of his masters
in describing the happiness of the man of {258} perfect virtue, and
the unhappiness of whoever might fall short of that character.
The Stoics in general seem to have admitted that there might be a
degree of proficiency in those who had not advanced to perfect virtue
and happiness. They distributed those proficients into different
classes, according to the degree of their advancement; and they called
the imperfect virtues which they supposed them capable of exercising,
not rectitudes, but proprieties, fitnesses, decent and becoming
actions, for which a plausible or probable reason could be assigned,
what Cicero expresses by the Latin word _officia_, and Seneca, I
think more exactly, by that of _convenientia_. The doctrine of
those imperfect, but attainable virtues, seems to have constituted
what we may call the practical morality of the Stoics. It is the
subject of Cicero's Offices; and is said to have been that of another
book written by Marcus Brutus, but which is now lost.
The plan and system which Nature has sketched out for our conduct,
seems to us to be altogether different from that of the Stoical
philosophy.
By Nature the events which immediately affect that little department
in which we ourselves have some little management and direction, which
immediately affect ourselves, our friends, our country, are the events
which interest us the most, and which chiefly excite our desires and
aversions, our hopes and fears, our joys and sorrows. Should those
passions be, what they are very apt to be, too vehement, Nature has
provided a proper remedy and correction. The real or even the
imaginary presence of the impartial spectator, the authority of the
man within the breast, is always at hand to overawe them into the
proper tone and temper of moderation.
If, notwithstanding our most faithful exertions, all the events which
can affect this little department, should turn out the most
unfortunate and disastrous, Nature has by no means left us without
consolation. That consolation may be drawn, not only from the complete
approbation of the man within the breast, but, if possible, from a
still nobler and more generous principle, from a firm reliance upon,
and a reverential submission to, that benevolent wisdom which directs
all the events of human life, and which, we may be assured, would
never have suffered those misfortunes to happen, had they not been
indispensably necessary for the good of the whole.
Nature has not prescribed to us this sublime contemplation as the
great business and occupation of our lives. She only points it out to
us as the consolation of our misfortunes. The Stoical philosophy
prescribes it as the great business and occupation of our lives. That
philosophy teaches us to interest ourselves earnestly and anxiously in
no events, external to the good order of our own minds, to the
propriety of our own choosing and rejecting, except in those which
concern a {259} department where we neither have nor ought to have any
sort of management or direction, the department of the great
Superintendent of the universe. By the perfect apathy which it
prescribes to us, by endeavouring, not merely to moderate, but to
eradicate all our private, partial, and selfish affections, by
suffering us to feel for whatever can befall ourselves, our friends,
our country, not even the sympathetic and reduced passions of the
impartial spectator, it endeavours to render us altogether indifferent
and unconcerned in the success or miscarriage of every thing which
Nature has prescribed to us as the proper business and occupation of
our lives.
The reasonings of philosophy, it may be said, though they may confound
and perplex the understanding, can never break down the necessary
connection which Nature has established between causes and their
effects. The causes which naturally excite our desires and aversions,
our hopes and fears, our joys and sorrows, would no doubt,
notwithstanding all the reasonings of Stoicism, produce upon each
individual, according to the degree of his actual sensibility, their
proper and necessary effects. The judgments of the man within the
breast, however, might be a good deal affected by those reasonings,
and that great inmate might be taught by them to attempt to overawe
all our private, partial, and selfish affections into a more or less
perfect tranquillity. To direct the judgments of this inmate is the
great purpose of all systems of morality. That the Stoical philosophy
had very great influence upon the character and conduct of its
followers, cannot be doubted; and that, though it might sometimes
incite them to unnecessary violence, its general tendency was to
animate them to actions of the most heroic magnanimity and most
extensive benevolence.
IV. Besides these ancient, there are some modern systems, according to
which virtue consists in propriety; or in the suitableness of the
affection from which we act, to the cause or object which excites it.
The system of Dr. Clark, which places virtue in acting according to
the relation of things, in regulating our conduct according to the
fitness or incongruity which there may be in the application of
certain actions to certain things, or to certain relations: that of
Mr. Wollaston, which places it in acting according to the truth of
things, according to their proper nature and essence, or in treating
them as what they really are, and not as what they are not: that of my
Lord Shaftesbury, which places it in maintaining a proper balance of
the affections, and in allowing no passion to go beyond its proper
sphere; are all of them more or less inaccurate descriptions of the
same fundamental idea.
None of those systems either give, or even pretend to give, any
precise or distinct measure by which this fitness or propriety of
affection can be ascertained or judged of. That precise and distinct
measure can be found no where but in the sympathetic feelings of the
impartial and well-informed spectator.
{260} The description of virtue, besides, which is either given, or at
least meant and intended to be given in each of those systems, for
some of the modern authors are not very fortunate in their manner of
expressing themselves, is no doubt quite just, so far as it goes.
There is no virtue without propriety, and wherever there is propriety
some degree of approbation is due. But still this description is
imperfect. For though propriety is an essential ingredient in every
virtuous action, it is not always the sole ingredient. Beneficent
actions have in them another quality by which they appear not only to
deserve approbation but recompense. None of those systems account
either easily or sufficiently for that superior degree of esteem which
seems due to such actions, or for that diversity of sentiment which
they naturally excite. Neither is the description of vice more
complete. For, in the same manner, though impropriety is a necessary
ingredient in every vicious action, it is not always the sole
ingredient; and there is often the highest degree of absurdity and
impropriety in very harmless and insignificant actions. Deliberate
actions, of a pernicious tendency to those we live with, have, besides
their impropriety, a peculiar quality of their own by which they
appear to deserve, not only disapprobation, but punishment; and to be
the objects, not of dislike merely, but of resentment and revenge: and
none of those systems easily and sufficiently account for that
superior degree of detestation which we feel for such actions.
-----
CHAP. II.--_Of those Systems which make Virtue consist in
Prudence._
THE most ancient of those systems which make virtue consist in
prudence, and of which any considerable remains have come down to us,
is that of Epicurus, who is said, however, to have borrowed all the
leading principles of his philosophy from some of those who had gone
before him, particularly from Aristippus; though it is very probable,
notwithstanding this allegation of his enemies, that at least his
manner of applying those principles was altogether his own.
According to Epicurus (Cicero de finibus, lib. i. Diogenes Laert. 1.
x.) bodily pleasure and pain were the sole ultimate objects of natural
desire and aversion. That they were always the natural objects of
those passions, he thought required no proof. Pleasure might, indeed,
appear sometimes to be avoided; not, however, because it was pleasure,
but because, by the enjoyment of it, we should either forfeit some
greater pleasure, or expose ourselves to some pain that was more to be
avoided than this pleasure was to be desired. Pain, in the same
manner, might appear sometimes to be eligible; not, however, because
it was pain, but because by enduring it we might either avoid a still
{261} greater pain, or acquire some pleasure of much more importance.
That bodily pain and pleasure, therefore, were always the natural
objects of desire and aversion, was, he thought, abundantly evident.
Nor was it less so, he imagined, that they were the sole ultimate
objects of those passions. Whatever else was either desired or
avoided, was so, according to him, upon account of its tendency to
produce one or other of those sensations. The tendency to procure
pleasure rendered power and riches desirable, as the contrary tendency
to produce pain made poverty and insignificancy the objects of
aversion. Honour and reputation were valued, because the esteem and
love of those we live with were of the greatest consequence both to
procure pleasure and to defend us from pain. Ignominy and bad fame, on
the contrary, were to be avoided, because the hatred, contempt, and
resentment of those we lived with, destroyed all security, and
necessarily exposed us to the greatest bodily evils.
All the pleasures and pains of the mind were, according to Epicurus,
ultimately derived from those of the body. The mind was happy when it
thought of the past pleasures of the body, and hoped for others to
come: and it was miserable when it thought of the pains which the body
had formerly endured, and dreaded the same or greater thereafter.
But the pleasures and pains of the mind, though ultimately derived
from those of the body, were vastly greater than their originals. The
body felt only the sensation of the present instant, whereas the mind
felt also the past and the future, the one by remembrance, the other
by anticipation, and consequently both suffered and enjoyed much more.
When we are under the greatest bodily pain, he observed, we shall
always find, if we attend to it, that it is not the suffering of the
present instant which chiefly torments us, but either the agonizing
remembrance of the past, or the yet more horrible dread of the future.
The pain of each instant, considered by itself, and cut off from all
that goes before and all that comes after it, is a trifle, not worth
the regarding. Yet this is all which the body can ever be said to
suffer. In the same manner, when we enjoy the greatest pleasure, we
shall always find that the bodily sensation, the sensation of the
present instant, makes but a small part of our happiness, that our
enjoyment chiefly arises either from the cheerful recollection of the
past, or the still more joyous anticipation of the future, and that
the mind always contributes by much the largest share of the
entertainment.
Since our happiness and misery, therefore, depended chiefly on the
mind, if this part of our nature was well disposed, if our thoughts
and opinions were as they should be, it was of little importance in
what manner our body was affected. Though under great bodily pain, we
might still enjoy a considerable share of happiness, if our reason and
judgment maintained their superiority. We might entertain ourselves
{262} with the remembrance of past, and with the hopes of future
pleasure; we might soften the rigour of our pains, by recollecting
what it was which, even in this situation, we were under any necessity
of suffering. That this was merely the bodily sensation, the pain of
the present instant, which by itself could never be very great. That
whatever agony we suffered from the dread of its continuance, was the
effect of an opinion of the mind, which might be corrected by juster
sentiments; by considering that, if our pains were violent, they would
probably be of short duration; and that if they were of long
continuance, they would probably be moderate, and admit of many
intervals of ease; and that, at any rate, death was always at hand and
within call to deliver us, which as, according to him, it put an end
to all sensation, either of pain or pleasure, could not be regarded as
an evil. When we are, said he, death is not; and when death is, we are
not; death therefore can be nothing to us.
If the actual sensation of positive pain was in itself so little to be
feared, that of pleasure was still less to be desired. Naturally the
sensation of pleasure was much less pungent than that of pain. If,
therefore, this last could take so very little from the happiness of a
well-disposed mind, the other could add scarce any thing to it. When
the body was free from pain and the mind from fear and anxiety, the
superadded sensation of bodily pleasure could be of very little
importance; and though it might diversify, could not properly be said
to increase the happiness of this situation.
In ease of body, therefore, and in security of tranquillity of mind,
consisted, according to Epicurus, the most perfect state of human
nature, the most complete happiness which man was capable of enjoying.
To obtain this great end of natural desire was the sole object of all
the virtues, which, according to him, were not desirable upon their
own account, but chiefly upon account of their tendency to bring about
this situation.
Prudence, for example, though, according to this philosophy, the
source and principle of all the virtues, was not desirable upon its
own account. That careful and laborious and circumspect state of mind,
ever watchful and ever attentive to the most distant consequences of
every action, could not be a thing pleasant or agreeable for its own
sake, but upon account of its tendency to procure the greatest goods
and to keep off the greatest evils.
To abstain from pleasure too, to curb and restrain our natural
passions for enjoyment, which was the office of temperance, could
never be desirable for its own sake. The whole value of this virtue
arose from its utility, from its enabling us to postpone the present
enjoyment for the sake of a greater to come, or to avoid a greater
pain that might ensue from it. Temperance, in short, was, according to
the Epicureans, nothing but prudence with regard to pleasure.
{263} To support labour, to endure pain, to be exposed to danger or to
death, the situations which fortitude would often lead us into, were
surely still less the objects of natural desire. They were chosen only
to avoid greater evils. We submitted to labour, in order to avoid the
greater shame and pain of poverty, and we exposed ourselves to danger
and to death in defence of our liberty and property, the means and
instruments of pleasure and happiness; or in defence of our country,
in the safety of which our own was necessarily comprehended. Fortitude
enabled us to do all this cheerfully, as the best which, in our
present situation, could possibly be done, and was in reality no more
than prudence, good judgment, and presence of mind in properly
appreciating pain, labour, and danger, always choosing the less in
order to avoid the greater evil.
It is the same case with justice. To abstain from what is another's
was not desirable on its own account, and it could not surely be
better for you, that I should possess what is my own, than that you
should possess it. You ought, however, to abstain from whatever
belongs to me, because by doing otherwise you will provoke the
resentment and indignation of mankind. The security and tranquillity
of your mind will be entirely destroyed. You will be filled with fear
and consternation at the thought of that punishment which you will
imagine that men are at all times ready to inflict upon you, and from
which no power, no art, no concealment, will ever, in your own fancy,
be sufficient to protect you. The other species of justice which
consists in doing proper good offices to different persons, according
to the various relations of neighbours, kinsmen, friends, benefactors,
superiors, or equals, which they may stand in to us, is recommended by
the same reasons. To act properly in all these different relations
procures us the esteem and love of those we live with; as to do
otherwise excites their contempt and hatred. By the one we naturally
secure, by the other we necessarily endanger our own ease and
tranquillity, the great and ultimate objects of all our desires. The
whole virtue of justice, therefore, the most important of all the
virtues, is no more than discreet and prudent conduct with regard to
our neighbours.
Such is the doctrine of Epicurus concerning the nature of virtue. It
may seem extraordinary that this philosopher, who is described as a
person of the most amiable manners, should never have observed, that,
whatever may be the tendency of those virtues, or of the contrary
vices, with regard to our bodily ease and security, the sentiments
which they naturally excite in others are the objects of a much more
passionate desire or aversion than all their other consequences; that
to be amiable, to be respectable, to be the proper object of esteem,
is by every well-disposed mind more valued than all the ease and
security which love, respect, and esteem can procure us; that, on the
contrary, to be odious, to be contemptible, to be the proper object of
indignation, is {264} more dreadful than all that we can suffer in our
body from hatred, contempt, or indignation; and that consequently our
desire of the one character, and our aversion to the other, cannot
arise from any regard to the effects which either of them may produce
upon the body.
This system is, no doubt, altogether inconsistent with that which I
have been endeavouring to establish. It is not difficult, however, to
discover from what phasis, if I may say so, from what particular view
or aspect of nature, this account of things derives its probability.
By the wise contrivance of the Author of nature, virtue is upon all
ordinary occasions, even with regard to this life, real wisdom, and
the surest and readiest means of obtaining both safety and advantage.
Our success or disappointment in our undertakings must very much
depend upon the good or bad opinion which is commonly entertained of
us, and upon the general disposition of those we live with, either to
assist or to oppose us. But the best, the surest, the easiest, and the
readiest way of obtaining the advantageous, and of avoiding the
unfavourable judgments of others, is undoubtedly to render ourselves
the proper objects of the former and not of the latter. 'Do you
desire,' said Socrates, 'the reputation of a good musician? The only
sure way of obtaining it, is to become a good musician. Would you
desire in the same manner to be thought capable of serving your
country either as a general or as a statesman? The best way in this
case too is really to acquire the art and experience of war and
government, and to become really fit to be a general or a statesman.
And in the same manner if you would be reckoned sober, temperate,
just, and equitable, the best way of acquiring this reputation is to
become sober, temperate, just, and equitable. If you can really render
yourself amiable, respectable, and the proper object of esteem, there
is no fear of your not soon acquiring the love, the respect, and
esteem of those you live with.' Since the practice of virtue,
therefore, is in general so advantageous, and that of vice so contrary
to our interest, the consideration of those opposite tendencies
undoubtedly stamps an additional beauty and propriety upon the one,
and a new deformity and impropriety upon the other. Temperance,
magnanimity, justice, and beneficence, come thus to be approved of,
not only under their proper characters, but under the additional
character of the highest wisdom and most real prudence. And in the
same manner, the contrary vices of intemperance, pusillanimity,
injustice, and either malevolence or sordid selfishness, come to be
disapproved of, not only under their proper characters, but under the
additional character of the most short-sighted folly and weakness.
Epicurus appears in every virtue to have attended to this species of
propriety only. It is that which is most apt to occur to those who are
endeavouring to persuade others to regularity of conduct. When men by
their practice, and perhaps too by their maxims, manifestly show that
the natural beauty of virtue is not like to have much effect upon
{265} them, how is it possible to move them but by representing the
folly of their conduct, and how much they themselves are in the end
likely to suffer by it?
By running up all the different virtues too to this one species of
propriety, Epicurus indulged a propensity, which is natural to all
men, but which philosophers in particular are apt to cultivate with a
peculiar fondness, as the great means of displaying their ingenuity,
the propensity to account for all appearances from as few principles
as possible. And he, no doubt, indulged this propensity still further,
when he referred all the primary objects of natural desire and
aversion to the pleasures and pains of the body. The great patron of
the atomical philosophy, who took so much pleasure in deducing all the
powers and qualities of bodies from the most obvious and familiar, the
figure, motion, and arrangement of the small parts of matter, felt no
doubt a similar satisfaction, when he accounted, in the same manner,
for all the sentiments and passions of the mind from those which are
most obvious and familiar.
The system of Epicurus agreed with those of Plato, Aristotle, and
Zeno, in making virtue consist in acting in the most suitable manner
to obtain (Prima naturæ) primary objects of natural desire. It
differed from all of them in two other respects; first, in the
account which it gave of those primary objects of natural desire; and
secondly, in the account which it gave of the excellence of virtue, or
of the reason why that quality ought to be esteemed.
The primary objects of natural desire consisted, according to
Epicurus, in bodily pleasure and pain, and in nothing else: whereas,
according to the other three philosophers, there were many other
objects, such as knowledge, such as the happiness of our relations, of
our friends, and of our country, which were ultimately desirable for
their own sakes.
Virtue too, according to Epicurus, did not deserve to be pursued for
its own sake, nor was itself one of the ultimate objects of natural
appetite, but was eligible only upon account of its tendency to
prevent pain and to procure ease and pleasure. In the opinion of the
other three, on the contrary, it was desirable, not merely as the
means of procuring the other primary objects of natural desire, but as
something which was in itself more valuable than them all. Man, they
thought, being born for action, his happiness must consist, not merely
in the agreeableness of his passive sensations, but also in the
propriety of his active exertions.
-----
CHAP. III.--_Of those Systems which make Virtue consist in
Benevolence._
THE system which makes virtue consist in benevolence, though I think
{266} not so ancient as all those which I have already given an
account of, is, however, of very great antiquity. It seems to have
been the doctrine of the greater part of those philosophers who, about
and after the age of Augustus, called themselves Eclectics, who
pretended to follow chiefly the opinions of Plato and Pythagoras, and
who upon that account are commonly known by the name of the later
Platonists.
In the divine nature, according to these authors, benevolence or love
was the sole principle of action, and directed the exertion of all the
other attributes. The wisdom of the Deity was employed in finding out
the means for bringing about those ends which his goodness suggested,
and his infinite power was exerted to execute them. Benevolence,
however, was still the supreme and governing attribute, to which the
others were subservient, and from which the whole excellency, or the
whole morality, if I may be allowed such an expression, of the divine
operations, was ultimately derived. The whole perfection and virtue of
the human mind consisted in some resemblance or participation of the
divine perfections, and, consequently, in being filled with the same
principle of benevolence and love which influenced all the actions of
the Deity. The actions of men which flowed from this motive were alone
truly praise-worthy, or could claim any merit in the sight of the
Deity. It was by actions of charity and love only that we could
imitate, as became us, the conduct of God, that we could express our
humble and devout admiration of his infinite perfections, that by
fostering in our own minds the same divine principle, we could bring
our own affections to a greater resemblance with his holy attributes,
and thereby become more proper objects of his love and esteem; till we
arrived at that immediate converse and communication with the Deity to
which it was the great object of this philosophy to raise us.
This system, as it was much esteemed by many ancient fathers of the
Christian church, so after the Reformation it was adopted by several
divines of the most eminent piety and learning and of the most amiable
manners; particularly, by Dr. Ralph Cudworth, by Dr. Henry More, and
by Mr. John Smith of Cambridge. But of all the patrons of this system,
ancient or modern, the late Dr. Hutcheson was undoubtedly, beyond all
comparison, the most acute, the most distinct, the most philosophical,
and what is of the greatest consequence of all, the soberest and most
judicious.
That virtue consists in benevolence is a notion supported by many
appearances in human nature. It has been observed already, that proper
benevolence is the most graceful and agreeable of all the affections,
that it is recommended to us by a double sympathy, that as its
tendency is necessarily beneficent, it is the proper object of
gratitude and reward, and that upon all these accounts it appears to
our natural sentiments to possess a merit superior to any other. It
has been observed, too, that even the weaknesses of benevolence are
not very {267} disagreeable to us, whereas those of every other
passion are always extremely disgusting. Who does not abhor excessive
malice, excessive selfishness, or excessive resentment? But the most
excessive indulgence even of partial friendship is not so offensive.
It is the benevolent passions only which can exert themselves without
any regard or attention to propriety, and yet retain something about
them which is engaging. There is something pleasing even in mere
instinctive good-will, which goes on to do good offices without once
reflecting whether by this conduct it is the proper object either of
blame or approbation. It is not so with the other passions. The moment
they are deserted, the moment they are unaccompanied by the sense of
propriety, they cease to be agreeable.
As benevolence bestows upon those actions which proceed from it, a
beauty superior to all others, so the want of it, and much more the
contrary inclination, communicates a peculiar deformity to whatever
evidences such a disposition. Pernicious actions are often punishable
for no other reason than because they show a want of sufficient
attention to the happiness of our neighbour.
Besides all this, Dr. Hutcheson (Inquiry concerning Virtue, sect. 1.
and 2.) observed, that whenever in any action, supposed to proceed
from benevolent affections, some other motive had been discovered, our
sense of the merit of this action was just so far diminished as this
motive was believed to have influenced it. If an action, supposed to
proceed from gratitude, should be discovered to have arisen from an
expectation of some new favour, or if what was apprehended to proceed
from public spirit, should be found out to have taken its origin from
the hope of a pecuniary reward, such a discovery would entirely
destroy all notion of merit or praise-worthiness in either of these
actions. Since, therefore, the mixture of any selfish motive, like
that of a baser alloy, diminished or took away altogether the merit
which would otherwise have belonged to any action, it was evident, he
imagined, that virtue must consist in pure and disinterested
benevolence alone.
When those actions, on the contrary, which are commonly supposed to
proceed from a selfish motive, are discovered to have arisen from a
benevolent one, it greatly enhances our sense of their merit. If we
believed of any person that he endeavoured to advance his fortune from
no other view but that of doing friendly offices, and of making proper
returns to his benefactors, we should only love and esteem him the
more. And this observation seemed still more to confirm the
conclusion, that it was benevolence only which could stamp upon any
action the character of virtue.
Last of all, what, he imagined, was an evident proof of the justness
of this account of virtue, in all the disputes of casuists concerning
the rectitude of conduct, the public good, he observed, was the
standard to which they constantly referred; thereby universally
acknowledging {268} that whatever tended to promote the happiness of
mankind was right and laudable and virtuous, and the contrary, wrong,
blamable, and vicious. In the late debates about passive obedience and
the right of resistance, the sole point in controversy among men of
sense was whether universal submission would probably be attended with
greater evils than temporary insurrections when privileges were
invaded. Whether what, upon the whole, tended most to the happiness of
mankind, was not also morally good, was never once, he said, made a
question by them.
Since benevolence, therefore, was the only motive which could bestow
upon any action the character of virtue, the greater the benevolence
which was evidenced by any action, the greater the praise which must
belong to it.
Those actions which aimed at the happiness of a great community, as
they demonstrated a more enlarged benevolence than those which aimed
only at that of a smaller system, so were they, likewise,
proportionally the more virtuous. The most virtuous of all affections,
therefore, was that which embraced as its object the happiness of all
intelligent beings. The least virtuous, on the contrary, of those to
which the character of virtue could in any respect belong, was that
which aimed no further than at the happiness of an individual, such as
a son, a brother, a friend.
In directing all our actions to promote the greatest possible good, in
submitting all inferior affections to the desire of the general
happiness of mankind, in regarding one's self but as one of the many,
whose prosperity was to be pursued no further than it was consistent
with, or conducive to that of the whole, consisted the perfection of
virtue.
Self-love was a principle which could never be virtuous in any degree
of in any direction. It was vicious whenever it obstructed the general
good. When it had no other effect than to make the individual take
care of his own happiness, it was merely innocent, and though it
deserved no praise, neither ought it to incur any blame. Those
benevolent actions which were performed, notwithstanding some strong
motive from self-interest, were the more virtuous upon that account.
They demonstrated the strength and vigour of the benevolent principle.
Dr. Hutcheson[7] was so far from allowing self-love to be in any case
a motive of virtuous actions, that even a regard to the pleasure of
self-approbation, to the comfortable applause of our own consciences,
according to him, diminished the merit of a benevolent action. This
was a selfish motive, he thought, which, so far as it contributed to
any action, demonstrated the weakness of that pure and disinterested
benevolence which could alone stamp upon the conduct of man the
character of virtue. In the common judgments of mankind, however, this
regard {269} to the approbation of our own minds is so far from being
considered as what can in any respect diminish the virtue of any
action, that it is often rather looked upon as the sole motive which
deserves the appellation of virtuous.
[Footnote 7: Inquiry concerning Virtue, sect. 2. art. 4.; also
Illustrations on the Moral Sense, sect. 5, last paragraph.]
Such is the account given of the nature of virtue in this amiable
system, a system which has a peculiar tendency to nourish and support
in the human heart the noblest and the most agreeable of all
affections, and not only to check the injustice of self-love, but in
some measure to discourage that principle altogether, by representing
it as what could never reflect any honour upon those who were
influenced by it.
As some of the other systems which I have already given an account of,
do not sufficiently explain from whence arises the peculiar excellency
of the supreme virtue of beneficence, so this system seems to have the
contrary defect, of not sufficiently explaining from whence arises our
approbation of the inferior virtues of prudence, vigilance,
circumspection, temperance, constancy, firmness. The view and aim of
our affections, the beneficent and hurtful effects which they tend to
produce, are the only qualities at all attended to in this system.
Their propriety and impropriety, their suitableness and
unsuitableness, to the cause which excites them, are disregarded
altogether.
Regard to our own private happiness and interest, too, appear upon
many occasions very laudable principles of action. The habits of
oeconomy, industry, discretion, attention, and application of
thought, are generally supposed to be cultivated from self-interested
motives, and at the same time are apprehended to be very praise-worthy
qualities, which deserve the esteem and approbation of every body. The
mixture of a selfish motive, it is true, seems often to sully the
beauty of those actions which ought to arise from a benevolent
affection. The cause of this, however, is not that self-love can never
be the motive of a virtuous action, but that the benevolent principle
appears in this particular case to want its due degree of strength,
and to be altogether unsuitable to its object. The character,
therefore, seems evidently imperfect, and upon the whole to deserve
blame rather than praise. The mixture of a benevolent motive in an
action to which self-love alone ought to be sufficient to prompt us,
is not so apt indeed to diminish our sense of its propriety, or of the
virtue of the person who performs it. We are not ready to suspect any
person of being defective in selfishness. This is by no means the weak
side of human nature, or the failing of which we are apt to be
suspicious. If we could really believe, however, of any man, that, was
it not from a regard to his family and friends, he would not take
that proper care of his health, his life, or his fortune, to which
self-preservation alone ought to be sufficient to prompt him, it would
undoubtedly be a failing, though one of those amiable failings which
render a person rather the object of pity than of contempt or hatred.
It would still, however, somewhat diminish the {270} dignity and
respectableness of his character. Carelessness and want of oeconomy
are universally disapproved of, not, however, as proceeding from a
want of benevolence, but from a want of proper attention to the
objects of self-interest.
Though the standard by which casuists frequently determine what is
right or wrong in human conduct, be its tendency to the welfare or
disorder of society, it does not follow that a regard to the welfare
of society should be the sole virtuous motive of action, but only
that, in competition, it ought to cast the balance against all other
motives.
Benevolence may, perhaps, be the sole principle of action in the
Deity, and there are several not improbable arguments which tend to
persuade us that it is so. It is not easy to conceive what other
motive an independent and all-perfect Being, who stands in need of
nothing external, and whose happiness is complete in himself, can act
from. But whatever may be the case with the Deity, so imperfect a
creature as man, the support of whose existence requires so many
things external to him, must often act from many other motives. The
condition of human nature were peculiarly hard, if those affections,
which, by the very nature of our being, ought frequently to influence
our conduct, could upon no occasion appear virtuous, or deserve esteem
and commendation from any body.
Those three systems, that which places virtue in propriety, that which
places it in prudence, and that which makes it consist in benevolence,
are the principal accounts which have been given of the nature of
virtue. To one or other of them, all the other descriptions of virtue,
how different soever they may appear, are easily reducible.
That system which places virtue in obedience to the will of the Deity,
may be accounted either among those which make it consist in prudence,
or among those which make it consist in propriety. When it is asked,
why we ought to obey the will of the Deity, this question, which would
be impious and absurd in the highest degree, if asked from any doubt
that we ought to obey him, can admit but of two different answers. It
must either be said that we ought to obey the will of the Deity
because he is a Being of infinite power, who will reward us eternally
if we do so, and punish us eternally if we do otherwise: or it must be
said, that independent of any regard to our own happiness, or to
rewards and punishments of any kind, there is a congruity and fitness
that a creature should obey its creator, that a limited and imperfect
being should submit to one of infinite and incomprehensible
perfections. Besides one or other of these two, it is impossible to
conceive that any other answer can be given to this question. If the
first answer be the proper one, virtue consists in prudence, or in the
proper pursuit of our own final interest and happiness; since it is
upon this account that we are obliged to obey the will of the Deity.
If the second answer be the proper one, virtue must consist in
propriety, since the ground of our {271} obligation to obedience is
the suitableness or congruity of the sentiments of humility and
submission to the superiority of the object which excites them.
That system which places virtue in utility, coincides too with that
which makes it consist in propriety. According to this system, all
those qualities of the mind which are agreeable or advantageous,
either to the person himself or to others, are approved of as
virtuous, and the contrary are disapproved of as vicious. But the
agreeableness or utility of any affection depends upon the degree
which it is allowed to subsist in. Every affection is useful when it
is confined to a certain degree of moderation; and every affection is
disadvantageous when it exceeds the proper bounds. According to this
system therefore, virtue consists not in any one affection, but in the
proper degree of all the affections. The only difference between it
and that which I have been endeavouring to establish, is, that it
makes utility, and not sympathy, or the correspondent affection of the
spectator, the natural and original measure of this proper degree.
-----
CHAP. IV.--_Of Licentious Systems._
ALL those systems, which I have hitherto given an account of, suppose
that that there is a real and essential distinction between vice and
virtue, whatever these qualities may consist in. There is a real and
essential difference between the propriety and impropriety of any
affection, between benevolence and any other principle of action,
between real prudence and short-sighted folly or precipitate rashness.
In the main, too, all of them contribute to encourage the
praiseworthy, and to discourage the blameable disposition.
It may be true, perhaps, of some of them, that they tend, in some
measure, to break the balance of the affections, and to give the mind
a particular bias to some principles of action, beyond the proportion
that is due to them. The ancient systems, which place virtue in
propriety, seem chiefly to recommend the great, the awful, and the
respectable virtues, the virtues of self-government and self-command;
fortitude, magnanimity, independency upon fortune, the contempt of all
outward accidents, of pain, poverty, exile and death. It is in these
great exertions that the noblest propriety of conduct is displayed.
The soft, the amiable, the gentle virtues, all the virtues of
indulgent humanity are, in comparison, but little insisted upon, and
seem, on the contrary, by the Stoics in particular, to have been often
regarded as weaknesses, which it behoved a wise man not to harbour in
his breast.
The benevolent system, on the other hand, while it fosters and
encourages all those milder virtues in the highest degree, seems
entirely to neglect the more awful and respectable qualities of the
mind. It {272} even denies them the appellation of virtues. It calls
them moral abilities, and treats them as qualities which do not
deserve the same sort of esteem and approbation, that is due to what
is properly denominated virtue. All those principles of action which
aim only at our own interest, it treats, if that be possible, still
worse. So far from having any merit of their own, they diminish, it
pretends, the merit of benevolence, when they co-operate with it; and
prudence, it is asserted, when employed only in promoting private
interest, can never even be imagined a virtue.
That system, again, which makes virtue consist in prudence only, while
it gives the highest encouragement to the habits of caution,
vigilance, sobriety, and judicious moderation, seems to degrade
equally both the amiable and respectable virtues, and to strip the
former of all their beauty, and the latter of all their grandeur.
But notwithstanding these defects, the general tendency of each of
those three systems is to encourage the best and most laudable habits
of the human mind, and it were well for society, if, either mankind in
general, or even those few who pretend to live according to any
philosophical rule, were to regulate their conduct by the precepts of
any one of them. We may learn from each of them something that is both
valuable and peculiar. If it was possible, by precept and exhortation,
to inspire the mind with fortitude and magnanimity, the ancient
systems of propriety would seem sufficient to do this. Or if it was
possible, by the same means, to soften it into humanity, and to awaken
the affections of kindness and general love towards those we live
with, some of the pictures which the benevolent system presents us,
might seem capable of producing this effect. We may learn from the
system of Epicurus, though undoubtedly the most imperfect of all the
three, how much the practice of both the amiable and respectable
virtues is conducive to our own interest, to our own ease and safety
and quiet even in this life. As Epicurus placed happiness in the
attainment of ease and security, he exerted himself in a particular
manner to show that virtue was, not merely the best and the surest,
but the only means of acquiring those invaluable possessions. The good
effects of virtue upon our inward tranquillity and peace of mind, are
what other philosophers have chiefly celebrated. Epicurus, without
neglecting this topic, has chiefly insisted **upon the influence of
that amiable quality on our outward prosperity and safety. It was upon
this account that his writings were so much studied in the ancient
world by men of all different philosophical parties. It is from him
that Cicero, the great enemy of the Epicurean system, borrows his most
agreeable proofs that virtue alone is sufficient to secure happiness.
Seneca, though a Stoic, the sect most opposite to that of Epicurus,
yet quotes this philosopher more frequently than any other.
There is, however, another system which seems to take away altogether
the distinction between vice and virtue, and of which the {273}
tendency is, upon that account, wholly pernicious: I mean the system
of Dr. Mandeville. Though the notions of this author are in almost
every respect erroneous, there are, however, some appearances in human
nature, which, when viewed in a certain manner, seem at first sight to
favour them. These described and exaggerated by the lively and
humorous, though coarse and rustic eloquence of Dr. Mandeville, have
thrown upon his doctrines an air of truth and probability which is
very apt to impose upon the unskilful.
Dr. Mandeville considers whatever is done from a sense of propriety,
from a regard to what is commendable and praiseworthy, as being done
from a love of praise and commendation, or as he calls it from vanity.
Man, he observes, is naturally much more interested in his own
happiness than in that of others, and it is impossible that in his
heart he can ever really prefer their prosperity to his own. Whenever
he appears to do so, we may be assured that he imposes upon us, and
that he is then acting from the same selfish motives as at all other
times. Among his other selfish passions, vanity is one of the
strongest, and he is always easily flattered and greatly delighted
with the applauses of those about him. When he appears to sacrifice
his own interest to that of his companions, he knows that this conduct
will be highly agreeable to their self-love, and that they will not
fail to express their satisfaction by bestowing upon him the most
extravagant praises. The pleasure which he expects from this,
over-balances, in his opinion, the interest which he abandons in order
to procure it. His conduct, therefore, upon this occasion, is in
reality just as selfish, and arises from just as mean a motive as upon
any other. He is flattered, however, and he flatters himself with the
belief that it is entirely disinterested; since, unless this was
supposed, it would not seem to merit any commendation either in his
own eyes or in those of others. All public spirit, therefore, all
preference of public to private interest, is, according to him, a mere
cheat and imposition upon mankind; and that human virtue which is so
much boasted of, and which is the occasion of so much emulation among
men, is the mere offspring of flattery begot upon pride.
Whether the most generous and public-spirited actions may not, in some
sense, be regarded as proceeding from self-love, I shall not at
present examine. The decision of this question is not, I apprehend, of
any importance towards establishing the reality of virtue, since
self-love may frequently be a virtuous motive of action. I shall only
endeavour to show that the desire of doing what is honourable and
noble, of rendering ourselves the proper objects of esteem and
approbation, cannot with any propriety be called vanity. Even the love
of well-grounded fame and reputation, the desire of acquiring esteem
by what is really estimable, does not deserve that name. The first is
the love of virtue, the noblest and the best passion of human nature.
The second {274} is the love of true glory, a passion inferior no
doubt to the former, but which in dignity appears to come immediately
after it. He is guilty of vanity who desires praise for qualities
which are either not praise-worthy in any degree, or not in that
degree in which he expects to be praised for them; who sets his
character upon the frivolous ornaments of dress and equipage, or upon
the equally frivolous accomplishments of ordinary behaviour. He is
guilty of vanity who desires praise for what indeed very well deserves
it, but what he perfectly knows does not belong to him. The empty
coxcomb who gives himself airs of importance which he has no title to,
the silly liar who assumes the merit of adventures which never
happened, the foolish plagiary who gives himself out for the author of
what he has no pretensions to, are properly accused of this passion.
He too is said to be guilty of vanity who is not contented with the
silent sentiments of esteem and approbation, who seems to be fonder of
their noisy expressions and acclamations than of the sentiments
themselves, who is never satisfied but when his own praises are
ringing in his ears, and who solicits with the most anxious
importunity all external marks of respect, is fond of titles, of
compliments, of being visited, of being attended, of being taken
notice of in public places with the appearance of deference and
attention. This frivolous passion is altogether different from either
of the two former, and is the passion of the lowest and the least of
mankind, as they are of the noblest and the greatest.
But though these three passions, the desire of rendering ourselves the
proper objects of honour and esteem, or of becoming what is honourable
and estimable; the desire of acquiring honour and esteem by really
deserving those sentiments; and the frivolous desire of praise at any
rate, are widely different; though the two former are always approved
of, while the latter never fails to be despised; there is, however, a
certain remote affinity among them, which, exaggerated by the humorous
and diverting eloquence of this lively author, has enabled him to
impose upon his readers. There is an affinity between vanity and the
love of true glory, as both these passions aim at acquiring esteem and
approbation. But they are different in this, that the one is a just,
reasonable, and equitable passion, while the other is unjust, absurd,
and ridiculous. The man who desires esteem for what is really
estimable, desires nothing but what he is justly entitled to, and what
cannot be refused him without some sort of injury. He, on the
contrary, who desires it upon any other terms, demands what he has no
just claim to. The first is easily satisfied, is not apt to be jealous
or suspicious that we do not esteem him enough, and is seldom
solicitous about receiving many external marks of our regard. The
other, on the contrary, is never to be satisfied, is full of jealousy
and suspicion that we do not esteem him so much as he desires, because
he has some secret consciousness that he desires more than he
deserves. The least {275} neglect of ceremony, he considers as a
mortal affront, and as an expression of the most determined contempt.
He is restless and impatient, and perpetually afraid that we have lost
all respect for him, and is upon this account always anxious to obtain
new expressions of our esteem, and cannot be kept in temper but by
continual attendance and adulation.
There is an affinity, too, between the desire of becoming what is
honourable and estimable and the desire of honour and esteem, between
the love of virtue and the love of true glory. They resemble one
another not only in this respect, that both aim at really being what
is honourable and noble, but even in that respect in which the love of
true glory resembles what is properly called vanity, some reference to
the sentiments of others. The man of the greatest magnanimity, who
desires virtue for its own sake, and is most indifferent about what
actually are the opinions of mankind with regard to him, is still,
however, delighted with the thoughts of what they should be, with the
consciousness that though he may neither be honoured nor applauded, he
is still the proper object of honour and applause, and that if mankind
were cool and candid and consistent with themselves, and properly
informed of the motives and circumstances of his conduct, they would
not fail to honour and applaud him. Though he despises the opinions
which are actually entertained of him, he has the highest value for
those which ought to be entertained of him. That he might think
himself worthy of those honourable sentiments, and, whatever was the
idea which other men might conceive of his character, that when he
should put himself in their situation, and consider, not what was, but
what ought to be their opinion, he should always have the highest idea
of it himself, was the great and exalted motive of his conduct. As
even in the love of virtue, therefore, there is still some reference,
though not to what is, yet to what in reason and propriety ought to
be, the opinion of others, there is even in this respect some affinity
between it and the love of true glory. There is, however, at the same
time, a very great difference between them. The man who acts solely
from a regard to what is right and fit to be done, from a regard to
what is the proper object of esteem and approbation, though these
sentiments should never be bestowed upon him, acts from the most
sublime and godlike motive which human nature is even capable of
conceiving. The man, on the other hand, who while he desires to merit
approbation, is at the same time anxious to obtain it, though he, too,
is laudable in the main, yet his motives have a greater mixture of
human infirmity. He is in danger of being mortified by the ignorance
and injustice of mankind, and his happiness is exposed to the envy of
his rivals and the folly of the public. The happiness of the other, on
the contrary, is altogether secure and independent of fortune, and of
the caprice of those he lives with. The contempt and hatred which
{276} may be thrown upon him by the ignorance of mankind, he considers
as not belonging to him, and is not at all mortified by it. Mankind
despise and hate him from a false notion of his character and conduct.
If they knew him better, they would esteem and love him. It is not him
whom, properly speaking, they hate and despise, but another person
whom they mistake him to be. Our friend, whom we should meet at a
masquerade in the garb of our enemy, would be more diverted than
mortified, if under that disguise we should vent our indignation
against him. Such are the sentiments of a man of real magnanimity,
when exposed to unjust censure. It seldom happens, however, that human
nature arrives at this degree of firmness. Though none but the weakest
and most worthless of mankind are much delighted with false glory,
yet, by a strange inconsistency, false ignominy is capable of
mortifying those who appear the most resolute and determined.
Dr. Mandeville is not satisfied with representing the frivolous motive
of vanity, as the source of all those actions which are commonly
accounted virtuous. He endeavours to point out the imperfection of
human virtue in many other respects. In every case, he pretends, it
falls short of that complete self-denial which it pretends to, and,
instead of a conquest, is commonly no more than a concealed indulgence
of our passions. Wherever our reserve with regard to pleasure falls
short of the most ascetic abstinence, he treats it as gross luxury and
sensuality. Every thing, according to him, is luxury which exceeds
what is absolutely necessary for the support of human nature, so that
there is vice even in the use of a clean shirt or of a convenient
habitation. The indulgence of the inclination to sex, in the most
lawful union, he considers as the same sensuality with the most
hurtful gratification of that passion, and derides that temperance and
that chastity which can be practised at so cheap a rate. The ingenious
sophistry of his reasoning, is here, as upon many other occasions,
covered by the ambiguity of language. There are some of our passions
which have no other names except those which mark the disagreeable and
offensive degree. The spectator is more apt to take notice of them in
this degree than in any other. When they shock his own sentiments,
when they give him some sort of antipathy and uneasiness, he is
necessarily obliged to attend to them, and is from thence naturally
led to give them a name. When they fall in with the natural state of
his own mind, he is very apt to overlook them altogether, and either
gives them no name at all, or, if he gives them any, it is one which
marks rather the subjection and restraint of the passion, than the
degree which it still is allowed to subsist in, after it is so
subjected and restrained. Thus the common names (luxury and lust) of
the love of pleasure, and of the love of sex, denote a vicious and
offensive degree of those passions. The words temperance and chastity,
on the other hand, seem to mark rather the restraint and subjection
which they are kept under, than the degree {277} which they are still
allowed to subsist in. When he can show, therefore, that they still
subsist in some degree, he imagines, he has entirely demolished the
reality of the virtues of temperance and chastity, and shown them to
be mere impositions upon the inattention and simplicity of mankind.
Those virtues, however, do not require an entire insensibility to the
objects of the passions which they mean to govern. They only aim at
restraining the violence of those passions so far as not to hurt the
individual, and neither disturb nor offend society.
It is the great fallacy of Dr. Mandeville's book (Fable of the Bees)
to represent every passion as wholly vicious, which is so in any
degree and in any direction. It is thus that he treats every thing as
vanity which has any reference, either to what are, or to what ought
to be the sentiments of others; and it is by means of this sophistry,
that he establishes his favourite conclusion, that private vices are
public benefits. If the love of magnificence, a taste for the elegant
arts and improvements of human life, for whatever is agreeable in
dress, furniture, or equipage, for architecture, statuary, painting,
and music, is to be regarded as luxury, sensuality, and ostentation,
even in those whose situation allows, without any inconveniency, the
indulgence of those passions, it is certain that luxury, sensuality,
and ostentation are public benefits: since without the qualities upon
which he thinks proper to bestow such opprobrious names, the arts of
refinement could never find encouragement, and must languish for want
of employment. Some popular ascetic doctrines which had been current
before his time, and which placed virtue in the entire extirpation and
annihilation of all our passions, were the real foundation of this
licentious system. It was easy for Dr. Mandeville to prove, first,
that this entire conquest never actually took place among men; and
secondly, that if it was to take place universally, it would be
pernicious to society, by putting an end to all industry and commerce,
and in a manner to the whole business of human life. By the first of
these propositions, he seemed to prove that there was no real virtue,
and that what pretended to be such, was a mere cheat and imposition
upon mankind; and by the second, that our private vices were public
benefits, since without them no society could prosper or flourish.
Such is the system of Dr. Mandeville, which once made so much noise in
the world, and which, though, perhaps, it never gave occasion to more
vice than what would have been without it, at least taught that vice,
which arose from other causes, to appear with more effrontery, and to
avow the corruption of its motives with a profligate audaciousness
which had never been heard of before.
But how destructive soever this system may appear, it could never have
imposed upon so great a number of persons, nor have occasioned so
general an alarm among those who are the friends of better principles,
had it not in some respects bordered upon the truth. A system of {278}
natural philosophy may appear very plausible, and be for a long time
very generally received in the world, and yet have no foundation in
nature, nor any sort of resemblance to the truth. The vortices of Des
Cartes were regarded by a very ingenious nation, for near a century
together, as a most satisfactory account of the revolutions of the
heavenly bodies. Yet it has been demonstrated, to the conviction of
all mankind, that these pretended causes of those wonderful effects,
not only do not actually exist, but are utterly impossible, and if
they did exist, could produce no such effects as are ascribed to them.
But it is otherwise with systems of moral philosophy, and an author
who pretends to account for the origin of our moral sentiments, cannot
deceive us so grossly, nor depart so very far from all resemblance to
the truth. When a traveller gives an account of some distant country,
he may impose upon our credulity, the most groundless and absurd
fictions as the most certain matters of fact. But when a person
pretends to inform us of what passes in our neighbourhood, and of the
affairs of the very parish which we live in, though here too, if we
are so careless as not to examine things with our own eyes, he may
deceive us in many respects, yet the greatest falsehoods which he
imposes upon us must bear some resemblance to the truth, and must even
have a considerable mixture of truth in them. An author who treats of
natural philosophy, and pretends to assign the causes of the great
phenomena of the universe, pretends to give an account of the affairs
of a very distant country, concerning which he may tell us what he
pleases, and as long as his narration keeps within the bounds of
seeming possibility, he need not despair of gaining of belief. But
when he proposes to explain the origin of our desires and affections,
of our sentiments of approbation and disapprobation, he pretends to
give an account, not only of the affairs of the very parish that we
live in, but of our own domestic concerns. Though here too, like
indolent masters who put their trust in a steward who deceives them,
we are very liable to be imposed upon, yet we are incapable of passing
any account which does not preserve some little regard to the truth.
Some of the articles, at least, must be just, and even those which are
most overcharged must have had some foundation, otherwise the fraud
would be detected even by that careless inspection which we are
disposed to give. The author who should assign, as the cause of any
natural sentiment, some principle which neither had any connection
with it, nor resembled any other principle which had some such
connection, would appear absurd and ridiculous to the most injudicious
and unexperienced reader.
-----
{279}
SEC. III.--OF THE DIFFERENT SYSTEMS WHICH HAVE BEEN FORMED CONCERNING
THE PRINCIPLE OF APPROBATION.
INTRODUCTION.--After the inquiry concerning the nature of virtue, the
next question of importance in Moral Philosophy, is concerning the
principle of approbation, concerning the power or faculty of the mind
which renders certain characters agreeable or disagreeable to us,
makes us prefer one tenor of conduct to another, denominate the one
right and the other wrong, and consider the one as the object of
approbation, honour, and reward, or the other as that of blame,
censure, and punishment.
Three different accounts have been given of this principle of
approbation. According to some, we approve and disapprove both of our
own actions and of those of others, from self-love only, or from some
view of their tendency to our own happiness or disadvantage: according
to others, reason, the same faculty by which we distinguish between
truth and falsehood, enables us to distinguish between what is fit and
unfit both in actions and affections: according to others, this
distinction is altogether the effect of immediate sentiment and
feeling, and arises from the satisfaction or disgust with which the
view of certain actions or affections inspires us. Self-love, reason
and sentiment, therefore, are the three different sources which have
been assigned for the principle of approbation.
Before I proceed to give an account of those different systems, I must
observe, that the determination of this second question, though of the
greatest importance in speculation, is of none in practice. The
question concerning the nature of virtue necessarily has some
influence upon our notions of right and wrong in many particular
cases. That concerning the principle of approbation can possibly have
no such effect. To examine from what contrivance or mechanism within,
those different notions or sentiments arise, is a mere matter of
philosophical curiosity.
-----
CHAP. I.--_Of those Systems which deduce the Principle of
Approbation from Self-love._
THOSE who account for the principle of approbation from self-love, do
not all account for it in the same manner, and there is a good deal of
confusion and inaccuracy in all their different systems. According to
Mr. Hobbes, and many of his followers (Puffendorff, Mandeville), man
is driven to take refuge in society, not by any natural love which he
bears to his own kind, but because without the assistance of others he
is incapable of subsisting with ease or safety. Society, upon this
account, becomes necessary to him, and whatever tends to its support
and welfare, he considers as having a remote tendency to his own {280}
interest; and, on the contrary, whatever is likely to disturb or
destroy it, he regards as in some measure hurtful or pernicious to
himself. Virtue is the great support, and vice the great disturber of
human society. The former, therefore, is agreeable, and the latter
offensive to every man; as from the one he foresees the prosperity,
and from the other the ruin and disorder of what is so necessary for
the comfort and the security of his existence.
That the tendency of virtue to promote, and of vice to disturb the
order of society, when we consider it coolly and philosophically,
reflects a very great beauty upon the one, and a very great deformity
upon the other, cannot, as I have observed upon a former occasion, be
called in question. Human society, when we contemplate it in a certain
abstract and philosophical light, appears like a great, an immense
machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand
agreeable effects. As in any other beautiful and noble machine that
was the production of human art, whatever tended to render its
movements more smooth and easy, would derive a beauty from this
effect, and, on the contrary, whatever tended to obstruct them would
displease upon that account: so virtue, which is, as it were, the fine
polish to the wheels of society, necessarily pleases; while vice, like
the vile rust, which makes them jar and grate upon one another, is as
necessarily offensive. This account, therefore, of the origin of
approbation and disapprobation, so far as it derives them from a
regard to the order of society, runs into that principle which gives
beauty to utility, and which I have explained upon a former occasion;
and it is from thence that this system derives all that appearance of
probability which it possesses. When those authors describe the
innumerable advantages of a cultivated and social, above a savage and
solitary life; when they expatiate upon the necessity of virtue and
good order for the maintenance of the one, and demonstrate how
infallibly the prevalence of vice and disobedience to the laws tend to
bring back the other, the reader is charmed with the novelty and
grandeur of those views which they open to him: he sees plainly a new
beauty in virtue, and a new deformity in vice, which he had never
taken notice of before, and is commonly so delighted with the
discovery, that he seldom takes time to reflect, that this political
view having never occurred to him in his life before, cannot possibly
be the ground of that approbation and disapprobation with which he has
been accustomed to consider those different qualities.
When those authors, on the other hand, deduce from self-love the
interest which we take in the welfare of society, and the esteem which
upon that account we bestow upon virtue, they do not mean, that when
we in this age applaud the virtue of Cato, and detest the villany of
Cataline, our sentiments are influenced by the notion of any benefit
we receive from the one, or of any detriment we suffer from the other.
It was not because the prosperity or subversion of society, in those
remote {281} ages and nations, was apprehended to have any influence
upon our happiness or misery in the present times; that according to
those philosophers, we esteemed the virtuous and blamed the disorderly
character. They never imagined that our sentiments were influenced by
any benefit or damage which we **supposed actually to redound to us,
from either; but by that which might have redounded to us, had we
lived in those distant ages and countries; or by that which might
still redound to us, if in our own times we should meet with
characters of the same kind. The idea, in short, which those authors
were groping about, but which they were never able to unfold
distinctly, was that indirect sympathy which we feel with the
gratitude or resentment of those who received the benefit or suffered
the damage resulting from such opposite characters: and it was this
which they were indistinctly pointing at, when they said, that it was
not the thought of what we had gained or suffered which prompted our
applause or indignation, but the conception or imagination of what we
might gain or suffer if we were to act in society with such
associates.
Sympathy, however, cannot, in any sense, be regarded as a selfish
principle. When I sympathize with your sorrow or your indignation, it
may be pretended, indeed, that my emotion is founded in self-love,
because it arises from bringing your case home to myself, from putting
myself in your situation, and thence conceiving what I should feel in
the like circumstances. But though sympathy is very properly said to
arise from an imaginary change of situations with the person
principally concerned, yet this imaginary change is not supposed to
happen to me in my own person and character, but in that of the person
with whom I sympathize. When I condole with you for the loss of your
only son, in order to enter into your grief I do not consider what I,
a person of such a character and profession, should suffer, if I had a
son, and if that son was unfortunately to die; but I consider what I
should suffer if I was really you, and I not only change circumstances
with you, but I change persons and characters. My grief, therefore, is
entirely upon your account, and not in the least upon my own. It is
not, therefore in the least selfish. How can that be regarded as a
selfish passion, which does not arise even from the imagination of any
thing that has befallen, or that relates to myself, in my own proper
person and character, but which is entirely occupied about what
relates to you? A man may sympathize with a woman in child-bed; though
it is impossible that he should conceive himself as suffering her
pains in his own proper person and character. That whole account of
human nature, however, which deduces all sentiments and affections
from self-love, which has made so much noise in the world, but which,
as far as I know, has never yet been fully and distinctly explained,
seems to me to have arisen from some confused misapprehension of the
system of sympathy.
{282}
CHAP. II.--_Of those Systems which make Reason the Principle of
Approbation._
IT is well known to have been the doctrine of Mr. Hobbes, that a state
of nature is a state of war; and that antecedent to the institution of
civil government, there could be no safe or peaceable society among
men. To preserve society, therefore, according to him, was to support
civil government, and to destroy civil government was the same thing
as to put an end to society. But the existence of civil government
depends upon the obedience that is paid to the supreme magistrate. The
moment he loses his authority, all government is at an end. As
self-preservation, therefore, teaches men to applaud whatever tends to
promote the welfare of society, and to blame whatever is likely to
hurt it; so the same principle, if they would think and speak
consistently, ought to teach them to applaud upon all occasions
obedience to the civil magistrate, and to blame all disobedience and
rebellion. The very ideas of laudable and blamable, ought to be the
same with those of obedience and disobedience. The laws of the civil
magistrate, therefore, ought to be regarded as the sole ultimate
standards of what was just and unjust, of what was right and wrong.
It was the avowed intention of Mr. Hobbes, by propagating these
notions, to subject the consciences of men immediately to the civil,
and not to the ecclesiastical powers, whose turbulence and ambition,
he had been taught, by the example of his own times, to regard as the
principal source of the disorders of society. His doctrine, upon this
account, was peculiarly offensive to theologians, who accordingly did
not fail to vent their indignation against him with great asperity and
bitterness. It was likewise offensive to all sound moralists, as it
supposed that there was no natural distinction between right and
wrong, that these were mutable and changeable, and depended upon the
mere arbitrary will of the civil magistrate. This account of things,
therefore, was attacked from all quarters, and by all sorts of
weapons, by sober reason as well as by furious declamation.
In order to confute so odious a doctrine, it was necessary to prove,
that antecedent to all law or positive institution, the mind was
naturally endowed with a faculty, by which it distinguished in certain
actions and affections, the qualities of right, laudable, and
virtuous, and in others those of wrong, blamable, and vicious.
Law, it was justly observed by Dr. Cudworth (Immutable Morality, 1.
1), could not be the original source of those distinctions; since upon
the supposition of such a law, it must either be right to obey it, and
wrong to disobey it, or indifferent whether we obeyed it or disobeyed
it. That law which it was indifferent whether we obeyed or disobeyed,
could not, it was evident, be the source of those distinctions;
neither {283} could that which it was right to obey and wrong to
disobey, since even this still supposed the antecedent notions or
ideas of right and wrong, and that obedience to the law was
conformable to the idea of right, and disobedience to that of wrong.
Since the mind, therefore, had a notion of those distinctions
antecedent to all law, it seemed necessarily to follow, that it
derived this notion from reason, which pointed out the difference
between right and wrong, in the same manner in which it did that
between truth and falsehood: and this conclusion, which, though true
in some respects, is rather hasty in others, was more easily received
at a time when the abstract science of human nature was but in its
infancy, and before the distinct offices and powers of the different
faculties of the human mind had been carefully examined and
distinguished from one another. When this controversy with Mr. Hobbes
was carried on with the greatest warmth and keenness, no other faculty
had been thought of from which any such ideas could possibly be
supposed to arise. It became at this time, therefore, the popular
doctrine, that the essence of virtue and vice did not consist in the
conformity or disagreement of human actions with the law of a
superior, but in their conformity or disagreement with reason, which
was thus considered as the original source and principle of
approbation and disapprobation.
That virtue consists in conformity to reason, is true in some
respects, and this faculty may very justly be considered as, in some
sense, the source and principle of approbation and disapprobation, and
of all solid judgments concerning right and wrong. It is by reason
that we discover those general rules of justice by which we ought to
regulate our actions: and it is by the same faculty that we form those
more vague and indeterminate ideas of what is prudent, of what is
decent, of what is generous or noble, which we carry constantly about
with us, and according to which we endeavour, as well as we can, to
model the tenor of our conduct. The general maxims of morality are
formed, like all other general maxims, from experience and induction.
We observe in a great variety of particular cases what pleases or
displeases our moral faculties, what these approve or disapprove of,
and, by induction from this experience, we establish those general
rules. But induction is always regarded as one of the operations of
reason. From reason, therefore, we are very properly said to derive
all those general maxims and ideas. It is by these, however, that we
regulate the greater part of our moral judgments, which would be
extremely uncertain and precarious if they depended altogether upon
what is liable to so many variations as immediate sentiment and
feeling, which the different states of health and humour are capable
of altering so essentially. As our most solid judgments, therefore,
with regard to right and wrong, are regulated by maxims and ideas
derived from an induction of reason, virtue may very properly be said
to consist in a conformity to {284} reason, and so far this faculty
may be considered as the source and principle of approbation and
disapprobation.
But though reason is undoubtedly the source of the general rules of
morality, and of all the moral judgments which we form by means of
them; it is altogether absurd and unintelligible to suppose that the
first perceptions of right and wrong can be derived from reason, even
in those particular cases upon the experience of which the general
rules are formed. These first perceptions, as well as all other
experiments upon which any general rules are founded, cannot be the
object of reason, but of immediate sense and feeling. It is by finding
in a vast variety of instances that one tenor of conduct constantly
pleases in a certain manner, and that another as constantly displeases
the mind, that we form the general rules of morality. But reason
cannot render any particular object either agreeable or disagreeable
to the mind for its own sake. Reason may show that this object is the
means of obtaining some other which is naturally either pleasing or
displeasing, and in this manner may render it either agreeable or
disagreeable for the sake of something else. But nothing can be
agreeable or disagreeable for its own sake, which is not rendered
such by immediate sense and feeling. If virtue, therefore, in every
particular instance, necessarily pleases for its own sake, and if vice
as certainly displeases the mind, it cannot be reason, but immediate
sense and feeling, which thus reconciles us to the one, and alienates
us from the other.
Pleasure and pain are the great objects of desire and aversion: but
these are distinguished, not by reason, but by immediate sense and
feeling. If virtue, therefore, be desirable for its own sake, and if
vice be, in the same manner, the object of aversion, it cannot be
reason which originally distinguishes those different qualities, but
immediate sense and feeling.
As reason, however, in a certain sense, may justly be considered as
the principle of approbation and disapprobation, these sentiments
were, through inattention, long regarded as originally flowing from
the operations of this faculty. Dr. Hutcheson had the merit of being
the first who distinguished with any degree of precision in what
respect all moral distinctions may be said to arise from reason, and
in what respect they are founded upon immediate sense and feeling. In
his illustrations upon the moral sense he has explained this so fully,
and, in my opinion, so unanswerably, that, if any controversy is still
kept up about this subject, I can impute it to nothing, but either to
inattention to what that gentleman has written, or to a superstitious
attachment to certain forms of expression, a weakness not very
uncommon among the learned, especially in subjects so deeply
interesting as the present, in which a man of virtue is often loath to
abandon even the propriety of a single phrase which he has been
accustomed to.
{285}
CHAP. III.--_Of those Systems which make Sentiment the Principle of
Approbation._
THOSE systems which make sentiment the principle of approbation may be
divided into two different classes.
I. According to some the principle of approbation is founded upon a
sentiment of a peculiar nature, upon a particular power of perception
exerted by the mind at the view of certain actions or affections; some
of which affecting this faculty in an agreeable and others in a
disagreeable manner, the former are stamped with the characters of
right, laudable, and virtuous; the latter with those of wrong,
blamable, and vicious. This sentiment being of a peculiar nature
distinct from every other, and the effect of a particular power of
perception, they give it a particular name, and call it a moral sense.
II. According to others, in order to account for the principle of
approbation, there is no occasion for supposing any new power of
perception which had never been heard of before: Nature, they imagine
acts here, as in all other cases, with the strictest oeconomy, and
produces a multitude of effects from one and the same cause; and
sympathy, a power which has always been taken notice of, and with
which the mind is manifestly endowed, is, they think, sufficient to
account for all the effects ascribed to this peculiar faculty.
I. Dr. Hutcheson (Inquiry concerning Virtue) had been at great pains
to prove that the principle of approbation was not founded on
self-love. He had demonstrated, too, that it could not arise from any
operation of reason. Nothing remained, he thought, but to suppose it a
faculty of a peculiar kind, with which Nature had endowed the human
mind, in order to produce this one particular and important effect.
When self-love and reason were both excluded, it did not occur to him
that there was any other known faculty of the mind which could in any
respect answer this purpose.
This new power of perception he called a moral sense, and supposed it
to be somewhat analogous to the external senses. As the bodies around
us, by affecting these in a certain manner, appear to possess the
different qualities of sound, taste, odour, colour; so the various
affections of the human mind, by touching this particular faculty in a
certain manner, appear to possess the different qualities of amiable
and odious, of virtuous and vicious, of right and wrong.
The various senses or powers of perception (Treatise of the Passions)
from which the human mind derives all its simple ideas, were,
according to this system, of two different kinds, of which the one
were called the direct or antecedent, the other, the reflex or
consequent senses. The direct senses were those faculties from which
the mind derived the perception of such species of things as did not
presuppose {286} the antecedent perception of any other. Thus sounds
and colours were objects of the direct senses. To hear a sound or to
see a colour does not presuppose the antecedent perception of any
other quality or object. The reflex or consequent senses, on the other
hand, were those faculties from which the mind derived the perception
of such species of things as presupposed the antecedent perception of
some other. Thus harmony and beauty were objects of the reflex senses.
In order to perceive the harmony of a sound, or the beauty of a
colour, we must first perceive the sound or the colour. The moral
sense was considered as a faculty of this kind. That faculty, which
Mr. Locke calls reflection, and from which he derived the simple ideas
of the different passions and emotions of the human mind, was,
according to Dr. Hutcheson, a direct internal sense. That faculty
again by which we perceived the beauty or deformity, the virtue or
vice, of those different passions and emotions, was a reflex, internal
sense.
Dr. Hutcheson endeavoured still further to support this doctrine, by
showing that it was agreeable to the analogy of nature, and that the
mind was endowed with a variety of other reflex senses exactly similar
to the moral sense; such as a sense of beauty and deformity in
external objects; a public sense, by which we sympathize with the
happiness or misery of our fellow-creatures; a sense of shame and
honour, and a sense of ridicule.
But notwithstanding all the pains which this ingenious philosopher has
taken to prove that the principle of approbation is founded in a
peculiar power of perception, somewhat analogous to the external
senses, there are some consequences, which he acknowledges to follow
from this doctrine, that will, perhaps, be regarded by many as a
sufficient confutation of it. The qualities, he allows,[8] which
belong to the objects of any sense, cannot, without the greatest
absurdity, be ascribed to the sense itself. Who ever thought of
calling the sense of seeing black or white, the sense of hearing loud
or low, or the sense of tasting sweet or bitter? And, according to
him, it is equally absurd to call our moral faculties virtuous or
vicious, morally good or evil. These qualities belong to the objects
of those faculties, not to the faculties themselves. If any man,
therefore, was so absurdly constituted as to approve of cruelty and
injustice as the highest virtues, and to disapprove of equity and
humanity as the most pitiful vices, such a constitution of mind might
indeed be regarded as inconvenient both to the individual and to the
society, and likewise as strange, surprising, and unnatural in itself;
but it could not, without the greatest absurdity, be denominated
vicious or morally evil.
[Footnote 8: Illustrations upon the Moral Sense, sect. i. p. 237, et
seq.; third edition.]
Yet surely if we saw any man shouting with admiration and applause at
a barbarous and unmerited execution, which some insolent tyrant had
ordered, we should not think we were guilty of any great absurdity
{287} in denominating this behaviour vicious and morally evil in the
highest degree, though it expressed nothing but depraved moral
faculties, or an absurd approbation of this horrid action, as of what
was noble, magnanimous, and great. Our heart, I imagine, at the sight
of such a spectator, would forget for a while its sympathy with the
sufferer, and feel nothing but horror and detestation, at the thought
of so execrable a wretch. We should abominate him even more than the
tyrant who might be goaded on by the strong passions of jealousy,
fear, and resentment, and upon that account be more excusable. But the
sentiments of the spectator would appear altogether without cause or
motive, and therefore most perfectly and completely detestable. There
is no perversion of sentiment or affection which our heart would be
more averse to enter into, or which it would reject with greater
hatred and indignation than one of this kind; and so far from
regarding such a constitution of mind as being merely something
strange or inconvenient, and not in any respect vicious or morally
evil, we should rather consider it as the very last and most dreadful
stage of depravity.
Correct moral sentiments, on the contrary, naturally appear in some
degree laudable and morally good. The man, whose censure and applause
are upon all occasions suited with the greatest accuracy to the value
or unworthiness of the object, seems to deserve a degree even of moral
approbation. We admire the delicate precision of his moral sentiments:
they lead our own judgments, and, upon account of their uncommon and
surprising justness, they even excite our wonder and applause. We
cannot indeed be always sure that the conduct of such a person would
be in any respect correspondent to the precision and accuracy of his
judgment concerning the conduct of others. Virtue requires habit and
resolution of mind, as well as delicacy of sentiment; and
unfortunately the former qualities are sometimes wanting, where the
latter is in the greatest perfection. This disposition of mind,
however, though it may sometimes be attended with imperfections, is
incompatible with any thing that is grossly criminal, and is the
happiest foundation upon which the superstructure of perfect virtue
can be built. There are many men who mean very well, and seriously
purpose to do what they think their duty, who notwithstanding are
disagreeable because of the coarseness of their moral sentiments.
It may be said, perhaps, that though the principle of approbation is
not founded upon any perception that is in any respect analogous to
the external senses, it may still be founded upon a peculiar sentiment
which answers this one particular purpose and no other. Approbation
and disapprobation, it may be pretended, are certain feelings or
emotions which arise in the mind upon the view of different characters
and actions; and as resentment might be called a sense of injuries, or
gratitude a sense of benefits, so these may very properly receive the
name of a sense of right and wrong, or of a moral sense.
{288} But this account of things, though it may not be liable to the
same objections with the foregoing, is exposed to others which may be
equally unanswerable.
First of all, whatever variations any particular emotion may undergo,
it still preserves the general features which distinguish it to be an
emotion of such a kind, and these general features are always more
striking and remarkable than any variation which it may undergo in
particular cases. Thus anger is an emotion of a particular kind: and
accordingly its general features are always more distinguishable than
all the variations it undergoes in particular cases. Anger against a
man is, no doubt, somewhat different from anger against a woman, and
that again from anger against a child. In each of those three cases,
the general passion of anger receives a different modification from
the particular character of its object, as may easily be observed by
the attentive. But still the general features of the passion
predominate in all these cases. To distinguish these, requires no nice
observation: a very delicate attention, on the contrary, is necessary
to discover their variations: every body takes notice of the former;
scarce any body observes the latter. If approbation and
disapprobation, therefore, were, like gratitude and resentment,
emotions of a particular kind, distinct from every other, we should
expect that in all the variations which either of them might undergo,
it would still retain the general features which mark it to be an
emotion of such a particular kind, clear, plain and easily
distinguishable. But in fact it happens quite otherwise. If we attend
to what we really feel when upon different occasions we either approve
or disapprove, we shall find that our emotion in one case is often
totally different from that in another, and that no common features
can possibly be discovered between them. Thus the approbation with
which we view a tender, delicate, and humane sentiment, is quite
different from that with which we are struck by one that appears
great, daring, and magnanimous. Our approbation of both may, upon
different occasions, be perfect and entire; but we are softened by the
one, and we are elevated by the other, and there is no sort of
resemblance between the emotions which they excite in us. But,
according to that system which I have been endeavouring to establish,
this must necessarily be the case. As the emotions of the person whom
we approve of, are, in those two cases, quite opposite to one another,
and as our approbation arises from sympathy with those opposite
emotions, what we feel upon the one occasion, can have no sort of
resemblance to what we feel upon the other. But this could not happen
if approbation consisted in a peculiar emotion which had nothing in
common with the sentiments we approved of, but which arose at the view
of those sentiments, like any other passion at the view of its proper
object. The same thing holds true with regard to disapprobation. Our
horror for cruelty has no sort of resemblance to our contempt for
{289} mean-spiritedness. It is quite a different species of discord
which we feel at the view of those two different vices, between our
own minds and those of the person whose sentiments and behaviour we
consider.
Secondly, I have already observed, that not only the different
passions or affections of the human mind which are approved or
disapproved of, appear morally good or evil, but that proper and
improper approbation appear, to our natural sentiments, to be stamped
with the same characters. I would ask, therefore, how it is, that,
according to this system, we approve or disapprove of proper or
improper approbation? To this question there is, I imagine, but one
reasonable answer which can possibly be given. It must be said, that
when the approbation with which our neighbour regards the conduct of a
third person coincides with our own, we approve of his approbation,
and consider it as, in some measure, morally good; and that, on the
contrary, when it does not coincide with our own sentiments, we
disapprove of it, and consider it as, in some measure, morally evil.
It must be allowed, therefore, that, at least in this one case, the
coincidence or opposition of sentiment, between the observer and the
person observed, constitutes moral approbation or disapprobation. And
if it does so in this one case, I would ask, why not in every other?
to what purpose imagine a new power of perception in order to account
for those sentiments?
Against every account of the principle of approbation, which makes it
depend upon a peculiar sentiment, distinct from every other, I would
object that it is strange that this sentiment, which Providence
undoubtedly intended to be the governing principle of human nature,
should hitherto have been so little taken notice of, as not to have
got a name in any language. The word Moral Sense is of very late
formation, and cannot yet be considered as making part of the English
tongue. The word Approbation has but within these few years been
appropriated to denote peculiarly any thing of this kind. In propriety
of language we approve of whatever is entirely to our satisfaction, of
the form of a building, of the contrivance of a machine, of the
flavour of a dish of meat. The word Conscience does not immediately
denote any moral faculty by which we approve or disapprove. Conscience
supposes, indeed, the existence of some such faculty, and properly
signifies our consciousness of having acted agreeably or contrary to
its directions. When love, hatred, joy, sorrow, gratitude, resentment,
with so many other passions which are all supposed to be the subjects
of this principle, have made themselves considerable enough to get
titles to know them by, is it not surprising that the sovereign of
them all should hitherto have been so little heeded, that, a few
philosophers excepted, nobody has yet thought it worth while to bestow
a name upon that principle.
When we approve of any character or action, the sentiments which we
feel, are, according to the foregoing system, derived from four {290}
sources, which are in some respects different from one another. First,
we sympathize with the motives of the agent; secondly, we enter into
the gratitude of those who receive the benefit of his actions;
thirdly, we observe that his conduct has been agreeable to the general
rules by which those two sympathies generally act; and, last of all,
when we consider such actions as making a part of a system of
behaviour which tends to promote the happiness either of the
individual or of the society, they appear to derive a beauty from this
utility, not unlike that which we ascribe to any well-contrived
machine. After deducting, in any one particular case, all that must be
acknowledged to proceed from some one or other of these four
principles, I should be glad to know what remains, and I shall
freely allow this overplus to be ascribed to a moral sense, or to any
other peculiar faculty, provided any body will ascertain precisely
what this overplus is. It might be expected, perhaps, that if there
was any such peculiar principle, such as this moral sense is supposed
to be, we should feel it, in some particular cases, separated and
detached from every other, as we often feel joy, sorrow, hope, and
fear, pure and unmixed with any other emotion. This, however, I
imagine, cannot even be pretended. I have never heard any instance
alleged in which this principle could be said to exert itself alone
and unmixed with sympathy or antipathy, with gratitude or resentment,
with the perception of the agreement or disagreement of any action to
an established rule, or last of all, with that general taste for
beauty and order which is excited by inanimated as well as by animated
objects.
II. There is another system which attempts to account for the origin
of our moral sentiments from sympathy, distinct from that which I have
been endeavouring to establish. It is that which places virtue in
utility, and accounts for the pleasure with which the spectator
surveys the utility of any quality from sympathy with the happiness of
those who are affected by it. This sympathy is different both from
that by which we enter into the motives of the agent, and from that by
which we go along with the gratitude of the persons who are benefited
by his actions. It is the same principle with that by which we approve
of a well-contrived machine. But no machine can be the object of
either of those two last-mentioned sympathies. I have already, in the
fourth part of this discourse, given some account of this system.
-----
SEC. IV.--OF THE MANNER IN WHICH DIFFERENT AUTHORS HAVE TREATED OF THE
PRACTICAL RULES OF MORALITY.
IT was observed in the third part of this discourse, that the rules of
justice are the only rules of morality which are precise and accurate;
that those of all the other virtues are loose, vague, and
indeterminate; {291} that the first may be compared to the rules of
grammar; the others to those which critics lay down for the attainment
of what is sublime and elegant in composition, and which present us
rather with a general idea of the perfection we ought to aim at, than
afford us any certain and infallible directions for acquiring it.
As the different rules of morality admit such different degrees of
accuracy, those authors who have endeavoured to collect and digest
them into systems have done it in two different manners; and one set
has followed through the whole that loose method to which they were
naturally directed by the consideration of one species of virtues;
while another has as universally endeavoured to introduce into their
precepts that sort of accuracy of which only some of them are
susceptible. The first have written like critics, the second like
grammarians.
I. The first, among whom we may count all the ancient moralists, have
contented themselves with describing in a general manner the different
vices and virtues, and with pointing out the deformity and misery of
the one disposition, as well as the propriety and happiness of the
other, but have not affected to lay down many precise rules that are
to hold good unexceptionally in all particular cases. They have only
endeavoured to ascertain, as far as language is capable of
ascertaining, first, wherein consists the sentiment of the heart, upon
which each particular virtue is founded, what sort of internal feeling
or emotion it is which constitutes the essence of friendship, of
humanity, of generosity, of justice, of magnanimity, and of all the
other virtues, as well as of the vices which are opposed to them: and,
secondly, what is the general way of acting, the ordinary tone and
tenor of conduct to which each of those sentiments would direct us, or
how it is that a friendly, a generous, a brave, a just, and a humane
man, would upon ordinary occasions, choose to act.
To characterize the sentiment of the heart, upon which each particular
virtue is founded, though it requires both a delicate and an accurate
pencil, is a task, however, which may be executed with some degree of
exactness. It is impossible, indeed, to express all the variations
which each sentiment either does or ought to undergo, according to
every possible variation of circumstances. They are endless, and
language wants names to mark them by. The sentiment of friendship, for
example, which we feel for an old man is different from that which we
feel for a young: that which we entertain for an austere man different
from that which we feel for one of softer and gentler manners: and
that again from what we feel for one of gay vivacity and spirit. The
friendship which we conceive for a man is different from that with
which a woman affects us, even where there is no mixture of any
grosser passion. What author could enumerate and ascertain these and
all the other infinite varieties which this sentiment is capable of
undergoing? But still the general sentiment of friendship and familiar
{292} attachment which is common to them all, may be ascertained with
a sufficient degree of accuracy. The picture which is drawn of it,
though it will always be in many respects incomplete, may, however,
have such a resemblance as to make us know the original when we meet
with it, and even distinguish it from other sentiments to which it has
a considerable resemblance, such as good-will, respect, admiration.
To describe, in a general manner, what is the ordinary way of acting
to which each virtue would prompt us, is still more easy. It is,
indeed, scarce possible to describe the internal sentiment or emotion
upon which it is founded, without doing something of this kind. It is
impossible by language to express, if I may say so, the invisible
features of all the different modifications of passion as they show
themselves within. There is no other way of marking and distinguishing
them from one another, but by describing the effects which they
produce without, the alterations which they occasion in the
countenance, in the air and external behaviour, the resolutions they
suggest, the actions they prompt to. It is thus that Cicero, in the
first book of his Offices, endeavours to direct us to the practice of
the four cardinal virtues, and that Aristotle in the practical parts
of his Ethics, points out to us the different habits by which he would
have us regulate our behaviour, such as liberality, magnificence,
magnanimity, and even jocularity and good humour, qualities which that
indulgent philosopher has thought worthy of a place in the catalogue
of the virtues, though the lightness of that approbation which we
naturally bestow upon them, should not seem to entitle them to so
venerable a name.
Such works present us with agreeable and lively pictures of manners.
By the vivacity of their descriptions they inflame our natural love of
virtue, and increase our abhorrence of vice: by the justness as well
as delicacy of their observations they may often help both to correct
and to ascertain our natural sentiments with regard to the propriety
of conduct, and suggesting many nice and delicate attentions, form us
to a more exact justness of behaviour, than what, without such
instruction, we should have been apt to think of. In treating of the
rules of morality, in this manner, consists the science which is
properly called Ethics, a science which, though like criticism, it
does not admit of the most accurate precision, is, however, both
highly useful and agreeable. It is of all others the most susceptible
of the embellishments of eloquence, and by means of them of bestowing,
if that be possible, a new importance upon the smallest rules of duty.
Its precepts, when thus dressed and adorned, are capable of producing
upon the flexibility of youth, the noblest and most lasting
impressions, and as they fall in with the natural magnanimity of that
generous age, they are able to inspire, for a time at least, the most
heroic resolutions, and thus tend both to establish and confirm the
best and most useful habits of which the mind of man is susceptible.
Whatever precept and exhortation can do to {293} animate us to the
practice of virtue, is done by this science delivered in this manner.
II. The second set of moralists, among whom we may count all the
casuists of the middle and latter ages of the Christian church, as
well as all those who in this and in the preceding century have
treated of what is called natural jurisprudence, do not content
themselves with characterizing in this general manner that tenor of
conduct which they would recommend to us, but endeavour to lay down
exact and precise rules for the direction of every circumstance of our
behaviour. As justice is the only virtue with regard to which such
exact rules can properly be given; it is this virtue, that has chiefly
fallen under the consideration of those two different sets of writers.
They treat of it, however, in a very different manner.
Those who write upon the principles of jurisprudence, consider only
what the person to whom the obligation is due, ought to think himself
entitled to exact by force; what every impartial spectator would
approve of him for exacting, or what a judge or arbiter, to whom he
had submitted his case, and who had undertaken to do him justice,
ought to oblige the other person to suffer or to perform. The
casuists, on the other hand, do not so much examine what it is, that
might properly be exacted by force, as what it is, that the person who
owes the obligation ought to think himself bound to perform from the
most sacred and scrupulous regard to the general rules of justice, and
from the most conscientious dread, either of wronging his neighbour,
or of violating the integrity of his own character. It is the end of
jurisprudence to prescribe rules for the decisions of judges and
arbiters. It is the end of casuistry to prescribe rules for the
conduct of a good man. By observing all the rules of jurisprudence,
supposing them ever so perfect, we should deserve nothing but to be
free from external punishment. By observing those of casuistry,
supposing them such as they ought to be, we should be entitled to
considerable praise by the exact and scrupulous delicacy of our
behaviour.
It may frequently happen that a good man ought to think himself bound,
from a sacred and conscientious regard to the general rules of
justice, to perform many things which it would be the highest
injustice to extort from him, or for any judge or arbiter to impose
upon him by force. To give a trite example; a highwayman, by the fear
of death, obliges a traveller to promise him a certain sum money.
Whether such a promise, extorted in this manner by force, ought to be
regarded as obligatory, is a question that has been much debated.
If we consider it merely as a question of jurisprudence, the decision
can admit of no doubt. It would be absurd to suppose that the
highwayman can be entitled to use force to constrain the other to
perform. To extort the promise was a crime which deserved the highest
punishment, and to extort the performance would only be adding a new
crime {294} to the former. He can complain of no injury who has been
only deceived by the person by whom he might justly have been killed.
To suppose that a judge ought to enforce the obligation of such
promises, or that the magistrate ought to allow them to sustain action
at law, would be the most ridiculous of all absurdities. If we
consider this question, therefore, as a question of jurisprudence, we
can be at no loss about the decision.
But if we consider it as a question of casuistry, it will not be so
easily determined. Whether a good man, from a conscientious regard to
that most sacred rule of justice, which commands the observance of all
serious promises, would not think himself bound to perform, is at
least much more doubtful. That no regard is due to the disappointment
of the wretch who brings him into this situation, that no injury is
done to the robber, and consequently that nothing can be extorted by
force, will admit of no sort of dispute. But whether some regard is
not, in this case, due to his own dignity and honour, to the
inviolable sacredness of that part of his character which makes him
reverence the law of truth and abhor every thing that approaches to
treachery and falsehood, may, perhaps, more reasonably be made a
question. The casuists accordingly are greatly divided about it. One
party, with whom we may count Cicero among the ancients, among the
moderns, Puffendorf, Barbeyrac his commentator, and above all the late
Dr. Hutcheson, one who in most cases was by no means a loose casuist,
determine, without any hesitation, that no sort of regard is due to
any such promise, and that to think otherwise is mere weakness and
superstition. Another party, among whom we may reckon (St. Augustine,
La Placette) some of the ancient fathers of the church, as well as
some very eminent modern casuists, have been of another opinion, and
have judged all such promises obligatory.
If we consider the matter according to the common sentiments of
mankind, we shall find that some regard would be thought due even to a
promise of this kind; but that it is impossible to determine how much,
by any general rule that will apply to all cases without exception.
The man who was quite frank and easy in making promises of this kind,
and who violated them with as little ceremony, we should not choose
for our friend and companion. A gentleman who should promise a
highwayman five pounds and not perform, would incur some blame. If the
sum promised, however, was very great, it might be more doubtful what
was proper to be done. If it was such, for example, that the payment
of it would entirely ruin the family of the promiser, if it was so
great as to be sufficient for promoting the most useful purposes, it
would appear in some measure criminal, at least extremely improper, to
throw it for the sake of a punctilio into such worthless hands. The
man who should beggar himself, or who should throw away an hundred
thousand pounds, though he could afford that {295} vast sum, for the
sake of observing such a parole with a thief, would appear to the
common sense of mankind, absurd and extravagant in the highest degree.
Such profusion would seem inconsistent with his duty, with what he
owed both to himself and others, and what, therefore, regard to a
promise extorted in this manner, could by no means authorise. To fix,
however, by any precise rule, what degree of regard ought to be paid
to it, or what might be the greatest sum which could be due from it,
is evidently impossible. This would vary according to the characters
of the persons, according to their circumstances, according to the
solemnity of the promise, and even according to the incidents of the
rencounter: and if the promiser had been treated with a great deal of
that sort of gallantry, which is sometimes to be met with in persons
of the most abandoned characters, more would seem due than upon other
occasions. It may be said in general, that exact propriety requires
the observance of all such promises, wherever it is not inconsistent
with some other duties that are more sacred; such as regard to the
public interest, to those whom gratitude, whom natural affection, or
whom the laws of proper beneficence should prompt us to provide for.
But, as was formerly taken notice of, we have no precise rules to
determine what external actions are due from a regard to such motives,
nor, consequently, when it is that those virtues are inconsistent with
the observance of such promises.
It is to be observed, however, that whenever such promises are
violated, though for the most necessary reasons, it is always with
some degree of dishonour to the person who made them. After they are
made, we may be convinced of the impropriety of observing them. But
still there is some fault in having made them. It is at least a
departure from the highest and noblest maxims of magnanimity and
honour. A brave man ought to die, rather than make a promise which he
can neither keep without folly, nor violate without ignominy. For some
degree of ignominy always attends a situation of this kind. Treachery
and falsehood are vices so dangerous, so dreadful, and, at the same
time, such as may so easily, and, upon many occasions, so safely be
indulged, that we are more jealous of them than of almost any other.
Our imagination therefore attaches the idea of shame to all violations
of faith, in every circumstance and in every situation. They resemble,
in this respect, the violations of chastity in the fair sex, a virtue
of which, for the like reasons, we are excessively jealous; and our
sentiments are not more delicate with regard to the one, than with
regard to the other. Breach of chastity dishonours irretrievably. No
circumstances, no solicitation can excuse it; no sorrow, no repentance
atone for it. We are so nice in this respect that even a rape
dishonours, and the innocence of the mind cannot, in our imagination,
wash out the pollution of the body. It is the same case with the
violation of faith, when it has been solemnly pledged, even to the
most {296} worthless of mankind. Fidelity is so necessary a virtue,
that we apprehend it in general to be due even to those to whom
nothing else is due, and whom we think it lawful to kill and destroy.
It is to no purpose that the person who has been guilty of the breach
of it, urges that he promised in order to save his life, and that he
broke his promise because it was inconsistent with some other
respectable duty to keep it. These circumstances may alleviate, but
cannot entirely wipe out his dishonour. He appears to have been guilty
of an action with which, in the imaginations of men, some degree of
shame is inseparably connected. He has broken a promise which he had
solemnly averred he would maintain; and his character, if not
irretrievably stained and polluted, has at least a ridicule affixed to
it, which it will be very difficult entirely to efface; and no man, I
imagine, who had gone through an adventure of this kind would be fond
of telling the story.
This instance may serve to show wherein consists the difference
between casuistry and jurisprudence, even when both of them consider
the obligations of the general rules of justice.
But though this difference be real and essential, though those two
sciences propose quite different ends, the sameness of the subject has
made such a similarity between them, that the greater part of authors
whose professed design was to treat of jurisprudence, have determined
the different questions they examine, sometimes according to the
principles of that science, and sometimes according to those of
casuistry, without distinguishing, and, perhaps, without being
themselves aware, when they did the one, and when the other.
The doctrine of the casuists, however, is by no means confined to the
consideration of what a conscientious regard to the general rules of
justice would demand of us. It embraces many other parts of Christian
and moral duty. What seems principally to have given occasion to the
cultivation of this species of science was the custom of auricular
confession, introduced by the Roman Catholic superstition, in times of
barbarism and ignorance. By that institution, the most secret actions,
and even the thoughts of every person, which could be suspected of
receding in the smallest degree from the rules of Christian purity,
were to be revealed to the confessor. The confessor informed his
penitents whether, and in what respect, they had violated their duty,
and what penance it behoved them to undergo, before he could absolve
them in the name of the offended Deity.
The consciousness, or even the suspicion of having done wrong, is a
load upon every mind, and is accompanied with anxiety and terror in
all those who are not hardened by long habits of iniquity. Men, in
this, as in all other distresses, are naturally eager to disburthen
themselves of the oppression which they feel upon their thoughts, by
unbosoming the agony of their mind to some person whose secrecy and
discretion they can confide in. The shame, which they suffer from this
{297} acknowledgment, is fully compensated by that alleviation of
their uneasiness which the sympathy of their confidence seldom fails
to occasion. It relieves them to find that they are not altogether
unworthy of regard, and that however their past conduct may be
censured, their present disposition is at least approved of, and is
perhaps sufficient to compensate the other, at least to maintain them
in some degree of esteem with their friend. A numerous and artful
clergy had, in those times of superstition, insinuated themselves into
the confidence of almost every private family. They possessed all the
little learning which the times could afford, and their manners,
though in many respects rude and disorderly, were polished and regular
compared with those of the age they lived in. They were regarded,
therefore, not only as the great directors of all religious, but of
all moral duties. Their familiarity gave reputation to whoever was so
happy as to possess it, and every mark of their disapprobation stamped
the deepest ignominy upon all who had the misfortune to fall under it.
Being considered as the great judges of right and wrong, they were
naturally consulted about all scruples that occurred, and it was
reputable for any person to have it known that he made those holy men
the confidants of all such secrets, and took no important or delicate
step in his conduct without their advice and approbation. It was not
difficult for the clergy, therefore, to get it established as a
general rule, that they should be entrusted with what it had already
become fashionable to entrust them, and with what they generally would
have been entrusted, though no such rule had been established. To
qualify themselves for confessors became thus a necessary part of the
study of churchmen and divines, and they were thence led to collect
what are called cases of conscience, nice and delicate situations in
which it is hard to determine whereabouts the propriety of conduct may
lie. Such works, they imagined, might be of use both to the directors
of consciences and to those who were to be directed; and hence the
origin of books of casuistry.
The moral duties which fell under the consideration of the casuists
were chiefly those which can, in some measure at least, be
circumscribed within general rules, and of which the violation is
naturally attended with some degree of remorse and some dread of
suffering punishment. The design of that institution which gave
occasion to their works, was to appease those terrors of conscience
which attend upon the infringement of such duties. But it is not every
virtue of which the defect is accompanied with any very severe
compunctions of this kind, and no man applies to his confessor for
absolution, because he did not perform the most generous, the most
friendly, or the most magnanimous action which, in his circumstances,
it was possible to perform. In failures of this kind, the rule that is
violated is commonly not very determinate, and is generally of such a
nature too, that though the observance of it might entitle to honour
and reward, the violation {298} seems to expose to no positive blame,
censure, or punishment. The exercise of such virtues the casuists seem
to have regarded as a sort of works of supererogation, which could not
be very strictly exacted, and which it was therefore unnecessary for
them to treat of.
The breaches of moral duty, therefore, which came before the tribunal
of the confessor, and upon that account fell under the cognisance of
the casuists, were chiefly of three different kinds.
First and principally, breaches of the rules of justice. The rules
here are all express and positive, and the violation of them is
naturally attended with the consciousness of deserving, and the dread
of suffering punishment both from God and man.
Secondly, breaches of the rules of chastity. These in all grosser
instances are real breaches of the rules of justice, and no person can
be guilty of them without doing the most unpardonable injury to some
other. In smaller instances, when they amount only to a violation of
those exact decorums which ought to be observed in the conversation of
the two sexes, they cannot indeed justly be considered as violations
of the rules of justice. They are generally, however, violations of a
pretty plain rule, and, at least in one of the sexes, tend to bring
ignominy upon the person who has been guilty of them, and consequently
to be attended in the scrupulous with some degree of shame and
contrition of mind.
Thirdly, breaches of the rules of veracity. The violation of truth,
it is to be observed, is not always a breach of justice, though it is
so upon many occasions, and consequently cannot always expose to any
external punishment. The vice of common lying, though a most miserable
meanness, may frequently do hurt to nobody, and in this case no claim
of vengeance or satisfaction can be due either to the persons imposed
upon, or to others. But though the violation of truth is not always a
breach of justice, it is always a breach of a very plain rule, and
what does naturally tend to cover with shame the person who has been
guilty of it.
There seems to be in young children an instinctive disposition to
believe whatever they are told. Nature seems to have judged it
necessary for their preservation that they should, for some time at
least, put implicit confidence in those to whom the care of their
childhood, and of the earliest and most necessary parts of their
education, is intrusted. Their credulity, accordingly, is excessive,
and it requires long and much experience of the falsehood of mankind
to reduce them to a reasonable degree of diffidence and distrust. In
grown-up people the degrees of credulity are, no doubt, very
different. The wisest and most experienced are generally the least
credulous. But the man scarce lives who is not more credulous than he
ought to be, and who does not, upon many occasions, give credit to
tales, which not only turn out to be perfectly false, but which a very
moderate degree of reflection and {299} attention might have taught
him could not well be true. The natural disposition is always to
believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach
incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most
cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself
is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think
of believing.
The man whom we believe is necessarily, in the things concerning which
we believe him, our leader and director, and we look up to him with a
certain degree of esteem and respect. But as from admiring other
people we come to wish to be admired ourselves; so from being led and
directed by other people we learn to wish to become ourselves leaders
and directors. And as we cannot always be satisfied merely with being
admired, unless we can at the same time persuade ourselves that we are
in some degree really worthy of admiration; so we cannot always be
satisfied merely with being believed, unless we are at the same time
conscious that we are really worthy of belief. As the desire of praise
and that of praise-worthiness, though very much akin, are yet distinct
and separate desires; so the desire of being believed and that of
being worthy of belief, though very much akin too, are equally
distinct and separate desires.
The desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading and
directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our
natural desires. It is, perhaps, the instinct upon which is founded
the faculty of speech, the characteristical faculty of human nature.
No other animal possesses this faculty, and we cannot discover in any
other animal any desire to lead and direct the judgment and conduct of
its fellows. Great ambition, the desire of real, superiority, of
leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and
speech is the great instrument of ambition, of real superiority, of
leading and directing the judgments and conduct of other people.
It is always mortifying not to be believed, and it is doubly so when
we suspect that it is because we are supposed to be unworthy of
belief and capable of seriously and wilfully deceiving. To tell a man
that he lies, is of all affronts the most mortal. But whoever
seriously and wilfully deceives is necessarily conscious to himself
that he merits this affront, that he does not deserve to be believed,
and that he forfeits all title to that sort of credit from which alone
he can derive any sort of ease, comfort, or satisfaction in the
society of his equals. The man who had the misfortune to imagine that
nobody believed a single word he said, would feel himself the outcast
of human society, would dread the very thought of going into it, or of
presenting himself before it, and could scarce fail, I think, to die
of despair. It is probable, however, that no man ever had just reason
to entertain this humiliating opinion of himself. The most notorious
liar, I am disposed to believe, tells the fair truth at least twenty
times for once that he seriously and {300} deliberately lies; and, as
in the most cautious the disposition to believe is apt to prevail over
that to doubt and distrust; so in those who are the most regardless of
truth, the natural disposition to tell it prevails upon most occasions
over that to deceive, or in any respect to alter or to disguise it.
We are mortified when we happen to deceive other people, though
unintentionally, and from having been ourselves deceived. Though this
involuntary falsehood may frequently be no mark of any want of
veracity, of any want of the most perfect love of truth, it is always
in some degree a mark of want of judgment, of want of memory, of
improper credulity, of some degree of precipitancy and rashness. It
always diminishes our authority to persuade, and always brings some
degree of suspicion upon our fitness to lead and direct. The man who
sometimes misleads from mistake, however, is widely different from him
who is capable of wilfully deceiving. The former may be trusted upon
many occasions; the latter very seldom upon any.
Frankness and openness conciliate confidence. We trust the man, who
seems willing to trust us. We see clearly, we think, the road by which
he means to conduct us, and we abandon ourselves with pleasure to his
guidance and direction. Reserve and concealment, on the contrary, call
forth diffidence. We are afraid to follow the man who is going we do
not know where. The great pleasure of conversation and society,
besides, arises from a certain correspondence of sentiments and
opinions, from a certain harmony of minds, which like so many musical
instruments coincide and keep time with one another. But this most
delightful harmony cannot be obtained unless there is a free
communication of sentiments and opinions. We all desire, upon this
account, to feel how each other is affected, to penetrate into each
other's bosoms, and to observe the sentiments and affections which
really subsist there. The man who indulges us in this natural passion,
who invites us into his heart, who, as it were, sets open the gates of
his breast to us, seems to exercise a species of hospitality more
delightful than any other. No man, who is in ordinary good temper, can
fail of pleasing, if he has the courage to utter his real sentiments
as he feels them, and because he feels them. It is this unreserved
sincerity which renders even the prattle of a child agreeable. How
weak and imperfect soever the views of the open-hearted, we take
pleasure to enter into them, and endeavour, as much as we can, to
bring down our own understanding to the level of their capacities, and
to regard every subject in the particular light in which they appear
to have considered it. This passion to discover the real sentiments of
others is naturally so strong, that it often degenerates into a
troublesome and impertinent curiosity to pry into those secrets of our
neighbours which they have very justifiable reasons for concealing;
and, upon many occasions, it requires prudence and a strong sense of
propriety to govern this, as {301} well as all the other passions of
human nature, and to reduce it to that pitch which any impartial
spectator can approve of. To disappoint this curiosity, however, when
it is kept within proper bounds, and aims at nothing which there can
be any just reason for concealing, is equally disagreeable in its
turn. The man who eludes our most innocent questions, who gives no
satisfaction to our most inoffensive inquiries, who plainly wraps
himself up in impenetrable obscurity, seems, as it were, to build a
wall about his breast. We run forward to get within it, with all the
eagerness of harmless curiosity; and feel ourselves all at once pushed
back with rude and offensive violence.
The man of reserve and concealment, though seldom a very amiable
character, is not disrespected or despised. He seems to feel coldly
towards us, and we feel as coldly towards him. He is not much praised
or beloved, but he is as little hated or blamed. He very seldom,
however, has occasion to repent of his caution, and is generally
disposed rather to value himself upon the prudence of his reserve.
Though his conduct, therefore, may have been very faulty, and
sometimes even hurtful, he can very seldom be disposed to lay his case
before the casuists, or to fancy that he has any occasion for their
acquittal or for their approbation.
It is not always so with the man, who, from false information, from
inadvertency, from precipitancy and rashness, has involuntarily
deceived. Though it should be in a matter of little consequence, in
telling a piece of common news, for example, if he is a real lover of
truth, he is ashamed of his own carelessness, and never fails to
embrace the first opportunity of making the fullest acknowledgments.
If it is in a matter of some consequence, his contrition is still
greater; and if any unlucky or fatal consequence has followed from his
misinformation, he can scarce ever forgive himself. Though not guilty,
he feels himself to be in the highest degree, what the ancients
called, piacular, and is anxious and eager to make every sort of
atonement in his power. Such a person might frequently be disposed to
lay his case before the casuists, who have in general been very
favourable to him, and though they have sometimes justly condemned him
for rashness, they have universally acquitted him of the ignominy of
falsehood.
But the man who had the most frequent occasion to consult them, was
the man of equivocation and mental reservation, the man who seriously
and deliberately meant to deceive, but who, at the same time, wished
to flatter himself that he had really told the truth. With him they
have dealt variously. When they approved very much of the motives of
his deceit, they have sometimes acquitted him, though, to do the
casuists justice, they have in general and much more frequently
condemned him.
The chief subjects of the works of the casuists, therefore, were the
conscientious regard that is due to the rules of justice; how far we
{302} ought to respect the life and property of our neighbour; the
duty of restitution; the laws of chastity and modesty, and wherein
consisted what, in the language of the casuists, were called the sins
of concupiscence; the rules of veracity, and the obligation of oaths,
promises, and contracts of all kinds.
It may be said in general of the works of the casuists that they
attempted, to no purpose, to direct by precise rules what it belongs
to feeling and sentiment only to judge of. How is it possible to
ascertain by rules the exact point at which, in every case, a delicate
sense of justice begins to run into a frivolous and weak scrupulosity
of conscience? When is it that secrecy and reserve begin to grow into
dissimulation? How far may an agreeable irony be carried, and at what
precise point it begins to degenerate into a detestable lie? What is
the highest pitch of freedom and ease of behaviour which can be
regarded as graceful and becoming, and when is it that it first begins
to run into a negligent and thoughtless licentiousness? With regard to
all such matters, what would hold good in any one case would scarce do
so exactly in any other, and what constitutes the propriety and
happiness of behaviour varies in every case with the smallest variety
of situation. Books of casuistry, therefore, are generally as useless
as they are commonly tiresome. They could be of little use to one who
should consult them upon occasion, even supposing their decisions to
be just; because, notwithstanding the multitude of cases collected in
them, yet upon account of the still greater variety of possible
circumstances, it is a chance, if among all those cases there be found
one exactly parallel to that under consideration. One, who is really
anxious to do his duty, must be very weak, if he can imagine that he
has much occasion for them; and with regard to one who is negligent of
it, the very style of those writings is not such as is likely to
awaken him to more attention. None of them tend to animate us to what
is generous and noble. None of them do tend to soften us to what is
gentle and humane. Many of them, on the contrary, tend rather to teach
us to chicane with our own consciences, and by their vain subtilties
serve to authorise innumerable evasive refinements with regard to the
most essential articles of our duty. That frivolous accuracy which
they attempted to introduce into subjects which do not admit of it,
almost necessarily betrayed them into those dangerous errors, and at
the same time rendered their works dry and disagreeable, abounding in
abstruse and metaphysical distinctions, but incapable of exciting in
the heart any of those emotions which it is the principal use of books
of morality to excite in the readers.
The two useful parts of moral philosophy, therefore, are Ethics and
Jurisprudence: casuistry ought to be rejected altogether; and the
ancient moralists appear to have judged much better, who, in treating
of the same subjects, did not affect any such nice exactness, but
{303} contented themselves with describing, in a general manner, what
is the sentiment upon which justice, modesty, and veracity are
founded, and what is the ordinary way of acting to which those great
virtues would commonly prompt us.
Something indeed, not unlike the doctrine of the casuists, seems to
have been attempted by several philosophers. There is something of
this kind in the third book of Cicero's Offices, where he endeavours
like a casuist, to give rules for our conduct in many nice cases, in
which it is difficult to determine whereabouts the point of propriety
may lie. It appears too, from many passages in the same book, that
several other philosophers had attempted something of the same kind
before him. Neither he nor they, however, appear to have aimed at
giving a complete system of this sort, but only meant to show how
situations may occur, in which it is doubtful, whether the highest
propriety of conduct consists in observing or in receding from what,
in ordinary cases, are the rules of our duty.
Every system of positive law may be regarded as a more or less
imperfect attempt towards a system of natural jurisprudence, or
towards an enumeration of the particular rules of justice. As the
violation of justice is what men will never submit to from one
another, the public magistrate is under a necessity of employing the
power of the commonwealth to enforce the practice of this virtue.
Without this precaution, civil society would become a scene of
bloodshed and disorder, every man revenging himself at his own hand
whenever he fancied he was injured. To prevent the confusion which
would attend upon every man's doing justice to himself, the
magistrate, in all governments that have acquired any considerable
authority, undertakes to do justice to all, and promises to hear and
to redress every complaint of injury. In all well-governed states,
too, not only judges are appointed for determining the controversies
of individuals, but rules are prescribed for regulating the decisions
of those judges; and these rules are, in general, intended to
coincide with those of natural justice. It does not, indeed, always
happen that they do so in every instance. Sometimes what is called the
constitution of the state, that is, the interest of the government;
sometimes the interest of particular orders of men who tyrannize the
government, warp the positive laws of the country from what natural
justice would prescribe. In some countries, the rudeness and barbarism
of the people hinder the natural sentiments of justice from arriving
at that accuracy and precision which, in more civilized nations, they
naturally attain to. Their laws are, like their manners, gross and
rude and undistinguishing. In other countries the unfortunate
constitution of their courts of judicature hinders any regular system
of jurisprudence from ever establishing itself among them, though the
improved manners of the people may be such as would admit of the most
accurate. In no country do the decisions of positive {304} law
coincide exactly, in every case, with the rules which the natural
sense of justice would dictate. Systems of positive law, therefore,
though they deserve the greatest authority, as the records of the
sentiments of mankind in different ages and nations, yet can never be
regarded as accurate systems of the rules of natural justice.
It might have been expected that the reasonings of lawyers, upon the
different imperfections and improvements of the laws of different
countries, should have given occasion to an inquiry into what were the
natural rules of justice independent of all positive institution. It
might have been expected that these reasonings should have led them to
aim at establishing a system of what might properly be called natural
jurisprudence, or a theory of the general principles which ought to
run through and be the foundation of the laws of all nations. But
though the reasonings of lawyers did produce something of this kind,
and though no man has treated systematically of the laws of any
particular country, without intermixing in his work many observations
of this sort; it was very late in the world before any such general
system was thought of, or before the philosophy of law was treated of
by itself, and without regard to the particular institutions of any
one nation. In none of the ancient moralists, do we find any attempt
towards a particular enumeration of the rules of justice. Cicero in
his Offices, and Aristotle in his Ethics, treat of justice in the same
general manner in which they treat of all the other virtues. In the
laws of Cicero and Plato, where we might naturally have expected some
attempts towards an enumeration of those rules of natural equity,
which ought to be enforced by the positive laws of every country,
there is, however, nothing of this kind. Their laws are laws of
police, not of justice. Grotius seems to have been the first who
attempted to give the world any thing like a system of those
principles which ought to run through, and be the foundation of the
laws of all nations; and his treatise of the laws of war and peace,
with all its imperfections, is perhaps at this day the most complete
work that has yet been given upon this subject. I shall in another
discourse endeavour to give an account of the general principles of
law and government, and of the different revolutions they have
undergone in the different ages and periods of society, not only in
what concerns justice, but in what concerns police, revenue, and arms,
and whatever else is the object of law. I shall not, therefore, at
present, enter into any further detail concerning the history of
jurisprudence.
-----
CONSIDERATIONS
CONCERNING THE FIRST
FORMATION OF LANGUAGES, ETC., ETC.
THE assignation of particular names to denote particular objects, that
is, the institution of nouns substantive, would, probably, be one of
the first steps towards the formation of language. Two savages, who
had never been taught to speak, but had been bred up remote from the
societies of men, would naturally begin to form that language by which
they would endeavour to make their mutual wants intelligible to each
other, by uttering certain sounds, whenever they meant to denote
certain objects. Those objects only which were most familiar to them,
and which they had most frequent occasion to mention would have
particular names assigned to them. The particular cave whose covering
sheltered them from the weather, the particular tree whose fruit
relieved their hunger, the particular fountain whose water allayed
their thirst, would first be denominated by the words _cave_, _tree_,
_fountain_, or by whatever other appellations they might think proper,
in that primitive jargon, to mark them. Afterwards, when the more
enlarged experience of these savages had led them to observe, and
their necessary occasions obliged them to make mention of other caves,
and other trees, and other fountains, they would naturally bestow,
upon each of those new objects, the same name, by which they had been
accustomed to express the similar objects they were first acquainted
with. The new objects had none of them any name of its own, but each
of them exactly resembled another object, which had such an
appellation. It was impossible that those savages could behold the new
objects, without recollecting the old ones; and the name of the old
ones, to which the new bore so close a resemblance. When they had
occasion, therefore, to mention or to point out to each other, any of
the new objects, they would naturally utter the name of the
correspondent old one, of which the idea could not fail, at that
instant, to present itself to their memory in the strongest and
liveliest manner. And thus, those words, which were originally the
proper names of individuals, would each of them insensibly become the
common name of a multitude. A child that is just learning to speak,
calls every person who comes to the house its papa or its mamma; and
thus bestows upon the whole species those names which it had been
taught to apply to two individuals. I have {306} known a clown, who
did not know the proper name of the river which ran by his own door.
It was _the river_, he said, and he never heard any other name for it.
His experience, it seems, had not led him to observe any other river.
The general word _river_, therefore, was, it is evident, in his
acceptance of it, a proper name, signifying an individual object. If
this person had been carried to another river, would he not readily
have called it a river? Could we suppose any person living on the
banks of the Thames so ignorant as not to know the general word
_river_ but to be acquainted only with the particular word _Thames_,
if he was brought to any other river, would he not readily call it _a
Thames_? This, in reality, is no more than what they, who are well
acquainted with the general word, are very apt to do. An Englishman,
describing any great river which he may have seen in some foreign
country, naturally says, that it is another Thames. The Spaniards,
when they first arrived upon the coast of Mexico, and observed the
wealth, populousness, and habitations of that fine country, so much
superior to the savage nations which they had been visiting for some
time before, cried out, that it was another Spain. Hence it was called
New Spain; and this name has stuck to that unfortunate country ever
since. We say, in the same manner, of a hero, that he is an Alexander;
of an orator, that he is a Cicero; of a philosopher, that he is a
Newton. This way of speaking, which the grammarians call an
Antonomasia, and which is still extremely common, though now not at
all necessary, demonstrates how mankind are disposed to give to one
object the name of any other, which nearly resembles it, and thus to
denominate a multitude, by what originally was intended to express an
individual.
It is this application of the name of an individual to a great
multitude of objects, whose resemblance naturally recalls the idea of
that individual, and of the name which expresses it, that seems
originally to have given occasion to the formation of those classes
and assortments, which, in the schools, are called genera and species,
and of which the ingenious and eloquent M. Rousseau of Geneva finds
himself so much at a loss to account for the origin. What constitutes
a species is merely a number of objects, bearing a certain degree of
resemblance to one another, and on that account denominated by a
single appellation, which may be applied to express any one of them.
When the greater part of objects had thus been arranged under their
proper classes and assortments, distinguished by such general names,
it was impossible that the greater part of that almost infinite number
of individuals, comprehended under each particular assortment or
species, could have any peculiar or proper names of their own,
distinct from the general name of the species. When there was
occasion, therefore, to mention any particular object, it often became
necessary to distinguish it from the other objects comprehended under
the same general name, either, first, by its peculiar qualities; or,
secondly, by the {307} peculiar relation which it stood in to some
other things. Hence the necessary origin of two other sets of words,
of which the one should express quality; the other, relation.
Nouns adjective are the words which express quality considered as
qualifying, or, as the schoolmen say, in concrete with, some
particular subject. Thus the word _green_ expresses a certain quality
considered as qualifying, or as in concrete with, the particular
subject to which it may be applied. Words of this kind, it is evident,
may serve to distinguish particular objects from others comprehended
under the same general appellation. The words _green tree_, for
example, might serve to distinguish a particular tree from others that
were withered or that were blasted.
Prepositions are the words which express relation considered, in the
same manner, in concrete with the co-relative object. Thus the
prepositions _of_, _to_, _for_, _with_, _by_, _above_, _below_, &c.,
denote some relation subsisting between the objects expressed by the
words between which the prepositions are placed; and they denote that
this relation is considered in concrete with the co-relative object.
Words of this kind serve to distinguish particular objects from others
of the same species, when those particular objects cannot be so
properly marked out by any peculiar qualities of their own. When we
say, _the green tree of the meadow_, for example, we distinguish a
particular tree, not only by the quality which belongs to it, but by
the relation which it stands in to another object.
As neither quality nor relation can exist in abstract, it is natural
to suppose that the words which denote them considered in concrete,
the way in which we always see them subsist, would be of much earlier
invention than those which express them considered in abstract, the
way in which we never see them subsist. The words _green_ and _blue_
would, in all probability, be sooner invented than the words
_greenness_ and _blueness_; the words _above_ and _below_, than the
words _superiority_ and _inferiority_. To invent words of the latter
kind requires a much greater effort of abstraction than to invent
those of the former. It is probable therefore, that such abstract
terms would be of much later institution. Accordingly, their
etymologies generally show that they are so, they being generally
derived from others that are concrete.
But though the invention of nouns adjective be much more natural than
that of the abstract nouns substantive derived from them, it would
still, however, require a considerable degree of abstraction and
generalization. Those, for example, who first invented the words
_green_, _blue_, _red_, and the other names of colours, must have
observed and compared together a great number of objects, must have
remarked their resemblances and dissimilitudes in respect of the
quality of colour, and must have arranged them, in their own minds,
into different classes and assortments, according to those
resemblances and {308} dissimilitudes. An adjective is by nature a
general, and in some measure an abstract word, and necessarily
pre-supposes the idea of a certain species or assortment of things, to
all of which it is equally applicable. The word _green_ could not, as
we were supposing might be the case of the word _cave_, have been
originally the name of an individual, and afterwards have become, by
what grammarians call an Antonomasia, the name of a species. The word
_green_ denoting, not the name of a substance, but the peculiar
quality of a substance, must from the very first have been a general
word, and considered as equally applicable to any other substance
possessed of the same quality. The man who first distinguished a
particular object by the epithet of _green_, must have observed other
objects that were not _green_, from which he meant to separate it by
this appellation. The institution of this name, therefore, supposes
comparison. It likewise supposes some degree of abstraction. The
person who first invented this appellation must have distinguished the
quality from the object to which it belonged, and must have conceived
the object as capable of subsisting without the quality. The
invention, therefore, even of the simplest nouns adjective must have
required more metaphysics than we are apt to be aware of. The
different mental operations, of arrangement or classing, of
comparison, and of abstraction, must all have been employed, before
even the names of the different colours, the least metaphysical of all
nouns adjective, could be instituted. From all which I infer, that
when languages were beginning to be formed, nouns adjective would by
no means be the words of the earliest invention.
There is nothing expedient for denoting the different qualities of
different substance, which as it requires no abstraction, nor any
conceived separation of the quality from the subject, seems more
natural than the invention of nouns adjective, and which, upon this
account, could hardly fail, in the first formation of language, to be
thought of before them. This expedient is to make some variation upon
the noun substantive itself, according to the different qualities
which it is endowed with. Thus in many languages, the qualities both
of sex and of the want of sex are expressed by different terminations
in the nouns substantive, which denote objects so qualified. In Latin,
for example, _lupus_, _lupa_; _equus_, _equa_; _juvencus_, _juvenca_;
_Julius_, _Julia_; _Lucretius_, _Lucretia_, &c., denote the qualities
of male and female in the animals and persons to whom such
appellations belong, without needing the addition of any adjective for
this purpose. On the other hand, the words, _forum_, _pratum_,
_plaustrum_, denote by their peculiar termination the total absence of
sex in the different substances which they stand for. Both sex, and
the want of all sex, being naturally considered as qualities modifying
and inseparable from the particular substances to which they belong,
it was natural to express them rather by a modification in the noun
substantive, than by any general and abstract word {309} expressive of
this particular species of quality. The expression bears, it is
evident, in this way, a much more exact analogy to the idea or object
which it denotes than in the other. The quality appears, in nature, as
a modification of the substance, and as it is thus expressed in
language, by a modification of the noun substantive, which denotes
that substance, the quality and the subject are, in this case, blended
together, if I may say so, in the expression, in the same manner as
they appear to be in the object and in the idea. Hence the origin of
the masculine, feminine, and neutral genders, in all the ancient
languages. By means of these, the most important of all distinctions,
that of substances into animated and inanimated, and that of animals
into male and female, seem to have been sufficiently marked without
the assistance of adjectives, or of any general names denoting this
most extensive species of qualifications.
There are no more than these three genders in any of the languages
with which I am acquainted; that is to say, the formation of nouns
substantive can, by itself, and without the accompaniment of
adjectives, express no other qualities but those three above
mentioned, the qualities of male, of female, of neither male nor
female. I should not, however, be surprised, if, in other languages
with which I am unacquainted, the different formations of nouns
substantive should be capable of expressing many other different
qualities. The different diminutives of the Italian, and of some other
languages, do, in reality, sometimes express a great variety of
different modifications in the substances denoted by those nouns which
undergo such variations.
It was impossible, however, that nouns substantive could, without
losing altogether their original form, undergo so great a number of
variations, as would be sufficient to express that almost infinite
variety of qualities, by which it might, upon different occasions, be
necessary to specify and distinguish them. Though the different
formation of nouns substantive, therefore, might, for some time,
forestall the necessity of inventing nouns adjective, it was
impossible that this necessity could be forestalled altogether. When
nouns adjective came to be invented, it was natural that they should
be formed with some similarity to the substantives to which they were
to serve as epithets or qualifications. Men would naturally give them
the same terminations with the substantives to which they were first
applied, and from that love of similarity of sound, from that delight
in the returns of the same syllables, which is the foundation of
analogy in all languages, they would be apt to vary the termination of
the same adjective, according as they had occasion to apply it to a
masculine, to a feminine, or to a neutral substantive. They would say,
_magnus lupus_, _magna lupa_, _magnum pratum_, when they meant to
express a great _he wolf_, a great _she wolf_, or a great _meadow_.
This variation, in the termination of the noun adjective, according to
{310} the gender of the substantive, which takes place in all the
ancient languages, seems to have been introduced chiefly for the sake
of a certain similarity of sound, of a certain species of rhyme, which
is naturally so very agreeable to the human ear. Gender, it is to
observed, cannot properly belong to a noun adjective, the
signification of which is always precisely the same, to whatever
species of substantives it is applied. When we say, _a great man_, _a
great woman_, the word _great_ has precisely the same meaning in both
cases, and the difference of the sex in the subjects to which it may
be applied, makes no sort of difference in its signification.
_Magnus_, _magna_, _magnum_, in the same manner, are words which
express precisely the same quality, and the change of the termination
is accompanied with no sort of variation in the meaning. Sex and
gender are qualities which belong to substances, but cannot belong to
the qualities of substances. In general, no quality, when considered
in concrete, or as qualifying some particular subject, can itself be
conceived as the subject of any other quality; though when considered
in abstract it may. No adjective therefore can qualify any other
adjective. A _great good man_, means a man who is both _great_ and
_good_. Both the adjectives qualify the substantive; they do not
qualify one another. On the other hand, when we say, the _great
goodness_ of the man, the word _goodness_ denoting a quality
considered in abstract, which may itself be the subject of other
qualities, is upon that account capable of being qualified by the word
_great_.
If the original invention of nouns adjective would be attended with so
much difficulty, that of prepositions would be accompanied with yet
more. Every preposition, as I have already observed, denotes some
relation considered in concrete with the co-relative object. The
preposition _above_, for example, denotes the relation of superiority,
not in abstract, as it is expressed by the word _superiority_, but in
concrete with some co-relative object. In this phrase, for example,
_the tree above the cave_, the word _above_ expresses a certain
relation between the _tree_ and the _cave_, and it expresses this
relation in concrete with the co-relative object, _the cave_. A
preposition always requires, in order to complete the sense, some
other word to come after it; as may be observed in this particular
instance. Now, I say, the original invention of such words would
require a yet greater effort of abstraction and generalization, than
that of nouns adjective. First of all, the relation is, in itself, a
more metaphysical object than a quality. Nobody can be at a loss to
explain what is meant by a quality; but few people will find
themselves able to express, very distinctly, what is understood by a
relation. Qualities are almost always the objects of our external
senses; relations never are. No wonder therefore, that the one set of
objects should be so much more comprehensible than the other.
Secondly, though prepositions always express the relation which they
stand for, in concrete with the co-relative object, they could not
have {311} originally been formed without a considerable effort of
abstraction. A preposition denotes a relation, and nothing but a
relation. But before men could institute a word, which signified a
relation, and nothing but a relation, they must have been able, in
some measure, to consider this relation abstractedly from the related
objects; since the idea of those objects does not, in any respect,
enter into the signification of the preposition. The invention of such
a word, therefore, must have required a considerable degree of
abstraction. Thirdly, a preposition is from its nature a general word,
which, from its very first institution, must have been considered as
equally applicable to denote any other similar relation. The man who
first invented the word _above_, must not only have distinguished, in
some measure, the relation of _superiority_ from the objects which
were so related, but he must also have distinguished this relation
from other relations, such as, from the relation of _inferiority_
denoted by the word _below_, from the relation of _juxta-position_,
expressed by the word _beside_, and the like. He must have conceived
this word, therefore, as expressive of a particular sort or species of
relation distinct from every other, which could not be done without a
considerable effort of comparison and generalization.
Whatever were the difficulties, therefore, which embarrassed the first
invention of nouns adjective, the same, and many more, must have
embarrassed that of prepositions. If mankind, therefore, in the first
formation of languages, seem to have, for some time, evaded the
necessity of nouns adjective, by varying the termination of the names
of substances, according as these varied in some of their most
important qualities, they would much more find themselves under the
necessity of evading, by some similar contrivance, the yet more
difficult invention of prepositions. The different cases in the
ancient languages is a contrivance of precisely the same kind. The
genitive and dative cases, in Greek and Latin, evidently supply the
place of the prepositions; and by a variation in the noun substantive,
which stands for the co-relative term, express the relation which
subsists between what is denoted by that noun substantive, and what is
expressed by some other word in the sentence. In these expressions,
for example, _fructus arboris_, _the fruit of the tree_; _sacer
Herculi_, _sacred to Hercules_; the variations made in the co-relative
words, arbor and Hercules, express the same relations which are
expressed in English by the prepositions _of_ and _to_.
To express a relation in this manner, did not require any effort of
abstraction. It was not here expressed by a peculiar word denoting
relation and nothing but relation, but by a variation upon the
co-relative term. It was expressed here, as it appears in nature, not
as something separated and detached, but as thoroughly mixed and
blended with the co-relative object.
To express relation in this manner, did not require any effort of
generalization. The words _arboris_ and _Herculi_, while they involve
in {312} their signification the same relation expressed by the
English prepositions _of_ and _to_, are not, like those prepositions,
general words, which can be applied to express the same relation
between whatever other objects it might be observed to subsist.
To express relation in this manner did not require any effort of
comparison. The words _arboris_ and _Herculi_ are not general words
intended to denote a particular species of relations which the
inventors of those expressions meant, in consequence of some sort of
comparison, to separate and distinguish from every other sort of
relation. The example, indeed, of this contrivance would soon probably
be followed, and whoever had occasion to express a similar relation
between any other objects would be very apt to do it by making a
similar variation on the name of the co-relative object. This, I say,
would probably, or rather certainly happen; but it would happen
without any intention or foresight in those who first set the example,
and who never meant to establish any general rule. The general rule
would establish itself insensibly, and by slow degrees, in consequence
of that love of analogy and similarity of sound, which is the
foundation of by far the greater part of the rules of grammar.
To express relation, therefore, by a variation in the name of the
co-relative object, requiring neither abstraction, nor generalization,
nor comparison of any kind, would, at first, be much more natural and
easy, than to express it by those general words called prepositions,
of of which the first invention must have demanded some degree of all
those operations.
The number of cases is different in different languages. There are
five in the Greek, six in the Latin, and there are said to be ten in
the Armenian language. It must have naturally happened that there
should be a greater or a smaller number of cases, according as in the
terminations of nouns substantive the first formers of any language
happened to have established a greater or a smaller number of
variations, in order to express the different relations they had
occasion to take notice of, before the invention of those more general
and abstract prepositions which could supply their place.
It is, perhaps, worth while to observe that those prepositions, which
in modern languages hold the place of the ancient cases, are, of all
others, the most general, and abstract, and metaphysical; and of
consequence, would probably be the last invented. Ask any man of
common acuteness, What relation is expressed by the preposition
_above_? He will readily answer, that of _superiority_. By the
preposition _below_? He will as quickly reply that of _inferiority_.
But ask him, what relation is expressed by the preposition _of_, and,
if he has not beforehand employed his thoughts a good deal upon these
subjects, you may safely allow him a week to consider of his answer.
The prepositions _above_ and _below_ do not denote any of the
relations expressed by the cases in the {313} ancient languages. But
the preposition _of_, denotes the same relation, which is in them
expressed by the genitive case; and which, it is easy to observe, is
of a very metaphysical nature. The preposition _of_, denotes relation
in general, considered in concrete with the co-relative object. It
marks that the noun substantive which goes before it, is somehow or
other related to that which comes after it, but without in any respect
ascertaining, as is done by the preposition _above_, what is the
peculiar nature of that relation. We often apply it, therefore, to
express the most opposite relations; because, the most opposite
relations agree so far that each of them comprehends in it the general
idea or nature of a relation. We say, _the father of the son_, and
_the son of the father_; _the fir-trees of the forest_, and _the
forest of the fir-trees_. The relation in which the father stands to
the son is, it is evident, a quite opposite relation to that in which
the son stands to the father; that in which the parts stand to the
whole, is quite opposite to that in which the whole stands to the
parts. The word _of_, however, serves very well to denote all those
relations, because in itself it denotes no particular relation, but
only relation in general; and so far as any particular relation is
collected from such expressions, it is inferred by the mind, not from
the preposition itself, but from the nature and arrangement of the
substantives, between which the preposition is placed.
What I have said concerning the preposition _of_, may in some measure
be applied to the prepositions _to_, _for_, _with_, _by_, and to
whatever other prepositions are made use of in modern languages, to
supply the place of the ancient cases. They all of them express very
abstract and metaphysical relations, which any man, who takes the
trouble to try it, will find it extremely difficult to express by
nouns substantive, in the same manner as we may express the relation
denoted by the preposition _above_, by the noun substantive
_superiority_. They all of them, however, express some specific
relation, and are, consequently, none of them so abstract as the
preposition _of_, which may be regarded as by far the most
metaphysical of all prepositions. The prepositions, therefore, which
are capable of supplying the place of the ancient cases, being more
abstract than the other prepositions, would naturally be of more
difficult invention. The relations at the same time which those
prepositions express, are, of all others, those which we have most
frequent occasion to mention. The prepositions _above_, _below_,
_near_, _within_, _without_, _against_, &c., are much more rarely made
use of, in modern languages, than the prepositions _of_, _to_, _for_,
_with_, _from_, _by_. A preposition of the former kind will not occur
twice in a page; we can scarce compose a single sentence without the
assistance of one or two of the latter. If these latter prepositions,
therefore, which supply the place of the cases, would be of such
difficult invention on account of their abstractedness, some expedient
to supply their place must have been of indispensable necessity, on
account of the frequent occasion {314} which men have to take notice
of the relations which they denote. But there is no expedient so
obvious, as that of varying the termination of one of the principal
words.
It is, perhaps, unnecessary to observe, that there are some of the
cases in the ancient languages, which, for particular reasons, cannot
be represented by any prepositions. These are the nominative,
accusative, and vocative cases. In those modern languages, which do
not admit of any such variety in the terminations of their nouns
substantive, the correspondent relations are expressed by the place of
the words, and by the order and construction of the sentence.
As men have frequently occasion to make mention of multitudes as well
as of single objects, it became necessary that they should have some
method of expressing number. Number may be expressed either by a
particular word, expressing number in general, such as the words
_many_, _more_, &c., or by some variation upon the words which express
the things numbered. It is this last expedient which mankind would
probably have recourse to, in the infancy of language. Number,
considered in general, without relation to any particular set of
objects numbered, is one of the most abstract and metaphysical ideas,
which the mind of man is capable of forming; and, consequently, is not
an idea, which would readily occur to rude mortals, who were just
beginning to form a language. They would naturally, therefore,
distinguish when they talked of a single, and when they talked of a
multitude of objects, not by any metaphysical adjectives, such as the
English _a_, _an_, _many_, but by a variation upon the termination of
the word which signified the objects numbered. Hence the origin of the
singular and plural numbers, in all the ancient languages; and the
same distinction has likewise been retained in all the modern
languages, at least, in the greater part of the words.
All primitive and uncompounded languages seem to have a dual, as well
as a plural number. This is the case of the Greek, and I am told of
the Hebrew, of the Gothic, and of many other languages. In the rude
beginnings of society, _one_, _two_, and _more_, might possibly be all
the numeral distinctions which mankind would have any occasion to take
notice of. These they would find it more natural to express, by a
variation upon every particular noun substantive, than by such general
and abstract words as _one_, _two_, _three_, _four_, &c. These words,
though custom has rendered them familiar to us, express, perhaps, the
most subtile and refined abstractions, which the mind of man is
capable of forming. Let any one consider within himself, for example,
what he means by the word _three_, which signifies neither three
shillings, nor three pence, nor three men, nor three horses, but three
in general; and he will easily satisfy himself that a word, which
denotes so very metaphysical an abstraction, could not be either a
very obvious or a very early invention. I have read of some savage
nations, whose language {315} was capable of expressing no more than
the three first numeral distinctions. But whether it expressed those
distinctions by three general words, or by variations upon the nouns
substantive, denoting the things numbered, I do not remember to have
met with any thing which could clearly determine.
As all the same relations which subsist between single, may likewise
subsist between numerous objects, it is evident there would be
occasion for the same number of cases in the dual and in the plural,
as in the singular number. Hence the intricacy and complexness of the
declensions in all the ancient languages. In the Greek there are five
cases in each of the three numbers, consequently fifteen in all.
As nouns adjective, in the ancient languages, varied their
terminations according to the gender of the substantive to which they
were applied, so did they likewise according to the case and the
number. Every noun adjective in the Greek language, therefore, having
three genders, and three numbers, and five cases in each number, may
be considered as having five and forty different variations. The first
formers of language seem to have varied the termination of the
adjective, according to the case and the number of the substantive,
for the same reason which made them vary it according to the gender;
the love of analogy, and of a certain regularity of sound. In the
signification of adjectives there is neither case nor number, and the
meaning of such words is always precisely the same, notwithstanding
all the variety of termination under which they appear. _Magnus vir_,
_magni viri_, _magnorum virorum_; _a great man_, _of a great man_, _of
great men_; in all these expressions the words, _magnus_, _magni_,
_magnorum_, as well as the word _great_, have precisely one and the
same signification, though the substantives to which they are applied
have not. The difference of termination in the noun adjective is
accompanied with no sort of difference in the meaning. An adjective
denotes the qualification of a noun substantive. But the different
relations in which that noun substantive may occasionally stand, can
make no sort of difference upon its qualification. If the declensions
of the ancient languages are so very complex, their conjugations are
infinitely more so. And the complexness of the one is founded upon the
same principle with that of the other, the difficulty of forming, in
the beginnings of language, abstract and general terms.
Verbs must necessarily have been coëval with the very first attempts
towards the formation of language. No affirmation can be expressed
without the assistance of some verb. We never speak but in order to
express our opinion that something either is or is not. But the word
denoting this event, or this matter of fact, which is the subject of
our affirmation, must always be a verb.
Impersonal verbs, which express in one word a complete event, which
preserve in the expression that perfect simplicity and unity, {316}
which there always is in the object and in the idea, and which suppose
no abstraction, or metaphysical division of the event into its several
constituent members of subject and attribute, would, in all
probability, be the species of verbs first invented. The verbs
_pluit_, _it rains_; _ningit_, _it snows_; _tonat_, _it thunders_;
_lucet_, _it is day_; _turbatur_, _there is a confusion_, &c., each of
them express a complete affirmation, the whole of an event, with that
perfect simplicity and unity with which the mind conceives it in
nature. On the contrary, the phrases, _Alexander ambulat_, _Alexander
walks_; _Petrus sedet_, _Peter sits_, divide the event, as it were,
into two parts, the person or subject, and the attribute, or matter of
fact, affirmed of that subject. But in nature, the idea or conception
of Alexander walking, is as perfectly and completely one simple
conception, as that of Alexander not walking. The division of this
event, therefore, into two parts, is altogether artificial, and is the
effect of the imperfection of language, which, upon this, as upon many
other occasions, supplies, by a number of words, the want of one,
which could express at once the whole matter of fact that was meant to
be affirmed. Every body must observe how much more simplicity there is
in the natural expression, _pluit_, than in the more artificial
expressions, _imber decidit_, _the rain falls_; or _tempestas est
pluvia_, _the weather is rainy_. In these two last expressions, the
simple event, or matter of fact, is artificially split and divided in
the one, into two; in the other, into three parts. In each of them it
is expressed by a sort of grammatical circumlocution, of which the
significancy is founded upon a certain metaphysical analysis of the
component parts of the idea expressed by the word _pluit_. The first
verbs, therefore, perhaps even the first words, made use of in the
beginnings of language, would in all probability be such impersonal
verbs. It is observed accordingly, I am told, by the Hebrew
grammarians, that the radical words of their language, from which all
the others are derived, are all of them verbs, and impersonal verbs.
It is easy to conceive how, in the progress of language, those
impersonal verbs should become personal. Let us suppose, for example,
that the word _venit_, _it comes_, was originally an impersonal verb,
and that it denoted, not the coming of something in general, as at
present, but the coming of a particular object, such as _the lion_.
The first savage inventors of language, we shall suppose, when they
observed the approach of this terrible animal, were accustomed to cry
out to one another, _venit_, that is, _the lion comes_; and that
this word thus expressed a complete event, without the assistance of
any other. Afterwards, when, on the further progress of language, they
had begun to give names to particular substances, whenever they
observed the approach of any other terrible object, they would
naturally join the name of that object to the word _venit_, and cry
out, _venit ursus_, _venit lupus_. By degrees the word venit would
thus come to signify the coming of any {317} terrible object, and not
merely the coming of the lion. It would, now, therefore, express, not
the coming of a particular object, but the coming of an object of a
particular kind. Having become more general in its signification, it
could no longer represent any particular distinct event by itself, and
without the assistance of a noun substantive, which might serve to
ascertain and determine its signification. It would now, therefore,
have become a personal, instead of an impersonal verb. We may easily
conceive how, in the further progress of society, it might still grow
more general in its signification, and come to signify, as at present,
the approach of any thing whatever, whether it were good, bad, or
indifferent.
It is probably in some such manner as this, that almost all verbs have
become personal, and that mankind have learned by degrees to split and
divide almost every event into a great number of metaphysical parts,
expressed by the different parts of speech, variously combined in the
different members of every phrase and sentence.[1] The same sort of
progress seems to have been made in the art of speaking as in the art
of writing. When mankind first began to attempt to express their ideas
by writing, every character represented a whole word. But the number
of words being almost infinite, the memory found itself quite loaded
and oppressed by the multitude of characters which it was obliged to
retain. Necessity taught them, therefore, to divide words into their
elements, and to invent characters which should represent, not the
words themselves, but the elements of which they were composed. In
consequence of this invention, every particular word came to be
represented, not by one character, but by a multitude of characters;
and the expression of it in writing became much more intricate and
complex than before. But though particular words were thus represented
by a greater number of characters, the whole language was expressed by
a much smaller, and about four and twenty letters were found capable
of supplying the place of that immense multitude of characters, which
were requisite before. In the same manner, in the beginnings of
language, men seem to have attempted to express every particular
event, which they had occasion to take notice of, by a particular
word, which expressed at once the whole of that event. But as the
number of words must, in this case, have become really infinite in
consequence of the really infinite variety of events, men found
themselves partly compelled by necessity, and partly conducted by
nature, to divide {318} every event into what may be called its
metaphysical elements, and to institute words, which should denote not
so much the events, as the elements of which they were composed. The
expression of every particular event, became in this manner more
intricate and complex, but the whole system of the language became
more coherent, more connected, more easily retained and comprehended.
[Footnote 1: As the far greater part of verbs express, at present, not
an event, but the attribute of an event, and, consequently, require a
subject, or nominative case, to complete their signification, some
grammarians, not having attended to this progress of nature, and being
desirous to make their common rules quite universal, and without any
exception, have insisted that all verbs required a nominative, either
expressed or understood; and have, accordingly, put themselves to the
torture to find some awkward nominatives to those few verbs which
still expressing a complete event, plainly admit of none. _Pluit_, for
example, according to _Sanctius_, means _pluvia pluit_, in English,
_the rain rains_. See Sanctii Minerva, 1. 3. c. 1.]
When verbs, from being originally impersonal, had thus, by the
division of the event into its metaphysical elements, become personal
it is natural to suppose that they would first be made use of in the
third person singular. No verb is ever used impersonally in our
language nor, so far as I know, in any other modern tongue. But in the
ancient languages, whenever any verb is used impersonally, it is
always in the third person singular. The termination of those verbs,
which are still always impersonal, is constantly the same with that of
the third person singular of personal verbs. The consideration of
these circumstances, joined to the naturalness of the thing itself,
may therefore serve to convince us that verbs first became personal in
what is now called the third person singular.
But as the event, or matter of fact, which is expressed by a verb, may
be affirmed either of the person who speaks, or of the person who is
spoken to, as well as of, some third person or object, it becomes
necessary to fall upon some method of expressing these two peculiar
relations of the event. In the English language this is commonly done,
by prefixing, what are called the personal pronouns, to the general
word which expresses the event affirmed. _I came_, _you came_, _he_ or
_it came_; in these phrases the event of having come is, in the first,
affirmed of the speaker; in the second, of the person spoken to; in
the third, of some other person or object. The first formers of
language, it may be imagined, might have done the same thing, and
prefixing in the same manner the two first personal pronouns, to the
same termination of the verb, which expressed the third person
singular, might have said _ego venit_, _tu venit_, as well as _ille_
or _illud venit_. And I make no doubt but they would have done so, if
at the time when they had first occasion to express these relations of
the verb there had been any such words as either _ego_ or _tu_ in
their language. But in this early period of the language, which we are
now endeavouring to describe, it is extremely improbable that any such
words would be known. Though custom has now rendered them familiar to
us, they, both of them, express ideas extremely metaphysical and
abstract. The word _I_, for example, is a word of a very particular
species. Whatever speaks may denote itself by this personal pronoun.
The word _I_, therefore, is a general word, capable of being
predicated, as the logicians say, of an infinite variety of objects.
It differs, however, from all other general words in this respect;
that the **objects of which it may be predicated, do not form any
particular species of objects distinguished from all others. The {319}
word _I_, does not, like the word _man_, denote a particular class of
objects separated from all others by peculiar qualities of their own.
It is far from being the name of a species, but, on the contrary,
whenever it is made use of, it always denotes a precise individual,
the particular person who then speaks. It may be said to be, at once,
both what the logicians call, a singular, and what they call, a common
term; and to join, in its signification the seemingly opposite
qualities of the most precise individuality and the most extensive
generalization. This word, therefore, expressing so very abstract and
metaphysical an idea, would not easily or readily occur to the first
formers of language. What are called the personal pronouns, it may be
observed, are among the last words of which children learn to make
use. A child, speaking of itself, says, _Billy walks_, _Billy sits_,
**instead of _I walk_, _I sit_. As in the beginnings of language,
therefore, mankind seem to have evaded the invention of at least the
more abstract prepositions, and to have expressed the same relations
which these now stand for, by varying the termination of the
co-relative term, so they likewise would naturally attempt to evade
the necessity of inventing those more abstract pronouns by varying the
termination of the verb, according as the event which it expressed was
intended to be affirmed of the first, second, or third person. This
seems, accordingly, to be the universal practice of all the ancient
languages. In Latin, _veni_, _venisti_, _venit_, sufficiently denote,
without any other addition, the different events expressed by the
English phrases, _I came_, _you came_, _he_ or _it came_. The verb
would, for the same reason, vary its termination, according as the
event was intended to be affirmed of the first, second, or third
persons plural; and what is expressed by the English phrases, _we
came_, _ye came_, _they came_, would be denoted by the Latin words,
_venimus_, **_venistis_, _veneunt_. Those primitive languages, too,
which upon account of the difficulty of inventing numeral names, had
introduced a dual, as well as a plural number, into the declension of
their nouns substantive, would probably, from analogy, do the same
thing in the conjugations of their verbs. And thus in all original
languages, we might expect to find, at least six, if not eight or nine
variations, in the termination of every verb, according as the event
which it denoted was meant to be affirmed of the first, second, or
third persons singular, dual, or plural. These variations again being
repeated, along with others, through all its different tenses, through
all its different modes, and through all its different voices, must
necessarily have rendered their conjugations still more intricate and
complex than their declensions.
Language would probably have continued upon this footing in all
countries, nor would ever have grown more simple in its declensions
and conjugations, had it not become more complex in its composition,
in consequence of the mixture of several languages with one another,
occasioned by the mixture of different nations. As long as any {320}
language was spoke by those only who learned it in their infancy, the
intricacy of its declensions and conjugations could occasion no great
embarrassment. The far greater part of those who had occasion to speak
it, had acquired it at so very early a period of their lives, so
insensibly and by such slow degrees, that they were scarce ever
sensible of the difficulty. But when two nations came to be mixed with
one another, either by conquest or migration, the case would be very
different. Each nation, in order to make itself intelligible to those
with whom it was under the necessity of conversing, would be obliged
to learn the language of the other. The greater part of individuals
too, learning the new language, not by art, or by remounting to its
rudiments and first principle, but by rote, and by what they commonly
heard in conversation, would be extremely perplexed by the intricacy
of its declensions and conjugations. They would endeavour, therefore,
to supply their ignorance of these, by whatever shift the language
could afford them. Their ignorance of the declensions they would
naturally supply by the use of prepositions; and a Lombard, who was
attempting to speak Latin, and wanted to express that such a person
was a citizen of Rome, or a benefactor to Rome, if he happened not to
be acquainted with the genitive and dative cases of the word _Roma_,
would naturally express himself by prefixing the prepositions _ad_ and
_de_ to the nominative; and instead of _Romæ_, would say, _ad Roma_,
and _de Roma_. _Al Roma_ and _di Roma_, accordingly, is the manner in
which the present Italians, the descendants of the ancient Lombards
and Romans, express this and all other similar relations. And in this
manner prepositions seem to have been introduced, in the room of the
ancient declensions. The same alteration has, I am informed, been
produced upon the Greek language, since the taking of Constantinople
by the Turks. The words are, in a great measure, the same as before;
but the grammar is entirely lost, prepositions having come in the
place of the old declensions. This change is undoubtedly a
simplification of the language, in point of rudiments and principle.
It introduces, instead of a great variety of declensions, one
universal declension, which is the same in every word, of whatever
gender, number, or termination.
A similar expedient enables men, in the situation above mentioned, to
get rid of almost the whole intricacy of their conjugations. There is
in every language a verb, known by the name of the substantive verb;
in Latin, _sum_; in English, _I am_. This verb denotes not the
existence of any particular event, but existence in general. It is,
upon that account, the most abstract and metaphysical of all verbs;
and, consequently, could by no means be a word of early invention.
When it came to be invented, however, as it had all the tenses and
modes of any other verb, by being joined with the passive participle,
it was capable of supplying the place of the whole passive voice, and
of rendering this part of their conjugations as simple and uniform as
the {321} use of prepositions had rendered their declensions. A
Lombard, who wanted to say, _I am loved_, but could not recollect the
word _amor_, naturally endeavoured to supply his ignorance, by saying
_ego sum amatus_. _Io sono amato_, is at this day the Italian
expression, which corresponds to the English phrase above mentioned.
There is another verb, which, in the same manner, runs through all
languages, and which is distinguished by the name of the possessive
verb; in Latin, _habeo_; in English, _I have_. This verb, likewise,
denotes an event of an extremely abstract and metaphysical nature,
and, consequently, cannot be supposed to have been a word of the
earliest invention. When it came to be invented, however, by being
applied to the passive participle, it was capable of supplying a great
part of the active voice, as the substantive verb had supplied the
whole of the passive. A Lombard, who wanted to say, _I had loved_, but
could not recollect the word _amaveram_, would endeavour to supply the
place of it, by saying either _ego habebam amatum_ or _ego habui
amatum_. _Io avevá amato_, or _Io ebbi amato_, are the correspondent
Italian expressions at this day. And thus upon the intermixture of
different nations with one another, the conjugations, by means of
different auxiliary verbs, were made to approach the simplicity and
uniformity of the declensions.
In general it may be laid down for a maxim, that the more simple any
language is in its composition, the more complex it must be in its
declensions and its conjugations; and on the contrary, the more simple
it is in its declensions and its conjugations, the more complex it
must be in its composition.
The Greek seems to be, in a great measure, a simple, uncompounded
language, formed from the primitive jargon of those wandering savages,
the ancient Hellenians and Pelasgians, from whom the Greek nation is
said to have been descended. All the words in the Greek language are
derived from about three hundred primitives, a plain evidence that the
Greeks formed their language almost entirely among themselves, and
that when they had occasion for a new word, they were not accustomed,
as we are, to borrow it from some foreign language, but to form it,
either by composition or derivation, from some other word or words, in
their own. The declensions and conjugations, therefore, of the Greek
are much more complex than those of any other European language with
which I am acquainted.
The Latin is a composition of the Greek and of the ancient Tuscan
languages. Its declensions and conjugations accordingly are much less
complex than those of the Greek; it has dropped the dual number in
both. Its verbs have no optative mood distinguished by any peculiar
termination. They have but one future. They have no aorist distinct
from the preterit-perfect; they have no middle voice; and even many of
their tenses in the passive voice are eked out, in the same manner as
in the modern languages, by the help of the substantive verb joined to
{322} the passive participle. In both the voices, the number of
infinitives and participles is much smaller in the Latin than in the
Greek.
The French and Italian languages are each of them compounded, the one
of the Latin and the language of the ancient Franks, the other of the
same Latin and the language of the ancient Lombards. As they are both
of them, therefore, more complex in their composition than the Latin,
so are they likewise more simple in their declensions and
conjugations. With regard to their declensions, they have both of them
lost their cases altogether; and with regard to their conjugations,
they have both of them lost the whole of the passive, and some part of
the active voices of their verbs. The want of the passive voice they
supply entirely by the substantive verb joined to the passive
participle; and they make out part of the active, in the same manner,
by the help of the possessive verb and the same passive participle.
The English is compounded of the French and the ancient Saxon
languages. The French was introduced into Britain by the Norman
conquest, and continued, till the time of Edward III. to be the sole
language of the law as well as the principal language of the court.
The English, which came to be spoken afterwards, and which continues
to be spoken now, is a mixture of the ancient Saxon and this Norman
French. As the English language, therefore, is more complex in its
composition than either the French or the Italian, so is it likewise
more simple in its declensions and conjugations. Those two languages
retain, at least, a part of the distinction of genders, and their
adjectives vary their termination according as they are applied to a
masculine or to a feminine substantive. But there is no such
distinction in the English language, whose adjectives admit of no
variety of termination. The French and Italian languages have, both of
them, the remains of a conjugation; and all those tenses of the active
voice, which cannot be expressed by the possessive verb joined to the
passive participle, as well as many of those which can, are, in those
languages, marked by varying the termination of the principal verb.
But almost all those other tenses are in the English eked out by other
auxiliary verbs, so that there is in this language scarce even the
remains of a conjugation. _I love_, _I loved_, _loving_, are all the
varieties of termination which the greater part of the English verbs
admit of. All the different modifications of meaning, which cannot be
expressed by any of those three terminations, must be made out by
different auxiliary verbs joined to some one or other of them. Two
auxiliary verbs supply all the deficiencies of the French and Italian
conjugations; it requires more than half a dozen to supply those of
the English, which, besides the substantive and possessive verbs,
makes use of _do_, _did_; _will_, _would_; _shall_, _should_; _can_,
_could_; _may_, _might_.
It is in this manner that language becomes more simple in its
rudiments and principles, just in proportion as it grows more complex
in {323} its composition, and the same thing has happened in it, which
commonly happens with regard to mechanical engines. All machines are
generally, when first invented, extremely complex in their principles,
and there is often a particular principle of motion for every
particular movement which it is intended they should perform.
Succeeding improvers observe, that one principle may be so applied as
to produce several of those movements; and thus the machine becomes
gradually more and more simple, and produces its effects with fewer
wheels, and fewer principles of motion. In language, in the same
manner, every case of every noun, and every tense of every verb, was
originally expressed by a particular distinct word, which served for
this purpose and for no other. But succeeding observations discovered,
that one set of words was capable of supplying the place of all that
infinite number, and that four or five prepositions, and half a dozen
auxiliary verbs, were capable of answering the end of all the
declensions, and of all the conjugations in the ancient languages.
But this simplification of languages, though it arises, perhaps, from
similar causes, has by no means similar effects with the correspondent
simplification of machines. The simplification of machines renders
them more and more perfect, but this simplification of the rudiments
of languages renders them more and more imperfect, and less proper for
many of the purposes of language; and this for the following reasons.
First of all, languages are by this simplification rendered more
prolix, several words having become necessary to express what could
have been expressed by a single word before. Thus the words, _Dei_ and
_Deo_, in the Latin, sufficiently show, without any addition, what
relation the object signified is understood to stand in to the objects
expressed by the other words in the sentence. But to express the same
relation in English, and in all other modern languages, we must make
use of, at least, two words, and say, _of God_, _to God_. So far as
the declensions are concerned, therefore, the modern languages are
much more prolix than the ancient. The difference is still greater
with regard to the conjugations. What a Roman expressed by the single
word _amavissem_, an Englishman is obliged to express by four
different words, _I should have loved_. It is unnecessary to take any
pains to show how much this prolixness must enervate the eloquence of
all modern languages. How much the beauty of any expression depends
upon its conciseness, is well known to those who have any experience
in composition.
Secondly, this simplification of the principles of languages renders
them less agreeable to the ear. The variety of termination in the
Greek and Latin, occasioned by their declensions and conjugations,
gives a sweetness to their language altogether unknown to ours, and a
variety unknown to any other modern language. In point of sweetness,
the Italian, perhaps, may surpass the Latin, and almost equal the
Greek; but in point of variety, it is greatly inferior to both.
{324} Thirdly, this simplification, not only renders the sounds of our
language less agreeable to the ear, but it also restrains us from
disposing such sounds as we have, in the manner that might be most
agreeable. It ties down many words to a particular situation, though
they might often be placed in another with much more beauty. In the
Greek and Latin, though the adjective and substantive were separated
from one another, the correspondence of their terminations still
showed their mutual reference, and the separation did not necessarily
occasion any sort of confusion. Thus in the first line of Virgil,
Tityre tu patulæ recubans sub tegmine fagi;
we easily see that _tu_ refers to _recubans_, and _patulæ_ to _fagi_;
though the related words are separated from one another by the
intervention of several others; because the terminations, showing the
correspondence of their cases, determine their mutual reference. But
if we were to translate this line literally into English, and say,
_Tityrus, thou of spreading reclining under the shade beech_, OEdipus
himself could not make sense of it; because there is here no
difference of termination, to determine which substantive each
adjective belongs to. It is the same case with regard to verbs. In
Latin the verb may often be placed, without any inconveniency or
ambiguity, in any part of the sentence. But in English its place is
almost always precisely determined. It must follow the subjective and
precede the objective member of the phrase in almost all cases. Thus
in Latin whether you say, _Joannem verberavit Robertas_, or _Robertas
verberavit Joannem_, the meaning is precisely the same, and the
termination fixes John to be the sufferer in both cases. But in
English _John beat Robert_, and _Robert beat John_, have by no means
the same signification. The place therefore of the three principal
members of the phrase is in the English, and for the same reason in
the French and Italian languages, almost always precisely determined;
whereas in the ancient languages a greater latitude is allowed, and
the place of those members is often, in a great measure, indifferent.
We must have recourse to Horace, in order to interpret some parts of
Milton's literal translation;
Who now enjoys thee credulous all gold,
Who always vacant, always amiable
Hopes thee; of flattering gales
Unmindful
are verses which it is impossible to interpret by any rules of our
language. There are no rules in our language, by which any man could
discover, that, in the first line, _credulous_ referred to _who_, and
not to _thee_; or that _all gold_ referred to any thing; or, that in
the fourth line, _unmindful_, referred to _who_, in the second, and
not to _thee_ in the third; or, on the contrary, that, in the second
line, _always vacant_, _always amiable_, referred to _thee_ in the
third, and not to _who_ in the same line with it. In the Latin,
indeed, all this is abundantly plain.
{325} Qui nunc te fruitur credulus aureâ,
Qui semper vacuam, semper amabilem
Sperat te; nescius auræ fallacis.
Because the terminations in the Latin determine the reference of each
adjective to its proper substantive, which it is impossible for any
thing in the English to do. How much this power of transposing the
order of their words must have facilitated the compositions of the
ancients, both in verse and prose, can hardly be imagined. That it
must greatly have facilitated their versification it is needless to
observe; and in prose, whatever beauty depends upon the arrangement
and construction of the several members of the period, must to them
have been acquirable with much more ease, and to much greater
perfection than it can be to those whose expression is constantly
confined by the prolixness, constraint, and monotony of modern
languages.
----------
THE PRINCIPLES
WHICH LEAD AND DIRECT
PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRIES;
AS ILLUSTRATED BY
THE HISTORY OF ASTRONOMY.
-----
WONDER, surprise, and admiration, are words which, though often
confounded, denote, in our language, sentiments that are indeed
allied, but that are in some respects different also, and distinct
from one another. What is new and singular, excites that sentiment
which, in strict propriety, is called Wonder; what is unexpected,
Surprise; and what is great or beautiful, Admiration.
We wonder at all extraordinary and uncommon objects, at all the rarer
phenomena of nature, at meteors, comets, eclipses, at singular plants
and animals, and at every thing, in short, with which we have before
been either little or not at all acquainted; and we still wonder,
though forewarned of what we are to see.
We are surprised at those things which we have seen often, but which
we least of all expected to meet with in the place where we find them;
we are surprised at the sudden appearance of a friend, whom we have
seen a thousand times, but whom we did not at all imagine we were to
see then.
We admire the beauty of a plain or the greatness of a mountain, {326}
though we have seen both often before, and though nothing appears to
us in either, but what we had expected with certainty to see.
Whether this criticism upon the precise meaning of these words be
just, is of little importance. I imagine it is just, though I
acknowledge, that the best writers in our language have not always
made use of them according to it. Milton, upon the appearance of
Death to Satan, says, that
The Fiend what this might be admir'd,
Admir'd, not fear'd.------
But if this criticism be just, the proper expression should have been
_wonder'd_. Dryden, upon the discovery of Iphigenia sleeping,
says that
The fool of nature stood with stupid eyes,
And gaping mouth, that testified surprise.
But what Cimon must have felt upon this occasion could not so much be
Surprise, as Wonder and Admiration. All that I contend for is, that
the sentiments excited by what is new, by what is unexpected, and by
what is great and beautiful are really different, however the words
made use of to express them may sometimes be confounded. Even the
admiration which is excited by beauty, is quite different (as will
appear more fully hereafter) from that which is inspired by greatness,
though we have but one word to denote them.
These sentiments, like all others when inspired by one and the same
object, mutually support and enliven one another: an object with which
we are quite familiar, and which we see every day, produces, though
both great and beautiful, but a small effect upon us; because our
admiration is not supported either by Wonder or by Surprise: and if we
have heard a very accurate description of a monster, our Wonder will
be the less when we see it; because our previous knowledge of it will
in a great measure prevent our Surprise.
It is the design of this essay to consider particularly the nature and
causes of each of these sentiments, whose influence is of far wider
extent than we should be apt upon a careless view to imagine. I shall
begin with Surprise.
-----
SEC. I.--_Of the Effect of Unexpectedness, or of Surprise._
WHEN an object of any kind, which has been for some time expected and
foreseen, presents itself, whatever be the emotion which it is by
nature fitted to excite, the mind must have been prepared for it, and
must even in some measure have conceived it before-hand; because the
idea of the object having been so long present to it, must have
before-hand excited some degree of the same emotion which the object
itself would excite: the change, therefore, which its presence
produces comes thus to be less considerable, and the emotion or
passion which it excites glides gradually and easily into the heart,
without violence, pain or difficulty.
{327} But the contrary of all this happens when the object is
unexpected; the passion is then poured in all at once upon the heart,
which is thrown, if it is a strong passion, into the most violent and
convulsive emotions, such as sometimes cause immediate death;
sometimes, by the suddenness of the ecstacy, so entirely disjoint the
whole frame of the imagination, that it never after returns to its
former tone and composure, but falls either into a frenzy or habitual
lunacy; and such as almost always occasion a momentary loss of reason,
or of that attention to other things which our situation or our duty
requires.
How much we dread the effects of the more violent passions, when they
come suddenly upon the mind, appears from those preparations which all
men think necessary when going to inform any one of what is capable of
exciting them. Who would choose all at once to inform his friend of an
extraordinary calamity that had befallen him, without taking care
before-hand, by alarming him with an uncertain fear, to announce, if
one may say so, his misfortune, and thereby prepare and dispose him
for receiving the tidings?
Those panic terrors which sometimes seize armies in the field, or
great cities, when an enemy is in the neighbourhood, and which deprive
for a time the most determined of all deliberate judgments, are never
excited but by the sudden apprehension of unexpected danger. Such
violent consternations, which at once confound whole multitudes,
benumb their understandings, and agitate their hearts, with all the
agony of extravagant fear, can never be produced by any foreseen
danger, how great soever. Fear, though naturally a very strong
passion, never rises to such excesses, unless exasperated both by
wonder, from the uncertain nature of the danger, and by surprise, from
the suddenness of the apprehension.
Surprise, therefore, is not to be regarded as an original emotion of a
species distinct from all others. The violent and sudden change
produced upon the mind, when an emotion of any kind is brought
suddenly upon it, constitutes the whole nature of Surprise.
But when not only a passion and a great passion comes all at once upon
the mind, but when it comes upon it while the mind is in the mood most
unfit for conceiving it, the Surprise is then the greatest. Surprises
of joy when the mind is sunk into grief, or of grief when it is elated
with joy, are therefore the most unsupportable. The change is in this
case the greatest possible. Not only a strong passion is conceived all
at once, but a strong passion the direct opposite of that which was
before in possession of the soul. When a load of sorrow comes down
upon the heart that is expanded and elated with gaiety and joy, it
seems not only to damp and oppress it, but almost to crush and bruise
it, as a real weight would crush and bruise the body. On the contrary,
when from an unexpected change of fortune, a tide of gladness seems,
if I may say so, to spring up all at once within it, when {328}
depressed and contracted with grief and sorrow, it feels as if
suddenly extended and heaved up with violent and irresistible force,
and is torn with pangs of all others most exquisite, and which almost
always occasion faintings, deliriums, and sometimes instant death. For
it may be worth while to observe, that though grief be a more violent
passion than joy, as indeed all uneasy sensations seem naturally more
pungent than the opposite agreeable ones, yet of the two, Surprises of
joy are still more insupportable than Surprises of grief. We are told
that after the battle of Thrasimenus, while a Roman lady, who had been
informed that her son was slain in the action, was sitting alone
bemoaning her misfortunes, the young man who escaped came suddenly
into the room to her, and that she cried out and expired instantly in
a transport of joy. Let us suppose the contrary of this to have
happened, and that in the midst of domestic festivity and mirth, he
had suddenly fallen down dead at her feet, is it likely that the
effects would have been equally violent? I imagine not. The heart
springs to joy with a sort of natural elasticity, it abandons itself
to so agreeable an emotion, as soon as the object is presented; it
seems to pant and leap forward to meet it, and the passion in its full
force takes at once entire and complete possession of the soul. But it
is otherwise with grief; the heart recoils from, and resists the first
approaches of that disagreeable passion, and it requires some time
before the melancholy object can produce its full effect. Grief comes
on slowly and gradually, nor ever rises at once to that height of
agony to which it is increased after a little time. But joy comes
rushing upon us all at once like a torrent. The change produced,
therefore, by a surprise of joy is more sudden, and upon that account
more violent and apt to have more fatal effects, than that which is
occasioned by a surprise of grief; there seems, too, to be something
in the nature of surprise, which makes it unite more easily with the
brisk and quick motion of joy, than with the slower and heavier
movement of grief. Most men who can take the trouble to recollect,
will find that they have heard of more people who died or became
distracted with sudden joy, than with sudden grief. Yet from the
nature of human affairs, the latter must be much more frequent than
the former. A man may break his leg, or lose his son, though he has
had no warning of either of these events, but he can hardly meet with
an extraordinary piece of good fortune, without having had some
foresight of what was to happen.
Not only grief and joy, but all the other passions, are more violent,
when opposite extremes succeed each other. Is any resentment so keen
as what follows the quarrels of lovers, or any love so passionate as
what attends their reconcilement?
Even the objects of the external senses affect us in a more lively
manner, when opposite extremes succeed to or are placed beside each
other. Moderate warmth seems intolerable heat if felt after extreme
{329} cold. What is bitter will seem more so when tasted after what is
very sweet; a dirty white will seem bright and pure when placed by a
jet black. The vivacity in short of every sensation, as well as of
every sentiment, seems to be greater or less in proportion to the
change made by the impression of either upon the situation of the mind
or organ; but this change must necessarily be the greatest when
opposite sentiments and sensations are contrasted, or succeed
immediately to one another. Both sentiments and sensations are then
the liveliest; and this superior vivacity proceeds from nothing but
their being brought upon the mind or organ when in a state most unfit
for conceiving them.
As the opposition of contrasted sentiments heightens their vivacity,
so the resemblance of those which immediately succeed each other
renders them more faint and languid. A parent who has lost several
children immediately after one another, will be less affected with the
death of the last than with that of the first, though the loss in
itself be, in this case, undoubtedly greater; but his mind being
already sunk into sorrow, the new misfortune seems to produce no other
effect than a continuance of the same melancholy, and is by no means
apt to occasion such transports of grief as are ordinarily excited by
the first calamity of the kind; he receives it, though with great
dejection, yet with some degree of calmness and composure, and without
anything of that anguish and agitation of mind which the novelty of
the misfortune is apt to occasion. Those who have been unfortunate
through the whole course of their lives are often indeed habitually
melancholy, and sometimes peevish and splenetic, yet upon any fresh
disappointment, though they are vexed and complain a little, they
seldom fly out into any more violent passion, and never fall into
those transports of rage or grief which often, upon like occasions,
distract the fortunate and successful.
Upon this are founded, in a great measure, some of the effects of
habit and custom. It is well known that custom deadens the vivacity of
both pain and pleasure, abates the grief we should feel for the one,
and weakens the joy we should derive from the other. The pain is
supported without agony, and the pleasure enjoyed without rapture:
because custom and the frequent repetition of any object comes at last
to form and bend the mind or organ to that habitual mood and
disposition which fits them to receive its impression, without
undergoing any very violent change.
-----
SEC. II.--_Of Wonder, or of the Effects of Novelty._
IT is evident that the mind takes pleasure in observing the
resemblances that are discoverable betwixt different objects. It is by
means of such observations that it endeavours to arrange and methodise
all its ideas, and to reduce them into proper classes and assortments.
Where it can observe but one single quality that is common to a great
{330} variety of otherwise widely different objects, that single
circumstance will be sufficient for it to connect them all together,
to reduce them to one common class, and to call them by one general
name. It is thus that all things endowed with a power of self-motion,
beasts, birds, fishes, insects, are classed under the general name of
Animal; and that these again, along with those which want that power,
are arranged under the still more general word, Substance: and this is
the origin of those assortments of objects and ideas which in the
schools are called Genera and Species, and of those abstract and
general names, which in all languages are made use of to express them.
The further we advance in knowledge and experience, the greater number
of divisions and subdivisions of those Genera and Species we are both
inclined and obliged to make. We observe a greater variety of
particularities amongst those things which have a gross resemblance;
and having made new divisions of them, according to those
newly-observed particularities, we are then no longer to be satisfied
with being able to refer an object to a remote genus, or very general
class of things, to many of which it has but a loose and imperfect
resemblance. A person, indeed, unacquainted with botany may expect to
satisfy your curiosity, by telling you, that such a vegetable is a
weed, or, perhaps in still more general terms, that it is a plant. But
a botanist will neither give nor accept of such an answer. He has
broke and divided that great class of objects into a number of
inferior assortments, accord to those varieties which his experience
has discovered among them; and he wants to refer each individual plant
to some tribe of vegetables, with all of which it may have a more
exact resemblance, than with many things comprehended under the
extensive genus of plants. A child imagines that it gives a
satisfactory answer when it tells you, that an object whose name it
knows not is a thing, and fancies that it informs you of something,
when it thus ascertains to which of the two most obvious and
comprehensive classes of objects a particular impression ought to be
referred; to the class of realities or solid substances which it calls
_things_, or to that of appearances which it calls _nothings_.
Whatever, in short, occurs to us we are fond of referring to some
species or class of things, with all of which it has a nearly exact
resemblance: and though we often know no more about them than about
it, yet we are apt to fancy that by being able to do so, we show
ourselves to be better acquainted with it, and to have a more thorough
insight into its nature. But when something quite new and singular is
presented, we feel ourselves incapable of doing this. The memory
cannot, from all its stores, cast up any image that nearly resembles
this strange appearance. If by some of its qualities it seems to
resemble, and to be connected with a species which we have before been
acquainted with, it is by others separated and detached from that, and
from all the {331} other assortments of things we have hitherto been
able to make. It stands alone and by itself in the imagination, and
refuses to be grouped or confounded with any set of objects whatever.
The imagination and memory exert themselves to no purpose, and in vain
look around all their classes of ideas in order to find one under
which it may be arranged. They fluctuate to no purpose from thought to
thought, and we remain still uncertain and undetermined where to place
it, or what to think of it. It is this fluctuation and vain
recollection, together with the emotion or movement of the spirits
that they excite, which constitute the sentiment properly called
_Wonder_, and which occasion that staring, and sometimes that
rolling of the eyes, that suspension of the breath, and that swelling
of the heart, which we may all observe, both in ourselves and others,
when wondering at some new object, and which are the natural symptoms
of uncertain and undetermined thought. What sort of a thing can that
be? What is that like? are the questions which, upon such an occasion,
we are all naturally disposed to ask. If we can recollect many such
objects which exactly resemble this new appearance, and which present
themselves to the imagination naturally, and as it were of their own
accord, our Wonder is entirely at an end. If we can recollect but a
few, and which it requires too some trouble to be able to call up, our
Wonder is indeed diminished, but not quite destroyed. If we can
recollect none, but are quite at a loss, it is the greatest possible.
With what curious attention does a naturalist examine a singular
plant, or a singular fossil, that is presented to him? He is at no
loss to refer it to the general genus of plants or fossils; but this
does not satisfy him, and when he considers all the different tribes
or species of either with which he has hitherto been acquainted, they
all, he thinks, refuse to admit the new object among them. It stands
alone in his imagination, and as it were detached from all the other
species of that genus to which it belongs. He labours, however, to
connect it with some one or other of them. Sometimes he thinks it may
be placed in this, and sometimes in that other assortment; nor is he
ever satisfied, till he has fallen upon one which, in most of its
qualities, it resembles. When he cannot do this, rather than it should
stand quite by itself, he will enlarge the precincts, if I may say so,
of some species, in order to make room for it; or he will create a new
species on purpose to receive it, and call it a Play of Nature, or
give it some other appellation, under which he arranges all the
oddities that he knows not what else to do with. But to some class or
other of known objects he must refer it, and betwixt it and them he
must find out some resemblance or ether, before he can get rid of that
Wonder, that uncertainty and anxious curiosity excited by its singular
appearance, and by its dissimilitude with all the objects he had
hitherto observed.
As single and individual objects thus excite our Wonder when, by {332}
their uncommon qualities and singular appearance, they make us
uncertain to what species of things we ought to refer them; so a
succession of objects which follow one another in an uncommon train or
order, will produce the same effect, though there be nothing
particular in any one of them taken by itself.
When one accustomed object appears after another, which it does not
usually follow, it first excites, by its unexpectedness, the sentiment
properly called Surprise, and afterwards, by the singularity of the
succession, or order of its appearance, the sentiment properly called
Wonder. We start and are surprised at seeing it there, and then wonder
how it came there. The motion of a small piece of iron along a plain
table is in itself no extraordinary object, yet the person who first
saw it begin, without any visible impulse, in consequence of the
motion of a loadstone at some little distance from it, could not
behold it without the most extreme Surprise; and when that momentary
emotion was over, he would still wonder how it came to be conjoined to
an event with which, according to the ordinary train of things, he
could have so little suspected it to have any connection.
When two objects, however unlike, have often been observed to follow
each other, and have constantly presented themselves to the senses in
that order, they come to be connected together in the fancy, that the
idea of the one seems, of its own accord, to call up and introduce
that of the other. If the objects are still observed to succeed each
other as before, this connection, or, as it has been called, this
association of their ideas, becomes stricter and stricter, and the
habit of the imagination to pass from the conception of the one to
that of the other, grows more and more rivetted and confirmed. As its
ideas move more rapidly than external objects, it is continually
running before them, and therefore anticipates, before it happens,
every event which falls out according to this ordinary course of
things. When objects succeed each other in the same train in which the
ideas of the imagination have thus been accustomed to move, and in
which, though not conducted by that chain of events presented to the
senses, they have acquired a tendency to go on of their own accord,
such objects appear all closely connected with one another, and the
thought glides easily along them, without effort and without
interruption. They fall in with the natural career of the imagination;
and as the ideas which represented such a train of things would seem
all mutually to introduce each other, every last thought to be called
up by the foregoing, and to call up the succeeding; so when the
objects themselves occur, every last event seems, in the same manner,
to be introduced by the foregoing, and to introduce the succeeding.
There is no break, no stop, no gap, no interval. The ideas excited by
so coherent a chain of things seem, as it were, to float through the
mind of their own accord, without obliging it to exert itself, or to
make any effort in order to pass from one of them to another.
{333} But if this customary connection be interrupted, if one or more
objects appear in an order quite different from that to which the
imagination has been accustomed, and for which it is prepared, the
contrary of all this happens. We are at first surprised by the
unexpectedness of the new appearance, and when that momentary emotion
is over, we still wonder how it came to occur in that place. The
imagination no longer feels the usual facility of passing from the
event which goes before to that which comes after. It is an order or
law of succession to which it has not been accustomed, and which it
therefore finds some difficulty in following, or in attending to. The
fancy is stopped and interrupted in that natural movement or career,
according to which it was proceeding. Those two events seem to stand
at a distance from each other; it endeavours to bring them together,
but they refuse to unite; and it feels, or imagines it feels,
something like a gap or interval betwixt them. It naturally hesitates,
and, as it were, pauses upon the brink of this interval; it endeavours
to find out something which may fill up the gap, which, like a bridge,
may so far at least unite those seemingly distant objects, as to
render the passage of the thought betwixt them smooth, and natural,
and easy. The supposition of a chain of intermediate, though
invisible, events, which succeed each other in a train similar to that
in which the imagination has been accustomed to move, and which links
together those two disjointed appearances, is the only means by which
the imagination can fill up this interval, is the only bridge which,
if one may say so, can smooth its passage from the one object to the
other. Thus, when we observe the motion of the iron, in consequence of
that of the loadstone, we gaze and hesitate, and feel a want of
connection betwixt two events which follow one another in so unusual a
train. But when, with Des Cartes, we imagine certain invisible
effluvia to circulate round one of them, and by their repeated
impulses to impel the other, both to move towards it, and to follow
its motion, we fill up the interval betwixt them, we join them
together by a sort of bridge, and thus take off that hesitation and
difficulty which the imagination felt in passing from the one to the
other. That the iron should move after the loadstone seems, upon this
hypothesis, in some measure according to the ordinary course of
things. Motion after impulse is an order of succession with which of
all things we are the most familiar. Two objects which are so
connected seem, to our mind, no longer to be disjointed, and the
imagination flows smoothly and easily along them.
Such is the nature of this second species of Wonder, which arises from
an unusual succession of things. The stop which is thereby given to
the career of the imagination, the difficulty which it finds in
passing along such disjointed objects, and the feeling of something
like a gap or interval betwixt them, constitute the whole essence of
this emotion. Upon the clear discovery of a connecting chain of
intermediate events, {334} it vanishes altogether. What obstructed the
movement of the imagination is then removed. Who wonders at the
machinery of the opera-house who has once been admitted behind the
scenes? In the wonders of nature, however, it rarely happens that we
can discover so clearly this connecting chain. With regard to a few
even of them, indeed, we seem to have been really admitted behind the
scenes, and our wonder accordingly is entirely at an end. Thus the
eclipses of the sun and moon, which once, more than all the other
appearances in the heavens, excited the terror and amazement of
mankind, seem now no longer to be wonderful, since the connecting
chain has been found out which joins them to the ordinary course of
things. Nay, in those cases in which we have been less successful,
even the vague hypothesis of Des Cartes, and the yet more indetermined
notions of Aristotle, have, with their followers, contributed to give
some coherence to the appearances of nature, and might diminish,
though they could not destroy, their wonder. If they did not
completely fill up the interval betwixt the two disjointed objects,
they bestowed upon them, however, some sort of loose connection which
they wanted before.
That the imagination feels a real difficulty in passing along two
events which follow one another in an uncommon order, may be confirmed
by many obvious observations. If it attempts to attend beyond a
certain time to a long series of this kind, the continual efforts it
is obliged to make, in order to pass from one object to another, and
thus follow the progress of the succession, soon fatigue it, and if
repeated too often, disorder and disjoint its whole frame. It is thus
that too severe an application to study sometimes brings on lunacy and
frenzy, in those especially who are somewhat advanced in life, but
whose imaginations, from being too late in applying, have not got
those habits which dispose them to follow easily the reasonings in the
abstract sciences. Every step of a demonstration, which to an old
practitioner is quite natural and easy, requires from them the most
intense application of thought.
Spurred on, however, either by ambition or by admiration for the
subject, they still continue till they become, first confused, then
giddy, and at last distracted. Could we conceive a person of the
soundest judgment, who had grown up to maturity, and whose imagination
had acquired those habits, and that mould, which the constitution of
things in this world necessarily impresses upon it, to be all at once
transported alive to some other planet, where nature was governed by
laws quite different from those which take place here; as he would be
continually obliged to attend to events, which must to him appear in
the highest degree jarring, irregular, and discordant, he would soon
feel the same confusion and giddiness begin to come upon him, which
would at last end in the same manner, in lunacy and distraction.
Neither, to produce this effect, is it necessary that the objects
should be either {335} great or interesting, or even uncommon, in
themselves. It is sufficient that they follow one another in an
uncommon order. Let any one attempt to look over even a game of cards,
and to attend particularly to every single stroke, and if he is
unacquainted with the nature and rules of the games; that is, with the
laws which regulate the succession of the cards; he will soon feel the
same confusion and giddiness begin to come upon him, which, were it to
be continued for days and months, would end in the same manner, in
lunacy and distraction. But if the mind be thus thrown into the most
violent disorder, when it attends to a long series of events which
follow one another in an uncommon train, it must feel some degree of
the same disorder, when it observes even a single event fall out in
this unusual manner: for the violent disorder can arise from nothing
but the too frequent repetition of this smaller uneasiness.
That it is the unusualness alone of the succession which occasions
this stop and interruption in the progress of the imagination as well
as the notion of an interval betwixt the two immediately succeeding
objects, to be filled up by some chain of intermediate events, is not
less evident. The same orders of succession, which to one set of men
seem quite according to the natural course of things, and such as
require no intermediate events to join them, shall to another appear
altogether incoherent and disjointed, unless some such events be
supposed: and this for no other reason, but because such orders of
succession are familiar to the one, and strange to the other. When we
enter the work-houses of the most common artizans; such as dyers,
brewers, distillers; we observe a number of appearances, which present
themselves in an order that seems to us very strange and wonderful.
Our thought cannot easily follow it, we feel an interval betwixt every
two of them, and require some chain of intermediate events, to fill it
up, and link them together. But the artizan himself, who has been for
many years familiar with the consequences of all the operations of his
art, feels no such interval. They fall in with what custom has made
the natural movement of his imagination: they no longer excite his
Wonder, and if he is not a genius superior to his profession, so as to
be capable of making the very easy reflection, that those things,
though familiar to him, may be strange to us, he will be **disposed
rather to laugh at, than sympathize with our Wonder. He cannot
conceive what occasion there is for any connecting events to unite
those appearances, which seem to him to succeed each other very
naturally. It is their nature, he tells us, to follow one another in
this order, and that accordingly they always do so. In the same manner
bread has, since the world begun been the common nourishment of the
human body, and men have so long seen it, every day, converted into
flesh and bones, substances in all respects so unlike it, that they
have seldom had the curiosity to inquire by what process of {336}
intermediate events this change is brought about. Because the passage
of the thought from the one object to the other is by custom become
quite smooth and easy, almost without the supposition of any such
process. Philosophers, indeed, who often look for a chain of invisible
objects to join together two events that occur in an order familiar to
all the world, have endeavoured to find out a chain of this kind
betwixt the two events I have just now mentioned; in the same manner
as they have endeavoured, by a like intermediate chain, to connect the
gravity, the elasticity, and even the cohesion of natural bodies, with
some of their other qualities. These, however, are all of them such
combinations of events as give no stop to the imaginations of the bulk
of mankind, as excite no Wonder, nor any apprehension that there is
wanting the strictest connection between them. But as in those sounds,
which to the greater part of men seem perfectly agreeable to measure
and harmony, the nicer ear of a musician will discover a want, both of
the most exact time, and of the most perfect coincidence; so the more
practised thought of a philosopher, who has spent his whole life in
the study of the connecting principles of nature, will often feel an
interval betwixt two objects, which, to more careless observers, seem
very strictly conjoined. By long attention to all the connections
which have ever been presented to his observation, by having often
compared them with one another, he has, like the musician, acquired,
if one may so, a nicer ear, and a more delicate feeling with regard to
things of this nature. And as to the one, that music seems dissonance
which falls short of the most perfect harmony; so to the other, those
events seem altogether separated and disjoined, which may fall short
of the strictest and most perfect connection.
Philosophy is the science of the connecting principles of nature.
Nature, after the largest experience that common observation can
acquire, seems to abound with events which appear solitary and
incoherent with all that go before them, which therefore disturb the
easy movement of the imagination; which makes its ideas succeed each
other, if one may say so, by irregular starts and sallies; and which
thus tend, in some measure, to introduce those confusions and
distractions we formerly mentioned. Philosophy, by representing the
invisible chains which bind together all these disjointed objects,
endeavours to introduce order into this chaos of jarring and
discordant appearances, to allay this tumult of the imagination, and
to restore it, when it surveys the great revolutions of the universe,
to that tone of tranquillity and composure, which is both most
agreeable in itself, and most suitable to its nature. Philosophy,
therefore, may be regarded as one of those arts which address
themselves to the imagination; and whose theory and history, upon that
account, fall properly within the circumference of our subject. Let us
endeavour to trace it, from its first origin, up to that summit of
perfection to which it is at present {337} supposed to have arrived,
and to which, indeed, it has equally been supposed to have arrived in
almost all former times. It is the most sublime of all the agreeable
arts, and its revolutions have been the greatest, the most frequent,
and the most distinguished of all those that have happened in the
literary world. Its history, therefore, must, upon all accounts, be
the most entertaining and the most instructive. Let us examine,
therefore, all the different systems of nature, which, in these
western parts of the world, the only parts of whose history we know
anything, have successively been adopted by the learned and ingenious;
and, without regarding their absurdity or probability, their agreement
or inconsistency with truth and reality, let us consider them only in
that particular point of view which belongs to our subject; and
content ourselves with inquiring how far each of them was fitted to
soothe the imagination, and to render the theatre of nature a more
coherent, and therefore a more magnificent spectacle, than otherwise
it would have appeared to be. According as they have failed or
succeeded in this, they have constantly failed or succeeded in gaining
reputation and renown to their authors; and this will be found to be
the clue that is most capable of conducting us through all the
labyrinths of philosophical history: for in the mean time, it will
serve to confirm what has gone before, and to throw light upon what is
to come after, that we observe, in general, that no system, how well
soever in other respects supported, has ever been able to gain any
general credit on the world, whose connecting principles were not such
as were familiar to all mankind. Why has the chemical philosophy in
all ages crept along in obscurity, and been so disregarded by the
generality of mankind, while other systems, less useful, and not more
agreeable to experience, have possessed universal admiration for whole
centuries together? The connecting principles of the chemical
philosophy are such as the generality of mankind know nothing about,
have rarely seen, and have never been acquainted with; and which to
them, therefore, are incapable of smoothing the passage of the
imagination betwixt any two seemingly disjointed objects. Salts,
sulphurs, and mercuries, acids and alkalis, are principles which can
smooth things to those only who live about the furnace; but whose most
common operations seem, to the bulk of mankind, as disjointed as any
two events which the chemists would connect together by them. Those
artists, however, naturally explained things to themselves by
principles that were familiar to themselves. As Aristotle observes,
that the early Pythagoreans, who first studied arithmetic, explained
all things by the properties of numbers; and Cicero tells us, that
Aristoxenus, the musician, found the nature of the soul to consist in
harmony. In the same manner, a learned physician lately gave a system
of moral philosophy upon the principles of his own art, in which
wisdom and virtue were the healthful state of the soul; the different
vices and follies, the different diseases {338} to which it was
subject; in which the causes and symptoms of those diseases were
ascertained; and, in the same medical strain, a proper method of cure
prescribed. In the same manner also, others have written parallels of
painting and poetry, of poetry and music, of music and architecture,
of beauty and virtue, of all the fine arts; systems which have
universally owed their origin to the lucubrations of those who were
acquainted with the one art, but ignorant of the other; who therefore
explained to themselves the phenomena, in that which was strange to
them, by those in that which was familiar; and with whom, upon that
account, the analogy, which in other writers gives occasion to a few
ingenious similitudes, became the great hinge upon which every thing
turned.
-----
SECT. III.--_Of the Origin of Philosophy._
MANKIND, in the first ages of society, before the establishment of
law, order, and security, have little curiosity to find out those
hidden chains of events which bind together the seemingly disjointed
appearances of nature. A savage, whose subsistence is precarious,
whose life is every day exposed to the rudest dangers, has no
inclination to amuse himself with searching out what, when discovered,
seems to serve no other purpose than to render the theatre of nature a
more connected spectacle to his imagination. Many of these smaller
incoherences, which in the course of things perplex philosophers,
entirely escape his attention. Those more magnificent irregularities,
whose grandeur he cannot overlook, call forth his amazement. Comets,
eclipses, thunder, lightning, and other meteors, by their greatness,
naturally overawe him, and he views them with a reverence that
approaches to fear. His inexperience and uncertainty with regard to
every thing about them, how they came, how they are to go, what went
before, what is to come after them, exasperate his sentiment into
terror and consternation. But our passions, as Father Malbranche
observes, all justify themselves; that is, suggest to us opinions
which justify them. As those appearances terrify him, therefore, he is
disposed to believe every thing about them which can render them still
more the objects of his terror. That they proceed from some
intelligent, though invisible causes, of whose vengeance and
displeasure they are either the signs or the effects, is the notion of
all others most capable of enhancing this passion, and is that,
therefore, which he is most apt to entertain. To this, too, that
cowardice and pusillanimity, so natural to man in his uncivilized
state, still more disposes him; unprotected by the laws of society,
exposed, defenceless, he feels his weakness upon all occasions; his
strength and security upon none.
But all the irregularities of nature are not of this awful or terrible
kind. Some of them are perfectly beautiful and agreeable. These, {339}
therefore, from the same impotence of mind, would be beheld with love
and complacency, and even with transports of gratitude; for whatever
is the cause of pleasure naturally excites our gratitude. A child
caresses the fruit that is agreeable to it, as it beats the stone that
hurts it. The notions of a savage are not very different. The ancient
Athenians, who solemnly punished the axe which had accidentally been
the cause of the death of a man, erected altars, and offered
sacrifices to the rainbow. Sentiments not unlike these, may sometimes,
upon such occasions, begin to be felt even in the breasts of the most
civilized, but are presently checked by the reflection, that the
things are not their proper objects. But a savage, whose notions are
guided altogether by wild nature and passion, waits for no other proof
that a thing is the proper object of any sentiment, than that it
excites it. The reverence and gratitude, with which some of the
appearances of nature inspire him, convince him that they are the
proper objects of reverence and gratitude, and therefore proceed from
some intelligent beings, who take pleasure in the expressions of those
sentiments. With him, therefore, every object of nature, which by its
beauty or greatness, its utility or hurtfulness, is considerable
enough to attract his attention, and whose operations are not
perfectly regular, is supposed to act by the direction of some
invisible and designing power. The sea is spread out into a calm, or
heaved into a storm, according to the good pleasure of Neptune. Does
the earth pour forth an exuberant harvest? It is owing to the
indulgence of Ceres. Does the vine yield a plentiful vintage? It flows
from the bounty of Bacchus. Do either refuse their presents? It is
ascribed to the displeasure of those offended deities. The tree which
now flourishes and now decays, is inhabited by a Dryad, upon whose
health or sickness its various appearances depend. The fountain, which
sometimes flows in a copious, and sometimes in a scanty stream, which
appears sometimes clear and limpid, and at other times muddy and
disturbed, is affected in all its changes by the Naiad who dwells
within it. Hence the origin of Polytheism, and of that vulgar
superstition which ascribes all the irregular events of nature to the
favour or displeasure of intelligent, though invisible beings, to
gods, demons, witches, genii, fairies. For it may be observed, that in
all polytheistic religions, among savages, as well as in the early
ages of heathen antiquity, it is the irregular events of nature only
that are ascribed to the agency and power of their gods. Fire burns,
and water refreshes; heavy bodies descend, and lighter substances fly
upwards, by the necessity of their own nature; nor was the invisible
hand of Jupiter ever apprehended to be employed in those matters. But
thunder and lightning, storms and sunshine, those more irregular
events, were ascribed to his favour, or his anger. Man, the only
designing power with which they were acquainted, never acts but either
to stop or to alter the course which natural events would take, if
left to themselves. {340} Those other intelligent beings, whom they
imagined, but knew not, were naturally supposed to act in the same
manner; not to employ themselves in supporting the ordinary course of
things, which went on of its own accord, but to stop, to thwart, and
to disturb it. And thus, in the first ages of the world, the lowest
and most pusillanimous superstition supplied the place of philosophy.
But when law has established order and security, and subsistence
ceases to be precarious, the curiosity of mankind is increased, and
their fears are diminished. The leisure which they then enjoy renders
them more attentive to the appearances of nature, more observant of
her smallest irregularities, and more desirous to know what is the
chain which links them together. That some such chain subsists betwixt
all her seemingly disjointed phenomena, they are necessarily led to
conceive; and that magnanimity and cheerfulness which all generous
natures acquire who are bred in civilized societies, where they have
so few occasions to feel their weakness, and so many to be conscious
of their strength and security, renders them less disposed to employ,
for this connecting chain, those invisible beings whom the fear and
ignorance of their rude forefathers had engendered. Those of liberal
fortunes, whose attention is not much occupied either with business or
with pleasure, can fill up the void of their imagination, which is
thus disengaged from the ordinary affairs of life, no other way than
by attending to that train of events which passes around them. While
the great objects of nature thus pass in review before them, many
things occur in an order to which they have not been accustomed. Their
imagination, which accompanies with ease and delight the regular
progress of nature, is stopped and embarrassed by those seeming
incoherences; they excite their wonder, and seem to require some chain
of intermediate events, which, by connecting them with something that
has gone before, may thus render the whole course of the universe
consistent and of a piece. Wonder, therefore, and not any expectation
of advantage from its discoveries, is the first principle which
prompts mankind to the study of Philosophy, of that science which
pretends to lay open the concealed connections that unite the various
appearances of nature; and they pursue this study for its own sake, as
an original pleasure or good in itself, without regarding its tendency
to procure them the means of many other pleasures.
Greece, and the Greek colonies in Sicily, Italy, and the Lesser Asia,
were the first countries which, in these western parts of the world,
arrived at a state of civilized society. It was in them, therefore,
that the first philosophers, of whose doctrine we have any distinct
account, appeared. Law and order seem indeed to have been established
in the great monarchies of Asia and Egypt, long before they had any
footing in Greece: yet, after all that has been said concerning the
learning of the Chaldeans and Egyptians, whether there ever was in
those nations {341} any thing which deserved the name of science, or
whether that despotism which is more destructive of security and
leisure than anarchy itself, and which prevailed over all the East,
prevented the growth of Philosophy, is a question which, for want of
monuments, cannot be determined with any degree of precision.
The Greek colonies having been settled amid nations either altogether
barbarous, or altogether unwarlike, over whom, therefore, they soon
acquired a very great authority, seem, upon that account, to have
arrived at a considerable degree of empire and opulence before any
state in the parent country had surmounted that extreme poverty,
which, by leaving no room for any evident distinction of ranks, is
necessarily attended with the confusion and misrule which flows from a
want of all regular subordination. The Greek islands being secure from
the invasion of land armies, or from naval forces, which were in those
days but little known, seem, upon that account too, to have got before
the continent in all sorts of civility and improvement. The first
philosophers, therefore, as well as the first poets, seem all to have
been natives, either of their colonies, or of their islands. It was
from thence that Homer, Archilochus, Stesichorus, Simonides, Sappho,
Anacreon, derived their birth. Thales and Pythagoras, the founders of
the two earliest sects of philosophy, arose, the one in an Asiatic
colony, the other in an island; and neither of them established his
school in the mother country.
What was the particular system of either of those two philosophers, or
whether their doctrine was so methodized as to deserve the name of a
system, the imperfection, as well as the uncertainty of all the
traditions that have come down to us concerning them, make it
impossible to determine. The school of Pythagoras, however, seems to
have advanced further in the study of the connecting principles of
nature, than that of the Ionian philosopher. The accounts which are
given of Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Archelaus, the
successors of Thales, represent the doctrines of those sages as full
of the most inextricable confusion. Something, however, that
approaches to a composed and orderly system, may be traced in what is
delivered down to us concerning the doctrine of Empedocles, of
Archytas, of Timæus, and of Ocellus the Lucanian, the most renowned
philosophers of the Italian school. The opinions of the two last
coincide pretty much; the one, with those of Plato; the other, with
those of Aristotle; nor do those of the two first seem to have been
very different, of whom the one was the author of the doctrine of the
Four Elements, the other the inventor of the Categories; who,
therefore, may be regarded as the founders, the one, of the ancient
Physics; the other, of the ancient Dialectic; and, how closely these
were connected will appear hereafter. It was in the school of
Socrates, however, from Plato and Aristotle, that Philosophy first
received that form, which introduced her, if one {342} may say so, to
the general acquaintance of the world. It is from them, therefore,
that we shall begin to give her history in any detail. Whatever was
valuable in the former systems, which was at all consistent with their
general principles, they seem to have consolidated into their own.
From the Ionian philosophy, I have not been able to discover that they
derived anything. From the Pythagorean school, both Plato and
Aristotle seem to have derived the fundamental principles of almost
all their doctrines. Plato, too, appears to have borrowed something
from two other sects of philosophers, whose extreme obscurity seems to
have prevented them from acquiring themselves any extensive
reputation; the one was that of Cratylus and Heraclitus; the other was
Xenophanes, Parmenides, Melissus, and Zeno. To pretend to rescue the
system of any of those ante-Socratic sages, from that oblivion which
at present covers them all, would be a vain and useless attempt. What
seems, however, to have been borrowed from them, shall sometimes be
marked as we go along.
There was still another school of philosophy, earlier than Plato, from
which, however, he was so far from borrowing any thing, that he seems
to have bent the whole force of his reason to discredit and expose its
principles. This was the philosophy of Leucippus, **Democritus, and
Protagoras, which accordingly seems to have submitted to his
eloquence, to have lain dormant, and to have been almost forgotten for
some generations, till it was afterwards more successfully revived by
Epicurus.
-----
SEC. IV.--_The History of Astronomy._
OF all the phenomena of nature, the celestial appearances are, by
their greatness and beauty, the most universal objects of the
curiosity of mankind. Those who surveyed the heavens with the most
careless attention, necessarily distinguished in them three different
sorts of objects; the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars. These last,
appearing always in the same situation, and at the same distance with
regard to one another, and seeming to revolve every day round the
earth in parallel circles, which widened gradually from the poles to
the equator, were naturally thought to have all the marks of being
fixed, like so many gems, in the concave side of the firmament, and of
being carried round by the diurnal revolutions of that solid body: for
the azure sky, in which the stars seem to float, was readily
apprehended, upon account of the uniformity of their apparent motions,
to be a solid body, the roof or outer wall of the universe, to whose
inside all those little sparkling objects were attached.
The Sun and Moon, often changing their distance and situation, in
regard to the other heavenly bodies, could not be apprehended to be
attached to the same sphere with them. They assigned, therefore, to
{343} each of them, a sphere of its own; that is, supposed each of
them to be attached to the concave side of a solid and transparent
body, by whose revolutions they were carried round the earth. There
was not, indeed, in this case, the same ground for the supposition of
such **a sphere as in that of the Fixed Stars; for neither the Sun nor
the Moon appear to keep always at the same distance with regard to any
one of the other heavenly bodies. But as the motion of the Stars had
been accounted for by an hypothesis of this kind, it rendered the
theory of the heavens more uniform, to account for that of the Sun and
Moon in the same manner. The sphere of the sun they placed above that
of the Moon; as the Moon was evidently seen in eclipses to pass
betwixt the Sun and the Earth. Each of them was supposed to revolve by
a motion of its own, and at the same time to be affected by the motion
of the Fixed Stars. Thus, the Sun was carried round from east to west
by the communicated movement of this outer sphere, which produced his
diurnal revolutions, and the vicissitudes of day and night; but at the
same time he had a motion of his own, contrary to this, from west to
east, which occasioned his annual revolution, and the continual
shifting of his place with regard to the Fixed Stars. This motion was
more easy, they thought, when carried on edgeways, and not in direct
opposition to the motion of the outer sphere, which occasioned the
inclination of the axis of the sphere of the Sun, to that of the
sphere of the Fixed Stars; this again produced the obliquity of the
ecliptic, and the consequent changes of the seasons. The moon, being
placed below the sphere of the Sun, had both a shorter course to
finish, and was less obstructed by the contrary movement of the sphere
of the Fixed Stars, from which she was farther removed. She finished
her period, therefore, in a shorter time, and required but a month,
instead of a year, to complete it.
The Stars, when more attentively surveyed, were some of them observed
to be less constant and uniform in their motions than the rest, and to
change their situations with regard to the other heavenly bodies;
moving generally eastward, yet appearing sometimes to stand still, and
sometimes even, to move westwards. These, to the number of five, were
distinguished by the name of Planets, or Wandering Stars, and marked
with the particular appellations of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and
Mercury. As, like the Sun and Moon, they seem to accompany the motion
of the Fixed Stars from east to west, but at the same time to have a
motion of their own, which is generally from west to east; they were
each of them, as well as those two great lamps of heaven, apprehended
to be attached to the inside of a solid concave and transparent
sphere, which had a revolution of its own, that was almost directly
contrary to the revolution of the outer heaven, but which, at the same
time, was hurried along by the superior violence and greater rapidity
of this last.
This is the system of concentric Spheres, the first regular system of
{344} Astronomy, which the world beheld, as it was taught in the
Italian school before Aristotle, and his two contemporary
philosophers, Eudoxus and Callippus, had given it all the perfection
which it is capable of receiving. Though rude and inartificial, it is
capable of connecting together, in the imagination, the grandest and
the most seemingly disjointed appearances in the heavens. The motions
of the most remarkable objects in the celestial regions, the Sun, the
Moon, the Fixed Stars, are sufficiently connected with one another by
this hypothesis. The eclipses of these two great luminaries are,
though not so easily calculated, as easily explained, upon this
ancient, as upon the modern system. When these early philosophers
explained to their disciples the very simple causes of those dreadful
phenomena, it was under the seal of the most sacred secrecy, that they
might avoid the fury of the people, and not incur the imputation of
impiety, when they thus took from the gods the direction of those
events, which were apprehended to be the most terrible tokens of their
impending vengeance. The obliquity of the ecliptic, the consequent
changes of the seasons, the vicissitudes of day and night, and the
different lengths of both days and nights in the different seasons,
correspond too, pretty exactly, with this ancient doctrine. And if
there had been no other bodies discoverable in the heavens, besides
the Sun, the Moon, and the Fixed Stars, this hypothesis might have
stood the examinations of all ages and gone down triumphant to the
remotest posterity.
If it gained the belief of mankind by its plausibility, it attracted
their wonder and admiration; sentiments that still more confirmed
their belief, by the novelty and beauty of that view of nature which
it presented to the imagination. Before this system was taught in the
world, the earth was regarded as, what it appears to the eye, a vast,
rough, and irregular plain, the basis and foundation of the universe,
surrounded on all sides by the ocean, and whose roots extended
themselves through the whole of that infinite depth which is below it.
The sky was considered as a solid hemisphere, which covered the earth,
and united with the ocean at the extremity of the horizon. The Sun,
the Moon, and all the heavenly bodies rose out of the eastern, climbed
up the convex side of the heavens, and descended again into the
western ocean, and from thence, by some subterraneous passages,
returned to their first chambers in the east. Nor was this notion
confined to the people, or to the poets who painted the opinions of
the people; it was held by Xenophanes, founder of the Eleatic
philosophy, after that of the Ionian and Italian schools, the earliest
that appeared in Greece. Thales of Miletus too, who, according to
Aristotle, represented the Earth as floating upon an immense ocean of
water, may have been nearly of the same opinion; notwithstanding what
we are told by Plutarch and Apuleius concerning his astronomical
discoveries, all of which must plainly have been of a much later date.
To those {345} who had no other idea of nature, besides what they
derived from so confused an account of things, how agreeable must that
system have appeared, which represented the Earth as distinguished
into land and water, self-balanced and suspended in the centre of the
universe, surrounded by the elements of Air and Ether, and covered by
eight polished and crystalline Spheres, each of which was
distinguished by one or more beautiful and luminous bodies, and all of
which revolved round their common centre, by varied, but by equable
and proportionable motions. It seems to have been the beauty of this
system that gave Plato the notion of something like an harmonic
proportion, to be discovered in the motions and distances of the
heavenly bodies; and which suggested to the earlier Pythagoreans, the
celebrated fancy of the Music of the Spheres; a wild and romantic
idea, yet such as does not ill correspond with that admiration, which
so beautiful a system, recommended too by the graces of novelty, is
apt to inspire.
Whatever are the defects which this account of things labours under,
they are such, as to the first observers of the heavens could not
readily occur. If all the motions of the Five Planets cannot, the
greater part of them may, be easily connected by it; they and all
their motions are the least remarkable objects in the heavens; the
greater part of mankind take no notice of them at all; and a system,
whose only defect lies in the account which it gives of them, cannot
thereby be much disgraced in their opinion. If some of the appearances
too of the Sun and Moon, the sometimes accelerated and again retarded
motions of those luminaries but ill correspond with it; these, too,
are such as cannot be discovered but by the most attentive
observation, and such as we cannot wonder that the imaginations of the
first enquirers should slur over, if one may say so, and take little
notice of.
It was, however, to remedy those defects, that Eudoxus, the friend and
auditor of Plato, found it necessary to increase the number of the
Celestial Spheres. Each Planet is sometimes observed to advance
forward in that eastern course which is peculiar to itself, sometimes
to retire backwards, and sometimes again to stand still. To suppose
that the sphere of the planet should by its own motion, if one may say
so, sometimes roll forwards, sometimes roll backwards, and sometimes
do neither the one nor the other, is contrary to all the natural
propensities of the imagination, which accompanies with ease and
delight any regular and orderly motion, but feels itself perpetually
stopped and interrupted, when it endeavours to attend to one so
desultory and uncertain. It would pursue, naturally and of its own
accord, the direct or progressive movement of the Sphere, but is every
now and then shocked, if one may say so, and turned violently out of
its natural career by the retrograde and stationary appearances of the
Planet, betwixt which and its more usual motion, the fancy feels a
want of connection, a gap or interval, which it cannot fill up, but by
supposing {346} some chain of intermediate events to join them. The
hypothesis of a number of other spheres revolving in the heavens,
besides those in which the luminous bodies themselves were infixed,
was the chain with which Eudoxus endeavoured to supply it. He bestowed
four of these Spheres upon each of the five Planets; one in which the
luminous body itself revolved, and three others above it. Each of
these had a regular and constant, but a peculiar movement of its own,
which it communicated to what was properly the Sphere of the Planet,
and thus occasioned that diversity of motions observable in those
bodies. One of these Spheres, for example, had an oscillatory motion,
like the circular pendulum of a watch. As when you turn round a watch,
like a Sphere upon its axis, the pendulum will, while turned round
along with it, still continue to oscillate, and communicate to
whatever body is comprehended within it, both its own oscillations and
the circular motion of the watch; so this oscillating Sphere, being
itself turned round by the motion of the Sphere above it, communicated
to the Sphere below it, that circular, as well as its own oscillatory
motions; produced by the one, the daily revolutions: by the other, the
direct, stationary, and retrograde appearances of the Planet, which
derived from a third Sphere that revolution by which it performed its
annual period. The motions of all these Spheres were in themselves
constant and equable, such as the imagination could easily attend to
and pursue, and which connected together that otherwise incoherent
diversity of movements observable in the Sphere of the Planet. The
motions of the Sun and Moon being more regular than those of the Five
Planets, by assigning three Spheres to each of them, Eudoxus imagined
he could connect together all the diversity of movements discoverable
in either. The motion of the Fixed Stars being perfectly regular, one
Sphere he judged sufficient for them all. So that, according to this
account, the whole number of Celestial Spheres amounted to
twenty-seven. Callippus, though somewhat younger, the contemporary of
Eudoxus, found that even this number was not enough to connect
together the vast variety of movements which he discovered in those
bodies, and therefore increased it to thirty-four. Aristotle, upon a
yet more attentive observation, found that even all these Spheres
would not be sufficient, and therefore added twenty-two more, which
increased their number to fifty-six. Later observers discovered still
new motions, and new inequalities, in the heavens. New Spheres were
therefore still to be added to the system, and some of them to be
placed even above that of the Fixed Stars. So that in the sixteenth
century, when Fracostorio, smit with the eloquence of Plato and
Aristotle, and with the regularity and harmony of their system, in
itself perfectly beautiful, though it corresponds but inaccurately
with the phenomena, endeavoured to revive this ancient Astronomy,
which had long given place to that of Ptolemy and Hipparchus, he found
it necessary to multiply {347} the number of Celestial Spheres to
seventy-two; neither were all these found to be enough.
This system had now become as intricate and complex as those
appearances themselves, which it had been invented to render uniform
and coherent. The imagination, therefore, found itself but little
relieved from that embarrassment, into which those appearances had
thrown it, by so perplexed an account of things. Another system, for
this reason, not long after the days of Aristotle, was invented by
Apollonius, which was afterwards perfected by Hipparchus, and has
since been delivered down to us by Ptolemy, the more artificial system
of Eccentric Spheres and Epicycles.
In this system, they first distinguished between the real and apparent
motion of the heavenly bodies. These, they observed, upon account of
their immense distance, must necessarily appear to revolve in circles
concentric with the globe of the Earth, and with one another: but that
we cannot, therefore, be certain that they really revolve in such
circles, since, though they did not, they would still have the same
appearance. By supposing, therefore, that the Sun and the other
Planets revolved in circles, whose centres were very distant from the
centre of the Earth; that consequently, in the progress of their
revolution, they must sometimes approach nearer, and sometimes recede
further from it, and must to its inhabitants appear to move faster in
the one case, and slower in the other, those philosophers imagined
they could account for the apparently unequal velocities of all those
bodies.
By supposing, that in the solidity of the Sphere of each of the Five
Planets there was formed another little Sphere, called an Epicycle,
which revolved round its own centre, at the same time that it was
carried round the centre of the Earth by the revolution of the great
Sphere, betwixt whose concave and convex sides it was inclosed; in the
same manner as we might suppose a little wheel inclosed within the
outer circle of a great wheel, and which whirled about several times
upon its own axis, while its centre was carried round the axis of the
great wheel, they imagined they could account for the retrograde and
stationary appearances of those most irregular objects in the heavens.
The Planet, they supposed, was attached to the circumference, and
whirled round the centre of this little Sphere, at the same time that
it was carried round the earth by the movement of the great Sphere.
The revolution of this little Sphere, or Epicycle, was such, that the
Planet, when in the upper part of it; that is, when furthest off and
least sensible to the eye; was carried round in the same direction
with the centre of the Epicycle, or with the Sphere in which the
Epicycle was inclosed: but when in the lower part, that is, when
nearest and most sensible to the eye; it was carried round a direction
contrary to that of the centre of the Epicycle: in the same manner as
every point in the upper part of the outer circle of a coach-wheel
revolves forward in the {348} same direction with the axis, while
every point, in the lower part, revolves backwards in a contrary
direction to the axis. The motions of the Planet, therefore, surveyed
from the Earth, appeared direct, when in the upper part of the
Epicycle, and retrograde, when in the lower. When again it either
descended from the upper part to the lower, or ascended from the lower
to the upper, it appeared stationary.
But, though, by the eccentricity of the great Sphere, they were thus
able, in some measure, to connect together the unequal velocities of
the heavenly bodies, and by the revolutions of the little Sphere, the
direct, stationary, and retrograde appearances of the Planets, there
was another difficulty that still remained. Neither the Moon, nor the
three superior Planets, appear always in the same part of the heavens,
when at their periods of most retarded motion, or when they are
supposed to be at the greatest distance from the Earth. The apogeum
therefore, or the point of greatest distance from the Earth, in the
Spheres of each of those bodies, must have a movement of its own,
which may carry it successively through all the different points of
the Ecliptic. They supposed, therefore, that while the great eccentric
Sphere revolved eastwards round its centre, that its centre too
revolved westwards in a circle of its own, round the centre of the
Earth, and thus carried its apogeum through all the different points
of the Ecliptic.
But with all those combined and perplexed circles; though the patrons
of this system were able to give some degree of uniformity to the real
directions of the Planets, they found it impossible so to adjust the
velocities of those supposed Spheres to the phenomena, as that the
revolution of any one of them, when surveyed from its own centre,
should appear perfectly equable and uniform. From that point, the only
point in which the velocity of what moves in a circle can be truly
judged of, they would still appear irregular and inconstant, and such
as tended to embarrass and confound the imagination. They invented,
therefore, for each of them, a new Circle, called the Equalizing
Circle, from whose centre they should all appear perfectly equable:
that is, they so adjusted the velocities of these Spheres, as that,
though the revolution of each of them would appear irregular when
surveyed from its own centre, there should, however, be a point
comprehended within its circumference, from whence its motions should
appear to cut off, in equal times, equal portions of the Circle, of
which that point was supposed to be the centre.
Nothing can more evidently show how much the repose and tranquillity
of the imagination is the ultimate end of philosophy, than the
invention of this Equalizing Circle. The motions of the heavenly
bodies had appeared inconstant and irregular, both in their velocities
and in their directions. They were such, therefore, as tended to
embarrass and confound the imagination, whenever it attempted to trace
them. The invention of Eccentric Spheres, of Epicycles, and of the
{349} revolution of the centres of the Eccentric Spheres, tended to
allay this confusion, to connect together those disjointed
appearances, and to introduce harmony and order into the mind's
conception of the movements of those bodies. It did this, however, but
imperfectly; it introduced uniformity and coherence into their real
directions. But their velocities, when surveyed from the only point in
which the velocity of what moves in a Circle can be truly judged of,
the centre of that Circle, still remained, in some measure, inconstant
as before; and still, therefore, embarrassed the imagination. The mind
found itself somewhat relieved from this embarrassment, when it
conceived, that how irregular soever the motions of each of those
Circles might appear, when surveyed from its own centre, there was,
however, in each of them, a point, from whence its revolution would
appear perfectly equable and uniform, and such as the imagination
could easily follow. Those philosophers transported themselves, in
fancy, to the centres of these imaginary Circles, and took pleasure in
surveying from thence, all those fantastical motions, arranged,
according to that harmony and order, which it had been the end of all
their researches to bestow upon them. Here, at last, they enjoyed that
tranquillity and repose which they had pursued through all the mazes
of this intricate hypothesis; and here they beheld this, the most
beautiful and magnificent part of the great theatre of nature, so
disposed and constructed, that they could attend, with delight, to all
the revolutions and changes that occurred in it.
These, the System of Concentric, and that of Eccentric Spheres, seem
to have been the two Systems of Astronomy, that had most credit and
reputation with that part of the ancient world, who applied themselves
particularly to the study of the heavens. Cleanthes, however, and the
other philosophers of the Stoical sect who came after him, appear to
have had a system of their own, quite different from either. But
though justly renowned for their skill in dialectic, and for the
security and sublimity of their moral doctrines, those sages seem
never to have had any high reputation for their knowledge of the
heavens; neither is the name of any one of them ever counted in the
catalogue of the great astronomers, and studious observers of the
Stars among the ancients. They rejected the doctrine of the Solid
Spheres; and maintained, that the celestial regions were filled with a
fluid ether, of too yielding a nature to carry along with it, by any
motion of its own, bodies so immensely great as the Sun, Moon, and
Five Planets. These, therefore, as well as the Fixed Stars, did not
derive their motion from the circumambient body, but had each of them,
in itself, and peculiar to itself, a vital principle of motion, which
directed it to move with its own peculiar velocity, and its own
peculiar direction. It was by this internal principle that the Fixed
Stars revolved directly from east to west in circles parallel to the
Equator, greater or less, according to their distance or nearness to
the Poles, and with velocities so proportioned, {350} that each of
them finished its diurnal period in the same time, in something less
than twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes. It was, by a principle
of the same kind, that the Sun moved westward, for they allowed of no
eastward motion in the heavens, but with less velocity than the Fixed
Stars, so as to finish his diurnal period in twenty-four hours, and,
consequently, to fall every day behind them, by a space of the heavens
nearly equal to that which he passes over in four minutes; that is,
nearly equal to a degree. This revolution of the Sun, too, was neither
directly westwards, nor exactly circular; but after the Summer
Solstice, his motion began gradually to decline a little southwards,
appearing in his meridian to-day, further south than yesterday; and
to-morrow still further south than to-day; and thus continuing every
day to describe a spiral line round the Earth, which carried him
gradually further and further southwards, till he arrived at the
Winter Solstice. Here this spiral line began to change its direction,
and to bring him gradually, every day, further and further northwards,
till it again restored him to the Summer Solstice. In the same manner
they accounted for the motion of the Moon, and that of the Five
Planets, by supposing that each of them revolved westwards, but with
directions and velocities, that were both different from one another,
and continually varying; generally, however, in spherical lines, and
somewhat inclined to the Equator.
This system seems never to have had the vogue. The system of
Concentric as well as that of Eccentric Spheres gives some sort of
reason, both for the constancy and equability of the motion of the
Fixed Stars, and for the variety and uncertainty of that of the
Planets. Each of them bestows some sort of coherence upon those
apparently disjointed phenomena. But this other system seems to leave
them pretty much as it found them. Ask a Stoic, why all the Fixed
Stars perform their daily revolutions in circles parallel to each
other, though of very different diameters, and with velocities so
proportioned that they all finish their period at the same time, and
through the whole course of it preserve the same distance and
situation with regard to one another? He can give no other answer, but
that the peculiar nature, or if one may say so, the caprice of each
Star directs it to move in that peculiar manner. His system affords
him no principle of connection, by which he can join together, in his
imagination, so great a number of harmonious revolutions. But either
of the other two systems, by the supposition of the solid firmament,
affords this easily. He is equally at a loss to connect together the
peculiarities that are observed in the motions of the other heavenly
bodies; the spiral motion of them all; their alternate progression
from north to south, and from south to north; the sometimes
accelerated, and again retarded motions of the Sun and Moon; the
direct retrograde and stationary appearances of the Planets. All these
have, in his system, {351} no bond of union, but remain as loose and
incoherent in the fancy, as they at first appeared to the senses,
before philosophy had attempted, by giving them a new arrangement, by
placing them at different distances, by assigning to each some
peculiar but regular principle of motion, to methodize and dispose
them into an order that should enable the imagination to pass as
smoothly, and with as little embarrassment, along them, as along the
most regular, most familiar, and most coherent appearances of nature.
Such were the systems of Astronomy that, in the ancient world, appear
to have been adopted by any considerable party. Of all of them, the
system of Eccentric Spheres was that which corresponded most exactly
with the appearances of the heavens. It was not invented till after
those appearances had been observed, with some accuracy, for more than
a century together; and it was not completely digested by Ptolemy till
the reign of Antoninus, after a much longer course of observations. We
cannot wonder, therefore, that it was adapted to a much greater number
of the phenomena, than either of the other two systems, which had been
formed before those phenomena were observed with any degree of
attention, which, therefore, could connect them together only while
they were thus regarded in the gross, but which, it could not be
expected, should apply to them when they came to be considered in the
detail. From the time of Hipparchus, therefore, this system seems to
have been pretty generally received by all those who attended
particularly to the study of the heavens. That astronomer first made a
catalogue of the Fixed Stars; calculated, for six hundred years, the
revolutions of the Sun, Moon, and Five Planets; marked the places in
the heavens, in which, during all that period, each of those bodies
should appear; ascertained the times of the eclipses of the Sun and
Moon, and the particular places of the Earth in which they should be
visible. His calculations were founded upon this system, and as the
events corresponded to his predictions, with a degree of accuracy
which, though inferior to what Astronomy has since arrived at, was
greatly superior to any thing which the world had then known, they
ascertained, to all astronomers and mathematicians, the preference of
his system, above all those which had been current before.
It was, however, to astronomers and mathematicians, only, that they
ascertained this; for, notwithstanding the evident superiority of this
system, to all those with which the world was then acquainted, it was
never adopted by one sect of philosophers.
Philosophers, long before the days of Hipparchus, seem to have
abandoned the study of nature, to employ themselves chiefly in
ethical, rhetorical, and dialectical questions. Each party of them
too, had by this time completed their peculiar system or theory of the
universe, and no human consideration could then have induced them to
give up any part of it. That supercilious and ignorant contempt too,
with {352} which at this time they regarded all mathematicians, among
whom they counted astronomers, seems even to have hindered them from
enquiring so far into their doctrines as to know what opinions they
held. Neither Cicero nor Seneca, who have so often occasion to mention
the ancient systems of Astronomy, takes any notice of that of
Hipparchus. His name is not to be found in the writings of Seneca. It
is mentioned but once in those of Cicero, in a letter to Atticus, but
without any note of approbation, as a geographer, and not as an
astronomer. Plutarch, when he counts up, in his second book,
concerning the opinions of philosophers, all the ancient systems of
Astronomy, never mentions this, the only tolerable one which was known
in his time. Those three authors, it seems, conversed only with the
writings of philosophers. The elder Pliny, indeed, a man whose
curiosity extended itself equally to every part of learning, describes
the system of Hipparchus, and never mentions its author, which he has
occasion to do often, without some note of that high admiration which
he had so justly conceived for his merit. Such profound ignorance in
those professed instructors of mankind, with regard to so important a
part of the learning of their own times, is so very remarkable, that I
thought it deserved to be taken notice of, even in this short account
of the revolutions of the philosophy of the ancients.
Systems in many respects resemble machines. A machine is a little
system, created to perform, as well as to connect together, in
reality, those different movements and effects which the artist has
occasion for. A system is an imaginary machine invented to connect
together in the fancy those different movements and effects which are
already in reality performed. The machines that are first invented to
perform any particular movement are always the most complex, and
succeeding artists generally discover that, with fewer wheels, with
fewer principles of motion, than had originally been employed, the
same effects may be more easily produced. The first systems, in the
same manner, are always the most complex, and a particular connecting
chain, or principle, is generally thought necessary to unite every two
seemingly disjointed appearances: but it often happens, that one great
connecting principle is afterwards found to be sufficient to bind
together all the discordant phenomena that occur in a whole species of
things. How many wheels are necessary to carry on the movements of
this imaginary machine, the system of Eccentric Spheres! The westward
diurnal revolution of the Firmament, whose rapidity carries all the
other heavenly bodies along with it, requires one. The periodical
eastward revolutions of the Sun, Moon, and Five Planets, require, for
each of those bodies, another. Their differently accelerated and
retarded motions require, that those wheels, or circles, should
neither be concentric with the Firmament, nor with one another; which,
more than any thing, seems to disturb the harmony of the universe. The
{353} retrograde and stationary appearance of the Five Planets, as
well as the extreme inconstancy of the Moon's motion, require, for
each of them, an Epicycle, another little wheel attached to the
circumference of the great wheel, which still more interrupts the
uniformity of the system. The motion of the apogeum of each of those
bodies requires, in each of them, still another wheel, to carry the
centres of their Eccentric Spheres round the centre of the Earth. And
thus, this imaginary machine, though, perhaps, more simple, and
certainly better adapted to the phenomena than the Fifty-six Planetary
Spheres of Aristotle, was still too intricate and complex for the
imagination to rest in it with complete tranquillity and satisfaction.
It maintained its authority, however, without any diminution of
reputation, as long as science was at all regarded in the ancient
world. After the reign of Antoninus, and, indeed, after the age of
Hipparchus, who lived almost three hundred years before Antoninus, the
great reputation which the earlier philosophers had acquired, so
imposed upon the imaginations of mankind, that they seem to have
despaired of ever equalling their renown. All human wisdom, they
supposed, was comprehended in the writings of those elder sages. To
abridge, to explain, and to comment upon them, and thus show
themselves, at least, capable of understanding some of their sublime
mysteries, became now the only road to reputation. Proclus and Theon
wrote commentaries upon the system of Ptolemy; but, to have attempted
to invent a new one, would then have been regarded, not only as
presumption, but as impiety to the memory of their so much revered
predecessors.
The ruin of the empire of the Romans, and, along with it, the
subversion of all law and order, which happened a few centuries
afterwards, produced the entire neglect of that study of the
connecting principles of nature, to which leisure and security can
alone give occasion. After the fall of those great conquerors and
civilizers of mankind, the empire of the Caliphs seems to have been
the first state under which the world enjoyed that degree of
tranquillity which the cultivation of the sciences requires. It was
under the protection of those generous and magnificent princes, that
the ancient philosophy and astronomy of the Greeks were restored and
established in the East; that tranquillity, which their mild, just,
and religious government diffused over their vast empire, revived the
curiosity of mankind, to inquire into the connecting principles of
nature. The **fame of the Greek and Roman learning, which was then
recent in the memories of men, made them desire to know, concerning
these abstruse subjects, what were the doctrines of the so much
renowned sages of those two nations.
They translated, therefore, into the Arabian language, and studied,
with great eagerness, the works of many Greek philosophers,
particularly of Aristotle, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, and Galen. The
superiority which they easily discovered in them, above the rude
essays which {354} their own nation had yet had time to produce, and
which were such, we may suppose, as arise every where in the first
infancy of science, necessarily determined them to embrace their
systems, particularly that of Astronomy: neither were they ever
afterwards able to throw off their authority. For, though the
munificence of the Abassides, the second race of the Caliphs, is said
to have supplied the Arabian astronomers with larger and better
instruments than any that were known to Ptolemy and Hipparchus, the
study of the sciences seems, in that mighty empire, to have been
either of too short, or too interrupted a continuance, to allow them
to make any considerable correction in the doctrines of those old
mathematicians. The imaginations of mankind had not yet got time to
grow so familiar with the ancient systems, as to regard them without
some degree of that astonishment which their grandeur and novelty
excited; a novelty of a peculiar kind, which had at once the grace of
what was new, and the authority of what was ancient. They were still,
therefore, too much enslaved to those systems, to dare to depart from
them, when those confusions which shook, and at last overturned the
peaceful throne of the Caliphs, banished the study of the sciences
from that empire. They had, however, before this, made some
considerable improvements: they had measured the obliquity of the
Ecliptic, with more accuracy than had been done before. The tables of
Ptolemy had, by the length of time, and by the inaccuracy of the
observations upon which they were founded, become altogether wide of
what was the real situation of the heavenly bodies, as he himself
indeed had foretold they would do. It became necessary, therefore, to
form new ones, which was accordingly executed by the orders of the
Caliph Almamon, under whom, too, was made the first mensuration of the
Earth that we know off, after the commencement of the Christian era,
by two Arabian astronomers, who, in the plain of Sennaar, measured two
degrees of its circumference.
The victorious arms of the Saracens carried into Spain the learning,
as well as the gallantry, of the East; and along with it, the tables
of Almamon, and the Arabian translations of Ptolemy and Aristotle; and
thus Europe received a second time, from Babylon, the rudiments of the
science of the heavens. The writings of Ptolemy were translated from
Arabic into Latin; and the Peripatetic philosophy was studied in
Averroes and Avicenna with as much eagerness and as much submission to
its doctrines in the West, as it had been in the East.
The doctrine of the Solid Spheres had, originally, been invented, in
order to give a physical account of the revolutions of the heavenly
bodies, according to the system of Concentric Circles, to which that
doctrine was very easily accommodated. Those mathematicians who
invented the doctrine of Eccentric Circles and Epicycles, contented
themselves with showing, how, by supposing the heavenly bodies to
revolve in such orbits, the phenomena might be connected together,
{355} and some sort of uniformity and coherence be bestowed upon their
real motions. The physical causes of those motions they left to the
consideration of the philosophers; though, as appears from some
passages of Ptolemy, they had some general apprehension, that they
were to be explained by a like hypothesis. But, though the system of
Hipparchus was adopted by all astronomers and mathematicians, it never
was received, as we have already observed, by any one sect of
philosophers among the ancients. No attempt, therefore, seems to have
been made amongst them, to accommodate to it any such hypothesis.
The schoolmen, who received, at once, from the Arabians, the
philosophy of Aristotle, and the astronomy of Hipparchus, were
necessarily obliged to reconcile them to one another, and to connect
together the revolutions of the Eccentric Circles and Epicycles of the
one, by the solid Spheres of the other. Many different attempts of
this kind were made by many different philosophers: but, of them all,
that of Purbach, in the fifteenth century, was the happiest and the
most esteemed. Though his hypothesis is the simplest of any of them,
it would be in vain to describe it without a scheme; neither is it
easily intelligible with one; for, if the system of Eccentric Circles
and Epicycles was before too perplexed and intricate for the
imagination to rest in it with complete tranquillity and satisfaction,
it became much more so, when this addition had been made to it. The
world, justly indeed, applauded the ingenuity of that philosopher, who
could unite, so happily, two such seemingly inconsistent systems. His
labours, however, seem rather to have increased than to have
diminished the causes of that dissatisfaction, which the learned soon
began to feel with the system of Ptolemy. He, as well as all those who
had worked upon the same plan before, by rendering this account of
things more complex, rendered it more embarrassing than it had been
before.
Neither was the complexness of this system the sole cause of the
dissatisfaction, which the world in general began, soon after the days
of Purbach, to express for it. The tables of Ptolemy having, upon
account of the inaccuracy of the observations on which they were
founded, become altogether wide of the real situation of the heavenly
bodies, those of Almamon, in the ninth century, were, upon the same
hypothesis, composed to correct their deviations. These again, a few
ages afterwards, became, for the same reason, equally useless. In the
thirteenth century, Alphonsus, the philosophical King of Castile,
found it necessary to give orders for the composition of those tables,
which bear his name. It is he, who is so well known for the whimsical
impiety of using to say, that, had he been consulted at the creation
of the universe, he could have given good advice; an apophthegm which
is supposed to have proceeded from his dislike to the intricate system
of Ptolemy. In the fifteenth century, the deviation of the Alphonsine
tables began to be as sensible, as those of Ptolemy and {356} Almamon
had been before. It appeared evident, therefore, that, though the
system of Ptolemy might, in the main, be true, certain corrections
were necessary to be made in it before it could be brought to
correspond with exact precision to the phenomena. For the revolution
of his Eccentric Circles and Epicycles, supposing them to exist, could
not, it was evident, be precisely such as he represented them; since
the revolutions of the heavenly bodies deviated, in a short time, so
widely from what the most exact calculations, that were founded upon
his hypothesis, represented them. It had plainly, therefore, become
necessary to correct, by more accurate observations, both the
velocities and directions of all the wheels and circles of which his
hypothesis is composed. This, accordingly, was begun by Purbach, and
carried on by Regiomontanus, the disciple, the continuator, and the
**perfecter of the system of Purbach; and one, whose untimely death,
amidst innumerable projects for the recovery of old, and the invention
and advancement of new sciences, is, even at this day, to be
regretted.
When you have convinced the world, that an established system ought to
be corrected, it is not very difficult to persuade them that it should
be destroyed. Not long, therefore, after the death of Regiomontanus,
Copernicus began to meditate a new system, which should connect
together the new appearances, in a more simple as well as a more
accurate manner, than that of Ptolemy.
The confusion, in which the old hypothesis represented the motions of
the heavenly bodies, was, he tells us, what first suggested to him the
design of forming a new system, that these, the noblest works of
nature, might no longer appear devoid of that harmony and proportion
which discover themselves in her meanest productions. What most of all
dissatisfied him, was the notion of the Equalizing Circle, which, by
representing the revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, as equable
only, when surveyed from a point that was different from their
centres, introduced a real inequality into their motions; contrary to
that most natural, and indeed fundamental idea, with which all the
authors of astronomical systems, Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle, even
Hipparchus and Ptolemy themselves, had hitherto set out, that the real
motions of such beautiful and divine objects must necessarily be
perfectly regular, and go on, in a manner, as agreeable to the
imagination, as the objects themselves are to the senses. He began to
consider, therefore, whether, by supposing the heavenly bodies to be
arranged in a different order from that in which Aristotle and
Hipparchus has placed them, this so much sought for uniformity might
not be bestowed upon their motions. To discover this arrangement, he
examined all the obscure traditions delivered down to us, concerning
every other hypothesis which the ancients had invented, for the same
purpose. He found, in Plutarch, that some old Pythagoreans had
represented the Earth as revolving in the centre of the universe, like
a wheel round its own axis; and that {357} others, of the same sect,
had removed it from the centre, and represented it as revolving in the
Ecliptic like a star round the central fire. By this central fire, he
supposed they meant the Sun; and though in this he was very widely
mistaken, it was, it seems, upon this interpretation, that he began to
consider how such an hypothesis might be made to correspond to the
appearances. The supposed authority of these old philosophers, if it
did not originally suggest to him his system, seems, at least, to have
confirmed him in an opinion, which, it is not improbable, that he had
beforehand other reasons for embracing, notwithstanding what he
himself would affirm to the contrary.
It then occurred to him, that, if the Earth was supposed to revolve
every day round its axis, from west to east, all the heavenly bodies
would appear to revolve, in a contrary direction, from east to west.
The diurnal revolution of the heavens, upon this hypothesis, might be
only apparent; the firmament, which has no other sensible motion,
might be perfectly at rest; while the Sun, the Moon, and the Five
Planets, might have no other movement beside that eastward revolution,
which is peculiar to themselves. That, by supposing the Earth to
revolve with the Planets, round the Sun, in an orbit, which
comprehended within it the orbits of Venus and Mercury, but was
comprehended within those of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, he could,
without the embarrassment of Epicycles, connect together the apparent
annual revolutions of the Sun, and the direct, retrograde, and
stationary appearances of the Planets: that while the Earth really
revolved round the Sun on one side of the heavens, the Sun would
appear to revolve round the Earth on the other; that while she really
advanced in her annual course, he would appear to advance eastward in
that movement which is peculiar to himself. That, by supposing the
axis of the Earth to be always parallel to itself, not to be quite
perpendicular, but somewhat inclined to the plane of her orbit, and
consequently to present to the Sun, the one pole when on the one side
of him, and the other when on the other, he would account for the
obliquity of the Ecliptic; the Sun's seemingly alternate progression
from north to south, and from south to north, the consequent change of
the seasons, and different lengths of the days and nights in the
different seasons.
If this new hypothesis thus connected together all these appearances
as happily as that of Ptolemy, there were others which it connected
together much better. The three superior Planets, when nearly in
conjunction with the Sun, appear always at the greatest distance from
the Earth, are smallest, and least sensible to the eye, and seem to
revolve forward in their direct motion with the greatest rapidity. On
the contrary, when in opposition to the Sun, that is, when in their
meridian about midnight, they appear nearest the Earth, are largest,
and most sensible to the eye, and seem to revolve backwards in their
retrograde motion. To explain these appearances, the system of Ptolemy
supposed {358} each of these Planets to be at the upper part of their
several Epicycles, in the one case; and at the lower, in the other.
But it afforded no satisfactory principle of connection, which could
lead the mind easily to conceive how the Epicycles of those Planets,
whose spheres were so distant from the sphere of the Sun, should thus,
if one may say so, keep time to his motion. The system of Copernicus
afforded this easily, and like a more simple machine, without the
assistance of Epicycles, connected together, by fewer movements, the
complex appearances of the heavens. When the superior Planets appear
nearly in conjunction with the Sun, they are then in the side of their
orbits, which is almost opposite to, and most distant from the Earth,
and therefore appear smallest, and least sensible to the eye. But, as
they then revolve in a direction which is almost contrary to that of
the Earth, they appear to advance forward with double velocity; as a
ship, that sails in a contrary direction to another, appears from that
other, to sail both with its own velocity, and the velocity of that
from which it is seen. On the contrary, when those Planets are in
opposition to the Sun, they are on the same side of the Sun with the
Earth, are nearest it, most sensible to the eye, and revolve in the
same direction with it; but, as their revolutions round the Sun are
slower than that of the Earth, they are necessarily left behind by it,
and therefore seem to revolve backwards; as a ship which sails slower
than another, though it sails in the same direction, appears from that
other to sail backwards. After the same manner, by the same annual
revolution of the Earth, he connected together the direct and
retrograde motions of the two inferior Planets, as well as the
stationary appearances of all the Five.
There are some other particular phenomena of the two inferior Planets,
which correspond still better to this system, and still worse to that
of Ptolemy. Venus and Mercury seem to attend constantly upon the
motion of the Sun, appearing, sometimes on the one side, and sometimes
on the other, of that great luminary; Mercury being almost always
buried in his rays, and Venus never receding above forty-eight degrees
from him, contrary to what is observed in the other three Planets,
which are often seen in the opposite side of the heavens, at the
greatest possible distance from the Sun. The system of Ptolemy
accounted for this, by supposing that the centres of the Epicycles of
these two Planets were always in the same line with those of the Sun
and the Earth; that they appeared therefore in conjunction with the
Sun, when either in the upper or lower part of their Epicycles, and at
the greatest distance from him, when in the sides of them. It
assigned, however, no reason why the Epicycles of these two Planets
should observe so different a rule from that which takes place in
those of the other three, nor for the enormous Epicycle of Venus,
whose sides must have been forty-eight degrees distant from the Sun,
while its centre was in conjunction with him, and whose diameter must
have covered {359} more than a quadrant of the Great Circle. But how
easily all these appearances coincide with the hypothesis, which
represents those two inferior Planets revolving round the Sun in
orbits comprehended within the orbit of the Earth, is too obvious to
require an explanation.
Thus far did this new account of things render the appearances of the
heavens more completely coherent than had been done by any of the
former systems. It did this, too, by a more simple and intelligible,
as well as more beautiful machinery. It represented the Sun, the great
enlightener of the universe, whose body was alone larger than all the
Planets taken together, as established immovable in the centre,
shedding light and heat on all the worlds that circulated around him
in one uniform direction, but in longer or shorter periods, according
to their different distances. It took away the diurnal revolution of
the firmament, whose rapidity, upon the old hypothesis, was beyond
what even thought could conceive. It not only delivered the
imagination from the embarrassment of Epicycles, but from the
difficulty of conceiving these two opposite motions going on at the
same time, which the system of Ptolemy and Aristotle bestowed upon all
the Planets; I mean, their diurnal westward, and periodical eastward
revolutions. The Earth's revolution round its own axis took away the
necessity for supposing the first, and the second was easily conceived
when by itself. The Five Planets, which seem, upon all other systems,
to be objects of a species by themselves, unlike to every thing to
which the imagination has been accustomed, when supposed to revolve
along with the Earth round the Sun, were naturally apprehended to be
objects of the same kind with the Earth, habitable, opaque, and
enlightened only by the rays of the Sun. And thus this hypothesis, by
classing them in the same species of things, with an object that is of
all others the most familiar to us, took off that wonder and that
uncertainty which the strangeness and singularity of their appearance
had excited; and thus far, too, better answered the great end of
Philosophy.
Neither did the beauty and simplicity of this system alone recommend
it to the imagination; the novelty and unexpectedness of that view of
nature, which it opened to the fancy, excited more wonder and surprise
than the strangest of those appearances, which it had been invented to
render natural and familiar, and these sentiments still more endeared
it. For, though it is the end of Philosophy, to allay that wonder,
which either the unusual or seemingly disjointed appearances of nature
excite, yet she never triumphs so much, as when, in order to connect
together a few, in themselves, perhaps, inconsiderable objects, she
has, if I may say so, created another constitution of things, more
natural, indeed, and such as the imagination can more easily attend
to, but more new, more contrary to common opinion and expectation,
than any of those appearances themselves. As, in the instance before
us, in order to connect together some seeming irregularities in the
motions of {360} the Planets, the most inconsiderable objects in the
heavens, and of which the greater part of mankind have no occasion to
take any notice during the whole course of their lives, she has, to
talk in the hyperbolical language of Tycho Brahe, moved the Earth from
its foundations, stopped the revolution of the Firmament, made the Sun
stand still, and subverted the whole order of the Universe.
Such were the advantages of this new hypothesis, as they appeared to
its author, when he first invented it. But, though that love of
paradox, so natural to the learned, and that pleasure, which they are
so apt to take in exciting, by the novelties of their supposed
discoveries, the amazement of mankind, may, notwithstanding what one
of his disciples tells us to the contrary, have had its weight in
prompting Copernicus to adopt this system; yet, when he had completed
his Treatise of Revolutions, and began coolly to consider what a
strange doctrine he was about to offer to the world, he so much
dreaded the prejudice of mankind against it, that, by a species of
continence, of all others the most difficult to a philosopher, he
detained it in his closet for thirty years together. At last, in the
extremity of old age, he allowed it to be extorted from him, but he
died as soon as it was printed, and before it was published to the
world.
When it appeared in the world, it was almost universally disapproved
of, by the learned as well as by the ignorant. The natural prejudices
of sense, confirmed by education, prevailed too much with both, to
allow them to give it a fair examination. A few disciples only, whom
he himself had instructed in his doctrine, received it with esteem and
admiration. One of them, Reinholdus, formed, upon this hypothesis,
larger and more accurate astronomical tables, than what accompanied
the Treatise of Revolutions, in which Copernicus had been guilty of
some errors in calculation. It soon appeared, that these Prutenic
Tables, as they were called, corresponded more exactly with the
heavens, than the Tables of Alphonsus. This ought naturally to have
formed a prejudice in favour of the diligence and accuracy of
Copernicus in observing the heavens. But it ought to have formed none
in favour of his hypothesis; since the same observations, and the
result of the same calculations, might have been accommodated to the
system of Ptolemy, without making any greater alteration in that
system than what Ptolemy had foreseen, and had even foretold should be
made. It formed, however, a prejudice in favour of both, and the
learned began to examine, with some attention, an hypothesis which
afforded the easiest methods of calculation, and upon which the most
exact predictions had been made. The superior degree of coherence,
which it bestowed upon the celestial appearances, the simplicity and
uniformity which it introduced into the real directions and velocities
of the Planets, soon disposed many astronomers, first to favour, and
at last to embrace a system, which thus connected together so happily,
{361} the most disjointed of those objects that chiefly occupied their
thoughts. Nor can any thing more evidently demonstrate, how easily the
learned give up the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence
of the ideas of their imagination, than the readiness with which this,
the most violent paradox in all philosophy, was adopted by many
ingenious astronomers, notwithstanding its inconsistency with every
system of physics then known in the world, and notwithstanding the
great number of other more real objections, to which, as Copernicus
left it, this account of things was most justly exposed.
It was adopted, however, nor can this be wondered at, by astronomers
only. The learned in all other sciences, continued to regard it with
the same contempt as the vulgar. Even astronomers were divided about
its merit; and many of them rejected a doctrine, which not only
contradicted the established system of Natural Philosophy, but which,
considered astronomically only, seemed, to them, to labour under
several difficulties.
Some of the objections against the motion of the Earth, that were
drawn from the prejudices of sense, the patrons of this system,
indeed, easily enough got over. They represented, that the Earth might
really be in motion, though, to its inhabitants, it seemed to be at
rest; and that the Sun and Fixed Stars might really be at rest, though
from the Earth they seemed to be in motion; in the same manner as a
ship, which sails through a smooth sea, seems to those who are in it,
to be at rest, though really in motion; while the objects which she
passes along, seem to be in motion, though really at rest.
But there were some other objections, which, though grounded upon the
same natural prejudices, they found it more difficult to get over. The
earth had always presented itself to the senses, not only as at rest,
but as inert, ponderous, and even averse to motion. The imagination
had always been accustomed to conceive it as such, and suffered the
greatest violence, when obliged to pursue, and attend it, in that
rapid motion which the system of Copernicus bestowed upon it. To
enforce their objection, the adversaries of this hypothesis were at
pains to calculate the extreme rapidity of this motion. They
represented, that the circumference of the Earth had been computed to
be above twenty-thousand miles: if the Earth, therefore, was supposed
to revolve every day round its axis, every point of it near the
equator would pass over above twenty-three thousand miles in a day;
and consequently, near a thousand miles in an hour, and about sixteen
miles in a minute; a motion more rapid than that of a cannon ball, or
even than the swifter progress of sound. The rapidity of its
periodical revolution was yet more violent than that of its diurnal
rotation. How, therefore, could the imagination ever conceive so
ponderous a body to be naturally endowed with so dreadful a movement?
The Peripatetic Philosophy, the only philosophy then known in the
world, still further confirmed {362} this prejudice. That philosophy,
by a very natural, though, perhaps, groundless distinction, divided
all motion into Natural and Violent. Natural motion was that which
flowed from an innate tendency in the body, as when a stone fell
downwards: Violent motion, that which arose from external force, and
which was, in some measure, contrary to the natural tendency of the
body, as when a stone was thrown upwards, or horizontally. No violent
motion could be lasting; for, being constantly weakened by the natural
tendency of the body, it would soon be destroyed. The natural motion
of the Earth, as was evident in all its parts, was downwards, in a
straight line to the centre; as that of fire and air was upwards, in a
straight line from the centre. It was the heavens only that revolved
naturally in a circle. Neither, therefore, the supposed revolution of
the Earth round its own centre, nor that round the Sun, could be
natural motions; they must therefore be violent, and consequently
could be of no long continuance. It was in vain that Copernicus
replied, that gravity was, probably, nothing else besides a tendency
in the different parts of the same Planet, to unite themselves to one
another; that this tendency took place, probably, in the parts of the
other Planets, as well as in those of the Earth; that it could very
well be united with a circular motion; that it might be equally
natural to the whole body of the Planet, and to every part of it; that
his adversaries themselves allowed, that a circular motion was natural
to the heavens, whose diurnal revolution was infinitely more rapid
than even that motion which he had bestowed upon the Earth; that
though a like motion was natural to the Earth, it would still appear
to be at rest to its inhabitants, and all the parts of it to tend in a
straight line to the centre, in the same manner as at present. But
this answer, how satisfactory soever it may appear to be now, neither
did nor could appear to be satisfactory then. By admitting the
distinction betwixt natural and violent motions, it was founded upon
the same ignorance of mechanical principles with the objection. The
systems of Aristotle and Hipparchus supposed, indeed, the diurnal
motion of the heavenly bodies to be infinitely more rapid than even
that dreadful movement which Copernicus bestowed upon the Earth. But
they supposed, at the same time, that those bodies were objects of a
quite different species, from any we are acquainted with, near the
surface of the Earth, and to which, therefore, it was less difficult
to conceive that any sort of motion might be natural. Those objects,
besides, had never presented themselves to the senses, as moving
otherwise, or with less rapidity, than these systems represented them.
The imagination, therefore, could feel no difficulty in following a
representation which the senses had rendered quite familiar to it. But
when the Planets came to be regarded as so many Earths, the case was
quite altered. The imagination had been accustomed to conceive such
objects as tending rather to rest than motion; and this idea of their
natural {363} inertness, encumbered, if one may say so, and clogged
its flight whenever it endeavoured to pursue them in their periodical
courses, and to conceive them as continually rushing through the
celestial spaces, with such violent and unremitting rapidity.
Nor were the first followers of Copernicus more fortunate in their
answers to some other objections, which were founded indeed in the
same ignorance of the laws of motion, but which, at the same time,
were necessarily connected with that way of conceiving things, which
then prevailed universally in the learned world.
If the earth, it was said, revolved so rapidly from west to east, a
perpetual wind would set in from east to west, more violent than what
blows in the greatest hurricanes; a stone, thrown westwards would fly
to a much greater distance than one thrown with the same force
eastwards; as what moved in a direction, contrary to the motion of the
Earth, would necessarily pass over a greater portion of its surface,
than what, with the same velocity, moved along with it. A ball, it was
said, dropped from the mast of a ship under sail, does not fall
precisely at the foot of the mast, but behind it; and in the same
manner, a stone dropped from a high tower would not, upon the
supposition of the Earth's motion, fall precisely at the bottom of the
tower, but west of it, the Earth being, in the mean time, carried away
eastward from below it. It is amusing to observe, by what, subtile and
metaphysical evasions the followers of Copernicus endeavoured to elude
this objection, which before the doctrine of the Composition of Motion
had been explained by Galileo, was altogether unanswerable. They
allowed, that a ball dropped from the mast of a ship under sail would
not fall at the foot of the mast, but behind it; because the ball,
they said, was no part of the ship, and because the motion of the ship
was natural neither to itself nor to the ball. But the stone was a
part of the earth, and the diurnal and annual revolutions of the Earth
were natural to the whole, and to every part of it, and therefore to
the stone. The stone, therefore, having naturally the same motion with
the Earth, fell precisely at the bottom of the tower. But this answer
could not satisfy the imagination, which still found it difficult to
conceive how these motions could be natural to the earth; or how a
body, which had always presented itself to the senses as inert,
ponderous, and averse to motion, should naturally be continually
wheeling about both its own axis and the Sun, with such violent
rapidity. It was, besides, argued by Tycho Brahe, upon the principles
of the same philosophy which had afforded both the objection and the
answer, that even upon the supposition, that any such motion was
natural to the whole body of the Earth, yet the stone, which was
separated from it, could no longer be actuated by that motion. The
limb, which is cut off from an animal, loses those animal motions
which were natural to the whole. The branch, which is cut off from the
trunk, loses that vegetative {364} motion which is natural to the
whole tree. Even the metals, minerals, and stones, which were dug out
from the bosom of the Earth, lose those motions which occasioned their
production and increase, and which were natural to them in their
original state. Though the diurnal and annual motion of the Earth,
therefore, had been natural to them while they were contained in its
bosom, it could no longer be so when they were separated from it.
Tycho Brahe, the great restorer of the science of the heavens, who had
spent his life, and wasted his fortune upon the advancement of
Astronomy, whose observations were both more numerous and more
accurate than those of all the astronomers who had gone before him,
was himself so much affected by the force of this objection, that,
though he had never mentioned the system of Copernicus without some
note of high admiration he had conceived for its author, he could
never himself be induced to embrace it; yet all his astronomical
observations tended to confirm it. They demonstrated, that Venus and
Mercury were sometimes above, and sometimes below the Sun; and that,
consequently, the Sun, and not the Earth, was the centre of their
periodical revolutions. They showed, that Mars, when in his meridian
at midnight, was nearer to the Earth than the Earth is to the Sun;
though, when in conjunction with the Sun, he was much more remote from
the Earth than that luminary; a discovery which was absolutely
inconsistent with the system of Ptolemy, which proved, that the Sun,
and not the Earth, was the centre of the periodical revolutions of
Mars, as well as of Venus and Mercury; and which demonstrated that the
Earth was placed betwixt the orbits of Mars and Venus. They made the
same thing probable with regard to Jupiter and Saturn; that they, too,
revolved round the Sun; and that, therefore, the Sun, if not the
centre of the universe, was at least, that of the planetary system.
They proved that Comets were superior to the Moon, and moved through
the heavens in all possible directions; an observation incompatible
with the Solid Spheres of Aristotle and Purbach, and which, therefore,
overturned the physical part, at least, of the established systems of
Astronomy.
All these observations, joined to his aversion to the system, and
perhaps, notwithstanding the generosity of his character, some little
jealousy for the fame of Copernicus, suggested to Tycho the idea of a
new hypothesis, in which the Earth continued to be, as in the old
account, the immovable centre of the universe, round which the
firmament revolved every day from east to west, and, by some secret
virtue, carried the Sun, the Moon, and the Five Planets along with it,
notwithstanding their immense distance, and notwithstanding that there
was nothing betwixt it and them but the most fluid ether. But,
although all these seven bodies thus obeyed the diurnal revolution of
the Firmament, they had each of them, as in the old system, too, a
{365} contrary periodical eastward revolution of their own, which made
them appear to be every day, more or less, left behind by the
Firmament. The Sun was the centre of the periodical revolutions of the
Five Planets; the Earth, that of the Sun and Moon. The Five Planets
followed the Sun in his periodical revolution round the Earth, as they
did the Firmament in its diurnal rotation. The three superior Planets
comprehended the Earth within the orbit in which they revolved round
the Sun, and had each of them an Epicycle to connect together, in the
same manner as in the system of Ptolemy, their direct, retrograde, and
stationary appearances. As, notwithstanding their immense distance,
they followed the Sun in his periodical revolution round the Earth,
keeping always at an equal distance from him, they were necessarily
brought much nearer to the Earth when in opposition to the Sun, than
than when in conjunction with him. Mars, the nearest of them, when in
his meridian at midnight, came within the orbit which the Sun
described round the Earth, and consequently was then nearer to the
Earth than the Earth was to the Sun. The appearances of the two
inferior Planets were explained, in the same manner, as in the system
of Copernicus, and consequently required no Epicycle to connect them.
The circles in which the Five Planets performed their periodical
revolutions round the Sun, as well as those in which the Sun and Moon
performed theirs round the Earth, were, as both in the old and new
hypothesis, Eccentric Circles, to connect together their differently
accelerated and retarded motions.
Such was the system of Tycho Brahe, compounded, as is evident, out of
these of Ptolemy and Copernicus; happier than that of Ptolemy, in the
account which it gives of the motions of the two inferior Planets;
more complex, by supposing the different revolutions of all the Five
to be performed round two different centres; the diurnal round the
Earth, the periodical round the Sun, but, in every respect, more
complex and more incoherent than that of Copernicus. Such, however,
was the difficulty that mankind felt in conceiving the motion of the
Earth, that it long balanced the reputation of that otherwise more
beautiful system. It may be said, that those who considered the
heavens only, favoured the system of Copernicus, which connected so
happily all the appearances which presented themselves there; but that
those who looked upon the Earth, adopted the account of Tycho Brahe,
which, leaving it at rest in the centre of the universe, did less
violence to the usual habits of the imagination. The learned were,
indeed, sensible of the intricacy, and of the many incoherences of
that system; that it gave no account why the Sun, Moon, and Five
Planets, should follow the revolution of the Firmament; or why the
Five Planets, notwithstanding the immense distance of the three
superior ones, should obey the periodical motion of the Sun; or why
the Earth, though placed between the orbits of Mars and Venus, should
remain immovable in the centre {366} of the Firmament, and constantly
resist the influence of whatever it was, which carried bodies that
were so much larger than itself, and that were placed on all sides of
it, periodically round the Sun. Tycho Brahe died before he had fully
explained his system. His great and merited renown disposed many of
the learned to believe, that, had his life been longer, he would have
connected together many of these incoherences, and knew methods of
adapting his system to some other appearances, with which none of his
followers could connect it.
The objection to the system of Copernicus, which was drawn from the
nature of motion, and that was most insisted on by Tycho Brahe, was at
last fully answered by Galileo; not, however, till about thirty years
after the death of Tycho, and about a hundred after that of
Copernicus. It was then that Galileo, by explaining the nature of the
composition of motion, by showing, both from reason and experience,
that a ball dropped from the mast of a ship under sail would fall
precisely at the foot of the mast, and by rendering this doctrine,
from a great number of other instances, quite familiar to the
imagination, took off, perhaps, the principal objection which had been
made to this hypothesis of the astronomers.
Several other astronomical difficulties, which encumbered this account
of things, were removed by the same philosopher. Copernicus, after
altering the centre of the world, and making the Earth, and all the
Planets revolve round the Sun, was obliged to leave the Moon to
revolve round the Earth as before. But no example of any such
secondary Planet having then been discovered in the heavens, there
seemed still to be this irregularity remaining in the system. Galileo,
who first applied telescopes to Astronomy, discovered, by their
assistance, the Satellites of Jupiter, which, revolving round that
Planet, at the same time that they were carried along with it in its
revolution, round either the Earth, or the Sun, made it seem less
contrary to the analogy of nature, that the Moon should both revolve
round the Earth, and accompany her in her revolution round the Sun.
It had been objected to Copernicus, that, if Venus and Mercury
revolved round the Sun in an orbit comprehended within the orbit of
the Earth, they would show all the same phases with the Moon; present,
sometimes their darkened, and sometimes their enlightened sides to the
Earth, and sometimes part of the one, and part of the other. He
answered, that they undoubtedly did all this; but that their smallness
and distance hindered us from perceiving it. This very bold assertion
of Copernicus was confirmed by Galileo. His telescopes rendered the
phases of Venus quite sensible, and thus demonstrated, more evidently
than had been done, even by the observations of Tycho Brahe, the
revolutions of these two Planets round the Sun, as well as so far
destroyed the system of Ptolemy.
The mountains and seas, which, by the help of the same instrument,
{367} he discovered, or imagined he had discovered in the Moon,
rendering that Planet, in every respect, similar to the Earth, made it
seem less contrary to the analogy of nature, that, as the Moon
revolved round the Earth, the Earth should revolve round the Sun.
The spots which, in the same manner, he discovered in the Sun,
demonstrating, by their motion, the revolution of the Sun round his
axis, made it seem less improbable that the Earth, a body so much
smaller than the Sun, should likewise revolve round her axis in the
same manner.
Succeeding telescopical observations, discovered, in each of the Five
Planets, spots not unlike those which Galileo had observed in the
Moon, and thereby seemed to demonstrate what Copernicus had only
conjectured, that the Planets were naturally opaque, enlightened only
by the rays of the Sun, habitable, diversified by seas and mountains,
and, in every respect, bodies of the same kind with the earth; and
thus added one other probability to this system. By discovering, too,
that each of the Planets revolved round its own axis, at the same
time that it was carried round either the Earth or the Sun, they made
it seem quite agreeable to the analogy of nature, that the Earth,
which, in every other respect, resembled the Planets, should, like
them too, revolve round its own axis, and at the same time perform its
periodical motion round the Sun.
While, in Italy, the unfortunate Galileo was adding so many
probabilities to the system of Copernicus, there was another
philosopher employing himself in Germany, to ascertain, correct, and
improve it; Kepler, with great genius, but without the taste, or the
order and method of Galileo, possessed, like all his other countrymen,
the most laborious industry, joined to that passion for discovering
proportions and resemblances betwixt the different parts of nature,
which, though common to all philosophers, seems, in him, to have been
excessive. He had been instructed, by Mæstlinus, in the system of
Copernicus; and his first curiosity was, as he tells us, to find out,
why the Planets, the Earth being counted for one, were Six in number;
why they were placed at such irregular distances from the Sun; and
whether there was any uniform proportion betwixt their several
distances, and the times employed in their periodical revolutions.
Till some reason, or proportion of this kind, could be discovered, the
system did not appear to him to be completely coherent. He
endeavoured, first, to find it in the proportions of numbers, and
plain figures; afterwards, in those of the regular solids; and, last
of all, in those of the musical divisions of the Octave. Whatever was
the science which Kepler was studying, he seems constantly to have
pleased himself with finding some analogy betwixt it and the system of
the universe; and thus, arithmetic and music, plane and solid
geometry, came all of them by turns to illustrate the doctrine of the
Sphere, in the explaining of which he was, by his {368} profession,
principally employed. Tycho Brahe, to whom he had presented one of his
books, though he could not but disapprove of his system, was pleased,
however, with his genius, and with his indefatigable diligence in
making the most laborious calculations. That generous and magnificent
Dane invited the obscure and indigent Kepler to come and live with
him, and communicated to him, as soon as he arrived, his observations
upon Mars, in the arranging and methodizing of which his disciples
were at that time employed. Kepler, upon comparing them with one
another, found, that the orbit of Mars was not a perfect circle; that
one of its diameters was somewhat longer than the other; and that it
approached to an oval, or an ellipse, which had the Sun placed in one
of its foci. He found, too, that the motion of the Planet was not
equable; that it was swiftest when nearest the Sun, and slowest when
furthest from him; and that its velocity gradually increased, or
diminished, according as it approached or receded from him. The
observations of the same astronomer discovered to him, though not so
evidently, that the same things were true of all the other Planets;
that their orbits were elliptical, and that their motions were
swiftest when nearest the Sun, and slowest when furthest from him.
They showed the same things, too, of the Sun, if supposed to revolve
round the Earth; and consequently of the Earth, if it also was
supposed to revolve round the Sun.
That the motions of all the heavenly bodies were perfectly circular,
had been the fundamental idea upon which every astronomical
hypothesis, except the irregular one of the Stoics, had been built. A
circle, as the degree of its curvature is every where the same, is of
all curve lines the simplest and the most easily conceived. Since it
was evident, therefore, that the heavenly bodies did not move in
straight lines, the indolent imagination found, that it could most
easily attend to their motions if they were supposed to revolve in
perfect circles. It had, upon this account, determined that a circular
motion was the most perfect of all motions, and that none but the most
perfect motion could be worthy of such beautiful and divine objects;
and it had upon this account, so often, in vain, endeavoured to adjust
to the appearances, so many different systems, which all supposed them
to revolve in this perfect manner.
The equality of their motions was another fundamental idea, which, in
the same manner, and for the same reason, was supposed by all the
founders of astronomical systems. For an equal motion can be more
easily attended to, than one that is continually either accelerated or
retarded. All inconsistency, therefore, was declared to be unworthy
those bodies which revolved in the celestial regions, and to be fit
only for inferior and sublunary things. The calculations of Kepler
overturned, with regard to the Planets, both these natural prejudices
of the imagination; destroyed their circular orbits; and introduced
into their {369} real motions, such an equality as no equalizing
circle would remedy. It was, however, to render their motion perfectly
equable, without even the assistance of a equalizing circle, that
Copernicus, as he himself assures us, had originally invented his
system. Since the calculations of Kepler, therefore, overturned what
Copernicus had principally in view in establishing his system, we
cannot wonder that they should at first seem rather to embarrass than
improve it.
It is true, by these elliptical orbits and unequal motions, Kepler
disengaged the system from the embarrassment of those small Epicycles,
which Copernicus, in order to connect the seemingly accelerated and
retarded movements of the Planets, with their supposed real equality,
had been obliged to leave in it. For it is remarkable, that though
Copernicus had delivered the orbits of the Planets from the enormous
Epicycles of Hipparchus, that though in this consisted the great
superiority of his system above that of the ancient astronomers, he
was yet obliged, himself, to abandon, in some measure, this advantage,
and to make use of some small Epicycles, to join together those
seeming irregularities. His Epicycles indeed, like the irregularities
for whose sake they were introduced, were but small ones, and the
imaginations of his first followers seem, accordingly, either to have
slurred them over altogether, or scarcely to have observed them.
Neither Galileo, nor Gassendi, the two most eloquent of his defenders,
take any notice of them. Nor does it seem to have been generally
attended to, that there was any such thing as Epicycles in the system
of Copernicus, till Kepler, in order to vindicate his own elliptical
orbits, insisted, that even, according to Copernicus, the body of the
Planet was to be found but at two different places in the
circumference of that circle which the centre of its Epicycle
described.
It is true, too, that an ellipse is, of all curve lines after a
circle, the simplest and most easily conceived; and it is true,
besides all this, that, while Kepler took from the motion of the
Planets the easiest of all proportions, that of equality, he did not
leave them absolutely without one, but ascertained the rule by which
their velocities continually varied; for a genius so fond of
analogies, when he had taken away one, would be sure to substitute
another in its room. Notwithstanding all this, notwithstanding that
his system was better supported by observations than any system had
ever been before, yet, such was the attachment to the equal motions
and circular orbits of the Planets, that it seems, for some time, to
have been in general but little attended to by the learned, to have
been altogether neglected by philosophers, and not much regarded even
by astronomers.
Gassendi, who began to figure in the world about the latter days of
Kepler, and who was himself no mean astronomer, seems indeed to have
conceived a good deal of esteem for his diligence and accuracy in
accommodating the observations of Tycho Brahe to the system of {370}
Copernicus. But Gassendi appears to have had no comprehension of the
importance of those alterations which Kepler had made in that system,
as is evident from his scarcely ever mentioning them in the whole
course of his voluminous writings upon Astronomy. Des Cartes, the
contemporary and rival of Gassendi, seems to have paid no attention to
them at all, but to have built his Theory of the Heavens, without any
regard to them. Even those astronomers, whom a serious attention had
convinced of the justness of his corrections, were still so enamoured
with the circular orbits and equal motion, that they endeavoured to
compound his system with those ancient but natural prejudices. Thus,
Ward endeavoured to show that, though the Planets moved in elliptical
orbits, which had the Sun in one of their foci, and though their
velocities in the elliptical line were continually varying, yet, if a
ray was supposed to be extended from the centre of any one of them to
the other focus, and to be carried along by the periodical motion of
the Planet, it would make equal angles in equal times, and
consequently cut off equal portions of the circle of which that other
focus was the centre. To one, therefore, placed in that focus, the
motion of the Planet would appear to be perfectly circular and
perfectly equable, in the same manner as in the Equalizing Circles of
Ptolemy and Hipparchus. Thus Bouillaud, who censured this hypothesis
of Ward, invented another of the same kind, infinitely more whimsical
and capricious. The Planets, according to that astronomer, always
revolve in circles; for that being the most perfect figure, it is
impossible they should revolve in any other. No one of them, however,
continues to move in any one circle, but is perpetually passing from
one to another, through an infinite number of circles, in the course
of each revolution; for an ellipse, said he, is an oblique section of
a cone, and in a cone, betwixt the two vortices of the ellipse there
is an infinite number of circles, out of the infinitely small portions
of which the elliptical line is compounded. The Planet, therefore
which moves in this line, is, in every point of it, moving in an
infinitely small portion of a certain circle. The motion of each
Planet, too, according to him, was necessarily, for the same reason,
perfectly equable. An equable motion being the most perfect of all
motions. It was not, however, in the elliptical line, that it was
equable, but in any one of the circles that were parallel to the base
of that cone, by whose section this elliptical line had been formed:
for, if a ray was extended from the Planet to any one of those
circles, and carried along by its periodical motion, it would cut off
equal portions of that circle in equal times; another most fantastical
equalising circle, supported by no other foundation besides the
frivolous connection between a cone and an ellipse, and recommended by
nothing but the natural passion for circular orbits and equable
motions. It may be regarded as the last effort of this passion, and
may serve to show the force of that principle which could {371} thus
oblige this accurate observer, and great improver of the Theory of the
Heavens, to adopt so strange an hypothesis. Such was the difficulty
and hesitation with which the followers of Copernicus adopted the
corrections of Kepler.
The rule, indeed, which Kepler ascertained for determining the gradual
acceleration or retardation in the movement of the Planets, was
intricate, and difficult to be comprehended; it could therefore but
little facilitate the progress of the imagination in tracing those
revolutions which were supposed to be conducted by it. According to
that astronomer, if a straight line was drawn from the centre of each
Planet to the Sun, and carried along by the periodical motion of the
Planet, it would describe equal areas in equal times, though the
Planet did not pass over equal spaces; and the same rule he found,
took place nearly with regard to the Moon. The imagination, when
acquainted with the law by which any motion is accelerated or
retarded, can follow and attend to it more easily, than when at a
loss, and, as it were, wandering in uncertainty with regard to the
proportion which regulates its varieties; the discovery of this
analogy therefore, no doubt, rendered the system of Kepler more
agreeable to the natural taste of mankind: it, was, however, an
analogy too difficult to be followed, or comprehended, to render it
completely so.
Kepler, besides this, introduced another new analogy into the system,
and first discovered, that there was one uniform relation observed
betwixt the distances of the Planets from the Sun, and the times
employed in their periodical motions. He found, that their periodical
times were greater than in proportion to their distances, and less
than in proportion to the squares of those distances; but, that they
were nearly as the mean proportionals betwixt their distances and the
squares of their distances; or, in other words, that the squares of
their periodical times were nearly as the cubes of their distances; an
analogy, which, though, like all others, it no doubt rendered the
system somewhat more distinct and comprehensible, was, however, as
well as the former, of too intricate a nature to facilitate very much
the effort of the imagination in conceiving it.
The truth of both these analogies, intricate as they were, was at last
fully established by the observations of Cassini. That astronomer
first discovered, that the secondary Planets of Jupiter and Saturn
revolved round their primary ones, according to the same laws which
Kepler had observed in the revolutions of the primary ones round the
Sun, and that of the Moon round the earth; that each of them described
equal areas in equal times, and that the squares of their periodic
times were as the cubes of their distances. When these two last
abstruse analogies, which, when Kepler at first observed them, were
but little regarded, had been thus found to take place in the
revolutions of the Four Satellites of Jupiter, and in those of the
Five of Saturn, they were {372} now thought not only to confirm the
doctrine of Kepler, but to add a new probability to the Copernican
hypothesis. The observations of Cassini seem to establish it as a law
of the system, that, when one body revolved round another, it
described equal areas in equal times; and that, when several revolved
round the same body, the squares of their periodic times were as the
cubes of their distances. If the Earth and the Five Planets were
supposed to revolve round the Sun, these laws, it was said, would take
place universally. But if, according to the system of Ptolemy, the
Sun, Moon, and Five Planets were supposed to revolve round the Earth,
the periodical motions of the Sun and Moon, would, indeed, observe the
first of these laws, would each of them describe equal areas in equal
times; but they would not observe the second, the squares of their
periodic times would not be as the cubes of their distances: and the
revolutions of the Five Planets would observe neither the one law nor
the other. Or if, according to the system of Tycho Brahe, the Five
Planets were supposed to revolve round the Sun, while the Sun and Moon
revolved round the Earth, the revolutions of the Five Planets round
the Sun, would, indeed, observe both these laws; but those of the
Sun and Moon round the Earth would observe only the first of them. The
analogy of nature, therefore, could be preserved completely, according
to no other system but that of Copernicus, which, upon that account,
must be the true one. This argument is regarded by Voltaire, and the
Cardinal of Polignac, as an irrefragable demonstration; even M'Laurin,
who was more capable of judging, nay, Newton himself, seems to mention
it as one of the principal evidences for the truth of that hypothesis.
Yet, an analogy of this kind, it would seem, far from a demonstration,
could afford, at most, but the shadow of a probability.
It is true, that though Cassini supposed the Planets to revolve in an
oblong curve, it was in a curve somewhat different from that of
Kepler. In the ellipse, the sum of the two lines which are drawn from
any one point in the circumference to the two foci, is always equal to
that of those which are drawn from any other point in the
circumference to the same foci. In the curve of Cassini, it is not the
sum of the lines, but the rectangles which are contained under the
lines, that are always equal. As this, however, was a proportion more
difficult to be comprehended by astronomers than the other, the curve
of Cassini has never had the vogue.
Nothing now embarrassed the system of Copernicus, but the difficulty
which the imagination felt in conceiving bodies so immensely ponderous
as the Earth and the other Planets revolving round the Sun with such
incredible rapidity. It was in vain that Copernicus pretended, that,
notwithstanding the prejudices of sense, this circular motion might be
as natural to the Planets, as it is to a stone to fall to the ground.
The imagination had been accustomed to conceive such {373} objects as
tending rather to rest than motion. This habitual idea of their
natural inertness was incompatible with that of their natural motion.
It was in vain that Kepler, in order to assist the fancy in connecting
together this natural inertness with their astonishing velocities,
talked of some vital and immaterial virtue, which was shed by the Sun
into the surrounding spaces, which was whirled about with his
revolution round his own axis, and which, taking hold of the Planets,
forced them, in spite of their ponderousness and strong propensity to
rest, thus to whirl about the centre of the system. The imagination
had no hold of this immaterial virtue, and could form no determinate
idea of what it consisted in. The imagination, indeed, felt a gap, or
interval, betwixt the constant motion and the supposed inertness of
the Planets, and had in this, as in all other cases, some general idea
or apprehension that there must be a connecting chain of intermediate
objects to link together these discordant qualities. Wherein this
connecting chain consisted, it was, indeed, at a loss to conceive; nor
did the doctrine of Kepler lend it any assistance in this respect.
That doctrine, like almost all those of the philosophy in fashion
during his time, bestowed a name upon this invisible chain, called it
an immaterial virtue, but afforded no determinate idea of what was its
nature.
Des Cartes was the first who attempted to ascertain, precisely,
wherein this invisible chain consisted, and to afford the imagination
a train of intermediate events, which, succeeding each other in an
order that was of all others the most familiar to it, should unite
those incoherent qualities, the rapid motion, and the natural
inertness of the Planets. Des Cartes was the first who explained
wherein consisted the real inertness of matter; that it was not in an
aversion to motion, or in a propensity to rest, but in a power of
continuing indifferently either at rest of in motion, and of
resisting, with a certain force, whatever endeavoured to change its
state from the one to the other. According to that ingenious and
fanciful philosopher, the whole of infinite space was full of matter,
for with him matter and extension were the same, and consequently
there could be no void. This immensity of matter, he supposed to be
divided into an infinite number of very small cubes; all of which,
being whirled about upon their own centres, necessarily gave occasion
to the production of two different elements. The first consisted of
those angular parts, which, having been necessarily rubbed off, and
grinded yet smaller by their mutual friction, constituted the most
subtle and movable part of matter. The second consisted of those
little globules that were formed by the rubbing off of the first. The
interstices betwixt these globules of the second element was filled up
by the particles of the first. But in the infinite collisions, which
must occur in an infinite space filled with matter, and all in motion,
it must necessarily happen that many of the globules of the second
element should be broken and grinded down into the first. The quantity
{374} of the first element having been thus increased beyond what was
sufficient to fill up the interstices of the second, it must, in many
places, have been heaped up together, without any mixture of the
second along with it. Such, according to Des Cartes, was the original
division of matter. Upon this infinitude of matter thus divided, a
certain quantity of motion was originally impressed by the Creator of
all things, and the laws of motion were so adjusted as always to
preserve the same quantity in it, without increase, and without
diminution. Whatever motion was lost by one part of matter, was
communicated to some other; and whatever was acquired by one part of
matter, was derived from some other: and thus, through an eternal
revolution, from rest to motion, and from motion to rest, in every
part of the universe, the quantity of motion in the whole was always
the same.
But, as there was no void, no one part of matter could be moved
without thrusting some other out of its place, nor that without
thrusting some other, and so on. To avoid, therefore, an infinite
progress, he supposed that the matter which any body pushed before it,
rolled immediately backwards, to supply the place of that matter which
flowed in behind it; and as we may observe in the swimming of a fish,
that the water which it pushes before it, immediately rolls backward,
to supply the place of what flows in behind it, and thus forms a small
circle or vortex round the body of the fish. It was, in the same
manner, that the motion originally impressed by the Creator upon the
infinitude of matter, necessarily produced in it an infinity of
greater and smaller vortices, or circular streams: and the law of
motion being so adjusted as always to preserve the same quantity of
motion in the universe, those vortices either continued for ever, or
by their dissolution gave birth to others of the same kind. There was,
thus, at all times, an infinite number of greater and smaller
vortices, or circular streams, revolving in the universe.
But, whatever moves in a circle, is constantly endeavouring to fly off
from the centre of its revolution. For the natural motion of all
bodies is in a straight line. All the particles of matter, therefore,
in each of those greater vortices, were continually pressing from the
centre to the circumference, with more or less force, according to the
different degrees of their bulk and solidity. The larger and more
solid globules of the second element forced themselves upwards to the
circumference, while the smaller, more yielding, and more active
particles of the first, which could flow, even through the interstices
of the second, were forced downwards to the centre. They were forced
downwards to the centre, notwithstanding their natural tendency was
upwards to the circumference; for the same reason that a piece of
wood, when plunged in water, is forced upwards to the surface,
notwithstanding its natural tendency is downwards to the bottom;
because its tendency downwards is less strong than that of the
particles of water, which, therefore, {375} if one may say so, press
in before it, and thus force it upwards. But there being a greater
quantity of the first element than what was necessary to fill up the
interstices of the second, it was necessarily accumulated in the
centre of each of these great circular streams, and formed there the
fiery and active substance of the Sun. For, according to that
philosopher, the Solar Systems were infinite in number, each Fixed
Star being the centre of one: and he is among the first of the
moderns, who thus took away the boundaries of the Universe; even
Copernicus and Kepler, themselves, having confined it within, what
they supposed, to be the vault of the Firmament.
The centre of each vortex being thus occupied by the most active and
movable parts of matter, there was necessarily among them, a more
violent agitation than in any other part of the vortex, and this
violent agitation of the centre cherished and supported the movement
of the whole. But, among the particles of the first element, which
fill up the interstices of the second, there are many, which, from the
pressure of the globules on all sides of them, necessarily receive an
angular form, and thus constitute a third element of particles less
fit for motion than those of the other two. As the particles, however,
of this third element were formed in the interstices of the second,
they are necessarily smaller than those of the second, and are,
therefore, along with those of the first, urged down towards the
centre, where, when a number of them happen to take hold of one
another, they form such spots upon the surface of the accumulated
particles of the first element, as are often discovered by telescopes
upon the face of that Sun which enlightens and animates our particular
system. Those spots are often broken and dispelled, by the violent
agitation of the particles of the first element, as has hitherto
happily been the case with those which have successively been formed
upon the face of our Sun. Sometimes, however, they encrust the whole
surface of that fire which is accumulated in the centre; and the
communication betwixt the most active and the most inert parts of the
vortex being thus interrupted, the rapidity of its motion immediately
begins to languish, and can no longer defend it from being swallowed
up and carried away by the superior violence of some other like
circular stream; and in this manner, what was once a Sun, becomes a
Planet. Thus, the time was, according to this system, when the Moon
was a body of the same kind with the Sun, the fiery centre of a
circular stream of ether, which flowed continually round her; but her
face having been crusted over by a congeries of angular particles, the
motion of this circular stream began to languish, and could no longer
defend itself from being absorbed by the more violent vortex of the
Earth, which was then, too, a Sun, and which chanced to be placed in
its neighbourhood. The Moon, therefore, became a Planet, and revolved
round the Earth. In process of time, the same fortune, which had thus
befallen the Moon, befell also {376} the Earth; its face was encrusted
by a gross and inactive substance; the motion of its vortex began to
languish, and it was absorbed by the greater vortex of the Sun: but
though the vortex of the Earth had thus become languid, it still had
force enough to occasion both the diurnal revolution of the Earth, and
the monthly motion of the Moon. For a small circular stream may easily
be conceived as flowing round the body of the Earth, at the same time
that it is carried along by that great ocean of ether which is
continually revolving round the Sun; in the same manner, as in a great
whirlpool of water, one may often see several small whirlpools, which
revolve round centres of their own, and at the same time are carried
round the centre of the great one. Such was the cause of the original
formation and consequent motions of the Planetary System. When a
solid body is turned round its centre, those parts of it, which are
nearest, and those which are remotest from the centre, complete their
revolutions in one and the same time. But it is otherwise with the
revolutions of a fluid; the parts of it which are nearest the centre
complete their revolutions in a shorter time, than those which are
remoter. The Planets, therefore, all floating, in that immense tide of
ether which is continually setting in from west to east round the body
of the Sun, complete their revolutions in a longer or a shorter time,
according to their nearness or distance from him. There was, however,
according to Des Cartes, no very exact proportion observed betwixt the
times of their revolutions and their distances from the centre. For
that nice analogy, which Kepler had discovered betwixt them, having
not yet been confirmed by the observations of Cassini, was, as I
before took notice, entirely disregarded by Des Cartes. According to
him, too, their orbits might not be perfectly circular, but be longer
the one way than the other, and thus approach to an Ellipse. Nor yet
was it necessary to suppose, that they described this figure with
geometrical accuracy, or even that they described always precisely the
same figure. It rarely happens, that nature can be mathematically
exact with regard to the figure of the objects she produces, upon
account of the infinite combinations of impulses, which must conspire
to the production of each of her effects. No two Planets, no two
animals of the same kind, have exactly the same figure, nor is that of
any one of them perfectly regular. It was in vain, therefore, that
astronomers laboured to find that perfect constancy and regularity in
the motions of the heavenly bodies, which is to be found in no other
parts of nature. These motions, like all others, must either languish
or be accelerated, according as the cause which produces them, the
revolution of the vortex of the Sun, either languishes, or is
accelerated; and there are innumerable events which may occasion
either the one or the other of those changes.
It was thus, that Des Cartes endeavoured to render familiar to the
imagination, the greatest difficulty in the Copernican system, the
rapid {377} motion of the enormous bodies of the Planets. When the
fancy had thus been taught to conceive them as floating in an immense
ocean of ether, it was quite agreeable to its usual habits to
conceive, that they should follow the stream of this ocean, how rapid
soever. This was an order of succession to which it had been long
accustomed, and with which it was, therefore, quite familiar. This
account, too, of the motions of the Heavens, was connected with a
vast, an immense system, which joined together a greater number of the
most discordant phenomena of nature, than had been united by any other
hypothesis; a system in which the principles of connection, though
perhaps equally imaginary, were, however, more distinct and
determinate, than any that had been known before; and which attempted
to trace to the imagination, not only the order of succession by which
the heavenly bodies were moved, but that by which they, and almost all
other natural objects, had originally been produced.--The Cartesian
philosophy begins now to be almost universally rejected, whilst the
Copernican system continues to be universally received. Yet it is not
easy to imagine, how much probability and coherence this admired
system was long supposed to derive from that exploded hypothesis. Till
Des Cartes had published his principles, the disjointed and incoherent
system of Tycho Brahe, though it was embraced heartily and completely
by scarce any body, was yet constantly talked of by all the learned,
as, in point of probability, upon a level with Copernicus. They took
notice, indeed, of its inferiority with regard to coherence and
connection, expressing hopes, however, that these defects might be
remedied by some future improvements. But when the world beheld that
complete, and almost perfect coherence, which the philosophy of Des
Cartes bestowed upon the system of Copernicus, the imaginations of
mankind could no longer refuse themselves the pleasure of going along
with so harmonious an account of things. The system of Tycho Brahe was
every day less and less talked of, till at last it was forgotten
altogether.
The system of Des Cartes, however, though it connected together the
real motions of the heavenly bodies according to the system of
Copernicus, more happily than had been done before, did so only when
they were considered in the gross; but did not apply to them, when
they were regarded in the detail. Des Cartes, as was said before, had
never himself observed the Heavens with any particular application.
Though he was not ignorant, therefore, of any of the observations
which had been made before his time, he seems to have paid them no
great degree of attention; which, probably, proceeded from his own
inexperience in the study of Astronomy. So far, therefore, from
accommodating his system to all the minute irregularities, which
Kepler had ascertained in the movements of the Planets; or from
showing, particularly, how these irregularities, and no other, should
arise from it, he contented himself with observing, that perfect
uniformity could not {378} be expected in their motions, from the
nature of the causes which produced them; that certain irregularities
might take place in them, for a great number of successive
revolutions, and afterwards gave way to others of a different kind: a
remark which, happily, relieved him from the necessity of applying his
system to the observations of Kepler, and the other Astronomers.
But when the observations of Cassini had established the authority of
those laws, which Kepler had first discovered in the system, the
philosophy of Des Cartes, which could afford no reason why such
particular laws should be observed, might continue to amuse the
learned in other sciences, but could no longer satisfy those that were
skilled in Astronomy. Sir Isaac Newton first attempted to give a
physical account of the motions of the Planets, which should
accommodate itself to all the constant irregularities which
astronomers had ever observed in their motions. The physical
connection, by which Des Cartes had endeavoured to bind together the
movements of the Planets, was the laws of impulse; of all the orders
of succession, those which are most familiar to the imagination; as
they all flow from the inertness of matter. After this quality, there
is no other with which we are so well acquainted as that of gravity.
We never act upon matter, but we have occasion to observe it. The
superior genius and sagacity of Sir Isaac Newton, therefore, made the
most happy, and, we may now say, the greatest and most admirable
improvement that was ever made in philosophy, when he discovered, that
he could join together the movements of the Planets by so familiar a
principle of connection, which completely removed all the difficulties
the imagination had hitherto felt in attending to them. He
demonstrated, that, if the Planets were supposed to gravitate towards
the Sun, and to one another, and at the same time to have had a
projecting force originally impressed upon them, the primary ones
might all describe ellipses in one of the foci of which that great
luminary was placed; and the secondary ones might describe figures of
the same kind round their respective primaries, without being
disturbed by the continual motion of the centres of their revolutions.
That if the force, which retained each of them in their orbits, was
like that of gravity, and directed towards the Sun, they would, each
of them, describe equal areas in equal times. That if this attractive
power of the Sun, like all other qualities which are diffused in rays
from a centre, diminished in the same proportion as the squares of the
distances increased, their motions would be swiftest when nearest the
Sun, and slowest when farthest off from him, in the same proportion in
which, by observation, they are discovered to be; and that upon the
same supposition, of this gradual diminution of their respective
gravities, their periodic times would bear the same proportion to
their distances, which Kepler and Cassini had established betwixt
them. Having thus shown, that gravity might be the {379} connecting
principle which joined together the movements of the Planets, he
endeavoured next to prove that it really was so. Experience shows us,
what is the power of gravity near the surface of the Earth. That it is
such as to make a body fall, in the first second of its descent,
through about fifteen Parisian feet. The Moon is about sixty
semidiameters of the Earth distant from its surface. If gravity,
therefore, was supposed to diminish, as the squares of the distance
increase, a body, at the Moon, would fall towards the Earth in a
minute; that is, in sixty seconds, through the same space, which it
falls near its surface in one second. But the arch which the Moon
describes in a minute, falls, by observation, about fifteen Parisian
feet below the tangent drawn at the beginning of it. So far,
therefore, the Moon may be conceived as constantly falling towards the
Earth.
The system of Sir Isaac Newton corresponded to many other
irregularities which Astronomers had observed in the Heavens. It
assigned a reason, why the centres of the revolutions of the Planets
were not precisely in the centre of the Sun, but in the common centre
of gravity of the Sun and the Planets. From the mutual attraction of
the Planets, it gave a reason for some other irregularities in their
motions; irregularities, which are quite sensible in those of Jupiter
and Saturn, when those Planets are nearly in conjunction with one
another. But of all the irregularities in the Heavens, those of the
Moon had hitherto given the greatest perplexity to Astronomers; and
the system of Sir Isaac Newton corresponded, if possible, yet more
accurately with them than with any of the other Planets. The Moon,
when either in conjunction, or in opposition to the Sun, appears
furthest from the Earth, and nearest to it when in her quarters.
According to the system of that philosopher, when she is in
conjunction with the Sun, she is nearer the Sun than the Earth is;
consequently, more attracted to him, and, therefore, more separated
from the Earth. On the contrary, when in opposition to the Sun, she is
further from the Sun than the Earth. The Earth, therefore, is more
attracted to the Sun: and consequently, in this case, too, further
separated from the Moon. But, on the other hand, when the Moon is in
her quarters, the Earth and the Moon, being both at equal distance
from the Sun, are equally attracted to him. They would not, upon this
account alone, therefore, be brought nearer to one another. As it is
not in parallel lines however that they are attracted towards the Sun,
but in lines which meet in his centre, they are, thereby, still
further approached to one another. Sir Isaac Newton computed the
difference of the forces with which the Moon and the Earth ought, in
all those different situations, according to his theory, to be
impelled towards one another; and found, that the different degrees of
their approaches, as they had been observed by Astronomers,
corresponded exactly to his computations. As the attraction of the
Sun, in the conjunctions and oppositions, diminishes the gravity of
{380} the Moon towards the Earth, and, consequently, makes her
necessarily extend her orbit, and, therefore, require a longer
periodical time to finish it. But, when the Moon and the Earth are in
that part of the orbit which is nearest the Sun, this attraction of
the Sun will be the greatest; consequently, the gravity of the Moon
towards the Earth will there be most diminished; her orbit be most
extended; and her periodic time be, therefore, the longest. This is,
also, agreeable to experience, and in the very same proportion, in
which, by computation, from these principles, it might be expected.
The orbit of the Moon is not precisely in the same Plane with that of
the Earth; but makes a very small angle with it. The points of
intersection with those two Planes, are called, the Nodes of the Moon.
These Nodes of the Moon are in continual motion, and in eighteen or
nineteen years, revolve backwards, from east to west, through all the
different points of the Ecliptic. For the Moon, after having finished
her periodical revolution, generally intersects the orbit of the Earth
somewhat behind the point where she had intersected it before. But,
though the motion of the Nodes is thus generally retrograde, it is not
always so, but is sometimes direct, and sometimes they appear even
stationary; the Moon generally intersects the Plane of the Earth's
orbit behind the point where she had intersected it in her former
revolution; but she sometimes intersects it before that point, and
sometimes in the very same point. It is the situation of those Nodes
which determines the times of Eclipses, and their motions had, upon
this account, at all times, been particularly attended to by
Astronomers. Nothing, however, had perplexed them more, than to
account for these so inconsistent motions, and, at the same time,
preserve their so much sought-for regularity in the revolutions of the
Moon. For they had no other means of connecting the appearances
together than by supposing the motions which produced them, to be, in
reality, perfectly regular and equable. The history of Astronomy,
therefore, gives an account of a greater number of theories invented
for connecting together the motions of the Moon, than for connecting
together those of all the other heavenly bodies taken together. The
theory of gravity, connected together, in the most accurate manner, by
the different actions of the Sun and the Earth, all those irregular
motions; and it appears, by calculation, that the time, the quantity,
and the duration of those direct and retrograde motions of the Nodes,
as well as of their stationary appearances, might be expected to be
exactly such, as the observations of Astronomers have determined them.
The same principle, the attraction of the Sun, which thus accounts for
the motions of the Nodes, connects, too, another very perplexing
irregularity in the appearances of the Moon; the perpetual variation
in the inclination of her orbit to that of the Earth.
As the Moon revolves in an ellipse, which has the centre of the {381}
Earth in one of its foci, the longer axis of its orbit is called the
Line of its Apsides. This line is found, by observation, not to be
always directed towards the same points of the Firmament, but to
revolve forwards from west to east, so as to pass through all the
points of the Ecliptic, and to complete its period in about nine
years; another irregularity, which had very much perplexed
Astronomers, but which the theory of gravity sufficiently accounted
for.
The Earth had hitherto been regarded as perfectly globular, probably
for the same reason which had made men imagine, that the orbits of the
Planets must necessarily be perfectly circular. But Sir Isaac Newton,
from mechanical principles, concluded, that, as the parts of the Earth
must be more agitated by her diurnal revolution at the Equator, than
at the Poles, they must necessarily be somewhat elevated at the first,
and flattened at the second. The observation, that the oscillations of
pendulums were slower at the Equator than at the Poles, seeming to
demonstrate, that gravity was stronger at the Poles, and weaker at the
Equator, proved, he thought, that the Equator was further from the
centre than the Poles. All the measures, however, which had hitherto
been made of the Earth, seemed to show the contrary, that it was drawn
out towards the Poles, and flattened towards the Equator. Newton,
however, preferred his mechanical computations to the former measures
of Geographers and Astronomers; and in this he was confirmed by the
observations of Astronomers on the figure of Jupiter, whose diameter
at the Pole seems to be to his diameter at the Equator, as twelve to
thirteen; a much greater inequality than could be supposed to take
place betwixt the correspondent diameters of the Earth, but which was
exactly proportioned to the superior bulk of Jupiter, and the superior
rapidity with which he performs his diurnal revolutions. The
observations of Astronomers at Lapland and Peru have fully confirmed
Sir Isaac's system, and have not only demonstrated, that the figure of
the Earth is, in general, such as he supposed it; but that the
proportion of its axis to the diameter of its Equator is almost
precisely such as he had computed it. And of all the proofs that have
ever been adduced of the diurnal revolution of the Earth, this perhaps
is the most solid and most satisfactory.
Hipparchus, by comparing his own observations with those of some
former Astronomers, had found that the equinoctial points were not
always opposite to the same part of the Heavens, but that they
advanced gradually eastward by so slow a motion, as to be scarce
sensible in one hundred years, and which would require thirty-six
thousand to make a complete revolution of the Equinoxes, and to carry
them successively through all the different points of the Ecliptic.
More accurate observations discovered that this procession of the
Equinoxes was not so slow as Hipparchus had imagined it, and that it
required somewhat less than twenty-six thousand years to give them a
complete {382} revolution. While the ancient system of Astronomy,
which represented the Earth as the immovable centre of the universe,
took place, this appearance was necessarily accounted for, by
supposing that the Firmament, besides its rapid diurnal revolution
round the poles of the Equator, had likewise a slow periodical one
round those of the Ecliptic. And when the system of Hipparchus was by
the schoolmen united with the solid Spheres of Aristotle, they placed
a new crystalline Sphere above the Firmament, in order to join this
motion to the rest. In the Copernican system, this appearance had
hitherto been connected with the other parts of that hypothesis, by
supposing a small revolution in the Earth's axis from east to west.
Sir Isaac Newton connected this motion by the same principle of
gravity, by which he had united all the others, and showed, how the
elevation of the parts of the Earth at the Equator must, by the
attraction of the Sun, produce the same retrograde motion of the Nodes
of the Ecliptic, which it produced of the Nodes of the Moon. He
computed the quantity of motion which could arise from this action of
the Sun, and his calculations here too corresponded with the
observations of Astronomers.
Comets have hitherto, of all the appearances in the Heavens, been the
least attended to by Astronomers. The rarity and inconstancy of their
appearance, seemed to separate them entirely from the constant,
regular, and uniform objects in the Heavens, and to make them resemble
more the inconstant, transitory, and accidental phenomena of those
regions that are in the neighbourhood of the Earth. Aristotle,
Eudoxus, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, and Purbach, therefore, had all degraded
them below the Moon, and ranked them among the meteors of the upper
regions of the air. The observations of Tycho Brahe demonstrated, that
they ascended into the celestial regions, and were often higher than
Venus or the Sun. Des Cartes, at random, supposed them to be always
higher than even the orbit of Saturn; and seems, by the superior
elevation he thus bestowed upon them, to have been willing to
compensate that unjust degradation which they had suffered for so many
ages before. The observations of some later Astronomers demonstrated,
that they too revolved about the Sun, and might therefore be parts of
the Solar System. Newton accordingly applied his mechanical principle
of gravity to explain the motions of these bodies. That they described
equal areas in equal times, had been discovered by the observations of
some later Astronomers; and Newton endeavoured to show how from this
principle, and those observations, the nature and position of their
several orbits might be ascertained, and their periodic times
determined. His followers have, from his principles, ventured even to
predict the returns of several of them, particularly of one which is
to make its appearance in 1758.[1] We must wait for that time {383}
before we can determine, whether his philosophy corresponds as happily
to this part of the system as to all the others. In the meantime,
however, the ductility of this principle, which applied itself so
happily to these, the most irregular of all the celestial appearances,
and which has introduced such complete coherence into the motions of
all the Heavenly Bodies, has served not a little to recommend it to
the imaginations of mankind.
[Footnote 1: It must be observed, that the whole of this Essay was
written previous to the date here mentioned; and that the return of
the comet happened agreeably to the prediction.]
But of all the attempts of the Newtonian philosophy, that which would
appear to be the most above the reach of human reason and experience,
is the attempt to compute the weights and densities of the Sun, and of
the several Planets. An attempt, however, which was indispensably
necessary to complete the coherence of the Newtonian system. The power
of attraction which, according to the theory of gravity, each body
possesses, is in proportion to the quantity of matter contained in
that body. But the periodic time in which one body, at a given
distance, revolves round another that attracts it, is shorter in
proportion as this power is greater, and consequently as the quantity
of matter in the attracting body. If the densities of Jupiter and
Saturn were the same with that of the Earth, the periodic times of
their several Satellites would be shorter than by observation they are
found to be. Because the quantity of matter, and consequently the
attracting power of each of them, would be as the cubes of their
diameters. By comparing the bulks of those Planets, and the periodic
times of their Satellites, it is found that, upon the hypothesis of
gravity, the density of Jupiter must be greater than that of Saturn,
and the density of the Earth greater than that of Jupiter. This seems
to establish it as a law in the system, that the nearer the several
Planets approach to the Sun, the density of their matter is the
greater: a constitution of things which seems to be the most
advantageous of any that could have been established; as water of the
same density with that of our Earth, would freeze under the Equator of
Saturn, and boil under that of Mercury.
Such is the system of Sir Isaac Newton, a system whose parts are all
more strictly connected together, than those of any other
philosophical hypothesis. Allow his principle, the universality of
gravity, and that it decreases as the squares of the distance
increase, and all the appearances, which he joins together by it,
necessarily follow. Neither is their connection merely a general and
loose connection, as that of most other systems, in which either these
appearances, or some such like appearances, might indifferently have
been expected. It is everywhere the most precise and particular that
can be imagined, and ascertains the time, the place, the quantity, the
duration of each individual phenomenon, to be exactly such as, by
observation, they have been determined to be. Neither are the
principles of union, which it employs, such as the imagination can
find any difficulty in going along with. The gravity of matter is, of
all its qualities, after its inertness, {384} that which is most
familiar to us. We never act upon it without having occasion to
observe this property. The law too, by which it is supposed to
diminish as it recedes from its centre, is the same which takes place
in all other qualities which are propagated in rays from a centre, in
light, and in every thing else of the same kind. It is such, that we
not only find that it does take place in all such qualities, but we
arc necessarily determined to conceive that, from the nature of the
thing, it must take place. The opposition which was made in France,
and in some other foreign nations, to the prevalence of this system,
did not arise from any difficulty which mankind naturally felt in
conceiving gravity as an original and primary mover in the
constitution of the universe. The Cartesian system, which had
prevailed so generally before it, had accustomed mankind to conceive
motion as never beginning, but in consequence of impulse, and had
connected the descent of heavy bodies, near the surface of the Earth,
and the other Planets, by this more general bond of union; and it was
the attachment the world had conceived for this account of things,
which indisposed them to that of Sir Isaac Newton. His system,
however, now prevails over all opposition, and has advanced to the
acquisition of the most universal empire that was ever established in
philosophy. His principles, it must be acknowledged, have a degree of
firmness and solidity that we should in vain look for in any other
system. The most sceptical cannot avoid feeling this. They not only
connect together most perfectly all the phenomena of the Heavens,
which had been observed before his time; but those also which the
persevering industry and more perfect instruments of later Astronomers
have made known to us have been either easily and immediately
explained by the application of his principles, or have been explained
in consequence of more laborious and accurate calculations from these
principles, than had been instituted before. And even we, while we
have been endeavouring to represent all philosophical systems as mere
inventions of the imagination, to connect together the otherwise
disjointed and discordant phenomena of Nature, have insensibly been
drawn in, to make use of language expressing the connecting principles
of this one, as if they were the real chains which Nature makes use of
to bind together her several operations. Can we wonder then, that it
should have gained the general and complete approbation of mankind,
and that it should now be considered, not as an attempt to connect in
the imagination the phenomena of the Heavens, but as the greatest
discovery that ever was made by man, the discovery of an immense chain
of the most important and sublime truths, all closely connected
together, by one capital fact, of the reality of which we have daily
experience.
* * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * *
{385}
_Note by the Editors._
The Author, at the end of this Essay, left some Notes and Memorandums,
from which it appears, that he considered this last part of his
History of Astronomy as imperfect, and needing several additions. The
Editors, however, chose rather to publish than suppress it. It must
be viewed, not as a History or Account of Sir Isaac Newton's
Astronomy, but chiefly as an additional illustration of those
Principles in the Human Mind which Mr. Smith has pointed out to be the
universal motives of Philosophical Researches.
----------
THE PRINCIPLES
WHICH LEAD AND DIRECT
PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRIES;
ILLUSTRATED BY THE
HISTORY OF THE ANCIENT PHYSICS.
-----
FROM arranging and methodizing the System of the Heavens, Philosophy
descended to the consideration of the inferior parts of Nature, of the
Earth, and of the bodies which immediately surround it. If the
objects, which were here presented to its view, were inferior in
greatness or beauty, and therefore less apt to attract the attention
of the mind, they were more apt, when they came to be attended to, to
embarrass and perplex it, by the variety of their species, and by the
intricacy and seeming irregularity of the laws or orders of their
succession. The species of objects in the Heavens are few in number;
the Sun, the Moon, the Planets, and the Fixed Stars, are all which
those philosophers could distinguish. All the changes too, which are
ever observed in these bodies, evidently arise from some difference in
the velocity and direction of their several motions; but the variety
of meteors in the air, of clouds, rainbows, thunder, lightning, winds,
rain, hail, snow, is vastly greater; and the order of their succession
seems to be still more irregular and inconstant. The species of
fossils, minerals, plants, animals, which are found in the Waters, and
near the surface of the Earth, are still more intricately diversified;
and if we regard the {386} different manners of their production,
their mutual influence in altering, destroying, supporting one
another, the orders of their succession seem to admit of an almost
infinite variety. If the imagination, therefore, when it considered
the appearances in the Heavens, was often perplexed, and driven out of
its natural career, it would be much more exposed to the same
embarrassment, when it directed its attention to the objects which the
Earth presented to it, and when it endeavoured to trace their progress
and successive revolutions.
To introduce order and coherence into the mind's conception of this
seeming chaos of dissimilar and disjointed appearances, it was
necessary to deduce all their qualities, operations, and laws of
succession, from those of some particular things, with which it was
perfectly acquainted and familiar, and along which its imagination
could glide smoothly and easily, and without interruption. But as we
would in vain attempt to deduce the heat of a stove from that of an
open chimney, unless we could show that the same fire which was
exposed in the one, lay concealed in the other; so it was impossible
to deduce the qualities and laws of succession, observed in the more
uncommon appearances of Nature, from those of such as were more
familiar, if those customary objects were not supposed, however
disguised in their appearance, to enter into the composition of those
rarer and more singular phenomena. To render, therefore, this lower
part of the great theatre of nature a coherent spectacle to the
imagination, it became necessary to suppose, first, That all the
strange objects of which it consisted were made up out of a few, with
which the mind was extremely familiar: and secondly, That all their
qualities, operations and rules of succession, were no more than
different diversifications of those to which it had long been
accustomed, in these primary and elementary objects.
Of all the bodies of which these inferior parts of the universe seem
to be composed, those with which we are most familiar, are the Earth,
which we tread upon; the Water, which we every day use; the Air, which
we constantly breathe; and the Fire, whose benign influence is not
only required for preparing the common necessaries of life, but for
the continual support of that vital principle which actuates both
plants and animals. These therefore, were by Empedocles, and the other
philosophers of the Italian school, supposed to be the elements, out
of which, at least, all the inferior parts of nature were composed.
The familiarity of those bodies to the mind, naturally disposed it to
look for some resemblance to them in whatever else was presented to
its consideration. The discovery of some such resemblance united the
new object to an assortment of things, with which the imagination was
perfectly acquainted. And if any analogy could be observed betwixt the
operations and laws of succession of the compound, and those of the
simple objects, the movement of the fancy, in tracing their progress,
{387} became quite smooth, and natural, and easy. This natural
anticipation, too, was still more confirmed by such a slight and
inaccurate analysis of things, as could be expected in the infancy of
science, when the curiosity of mankind, grasping at an account of all
things before it had got full satisfaction with regard to any one,
hurried on to build, in imagination, the immense fabric of the
universe. The heat, observed in both plants and animals, seemed to
demonstrate, that Fire made a part of their composition. Air was not
less necessary for the subsistence of both, and seemed, too, to enter
into the fabric of animals by respiration, and into that of plants by
some other means. The juices which circulated through them showed how
much of their texture was owing to Water. And their resolution into
Earth by putrefaction discovered that this element had not been left
out in their original formation. A similar analysis seemed to show the
same principles in most of the other compound bodies.
The vast extent of those bodies seemed to render them, upon another
account, proper to be the great stores out of which nature compounded
all the other species of things. Earth and Water divide almost the
whole of the terrestrial globe between them. The thin transparent
covering of the Air surrounds it to an immense height upon all sides.
Fire, with its attendant, light, seems to descend from the celestial
regions, and might, therefore, either be supposed to be diffused
through the whole of those etherial spaces, as well as to be condensed
and conglobated in those luminous bodies, which sparkle across them,
as by the Stoics; or, to be placed immediately under the sphere of the
Moon, in the region next below them, as by the Peripatetics, who could
not reconcile the devouring nature of Fire with the supposed
unchangeable essence of their solid and crystalline spheres.
The qualities, too, by which we are chiefly accustomed to characterize
and distinguish natural bodies, are all of them found, in the highest
degree in those Four Elements. The great divisions of the objects,
near the surface of the Earth, are those into hot and cold, moist and
dry, light and heavy. These are the most remarkable properties of
bodies; and it is upon them that many of their other most sensible
qualities and powers seem to depend. Of these, heat and cold were
naturally enough regarded by those first enquirers into nature, as the
active, moisture and dryness, as the passive qualities of matter. It
was the temperature of heat and cold which seemed to occasion the
growth and dissolution of plants and animals; as appeared evident from
the effects of the change of the seasons upon both. A proper degree of
moisture and dryness was not less necessary for these purposes; as was
evident from the different effects and productions of wet and dry
seasons and soils. It was the heat and cold, however, which actuated
and determined those two otherwise inert qualities of things, to a
state either of rest or motion. Gravity and levity were regarded {388}
as the two principles of motion, which directed all sublunary things
to their proper place: and all those six qualities, taken together,
were, upon such an inattentive view of nature, as must be expected in
the beginnings of philosophy, readily enough apprehended to be capable
of connecting together the most remarkable revolutions, which occur in
these inferior parts of the universe. Heat and dryness were the
qualities which characterized the element of Fire; heat and moisture
that of Air; moisture and cold that of Water; cold and dryness that of
Earth. The natural motion of two of these elements, Earth and Water,
was downwards, upon account of their gravity. This tendency, however,
was stronger in the one than in the other, upon account of the
superior gravity of Earth. The natural motion of the two other
elements, Fire and Air, was upwards, upon account of their levity; and
this tendency, too, was stronger in the one than in the other, upon
account of the superior levity of Fire. Let us not despise those
ancient philosophers, for thus supposing, that these two elements had
a positive levity, or a real tendency upwards. Let us remember, that
this notion has an appearance of being confirmed by the most obvious
observations; that those facts and experiments, which demonstrate the
weight of the Air, and which no superior sagacity, but chance alone,
presented to the moderns, were altogether unknown to them; and that,
what might, in some measure, have supplied the place of those
experiments, the reasonings concerning the causes of the ascent of
bodies, in fluids specifically heavier than themselves, seem to have
been unknown in the ancient world, till Archimedes discovered them,
long after their system of physics was completed, and had acquired an
established reputation: that those reasonings are far from being
obvious, and that by their inventor, they seem to have been thought
applicable only to the ascent of Solids in Water, and not even to that
of Solids in Air, much less to that of one fluid in another. But it is
this last only which could explain the ascent of flame, vapours, and
fiery exhalations, without the supposition of a specific levity.
Thus, each of those Four Elements had, in the system of the Universe,
a place which was peculiarly allotted to it, and to which it naturally
tended. Earth and Water rolled down to the centre; the Air spread
itself above them; while the Fire soared aloft, either to the
celestial region, or to that which was immediately below it. When each
of those simple bodies had thus obtained its proper sphere, there was
nothing in the nature of any one of them to make it pass into the
place of the other, to make the Fire descend into the Air, the Air
into the Water, or the Water into the Earth; or, on the contrary, to
bring up the Earth into the place of the Water, the Water into that of
the Air, or the Air into that of the Fire. All sublunary things,
therefore, if left to themselves, would have remained in an eternal
repose. The revolution of the heavens, those of the Sun, Moon, and
Five Planets, {389} by producing the vicissitudes of Day and Night,
and of the Seasons, prevented this torpor and inactivity from reigning
through the inferior parts of nature; inflamed by the rapidity of
their circumvolutions, the element of Fire, and forced it violently
downwards into the Air, into the Water, and into the Earth, and
thereby produced those mixtures of the different elements which kept
up the motion and circulation of the lower parts of Nature;
occasioned, sometimes, the entire transmutation of one element into
another, and sometimes the production of forms and species different
from them all, and in which, though the qualities of them all might be
found, they were so altered and attempered by the mixture, as scarce
to be distinguishable.
Thus, if a small quantity of Fire was mixed with a great quantity of
Air, the moisture and moderate warmth of the one entirely surmounted
and changed into their own essence the intense heat and dryness of the
other; and the whole aggregate became Air. The contrary of which
happened, if a small quantity of Air was mixed with a great quantity
of Fire: the whole, in this case, became Fire. In the same manner, if
a small quantity of Fire was mixed with a great quantity of Water,
then, either the moisture and cold of the Water might surmount the
heat and dryness of the Fire, so that the whole should become Water;
or, the moisture of the Water might surmount the dryness of the Fire,
while, in its turn, the heat of the Fire surmounted the coldness of
the Water, so as that the whole aggregate, its qualities being heat
and moisture, should become Air, which was regarded as the more
natural and easy metamorphosis of the two. In the same manner they
explained how like changes were produced by the different mixtures of
Fire and Earth, Earth and Water, Water and Air, Air and Earth; and
thus they connected together the successive transmutations of the
elements into one another.
Every mixture of the Elements, however, did not produce an entire
transmutation. They were sometimes so blended together, that the
qualities of the one, not being able to destroy, served only to
attemper those of the other. Thus Fire, when mixed with Water,
produced sometimes a watery vapour, whose qualities were heat and
moisture; which partook at once of the levity of the Fire, and of the
gravity of the Water, and which was elevated by the first into the
Air, but retained by the last from ascending into the region of Fire.
The relative cold, which they supposed prevailed in the middle region
of the Air, upon account of its equal distance, both from the region
of Fire, and from the rays that are reflected by the surface of the
Earth, condensed this vapour into Water; the Fire escaped it, and flew
upwards, and the Water fell down in rain, or, according to the
different degrees of cold that prevailed in the different seasons, was
sometimes congealed into snow, and sometimes into hail. In the same
manner, Fire, when mixed with Earth, produced sometimes a fiery
exhalation, whose qualities {390} were heat and dryness, which being
elevated by the levity of the first into the Air condensed by the
cold, so as to take fire, and being at the same time surrounded by
watery vapours, burst forth into thunder and lightning, and other
fiery meteors. Thus they connected together the different appearances
in the Air, by the qualities of their Four Elements; and from them,
too, in the same manner, they endeavoured to deduce all the other
qualities in the other homogeneous bodies, that are near the surface
of the Earth. Thus, to give an example, with regard to the hardness
and softness of bodies; heat and moisture, they observed, were the
great softeners of matter. Whatever was hard, therefore, owed that
quality either to the absence of heat, or to the absence of moisture.
Ice, crystal, lead, gold, and almost all metals, owed their hardness
to the absence of heat, and were, therefore, dissolvable by Fire.
Rock-salt, nitre, alum, and hard clay, owed that quality to the
absence of moisture, and were therefore, dissolvable in water. And, in
the same manner, they endeavoured to connect together most of the
other tangible qualities of matter. Their principles of union, indeed,
were often such as had no real existence, and were always vague and
undetermined in the highest degree; they were such, however, as might
be expected in the beginnings of science, and such as, with all their
imperfections, could enable mankind both to think and to talk, with
more coherence, concerning those general subjects, than without them
they would have been capable of doing. Neither was their system
entirely devoid either of beauty or magnificence. Each of the Four
Elements having a particular region allotted to it, had a place of
rest, to which it naturally tended, by its motion, either up or down,
in a straight line, and where, when it had arrived, it naturally
ceased to move. Earth descended, till it arrived at the place of
Earth; Water, till it arrived at that of Water; and Air, till it
arrived at that of Air; and there each of them tended to a state of
eternal repose and inaction. The Spheres consisted of a Fifth Element,
which was neither light nor heavy, and whose natural motion made it
tend, neither to the centre, nor from the centre, but revolve round it
in a circle. As, by this motion, they could never change their
situation with regard to the centre, they had no place of repose, no
place to which they naturally tended more than to any other, but
revolved round and round for ever. This Fifth Element was subject
neither to generation nor corruption, nor alteration of any kind; for
whatever changes may happen in the Heavens, the senses can scarce
perceive them, and their appearance is the same in one age as in
another. The beauty, too, of their supposed crystalline spheres seemed
still more to entitle them to this distinction of unchangeable
immortality. It was the motion of those Spheres, which occasioned the
mixtures of the Elements, and from hence, the production of all the
forms and species, that diversify the world. It was the approach of
the Sun and of the {391} other Planets, to the different parts of the
Earth, which, by forcing down the element of Fire, occasioned the
generation of those forms. It was the recess of those bodies, which,
by allowing each Element to escape to its proper sphere, brought
about, in an equal time, their corruption. It was the periods of those
great lights of Heaven, which measured out to all sublunary things,
the term of their duration, of their growth, and of their decay,
either in one, or in a number of seasons, according as the Elements of
which they were composed, were either imperfectly or accurately
blended and mixed with one another. Immortality, they could bestow
upon no individual form, because the principles out of which it was
formed, all tending to disengage themselves, and to return to their
proper spheres, necessarily, at last, brought about its dissolution.
But, though all individuals were thus perishable, and constantly
decaying, every species was immortal, because the subject-matter out
of which they were made, and the revolution of the Heavens, the cause
of their successive generations, continued to be always the same.
In the first ages of the world, the seeming incoherence of the
appearances of nature, so confounded mankind, that they despaired of
discovering in her operations any regular system. Their ignorance, and
confusion of thought, necessarily gave birth to that pusillanimous
superstition, which ascribes almost every unexpected event, to the
arbitrary will of some designing, though invisible beings, who
produced it for some private and particular purpose. The idea of an
universal mind, of a God of all, who originally formed the whole, and
who governs the whole by general laws, directed to the conservation
and prosperity of the whole, without regard to that of any private
individual, was a notion to which they were utterly strangers. Their
gods, though they were apprehended to interpose, upon some particular
occasions, were so far from being regarded as the creators of the
world, that their origin was apprehended to be posterior to that of
the world. The Earth, according to Hesiod, was the first production of
the chaos. The Heavens arose out of the Earth, and from both together,
all the gods, who afterwards inhabited them. Nor was this notion
confined to the vulgar, and to those poets who seem to have recorded
the vulgar theology. Of all the philosophers of the Ionian school,
Anaxagoras, it is well known, was the first who supposed that mind and
understanding were requisite to account for the first origin of the
world, and who, therefore, compared with the other philosophers of his
time, talked, as Aristotle observes, like a sober man among drunkards;
but whose opinion was, at the time, so remarkable, that he seems to
have got a sirname from it. The same notion, of the spontaneous origin
of the world, was embraced, too, as the same author tells, by the
early Pythagoreans, a sect, which, in the ancient world, was never
regarded as irreligious. Mind, and understanding, and consequently
Deity, being {392} the most perfect, were necessarily, according to
them, the last productions of Nature. For in all other things, what
was most perfect, they observed, always came last. As in plants and
animals, it is not the seed that is most perfect, but the complete
animal, with all its members, in the one; and the complete plant, with
all its branches, leaves, flowers, and fruits, in the other. This
notion, which could take place only while Nature was still considered
as, in some measure, disorderly and inconsistent in her operations,
was necessarily renounced by those philosophers, when, upon a more
attentive survey, they discovered, or imagined they had discovered,
more distinctly, the chain which bound all her different parts to one
another. As soon as the Universe was regarded as a complete machine,
as a coherent system, governed by general laws, and directed to
general ends, viz. its own preservation and prosperity, and that of
all the species that are in it; the resemblance which it evidently
bore to those machines which are produced by human art, necessarily
impressed those sages with a belief, that in the original formation of
the world there must have been employed an art resembling the human
art, but as much superior to it, as the world is superior to the
machines which that art produces. The unity of the system, which,
according to this ancient philosophy, is most perfect, suggested the
idea of the unity of that principle, by whose art it was formed; and
thus, as ignorance begot superstition, science gave birth to the first
theism that arose among those nations, who were not enlightened by
divine Revelation. According to Timæus, who was followed by Plato,
that intelligent Being who formed the world endowed it with a
principle of life and understanding, which extends from its centre to
its remotest circumference, which is conscious of all its changes, and
which governs and directs all its motions to the great end of its
formation. This soul of the world was itself a God, the greatest of
all the inferior, and created deities; of an essence that was
indissoluble, by any power but by that of him who made it, and which
was united to the body of the world, so as to be inseparable by every
force, but his who joined them, from the exertion of which his
goodness secured them. The beauty of the celestial spheres attracting
the admiration of mankind, the constancy and regularity of their
motions seeming to manifest peculiar wisdom and understanding, they
were each of them supposed to be animated by an Intelligence of a
nature that was, in the same manner, indissoluble and immortal, and
inseparably united to that sphere which it inhabited. All the mortal
and changeable beings which people the surface of the earth were
formed by those inferior deities; for the revolutions of the heavenly
bodies seemed plainly to influence the generation and growth of both
plants and animals, whose frail and fading forms bore the too evident
marks of the weakness of those inferior causes, which joined their
different parts to one another. According to Plato and Timæus, neither
the {393} Universe, nor even those inferior deities who govern the
Universe, were eternal, but were formed in time, by the great Author
of all things, out of that matter which had existed from all eternity.
This at least their words seemed to import, and thus they are
understood by Cicero, and by all the other writers of earlier
antiquity, though some of the later Platonists have interpreted them
differently.
According to Aristotle, who seems to have followed the doctrine of
Ocellus, the world was eternal; the eternal effect of an eternal
cause. He found it difficult, it would seem, to conceive what could
hinder the First Cause from exerting his divine energy from all
eternity. At whatever time he began to exert it, he must have been at
rest during all the infinite ages of that eternity which had passed
before it. To what obstruction, from within or from without, could
this be owing? or how could this obstruction, if it ever had
subsisted, have ever been removed? His idea of the nature and manner
of existence of this First Cause, as it is expressed in the last book
of his Physics, and the five last chapters of his Metaphysics, is
indeed obscure and unintelligible in the highest degree, and has
perplexed his commentators more than any other parts of his writings.
Thus far, however, he seems to express himself plainly enough: that
the First Heavens, that of the Fixed Stars, from which are derived the
motions of all the rest, is revolved by an eternal, immovable,
unchangeable, unextended being, whose essence consists in
intelligence, as that of a body consists in solidity and extension;
and which is therefore necessarily and always intelligent, as a body
is necessarily and always extended: that this Being was the first and
supreme mover of the Universe: that the inferior Planetary Spheres
derived each of them its peculiar revolution from an inferior being of
the same kind; eternal, immovable, unextended, and necessarily
intelligent: that the sole object of the intelligences of those beings
was their own essence, and the revolution of their own spheres; all
other inferior things being unworthy of their consideration; and that
therefore whatever was below the Moon was abandoned by the gods to the
direction of Nature, and Chance, and Necessity. For though those
celestial beings were, by the revolutions of their several Spheres,
the original causes of the generation and corruption of all sublunary
forms, they were causes who neither knew nor intended the effects
which they produced. This renowned philosopher seems, in his
theological notions, to have been directed by prejudices which, though
extremely natural, are not very philosophical. The revolutions of the
Heavens, by their grandeur and constancy, excited his admiration, and
seemed, upon that account, to be effects not unworthy a Divine
Intelligence. Whereas the meanness of many things, the disorder and
confusion of all things below, exciting no such agreeable emotion,
seemed to have no marks of being directed by that Supreme
Understanding. Yet, though this opinion saps the foundations of human
worship, and must have the {394} same effects upon society as Atheism
itself, one may easily trace, in the Metaphysics upon which it is
grounded, the origin of many of the notions, or rather of many of the
expressions, in the scholastic theology, to which no notions can be
annexed.
The Stoics, the most religious of all the ancient sects of
philosophers, seem in this, as in most other things, to have altered
and refined upon the doctrine of Plato. The order, harmony, and
coherence which this philosophy bestowed upon the Universal System,
struck them with awe and veneration. As, in the rude ages of the
world, whatever particular part of Nature excited the admiration of
mankind, was apprehended to be animated by some particular divinity;
so the whole of Nature having, by their reasonings, become equally the
object of admiration, was equally apprehended to be animated by a
Universal Deity, to be itself a Divinity, an Animal; a term which to
our ears seems by no means synonymous with the foregoing; whose body
was the solid and sensible parts of Nature, and whose soul was that
etherial Fire, which penetrated and actuated the whole. For of all the
four elements, out of which all things were composed, Fire or Ether
seemed to be that which bore the greatest resemblance to the Vital
Principle which informs both plants and animals, and therefore most
likely to be the Vital Principle which animated the Universe. This
infinite and unbounded Ether, which extended itself from the centre
beyond the remotest circumference of Nature, and was endowed with the
most consummate reason and intelligence, or rather was itself the very
essence of reason and intelligence, had originally formed the world,
and had communicated a portion, or ray, of its own essence to whatever
was endowed with life and sensation, which, upon the dissolution of
those forms, either immediately or some time after, was again absorbed
into that ocean of Deity from whence it had originally been detached.
In this system the Sun, the Moon, the Planets, and the Fixed Stars,
were each of them also inferior divinities, animated by a detached
portion of that etherial essence which was the soul of the world. In
the system of Plato, the Intelligence which animated the world was
different from that which originally formed it. Neither were these
which animated the celestial spheres, nor those which informed
inferior terrestrial animals, regarded as portions of this plastic
soul of the world. Upon the dissolution of animals, therefore, their
souls were not absorbed in the soul of the world, but had a separate
and eternal existence, which gave birth to the notion of the
transmigration of souls. Neither did it seem unnatural, that, as the
same matter which had composed one animal body might be employed to
compose another, that the same intelligence which had animated one
such being should again animate another. But in the system of the
Stoics, the intelligence which originally formed, and that which
animated the world, were one and the same, all inferior intelligences
were detached portions {395} of the great one; and therefore, in a
longer, or in a shorter time, were all of them, even the gods
themselves, who animated the celestial bodies, to be at last resolved
into the infinite essence of this almighty Jupiter, who, at a distant
period, should, by an universal conflagration, wrap up all things, in
that etherial and fiery nature, out of which they had originally been
deduced, again to bring forth a new Heaven and a new Earth, new
animals, new men, new deities; all of which would again, at a fated
time, be swallowed up in a like conflagration, again to be
re-produced, and again to be re-destroyed, and so on without end.
----------
THE PRINCIPLES
WHICH LEAD AND DIRECT
PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRIES;
ILLUSTRATED BY THE HISTORY OF THE
ANCIENT LOGICS AND METAPHYSICS.
-----
IN every transmutation, either of one element into another, or of one
compound body either into the elements out of which it was composed,
or into another compound body, it seemed evident, that both in the old
and in the new species, there was something that was the same, and
something that was different. When Fire was changed into Air, or Water
into Earth, the Stuff, or Subject-matter of this Air and this Earth,
was evidently the same with that of the former Fire or Water; but the
Nature or Species of those new bodies was entirely different. When, in
the same manner, a number of fresh, green, and odoriferous flowers
were thrown together in a heap, they, in a short time, entirely
changed their nature, became putrid and loathsome, and dissolved into
a confused mass of ordure, which bore no resemblance, either in
sensible qualities or in its effects, to their former beautiful
appearance. But how different soever the species, the subject-matter
of the flowers, and of the ordure, was, in this case too, evidently
the same. In every body therefore, whether simple or mixed, there were
evidently two principles, whose combination constituted the whole
nature of that particular body. The first was the Stuff, or
Subject-matter, out of which it was made; the second was the Species,
the Specific Essence, the Essential, or, as the schoolmen have called
it, the Substantial Form of the Body. {396} The first seemed to be the
same in all bodies, and to have neither qualities nor powers of any
kind, but to be altogether inert and imperceptible by any of the
senses, till it was qualified and rendered sensible by its union with
some species or essential form. All the qualities and powers of bodies
seemed to depend upon their species or essential forms. It was not the
stuff or matter of Fire, or Air, or Earth, or Water, which enabled
those elements to produce their several effects, but that essential
form which was peculiar to each of them. For it seemed evident that
Fire must produce the effects of Fire, by that which rendered it Fire;
Air, by that which rendered it Air; and that in the same manner all
other simple and mixed bodies must produce their several effects, by
that which constituted them such or such bodies; that is, by their
Specific Essence or essential forms. But it is from the effects of
bodies upon one another, that all the changes and revolutions in the
material world arise. Since these, therefore, depend upon the specific
essences of those bodies, it must be the business of philosophy, that
science which endeavours to connect together all the different changes
that occur in the world, to determine wherein the Specific Essence of
each object consists, in order to foresee what changes or revolutions
may be expected from it. But the Specific Essence of each individual
object is not that which is peculiar to it as an individual, but that
which is common to it, with all other objects of the same kind. Thus
the Specific Essence of the Water, which now stands before me, does
not consist in its being heated by the Fire, or cooled by the Air, in
such a particular degree; in its being contained in a vessel of such a
form, or of such dimensions. These are all accidental circumstances,
which are altogether extraneous to its general nature, and upon which
none of its effects as Water depend. Philosophy, therefore, in
considering the general nature of Water, takes no notice of those
particularities which are peculiar to this water, but confines itself
to those things which are common to all Water. If, in the progress of
its inquiries, it should descend to consider the nature of Water that
is modified by such particular accidents, it still would not confine
its consideration to this water contained in this vessel, and thus
heated at this fire, but would extend its views to Water in general
contained in such kind of vessels, and heated to such a degree at such
a fire. In every case, therefore, Species, or Universals, and not
Individuals, are the objects of Philosophy. Because whatever effects
are produced by individuals, whatever changes can flow from them, must
all proceed from some universal nature that is contained in them. As
it was the business of Physics, or Natural Philosophy, to determine
wherein consisted the Nature and Essence of every particular Species
of things, in order to connect together all the different events that
occur in the material world; so there were two other sciences, which,
though they had originally arisen out of that system of Natural
Philosophy I have just {397} been describing, were, however,
apprehended to go before it, in the order in which the knowledge of
Nature ought to be communicated. The first of these, Metaphysics,
considered the general nature of Universals, and the different sorts
or species into which they might be divided. The second of these,
Logics, was built upon this doctrine of Metaphysics; and from the
general nature of Universals, and of the sorts into which they were
divided, endeavoured to ascertain the general rules by which we might
distribute all particular objects into general classes, and determine
to what class each individual object belonged; for in this, they
justly enough apprehended, consisted the whole art of philosophical
reasoning. As the first of these two sciences, Metaphysics, is
altogether subordinate to the second, Logic, they seem, before the
time of Aristotle, to have been regarded as one, and to have made up
between them that ancient Dialectic of which we hear so much, and of
which we understand so little: neither does this separation seem to
have been much attended to, either by his own followers, the ancient
Peripatetics, or by any other of the old sects of philosophers. The
later schoolmen, indeed, have distinguished between Ontology and
Logic; but their Ontology contains but a small part of what is the
subject of the metaphysical books of Aristotle, the greater part of
which, the doctrines of Universals, and everything that is preparatory
to the arts of defining and dividing, has, since the days of Porphery,
been inserted into their Logic.
According to Plato and Timæus, the principles out of which the Deity
formed the World, and which were themselves eternal, were three in
number. The Subject-matter of things, the Species, or Specific
Essences of things, and what was made out of these, the sensible
objects themselves. These last had no proper or durable existence, but
were in perpetual flux and succession. For as Heraclitus had said that
no man ever passed the same river twice, because the water which he
had passed over once was gone before he could pass over it a second
time; so, in the same manner, no man ever saw, or heard, or touched
the same sensible object twice. When I look at the window, for
example, the visible species, which strikes my eyes this moment,
though resembling, is different from that which struck my eyes the
immediately preceding moment. When I ring the bell, the sound, or
audible species, which I hear this moment, though resembling in the
same manner, is different, however, from that which I heard the moment
before. When I lay my hand on the table, the tangible species which I
feel this moment, though resembling, in the same manner, is
numerically different too from that which I felt the moment before.
Our sensations, therefore, never properly exist or endure one moment;
but, in the very instant of their generation, perish and are
annihilated for ever. Nor are the causes of those sensations more
permanent. No corporeal substance is ever exactly the {398} same,
either in whole or in any assignable part, during two successive,
moments, but by the perpetual addition of new parts, as well as loss
of old ones, is in continual flux and succession. Things of so
fleeting a nature can never be the objects of science, or of any
steady or permanent judgment. While we look at them, in order to
consider them, they are changed and gone, and annihilated for ever.
The objects of science, and of all the steady judgments of the
understanding, must be permanent, unchangeable, always existent, and
liable neither to generation nor corruption, nor alteration of any
kind. Such are the species or specific essences of things. Man is
perpetually changing every particle of his body; and every thought of
his mind is in continual flux and succession. But humanity, or human
nature, is always existent, is always the same, is never generated,
and is never corrupted. This, therefore, is the object of science,
reason, and understanding, as man is the object of sense, and of those
inconstant opinions which are founded upon sense. As the objects of
sense were apprehended to have an external existence, independent of
the act of sensation, so these objects of the understanding were much
more supposed to have an external existence independent of the act of
understanding. Those external essences were, according to Plato, the
exemplars, according to which the Deity formed the world, and all the
sensible objects that are in it. The Deity comprehended within his
infinite essence, all these species, or external exemplars, in the
same manner as he comprehended all sensible objects.
Plato, however, seems to have regarded the first of those as equally
distinct with the second from what we would now call the Ideas or
Thoughts of the Divine Mind,[1] and even to have supposed, that they
had a particular place of existence, beyond the sphere of the visible
{399} corporeal world; though this has been much controverted, both by
the later Platonists, and by some very judicious modern critics, who
have followed the interpretation of the later Platonists, as what did
most {400} honour to the judgment of that renowned philosopher. All
the objects in this world, continued he, are particular and
individual. Here, therefore, the human mind has no opportunity of
seeing any Species, or Universal Nature. Whatever ideas it has,
therefore, of such beings, for it plainly has them, it must derive
from the memory of what it has seen, in some former period of its
existence, when it had an opportunity of visiting the place or Sphere
of Universals. For some time after it is immersed in the body, during
its infancy, its childhood, and a great part of its youth, the
violence of those passions which it derives from the body, and which
are all directed to the particular and individual objects of this
world, hinder it from turning its attention to those Universal
Natures, with which it had been conversant in the world from whence it
came. The Ideas, of these, therefore, seem, in this first period of
its existence here, to be overwhelmed in the confusion of those
turbulent emotions, and to be almost entirely wiped out of its
remembrance. During the continuance of this state, it is incapable of
Reasoning, Science and Philosophy, which are conversant about
Universals. Its whole attention is turned towards particular objects,
concerning which, being directed by no general notions, it forms many
vain and false opinions, and is filled with error, perplexity, and
confusion. But, when age has abated the violence of its passions, and
composed the confusion of its thoughts, it then becomes more capable
of reflection, and of turning its attention to those almost forgotten
ideas of things with which it had been conversant in the former state
of its existence. All the particular objects in this sensible world,
being formed after the eternal exemplars in that intellectual world,
awaken, upon account of their resemblance, insensibly, and by slow
degrees, the almost obliterated ideas of these last. The beauty, which
is shared in different degrees among terrestrial objects, revives the
same idea of that Universal Nature of beauty which exists in the
intellectual world: particular acts of justice, of the universal
nature of justice; particular reasonings, and particular sciences, of
the universal nature of science and reasoning; particular roundnesses,
of the universal nature of roundness; particular squares, of the
universal nature of squareness. Thus science, which is conversant
about Universals, is derived from memory; and to instruct any person
concerning the general nature of any subject, is no more than to
awaken in him the remembrance of what he formerly knew about it. This
both Plato and Socrates imagined they could still further confirm, by
the fallacious experiment, {401} which showed, that a person might be
led to discover himself, without any information, any general truth,
of which he was before ignorant, merely by being asked a number of
properly arranged and connected questions concerning it.
[Footnote 1: He calls them, indeed, Ideas, a word which, in him, in
Aristotle, and all the other writers of earlier antiquity, signifies a
Species, and is perfectly synonymous with that other word [Greek:
Eidos], more frequently made use of by Aristotle. As, by some of the
later sects of philosophers, particularly by the Stoics, all species,
or specific essences, were regarded as mere creatures of the mind,
formed by abstraction, which had no real existence external to the
thoughts that conceived them, the word Idea came, by degrees, to its
present signification, to mean, first, an abstract thought or
conception; and afterwards, a thought or conception of any kind; and
thus became synonymous with that other Greek word, [Greek: Ennoia],
from which it had originally a very different meaning. When the later
Platonists, who lived at a time when the notion of the separate
existence of specific essences was universally exploded, began to
comment upon the writings of Plato, and upon that strange fancy that,
in his writings, there was a double doctrine; and that they were
intended to seem to mean one thing, while at bottom they meant a very
different, which the writings of no man in his senses ever were, or
ever could be intended to do; they represented his doctrine as meaning
no more, than that the Deity formed the world after what we would now
call an Idea, or plan conceived in his own mind, in the same manner as
any other artist. But, if Plato had meant to express no more than this
most natural and simple of all notions, he might surely have expressed
it more plainly, and would hardly, one would think, have talked of it
with so much emphasis, as of something which it required the utmost
reach of thought to comprehend. According to this representation,
Plato's notion of Species, or Universals, was the same with that of
Aristotle. Aristotle, however, does not seem to understand it as such;
he bestows a great part of his Metaphysics upon confuting it, and
opposes it in all his other works; nor does he, in any one of them,
give the least hint, or insinuation, as if it could be suspected that,
by the Ideas of Plato, was meant the thoughts or conceptions of the
Divine Mind. Is it possible that he, who was twenty years in his
school, should, during all that time, have misunderstood him,
especially when his meaning was so very plain and obvious? Neither is
this notion of the separate existence of Species, distinct both from
the mind which conceives them, and from the sensible objects which are
made to resemble them, one of those doctrines which Plato would but
seldom have occasion to talk of. However it may be interpreted, it is
the very basis of his philosophy; neither is there a single dialogue
in all his works which does not refer to it. Shall we suppose, that
that great philosopher, who appears to have been so much superior to
his master in every thing but eloquence, wilfully, and upon all
occasions, misrepresented, not one of the deep and mysterious
doctrines of the philosophy of Plato, but the first and most
fundamental principle of all his reasonings; when the writings of
Plato were in the hands of every body; when his followers and
disciples were spread all over Greece; when almost every Athenian of
distinction, that was nearly of the same age with Aristotle, must have
been bred in his school; when Speusippus, the nephew and successor of
Plato, as well as Xenocrates, who continued the school in the Academy,
at the same time that Aristotle held his in the Lyceum, must have been
ready, at all times, to expose and affront him for such gross
disingenuity. Does not Cicero, does not Seneca understand this
doctrine in the same manner as Aristotle has represented it? Is there
any author in all antiquity who seems to understand it otherwise,
earlier than Plutarch, an author who seems to have been as bad a
critic in philosophy as in history, and to have taken every thing at
second-hand in both, and who lived after the origin of that eclectic
philosophy, from whence the later Platonists arose, and who seems
himself to have been one of that sect? Is there any one passage in any
Greek author, near the time of Aristotle and Plato, in which the word
Idea is used in its present meaning, to signify a thought or
conception? Are not the words, which in all languages express reality
or existence, directly opposed to those which express thought, or
conception only? Or, is there any other difference betwixt a thing
that exists, and a thing that does not exist, except this, that the
one is a mere conception, and that the other is something more than a
conception? With what propriety, therefore, could Plato talk of those
eternal species, as of the only things which had any real existence,
if they were no more than the conceptions of the Divine Mind? Had not
the Deity, according to Plato, as well as according to the Stoics,
from all eternity, the idea of every individual, as well as of every
species, and of the state in which every individual was to be, in each
different instance of its existence? Were not all the divine ideas,
therefore, of each individual, or of all the different states, which
each individual was to be in during the course of its existence,
equally eternal and unalterable with those of the species? With what
sense, therefore, could Plato say, that the first were eternal,
because the Deity had conceived them from all eternity, since he had
conceived the others from all eternity too, and since his ideas of the
Species could, in this respect, have no advantage of those of the
individual? Does not Plato, in many different places, talk of the
Ideas of Species or Universals as innate, and having been impressed
upon the mind in its state of pre-existence, when it had an
opportunity of viewing these Species as they are in themselves, and
not as they are expressed in their copies, or representatives upon
earth? But if the only place of the existence of those Species was the
Divine Mind, will not this suppose, that Plato either imagined, like
Father Malbranche, that in its state of pre-existence, the mind saw
all things in God: or that it was itself an emanation of the Divinity?
That he maintained the first opinion, will not be pretended by any
body who is at all versed in the history of science. That enthusiastic
notion, though it may seem to be favoured by some passages in the
Fathers, was never, it is well known, coolly and literally maintained
by any body before that Cartesian philosopher. That the human mind was
itself an emanation of the Divine, though it was the doctrine of the
Stoics, was by no means that of Plato; though, upon the notion of a
pretended double doctrine, the contrary has lately been asserted.
According to Plato, the Deity formed the soul of the world out of that
substance which is always the same, that is, out of Species or
Universals; out of that which is always different, that is, out of
corporeal substances; and out of a substance that was of a middle
nature between these, which it is not easy to understand what he meant
by. Out of a part of the same composition, he made those inferior
intelligences who animated the celestial spheres, to whom he delivered
the remaining part of it, to form from thence the souls of men and
animals. The souls of those inferior deities, though made out of a
similar substance or composition, were not regarded as parts or
emanations of that of the world; nor were those of animals, in the
same manner, regarded as parts or emanations of those inferior
deities: much less were any of them regarded as parts, or emanations
of the great Author of all things.]
The more the soul was accustomed to the consideration of those
Universal Natures, the less it was attached to any particular and
individual objects; it approached the nearer to the original
perfection of its nature, from which, according to this philosophy, it
had fallen. Philosophy, which accustoms it to consider the general
Essence of things only, and to abstract from all their particular and
sensible circumstances, was, upon this account, regarded as the great
purifier of the soul. As death separated the soul from the body, and
from the bodily senses and passions, it restored it to that
intellectual world, from whence it had originally descended, where no
sensible Species called off its attention from those general Essences
of things. Philosophy, in this life, habituating it to the same
considerations, brings it, in some degree, to that state of happiness
and perfection, to which death restores the souls of just men in a
life to come.
Such was the doctrine of Plato concerning the Species or Specific
Essence of things. This, at least, is what his words seem to import,
and thus he is understood by Aristotle, the most intelligent and the
most renowned of all his disciples. It is a doctrine, which, like many
of the other doctrines of abstract Philosophy, is more coherent in the
expression than in the idea; and which seems to have arisen, more from
the nature of language, than from the nature of things. With all its
imperfections it was excusable, in the beginnings of philosophy, and
is not a great deal more remote from the truth, than many others which
have since been substituted in its room by some of the greatest
pretenders to accuracy and precision. Mankind have had, at all times,
a strong propensity to realize their own abstractions, of which we
shall immediately see an example, in the notions of that very
philosopher who first exposed the ill-grounded foundation of those
Ideas, or Universals, of Plato and Timæus. To explain the nature, and
to account for the origin of general Ideas, is, even at this day, the
greatest difficulty in abstract philosophy. How the human mind, when
it reasons concerning the general nature of triangles, should either
conceive, as Mr. Locke imagines it does, the idea of a triangle, which
is neither obtusangular, nor rectangular, nor acutangular; but which
was at once both none and of all those together; or should, as
Malbranche thinks necessary for this purpose, comprehend at once,
within its finite capacity, all possible triangles of all possible
forms and dimensions, which are infinite in number, is a question, to
which it is surely not easy to give a satisfactory answer. Malbranche,
to solve it, had recourse to the enthusiastic and unintelligible
notion of the intimate union of the human mind with the divine, in
whose infinite {402} essence the immensity of such species could alone
be comprehended; and in which alone, therefore, all finite
intelligences could have an opportunity of viewing them. If, after
more than two thousand years reasoning about this subject, this
ingenious and sublime philosopher was forced to have recourse to so
strange a fancy, in order to explain it, can we wonder that Plato, in
the very first dawnings of science, should, for the same purpose,
adopt an hypothesis, which has been thought, without much reason,
indeed, to have some affinity to that of Malbranche, and which is not
more out of the way?
What seems to have misled those early philosophers, was, the notion,
which appears, at first, natural enough, that those things, out of
which any object is composed, must exist antecedent to that object.
But the things out of which all particular objects seem to be
composed, are the stuff or matter of those objects, and the form or
specific Essence, which determines them to be of this or that class of
things. These, therefore, it was thought, must have existed antecedent
to the object which was made up between them. Plato, who held, that
the sensible world, which, according to him, is the world of
individuals, was made in time, necessarily conceived, that both the
universal matter, the object of spurious reason, and the specific
essence, the object of proper reason and philosophy out of which it
was composed, must have had a separate existence from all eternity.
This intellectual world, very different from the intellectual world of
Cudworth, though much of the language of the one has been borrowed
from that of the other, was necessarily and always existent; whereas
the sensible world owed its origin to the free will and bounty of its
author.
A notion of this kind, as long as it is expressed in very general
language; as long as it is not much rested upon, nor attempted to be
very particularly and distinctly explained, passes easily enough,
through the indolent imagination, accustomed to substitute words in
the room of ideas; and if the words seem to hang easily together,
requiring no great precision in the ideas. It vanishes, indeed; is
discovered to be altogether incomprehensible, and eludes the grasp of
the imagination, upon an attentive consideration. It requires,
however, an attentive consideration; and if it had been as fortunate
as many other opinions of the same kind, and about the same subject,
it might, without examination, have continued to be the current
philosophy for a century or two. Aristotle, however, seems immediately
to have discovered, that it was impossible to conceive, as actually
existent, either that general matter, which was not determined by any
particular species, or those species which were not embodied, if one
may say so, in some particular portion of matter. Aristotle, too,
held, as we have already observed the eternity of the sensible world.
Though he held, therefore, that all sensible objects were made up of
two principles, both of which, he calls, equally, substances, the
matter and the specific essence, he was {403} not obliged to hold,
like Plato, that those principles existed prior in the order of time
to the objects which they afterwards composed. They were prior, he
said, in nature, but not in time, according to a distinction which was
of use to him upon some other occasion. He distinguished, too, betwixt
actual and potential existence. By the first, he seems to have
understood what is commonly meant by existence or reality; by the
second, the bare possibility of existence. His meaning, I say, seems
to amount to this; though he does not explain it precisely in this
manner. Neither the material Essence of body could, according to him,
exist actually without being determined by some Specific Essence, to
some particular class of things, nor any Specific Essence without
being embodied in some particular portion of matter. Each of these two
principles, however, could exist potentially in this separate state.
That matter existed potentially, which, being endowed with a
particular form, could be brought into actual existence; and that
form, which, by being embodied in a particular portion of matter,
could, in the same manner, be called forth into the class of complete
realities. This potential existence of matter and form, he sometimes
talks of, in expressions which resemble those of Plato, to whose
notion of separate Essence it bears a very great affinity.
Aristotle, who seems in many things original, and who endeavoured to
seem to be so in all things, added the principle of privation to those
of matter and form, which he had derived from the ancient Pythagorean
school. When Water is changed into Air, the transmutation is brought
about by the material principle of those two elements being deprived
of the form of Water, and then assuming the form of Air. Privation,
therefore, was a third principle opposite to form, which entered into
the generation of every Species, which was always from some other
Species. It was a principle of generation, but not of composition, as
is most obvious.
The Stoics, whose opinions were, in all the different parts of
philosophy, either the same with, or very nearly allied to those of
Aristotle and Plato, though often disguised in very different
language, held, that all things, even the elements themselves, were
compounded of two principles, upon one of which depended all the
active, and upon the other all the passive, powers of these bodies.
The last of these, they called Matter; the first, the Cause, by which
they meant the very same thing which Aristotle and Plato understood,
by their specific Essences. Matter, according to the Stoics, could
have no existence separate from the cause or efficient principle which
determined it to some particular class of things. Neither could the
efficient principle exist separately from the material, in which it
was always necessarily embodied. Their opinion, therefore, so far
coincided with that of the old Peripatetics. The efficient principle,
they said, was the Deity. By which they meant, that it was a detached
portion of the etherial and divine nature, {404} which penetrated all
things, that constituted what Plato would have called the Specific
Essence of each individual object; and so far their opinion coincides
pretty nearly with that of the latter Platonists, who held, that the
Specific Essences of all things were detached portions of their
created deity, the soul of the world; and with that of some of the
Arabian and Scholastic Commentators of Aristotle, who held that the
substantial forms of all things descended from those Divine Essences
which animated the Celestial Spheres. Such was the doctrine of the
four principal Sects of the ancient Philosophers, concerning the
Specific Essences of things, of the old Pythagoreans, of the
Academical, the Peripatetic, and the Stoical Sects.
As this doctrine of Specific Essences seems naturally enough to have
arisen from that ancient system of Physics, which I have above
described, and which is, by no means, devoid of probability, so many
of the doctrines of that system, which seems to us, who have been long
accustomed to another, the most incomprehensible, necessarily flow
from this metaphysical notion. Such are those of generation,
corruption, and alteration; of mixture, condensation, and rarefaction.
A body was generated or corrupted, when it changed its Specific
Essence, and passed from one denomination to another. It was altered
when it changed only some of its qualities, but still retained the
same Specific Essence, and the same denomination. Thus, when a flower
was withered, it was not corrupted; though some of its qualities were
changed, it still retained the Specific Essence, and therefore justly
passed under the denomination of a flower. But, when, in the further
progress of its decay, it crumbled into earth, it was corrupted; it
lost the Specific Essence, or substantial form of the flower, and
assumed that of the earth, and therefore justly changed its
denomination.
The Specific Essence, or universal nature that was lodged in each
particular class of bodies, was not itself the object of any of our
senses, but could be perceived only by the understanding. It was by
the sensible qualities, however, that we judged of the Specific
Essence of each object. Some of these sensible qualities, therefore,
we regarded as essential, or such as showed, by their presence or
absence, the presence or absence of that essential form from which
they necessarily flowed. Others were accidental, or such whose
presence or absence had no such necessary consequences. The first of
these two sorts of qualities was called Properties; the second,
Accidents.
In the Specific Essence of each object itself, they distinguished two
parts; one of which was peculiar and characteristical of the one class
of things of which that particular object was an individual, the other
was common to it with some other higher classes of things. These two
parts were, to the Specific Essence, pretty much what the Matter and
the Specific Essence were to each individual body. The one, which was
called the Genus, was modified and determined by the other, {405}
which was called the Specific Difference, pretty much in the same
manner as the universal matter contained in each body was modified and
determined by the Specific Essence of that particular class of bodies.
These four, with the Specific Essence or Species itself, made up the
number of the Five Universals, so well known in the schools by the
names of Genus, Species, Differentia, Proprium, and Accidens.
* * * * *
----------
OF THE
NATURE OF THAT IMITATION
WHICH TAKES PLACE IN WHAT ARE CALLED
THE IMITATIVE ARTS.
-----
PART I.
THE most perfect imitation of an object of any kind must in all cases,
it is evident, be another object of the same kind, made as exactly as
possible after the same model. What, for example, would be the most
perfect imitation of the carpet which now lies before me?--Another
carpet, certainly, wrought as exactly as possible after the same
pattern. But, whatever might be the merit or beauty of this second
carpet, it would not be supposed to derive any from the circumstance
of its having been made in imitation of the first. This circumstance
of its being not an original, but a copy, would even be considered as
some diminution of that merit; a greater or smaller, in proportion as
the object was of a nature to lay claim to a greater or smaller degree
of admiration. It would not much diminish the merit of a common
carpet, because in such trifling objects, which at best can lay claim
to so little beauty or merit of any kind, we do not always think it
worth while to affect originality: it would diminish a good deal that
of a carpet of very exquisite workmanship. In objects of still
greater importance, this exact, or, as it would be called, this
servile imitation, would be considered as the most unpardonable
blemish. To build another St. Peter's or St. Paul's church, of exactly
the same dimensions, proportions, and ornaments with the present
buildings at Rome or London, would be supposed to argue such a
miserable barrenness of genius and invention in the architect as would
disgrace the most expensive magnificence.
The exact resemblance of the correspondent parts of the same object
{406} is frequently considered as a beauty, and the want of it as a
deformity; as in the correspondent members of the human body, in the
opposite wings of the same building, in the opposite trees of the same
alley, in the correspondent compartments of the same piece of
carpet-work, or of the same flower-garden, in the chairs or tables
which stand in the correspondent parts of the same room, etc. But in
objects of the same kind, which in other respects are regarded as
altogether separate and unconnected, this exact resemblance is seldom
considered as a beauty, nor the want of it as a deformity. A man, and
in the same manner a horse, is handsome or ugly, each of them, on
account of his own intrinsic beauty or deformity, without any regard
to their resembling or not resembling, the one, another man, or the
other, another horse. A set of coach-horses, indeed, is supposed to be
handsomer when they are all exactly matched; but each horse is, in
this case, considered not as a separated and unconnected object, or as
a whole by himself, but as a part of another whole, to the other parts
of which he ought to bear a certain correspondence: separated from the
set, he derives neither beauty from his resemblance, nor deformity
from his unlikeness to the other horses which compose it.
Even in the correspondent parts of the same object, we frequently
require no more than a resemblance in the general outline. If the
inferior members of those correspondent parts are too minute to be
seen distinctly, without a separate and distinct examination of each
part by itself, as a separate and unconnected object, we should
sometimes even be displeased if the resemblance was carried beyond
this general outline. In the correspondent parts of a room we
frequently hang pictures of the same size; those pictures, however,
resemble one another in nothing but the frame, or, perhaps, in the
general character of the subject; if the one is a landscape, the other
is a landscape too; if the one represents a religious or a
bacchanalian subject, its companion represents another of the same
kind. Nobody ever thought of repeating the same picture in each
correspondent frame. The frame, and the general character of two or
three pictures, is as much as the eye can comprehend at one view, or
from one station. Each picture, in order, to be seen distinctly, and
understood thoroughly, must be viewed from a particular station, and
examined by itself as a separate and unconnected object. In a hall or
portico, adorned with statues, the niches, or perhaps the pedestals,
may exactly resemble one another, but the statues are always different
Even the masks which are sometimes carried upon the different
key-stones of the same arcade, or of the correspondent doors and
windows of the same front, though they may all resemble one another in
the general outline, yet each of them has always its own peculiar
features, and a grimace of its own. There are some Gothic buildings in
which the correspondent windows resemble one another only in the
general outline, and not in the smaller {407} ornaments and
subdivisions. These are different in each, and the architect had
considered them as too minute to be seen distinctly, without a
particular and separate examination of each window by itself, as a
separate and unconnected object. A variety of this sort, however, I
think, is not agreeable. In objects which are susceptible only of a
certain inferior order of beauty, such as the frames of pictures, the
niches or the pedestals of statues, &c., there seems frequently to be
affectation in the study of variety, of which the merit is scarcely
ever sufficient to compensate the want of that perspicuity and
distinctness, of that easiness to be comprehended and remembered,
which is the natural effect of exact uniformity. In a portico of the
Corinthian or Ionic order, each column resembles every other, not only
in the general outline, but in all the minutest ornaments; though some
of them, in order to be seen distinctly, may require a separate and
distinct examination in each column, and in the entablature of each
intercolumnation. In the inlaid tables, which, according to the
present fashion, are sometimes fixed in the correspondent parts of the
same room, the pictures only are different in each. All the other more
frivolous and fanciful ornaments are commonly, so far at least as I
have observed the fashion, the same in them all. Those ornaments,
however, in order to be seen distinctly, require a distinct
examination of each table.
The extraordinary resemblance of two natural objects, of twins, for
example, is regarded as a curious circumstance; which, though it does
not increase, yet does not diminish the beauty of either, considered
as a separate and unconnected object. But the exact resemblance of two
productions of art, seems to be always considered as some diminution
of the merit of at least one of them; as it seems to prove, that one
of them, at least, is a copy either of the other, or of some other
original. One may say, even of the copy of a picture, that it derives
its merit, not so much from its resemblance to the original, as from
its resemblance to the object which the original was meant to
resemble. The owner of the copy, so far from setting any high value
upon its resemblance to the original, is often anxious to destroy any
value or merit which it might derive from this circumstance. He is
often anxious to persuade both himself and other people that it is not
a copy, but an original, of which what passes for the original is only
a copy. But, whatever merit a copy may derive from its resemblance to
the original, an original can derive none from the resemblance of its
copy.
But though a production of art seldom derives any merit from its
resemblance to another object of the same kind, it frequently derives
a great deal from its resemblance to an object of a different kind,
whether that object be a production of art or of nature. A painted
cloth, the work of some laborious Dutch artist, so curiously shaded
and coloured as to represent the pile and softness of a woollen one,
might derive some merit from its resemblance even to the sorry carpet
which now {408} lies before me. The copy might, and probably would, in
this case, be of much greater value than the original. But if this
carpet was represented as spread, either upon a floor or upon a table,
and projecting from the background of the picture, with exact
observation of perspective, and of light and shade, the merit of the
imitation would be still even greater.
In Painting, a plain surface of one kind is made to resemble, not only
a plain surface of another, but all the three dimensions of a solid
substance. In Statuary and Sculpture, a solid substance of one kind,
is made to resemble a solid substance of another. The disparity
between the object imitating, and the object imitated, is much greater
in the one art than in the other; and the pleasure arising from the
imitation seems greater in proportion as this disparity is greater.
In Painting, the imitation frequently pleases, though the original
object be indifferent, or even offensive. In Statuary and Sculpture it
is otherwise. The imitation seldom pleases, unless the original object
be in a very high degree either great, or beautiful, or interesting. A
butcher's-stall, or a kitchen-dresser, with the objects which they
commonly present, are not certainly the happiest subjects, even for
Painting. They have, however, been represented with so much care and
success by some Dutch masters, that it is impossible to view the
pictures without some degree of pleasure. They would be most absurd
subjects for Statuary or Sculpture, which are, however, capable of
representing them. The picture of a very ugly or deformed man, such as
Æsop, or Scarron, might not make a disagreeable piece of furniture.
The statue certainly would. Even a vulgar ordinary man or woman,
engaged in a vulgar ordinary action, like what we see with so much
pleasure in the pictures of Rembrandt, would be too mean a subject for
Statuary. Jupiter, Hercules, and Apollo, Venus and Diana, the Nymphs
and the Graces, Bacchus, Mercury, Antinous, and Meleager, the
miserable death of Laocoon, the melancholy fate of the children of
Niobe, the Wrestlers, the fighting, the dying gladiator, the figures
of gods and goddesses, of heroes and heroines, the most perfect forms
of the human body, placed either in the noblest attitudes, or in the
most interesting situations which the human imagination is capable of
conceiving, are the proper, and therefore have always been the
favourite, subjects of Statuary: that art cannot, without degrading
itself, stoop to represent any thing that is offensive, or mean, or
even indifferent. Painting is not so disdainful; and, though capable
of representing the noblest objects, it can, without forfeiting its
title to please, submit to imitate those of a much more humble nature.
The merit of the imitation alone, and without any merit in the
imitated object, is capable of supporting the dignity of Painting: it
cannot support that of Statuary. There would seem, therefore, to be
more merit in the one species of imitation than in the other.
{409} In Statuary, scarcely any drapery is agreeable. The best of the
ancient statues were either altogether naked or almost naked; and
those of which any considerable part of the body is covered, are
represented as clothed in wet linen--a species of clothing which most
certainly never was agreeable to the fashion of any country. This
drapery too is drawn so tight, as to express beneath its narrow
foldings the exact form and outline of any limb, and almost of every
muscle of the body. The clothing which thus approached the nearest to
no clothing at all, had, it seems, in the judgment of the great
artists of antiquity, been that which was most suitable to Statuary. A
great painter of the Roman school, who had formed his manner almost
entirely upon the study of the ancient statues, imitated at first
their drapery in his pictures; but he soon found that in Painting it
had the air of meanness and poverty, as if the persons who wore it
could scarce afford clothes enough to cover them; and that larger
folds, and a looser and more flowing drapery, were more suitable to
the nature of his art. In Painting, the imitation of so very inferior
an object as a suit of clothes is capable of pleasing; and, in order
to give this object all the magnificence of which it is capable, it is
necessary that the folds should be large, loose, and flowing. It is
not necessary in Painting that the exact form and outline of every
limb, and almost of every muscle of the body, should be expressed
beneath the folds of the drapery; it is sufficient if these are so
disposed as to indicate in general the situation and attitude of the
principal limbs. Painting, by the mere force and merit of its
imitation, can venture, without the hazard of displeasing, to
substitute, upon many occasions, the inferior in the room of the
superior object, by making the one, in this manner, cover and entirely
conceal a great part of the other. Statuary can seldom venture to do
this, but with the utmost reserve and caution; and the same drapery,
which is noble and magnificent in the one art, appears clumsy and
awkward in the other. Some modern artists, however, have attempted to
introduce into Statuary the drapery which is peculiar to Painting. It
may not, perhaps, upon every occasion, be quite so ridiculous as the
marble periwigs in Westminster Abbey: but if it does not always appear
clumsy and awkward, it is at best always insipid and uninteresting.
It is not the want of colouring which hinders many things from
pleasing in Statuary which please in Painting; it is the want of that
degree of disparity between the imitating and the imitated object,
which is necessary, in order to render interesting the imitation of an
object which is itself not interesting. Colouring, when added to
Statuary, so far from increasing, destroys almost entirely the
pleasure which we receive from the imitation; because it takes away
the great source of that pleasure, the disparity between the imitating
and the imitated object. That one solid and coloured object should
exactly resemble another solid and coloured object, seems to be a
matter of no {410} great wonder or admiration. A painted statue,
though it may resemble a human figure much more exactly than any
statue which is not painted, is generally acknowledged to be a
disagreeable and even an offensive object; and so far are we from
being pleased with this superior likeness, that we are never satisfied
with it; and, after viewing it again and again, we always find that it
is not equal to what we are disposed to imagine it might have been:
though it should seem to want scarce any thing but the life, we could
not pardon it for thus wanting what it is altogether impossible it
should have. The works of Mrs. Wright, a self-taught artist of great
merit, are perhaps more perfect in this way than any thing I have ever
seen. They do admirably well to be seen now and then as a show; but
the best of them we shall find, if brought home to our own house, and
placed in a situation where it was to come often into view, would
make, instead of an ornamental, a most offensive piece of household
furniture. Painted statues, accordingly, are universally reprobated,
and we scarce ever meet with them. To colour the eyes of statues is
not altogether so uncommon: even this, however, is disapproved by all
good judges. 'I cannot bear it,' (a gentleman used to say, of great
knowledge and judgment in this art), 'I cannot bear it; I always want
them to speak to me.'
Artificial fruits and flowers sometimes imitate so exactly the natural
objects which they represent, that they frequently deceive us. We soon
grow weary of them, however; and, though they seem to want nothing but
the freshness and the flavour of natural fruits and flowers, we cannot
pardon them, in the same manner, for thus wanting what it is
altogether impossible they should have. But we do not grow weary of a
good flower and fruit painting. We do not grow weary of the foliage of
the Corinthian capital, or of the flowers which sometimes ornament the
frieze of that order. Such imitations, however, never deceive us;
their resemblance to the original objects is always much inferior to
that of artificial fruits and flowers. Such as it is, however, we are
contented with it; and, where there is such disparity between the
imitating and the imitated objects, we find that it is as great as it
can be, or as we expect that it should be. Paint that foliage and
those flowers with the natural colours, and, instead of pleasing more,
they will please much less. The resemblance, however, will be much
greater; but the disparity between the imitating and the imitated
objects will be so much less, that even this superior resemblance will
not satisfy us. Where the disparity is so very great, on the contrary,
we are often contented with the most imperfect resemblance; with the
very imperfect resemblance, for example, both as to the figure and the
colour, of fruits and flowers in shell-work.
It may be observed, however, that, though in Sculpture the imitation
of flowers and foliage pleases as an ornament of architecture, as a
part of the dress which is to set off the beauty of a different and a
more {411} important object, it would not please alone, or as a
separate and unconnected object, in the same manner as a fruit and
flower painting pleases. Flowers and foliage, how elegant and
beautiful soever, are not sufficiently interesting; they have not
dignity enough, if I may say so, to be proper subjects for a piece of
Sculpture, which is to please alone, and not to appear as the
ornamental appendage of some other object.
In Tapestry and Needle-work, in the same manner as in Painting, a
plain surface is sometimes made to represent all the three dimensions
of a solid substance. But both the shuttle of the weaver, and the
needle of the embroiderer, are instruments of imitation so much
inferior to the pencil of the painter, that we are not surprised to
find a proportionable inferiority in their productions. We have all
more or less experience that they usually are much inferior: and, in
appreciating a piece of Tapestry or Needle-work, we never compare the
imitation of either with that of a good picture, for it never could
stand that comparison, but with that of other pieces of Tapestry or
Needle-work. We take into consideration, not only the disparity
between the imitating and the imitated object, but the awkwardness of
the instruments of imitation; and if it is as well as any thing that
can be expected from these, if it is better than the greater part of
what actually comes from them, we are often not only contented but
highly pleased.
A good painter will often execute in a few days a subject which would
employ the best tapestry-weaver for many years; though, in proportion
to his time, therefore, the latter is always much worse paid than the
former, yet his work in the end comes commonly much dearer to market.
The great expense of good Tapestry, the circumstance which confines it
to the palaces of princes and of great lords, gives it, in the eyes
of the greater part of the people, an air of riches and magnificence,
which contributes still further to compensate the imperfection of its
imitation. In arts which address themselves, not to the prudent and
the wise, but to the rich and the great, to the proud and the vain, we
ought not to wonder if the appearances of great expense, of being what
few people can purchase, of being one of the surest characteristics of
great fortune, should often stand in the place of exquisite beauty,
and contribute equally to recommend their productions. As the idea of
expense seems often to embellish, so that of cheapness seems as
frequently to tarnish the lustre even of very agreeable objects. The
difference between real and false jewels is what even the experienced
eye of a jeweller can sometimes with difficulty distinguish. Let an
unknown lady, however, come into a public assembly, with a head-dress
which appears to be very richly adorned with diamonds, and let a
jeweller only whisper in our ear that they are false stones, not only
the lady will immediately sink in our imagination from the rank of a
princess to that of a very ordinary woman, but the {412} head-dress,
from being an object of the most splendid magnificence, will at once
become an impertinent piece of tawdry and tinsel finery.
It was some years ago the fashion to ornament a garden with yew and
holly trees, clipped into the artificial shapes of pyramids, and
columns, and vases, and obelisks. It is now the fashion to ridicule
this taste as unnatural. The figure of a pyramid or obelisk, however,
is not more unnatural to a yew-tree than to a block of porphyry or
marble. When the yew-tree is presented to the eye in this artificial
shape, the gardener does not mean that it should be understood to have
grown in that shape: he means, first, to give it the same beauty of
regular figure, which pleases so much in porphyry and marble; and,
secondly, to imitate in a growing tree the ornaments of those precious
materials: he means to make an object of one kind resembling another
object of a very different kind; and to the original beauty of figure
to join the relative beauty of imitation: but the disparity between
the imitating and the imitated object is the foundation of the beauty
of imitation. It is because the one object does not naturally resemble
the other, that we are so much pleased with it, when by art it is made
to do so. The shears of the gardener, it may be said, indeed, are very
clumsy instruments of Sculpture. They are so, no doubt, when employed
to imitate the figures of men, or even of animals. But in the simple
and regular forms of pyramids, vases, and obelisks, even the shears of
the gardener do well enough. Some allowance, too, is naturally made
for the necessary imperfection of the instrument, in the same manner
as in Tapestry and Needle-work. In short, the next time you have an
opportunity of surveying those out-of-fashion ornaments, endeavour
only to let yourself alone, and to restrain for a few minutes the
foolish passion for playing the critic, and you will be sensible that
they are not without some degree of beauty; that they give the air of
neatness and correct culture at least to the whole garden; and that
they are not unlike what the 'retired leisure, that' (as Milton says)
'in trim gardens takes his pleasure,' might be amused with. What then,
it may be said, has brought them into such universal disrepute among
us? In a pyramid or obelisk of marble, we know that the materials are
expensive, and that the labour which wrought them into that shape must
have been still more so. In a pyramid or obelisk of yew, we know that
the materials could cost very little, and the labour still less. The
former are ennobled by their expense; the latter degraded by their
cheapness. In the cabbage-garden of a tallow-chandler we may sometimes
perhaps have seen as many columns and vases and other ornaments in
yew, as there are in marble and porphyry at Versailles: it is this
vulgarity which has disgraced them. The rich and the great, the proud
and the vain will not admit into their gardens an ornament which the
meanest of the people can have as well as they. The taste for these
ornaments came originally from France; where, notwithstanding that
{413} inconstancy of fashion with which we sometimes reproach the
natives of that country, it still continues in good repute. In France,
the condition of the inferior ranks of people is seldom so happy as it
frequently is in England; and you will there seldom find even pyramids
and obelisks of yew in the garden of a tallow-chandler. Such
ornaments, not having in that country been degraded by their
vulgarity, have not yet been excluded from the gardens of princes and
lords.
The works of the great masters in Statuary and Painting, it is to be
observed, never produce their effect by deception. They never are, and
it never is intended that they should be, mistaken for the real
objects which they represent. Painted Statuary may sometimes deceive
an inattentive eye: proper Statuary never does. The little pieces of
perspective in Painting, which it is intended should please by
deception, represent always some very simple, as well as
insignificant, objects: a roll of paper, for example, or the steps of
a staircase, in the dark corner of some passage or gallery. They are
generally the works too of some very inferior artists. After being
seen once, and producing the little surprise which it is meant they
should excite, together with the mirth which commonly accompanies it,
they never please more, but appear to be ever after insipid and
tiresome.
The proper pleasure which we derive from those two imitative arts, so
far from being the effect of deception, is altogether incompatible
with it. That pleasure is founded altogether upon our wonder at seeing
an object of one kind represent so well an object of a very different
kind, and upon our admiration of the art which surmounts so happily
that disparity which Nature had established between them. The nobler
works of Statuary and Painting appear to us a sort of wonderful
phenomena, differing in this respect from the wonderful phenomena of
Nature, that they carry, as it were, their own explication along with
them, and demonstrate, even to the eye, the way and manner in which
they are produced. The eye, even of an unskilful spectator,
immediately discerns, in some measure, how it is that a certain
modification of figure in Statuary, and of brighter and darker colours
in Painting, can represent, with so much truth and vivacity, the
actions, passions, and behaviour of men, as well as a great variety of
other objects. The pleasing wonder of ignorance is accompanied with
the still more pleasing satisfaction of science. We wonder and are
amazed at the effect; and we are pleased ourselves, and happy to find
that we can comprehend, in some measure, how that wonderful effect is
produced upon us.
A good looking-glass represents the objects which are set before it
with much more truth and vivacity than either Statuary or Painting.
But, though the science of optics may explain to the understanding,
the looking-glass itself does not at all demonstrate to the eye how
this effect is brought about. It may excite the wonder of ignorance;
and {414} in a clown, who had never beheld a looking-glass before, I
have seen that wonder rise almost to rapture and extasy; but it cannot
give the satisfaction of science. In all looking-glasses the effects
are produced by the same means, applied exactly in the same manner. In
every different statue and picture the effects are produced, though by
similar, yet not by the same means; and those means too are applied in
a different manner in each. Every good statue and picture is a fresh
wonder, which at the same time carries, in some measure, its own
explication along with it. After a little use and experience, all
looking-glasses cease to be wonders altogether; and even the ignorant
become so familiar with them, as not to think that their effects
require any explication. A looking-glass, besides, can represent only
present objects; and, when the wonder is once fairly over, we choose,
in all cases, rather to contemplate the substance than to gaze at the
shadow. One's own face becomes then the most agreeable object which a
looking-glass can represent to us, and the only object which we do not
soon grow weary with looking at; it is the only present object of
which we can see only the shadow: whether handsome or ugly, whether
old or young, it is the face of a friend always, of which the features
correspond exactly with whatever sentiment, emotion, or passion we may
happen at that moment to feel.
In Statuary, the means by which the wonderful effect is brought about
appear more simple and obvious than in Painting; where the disparity
between the imitating and the imitated object being much greater, the
art which can conquer that greater disparity appears evidently, and
almost to the eye, to be founded upon a much deeper science, or upon
principles much more abstruse and profound. Even in the meanest
subjects we can often trace with pleasure the ingenious means by which
Painting surmounts this disparity. But we cannot do this in Statuary,
because the disparity not being so great, the means do not appear so
ingenious. And it is upon this account, that in Painting we are often
delighted with the representation of many things, which in Statuary
would appear insipid, and not worth the looking at.
It ought to be observed, however, that though in Statuary the art of
imitation appears, in many respects, inferior to what it is in
Painting, yet, in a room ornamented with both statues and pictures of
nearly equal merit, we shall generally find that the statues draw off
our eye from the pictures. There is generally but one or little more
than one, point of view from which a picture can be seen with
advantage, and it always presents to the eye precisely the same
object. There are many different points of view from which a statue
may be seen with equal advantage, and from each it presents a
different object. There is more variety in the pleasure which we
receive from a good statue, than in that which we receive from a good
picture; and one statue may frequently be the subject of many good
pictures or drawings, all different {415} from one another. The
shadowy relief and projection of a picture, besides, is much
flattened, and seems almost to vanish away altogether, when brought
into comparison with the real and solid body which stands by it. How
nearly soever these two arts may seem to be akin, they accord so very
ill with one another, that their different productions ought, perhaps,
scarce ever to be seen together.
-----
PART II.
AFTER the pleasures which arise from the gratification of the bodily
appetites, there seem to be none more natural to man than Music and
Dancing. In the progress of art and improvement they are, perhaps, the
first and earliest pleasures of his own invention; for those which
arise from the gratification of the bodily appetites cannot be said to
be his own invention. No nation has yet been discovered so uncivilized
as to be altogether without them. It seems even to be amongst the most
barbarous nations that the use and practice of them is both most
frequent and most universal, as among the negroes of Africa and the
savage tribes of America. In civilized nations, the inferior ranks of
people have very little leisure, and the superior ranks have many
other amusements; neither the one nor the other, therefore, can spend
much of their time in Music and Dancing. Among savage nations, the
great body of the people have frequently great intervals of leisure,
and they have scarce any other amusement; they naturally, therefore,
spend a great part of their time in almost the only one they have.
What the ancients called Rhythmus, what we call Time or Measure, is
the connecting principle of those two arts; Music consisting in a
succession of a certain sort of sounds, and Dancing in a succession of
a certain sort of steps, gestures, and motions, regulated according to
time or measure, and thereby formed, into a sort of whole or system;
which in the one art is called a song or tune, and in the other a
dance; the time or measure of the dance corresponding always exactly
with that of the song or tune which accompanies and directs it.[1]
[Footnote 1: The Author's Observations on the Affinity between Music,
Dancing, and Poetry, are annexed to the end of Part III. of this
Essay.]
The human voice, as it is always the best, so it would naturally be
the first and earliest of all musical instruments: in singing, or in
its first attempts towards singing, it would naturally employ sounds
as similar as possible to those which it had been accustomed to; that
is, it would employ words of some kind or other, pronouncing them only
in time and measure, and generally with a more melodious tone than had
been usual in common conversation. Those words, however, might not,
and probably would not, for a long time have any meaning, but might
resemble the syllables which we make use of in _fol-faing_, or
the {416} _derry-down-down_ of our common ballads; and serve only
to assist the voice in forming sounds proper to be modulated into
melody, and to be lengthened or shortened according to the time and
measure of the tune. This rude form of vocal Music, as it is by far
the most simple and obvious, so it naturally would be the first and
earliest.
In the succession of ages it could not fail to occur, that in room of
those unmeaning or musical words, if I may call them so, might be
substituted words which expressed some sense or meaning, and of which
the pronunciation might coincide as exactly with the time and measure
of the tune, as that of the musical words had done before. Hence the
origin of Verse or Poetry. The Verse would for a long time be rude and
imperfect. When the meaning words fell short of the measure required,
they would frequently be eked out with the unmeaning ones, as is
sometimes done in our common ballads. When the public ear came to be
so refined as to reject, in all serious Poetry, the unmeaning words
altogether, there would still be a liberty assumed of altering and
corrupting, upon many occasions, the pronunciation of the meaning
ones, for the sake of accommodating them to the measure. The syllables
which composed them would, for this purpose, sometimes be improperly
lengthened, and sometimes improperly shortened; and though no
unmeaning words were made use of, yet an unmeaning syllable would
sometimes be stuck to the beginning, to the end, or into the middle of
a word. All these expedients we find frequently employed in the verses
even of Chaucer, the father of the English Poetry. Many ages might
pass away before verse was commonly composed with such correctness,
that the usual and proper pronunciation of the words alone, and
without any other artifice, subjected the voice to the observation of
a time and measure, of the same kind with the time and measure of the
science of Music.
The Verse would naturally express some sense which suited the grave or
gay, the joyous or melancholy humour of the tune which it was sung to;
being as it were blended and united with that tune, it would seem to
give sense and meaning to what otherwise might not appear to have any,
or at least any which could be clearly understood, without the
accompaniment of such an explication.
A pantomime dance may frequently answer the same purpose, and, by
representing some adventure in love or war, may seem to give sense and
meaning to a Music, which might not otherwise appear to have any. It
is more natural to mimic, by gestures and motions, the adventures of
common life, than to express them in Verse or Poetry. The thought
itself is more obvious, and the execution is much more easy. If this
mimicry was accompanied by Music, it would of its own accord, and
almost without any intention of doing so, accommodate, in some
measure, its different steps and movements to the time and measure of
the tune; especially if the same person both sung the tune {417} and
performed the mimicry, as is said to be frequently the case among the
savage nations of Africa and America. Pantomime Dancing might in this
manner serve to give a distinct sense and meaning to Music many ages
before the invention, or at least before the common use of Poetry. We
hear little, accordingly, of the Poetry of the savage nations who
inhabit Africa and America, but a great deal of their pantomime
dances.
Poetry, however, is capable of expressing many things fully and
distinctly, which Dancing either cannot represent at all, or can
represent but obscurely and imperfectly; such as the reasonings and
judgments, of the understanding; the ideas, fancies, and suspicions of
the imagination; the sentiments, emotions, and passions of the heart.
In the power of expressing a meaning with clearness and distinctness,
Dancing is superior to Music, and Poetry to Dancing.
Of those three Sister Arts, which originally, perhaps, went always
together, and which at all times go frequently together, there are two
which can subsist alone, and separate from their natural companions,
and one which cannot. In the distinct observation of what the ancients
called Rhythmus, of what we call Time and Measure, consists the
essence both of Dancing and of Poetry or Verse; or the
characteristical quality which distinguishes the former from all other
motion and action, and the latter from all other discourse. But,
concerning the proportion between those intervals and divisions of
duration which constitute what is called time and measure, the ear, it
would seem, can judge with much more precision than the eye; and
Poetry, in the same manner as Music, addresses itself to the ear,
whereas Dancing addresses itself to the eye. In Dancing, the rhythmus,
the proper proportion, the time and measure of its motions, cannot
distinctly be perceived, unless they are marked by the more distinct
time and measure of Music. It is otherwise in Poetry; no accompaniment
is necessary to mark the measure of good Verse. Music and Poetry,
therefore, can each of them subsist alone; Dancing always requires the
accompaniment of Music.
It is Instrumental Music which can best subsist apart, and separate
from both Poetry and Dancing. Vocal Music, though it may, and
frequently does, consist of notes which have no distinct sense or
meaning, yet naturally calls for the support of Poetry. But, 'Music,
married to immortal Verse,' as Milton says, or even to words of any
kind which have a distinct sense or meaning, is necessarily and
essentially imitative. Whatever be the meaning of those words, though,
like many of the songs of ancient Greece, as well as some of those of
more modern times, they may express merely some maxims of prudence and
morality, or may contain merely the simple narrative of some important
event, yet even in such didactic and historical songs there will still
be imitation; there will still be a thing of one kind, which by art is
made to {418} resemble a thing of a very different kind; there will
still be Music imitating discourse; there will still be Rhythmus and
Melody, shaped and fashioned into the form either of a good moral
counsel, or of an amusing and interesting story.
In this first species of imitation, which being essential to, is
therefore inseparable from, all such Vocal Music, there may be, and
there commonly is, added a second. The words may, and commonly do,
express the situation of some particular person, and all the
sentiments and passions which he feels from that situation. It is a
joyous companion who gives vent to the gaiety and mirth with which
wine, festivity, and good company inspire him. It is a lover who
complains, or hopes, or fears, or despairs. It is a generous man who
expresses either his gratitude for the favours, or his indignation at
the injuries, which may have been done to him. It is a warrior who
prepares himself to confront danger, and who provokes or desires his
enemy. It is a person in prosperity who humbly returns thanks for the
goodness, or one in affliction who with contrition implores the mercy
and forgiveness of that invisible Power to whom he looks up as the
Director of all the events of human life. The situation may
comprehend, not only one, but two, three, or more persons; it may
excite in them all either similar or opposite sentiments; what is a
subject of sorrow to one, being an occasion of joy and triumph to
another; and they may all express, sometimes separately and sometimes
together, the particular way in which each of them is affected, as in a
duo, trio, or a chorus.
All this it may, and it frequently has been said is unnatural; nothing
being more so, than to sing when we are anxious to persuade, or in
earnest to express any very serious purpose. But it should be
remembered, that to make a thing of one kind resemble another thing of
a very different kind, is the very circumstance which, in all the
Imitative Arts, constitutes the merits of imitation; and that to
shape, and as it were to bend, the measure and the melody of Music, so
as to imitate the tone and the language of counsel and conversation,
the accent and the style of emotion and passion, is to make a thing of
one kind resemble another thing of a very different kind.
The tone and the movements of Music, though naturally very different
from those of conversation and passion, may, however, be so managed as
to seem to resemble them. On account of the great disparity between
the imitating and the imitated object, the mind in this, as in the
other cases, cannot only be contented, but delighted, and even charmed
and transported, with such an imperfect resemblance as can be had.
Such imitative Music, therefore, when sung to words which explain and
determine its meaning, may frequently appear to be a very perfect
imitation. It is upon this account, that even the incomplete Music of
a recitative seems to express sometimes all the sedateness and
composure of serious but calm discourse, and sometimes all the {419}
exquisite sensibility of the most interesting passion. The more
complete Music of an air is still superior, and, in the imitation of
the more animated passions, has one great advantage over every sort of
discourse, whether Prose or Poetry, which is not sung to Music. In a
person who is either much depressed by grief or enlivened by joy, who
is strongly affected either with love or hatred, with gratitude or
resentment, with admiration or contempt, there is commonly one thought
or idea which dwells upon his mind, which continually haunts him,
which, when he has chased it away, immediately returns upon him, and
which in company makes him absent and inattentive. He can think but of
one object, and he cannot repeat to them that object so frequently as
it recurs upon him. He takes refuge in solitude, where he can with
freedom either indulge the extasy or give way to the agony of the
agreeable or disagreeable passion which agitates him; and where he can
repeat to himself, which he does sometimes mentally, and sometimes
even aloud, and almost always in the same words, the particular
thought which either delights or distresses him. Neither Prose nor
Poetry can venture to imitate those almost endless repetitions of
passion. They may describe them as I do now, but they dare not imitate
them; they would become most insufferably tiresome if they did. The
Music of a passionate air, not only may, but frequently does, imitate
them; and it never makes its way so directly or so irresistibly to the
heart as when it does so. It is upon this account that the words of an
air, especially of a passionate one, though they are seldom very long,
yet are scarce ever sung straight on to the end, like those of a
recitative; but are almost always broken into parts, which are
transposed and repeated again and again, according to the fancy or
judgment of the composer. It is by means of such repetitions only,
that Music can exert those peculiar powers of imitation which
distinguish it, and in which it excels all the other Imitative Arts.
Poetry and Eloquence, it has accordingly been often observed, produce
their effect always by a connected variety and succession of different
thoughts and ideas: but Music frequently produces its effects by a
repetition of the same idea; and the same sense expressed in the same,
or nearly the same, combination of sounds, though at first perhaps it
may make scarce any impression upon us, yet, by being repeated again
and again, it comes at last gradually, and by little and little, to
move, to agitate, and to transport us.
To these powers of imitating, Music naturally, or rather necessarily,
joins the happiest choice in the objects of its imitation. The
sentiments and passions which Music can best imitate are those which
unite and bind men together in society; the social, the decent, the
virtuous, the interesting and affecting, the amiable and agreeable,
the awful and respectable, the noble, elevating, and commanding
passions. Grief and distress are interesting and affecting; humanity
and compassion, joy and admiration, are amiable and agreeable;
devotion is awful {420} and respectable; the generous contempt of
danger, the honourable indignation at injustice, are noble, elevating,
and commanding. But it is these and such like passions which Music is
fittest for imitating, and which it in fact most frequently imitates.
They are, if I may say so, all Musical Passions; their natural tones
are all clear, distinct, and almost melodious; and they naturally
express themselves in a language which is distinguished by pauses at
regular, and almost equal, intervals; and which, upon that account,
can more easily be adapted to the regular returns of the correspondent
periods of a tune. The passions, on the contrary, which drive men from
one another, the unsocial, the hateful, the indecent, the vicious
passions, cannot easily be imitated by Music, The voice of furious
anger, for example, is harsh and discordant; its periods are all
irregular, sometimes very long and sometimes very short, and
distinguished by no regular pauses. The obscure and almost
inarticulate grumblings of black malice and envy, the screaming
outcries of dastardly fear, the hideous growlings of brutal and
implacable revenge, are all equally discordant. It is with difficulty
that Music can imitate any of those passions, and the Music which does
imitate them is not the most agreeable. A whole entertainment may
consist, without any impropriety, of the imitation of the social and
amiable passions. It would be a strange entertainment which consisted
altogether in the imitation of the odious and the vicious. A single
song expresses almost always some social, agreeable, or interesting
passion. In an opera the unsocial and disagreeable are sometimes
introduced, but it is rarely, and as discords are introduced into
harmony, to set off by their contrast the superior beauty of the
opposite passions. What Plato said of Virtue, that it was of all
beauties the brightest, may with some sort of truth be said of the
proper and natural objects of musical imitation. They are either the
sentiments and passions, in the exercise of which consist both the
glory and the happiness of human life, or they are those from which it
derives its most delicious pleasures, and most enlivening joys; or, at
the worst and the lowest, they are those by which it calls upon our
indulgence and compassionate assistance to its unavoidable weaknesses,
distresses, and misfortunes.
To the merit of its imitation and to that of its happy choice in the
objects which it imitates, the great merits of Statuary and Painting,
Music joins another peculiar and exquisite merit of its own. Statuary
and Painting cannot be said to add any new beauties of their own to
the beauties of Nature which they imitate; they may assemble a greater
number of those beauties, and group them in a more agreeable manner
than they are commonly, or perhaps ever, to be found in Nature. It may
perhaps be true, what the artists are so very fond of telling us, that
no woman ever equalled, in all the parts of her body, the beauty of
the Venus of Medicis, nor any man that of the Apollo of Belvidere. But
they must allow, surely, that there is no particular {421} beauty in
any part or feature of those two famous statues, which is not at least
equalled, if not much excelled, by what is to be found in many living
subjects. But Music, by arranging, and as it were bending to its own
time and measure, whatever sentiments and passions it expresses, not
only assembles and groups, as well as Statuary and Painting, the
different beauties of Nature which it imitates, but it clothes them,
besides, with a new and an exquisite beauty of its own; it clothes
them with melody and harmony, which, like a transparent mantle, far
from concealing any beauty, serve only to give a brighter colour, a
more enlivening lustre and a more engaging grace to every beauty which
they infold.
To these two different sorts of imitation,--to that general one, by
which Music is made to resemble discourse, and to that particular one,
by which it is made to express the sentiments and feelings with which
a particular situation inspires a particular person,--there is
frequently joined a third. The person who sings may join to this
double imitation of the singer the additional imitation of the actor;
and express, not only by the modulation and cadence of his voice, but
by his countenance, by his attitudes, by his gestures, and by his
motions, the sentiments and feelings of the person whose situation is
painted in the song. Even in private company, though a song may
sometimes perhaps be said to be well sung, it can never be said to be
well performed, unless the singer does something of this kind; and
there is no comparison between the effect of what is sung coldly from
a music-book at the end of a harpsichord, and of what is not only
sung, but acted with proper freedom, animation, and boldness. An opera
actor does no more than this; and an imitation which is so pleasing,
and which appears even so natural, in private society, ought not to
appear forced, unnatural, or disagreeable upon the stage.
In a good opera actor, not only the modulations and pauses of his
voice, but every motion and gesture, every variation, either in the
air of his head, or in the attitude of his body, correspond to the
time and measure of Music: they correspond to the expression of the
sentiment or passion which the Music imitates, and that expression
necessarily corresponds to this time and measure. Music is as it were
the soul which animates him, which informs every feature of his
countenance, and even directs every movement of his eyes. Like the
musical expression of a song, his action adds to the natural grace of
the sentiment or action which it imitates, a new and peculiar grace of
its own; the exquisite and engaging grace of those gestures and
motions, of those airs and attitudes which are directed by the
movement, by the time and measure of Music; this grace heightens and
enlivens that expression. Nothing can be more deeply affecting than
the interesting scenes of the serious opera, when to good Poetry and
good Music, to the Poetry of Metastasio and the Music of Pergolese, is
added the {422} execution of a good actor. In the serious opera,
indeed, the action is too often sacrificed to the Music; the castrati,
who perform the principal parts, being always the most insipid and
miserable actors. The sprightly airs of the comic opera are, in the
same manner, in the highest degree enlivening and diverting. Though
they do not make us laugh so loud as we sometimes do at the scenes of
the common comedy, they make us smile more frequently; and the
agreeable gaiety, the temperate joy, if I may call it so, with which
they inspire us, is not only an elegant, but a most delicious
pleasure. The deep distress and the great passions of tragedy are
capable of producing some effect, though it should be but
indifferently acted. It is not so with the lighter misfortunes and
less affecting situations of comedy: unless it is at least tolerably
acted, it is altogether insupportable. But the castrati are scarce
ever tolerable actors; they are accordingly seldom admitted to play in
the comic opera; which, being upon that account commonly better
performed than the serious, appears to many people the better
entertainment of the two.
The imitative powers of Instrumental are much inferior to those of
Vocal Music; its melodious but unmeaning and inarticulated sounds
cannot, like the articulations of the human voice, relate distinctly
the circumstances of any particular story, or describe the different
situations which those circumstances produced; or even express
clearly, and so as to be understood by every hearer, the various
sentiments and passions which the parties concerned felt from these
situations: even its imitation of other sounds, the objects which it
can certainly best imitate, is commonly so indistinct, that alone, and
without any explication, it might not readily suggest to us what was
the imitated object. The rocking of a cradle is supposed to be
imitated in that concerto of Correlli, which is said to have been
composed for the Nativity: but unless we were told beforehand, it
might not readily occur to us what it meant to imitate, or whether it
meant to imitate any thing at all; and this imitation (which, though
perhaps as successful as any other, is by no means the distinguished
beauty of that admired composition) might only appear to us a singular
and odd passage in Music. The ringing of bells and the singing of the
lark and nightingale are imitated in the symphony of Instrumental
Music which Mr. Handel has composed for the Allegro and Penseroso of
Milton: these are not only sounds but musical sounds, and may
therefore be supposed to be more within the compass of the powers of
musical imitation. It is accordingly universally acknowledged, that in
these imitations this great master has been remarkably successful; and
yet, unless the verses of Milton explained the meaning of the Music,
it might not even in this case readily occur to us what it meant to
imitate, or whether it meant to imitate any thing at all. With the
explication of the words, indeed, the imitation appears, what it
certainly is, a very fine one; but without {423} that explication it
might perhaps appear only a singular passage, which had less
connexion either with what went before or with what came after it,
than any other in the Music.
Instrumental Music is said sometimes to imitate motion; but in reality
it only either imitates the particular sounds which accompany certain
motions, or it produces sounds of which the time and measure bear some
correspondence to the variations, to the pauses and interruptions, to
the successive accelerations and retardations of the motion which it
means to imitate: it is in this way that it sometimes attempts to
express the march and array of an army, the confusion and hurry of a
battle, &c. In all these cases, however, its imitation is so very
indistinct, that without the accompaniment of some other art, to
explain and interpret its meaning, it would be almost always
unintelligible; and we could scarce ever know with certainty, either
what it meant to imitate, or whether it meant to imitate any thing at
all.
In the imitative arts, though it is by no means necessary that the
imitating should so exactly resemble the imitated object, that the one
should sometimes be mistaken for the other, it is, however, necessary
that they should resemble at least so far, that the one should always
readily suggest the other. It would be a strange picture which
required an inscription at the foot to tell us, not only what
particular person it meant to represent, but whether it meant to
represent a man or a horse, or whether it meant to be a picture at
all, and to represent any thing. The imitations of instrumental Music
may, in some respects, be said to resemble such pictures. There is,
however, this very essential difference between them, that the picture
would not be much mended by the inscription; whereas, by what may be
considered as very little more than such an inscription, instrumental
Music, though it cannot always even then, perhaps, be said properly to
imitate, may, however, produce all the effects of the finest and most
perfect imitation. In order to explain how this is brought about, it
will not be necessary to descend into any great depth of philosophical
speculation.
That train of thoughts and ideas which is continually passing through
the mind does not always move on with, the same pace, if I may say so,
or with the same order and connection. When we are gay and cheerful,
its motion is brisker and more lively, our thoughts succeed one
another more rapidly, and those which immediately follow one another
seem frequently either to have but little connection, or to be
connected rather by their opposition than by their mutual resemblance.
As in this wanton and playful disposition of mind we hate to dwell
long upon the same thought, so we do not much care to pursue
resembling thoughts; and the variety of contrast is more agreeable to
us than the sameness of resemblance. It is quite otherwise when we are
melancholy and desponding; we then frequently find ourselves haunted,
as it were, by some thought which we would gladly chase away, but
{424} which constantly pursues us, and which admits no followers,
attendants, or companions, but such as are of its own kindred and
complexion. A slow succession of resembling or closely connected
thoughts is the characteristic of this disposition of mind; a quick
succession of thoughts, frequently contrasted and in general very
slightly connected, is the characteristic of the other. What may be
called the natural state of the mind, the state in which we are
neither elated nor dejected, the state of sedateness, tranquillity,
and composure, holds a sort of middle place between those two opposite
extremes; our thoughts may succeed one another more slowly, and with a
more distinct connection, than in the one; but more quickly and with
a greater variety, than in the other.
Acute sounds are naturally gay, sprightly, and enlivening; grave
sounds solemn, awful, and melancholy. There seems too to be some
natural connection between acuteness in tune and quickness in time or
succession, as well as between gravity and slowness: an acute sound
seems to fly off more quickly than a grave one: the treble is more
cheerful than the bass; its notes likewise commonly succeed one
another more rapidly. But instrumental Music, by a proper arrangement,
by a quicker or slower succession of acute and grave, of resembling
and contrasted sounds, can not only accommodate itself to the gay, the
sedate, or the melancholy mood; but if the mind is so far vacant as
not to be disturbed by any disorderly passion, it can, at least for
the moment, and to a certain degree, produce every possible
modification of each of those moods or dispositions. We all readily
distinguish the cheerful, the gay, and the sprightly Music, from the
melancholy, the plaintive, and the affecting; and both these from what
holds a sort of middle place between them, the sedate, the tranquil,
and the composing. And we are all sensible that, in the natural and
ordinary state of the mind, Music can, by a sort of incantation, sooth
and charm us into some degree of that particular mood or disposition
which accords with its own character and temper. In a concert of
instrumental Music the attention is engaged, with pleasure and
delight, to listen to a combination of the most agreeable and
melodious sounds, which follow one another, sometimes with a quicker,
and sometimes with a slower succession; and in which those that
immediately follow one another sometimes exactly or nearly resemble,
and sometimes contrast with one another in tune, in time, and in order
of arrangement. The mind being thus successively occupied by a train
of objects, of which the nature, succession, and connection
correspond, sometimes to the gay, sometimes to the tranquil, and
sometimes to the melancholy mood or disposition, it is itself
successively led into each of those moods or dispositions; and is thus
brought into a sort of harmony or concord with the Music which so
agreeably engages its attention.
{425} It is not, however, by imitation properly, that instrumental
Music produces this effect: instrumental Music does not imitate, as
vocal Music, as Painting, or as Dancing would imitate, a gay, a
sedate, or a melancholy person; it does not tell us, as any of those
other arts could tell us, a pleasant, a serious, or a melancholy
story. It is not, as in vocal Music, in Painting, or in Dancing, by
sympathy with the gaiety, the sedateness, or the melancholy and
distress of some other person, that instrumental Music soothes us into
each of these dispositions: it becomes itself a gay, a sedate, or a
melancholy object; and the mind naturally assumes the mood or
disposition which at the time corresponds to the object which engages
its attention. Whatever we feel from instrumental Music is an
original, and not a sympathetic feeling: it is our own gaiety,
sedateness, or melancholy; not the the reflected disposition of
another person.
When we follow the winding alleys of some happily situated and well
laid out garden, we are presented with a succession of landscapes,
which are sometimes gay, sometimes gloomy, and sometimes calm and
serene; if the mind is in its natural state, it suits itself to the
objects which successively present themselves, and varies in some
degree its mood and present humour with every variation of the scene.
It would be improper, however, to say that those scenes imitated the
gay, the calm, or the melancholy mood of the mind; they may produce in
their turn each of those moods, but they cannot imitate any of them.
Instrumental Music, in the same manner, though it can excite all those
different dispositions, cannot imitate any of them. There are no two
things in nature more perfectly disparate than sound and sentiment;
and it is impossible by any human power to fashion the one into any
thing that bears any real resemblance to the other.
This power of exciting and varying the different moods and
dispositions of the mind, which instrumental Music really possesses to
a very considerable degree, has been the principal source of its
reputation for those great imitative powers which have been ascribed
to it. 'Painting,' says an author, more capable of feeling strongly
than of analysing accurately, Mr. Rousseau of Geneva, 'Painting, which
presents its imitations, not to the imagination, but to the senses,
and to only one of the senses, can represent nothing besides the
objects of sight. Music, one might imagine, should be equally confined
to those of hearing. It imitates, however, every thing, even those
objects which are perceivable by sight only. By a delusion that seems
almost inconceivable, it can, as it were, put the eye into the ear;
and the greatest wonder, of an art which acts only by motion and
succession, is, that it can imitate rest and repose. Night, Sleep,
Solitude, and Silence are all within the compass of musical imitation.
Though all Nature should be asleep, the person who contemplates it is
awake; and the art of the musician consists in substituting, in the
room of an {426} image of what is not the object of hearing, that of
the movements which its presence would excite in the mind of the
spectator.'--That is, of the effects which it would produce upon his
mood and disposition. 'The musician (continues the same author) will
sometimes, not only agitate the waves of the sea, blow up the flames
of a conflagration, make the rain fall, the rivulets flow and swell
the torrents, but he will paint the horrors of a hideous desert,
darken the walls of a subterraneous dungeon, calm the tempest, restore
serenity and tranquillity to the air and the sky, and shed from the
orchestra a new freshness over the groves and the fields. He will not
directly represent any of these objects, but he will excite in the
mind the same movements which it would feel from seeing them.'
Upon this very eloquent description of Mr. Rousseau I must observe,
that without the accompaniment of the scenery and action of the opera,
without the assistance either of the scene-painter or of the poet, or
of both, the instrumental Music of the orchestra could produce none of
the effects which are here ascribed to it: and we could never know, we
could never even guess, which of the gay, melancholy, or tranquil
objects above mentioned it meant to represent to us; or whether it
meant to represent any of them, and not merely to entertain us with a
concert of gay, melancholy, or tranquil Music; or, as the ancients
called them, of the Diastaltic, of the Systaltic, or of the Middle
Music. With that accompaniment, indeed, though it cannot always even
then, perhaps, be said properly to imitate, yet by supporting the
imitation of some other art, it may produce all the same effects upon
us as if itself had imitated in the finest and most perfect manner.
Whatever be the object or situation which the scene-painter represents
upon the theatre, the Music of the orchestra, by disposing the mind to
the same sort of mood and temper which it would feel from the presence
of that object, or from sympathy with the person who was placed in
that situation, can greatly enhance the effect of that imitation: it
can accommodate itself to every diversity of scene. The melancholy of
the man who, upon some great occasion, only finds himself alone in the
darkness, the silence and solitude of the night, is very different
from that of one who, upon a like occasion, finds himself in the midst
of some dreary and inhospitable desert; and even in this situation his
feelings would not be the same as if he was shut up in a subterraneous
dungeon. The different degrees of precision with which the Music of
the orchestra can accommodate itself to each of those diversities,
must depend upon the taste, the sensibility, the fancy and imagination
of the composer: it may sometimes, perhaps, contribute to this
precision, that it should imitate, as well as it can, the sounds which
either naturally accompany, or which might be supposed to accompany,
the particular objects represented. The symphony in the French opera
of Alcyone, which imitated the violence of the winds and the dashing
of the waves, in the {427} tempest which was to drown Coix, is much
commended by cotemporary writers. That in the opera of Isse, which
imitated that murmuring in the leaves of the oaks of Dodona, which
might be supposed to precede the miraculous pronunciation of the
oracle: and that in the opera of Amadis, of which the dismal accents
imitated the sounds which might be supposed to accompany the opening
of the tomb of Ardari, before the apparition of the ghost of that
warrior, are still more celebrated. Instrumental Music, however,
without violating too much its own melody and harmony, can imitate but
imperfectly the sounds of natural objects, of which the greater part
have neither melody nor harmony. Great reserve, great discretion, and
a very nice discernment are requisite, in order to introduce with
propriety such imperfect imitations, either into Poetry or Music; when
repeated too often, when continued too long, they appear to be what
they really are, mere tricks, in which a very inferior artist, if he
will only give himself the trouble to attend to them, can easily equal
the greatest. I have seen a Latin translation of Mr. Pope's Ode on St.
Cecilia's Day, which in this respect very much excelled the original.
Such imitations are still easier in Music. Both in the one art and in
the other, the difficulty is not in making them as well as they are
capable of being made, but in knowing when and how far to make them at
all: but to be able to accommodate the temper and character of the
Music to every peculiarity of the scene and situation with such exact
precision, that the one shall produce the very same effect upon the
mind as the other, is not one of those tricks in which an inferior
artist can easily equal the greatest; it is an art which requires all
the judgment, knowledge, and invention of the most consummate master.
It is upon this art, and not upon its imperfect imitation, either of
real or imaginary sounds, that the great effects of instrumental Music
depend; such imitations ought perhaps to be admitted only so far as
they may sometimes contribute to ascertain the meaning, and thereby to
enhance the effects of this art.
By endeavouring to extend the effects of scenery beyond what the
nature of the thing will admit of, it has been much abused; and in the
common, as well as in the musical drama, many imitations have been
attempted, which, after the first and second time we have seen them,
necessarily appear ridiculous: such are, the Thunder rumbling from the
Mustard-bowl, and the Snow of Paper and thick Hail of Pease, so finely
exposed by Mr. Pope. Such imitations resemble those of painted
Statuary; they may surprise at first, but they disgust ever after, and
appear evidently such simple and easy tricks as are fit only for the
amusement of children and their nurses at a puppet-show. The thunder
of either theatre ought certainly never to be louder than that which
the orchestra is capable of producing; and their most dreadful
tempests ought never to exceed what the scene painter is capable of
representing. In such imitations there may be an art which merits
{428} some degree of esteem and admiration. In the other there can be
none which merits any.
This abuse of scenery has both subsisted much longer, and been carried
to a much greater degree of extravagance, in the musical than in the
common drama. In France it has been long banished from the latter; but
it still continues, not only to be tolerated, but to be admired and
applauded in the former. In the French operas, not only thunder and
lightning, storms and tempests, are commonly represented in the
ridiculous manner above mentioned, but all the marvellous, all the
supernatural of Epic Poetry, all the metamorphoses of Mythology, all
the wonders of Witchcraft and Magic, every thing that is most unfit to
be represented upon the stage, are every day exhibited with the most
complete approbation and applause of that ingenious nation. The music
of the orchestra producing upon the audience nearly the same effect
which a better and more artful imitation would produce, hinders them
from feeling, at least in its full force, the ridicule of those
childish and awkward imitations which necessarily abound in that
extravagant scenery. And in reality such imitations, though no doubt
ridiculous every where, yet certainly appear somewhat less so in the
musical than they would in the common drama. The Italian opera, before
it was reformed by Apostolo, Zeno, and Metastasio, was in this respect
equally extravagant, and was upon that account the subject of the
agreeable raillery of Mr. Addison in several different papers of the
Spectator. Even since that reformation it still continues to be a
rule, that the scene should change at least with every act; and the
unity of place never was a more sacred law in the common drama, than
the violation of it has become in the musical: the latter seems in
reality to require both a more picturesque and a more varied scenery,
than is at all necessary for the former. In an opera, as the Music
supports the effect of the scenery, so the scenery often serves to
determine the character, and to explain the meaning of the Music; it
ought to vary therefore as that character varies. The pleasure of an
opera, besides, is in its nature more a sensual pleasure, than that of
a common comedy or tragedy; the latter produce their effect
principally by means of the imagination: in the closet, accordingly,
their effect is not much inferior to what it is upon the stage. But
the effect of an opera is seldom very great in the closet; it
addresses itself more to the external senses, and as it soothes the
ear by its melody and harmony, so we feel that it ought to dazzle the
eye with the splendour of its scenery.
In an opera the instrumental Music of the orchestra supports the
imitation both of the poet and of the actor, as well as of the
scene-painter. The overture disposes the mind to that mood which fits
it for the opening of the piece. The Music between the acts keeps up
the impression which the foregoing had made, and prepares us for that
which the following is to make. When the orchestra interrupts, as it
{429} frequently does, either the recitative or the air, it is in
order either to enforce the effect of what had gone before, or to put
the mind in the mood which fits it for hearing what is to come after.
Both in the recitatives and in the airs it accompanies and directs the
voice, and often brings it back to the proper tone and modulation,
when it is upon the point of wandering away from them; and the
correctness of the best vocal Music is owing in a great measure to the
guidance of instrumental; though in all these cases it supports the
imitation of another art, yet in all of them it may be said rather to
diminish than to increase the resemblance between the imitating and
the imitated object. Nothing can be more unlike to what really passes
in the world, than that persons engaged in the most interesting
situations, both of public and private life, in sorrow, in
disappointment, in distress, in despair, should, in all that they say
and do, be constantly accompanied with a fine concert of instrumental
Music. Were we to reflect upon it, such accompaniment must in all
cases diminish the probability of the action, and render the
representation still less like nature than it otherwise would be. It
is not by imitation, therefore, that instrumental Music supports and
enforces the imitations of the other arts; but it is by producing upon
the mind, in consequence of other powers, the same sort of effect
which the most exact imitation of nature, which the most perfect
observation of probability, could produce. To produce this effect is,
in such entertainments, the sole end and purpose of that imitation and
observation. If it can be equally well produced by other means, this
end and purpose may be equally well answered.
But if instrumental Music can seldom be said to be properly imitative,
even when it is employed to support the imitation of some other art,
it is commonly still less so when it is employed alone. Why should it
embarrass its melody and harmony, or constrain its time and measure,
by attempting an imitation which, without the accompaniment of some
other art to explain and interpret its meaning, nobody is likely to
understand? In the most approved instrumental Music, accordingly, in
the overtures of Handel and the concertos of Correlli, there is little
or no imitation, and where there is any, it is the source of but a
very small part of the merit of those compositions. Without any
imitation, instrumental Music can produce very considerable effects;
though its powers over the heart and affections are, no doubt, much
inferior to those of vocal Music, it has, however, considerable
powers: by the sweetness of its sounds it awakens agreeably, and calls
upon the attention; by their connection and affinity it naturally
detains that attention, which follows easily a series of agreeable
sounds, which have all a certain relation both to a common,
fundamental, or leading note, called the key note; and to a certain
succession or combination of notes, called the song or composition. By
means of this relation each foregoing sound seems to introduce, and as
it were prepare the mind for the following: by its {430} rhythmus, by
its time and measure, it disposes that succession of sounds into a
certain arrangement, which renders the whole more easy to be
comprehended and remembered. Time and measure are to instrumental
Music what order and method are to discourse; they break it into
proper parts and divisions, by which we are enabled both to remember
better what is gone before, and frequently to foresee somewhat of what
is to come after; we frequently foresee the return of a period which
we know must correspond to another which we remember to have gone
before; and, according to the saying of an ancient philosopher and
musician, the enjoyment of Music arises partly from memory and partly
from foresight. When the measure, after having been continued so long
as to satisfy us, changes to another, that variety, which thus
disappoints, becomes more agreeable to us than the uniformity which
would have gratified our expectation: but without this order and
method we could remember very little of what had gone before, and we
could foresee still less of what was to come after; and the whole
enjoyment of Music would be equal to little more than the effect of
the particular sounds which rung in our ears at every particular
instant. By means of this order and method it is, during the progress
of the entertainment, equal to the effect of all that we remember, and
of all that we foresee; and at the conclusion of the entertainment, to
the combined and accumulated effect of all the different parts of
which the whole was composed.
A well-composed concerto of instrumental Music, by the number and
variety of the instruments, by the variety of the parts which are
performed by them, and the perfect concord or correspondence of all
these different parts; by the exact harmony or coincidence of all the
different sounds which are heard at the same time, and by that happy
variety of measure which regulates the succession of those which are
heard at different times, presents an object so agreeable, so great,
so various, and so interesting, that alone, and without suggesting any
other object, either by imitation or otherwise, it can occupy, and as
it were fill up, completely the whole capacity of the mind, so as to
leave no part of its attention vacant for thinking of any thing else.
In the contemplation of that immense variety of agreeable and
melodious sounds, arranged and digested, both in their coincidence and
in their succession, into so complete and regular a system, the mind
in reality enjoys not only a very great sensual, but a very high
intellectual pleasure, not unlike that which it derives from the
contemplation of a great system in any other science. A full concerto
of such instrumental Music, not only does not require, but it does not
admit of any accompaniment. A song or a dance, by demanding an
attention which we have not to spare, would disturb, instead of
heightening, the effect of the Music; they may often very properly
succeed, but they cannot accompany it. That music seldom means to tell
any particular story, or to imitate any {431} particular event, or in
general to suggest any particular object, distinct from that
combination of sounds of which itself is composed. Its meaning,
therefore, may be said to be complete in itself, and to require no
interpreters to explain it. What is called the subject of such Music
is merely, as has already been said, a certain leading combination of
notes, to which it frequently returns, and to which all its
digressions and variations bear a certain affinity. It is altogether
different from what is called the subject of a poem or a picture,
which is always something which is not either in the poem or in the
picture, or something distinct from that combination, either of words
on the one hand or of colours on the other, of which they are
respectively composed. The subject of a composition of instrumental
Music is part of that composition: the subject of a poem or picture is
part of neither.
The effect of instrumental Music upon the mind has been called its
expression. In the feeling it is frequently not unlike the effect of
what is called the expression of Painting, and is sometimes equally
interesting. But the effect of the expression of Painting arises
always from the thought of something which, though distinctly and
clearly suggested by the drawing and colouring of the picture, is
altogether different from that drawing and colouring. It arises
sometimes from sympathy with, sometimes from antipathy and aversion
to, the sentiments, emotions, and passions which the countenance, the
action, the air and attitude of the persons represented suggest. The
melody and harmony of instrumental Music, on the contrary, do not
distinctly and clearly suggest any thing that is different from that
melody and harmony. Whatever effect it produces is the immediate
effect of that melody and harmony, and not of something else which is
signified and suggested by them: they in fact signify and suggest
nothing. It may be proper to say that the complete art of painting,
the complete merit of a picture, is composed of three distinct arts or
merits; that of drawing, that of colouring, and that of expression.
But to say, as Mr. Addison does, that the complete art of a musician,
the complete merit of a piece of Music, is composed or made up of
three distinct arts or merits, that of melody, that of harmony, and
that of expression, is to say, that it is made up of melody and
harmony, and of the immediate and necessary effect of melody and
harmony: the division is by no means logical; expression in painting
is not the necessary effect either of good drawing or of good
colouring, or of both together; a picture may be both finely drawn and
finely coloured, and yet have very little expression: but that effect
upon the mind which is called expression in Music, is the immediate
and necessary effect of good melody. In the power of producing this
effect consists the essential characteristic which distinguishes such
melody from what is bad or indifferent. Harmony may enforce the effect
of good melody, but without good melody the most skilful harmony can
produce no effect which deserves the name {432} of expression; it can
do little more than fatigue and confound the ear. A painter may
possess, in a very eminent degree, the talents of drawing and
colouring, and yet possess that of expression in a very inferior
degree. Such a painter, too, may have great merit. In the judgment of
Du Piles, even the celebrated Titian was a painter of this kind. But
to say that a musician possessed the talents of melody and harmony in
a very eminent degree, and that of expression in a very inferior one,
would be to say, that in his works the cause was not followed by its
necessary and proportionable effect. A musician may be a very skilful
harmonist, and yet be defective in the talents of melody, air, and
expression; his songs may be dull and without effect. Such a musician
too may have a certain degree of merit, not unlike that of a man of
great learning, who wants fancy, taste, and invention.
Instrumental Music, therefore, though it may, no doubt, be considered
in some respects as an imitative art, is certainly less so than any
other which merits that appellation; it can imitate but a few objects,
and even these so imperfectly, that without the accompaniment of some
other art, its imitation is scarce ever intelligible: imitation is by
no means essential to it, and the principal effect it is capable of
producing arises from powers altogether different from those of
imitation.
-----
PART III.
THE imitative powers of Dancing are much superior to those of
instrumental Music, and are at least equal, perhaps superior, to those
of any other art. Like instrumental Music, however, it is not
necessarily or essentially imitative, and it can produce very
agreeable effects, without imitating any thing. In the greater part of
our common dances there is little or no imitation, and they consist
almost entirely of a succession of such steps, gestures, and motions,
regulated by the time and measure of Music, as either display
extraordinary grace or require extraordinary agility. Even some of our
dances, which are said to have been originally imitative, have, in the
way in which we practise them, almost ceased to be so. The minuet, in
which the woman, after passing and repassing the man several times,
first gives him up one hand, then the other, and then both hands, is
said to have been originally a Moorish dance, which emblematically
represented the passion of love. Many of my readers may have
frequently danced this dance, and, in the opinion of all who saw them,
with great grace and propriety, though neither they nor the spectators
once thought of the allegorical meaning which it originally intended
to express.
A certain measured, cadenced step, commonly called a dancing step,
which keeps time with, and as it were beats the measure of, the Music
which accompanies and directs it, is the essential characteristic
which {433} distinguishes a dance from every other sort of motion.
When the dancer, moving with a step of this kind, and observing this
time and measure, imitates either the ordinary or the more important
actions of human life, he shapes and fashions, as it were, a thing of
one kind, into the resemblance of another thing of a very different
kind: his art conquers the disparity which Nature has placed between
the imitating and the imitated object, and has upon that account some
degree of that sort of merit which belongs to all the imitative arts.
This disparity, indeed, is not so great as in some other of those
arts, nor consequently the merit of the imitation which conquers it.
Nobody would compare the merit of a good imitative dancer to that of a
good painter or statuary. The dancer, however, may have a very
considerable degree of merit, and his imitation perhaps may sometimes
be capable of giving us as much pleasure as that of either of the
other two artists. All the subjects, either of Statuary or of History
Painting, are within the compass of his imitative powers; and in
representing them, his art has even some advantage over both the other
two. Statuary and History Painting can represent but a single instant
of the action which they mean to imitate: the causes which prepared,
the consequences which followed, the situation of that single instant
are altogether beyond the compass of their imitation. A pantomime
dance can represent distinctly those causes and consequences; it is
not confined to the situation of a single instant; but, like Epic
Poetry, it can represent all the events of a long story, and exhibit a
long train and succession of connected and interesting situations. It
is capable therefore of affecting us much more than either Statuary or
Painting. The ancient Romans used to shed tears at the representations
of their pantomimes, as we do at that of the most interesting
tragedies; an effect which is altogether beyond the powers of Statuary
or Painting.
The ancient Greeks appear to have been a nation of dancers, and both
their common and their stage dances seem to have been all imitative.
The stage dances of the ancient Romans appear to have been equally so.
Among that grave people it was reckoned indecent to dance in private
societies; and they could therefore have no common dances; and among
both nations imitation seems to have been considered as essential to
dancing.
It is quite otherwise in modern times: though we have pantomime dances
upon the stage, yet the greater part even of our stage dances are not
pantomime, and cannot well be said to imitate any thing. The greater
part of our common dances either never were pantomime, or, with a very
few exceptions, have almost all ceased to be so.
This remarkable difference of character between the ancient and the
modern dances seems to be the natural effect of a correspondent
difference in that of the music, which has accompanied and directed
both the one and the other.
{434} In modern times we almost always dance to instrumental music,
which being itself not imitative, the greater part of the dances which
it directs, and as it were inspires, have ceased to be so. In ancient
times, on the contrary, they seem to have danced almost always to
vocal music; which being necessarily and essentially imitative, their
dances became so too. The ancients seem to have had little or nothing
of what is properly called instrumental music, or of music composed
not to be sung by the voice, but to be played upon instruments, and
both their wind and stringed instruments seem to have served only as
an accompaniment and direction to the voice.
In the country it frequently happens, that a company of young people
take a fancy to dance, though they have neither fiddler nor piper to
dance to. A lady undertakes to sing while the rest of the company
dance: in most cases she sings the notes only, without the words, and
then the voice being little more than a musical instrument, the dance
is performed in the usual way, without any imitation. But if she sings
the words, and if in those words there happens to be somewhat more
than ordinary spirit and humour, immediately all the company,
especially all the best dancers, and all those who dance most at their
ease, become more or less pantomimes, and by their gestures and
motions express, as well as they can, the meaning and story of the
song. This would be still more the case, if the same person both
danced and sung; a practice very common among the ancients: it
requires good lungs and a vigorous constitution; but with these
advantages and long practice, the very highest dances may be performed
in this manner. I have seen a Negro dance to his own song, the
war-dance of his own country, with such vehemence of action and
expression, that the whole company, gentlemen as well as ladies, got
up upon chairs and tables, to be as much as possible out of the way of
his fury. In the Greek language there are two verbs which both signify
to dance; each of which has its proper derivatives, signifying a dance
and a dancer. In the greater part of Greek authors, these two sets of
words, like all others which are nearly synonymous, are frequently
confounded, and used promiscuously. According to the best critics,
however, in strict propriety, one of these verbs signifies to dance
and sing at the same time, or to dance to one's own music. The other
to dance without singing, or to dance to the music of other people.
There is said too to be a correspondent difference in the
signification of their respective derivatives. In the choruses of the
ancient Greek tragedies, consisting sometimes of more than fifty
persons, some piped and some sung, but all danced, and danced to their
own music.
* * * * *
* * * * *
{435}
*** [_The following Observations were found among Mr._ SMITH'S
_Manuscripts, without any intimation whether they were intended as
part of this, or of a different Essay. As they appeared too valuable
to be suppressed, the Editors have annexed them to this Essay._]
_Of the Affinity between Music, Dancing, and Poetry._
IN the second part of the preceding Essay I have mentioned the
connection between the two arts of _Music_ and _Dancing_,
formed by the _Rhythmus_, as the ancients termed it, or, as we
call it, the tune or measure that equally regulates both.
It is not, however, every sort of step, gesture, or motion, of which
the correspondence with the tune or measure of Music will constitute a
Dance. It must be a step, gesture, or motion of a particular sort. In
a good opera-actor, not only the modulations and pauses of his voice,
but every motion and gesture, every variation, either in the air of
his head or in the attitude of his body, correspond to the time and
measure of Music. The best opera-actor, however, is not, according to
the language of any country in Europe, understood to dance, yet in the
performance of his part, he makes use of what is called the stage
step; but even this step is not understood to be a dancing step.
Though the eye of the most ordinary spectator readily distinguishes
between what is called a dancing step and any other step, gesture, or
motion, yet it may not perhaps be very easy to express what it is
which constitutes this distinction. To ascertain exactly the precise
limits at which the one species begins, and the other ends, or to give
an accurate definition of this very frivolous matter, might perhaps
require more thought and attention than the very small importance of
the subject may seem to deserve. Were I, however, to attempt to do
this, I should observe, that though in performing any ordinary
action--in walking, for example--from the one end of the room to the
other, a person may show both grace and agility, yet if he betrays the
least intention of showing either, he is sure of offending more or
less, and we never fail to accuse him of some degree of vanity and
affectation. In the performance of any such ordinary action, every
person wishes to appear to be solely occupied about the proper purpose
of the action: if he means to show either grace or agility, he is
careful to conceal that meaning, and he is very seldom successful in
doing so: he offends, however, just in proportion as he betrays it,
and he almost always betrays it. In Dancing, on the contrary, every
person professes, and avows, as it were, the intention of displaying
some degree either of grace or of agility, or of both. The display of
one, or other, or both of these qualities, is in reality the proper
purpose of the action; and there can never be any disagreeable vanity
or affectation in following {436} out the proper purpose of any
action. When we say of any particular person, that he gives himself
many affected airs and graces in Dancing, we mean either that he gives
himself airs and graces which are unsuitable to the nature of the
Dance, or that he executes awkwardly, perhaps exaggerates too much,
(the most common fault in Dancing,) the airs and graces which are
suitable to it. Every Dance is in reality a succession of airs and
graces of some kind or other, and of airs and graces which, if I may
say so, profess themselves to be such. The steps, gestures, and
motions which, as it were, avow the intention of exhibiting a
succession of such airs and graces, are the steps, the gestures, and
the motions which are peculiar to Dancing, and when these are
performed to the time and the measure of Music, they constitute what
is properly called a Dance.
But though every sort of step, gesture, or motion, even though
performed to the time and measure of Music, will not alone make a
Dance, yet almost any sort of sound, provided it is repeated with a
distinct rhythmus, or according to a distinct time and measure, though
without any variation as to gravity or acuteness, will make a sort of
Music, no doubt indeed, an imperfect one. Drums, cymbals, and, so far
as I have observed, all other instruments of percussion, have only one
note; this note, however, when repeated with a certain rhythmus, or
according to a certain time and measure, and sometimes, in order to
mark more distinctly that time and measure, with some little variation
as to loudness and lowness, though without any as to acuteness and
gravity, does certainly make a sort of Music, which is frequently far
from being disagreeable, and which even sometimes produces
considerable effects. The simple note of such instruments, it is true,
is generally a very clear, or what is called a melodious, sound. It
does not however seem indispensably necessary that it should be so.
The sound of the muffled drum, when it beats the dead march, is far
from being either clear or melodious, and yet it certainly produces a
species of Music which is sometimes affecting. Even in the performance
of the most humble of all artists, of the man who drums upon the table
with his fingers, we may sometimes distinguish the measure, and
perhaps a little of the humour, of some favourite song; and we must
allow that even he makes some sort of Music. Without a proper step and
motion, the observation of tune alone will not make a Dance; time
alone, without tune, will make some sort of Music.
That exact observation of tune, or of the proper intervals of gravity
and acuteness, which constitutes the great beauty of all perfect
Music, constitutes likewise its great difficulty. The time, or measure
of a song are simple matters, which even a coarse and unpractised ear
is capable of distinguishing and comprehending: but to distinguish and
comprehend all the variations of the tune, and to conceive with
precision the exact proportion of every note, is what the finest and
most cultivated {437} ear is frequently no more than capable of
performing. In the singing of the common people we may generally
remark a distinct enough observation of time, but a very imperfect one
of tune. To discover and to distinguish with precision the proper
intervals of tune, must have been a work of long experience and much
observation. In the theoretical treatises upon Music, what the authors
have to say upon time is commonly discussed in a single chapter of no
great length or difficulty. The theory of tune fills commonly all the
rest of the volume, and has long ago become both an extensive and an
abstruse science, which is often but imperfectly comprehended, even by
intelligent artists. In the first rude efforts of uncivilized nations
towards singing, the niceties of tune could be but little attended to:
I have, upon this account, been frequently disposed to doubt of the
great antiquity of those national songs, which it is pretended have
been delivered down from age to age by a sort of oral tradition,
without having been ever noted or distinctly recorded for many
successive generations. The measure, the humour of the song, might
perhaps have been delivered down in this manner, but it seems scarcely
possible that the precise notes of the tune should have been so
preserved. The method of singing some of what we reckon our old Scotch
songs, has undergone great alterations within the compass of my
memory, and it may have undergone still greater before.
The distinction between the sounds or tones of singing and those of
speaking seems to be of the same kind with that between the steps,
gestures, and motions of Dancing, and those of any other ordinary
action; though in speaking, a person may show a very agreeable tone of
voice, yet if he seems to intend to show it, if he appears to listen
to the sound of his own voice, and as it were to tune it into a
pleasing modulation, he never fails to offend, as guilty of a most
disagreeable affectation. In speaking, as in every other ordinary
action, we expect and require that the speaker should attend only to
the proper purpose of the action, the clear and distinct expression of
what he has to say. In singing, on the contrary, every person
professes the intention to please by the tone and cadence of his
voice; and he not only appears to be guilty of no disagreeable
affectation in doing so, but we expect and require that he should do
so. To please by the choice and arrangement of agreeable sounds is the
proper purpose of all Music, vocal as well as instrumental; and we
always expect and require, that every person should attend to the
proper purpose of whatever action he is performing. A person may
appear to sing, as well as to dance, affectedly; he may endeavour to
please by sounds and tones which are unsuitable to the nature of the
song, or he may dwell too much on those which are suitable to it, or
in some other way he may show an overweening conceit of his own
abilities, beyond what seems to be warranted by his performance. The
disagreeable affectation appears {438} to consist always, not in
attempting to please by a proper, but by some improper modulation of
the voice. It was early discovered that the vibrations of chords or
strings, which either in their lengths, or in their densities, or in
their degrees of tension, bear a certain proportion to one another,
produce sounds which correspond exactly, or, as the musicians say, are
the unisons of those sounds or tones of the human voice which the ear
approves of in singing. This discovery has enabled musicians to speak
with distinctness and precision concerning the musical sounds or tones
of the human voice; they can always precisely ascertain what are the
particular sounds or tones which they mean, by ascertaining what are
the proportions of the strings of which the vibrations produce the
unisons of those sounds or tones. What are called the intervals; that
is, the differences, in point of gravity and acuteness, between the
sounds or tones of a singing voice, are much greater and more distinct
than those of the speaking voice. Though the former, therefore, can be
measured and appreciated by the proportions of chords or strings, the
latter cannot. The nicest instruments cannot express the extreme
minuteness of these intervals. The heptamerede of Mr. _Sauveur_
could express an interval so small as the seventh part of what is
called a comma, the smallest interval that is admitted in modern
Music. Yet even this instrument, we are informed by Mr. _Duclos_,
could not express the minuteness of the intervals in the pronunciation
of the Chinese language; of all the languages in the world, that of
which the pronunciation is said to approach the nearest to singing, or
in which the intervals are said to be the greatest.
As the sounds or tones of the singing voice, therefore, can be
ascertained or appropriated, while those of the speaking voice cannot;
the former are capable of being noted or recorded, while the latter
are not.
----------
ADAM SMITH
ON THE
EXTERNAL SENSES;
THE Senses, by which we perceive external objects, are commonly
reckoned Five in Number; viz. Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and
Touching.
Of these, the four first mentioned are each of them confined to
particular parts or organs of the body; the Sense of Seeing is
confined to the Eyes; that of Hearing to the Ears; that of Smelling to
the Nostrils; and that of Tasting to the Palate. The Sense of Touching
alone {439} seems not to be confined to any particular organ, but to
be diffused through almost every part of the body; if we except the
hair and the nails of the fingers and toes, I believe through every
part of it. I shall say a few words concerning each of these Senses;
beginning with the last, proceeding backwards in the opposite order to
that in which they are commonly enumerated.
_Of the Sense of_ TOUCHING.
The objects of Touch always present themselves as pressing upon, or as
resisting the particular part of the body which perceives them, or by
which we perceive them. When I lay my hand upon the table, the table
presses upon my hand, or resists the further motion of my hand, in the
same manner as my hand presses upon the table. But pressure or
resistance necessarily supposes externality in the thing which presses
or resists. The table could not press upon, or resist the further
motion of my hand, if it was not external to my hand. I feel it
accordingly as something which is not merely an affection of the hand,
but altogether external to and independent of my hand. The agreeable,
indifferent, or painful sensation of pressure, accordingly as I happen
to press hardly or softly, I feel, no doubt, as affections of my hand;
but the thing which presses and which resists I feel as something
altogether different from those affections, as external to my hand,
and as being altogether independent of it.
In moving my hand along the table it soon comes, in every direction,
to a place where this pressure or resistance ceases. This place we
call the boundary, or end of the table; of which the extent and figure
are determined by the extent and direction of the lines or surfaces
which constitute this boundary or end.
It is in this manner that a man born blind, or who has lost his sight
so early that he has no remembrance of visible objects, may form the
most distinct idea of the extent and figure of all the different parts
of his own body, and of every other tangible object which he has an
opportunity of handling and examining. When he lays his hand upon his
foot, as his hand feels the pressure or resistance of his foot, so his
foot feels that of his hand. They are both external to one another,
but they are, neither of them, altogether so external to him. He feels
in both, and he naturally considers them as parts of himself, or at
least as something which belongs to him, and which, for his own
comfort, it is necessary that he should take some care of.
When he lays his hand upon the table, though his hand feels the
pressure of the table, the table does not feel, at least he does not
know that it feels, the pressure of his hand. He feels it therefore as
something external, not only to his hand, but to himself, as something
which makes no part of himself, and in the state and condition of
which he has not necessarily any concern.
{440} When he lays his hand upon the body either of another man, or of
any other animal, though he knows, or at least may know, that they
feel the pressure of his hand as much as he feels that of their body:
yet as this feeling is altogether external to him, he frequently gives
no attention to it, and at no time takes any further concern in it
than he is obliged to do by that fellow-feeling which Nature has, for
the wisest purposes, implanted in man, not only towards all other men,
but (though no doubt in a much weaker degree) towards all other
animals. Having destined him to be the governing animal in this world,
it seems to have been her benevolent intention to inspire him with
some degree of respect, even for the meanest and weakest of his
subjects.
This power or quality of resistance we call Solidity; and the thing
which possesses it, the Solid Body or Thing. As we feel it as
something altogether external to us, so we necessarily conceive it as
something altogether independent of us. We consider it, therefore, as
what we call a Substance, or as a thing that subsists by itself, and
independent of any other thing. Solid and substantial, accordingly,
are two words which, in common language, are considered either as
altogether or as nearly synonymous.
Solidity necessarily supposes some degree of extension, and that in
all the three directions of length, breadth, and thickness. All the
solid bodies, of which we have any experience, have some degree of
such bulk or magnitude. It seems to be essential to their nature, and
without it, we cannot even conceive how they should be capable of
pressure or resistance; are are the powers by which they are made
known to us, and by which alone they are capable of acting upon our
own, and upon all other bodies.
Extension, at least any sensible extension, supposes divisibility. The
body may be so hard, that our strength is not sufficient to break it;
we still suppose, however, that if a sufficient force were applied, it
might be so broken; and, at any rate, we can always, in fancy at
least, imagine it to be divided into two or more parts.
Every solid and extended body, if it be not infinite, (as the universe
may be conceived to be,) must have some shape or figure, or be bounded
by certain lines and surfaces.
Every such body must likewise be conceived as capable both of motion
and of rest; both of altering its situation with regard to other
surrounding bodies, and of remaining in the same situation. That
bodies of small or moderate bulk, are capable of both motion and rest
we have constant experience. Great masses, perhaps, are according to
the ordinary habits of the imagination, supposed to be more fitted for
rest than for motion. Provided a sufficient force could be applied,
however, we have no difficulty in conceiving that the greatest and
most unwieldy masses might be made capable of motion. Philosophy
teaches us, (and by reasons too to which it is scarcely possible to
{441} refuse our assent,) that the earth itself, and bodies much
larger than the earth, are not only movable, but are at all times
actually in motion, and continually altering their situation, in
respect to other surrounding bodies, with a rapidity that almost
passes all human comprehension. In the system of the universe, at
least according to the imperfect notions which we have hitherto been
able to attain concerning it, the great difficulty seems to be, not to
find the most enormous masses in motion, but to find the smallest
particle of matter that is perfectly at rest with regard to all other
surrounding bodies.
These four qualities, or attributes of extension, divisibility,
figure, and mobility, or the capacity of motion or rest, seem
necessarily involved in the idea or conception of a solid substance.
They are, in reality, inseparable from that idea or conception, and
the solid substance cannot possibly be conceived to exist without
them. No other qualities or attributes seem to be involved, in the
same manner, in this our idea or conception of solidity. It would,
however, be rash from thence to conclude that the solid substance can,
as such, possess no other qualities or attributes. This rash
conclusion, notwithstanding, has been not only drawn, but insisted
upon, as an axiom of indubitable certainty, by philosophers of very
eminent reputation.
Of these external and resisting substances, some yield easily, and
change their figure, at least in some degree, in consequence of the
pressure of our hand: others neither yield nor change their figure, in
any respect, in consequence of the utmost pressure which our hand
alone is capable of giving them. The former we call soft, the latter
hard, bodies. In some bodies the parts are so very easily separable,
that they not only yield to a very moderate pressure, but easily
receive the pressing body within them, and without much resistance
allow it to traverse their extent in every possible direction. These
are called Fluid, in contradistinction to those of which the parts not
being so easily separable, are upon that account peculiarly called
Solid Bodies; as if they possessed, in a more distinct and perceptible
manner, the characteristical quality of solidity or the power of
resistance. Water, however (one of the fluids with which we are most
familiar), when confined on all sides (as in a hollow globe of metal,
which is first filled with it, and then sealed hermetically), has been
found to resist pressure as much as the very hardest, or what we
commonly call the most solid bodies.
Some fluids yield so very easily to the slightest pressure, that upon,
ordinary occasions we are scarcely sensible of their resistance; and
are upon that account little disposed to conceive them as bodies, or
as things capable of pressure and resistance. There was a time, as we
may learn from Aristotle and Lucretius, when it was supposed to
require some degree of philosophy to demonstrate that air was a real
solid body, or capable of pressure and resistance. What, in ancient
{442} times, and in vulgar apprehensions, was supposed to be doubtful
with regard to air, still continues to be so with regard to light, of
which the rays, however condensed or concentrated, have never appeared
capable of making the smallest resistance to the motion of other
bodies, the characteristical power or quality of what are called
bodies, or solid substances. Some philosophers accordingly doubt, and
some even deny, that light is a material or corporeal substance.
Though all bodies or solid substances resist, yet all those with which
we are acquainted appear to be more or less compressible, or capable
of having, without any diminution in the quantity of their matter,
their bulk more or less reduced within a smaller space than that which
they usually occupy. An experiment of the Florentine academy was
supposed to have fully demonstrated that water was absolutely
incompressible. The same experiment, however, having been repeated
with more care and accuracy, it appears, that water, though it
strongly resists compression, is, however, when a sufficient force is
applied, like all other bodies, in some degree liable to it. Air, on
the contrary, by the application of a very moderate force, is easily
reducible within a much smaller portion of space than that which it
usually occupies. The condensing engine, and what is founded upon it,
the wind-gun, sufficiently demonstrate this: and even without the help
of such ingenious and expensive machines, we may easily satisfy
ourselves of the truth of this proportion, by squeezing a full-blown
bladder of which the neck is well tied.
The hardness or softness of bodies, or the greater or smaller force
with which they resist any change of shape, seems to depend altogether
upon the stronger or weaker degree of cohesion with which their parts
are mutually attracted to one another. The greater or smaller force
with which they resist compression may, upon many occasions, be owing
partly to the same cause: but it may likewise be owing to the greater
or smaller proportion of empty space comprehended within their
dimensions, or intermixed with the solid parts which compose them. A
body which comprehended no empty space within its dimensions, which,
through all its parts, was completely filled with the resisting
substance, we are naturally disposed to conceive as something which
would be absolutely incompressible, and which would resist, with
unconquerable force, every attempt to reduce it within narrower
dimensions. If the solid and resisting substance, without moving out
of its place, should admit into the same place another solid and
resisting substance, it would from that moment, in our apprehension,
cease to be a solid and resisting substance, and would no longer
appear to possess that quality, by which alone it is made known to us,
and which we therefore consider as constituting its nature and
essence, and as altogether inseparable from it. Hence our notion of
what has been called impenetrability of matter; or of the absolute
impossibility that two {443} solid resisting substances should occupy
the same place at the same time.
This doctrine, which is as old as Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus,
was in the last century revived by Gassendi, and has since been
adopted by Newton and the far greater part of his followers. It may at
present be considered as the established system, or as the system that
is most in fashion, and most approved of by the greater part of the
philosophers of Europe. Though it has been opposed by several puzzling
arguments, drawn from that species of metaphysics which confounds
every thing and explains nothing, it seems upon the whole to be the
most simple, the most distinct, and the most comprehensible account
that has yet been given of the phenomena which are meant to be
explained by it. I shall only observe, that whatever system may be
adopted concerning the hardness or softness, the fluidity or solidity,
the compressibility or incompressibility of the resisting substance,
the certainty of our distinct sense and feeling of its Externality, or
of its entire independency upon the organ which perceives it, or by
which we perceive it, cannot in the smallest degree be affected by any
such system. I shall not therefore attempt to give any further account
of such systems.
Heat and cold being felt by almost every part of the human body, have
commonly been ranked along with solidity and resistance, among the
qualities which are the objects of Touch. It is not, however, I think,
in our language proper to say that we touch, but that we feel the
qualities of heat and cold. The word _feeling_, though in many
cases we use it as synonymous to _touching_, has, however, a much
more extensive signification, and is frequently employed to denote our
internal, as well as our external, affections. We feel hunger and
thirst, we feel joy and sorrow, we feel love and hatred.
Heat and cold, in reality, though they may frequently be perceived by
the same parts of the human body, constitute an order of sensations
altogether different from those which are the proper objects of Touch.
They are naturally felt, not as pressing upon the organ, but as in the
organ. What we feel while we stand in the sunshine during a hot, or in
the shade during a frosty, day, is evidently felt, not as pressing
upon the body, but as in the body. It does not necessarily suggest the
presence of any external object, nor could we from thence alone infer
the existence of any such object. It is a sensation which neither does
nor can exist any where but either in the organ which feels it, or in
the unknown principle of perception, whatever that may be, which feels
in that organ, or by means of that organ. When we lay our hand upon a
table, which is either heated or cooled a good deal beyond the actual
temperature of our hand, we have two distinct perceptions: first, that
of the solid or resisting table, which is necessarily felt as
something external to, and independent of, the hand which feels it;
and secondly, {444} that of the heat or cold, which by the contact of
the table is excited in our hand, and which is naturally felt as
nowhere but in our hand, or in the principle of perception which feels
in our hand.
But though the sensations of heat and cold do not necessarily suggest
the presence of any external object, we soon learn from experience
that they are commonly excited by some such object: sometimes by the
temperature of some external body immediately in contact with our own
body, and sometimes by some body at either a moderate or a great
distance from us; as by the fire in a chamber, or by the sun in a
summer's day. By the frequency and uniformity of this experience, by
the custom and habit of thought which that frequency and uniformity
necessarily occasion, the Internal Sensation, and the External Cause
of that Sensation, come in our conception to be so strictly connected,
that in our ordinary and careless way of thinking, we are apt to
consider them as almost one and the same thing, and therefore denote
them by one and the same word. The confusion, however, is in this case
more in the word than in the thought; for in reality we still retain
some notion of the distinction, though we do not always evolve it with
that accuracy which a very slight degree of attention might enable us
to do. When we move our hand, for example, along the surface of a very
hot or of a very cold table, though we say that the table is hot or
cold in every part of it, we never mean that, in any part of it, it
feels the sensations either of heat or of cold, but that in every part
of it, it possesses the power of exciting one or other of those
sensations in our bodies. The philosophers who have taken so much
pains to prove that there is no heat in the fire, meaning that the
sensation or feeling of heat is not in the fire, have laboured to
refute an opinion which the most ignorant of mankind never
entertained. But the same word being, in common language, employed to
signify both the sensation and the power of exciting that sensation,
they, without knowing it perhaps, or intending it, have taken
advantage of this ambiguity, and have triumphed in their own
superiority, when by irresistible arguments they establish an opinion
which, in words indeed, is diametrically opposite to the most obvious
judgments of mankind, but which in reality is perfectly agreeable to
those judgments.
_Of the Sense of_ TASTING.
WHEN we taste any solid or liquid substance, we have always two
distinct perceptions: first, that of the solid or liquid body, which
is naturally felt as pressing upon, and therefore as external to, and
independent of, the organ which feels it; and secondly, that of
particular taste, relish, or savour which it excites in the palate or
organ of Tasting, and which is naturally felt, not as pressing upon,
as external to, or as independent of, that organ; but as altogether in
the organ, and nowhere but in the organ, or in the principle of
perception which feels in {445} that organ. When we say that the food
which we eat has an agreeable or disagreeable taste in every part of
it, we do not thereby mean that it has the feeling or sensation of
taste in any part of it, but that in every part of it, it has the
power of exciting that feeling or sensation in our palates. Though in
this case we denote by the same word (in the same manner, and for the
same reason, as in the case of heat and cold) both the sensation and
the power of exciting that sensation, this ambiguity of language
misleads the natural judgments of mankind in the one case as little as
in the other. Nobody ever fancies that our food feels its own
agreeable or disagreeable taste.
_Of the Sense of_ SMELLING.
EVERY smell or odour is naturally felt as in the nostrils; not as
pressing upon or resisting the organ, not as in any respect external
to, or independent of, the organ, but as altogether in the organ, and
nowhere else but in the organ, or in the principle of perception which
feels in that organ. We soon learn from experience, however, that this
sensation is commonly excited by some external body; by a flower, for
example, of which the absence removes, and the presence brings back,
the sensation. This external body we consider as the cause of this
sensation, and we denominate by the same words both the sensation and
the power by which the external body produces this sensation. But when
we say that the smell is in the flower, we do not thereby mean that
the flower itself has any feeling of the sensation which we feel; but
that it has the power of exciting this sensation in our nostrils, or
in the principle of perception which feels in our nostrils. Though
this sensation, and the power by which it is excited, are thus denoted
by the same word, this ambiguity of language misleads, in this case,
the natural judgments of mankind as little as in the two preceding.
_Of the Sense of_ HEARING.
EVERY sound is naturally felt as in the Ear, the organ of Hearing.
Sound is not naturally felt as resisting or pressing upon the organ,
or as in any respect external to, or independent of, the organ. We
naturally feel it as an affection of our Ear, as something which is
altogether in our Ear, and nowhere but in our Ear, or in the principle
of perception which feels in our Ear. We soon learn from experience,
indeed, that the sensation is frequently excited by bodies at a
considerable distance from us; often at a much greater distance, than
those ever are which excite the sensation of Smelling. We learn too
from experience that this sound or sensation in our Ears receives
different modifications, according to the distance and direction of
the body which originally causes it. The sensation is stronger, the
sound is louder, when that body is near. The sensation is weaker, the
sound is lower, when that body is at a distance. The sound, or
sensation, too undergoes some {446} variation according as the body is
placed on the right hand or on the left, before or behind us. In
common language we frequently say, that the sound seems to come from a
great or from a small distance, from the right hand or from the left,
from before or from behind us. We frequently say too that we hear a
sound at a great or small distance, on our right hand or on our left.
The real sound, however, the sensation in our ear, can never be heard
or felt any where but in our ear, it can never change its place, it is
incapable of motion, and can come, therefore, neither from the right
nor from the left, neither from before nor from behind us. The Ear can
feel or hear nowhere but where it is, and cannot stretch out its
powers of perception, either to a great or to a small distance, either
to the right or to the left. By all such phrases we in reality mean
nothing but to express our opinion concerning either the distance or
the direction of the body which excites the sensation of sound. When
we say that the sound is in the bell, we do not mean that the bell
hears its own sound, or that any thing like our sensation is in the
bell, but that it possesses the power of exciting that sensation in
our organ of Hearing. Though in this, as well as in some other cases,
we express by the same word, both the Sensation, and the Power of
exciting that Sensation; this ambiguity of language occasions scarce
any confusion in the thought, and when the different meanings of the
word are properly distinguished, the opinions of the vulgar, and those
of the philosopher, though apparently opposite, on examination turn
out to be exactly the same.
These four classes of secondary qualities, as philosophers have called
them, or to speak more properly, these four classes of Sensations;
Heat and Cold, Taste, Smell, and Sound; being felt, not as resisting
or pressing upon the organ, but as in the organ, are not naturally
perceived as external and independent substances; or even as qualities
of such substances; but as mere affections of the organ, and what can
exist nowhere but in the organ.
They do not possess, nor can we even conceive them as capable of
possessing, any one of the qualities, which we consider as essential
to, and inseparable from, external solid and independent substances.
First, They have no extension. They are neither long nor short; they
are neither broad nor narrow; they are neither deep nor shallow. The
bodies which excite them, the spaces within which they may be
perceived, may possess any of those dimensions; but the Sensations
themselves can possess none of them. When we say of a Note in Music,
that it is long or short, we mean that it is so in point of duration.
In point of extension we cannot even conceive, that it should be
either the one or the other.
Secondly, Those Sensations have no figure. They are neither round nor
square, though the bodies which excite them, though the spaces within
which they may be perceived, may be either the one or the other.
{447} Thirdly, Those Sensations are incapable of motion. The bodies
which excite them may be moved to a greater or to a smaller distance.
The Sensations become fainter in the one case, and stronger in the
other. Those bodies may change their direction with regard to the
organ of Sensation. If the change be considerable, the Sensations
undergo some sensible variation in consequence of it. But still we
never ascribe motion to the Sensations. Even when the person who feels
any of those Sensations, and consequently the organ by which he feels
them, changes his situation, we never, even in this case, say, that
the Sensation moves, or is moved. It seems to exist always, where
alone it is capable of existing, in the organ which feels it. We never
even ascribe to those Sensations the attribute of rest; because we
never say that any thing is at rest, unless we suppose it capable of
motion. We never say that any thing does not change its situation with
regard to other things, unless we can suppose it to be capable of
changing that situation.
Fourthly, Those Sensations, as they have no extension, so they can
have no divisibility. We cannot even conceive that a degree of Heat or
Cold, that a Smell, a Taste, or a Sound, should be divided (in the
same manner as the solid and extended substance may be divided) into
two halves, or into four quarters, or into any number of parts.
But though all these Sensations are equally incapable of division;
there are three of them, Taste, Smell, and Sound; which seem capable
of a certain composition and decomposition. A skilful cook will, by
his taste, perhaps, sometimes distinguish the different ingredients,
which enter into the composition of a new sauce, and of which the
simple tastes make up the compound one of the sauce. A skilful
perfumer may, perhaps, sometimes be able to do the same thing with
regard to a new scent. In a concert of vocal and instrumental music,
an acute and experienced Ear readily distinguishes all the different
sounds which strike upon it at the same time, and which may,
therefore, be considered as making up one compound sound.
Is it by nature, or by experience, that we learn to distinguish
between simple and compound Sensations of this kind? I am disposed to
believe that it is altogether by experience; and that naturally all
Tastes, Smells, and Sounds, which affect the organ of Sensation at the
same time, are felt as simple and uncompounded Sensations. It is
altogether by experience, I think, that we learn to observe the
different affinities and resemblances which the compound Sensation
bears to the different simple ones, which compose it, and to judge
that the different causes, which excite those different simple
Sensations, enter into the composition of that cause which excites the
compounded one.
It is sufficiently evident that this composition and decomposition is
altogether different from that union and separation of parts, which
constitutes the divisibility of solid extension.
{448} The Sensations of Heat and Cold seem incapable even of this
species of composition and decomposition. The Sensations of Heat and
Cold may be stronger at one time and weaker at another. They may
differ in degree, but they cannot differ in kind. The Sensations of
Taste, Smell, and Sound, frequently differ, not only in degree, but in
kind. They are not only stronger and weaker, but some Tastes are sweet
and some bitter; some Smells are agreeable, and some offensive; some
Sounds are acute, and some grave; and each of these different kinds or
qualities, too, is capable of an immense variety of modifications. It
is the combination of such simple Sensations, as differ not only in
degree but in kind, which constitutes the compounded Sensation.
These four classes of Sensations, therefore, having none of the
qualities which are essential to, and inseparable from, the solid,
external, and independent substances which excite them, cannot be
qualities or modifications of those substances. In reality we do not
naturally consider them as such; though in the way in which we express
ourselves on the subject, there is frequently a good deal of ambiguity
and confusion. When the different meanings of words, however, are
fairly distinguished, these Sensations are, even by the most ignorant
and illiterate, understood to be, not the qualities, but merely the
effects of the solid, external, and independent substances upon the
sensible and living organ, or upon the principle of perception which
feels in that organ.
Philosophers, however, have not in general supposed that those
exciting bodies produce those Sensations immediately, but by the
intervention of one, two, or more intermediate causes.
In the Sensation of Taste, for example, though the exciting body
presses upon the organ of Sensation, this pressure is not supposed to
be the immediate cause of the Sensation of Taste. Certain juices of
the exciting body are supposed to enter the pores of the palate, and
to excite, in the irritable and sensible fibres of that organ, certain
motions or vibrations, which produce there the Sensation of Taste. But
how those juices should excite such motions, or how such motions
should produce, either in the organ, or in the principle of
perception which feels in the organ, the Sensation of Taste; or a
Sensation, which not only does not bear the smallest resemblance to
any motion, but which itself seems incapable of all motion, no
philosopher has yet attempted, nor probably ever will attempt, to
explain to us.
The Sensations of Heat and Cold, of Smell and Sound, are frequently
excited by bodies at a distance, sometimes at a great distance, from
the organ which feels them. But it is a very ancient and
well-established axiom in metaphysics, that nothing can act where it
is not; and this axiom, it must, I think, be acknowledged, is at
least perfectly agreeable to our natural and usual habits of thinking.
The Sun, the great source of both Heat and Light, is at an immense
{449} distance from us. His rays, however (traversing, with
inconceivable rapidity, the immensity of the intervening regions), as
they convey the Sensation of Light to our eyes, so they convey that of
Heat to all the sensible parts of our body. They even convey the power
of exciting that Sensation to all the other bodies that surround us.
They warm the earth and air, we say; that is, they convey to the earth
and the air the power of exciting that Sensation in our bodies. A
common fire produces, in the same manner, all the same effects; though
the sphere of its action is confined within much narrower limits.
The odoriferous body, which is generally too at some distance from us,
is supposed to act upon our organs by means of certain small particles
of matter, called Effluvia, which being sent forth in all possible
directions, and drawn into our nostrils by the inspiration of
breathing, produce there the Sensation of Smell. The minuteness of
those small particles of matter, however, must surpass all human
comprehension. Inclose in a gold box, for a few hours, a small
quantity of musk. Take out the musk, and clean the box with soap and
water as carefully as it is possible. Nothing can be supposed to
remain in the box, but such effluvia as, having penetrated into its
interior pores, may have escaped the effects of this cleansing. The
box, however, will retain the smell of musk for many, I do not know
for how many years; and these effluvia, how minute soever we may
suppose them, must have had the powers of subdividing themselves, and
of emitting other effluvia of the same kind, continually, and without
any interruption, during so long a period. The nicest balance,
however, which human art has ever been able to invent, will not show
the smallest increase of weight in the gold box immediately after it
has been thus carefully cleaned.
The Sensation of Sound is frequently felt at a much greater distance
from the sounding, than that of Smell ever is from the odoriferous
body. The vibrations of the sounding body, however, are supposed to
produce certain correspondent vibrations and pulses in the surrounding
atmosphere, which being propagated in all directions, reach our organ
of Hearing, and produce there the Sensation of Sound. There are not
many philosophical doctrines, perhaps, established upon a more
probable foundation, than that of the propagation of Sound by means of
the pulses or vibrations of the air. The experiment of the bell,
which, in an exhausted receiver, produces no sensible Sound, would
alone render this doctrine somewhat more than probable. But this great
probability is still further confirmed by the computations of Sir
Isaac Newton, who has shown that, what is called the velocity of
Sound, or the time which passes between the commencement of the action
of the sounding body, and that of the Sensation in our ear, is
perfectly suitable to the velocity with which the pulses and
vibrations of an elastic fluid of the same density with the air, are
naturally propagated. Dr. {450} Benjamin Franklin has made objections
to this doctrine, but, I think, without success.
Such are the intermediate causes by which philosophers have
endeavoured to connect the Sensation in our organs, with the distant
bodies which excite them. How those intermediate causes, by the
different motions and vibrations which they may be supposed to excite
on our organs, produce there those different Sensations, none of which
bear the smallest resemblance to vibration or motion of any kind, no
philosopher has yet attempted to explain to us.
_Of the Sense of_ SEEING.
DR. BERKLEY, in his New Theory of Vision, one of the finest examples
of philosophical analysis that is to be found, either in our own, or
in any other language, has explained, so very distinctly, the nature
of the objects of Sight: their dissimilitude to, as well as their
correspondence and connection with those of Touch, that I have
scarcely any thing to add to what he has already done. It is only in
order to render some things, which I shall have occasion to say
hereafter, intelligible to such readers as may not have had an
opportunity of studying his book, that I have presumed to treat of the
same subject, after so great a master. Whatever I shall say upon it,
if not directly borrowed from Dr. Berkley, has at least been suggested
by what he has already said.
That the objects of Sight are not perceived as resisting or pressing
upon the organ which perceives them, is sufficiently obvious. They
cannot therefore suggest, at least in the same manner as the objects
of Touch, their externality and independency of existence.
We are apt, however, to imagine that we see objects at a distance from
us, and that consequently the externality of their existence is
immediately perceived by our sight. But if we consider that the
distance of any object from the eye, is a line turned endways to it;
and that this line must consequently appear to it, but as one point;
we shall be sensible that distance from the eye cannot be the
immediate object of Sight, but that all visible objects must naturally
be perceived as close upon the organ, or more properly, perhaps, like
all other Sensations, as in the organ which perceives them. That the
objects of Sight are all painted in the bottom of the eye, upon a
membrane called the _retina_, pretty much in the same manner as
the like objects are painted in a Camera Obscura, is well known to
whoever has the slightest tincture of the science of Optics: and the
principle of perception, it is probable, originally perceives them, as
existing in that part of the organ, and nowhere but in that part of
the organ. No optician, accordingly, no person who has ever bestowed
any moderate degree of attention upon the nature of Vision, has ever
pretended that distance from the eye was the immediate object of
Sight. How it is that, by {451} means of our Sight we learn to judge
of such distances Opticians have endeavoured to explain in several
different ways. I shall not, however, at present, stop to examine
their systems.
The objects of Touch are solidity, and those modifications of solidity
which we consider as essential to it, and inseparable from it; solid
extension, figure, divisibility, and mobility.
The objects of Sight are colour, and those modifications of colour
which, in the same manner, we consider as essential to it, and
inseparable from it; coloured extension, figure, divisibility, and
mobility. When we open our eyes, the sensible coloured objects, which
present themselves to us, must all have a certain extension, or must
occupy a certain portion of the visible surface which appears before
us. They must too have all a certain figure, or must be bounded by
certain visible lines, which mark upon that surface the extent of
their respective dimensions. Every sensible portion of this visible or
coloured extension must be conceived as divisible, or as separable
into two, three, or more parts. Every portion too of this visible or
coloured surface must be conceived as moveable, or as capable of
changing its situation, and of assuming a different arrangement with
regard to the other portions of the same surface.
Colour, the visible, bears no resemblance to solidity, the tangible
object. A man born blind, or who has lost his sight so early as to
have no remembrance of visible objects, can form no idea or conception
of colour. Touch alone can never help him to it. I have heard, indeed,
of some persons who had lost their sight after the age of manhood, and
who had learned to distinguish by the touch alone, the different
colours of cloths or silks, the goods which it happened to be their
business to deal in. The powers by which different bodies excite in
the organs of Sight the Sensations of different colours, probably
depend upon some difference in the nature, configuration, and
arrangement of the parts which compose their respective surfaces. This
difference may, to a very nice and delicate touch, make some
difference in the feeling, sufficient to enable a person, much
interested in the case, to make this distinction in some degree,
though probably in a very imperfect and inaccurate one. A man born
blind might possibly be taught to make the same distinctions. But
though he might thus be able to name the different colours, which
those different surfaces reflected, though he might thus have some
imperfect notion of the remote causes of the Sensations, he could have
no better idea of the Sensations themselves, than that other blind
man, mentioned by Mr. Locke, had, who said that he imagined the Colour
of Scarlet resembled the Sound of a Trumpet. A man born deaf may, in
the same manner, be taught to speak articulately. He is taught how to
shape and dispose of his organs, so as to pronounce each letter,
syllable, and word. But still, though he may have some imperfect idea
of the remote causes of {452} the Sounds which he himself utters, of
the remote causes of the Sensations which he himself excites in other
people; he can have none of those Sounds or Sensations themselves.
If it were possible, in the same manner, that a man could be born
without the Sense of Touching, that of Seeing could never alone
suggest to him the idea of Solidity, or enable him to form any notion
of the external and resisting substance. It is probable, however, not
only that no man, but that no animal was ever born without the Sense
of Touching, which seems essential to, and inseparable from, the
nature of animal life and existence. It is unnecessary, therefore, to
throw away any reasoning, or to hazard any conjectures, about what
might be the effects of what I look upon as altogether an impossible
supposition. The eye when pressed upon by any external and solid
substance, feels, no doubt, that pressure and resistance, and suggests
to us (in the same manner as every other feeling part of the body) the
external and independent existence of that solid substance. But in
this case, the eye acts, not as the organ of Sight, but as an organ of
Touch; for the eye possesses the Sense of Touching in common with
almost all the other parts of the body.
The extension, figure, divisibility, and mobility of Colour, the sole
object of Sight, though, on account of their correspondence and
connection with the extension, figure, divisibility, and mobility of
Solidity, they are called by the same name, yet seem to bear no sort
of resemblance to their namesakes. As Colour and Solidity bear no sort
of resemblance to one another, so neither can their respective
modifications. Dr. Berkley very justly observes, that though we can
conceive either a coloured or a solid line to be prolonged
indefinitely, yet we cannot conceive the one to be added to the other.
We cannot, even in imagination, conceive an object of Touch to be
prolonged into an object of Sight, or an object of Sight into an
object of Touch. The objects of Sight and those of Touch constitute
two worlds, which, though they have a most important correspondence
and connection with one another, bear no sort of resemblance to one
another. The tangible world, as well as all the different parts which
compose it, has three dimensions, Length, Breadth, and Depth. The
visible world, as well as all the different parts which compose it,
has only two, Length and Breadth. It presents to us only a plain or
surface, which, by certain shades and combinations of Colour, suggests
and represents to us (in the same manner as a picture does) certain
tangible objects which have no Colour, and which therefore can bear no
resemblance to those shades and combinations of Colour. Those shades
and combinations suggest those different tangible objects as at
different distances, according to certain rules of Perspective, which
it is, perhaps, not very easy to say how it is that we learn, whether
by some particular instinct, or by some application of either reason
or experience, which {453} has become so perfectly habitual to us,
that we are scarcely sensible when we make use of it.
The distinctness of this Perspective, the precision and accuracy with
which, by means of it, we are capable of judging concerning the
distance of different tangible objects, is greater or less, exactly in
proportion as this distinctness, as this precision and accuracy, are
of more or less importance to us. We can judge of the distance of near
objects, of the chairs and tables for example, in the chamber where we
are sitting, with the most perfect precision and accuracy; and if in
broad daylight we ever stumble over any of them, it must be, not from
any error in the Sight, but from some defect in the attention. The
precision and accuracy of our judgment concerning such near objects
are of the utmost importance to us, and constitute the great advantage
which a man who sees has over one who is unfortunately blind. As the
distance increases, the distinctness of this Perspective, the
precision and accuracy of our judgment gradually diminish. Of the
tangible objects which are even at the moderate distance of one, two,
or three miles from the eye, we are frequently at a loss to determine
which is nearest, and which remotest. It is seldom of much importance
to us to judge with precision concerning the situation of the tangible
objects which are even at this moderate distance. As the distance
increases, our judgments become more and more uncertain; and at a very
great distance, such as that of the fixed stars, it becomes altogether
uncertain. The most precise knowledge of the relative situation of
such objects could be of no other use to the enquirer than to satisfy
the most unnecessary curiosity.
The distances at which different men can by Sight distinguish, with
some degree of precision, the situation of the tangible objects which
the visible ones represent, is very different; and this difference,
though it, no doubt, may sometimes depend upon some difference in the
original configuration of their eyes, yet seems frequently to arise
altogether from the different customs and habits which their
respective occupations have led them to contract. Men of letters, who
live much in their closets, and have seldom occasion to look at very
distant objects, are seldom far-sighted. Mariners, on the contrary,
almost always are; those especially who have made many distant
voyages, in which they have been the greater part of their time out of
sight of land, and have in daylight been constantly looking out
towards the horizon for the appearance of some ship, or of some
distant shore. It often astonishes a landsman to observe with what
precision a sailor can distinguish in the offing, not only the
appearance of a ship which is altogether invisible to the landsman,
but the number of her masts, the direction of her course, and the rate
of her sailing. If she is a ship of his acquaintance, he frequently
can tell her name, before the landsman has been able to discover even
the appearance of a ship.
{454} Visible objects, Colour, and all its different modifications,
are in themselves mere shadows or pictures, which seem to float, as it
were, before the organ of Sight. In themselves, and independent of
their connection with the tangible objects which they represent, they
are of no importance to us, and can essentially neither benefit us
nor hurt us. Even while we see them we are seldom thinking of them.
Even when we appear to be looking at them with the greatest
earnestness, our whole attention is frequently employed, not upon
them, but upon the tangible objects represented by them.
It is because almost our whole attention is employed, not upon the
visible and representing, but upon the tangible and represented
objects, that in our imaginations we arc apt to ascribe to the former
a degree of magnitude which does not belong to them, but which belongs
altogether to the latter. If you shut one eye, and hold immediately
before the other a small circle of plain glass, of not more than half
an inch in diameter, you may see through that circle the most
extensive prospects; lawns and woods, and arms of the sea, and distant
mountains. You are apt to imagine that the Landscape which is thus
presented to you, that the visible Picture which you thus see, is
immensely great and extensive. The tangible objects which this visible
Picture represents, undoubtedly are so. But the visible Picture which
represents them can be no greater than the little visible circle
through which you see it. If while you are looking through this
circle, you could conceive a fairy hand and a fairy pencil to come
between your eye and the glass, that pencil could delineate upon that
little glass the outline of all those extensive lawns and woods, and
arms of the sea, and distant mountains, in the full and the exact
dimensions with which they are really seen by the naked eye.
Every visible object which covers from the eye any other visible
object, must appear at least as large as that other visible object. It
must occupy at least an equal portion of that visible plain or surface
which is at that time presented to the eye. Opticians accordingly tell
us, that all the visible objects which are seen under equal angles
must to the eye appear equally large. But the visible object, which
covers from the eye any other visible object, must necessarily be seen
under angles at least equally large as those under which that other
object is seen. When I hold up my finger, however, before my eye, it
appears to cover the greater part of the visible chamber in which I am
sitting. It should therefore appear as large as the greater part of
that visible chamber. But because I know that the tangible finger
bears but a very small proportion to the greater part of the tangible
chamber, I am apt to fancy that the visible finger bears but a like
proportion to the greater part of the visible chamber. My judgment
corrects my eyesight, and, in my fancy, reduces the visible object,
which represents the little tangible one, below its real visible
dimensions; and, on the {455} contrary, it augments the visible object
which represents the great tangible one a good deal beyond those
dimensions. My attention being generally altogether occupied about the
tangible and represented, and not at all about the visible and
representing objects, my careless fancy bestows upon the latter a
proportion which does not in the least belong to them, but which
belongs altogether to the former.
It is because the visible object which covers any other visible object
must always appear at least as large as that other object, that
opticians tell us that the sphere of our vision appears to the eye
always equally large; and that when we hold our hand before our eye in
such a manner that we see nothing but the inside of the hand, we still
see precisely the same number of visible points, the sphere of our
vision is still as completely filled, the retina of the eye is as
entirely covered with the object which is thus presented to it, as
when we survey the most extensive horizon.
A young gentleman who was born with a cataract upon each of his eyes,
was, in one thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight, couched by Mr.
Cheselden, and by that means for the first time made to see
distinctly. 'At first,' says the operator, 'he could bear but very
little sight, and the things he saw he thought extremely large; but
upon seeing things larger, those first seen he conceived less, never
being able to imagine any lines beyond the bounds he saw; the room he
was in, he said, he knew to be but part of the house, yet he could not
conceive that the whole house would look bigger.' It was unavoidable
that he should at first conceive, that no visible object could be
greater, could present to his eye a greater number of visible points,
or could more completely fill the comprehension of that organ, than
the narrowest sphere of his vision. And when that sphere came to be
enlarged, he still could not conceive that the visible objects which
it presented could be larger than those which he had first seen. He
must probably by this time have been in some degree habituated to the
connection between visible and tangible objects, and enabled to
conceive that visible object to be small which represented a small
tangible object; and that to be great, which represented a great one.
The great objects did not appear to his sight greater than the small
ones had done before; but the small ones, which, having filled the
whole sphere of his vision, had before appeared as large as possible,
being now known to represent much smaller tangible objects, seemed in
his conception to grow smaller. He had begun now to employ his
attention more about the tangible and represented, than about the
visible and representing objects; and he was beginning to ascribe to
the latter the proportions and dimensions which properly belonged
altogether to the former.
As we frequently ascribe to the objects of Sight a magnitude and
proportion which does not really belong to them, but to the objects of
{456} Touch which they represent, so we likewise ascribe to them a
steadiness of appearance, which as little belongs to them, but which
they derive altogether from their connection with the same objects of
Touch. The chair which now stands at the farther end of the room, I am
apt to imagine, appears to my eye as large as it did when it stood
close by me, when it was seen under angles at least four times larger
than those under which it is seen at present, and when it must have
occupied, at least, sixteen times that portion which it occupies at
present, of the visible plain or surface which is now before my eyes.
But as I know that the magnitude of the tangible and represented
chair, the principal object of my attention, is the same in both
situations, I ascribe to the visible and representing chair (though
now reduced to less than the sixteenth part of its former dimensions)
a steadiness of appearance, which certainly belongs not in any respect
to it, but altogether to the tangible and represented one. As we
approach to, or retire from, the tangible object which any visible one
represents, the visible object gradually augments in the one case, and
diminishes in the other. To speak accurately, it is not the same
visible object which we see at different distances, but a succession
of visible objects, which, though they all resemble one another, those
especially which follow near after one another; yet are all really
different and distinct. But as we know that the tangible object which
they represent remains always the same, we ascribe to them too a
sameness which belongs altogether to it: and we fancy that we see the
same tree at a mile, at half a mile, and at a few yards distance. At
those different distances, however, the visible objects are so very
widely different, that we are sensible of a change in their
appearance. But still, as the tangible objects which they represent
remain invariably the same, we ascribe a sort of sameness even to them
too.
It has been said, that no man ever saw the same visible object twice;
and this, though, no doubt, an exaggeration, is, in reality, much less
so than at first view it appears to be. Though I am apt to fancy that
all the chairs and tables, and other little pieces of furniture in the
room where I am sitting, appear to my eye always the same, yet their
appearance is in reality continually varying, not only according to
every variation in their situation and distance with regard to where I
am sitting, but according to every, even the most insensible variation
in the altitude of my body, in the movement of my head, or even in
that of my eyes. The perspective necessarily varies according to all
even the smallest of these variations; and consequently the appearance
of the objects which that perspective presents to me. Observe what
difficulty a portrait painter finds, in getting the person who sits
for his picture to present to him precisely that view of the
countenance from which the first outline was drawn. The painter is
scarce ever completely satisfied with the situation of the face which
is presented to {457} him, and finds that it is scarcely ever
precisely the same with that from which he rapidly sketched the first
outline. He endeavours, as well as he can, to correct the difference
from memory, from fancy, and from a sort of art of approximation, by
which he strives to express as nearly as he can, the ordinary effect
of the look, air, and character of the person whose picture he is
drawing. The person who draws from a statue, which is altogether
immovable, feels a difficulty, though, no doubt, in a less degree, of
the same kind. It arises altogether from the difficulty which he finds
in placing his own eye precisely in the same situation during the
whole time which he employs in completing his drawing. This difficulty
is more than doubled upon the painter who draws from a living subject.
The statue never is the cause of any variation or unsteadiness in its
own appearance. The living subject frequently is.
The benevolent purpose of nature in bestowing upon us the sense of
seeing, is evidently to inform us concerning the situation and
distance of the tangible objects which surround us. Upon the knowledge
of this distance and situation depends the whole conduct of human
life, in the most trifling as well as in the most important
transactions. Even animal motion depends upon it; and without it we
could neither move, nor even sit still, with complete security. The
objects of sight, as Dr. Berkley finely observes, constitute a sort of
language which the Author of Nature addresses to our eyes, and by
which he informs us of many things, which it is of the utmost
importance to us to know. As, in common language, the words or sounds
bear no resemblance to the thing which they denote, so, in this other
language, the visible objects bear no sort of resemblance to the
tangible object which they represent, and of whose relative situation,
with regard both to ourselves and to one another, they inform us.
He acknowledges, however, that though scarcely any word be by nature
better fitted to express one meaning than any other meaning, yet that
certain visible objects are better fitted than others to represent
certain tangible objects. A visible square, for example, is better
fitted than a visible circle to represent a tangible square. There is,
perhaps, strictly speaking, no such thing as either a visible cube, or
a visible globe, the objects of sight being all naturally presented to
the eye as upon one surface. But still there are certain combinations
of colours which are fitted to represent to the eye, both the near and
the distant, both the advancing and the receding lines, angles, and
surfaces of the tangible cube; and there are others fitted to
represent, in the same manner, both the near and the receding surface
of the tangible globe. The combination which represents the tangible
cube, would not be fit to represent the tangible globe; and that which
represents the tangible globe, would not be fit to represent the
tangible cube. Though there may, therefore, be no resemblance between
visible and tangible {458} objects, there seems to be some affinity or
correspondence between them sufficient to make each visible object
fitter to represent a certain precise tangible object than any other
tangible object. But the greater part of words seem to have no sort of
affinity or correspondence with the meanings or ideas which they
express; and if custom had so ordered it, they might with equal
propriety have been made use of to express any other meanings or
ideas.
Dr. Berkley, with that happiness of illustration which scarcely ever
deserts him, remarks, that this in reality is no more than what
happens in common language; and that though letters bear no sort of
resemblance to the words which they denote, yet that the same
combination of letters which represents one word, would not always be
fit to represent another; and that each word is always best
represented by its own proper combination of letters. The comparison,
however, it must be observed, is here totally changed. The connection
between visible and tangible objects was first illustrated by
comparing it with that between spoken language and the meanings or
ideas which spoken language suggests to us; and it is now illustrated
by the connection between written language and spoken language, which
is altogether different. Even this second illustration, besides, will
not apply perfectly to the case. When custom, indeed has perfectly
ascertained the powers of each letter; when it has ascertained, for
example, that the first letter of the alphabet shall always represent
such a sound, and the second letter such another sound; each word
comes then to be more properly represented by one certain combination
of written letters or characters, than it could be by any other
combination. But still the characters themselves are altogether
arbitrary, and have no sort of affinity or correspondence with the
articulate sounds which they denote. The character which marks the
first letter of the alphabet, for example, if custom had so ordered
it, might, with perfect propriety, have been made use of to express
the sound which we now annex to the second, and the character of the
second to express that which we now annex to the first. But the
visible characters which represent to our eyes the tangible globe,
could not so well represent the tangible cube; nor could those which
represent the tangible cube, so properly represent the tangible globe.
There is evidently, therefore, a certain affinity and correspondence
between each visible object and the precise tangible object
represented by it, much superior to what takes place either between
written and spoken language, or between spoken language and the ideas
or meanings which it suggests. The language which nature addresses to
our eyes, has evidently a fitness of representation, an aptitude for
signifying the precise things which it denotes, much superior to that
of any of the artificial languages which human art and ingenuity have
ever been able to invent.
{459} That this affinity and correspondence, however, between visible
and tangible objects could not alone, and without the assistance of
observation and experience, teach us, by any effort of reason, to
infer what was the precise tangible object which each visible one
represented, if it is not sufficiently evident from what has been
already said, it must be completely so from the remarks of Mr.
Cheselden upon the young gentleman above-mentioned, whom he had
couched for a cataract. 'Though we say of this gentleman, that he was
blind,' observes Mr. Cheselden, 'as we do of all people who have ripe
cataracts; yet they are never so blind from that cause but that they
can discern day from night; and for the most part, in a strong light,
distinguish black, white, and scarlet; but they cannot perceive the
shape of any thing; for the light by which these perceptions are made,
being let in obliquely through aqueous humour, or the anterior surface
of the crystalline, (by which the rays cannot be brought into a focus
upon the retina,) they can discern in no other manner than a sound
eye can through a glass of broken jelly, where a great variety of
surfaces so differently refract the light, that the several distinct
pencils of rays cannot be collected by the eye into their proper foci;
wherefore the shape of an object in such a case cannot be at all
discerned though the colour may: and thus it was with this young
gentleman, who, though he knew those colours asunder in a good light,
yet when he saw them after he was couched, the faint ideas he had of
them before were not sufficient for him to know them by afterwards;
and therefore he did not think them the same which he had before known
by those names.' This young gentleman, therefore, had some advantage
over one who from a state of total blindness had been made for the
first time to see. He had some imperfect notion of the distinction of
colours; and he must have known that those colours had some sort of
connection with the tangible objects which he had been accustomed to
feel. But had he emerged from total blindness, he could have learnt
this connection only from a very long course of observation and
experience. How little this advantage availed him, however, we may
learn partly from the passages of Mr. Cheselden's narrative, already
quoted, and still more from the following:
'When he first saw,' says that ingenious operator, 'he was so far from
making any judgment about distances, that he thought all objects
whatever touched his eyes (as he expressed) as what he felt did his
skin; and thought no objects so agreeable as those which were smooth
and regular, though he could form no judgment of their shape, or guess
what it was in any object that was pleasing to him. He knew not the
shape of any thing, nor any one thing from another, however different
in shape or magnitude; but upon being told what things were, whose
form he before knew from feeling, he would carefully observe, that he
might know them again; but having too many {460} objects to learn at
once, he forgot many of them; and (as he said) at first learned to
know, and again forgot a thousand things in a day. One particular only
(though it may appear trifling) I will relate: Having often forgot
which was the cat and which was the dog, he was ashamed to ask; but
catching the cat (which he knew by feeling) he was observed to look at
her steadfastly, and then setting her down, said, So, puss! I shall
know you another time.'
When the young gentleman said, that the objects which he saw touched
his eyes, he certainly could not mean that they pressed upon or
resisted his eyes; for the objects of sight never act upon the organ
in any way that resembles pressure or resistance. He could mean no
more than that they were close upon his eyes, or, to speak more
properly, perhaps, that they were in his eyes. A deaf man, who was
made all at once to hear, might in the same manner naturally enough
say, that the sounds which he heard touched his ears, meaning that he
felt them as close upon his ears, or, to speak perhaps more properly,
as in his ears.
Mr. Cheselden adds afterwards: 'We thought he soon knew what pictures
represented which were showed to him, but we found afterwards we were
mistaken; for about two months after he was couched, he discovered at
once they represented solid bodies, when to that time, he considered
them only as party-coloured planes, or surfaces diversified with
variety of paints; but even then he was no less surprised, expecting
the pictures would feel like the things they represented, and was
amazed when he found those parts, which by their light and shadow
appeared now round and uneven, felt only flat like the rest; and asked
which was the lying sense, feeling or seeing?'
Painting, though, by combinations of light and shade, similar to those
which Nature makes use of in the visible objects which she presents to
our eyes, it endeavours to imitate those objects; yet it never has
been able to equal the perspective of Nature, or to give to its
productions that force and distinctness of relief and rejection which
Nature bestows upon hers. When the young gentleman was just beginning
to understand the strong and distinct perspective of Nature, the faint
and feeble perspective of Painting made no impression upon him, and
the picture appeared to him what it really was, a plain surface
bedaubed with different colours. When he became more familiar with the
perspective of Nature, the inferiority of that of Painting did not
hinder him from discovering its resemblance to that of Nature. In the
perspective of Nature, he had always found that the situation and
distance of the tangible and represented objects, corresponded exactly
to what the visible and representing ones suggested to him. He
expected to find the same thing in the similar, though inferior
perspective of Painting, and was disappointed when he found that the
visible and tangible objects had not, in this case, their usual
correspondence.
{461} 'In a year after seeing,' adds Mr. Cheselden, 'the young
gentleman being carried upon Epsom-downs, and observing a large
prospect, he was exceedingly delighted with it, and called it a new
kind of seeing.' He had now, it is evident, come to understand
completely the language of Vision. The visible objects which this
noble prospect presented to him did not now appear as touching, or as
close upon his eye. They did not now appear of the same magnitude with
those small objects to which, for some time after the operation, he
had been accustomed, in the little chamber where he was confined.
Those new visible objects at once, and as it were of their own accord,
assumed both the distance and the magnitude of the great tangible
objects which they represented. He had now, therefore, it would seem,
become completely master of the language of Vision, and he had become
so in the course of a year; a much shorter period than that in which
any person, arrived at the age of manhood, could completely acquire
any foreign language. It would appear too, that he had made very
considerable progress even in the two first months. He began at that
early period to understand even the feeble perspective of Painting;
and though at first he could not distinguish it from the strong
perspective of Nature, yet he could not have been thus imposed upon by
so imperfect an imitation, if the great principles of Vision had not
beforehand been deeply impressed upon his mind, and if he had not,
either by the association of ideas, or by some other unknown
principle, been strongly determined to expect certain tangible objects
in consequence of the visible ones which had been presented to him.
This rapid progress, however, may, perhaps, be accounted for from that
fitness of representation, which has already been taken notice of,
between visible and tangible objects. In this language of Nature, it
may be said, the analogies are more perfect; the etymologies, the
declensions, and conjugations, if one may say so, are more regular
than those of any human language. The rules are fewer, and those rules
admit of no exceptions.
But though it may have been altogether by the slow paces of
observation and experience that this young gentleman acquired the
knowledge of the connection between visible and tangible objects; we
cannot from thence with certainty infer, that young children have not
some instinctive perception of the same kind. In him this instinctive
power, not having been exerted at the proper season, may, from disuse,
have gone gradually to decay, and at last have been completely
obliterated. Or, perhaps (what seems likewise very possible), some
feeble and unobserved remains of it may have somewhat facilitated his
acquisition of what he might otherwise have found it much more
difficult to acquire a knowledge of.
That, antecedent to all experience, the young of at least the greater
part of animals possess some instinctive perception of this kind,
seems abundantly evident. The hen never feeds her young by dropping
the {462} food into their bills, as the linnet and thrush feed theirs.
Almost as soon as her chickens are hatched, she does not feed them,
but carries them to the field to feed, where they walk about at their
ease, it would seem, and appear to have the most distinct perception
of all the tangible objects which surround them. We may often see
them, accordingly, by the straightest road, run to and pick up any
little grains which she shows them, even at the distance of several
yards; and they no sooner come into the light than they seem to
understand this language of Vision as well as they ever do afterwards.
The young of the partridge and of the grouse seem to have, at the same
early period, the most distinct perceptions of the same kind. The
young partridge, almost as soon as it comes from the shell, runs about
among long grass and corn; the young grouse among long heath, and
would both most essentially hurt themselves if they had not the most
acute, as well as distinct perception of the tangible objects which
not only surround them but press upon them on all sides. This is the
case too with the young of the goose, of the duck, and, so far as I
have been able to observe, with those of at least the greater part of
the birds which make their nests upon the ground, with the greater
part of those which are ranked by Linnæus in the orders of the hen and
the goose, and of many of those long-shanked and wading birds which he
places in the order that he distinguishes by the name of Grallæ.
The young of those birds that build their nests in bushes, upon trees,
in the holes and crevices of high walls, upon high rocks and
precipices, and other places of difficult access; of the greater part
of those ranked by Linnæus in the orders of the hawk, the magpie, and
the sparrow, seem to come blind from the shell, and to continue so for
at least some days thereafter. Till they are able to fly they are fed
by the joint labour of both parents. As soon as that period arrives,
however, and probably for some time before, they evidently enjoy all
the powers of Vision in the most complete perfection, and can
distinguish with most exact precision the shape and proportion of the
tangible objects which every visible one represents. In so short a
period they cannot be supposed to have acquired those powers from
experience, and must therefore derive them from some instinctive
suggestion. The sight of birds seems to be both more prompt and more
acute than that of any other animals. Without hurting themselves they
dart into the thickest and most thorny bushes, fly with the utmost
rapidity through the most intricate forests, and while they are
soaring aloft in the air, discover upon the ground the insects and
grains upon which they feed.
The young of several sorts of quadrupeds seem, like those of the
greater part of birds which make their nests upon the ground, to enjoy
as soon as they come into the world the faculty of seeing as
completely as they ever do afterwards. The day, or the day after they
are dropped, the calf follows the cow, and the foal the mare, to the
field; and though {463} from timidity they seldom remove far from the
mother, yet they seem to walk about at their ease; which they could
not do unless they could distinguish, with some degree of precision,
the shape and proportion of the tangible objects which each visible
one represents. The degree of precision, however, with which the horse
is capable of making this distinction, seems at no period of his life
to be very complete. He is at all times apt to startle at many visible
objects, which, if they distinctly suggested to him the real shape and
proportion of the tangible objects which they represent, could not be
the objects of fear; at the trunk or root of an old tree, for example,
which happens to be laid by the roadside, at a great stone, or the
fragment of a rock which happens to lie near the way where he is
going. To reconcile him, even to a single object of this kind, which
has once alarmed him, frequently requires some skill, as well as much
patience and good temper in the rider. Such powers of sight, however,
as Nature has thought proper to render him capable of acquiring, he
seems to enjoy from the beginning, in as great perfection as he ever
does afterwards.
The young of other quadrupeds, like those of the birds which make
their nests in places of difficult access, come blind into the world.
Their sight, however, soon opens, and as soon as it does so, they seem
to enjoy it in the most complete perfection, as we may all observe in
the puppy and the kitten. The same thing, I believe, may be said of
all other beasts of prey, at least of all those concerning which I
have been able to collect any distinct information. They come blind
into the world; but as soon as their sight opens, they appear to enjoy
it in the most complete perfection.
It seems difficult to suppose that man is the only animal of which the
young are not endowed with some instinctive perception of this kind.
The young of the human species, however, continue so long in a state
of entire dependency, they must be so long carried about in the arms
of their mothers or of their nurses, that such an instinctive
perception may seem less necessary to them than to any other race of
animals. Before it could be of any use to them, observation and
experience may, by the known principle of the association of ideas,
have sufficiently connected in their young minds each visible object
with the corresponding tangible one which it is fitted to represent.
Nature, it may be said, never bestows upon any animal any faculty
which is not either necessary or useful, and an instinct of this kind
would be altogether useless to an animal which must necessarily
acquire the knowledge which the instinct is given to supply, long
before that instinct could be of any use to it. Children, however,
appear at so very early a period to know the distance, the shape, and
magnitude of the different tangible objects which are presented to
them, that I am disposed to believe that even they may have some
instinctive perception of this kind; though possibly in a much weaker
degree than the greater part {464} of other animals. A child that is
scarcely a month old, stretches out its hands to feel any little
plaything that is presented to it. It distinguishes its nurse, and the
other people who are much about it, from strangers. It clings to the
former, and turns away from the latter. Hold a small looking-glass
before a child of not more than two or three months old, and it will
stretch out its little arms behind the glass, in order to feel the
child which it sees, and which it imagines is at the back of the
glass. It is deceived, no doubt; but even this sort of deception
sufficiently demonstrates that it has a tolerably distinct
apprehension of the ordinary perspective of Vision, which it cannot
well have learnt from observation and experience.
Do any of our other senses, antecedently to such observation and
experience, instinctively suggest to us some conception of the solid
and resisting substances which excite their respective sensations,
though these sensations bear no sort of resemblance to those
substances?
The sense of Tasting certainly does not. Before we can feel the
sensation, the solid and resisting substance which excites it must be
pressed against the organs of Taste, and must consequently be
perceived by them. Antecedently to observation and experience,
therefore, the sense of Tasting can never be said instinctively to
suggest some conception of that substance.
It may, perhaps, be otherwise with the sense of Smelling. The young of
all suckling animals, (of the Mammalia of Linnæus,) whether they are
born with sight or without it, yet as soon as they come into the world
apply to the nipple of the mother in order to suck. In doing this they
are evidently directed by the Smell. The Smell appears either to
excite the appetite for the proper food, or at least to direct the
new-born animal to the place where that food is to be found. It may
perhaps do both the one and the other.
That when the stomach is empty, the Smell of agreeable food excites
and irritates the appetite, is what we all must have frequently
experienced. But the stomach of every new-born animal is necessarily
empty. While in the womb it is nourished, not by the mouth, but by the
navel-string. Children have been born apparently in the most perfect
health and vigour, and have applied to suck in the usual manner; but
immediately, or soon after, have thrown up the milk, and in the course
of a few hours have died vomiting and in convulsions. Upon opening
their bodies it has been found that the intestinal tube or canal had
never been opened or pierced in the whole extent of its length; but,
like a sack, admitted of no passage beyond a particular place. It
could not have been in any respect by the mouth, therefore, but
altogether by the navel-string, that such children had been nourished
and fed up to the degree of health and vigour in which they were born.
Every animal, while in the womb, seems to draw its nourishment, more
like a vegetable, from the root, than like an animal {465} from the
mouth; and that nourishment seems to be conveyed to all the different
parts of the body by tubes and canals in many respects different from
those which afterwards perform the same function. As soon as it comes
into the world, this new set of tubes and canals which the
providential care of Nature had for a long time before been gradually
preparing, is all at once and instantaneously opened. They are all
empty, and they require to be filled. An uneasy sensation accompanies
the one situation, and an agreeable one the other. The smell of the
substance which is fitted for filling them, increases and irritates
that uneasy sensation, and produces in the infant hunger, or the
appetite for food.
But all the appetites which take their origin from a certain state of
the body, seem to suggest the means of their own gratification; and,
even long before experience, some anticipation or preconception of the
pleasure which attends that gratification. In the appetite for sex,
which frequently, I am disposed to believe almost always, comes a long
time before the age of puberty, this is perfectly and distinctly
evident. The appetite for food suggests to the new-born infant the
operation of sucking, the only means by which it can possibly
gratifying that appetite. It is continually sucking. It sucks whatever
is presented to its mouth. It sucks even when there is nothing
presented to its mouth, and some anticipation or preconception of the
pleasure which it is to enjoy in sucking, seems to make it delight in
putting its mouth into the shape and configuration by which it alone
can enjoy that pleasure. There are other appetites in which the most
unexperienced imagination produces a similar effect upon the organs
which Nature has provided for their gratification.
The smell not only excites the appetite, but directs to the object
which can alone gratify that appetite. But by suggesting the direction
towards that object, the Smell must necessarily suggest some notion of
distance and externality, which are necessarily involved in the idea
of direction; in the idea of the line of motion by which the distance
can best be overcome, and the mouth brought into contact with the
unknown substance which is the object of the appetite. That the Smell
should alone suggest any preconception of the shape or magnitude of
the external body to which it directs, seems not very probable. The
sensation of Smell seems to have no sort of affinity or correspondence
with shape or magnitude; and whatever preconception the infant may
have of these, (and it may very probably have some such
preconception,) is likely to be suggested, not so much directly by the
Smell, and indirectly by the appetite excited by that Smell; as by the
principle which teaches the child to mould its mouth into the
conformation and action of sucking, even before it reaches the object
to which alone that conformation and action can be usefully applied.
The Smell, however, as it suggests the direction by which the external
{466} body must be approached, must suggest at least some vague idea
or preconception of the existence of that body; of the thing to which
it directs, though not perhaps of the precise shape and magnitude of
that thing. The infant, too, feeling its mouth attracted and drawn as
it were towards that external body, must conceive the Smell which thus
draws and attracts it, as something belonging to or proceeding from
that body, or what is afterwards denominated and obscurely understood
to be as a sort of quality or attribute of that body.
The Smell, too, may very probably suggest some even tolerably distinct
perception of the Taste of the food to which it directs. The
respective objects of our different external senses seem, indeed, the
greater part of them, to bear no sort of resemblance to one another.
Colour bears no sort of resemblance to Solidity, nor to Heat, nor to
Cold, nor to Sound, nor to Smell, nor to Taste. To this general rule,
however, there seems to be one, and perhaps but one exception. The
sensations of Smell and Taste seem evidently to bear some sort of
resemblance to one another. Smell appears to have been given to us by
Nature as the director of Taste. It announces, as it were, before
trial, what is likely to be the Taste of the food which is set before
us. Though perceived by a different organ, it seems in many cases to
be but a weaker sensation nearly of the same kind with that of the
Taste which that announces. It is very natural to suppose, therefore,
that the Smell may suggest to the infant some tolerably distinct
preconception of the Taste of the food which it announces, and may,
even before experience, make its mouth, as we say, water for that
food.
That numerous division of animals which Linnæus ranks under the class
of _worms_, have, scarcely any of them, any head. They neither
see nor hear, have neither eyes nor ears; but many of them have the
power of self-motion, and appear to move about in search of their
food. They can be directed in this search by no other sense than that
of Smelling. The most accurate microscopical observations, however,
have never been able to discover in such animals any distinct organ of
Smell. They have a mouth and a stomach, but no nostrils. The organ of
Taste, it is probable, has in them a sensibility of the same kind with
that which the olfactory nerves have in more perfect animals. They
may, as it were, taste at a distance, and be attracted to their food
by an affection of the same organ by which they afterwards enjoy it;
and Smell and Taste may in them be no otherwise distinguished than as
weaker or stronger sensations derived from the same organ.
The sensations of Heat and Cold, when excited by the pressure of some
body either heated or cooled beyond the actual temperature of our own
organs, cannot be said, antecedently to observation and experience,
instinctively to suggest any conception of the solid and resisting
substance which excites them. What was said of the sense of Taste may
very properly be said here. Before we can feel those sensations, {467}
the pressure of the external body which excites them must necessarily
suggest, not only some conception, but the most distinct conviction of
its own external and independent existence.
It may be otherwise, perhaps, when those sensations are either of them
excited by the temperature of the external air. In a calm day when
there is no wind, we scarcely perceive the external air as a solid
body; and the sensations of Heat and Cold, it may be thought, are then
felt merely as affections of our own body, without any reference to
any thing external. Several cases, however, may be conceived, in which
it must be allowed, I imagine, that those sensations, even when
excited in this manner, must suggest some vague notion of some
external thing or substance which excites them. A new-born animal,
which had the power of self-motion, and which felt its body, either
agreeably or disagreeably, more heated or more cooled on the one side
than on the other, would, I imagine, instinctively and antecedently to
all observation and experience, endeavour to move towards the side in
which it felt the agreeable, and to withdraw from that in which it
felt the disagreeable sensation. But the very desire of motion
supposes some notion or preconception of externality; and the desire
to move towards the side of the agreeable, or from that of the
disagreeable sensation, supposes at least some vague notion of some
external thing or place which is the cause of those respective
sensations.
The degrees of Heat and Cold which are agreeable, it has been found
from experience, are likewise healthful; and those which are
disagreeable, unwholesome. The degree of their unwholesomeness, too,
seems to be pretty much in proportion to that of their
disagreeableness. If either of them is so disagreeable as to be
painful, it is generally destructive; and, that, too, in a very short
period of time. Those sensations appear to have been given us for the
preservation of our own bodies. They necessarily excite the desire of
changing our situation when it is unwholesome or destructive; and when
it is healthy, they allow us, or rather they entice us, to remain in
it. But the desire of changing our situation necessarily supposes some
idea of externality; or of motion into a place different from that in
which we actually are; and even the desire of remaining in the same
place supposes some idea of at least the possibility of changing.
Those sensations could not well have answered the intention of Nature,
had they not thus instinctively suggested some vague notion of
external existence.
That Sound, the object of the sense of Hearing, though perceived
itself as in the ear, and nowhere but in the ear, may likewise,
instinctively, and antecedently to all observation and experience,
obscurely suggest some vague notion of some external substance or
thing which excites it, I am much disposed to believe. I acknowledge,
however, that I have not been able to recollect any one instance in
which this sense seems so distinctly to produce this effect, as that
of Seeing, that {468} of Smelling, and even that of Heat and Cold,
appear to do in some particular cases. Unusual and unexpected Sound
alarms always, and disposes us to look about for some external
substance or thing as the cause which excites it, or from which it
proceeds. Sound, however, considered merely as a sensation, or as an
affection of the organ of Hearing, can in most cases neither benefit
nor hurt us. It may be agreeable or disagreeable, but in its own
nature it does not seem to announce any thing beyond the immediate
feeling. It should not therefore excite any alarm. Alarm is always the
fear of some uncertain evil beyond what is immediately felt, and from
some unknown and external cause. But all animals, and men among the
rest, feel some degree of this alarm, start, are roused and rendered
circumspect and attentive by unusual and unexpected Sound. This
effect, too, is produced so readily and so instantaneously that it
bears every mark of an instinctive suggestion of an impression
immediately struck by the hand of Nature, which does not wait for any
recollection of past observation and experience. The hare, and all
those other timid animals to whom flight is the only defence, are
supposed to possess the sense of Hearing in the highest degree of
activeness. It seems to be the sense in which cowards are very likely
to excel.
The three senses of Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling, seem to be given to
us by Nature, not so much in order to inform us concerning the actual
situation of our bodies, as concerning that of those other external
bodies, which, though at some distance from us, may sooner or later
affect the actual situation, and eventually either benefit or hurt us.
----------
OF THE AFFINITY
BETWEEN CERTAIN
ENGLISH AND ITALIAN VERSES.
-----
THE measure of the verses, of which the octave of the Italians, their
terzetti, and the greater part of their sonnets, are composed, seems
to be as nearly the same with that of the English Heroic Rhyme, as the
different genius and pronunciation of the two languages will permit.
The English Heroic Rhyme is supposed to consist sometimes of ten, and
sometimes of eleven syllables: of ten, when the verse ends with a
single, and of eleven, when it ends with a double rhyme.
The correspondent Italian verse is supposed to consist sometimes of
{469} ten, sometimes of eleven, and sometimes of twelve syllables,
according as it happens to end with a single, a double, or a triple
rhyme.
The rhyme ought naturally to fall upon the last syllable of the verse;
it is proper likewise that it should fall upon an accented syllable,
in order to render it more sensible. When, therefore, the accent
happens to fall, not upon the last syllable, but upon that immediately
before it, the rhyme must fall both upon the accented syllable and
upon that which is not accented. It must be a double rhyme.
In the Italian language, when the accent falls neither upon the last
syllable, nor upon that immediately before it, but upon the third
syllable from the end, the rhyme must fall upon all the three. It must
be a triple rhyme, and the verse is supposed to consist of twelve
syllables:
_Forsè era ver, non però credìbile,_ &c.
Triple rhymes are not admitted into English Heroic Verse.
In the Italian language the accent falls much more rarely, either upon
the third syllable from the end of a word, or upon the last syllable,
than it does upon the one immediately before the last. In reality,
this second syllable from the end seems, in that language, to be its
most common and natural place. The Italian Heroic Poetry, therefore,
is composed principally of double rhymes, or of verses supposed to
consist of eleven syllables. Triple rhymes occur but seldom, and
single rhymes still more seldom.
In the English language the accent falls frequently upon the last
syllable of the word. Our language, besides, abounds in words of one
syllable, the greater part of which do (for there are few which do
not) admit of being accented. Words of one syllable are most
frequently the concluding words of English rhymes. For both these
reasons, English Heroic Rhyme is principally composed of single
rhymes, or of verses supposed to consist of ten syllables. Double
Rhymes occur almost as rarely in it, as either single or triple do in
the Italian.
The rarity of double rhymes in English Heroic Verse makes them appear
odd, and awkward, and even ludicrous, when they occur. By the best
writers, therefore, they are reserved for light and ludicrous
occasions; when, in order to humour their subject, they stoop to a
more familiar style than usual. When Mr. Pope says;
Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow;
The rest is all but leather or prunello;
he means, in compliance with his subject, to condescend a good deal
below the stateliness of his diction on the Essay on Man. Double
rhymes abound more in Dryden than in Pope, and in Butler's Hudibras
more than in Dryden.
The rarity both of single and of triple rhyme in Italian Heroic Verse,
gives them the same odd and ludicrous air which double rhymes have
{470} in English Verse. In Italian, triple rhymes occur more
frequently than single rhymes. The slippery, or if I may be allowed to
use a very low, but a very expressive word, the glib pronunciation of
the triple rhyme (_verso sotrucciolo_) seems to depart less from
the ordinary movement of the double rhyme, than the abrupt ending of
the single rhyme (_verso tronco e cadente_), of the verse that
appears to be cut off and to fall short of the usual measure. Single
rhymes accordingly appear in Italian verse much more burlesque than
triple rhymes. Single rhymes occur very rarely in Ariosto; but
frequently in the more burlesque poem of Ricciardetto. Triple rhymes
occur much oftener in all the best writers. It is thus, that what in
English appears to be the verse of the greatest gravity and dignity,
appears in Italian to be the most burlesque and ludicrous; for no
other reason, I apprehend, but because in the one language it is the
ordinary verse, whereas in the other it departs most from the
movements of ordinary verse.
The common Italian Heroic Poetry being composed of double rhymes, it
can admit both of single and of triple rhymes; which seem to recede
from the common movement on opposite sides to nearly equal distances.
The common English Heroic Poetry, consisting of single rhymes, it can
admit of double; but it cannot admit of triple rhymes, which would
recede so far from the common movements as to appear perfectly
burlesque and ridiculous. In English, when a word accented upon the
third syllable from the end happens to make the last word of a verse,
the rhyme falls upon the last syllable only. It is a single rhyme, and
the verse consists of no more than ten syllables: but as the last
syllable is not accented, it is an imperfect rhyme, which, however,
when confined to the second verse of the couplet, and even there
introduced but rarely, may have a very agreeable grace, and the line
may even seem to run more easy and natural by means of it:
Bùt of this fràme, the beàrings, and the tìes.
The strìct connèctions, nìce depèndencies, &c.
When by a well accented syllable in the end of the first line of a
couplet, it has once been clearly ascertained what the rhyme is to be,
a very slight allusion to it, such as can be made by a syllable of the
same termination that is not accented, may often be sufficient to mark
the coincidence in the second line; a word of this kind in the end of
the first line seldom succeeds so well:
Th' inhabitants of old Jerusalem
Were Jebusites; the town so called from them.
A couplet in which both verses were terminated in this manner, would
be extremely disagreeable and offensive.
In counting the syllables, even of verses which to the ear appear
sufficiently correct, a considerable indulgence must frequently be
given, {471} before they can, in either language, be reduced to the
precise number of ten, eleven, or twelve, according to the nature of
the rhyme. In the following couplet, for example, there are, strictly
speaking, fourteen syllables in the first line, and twelve in the
second.
And many a h[)u]mo[)u]rous, many an amorous lay,
Was sung by many a bard, on many a day.
By the rapidity, however, or, if I may use a very low word a second
time, by the glibness of the pronunciation, those fourteen syllables
in the first line, and those twelve in the second, appear to take up
the time but of ten ordinary syllables. The words _many a_, though
they plainly consist of three distinct syllables, or sounds, which are
all pronounced successively, or the one after the other, yet pass as
but two syllables; as do likewise these words, _h[)u]mo[)u]ro[)u]s_,
and _amorous_. The words _heaven_ and _given_, in the same manner,
consist each of them of two syllables, which, how rapidly so ever they
may be pronounced, cannot be pronounced but successively, or the one
after the other. In verse, however, they are considered as consisting
but of one syllable.
In counting the syllables of the Italian Heroic Verse, still greater
indulgences must be allowed: three vowels must there frequently be
counted as making but one syllable, though they are all pronounced,
rapidly indeed, but in succession, or the one after the other, and
though no two of them are supposed to make a diphthong. In these
licenses too, the Italians seem not to be very regular, and the same
concourse of vowels which in one place makes but one syllable, will in
another sometimes make two. There are even some words which in the end
of a verse are constantly counted for two syllables, but which in any
other part of it are never counted for more than one; such as the
words _suo_, _tuo_, _suoi_, _tuoi_.
Ruscelli observes, that in the Italian Heroic Verse the accent ought
to fall upon the fourth, the sixth, the eighth, and the tenth
syllables; and that if it falls upon the third, the fifth, the
seventh, or the ninth syllables, it will spoil the verse.
In English, if the accent falls upon any of the above-mentioned odd
syllables, it equally spoils the verse.
Bow'd their stiff necks, loaden with stormy blasts,
though a line of Milton, has not the ordinary movement of an English
Heroic Verse, the accent falls upon the third and sixth syllables.
In Italian frequently, and in English sometimes, an accent is with
great grace thrown upon the first syllable, in which case it seldom
happens that any other syllable is accented before the fourth;
_Cánto l'armé pietóse e'l capitáno._
Fírst in these fiélds I trý the sýlvan stráins.
Both in English and in Italian the second syllable may be accented
{472} with great grace, and it generally is so when the first syllable
is not accented:
_E in van l' inferno a' lui s' oppose; e in vano
S' armó d' Asia, e di Libia il popol misto,_ &c.
Let us, since life can little more supply
Than just to look about us, and to die, &c.
Both in English and in Italian Verse, an accent, though it must never
be misplaced, may sometimes be omitted with great grace. In the last
of the above-quoted English Verses there is no accent upon the eighth
syllable; the conjunction _and_ not admitting of any. In the
following Italian Verse there is no accent upon the sixth syllable:
_O Musa, tu, che di caduchi allori,_ &c.
The preposition _di_ will as little admit of an accent as the
conjunction _and_. In this case, however, when the even syllable
is not accented, neither of the odd syllables immediately before or
behind it must be accented.
Neither in English nor in Italian can two accents running be omitted.
It must be observed, that in Italian there are two accents, the grave
and the acute: the grave accent is always marked by a slight stroke
over the syllable to which it belongs; the acute accent has no mark.
The English language knows no distinction between the grave and the
acute accents.
The same author observes, that in the Italian Verse the Pause, or what
the grammarians call the Cesura, may with propriety be introduced
after either the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, or the
seventh syllables. The like observations have been made by several
different writers upon the English Heroic Verse. Dobie admires
particularly the verse in which there are two pauses; one after the
fifth, and another after the ninth syllable. The example he gives is
from Petrarch:
_Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade,_ &c.
In this verse, the second pause, which he says comes after the ninth
syllable, in reality comes in between the two vowels, which, in the
Italian way of counting syllables, compose the ninth syllable. It may
be doubtful, therefore, whether this pause may not be considered as
coming after the eighth syllable. I do not recollect any good English
Verse in which the pause comes in after the ninth syllable. We have
many in which it comes in after the eighth:
Yet oft, before his infant eyes, would run, &c.
In which verse there are two pauses; one after the second, and the
other after the eighth syllable. I have observed many Italian Verses
in which the pause comes after the second syllable.
Both the English and the Italian Heroic Verse, perhaps, are not so
{473} properly composed of a certain number of syllables, which vary
according to the nature of the rhyme; as of a certain number of
intervals, (of five invariably,) each of which is equal in length, or
time, to two ordinary distinct syllables, though it may sometimes
contain more, of which the extraordinary shortness compensates the
extraordinary number. The close frequently of each of those intervals,
but always of every second interval, is marked by a distinct accent.
This accent may frequently, with great grace, fall upon the beginning
of the first interval; after which, it cannot, without spoiling the
verse, fall any where but upon the close of an interval. The syllable
or syllables which come after the accent that closes the fifth
interval are never accented. They make no distinct interval, but are
considered as a sort of excrescence of the verse, and are in a manner
counted for nothing.
THE END.
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.
******************************
Transcriber's Note
Page numbers
Page numbers printed in the text are given within {}.
Footnotes
Most footnotes in the text are indicated by an asterisk. Here they are
numbered within each work and placed at the end of paragraph in which
they occur. One footnote in the first essay is numbered; it is here
given as 1*.
Diacritics
The only sign needing special mention is the breve used in the last
essay to indicate short syllables. On a "u", it is transcribed [)u].
Spelling Corrections
The following changes have been made to the printed text (usually with
reference to earlier editions). Corrected words are marked with two
asterisks preceding.
Page Printed text Correction
Biographical Notice
1757 1759 (by reference to
Stewart's full note)
8 The page numbers for the first essay are out by two (so e.g.
327-328 325-326 [not marked in text]
Of the Affinity etc. begins on 435, not 434 as in printed text
55 advantange advantage
88 acomplish accomplish
190 resposibility responsibility
224 the the the
243 acccording according
272 unpon upon
281 suppposed supposed
318 object objects
319 insteads instead
319 venisitis venistis
335 dis-disposed disposed
342 Democratus Democritus
343 such sphere such a sphere
353 same fame
356 perfector perfecter
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