abruptly with a half apology. Hume's attempt, indeed, was hopeless. The older philosophy had resolved feelings into beliefs. The passion, pride, for example, was identified with the conviction I am better than my neighbours.' Hume at once accepts a classification founded on this conception, and tries to get rid of the intellectual element implied. The attempt is contradictory. Pride, if pride be an elementary passion, must imply, at least, the intellectual processes necessary to frame some consciousness of myself and neighbours. Hume's effort to evade this conclusion is, at best, a display of wasted ingenuity. Human nature is compounded of too many elements, too intricately blended, for any offhand guesses of the cleverest philosopher to be of much value.

95. But the fact that Hume was not, and could not be, a scientific psychologist, does not destroy the value of his critical assault upon the ontologists. To confute the school of Clarke, little more was required than to show that ethics was not a branch of pure mathematics; for the truth and reality which they ascribed to morality were, on their showing, to be found in the mathematical world alone. Hume's criticism has a wider application. Morality, he says, in substance, cannot be deduced from absolute a priori truths, for it includes an empirical element. This follows from the fact that, if two men (or two races) shared the same intellectual convictions, the actions which resulted would vary according to their emotional compositions. The same truth which to the angelical nature would supply a motive for doing good, would supply to the diabolical nature a motive for doing evil. Hume, for this reason, compares the moral aspects of an action to the 'secondary' qualities. An action is seen as coloured by our emotions as the external world is known, and can only be known as it affects our senses. From the point of view of the earlier philosophy, this was to admit the unreality of vice and virtue, or, in a different phraseology, it would prove vice and virtue to be 'subjective.'

96. Hume's view of the passions as entirely independent of the intellect, and associated with certain objects by a tie in sense arbitrary, as indeed every causal tie is with

some

1 Hume's Works, ii. 245.

Hume arbitrary, might seem to sanction this conclusion. If our likes and dislikes might be indefinitely altered or inverted, there could be no science of human conduct. In fact, however, Hume's aim is precisely to discover such a science, but to prove simultaneously that it must be a science of observation. The passions, he says, form a 'regular mechanism,' which is as susceptible of scientific investigation as any branch of natural philosophy. Thus his argument virtually comes to the statement that a scientific morality would imply a psychology, and that psychology must be based upon experience alone. The relation is the same as that between sanitary and physiological science. The laws of moral as of physical health depend upon the structure of the organism, and the nature of that structure is only discoverable through the ordinary methods of scientific investigation. In this sense morality must include an empirical element, unless it be maintained that an a priori deduction of psychology is possible. The assumption of the possibility, to say nothing of the actual performance of such a deduction, depends upon the resolution of the passions into intellectual perceptions. If the passions are in some sense reason, there is some plausibility in attempting to frame an a priori scheme of psychological truths parallel to the so-called a priori scheme of mathematical truths. In that case, again, and in that case alone, morality would be in a sense capable of a priori deduction. We could not, indeed, even in that case, justify the identification of virtue and vice with truth and falsehood, or reason and error, implied in Clarke's substitution of ought' for 'is,' for that would be to show that bad actions were impossible as well as unusual, or to identify moral with scientific laws. But we might show that certain actions had always certain qualities or tendencies, which justified the moral distinction. That is to say, we might find an a priori justification for the utilitarian or 'moral sense' theories.

97. Meanwhile Hume is justified in declaring that morality must be based on experience if psychology be based on experience. We should amend his statement by adding that a complete science of morality would imply a science of sociology as well as of psychology, and requires a wider

Last sentence of Treatise on the Passions.'

and more systematic interrogation of experience than he had fully contemplated. There must be not only an empirical, but a variable, element in morality; and this is enough to condemn the hypothesis of Clarke. A scheme of morality deduced from self-evident and necessary truths must produce a code as rigid as its fundamental axioms, and, therefore, incapable of varying with the development of the race. Morality, on the other hand, includes in its primary data an element which varies, though, of course, varies according to definite laws. It must, therefore, give rules varying as the subject-matter varies; just as sanitary science gives one set of rules for men and another for beasts, and prescribes different conduct to a negro and a European. Hume did not fully appreciate this view, because, accepting from the ontologists the doctrine that human nature is always the same, he contemplated only a variation of external circumstances. As he, like all his contemporaries, failed to make allowance for the slow evolution of new social and intellectual conditions, the observed inconsistencies of the ethical code seemed to imply an almost indefinite variability of the moral sense.

98. If this be the true view of the relation between ethics on the one hand, and the sciences of psychology and sociology on the other, and if again, as is perfectly clear, no scientific psychology or sociology existed (even if they now exist) till long after the foundation of morality, one of two results must follow. Either the moral law is revealed by an instinct or inspired faculty, which can act independently of reason, or morality must be an empirical science; that is to say, it must have been discovered like other truths-by a series of experiments. As sanitary rules preceded physiology, ethical rules have preceded psychology. Was the moral law known by revelation, or by a special faculty, or was it explicable by some admitted and normal faculties of human nature? Hume's object is to answer this question by showing the possibility of the last alternative. The ground was already prepared. Innumerable moralists had proved that virtue produced happiness. Hutcheson, with whom Hume corresponded, had agreed, as we have seen, that the test of the morality was its tendency to produce happiness. The one necessary step was to get rid of the teleological view, and

to represent this tendency to produce happiness, not as a case of preordained harmony, but as a simple case of cause and effect. Those actions are good, said Hume, which are useful, and are good because and in so far as they are useful, not useful because they are good. The inversion was very simple, but so fruitful as to justify the complacency with which Hume concludes the enquiry. His doctrine seems to him so obvious, that it must have been long ago accepted, were there not some hidden objection to it. It explains the various puzzles which had led some to reject morality, and others to regard it as a mystery. Locke and Mandeville, for example, had insisted upon the variability of the moral standard in different ages and countries. Locke cuts the knot by introducing the divine law; Mandeville accepts the conclusion that the taste for chastity is as arbitrary as the taste for big buttons. Hume considers the same problem in the Dialogue which follows the 'Enquiry.' After pointing out with ingenious exaggeration the difference between the standard accepted in ancient Greece, in France, and in England, he asks how any fixed standard is discoverable? The answer is simple. By tracing matters a little higher, and examining the first principles which each nation establishes of blame and censure. The Rhine flows north, the Rhône south, yet both spring from the same mountain, and are also actuated in their opposite directions by the same principle of gravity.'' Utility is the moral force of gravitation. Qualities are admired as useful or agreeable. The many qualities admired by Greeks and Frenchmen were admired because useful both in Athens and Paris: the qualities approved by one nation and condemned by the other were differently judged because the different circumstances of distant regions and periods made qualities valuable in one country which were prejudicial in the other. The military virtues are more admired because more essential in times of disorder than in times of peace; and customs, such as those which determine the relations between the senses, will lead to corresponding varieties of moral sentiment.

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

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

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

2 Sermon viii. Dissertation on Nature of Virtue.'