The Scottish Philosophy [212]
physiological speculations, ground less, or at best uncertain." He was particularly struck with the shrewdness and graphic though homely illustrations of Tucker, who was always a great favorite with him. He criticises Bentham at considerable length. He blames him, in particular, for maintaining that, " because the principle of utility {357} forms a necessary part of every moral theory, it ought therefore to be the chief motive of human conduct." But he has not seized on the fundamental defect in Bentham's theory, for he himself has so far given in to it by reckoning tendency to produce happiness as the constituent of virtue. As setting so high a value on the social affections, he was specially offended with Mr. James Mill, who" derives the whole theory of government from the single fact that every man pursues his interest when he knows it."
Altogether, these sketches have not the calm wisdom nor some of the other admirable qualities of those drawn by Dugald Stewart, who had evidently devoted his life to the study, and contemplated the subject on all sides. But they are often searching, generally just, and always candid, sympathetic, and comprehensive.
He criticises the ethical writers, as we might expect, by a standard of his own, which is ever cropping out, and at the close of his dissertation he expounds his own theory. He insists, very properly, on a distinction being drawn between the inquiry into right and wrong, and into the mental power which discerns them. In answer to the first, he maintains that virtue consists in beneficial tendency, and to the second that it consists of a class of feelings gendered by association. In both these points, he goes a step in the descending progress beyond Brown, who makes moral good a simple unresolvable quality, and the feeling of moral approbation an original one. I propose to consider both these points in the reverse order to that which he follows.
(1) He lays down the principle that morality is not affected by the way in which we explain the rise of the moral emotion, whether we trace it to moral reason, to an original feeling, or to association. I am not prepared to give in to this. If it is to be ascribed with Brown to mere feeling, it will always be competent to argue that the distinction between good and evil depends on human temperament, and does not imply an original, a necessary, and eternal distinction between good and evil. If it is regarded with Mackintosh, as a mere feeling gendered by association, then it is simply the product of circumstances, and may shift with circumstances. It is vain on this theory to appeal, as Mackintosh would wish to do, to conscience as having {358} authority, and supreme authority; it has merely the authority of association, and cannot claim the authority of God, or even of our essential constitution. I rather think that Mackintosh would have shrunk from his doctrine, had he foreseen how physiologists, by means of heredity and undesigned natural selection, manufacture moral feeling out of animal sensations. The authority of conscience depends on the source from which it is derived.
According to Brown, conscience is a mere class of feelings, and Mackintosh follows him. But Mackintosh makes the feelings to be gendered by association. In order to support this theory, he is obliged to give to association a larger power than was given to it even by Brown. He correct, the erroneous but prevalent notion, that the law of association produces only such a close union of thought as gives one the power of reviving the other; " and insists that " it forms them into a new compound, in which the properties of the component parts are no longer discoverable, and which may itself become a substantive principle of human nature. They supposed the condition, produced by its power, to resemble that of material substances in a state of mechanical diffusion; whereas, in reality, it may be better likened to a chemical combination of the same substances from which a totally new product arises" (Sect.VII). But what does he mean by association?
Altogether, these sketches have not the calm wisdom nor some of the other admirable qualities of those drawn by Dugald Stewart, who had evidently devoted his life to the study, and contemplated the subject on all sides. But they are often searching, generally just, and always candid, sympathetic, and comprehensive.
He criticises the ethical writers, as we might expect, by a standard of his own, which is ever cropping out, and at the close of his dissertation he expounds his own theory. He insists, very properly, on a distinction being drawn between the inquiry into right and wrong, and into the mental power which discerns them. In answer to the first, he maintains that virtue consists in beneficial tendency, and to the second that it consists of a class of feelings gendered by association. In both these points, he goes a step in the descending progress beyond Brown, who makes moral good a simple unresolvable quality, and the feeling of moral approbation an original one. I propose to consider both these points in the reverse order to that which he follows.
(1) He lays down the principle that morality is not affected by the way in which we explain the rise of the moral emotion, whether we trace it to moral reason, to an original feeling, or to association. I am not prepared to give in to this. If it is to be ascribed with Brown to mere feeling, it will always be competent to argue that the distinction between good and evil depends on human temperament, and does not imply an original, a necessary, and eternal distinction between good and evil. If it is regarded with Mackintosh, as a mere feeling gendered by association, then it is simply the product of circumstances, and may shift with circumstances. It is vain on this theory to appeal, as Mackintosh would wish to do, to conscience as having {358} authority, and supreme authority; it has merely the authority of association, and cannot claim the authority of God, or even of our essential constitution. I rather think that Mackintosh would have shrunk from his doctrine, had he foreseen how physiologists, by means of heredity and undesigned natural selection, manufacture moral feeling out of animal sensations. The authority of conscience depends on the source from which it is derived.
According to Brown, conscience is a mere class of feelings, and Mackintosh follows him. But Mackintosh makes the feelings to be gendered by association. In order to support this theory, he is obliged to give to association a larger power than was given to it even by Brown. He correct, the erroneous but prevalent notion, that the law of association produces only such a close union of thought as gives one the power of reviving the other; " and insists that " it forms them into a new compound, in which the properties of the component parts are no longer discoverable, and which may itself become a substantive principle of human nature. They supposed the condition, produced by its power, to resemble that of material substances in a state of mechanical diffusion; whereas, in reality, it may be better likened to a chemical combination of the same substances from which a totally new product arises" (Sect.VII). But what does he mean by association?