The Scottish Philosophy [241]
views as Calvin drew out of the Scriptures; but they appear with a more humane and benignant aspect, and with a more thorough conformity to the principles of man's nature.
In his philosophical works he unfolds and enforces a number of very important principles, not, it may be, absolutely original, but still fresh and independent in his statement and illustration of them, and setting aside error on the one side or other. His " Sketches of Moral and Mental Philosophy " cannot be said to be a full work on ethics, but it enforces great truths in a very impressive and eloquent way. He draws the distinction between mental and moral philosophy: the one has to do with, and the other with . He holds by the distinction between will and desire, maintaining that the former may be moral or immoral, whereas the latter is not. It seems to me that he has scarcely hit on the essential ethical distinction, which is not between will and desire, but between emotion and will; the latter of which may embrace not only volition, but wishes; in short, every thing optative, every thing in which is choice. He treats of the emotions, and shows that there is always a conception (the better expression is phantasm) involved in them. He dwells on the command which the will has over the emotions and of the morality of the emotions. Nothing is either virtuous or vicious unless the voluntary in some way intermingles with it; but then the will has influence over a vast number of the operations of the mind. " It may be very true that the will has as little to do with that pathological law by which the sight of distress awakens in my {402} bosom an emotion of pity, as with that other pathological law by which the sight of a red object impresses on my retina the sensation peculiar to that color; yet the will, though not the proximate, may have been the remote, and so the real cause both of the emotion and sensation notwithstanding. It may have been at the bidding of my will that, instead of hiding my self from my own flesh, I visited a scene of wretchedness, and entered within the confines, as it were, of the pathological influence, in virtue of which, after that the spectacle of suffering was seen, the compassion was unavoidable." He has very just remarks, propounded with great eloquence, on the final cause of the emotions.
His views on natural theology appeared first in the "Bridge water Treatise," on" The Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man." The feeling of admiration excited was mingled with disappointment. The bulk was too great for the matter, and the work had the appearance of a hasty recooking of his old thoughts which were grand in themselves, but were not formed into a duly proportioned whole. His arguments and his illustrations have a much better form given them in his subsequently published work, "Natural Theology." He begins with a discussion of the argument for the existence of God, and examines Samuel Clarke's " Demonstration." He objects that Clarke would make the test of a logical and mathematical truth to be also the test of a physical necessity in the existent state of actual nature, and that he confounds a logical with a physical impossibility. He turns to the argument, but is obliged, without his being aware of it, to call in an principle. "The doctrine of innate ideas in the mind is totally different from the doctrine of innate tendencies in the mind, which tendencies may be undeveloped till the excitement of some occasion have manifested or brought them forth." He proceeds, as every one must, in constructing the argument from design, on the principle of cause and effect, but identifies that principle with what is surely a different thing, -- with the expectation of a uniformity in the succession of events. At this point he draws the distinction, which has been accepted by J. S. Mill, and has ever since been identified with Chalmers's name, between the laws of matter and the collocations of matter. It is from the {403}
In his philosophical works he unfolds and enforces a number of very important principles, not, it may be, absolutely original, but still fresh and independent in his statement and illustration of them, and setting aside error on the one side or other. His " Sketches of Moral and Mental Philosophy " cannot be said to be a full work on ethics, but it enforces great truths in a very impressive and eloquent way. He draws the distinction between mental and moral philosophy: the one has to do with
His views on natural theology appeared first in the "Bridge water Treatise," on" The Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man." The feeling of admiration excited was mingled with disappointment. The bulk was too great for the matter, and the work had the appearance of a hasty recooking of his old thoughts which were grand in themselves, but were not formed into a duly proportioned whole. His arguments and his illustrations have a much better form given them in his subsequently published work, "Natural Theology." He begins with a discussion of the argument for the existence of God, and examines Samuel Clarke's " Demonstration." He objects that Clarke would make the test of a logical and mathematical truth to be also the test of a physical necessity in the existent state of actual nature, and that he confounds a logical with a physical impossibility. He turns to the argument, but is obliged, without his being aware of it, to call in an principle. "The doctrine of innate ideas in the mind is totally different from the doctrine of innate tendencies in the mind, which tendencies may be undeveloped till the excitement of some occasion have manifested or brought them forth." He proceeds, as every one must, in constructing the argument from design, on the principle of cause and effect, but identifies that principle with what is surely a different thing, -- with the expectation of a uniformity in the succession of events. At this point he draws the distinction, which has been accepted by J. S. Mill, and has ever since been identified with Chalmers's name, between the laws of matter and the collocations of matter. It is from the {403}