in the forefront of that ethical argument itself. The following passage is as explicit on this point as any one could wish: 'Tis evident that, when we praise any actions, we regard only the motives that produce them, and consider the actions as signs or indications of certain principles in the mind. . . . It appears, therefore, that all virtuous actions derive their merit only from virtuous motives and are considered merely as signs of those motives.' 1

But if this be conceded-as Hume, entrenching himself in the common sense, the common conscience, of his day, is confident that it must be conceded-it follows that we cannot, at the same time, place any intrinsic merit in the action taken purely by itself. 'From this principle,' he continues, I conclude that the first virtuous motive which bestows a merit on any action can never be a regard to the virtue of that action, but must be some other motive or principle. . . . In short, it may be established as an undoubted maxim that no action can be virtuous, or morally good, unless there be in human nature some motive to produce it, distinct from the sense of its morality.

2

The latter part of the passage reveals a second reason which led Hume to dwell upon the importance of motives. A knowledge of the motive is necessary not only on moral grounds, as a means, and the only means, of distinguishing between virtuous and vicious actions; but also as a means, and the only means, of accounting for there being such a thing as action at all, for action as a purely natural phenomenon. If it is necessary for the purposes of the moralist, it is also, and no less, necessary for the purposes of the philosopher, of those who concern themselves with the natural history of the human mind. The significance of this, in both its aspects, will become apparent when we come on to consider Hume's doctrine of the 'moral sense.'

The first and chief purpose of Hume, in establishing these 'maxims,' was, no doubt, to bar the door against the doctrine that duty alone, duty pure and simple, can ever be a sufficient motive for the first performance of any action. Even allowing the idea of duty to have validity, we are still confronted with the fact that some other motive, some motive in human nature,' must have disposed us to the action, before we are in a position to ask ourselves

1 Morals, Part 11. § i.; Treatise, vol. ii. p. 252.

2 Treatise, ii. pp. 252-3.

3 Hume is careful to confine this to the first virtuous motive.' He freely admits that when a certain type of action is once generally recognised as a matter of duty, a man who feels his heart devoid of the motive appropriate to it,' may yet perform the action without the motive, from a certain sense of duty, in order to acquire by practice that virtuous principle, or at least to disguise to himself as much as possible his want of it (ib. p. 253).

whether it is in accordance with that idea, or no. More than that: we should still have to admit that, before we can pronounce the motive of any action to be good, or 'virtuous,' there must, quite apart from the question of obligation, be some natural feeling, some instinctive "sense,' which assures us that it is so. Or to put the same thing in other words, however much the idea of duty may have subsequently supervened, it can have played no part either in the first production' of the given act, or in our judgement that it is a good act: an act, that is, which springs from a 'virtuous

motive.'

But, if the main object of this argument was to exclude the idea of duty, as an original principle of human nature, there can be little doubt that Hume intended it to serve another, and a more special, purpose also: to strike a parting blow at Clarke and his eternal fitnesses.' To maintain that the virtue of an act lies in its own intrinsic nature, and to maintain in the same breath that it lies in the motive of the agent, is evidently, as Hume points out, to reason in a circle.' 1 And what school of moralists is more flagrantly guilty of this inconsistency than those who, starting from the principle that the standard of goodness is to be found in the eternal fitness of certain acts, yet never weary of telling us that the outward act has no significance except in so far as it reveals the workings of the agent's heart? The Gospel, no doubt, teaches us that the motive is all-important; that out of the heart the mouth speaketh. But when a man has once persuaded himself that the cause of religion is bound up with the eternal fitnesses, that nothing short of them can satisfy our faith in an all-wise Providence, he must be content to part company with the Gospel.

But if the doctrine of motives is fatal to the system of Clarke, it is still more fatal to that of the utilitarians. If it debars us from judging a man by his outward acts, still more does it debar us from judging him by their consequences. Between the outward act and the motive, the relation is fairly uniform; how else should we be justified in taking-as, on Hume's showing, we habitually do take the one for a sign,' or token, of the other? Between the motive and the consequence, however, there is no relation whatever. It is impossible to argue, either backwards or forwards, from the one to the other. The utilitarians themselves have been quick to perceive this; the first whisper of motive is enough to throw the most placid of them off his balance. It follows that any argument which denies the validity of judging by the act must, a fortiori, deny the validity of judging by its consequences. And as the validity, or rather the imperative necessity, of the latter judgement is the cardinal principle of the utilitarians, we must 1 Treatise, p. 253. For Clarke's moral doctrine cf. p. 308, n. 2.

conclude that Hume's argument tells with yet greater force against their system than against that of Clarke.

That Hume foresaw and intended this application of his argument, there is no need to maintain. All we can say is that, consciously or unconsciously, his system is so framed as to avoid the dangers which beset all other forms not only of the hedonist, but also of the utilitarian, theory of morals: in particular, to elude the snares into which the utilitarians of the next century and more allowed themselves to fall without a struggle. Whether this was due to deliberate foresight or, as is perhaps more likely, to an uncanny instinct, it would be rash to pronounce. In either case, it would be hard to find stronger proof of his clear-sightedness or sagacity.

Having thus, consciously or unconsciously, disposed of rival theories, Hume is now free to proceed with laying the foundations of his own. The problem before him, as we have seen, was, while retaining pleasure as the chief spring and actuating principle of the human mind' in these matters, to find some test, some means of distinguishing between good and evil, between virtuous and vicious, pleasures which should not involve the admission of some other actuating principle' behind and above pleasure. The champions of reason, he held, had gone wrong because they rejected pleasure, root and branch. The Cyrenaics had lost the battle because, preferring to put pleasure in the first place, they had ended by degrading it into the second. And the utilitarians, though they might choose a different road to it, were destined to reach substantially the same result. With all these danger signals in front of him, was it possible to discover some principle of discrimination which should not be reason, either avowed or masquerading under the clumsy alias of 'refinement,' or 'utility'? Was it possible, in short, to find some test of pleasure which should itself be nothing more than a special modification of the primary sense of pleasure?

Hume, at any rate, was confident that he had found it: found it in that modification of the general sense of pleasure which, adroitly availing himself of a term first brought into currency by Shaftesbury, he described as the 'moral sense.' 1 To Shaftesbury this term had meant the rational conviction, intuitively arrived at, which leads men to sacrifice their own personal interests to those of the society, large or small, of which they are members; to postpone the private order' to the 'public'; to subordinate the self to the common good. In other words, it had been practically equivalent to the sense of duty. To Hume it bears an entirely different meaning. To him, as to Shaftesbury, it is no doubt 1 Morals, 1. § ii.; Treatise, vol. ii. pp. 246-51.

an intuitive perception. But there the resemblance ends. To Shaftesbury it is a rational principle; to Hume, one of pure sensibility. To Shaftesbury it is a sense of duty; to Hume, a sense of pleasure. Pleasure, no doubt, of a particular kind'; but, in principle, nowise different from the pleasure which comes to us through the senses, or from the satisfaction of such passions as pride, benevolence, or love.

What then are the particular feelings involved, what the specific passions called into play, in the process which constitutes the moral sense? They are two: sympathy and, alternatively, either love or pride: love, if the action-or rather the qualities, the prevailing character, implied in the action-be contemplated in another; pride, if attributed to ourselves.1 Sympathy is required; for it is only by sympathy that we can enter into the feelings of another; that we can become aware of the feelings which are passing in his breast, either when he performs a given action himself, or when he witnesses its performance by us. And love, or pride, are the passions naturally and inevitably called forth, according as we either witness the performance of that action by others, or conceive of it as performed, or about to be performed, by ourselves.2

In those cases where we ourselves are about to act, it must be observed that sympathy has a yet further operation: that it performs, in short, a double function. On the one hand, just as in the simpler case where we merely contemplate the acts and motives of others, it serves to inform the agent what are the feelings actually entertained by those around him. On the other hand, blending with pride, it supplies him with the strongest possible motive to frame his own course accordingly. Where it is a question, not of determining our own action, but merely of contemplating that of others, this further operation is of necessity excluded. Yet even here, sympathy is not without its practical value; even here, it serves to quicken the moral sense, to keep it alert and vigorous against all future calls to action.

1 Morals, III. §i.; Treatise, vol. ii. pp. 334-8. It is significant that Hume does not come to close quarters with his analysis of the natural virtues and of the moral sense, which manifestly operates with the greatest purity in the natural virtues, until after he has disposed of the artificial virtues, those implied in the existence of organised society. This proves him to have clearly seen that even the 'private' virtues could never have arisen, or taken root, except in civil society: as he says himself, that our private duties are more dependent on our public duties, than our public on our private' (Morals, 11. § viii.; Treatise, ii. p. 310).

2 Hume's account of Sympathy is to be found in The Passions, 1. § xi. and II. §§ v.-vii.; of Pride, ib. 1. §§ i.-xii. (Treatise, ii. pp. 110-14; pp. 145157; PP. 75-120.

From this account it results that the moral act is that which is done, the moral character that which habitually finds outward expression, in response to, or in conformity with, the demands of which we are instinctively conscious either in ourselves, or in those around us; the immoral or vicious character, that which habitually defies them. Or to put the matter yet more simply, morality, in Hume's sense of the term, consists in doing what is expected of us by the public opinion of our community, or of those with whom for the moment we are brought in contact. The 'moral sense' is the faculty which intuitively, and on the mere view and contemplation,'1 informs us what those expectations actually are; and the passions through which the moral sense works, of which the moral sense is the joint expression, are sympathy and, alternatively, either pride or love.

This then is the theory by which Hume sought to account for the working of the moral consciousness; by which, in particular, he strove to provide a test, at once effective and natural, as between good and evil, between virtuous and vicious pleasures. It only remains to ask how far his venture prospered; how far he succeeded in satisfying the conditions which he accepted from the

start.

These conditions, as we have seen, may be reduced to three: the first, that the thing to be considered is not the outward act, but the motive which produces it; the second, that this motive must either be desire for pleasure or, when put in operation, must at least result in pleasure; and the third, that the principle by which we distinguish between good and evil pleasures must itself be some form of pleasure: the determining motive which leads us to seek the one and reject the other must be itself the desire for a particular kind of pleasure.'

Allowance being made for the complication, not to say the inconsistency, involved in the qualification attached to the second of these conditions, Hume may fairly claim, at least on the surface of the matter, to have satisfied all three. He does consistently base his argument, not on the outward act, but on the motive which produces it. He does consistently find that motive power-or, failing that, its inevitable consequence-in pleasure. And he does consistently find his discriminating test between good and evil pleasures in a principle which is itself a particular form of pleasure: the pleasure resulting to the agent from the sense that he is feeling and acting in 'sympathy' with those around him. Finally-but this is virtually implied in the statement that the moral sense, like all the other practical faculties of man, is itself a sense of pleasurehis discriminating test is a test which works not by reason, but by 1 Morals, 1. § ii. (Treatise, ii. p. 251); from the survey,' ib. p. 247.