that what was pleasure in the one has become self-interest, or utility, in the other; in one word, that he has passed from the hedonist camp into that of the utilitarians. But this makes little or no difference to the concessions which, in his candour, he feels called upon to make. In the one field, as in the other, he is constrained to admit the idea of duty. In the one field, as in the other, he is compelled, however little he may realise it, to allow the existence of a permanent self.

The latter concession, as we have seen, is by far the less important; and it may be despatched as swiftly as it was in connection with his moral theory. Indeed, but for the remarkable argument by which Hume supports his position, there would have been little need to dwell upon it at all.

On any rigorous interpretation, no doubt, it might fairly be contended that the mere establishment of permanent institutions— in other words, the bare existence of the State-implies the existence of a permanent self, capable of looking before and after, in the individuals who create them. So far as Hume is concerned, however, no such rigour is required. In face of his own arguments, it would be sheer labour lost. For what is the motive which he assigns for the establishment of Government and to attendant institutions? Briefly, it is that, after some experience of unorganised Society, men find that the security, which is the chief end of Society, is still grievously lacking. They discover without much difficulty that the cause of the evil is their own lack of self-control: their own deplorable habit of sacrificing their permanent interests to the passion of the moment, of 'preferring contiguous to remote.' They foresee that the only remedy for this evil is to make it the business of some person or persons to uphold those permanent interests on their behalf; and without fear or favour to punish any one, themselves included, who under stress of passion shall be perverse enough to resist. And they act accordingly.1

On this showing, the sole purpose for which Government is instituted is to save men from themselves. And they themselves are all the time acutely aware of it, or they would never have put themselves to all this trouble. In other words, every one concerned in the establishment of Government thinks of himself as a permanent subject, liable to incessant conflicts between passion and interest: or rather between the calm and sedate passions on the one hand and the violent, but fleeting, passions on the other. And it is in this permanent subject, not in that which receives passing impressions or is swept away by momentary passions, that he deliberately chooses to find his true self. Such is Hume's

1 Of Morals, 11. § vii. pp. 300-304.

argument; and as an admission of the reality of the permanent self, it must be allowed to be conclusive.

The other concession is a much more serious matter. While maintaining that the ultimate motive for obedience to Government is self-interest or utility,' Hume is equally ready to admit or rather, to insist-that the proximate motive, in the vast majority of cases, is a very different one: the sense of duty. He applies this argument impartially to both sides of the relation. On the one hand, he pleads, 'it is certain, as a plain matter of fact, that every one thinks he is under an obligation to submit to Government'; and for that very reason, if we accept the doctrine of the moral sense, it must at once be admitted that he is so. On the other hand, it is equally certain that no Government which ever existed has been willing to base its claims upon the interest, as represented by the voluntary consent, of the subject; that all of them have claimed his obedience as a matter not of choice, but of obligation; and the more nearly their title has approached to one of pure consent on the part of their subjects, the more eager have they shown themselves to veil the unwelcome truth under a fiction of legitimacy,' or even of divine right.' Hence the politic prevarications of Henry IV. and Henry VII., neither of whom was in fact anything more than a fortunate usurper, white-washed by Parliament after the event. Hence, he might have added, the like prevarications of Somers and others, when the crown was transferred from James to William at the Revolution.2

Thus, on both sides, Government is admitted to rest, for all practical purposes, not on the felt interest of the governed, but on their sense of duty to their appointed ruler. Or, to use Hume's technical terms, Allegiance, which took its rise as an artificial virtue, becomes in process of time hardly less of a natural virtue than clemency or benevolence. Like the natural virtues, it awakens, on the mere survey and contemplation,' an intuitive sense of pleasure; while the breach of it, whether by ourselves or others, arouses an equally instinctive feeling of uneasiness and displeasure. Like the natural virtues, therefore, it falls under the operation of the moral sense.3

It is quite true that the ultimate justification of such allegiance

1 Of Morals, II. § viii. (Of the Source of Allegiance); vol. ii. pp. 306-16; Essays, Part 11. xii. (Of the Original Contract); Essays, vol. i. pp. 444-542 See Macaulay's History of England, chap. x. (People's Edition, vol. i. pp. 634-50); and Burke, Reflections and Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.

3 The way for this assimilation between the natural and the artificial virtues had been paved by the plea that sympathy is, with some trifling qualifications, the source of both. See above, p. 352.

is to be found in the general sense of its advantage or utility; and that the reasoning which convinces us of this is so simple that almost any man is capable of understanding it. But, at bottom, much the same is true of the distinctively natural' virtues also. Even benevolence, for example, has come to be valued because it is demonstrably for the advantage of Society and all its members. And if the same cannot be said of the more exclusive qualities, such as wit and beauty-on Hume's showing, it would hardly be too much to call them virtues-at any rate the main source of the pleasure they give is to be found in the sense of the advantage which they bring to their possessors.1 Hence also, it may be added, the possibility and rightfulness of renouncing allegiance, when it is manifestly for the advantage of the community to do so; or the like possibility and rightfulness of refusing to perform a given act of benevolence when its performance would manifestly be against the general interest.

From all this it results that the difference between the natural and the artificial virtues is not so great as the opening stages of Hume's argument might have led us to suppose. In both, the immediate motive is furnished by the pleasure felt on the mere survey and contemplation. In both, this intuitive pleasure eventually translates itself into an equally intuitive sense of duty. And in both, the ultimate cause-whether of the pleasure, or the sense of duty which springs from it-is to be found in the belief that a given course of action, or rather the motive which habitually gives rise to it, is to the advantage of Society as a whole: is to be found, that is, in its expediency or utility. No doubt, the centre of gravity is not quite the same in the one virtue as in the other. With the natural virtues, the stress lies on the element of pleasure; with the artificial virtues, on the element of utility. But though differently mixed, the elements are the same. And, what mainly concerns us, the idea of duty follows, however mysteriously, in the one case as in the other. It plays a part only a shade less important in Hume's political, than it does in his moral, theory.

Some surprise may perhaps be felt that, when he allows so much to duty in respect of the relation between the Government and the governed, he should make no such allowance-none, at least, that he himself can be supposed to have intended-in respect of the yet more fundamental relation between one member of the community and the rest, between the individual members and the community as a whole. Yet, if the bond of duty is essential in the one case, it may well be thought to be still more essential in the other. The reason for this omission is, no doubt, to be found partly in the general temper of his time. Alike in theory and in 1 Of Morals, 11. §§ ix. x. (Of the Measures, Of the Objects, of allegiance.)

practice, the community had long counted for little or nothing; the State, perversely identified with the Government, was virtually all in all. A wider and truer view of the matter came only with Rousseau in the field of theory, with the French Revolution in that of practice.

The real cause of Hume's silence, however, clearly goes deeper than this. It was a necessity of his whole argument to assume that the idea of duty was a purely secondary idea, an idea arrived at only by a slow process of development: an idea, moreover, of more than doubtful legitimacy, however widely it may be accepted in fact. That being the case, it was possible for him, as a matter of origins, to admit that it was one of the motives which first drew men together in civil society. It was not easy, though it was not wholly impossible, for him to admit it to be one of the motives which come to hold the individual members together, when the community is once fully formed. For that would have been to admit a moral bond between man and man, a moral element in the life of the community, of a sort alien, if not to his intellectual principle, at least to his whole temperament and habits of mind. The nearest he comes to the former admission on the subject of origins is his plea that, on the first formation of society, it is not the individual, but the family, which is the unit; and that the process of 'co-alescence' is made the easier because the members of those families have already had their rough corners and untoward affections rubbed off-in other words, because they have already passed under a moral discipline, inseparably bound up with a sense of duty-while they were still in the state of nature. The nearest he comes to the latter admission is in his amended doctrine of sympathy, which, as we have seen, is not to be sustained unless, which Hume himself would steadfastly deny, it be held to contain a sense of obligation as between man and man, purely on the ground of their common humanity. Hume, however, makes no attempt to apply this doctrine to the community as distinguished from the individual, to the realm of politics as distinguished from that of morals. What is yet more decisive, neither in one case nor in the other, neither in what he says of the Family nor in what he says of Sympathy, does he ever admit the further implications which seem to lie behind the concessions he actually avows.

All this must be borne in mind when we speak of the part which Hume assigns to duty, alike in his political and his moral theory. Yet, when all deductions have been made, that part still remains a very considerable and, in view of the thesis which he was out to maintain, a very strange one. For it must never be forgotten that, in both theories alike, the idea of duty is a pure intruder; and that in neither theory does he make any effort to account for, still

less to justify, the intrusion. In dealing with the parallel idea of
cause and effect, he had at least made a feint of invoking the law
of association' as the channel through which the illicit inference
had insinuated itself into men's minds; though even here the
explanation misses fire, seeing that, unless the idea of causation were
already in the mind, no coincidence of two experiences in the
same order, however often repeated, could avail to suggest it.
But in the case of duty, no explanation whatever, good or bad, of
the mystery is offered. All we are told is that, when 'a particular
kind of pleasure' has been experienced sufficiently often, the mind
does, as a matter of fact, begin to attach to it the idea of duty.
No attempt is made to reduce the latter to the former.

No attempt

is therefore made to prove that the former expresses the real truth
of the matter, while the latter is no more than an illicit inference.
On the contrary, no Christian moralist could insist more forcibly
than Hume either on the necessity of duty or on the vast influence
which it wields upon motive and action. The idea is abruptly
Its effects are duly expounded. But how, or
thrown upon us.
why, it arose; how it sprang out of an idea so utterly opposed to it
as that of pleasure, or interest-all this is left a blank.1

And this from the man who plumed himself upon maintaining the principle of naturalism more rigorously than any of his predecessors; who at the beginning of his ethical discussion pledged himself, if not to exclude the idea of duty, at least to explain and account for its supervention: to give a reason for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation '—that of dutycan be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.' But let the great writer speak for himself:

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6

'I cannot forbear adding an observation which may perhaps be found of some importance. In every system of morality which

1 The nearest approach that Hume makes to indicating the process by which the idea of duty arose, or may have arisen, is the following: When men have found by experience that 'tis impossible to subsist without society, and that 'tis impossible to maintain society while they give free course to their appetites, so urgent an interest quickly restrains their actions and imposes an obligation to observe those rules, which we call the laws of justice. This obligation of interest rests not here; but, by the necessary course of the passions and sentiments, gives rise to the moral obligation of duty; while we approve of such actions as tend to the peace of society, and disapprove of such as tend to its disturbance.' Of Morals, 11. xi. (Of the Laws of Nations); vol. ii. p. 329. The same phrase, obligation of interest, occurs again, ib. 11. § viii. (Of the Source of Allegiance), P. 309. It is apparently the connecting link by which Hume slides into the acceptance of moral obligation. But the very phrase betrays a strange confusion of thought.