1. In his speculation on morals, no less than on knowledge, Hume follows the lines laid down by Locke. With each there is a precise correspondence between the doctrine of nature and the doctrine of the good. Each gives an account of reason consistent at least in this that, as it allows reason no place in the constitution of real objects, so it allows it none in the constitution of objects that determine desire and, through it, the will. With each, consequently, the ‘moral faculty,’ whether regarded as the source of the judgments ‘ought and ought not,’ or of acts to which these judgments are appropriate, can only be a certain faculty of feeling, a particular susceptibility of pleasure and pain. The originality of Hume lies in his systematic effort to account for those objects, apparently other than pleasure and pain, which determine desire, and which Locke had taken for granted without troubling himself about their adjustment to his theory, as resulting from the modification of primary feelings by ‘associated ideas.’ ‘Natural relation,’ the close and uniform sequence of certain impressions and ideas upon each other, is the solvent by which in the moral world, as in the world of knowledge, he disposes of those ostensibly necessary ideas that seem to regulate impressions without being copied from them; and in regard to the one application of it as much as to the other, the question is whether the efficiency of the solvent does not depend on its secretly including the very ideas of which it seems to get rid.
Its relation to Locke: Locke’s account of freedom, will, and desire.
2. The place held by the ‘Essay concerning Human Understanding,’ as a sort of philosopher’s Bible in the last century, is strikingly illustrated by the effect of doctrines that only appear in it incidentally. It does not profess to be ethical treatise at all, yet the moral psychology contained in the chapter ‘of Power’ (II. 21), and the account of moral good and evil contained In the chapter ‘of other Relations’ (II. 28) furnished the text for most of the ethical speculation that prevailed in England, France, and Scotland for a century later. If Locke’s theory was essentially a reproduction of Hobbes’, it was yet in the form he gave it that it survived while Hobbes was decried and forgotten. The chapter on Power is in effect an account of determination by motives. More, perhaps, than any other part of the essay it bears the marks of having been written ‘currente calamo.’ In the second edition a summary was annexed which differs somewhat in the use of terms, but not otherwise, from the original draught. The main course of thought, however, is clear throughout. Will and freedom are at first defined in all but identical terms as each a ‘power to begin or forbear action barely by a preference of the mind’ (§§ 5, 8, 71). Nor is this identification departed from, except that the term ‘will’ is afterwards restricted to the ‘preference’ or ‘power of preference,’ while freedom is confined to the power of acting upon preference; in which sense it is pointed out that though there cannot be freedom without will, there may be will without freedom, as when, through the breaking of a bridge, a man cannot help falling into the water, though he prefers not to do so. ‘Freedom’ and ‘will’ being thus alike powers, if not the same power, it is as improper to ask whether the will is free as whether one power has another power. The proper question is whether man is free (§§ 14, 21), and the answer to this question, according to Locke, is that within certain limits he is free to act, but that he is not free to will. When in any case he has the option of acting or forbearing to act, he cannot help preferring, i.e. willing, one or other alternative. If it is further asked, What determines the will or preference? the answer is that ‘nothing sets us upon any new action but some uneasiness’ (§ 29), viz., the ‘most urgent uneasiness we at any time feel’ (§ 40), which again is always ‘the uneasiness of desire fixed on some absent good, either negative, as indolence to one in pain, or positive, as enjoyment of pleasure.’ In one sense, indeed, it may be said that the will often runs counter to desire, but this merely means that we ‘being in this world beset with sundry uneasinesses, distressed with different desires,’ the determination of the will by the most pressing desire often implies the counteraction of other desires which would, indeed, under other circumstances, be the most pressing, but at the particular time of the supposed action are not so.
Two questions: Does man always act from the strongest motive? and,
What constitutes his motive? The latter the important question:
Distinction between desires that are, and those that are not,
determined by the conception of self.
3. So far Locke’s doctrine amounts to no more than this, that action is always determined by the strongest motive; and only those who strangely hold that human freedom is to be vindicated by disputing that truism will care to question it. To admit that the strongest desire always moves action (there being, in fact, no test of its strength but its effect on action) and that, since every desire causes uneasiness till it is satisfied, the strongest desire is also the most pressing uneasiness, [1] is compatible with the most opposite views as to the constitution of the objects which determine desire. To understand that it is this constitution of the desired object, not any possible intervention of unmotived willing between the presentation of a strongest motive and action, which forms the central question of ethics, is the condition of all clear thinking on the subject. It is a question, however, which Locke ignores, and popular philosophy, to its great confusion, has not only continued to do the same, but would probably resent as pedantic any attempt at more accurate analysis. When we hear of the strongest ‘desire’ being the uniform motive to action, we have to ask, in the first place, whether the term is confined to impulses determined by a prior consciousness, or is taken to include those impulses, commonly called ‘mere appetites,’ which are not so determined, but depend directly and solely on the ‘constitution of our bodily organs.’ The appetite of hunger is obviously quite independent of any remembrance of the pleasure of eating, yet nothing is commoner than to identify with such simple appetite the desire determined by consciousness of some sort, as when we say of a drunkard, who never drinks merely because he is thirsty, that he is governed by his appetite. Upon this distinction, however, since it is recognised by current psychology, it is less important to insist than on that between the kinds of prior consciousness which may determine desire proper. Does this prior consciousness consist simply in the return of an image of past pleasure with consequent hope of its renewal, or is it a conception—the thought of an object under relations to self or of self in relation to certain objects—in a word, self-consciousness as distinct from simple feeling?
[1] Locke’s language in regard to ‘the most pressing uneasiness’ will not be found uniformly consistent. His usual doctrine is that the strength of a desire, as evinced by the resulting action, and the uneasiness which it causes are in exact proportion to each other. According to this view, desire for future happiness can only become a prevalent motive when the uneasiness which it causes has come to outweigh every other (Cf. Chap, xxi., Secs. 43 and 45). On the other hand, he sometimes seems to distinguish the desire for future pleasure from present uneasiness, while at the same time implying that it may be a strongest motive (Cf. sec. 65). But if so, it follows that there may be a strongest desire which is not the most pressing uneasiness. (See below, sec. 13.) Hume, distinguishing strong from violent desires, and restricting ‘uneasiness’ to the latter, is able to hold that it is not alone the present uneasiness which determines action. (Book II., part 3, sec. 3, sub fin.)
Effect of this conception on the objects of human desire.
4. Of desire determined in the former way we have experience, if at all, in those motives which actuate us, as we say, ‘unconsciously’; which means, without our attending to them—feelings which we do not fix even momentarily by reference to self or to a thing. As we cannot set ourselves to recall such feelings without thinking them, without determining them by that reference to self which we suppose them to exclude, they cannot be described; but some of our actions (such as the instinctive recurrence to a sweet smell), seem only to be thus accounted for, and probably those actions of animals which do not proceed from appetite proper are to be accounted for in the same way. But whether such actions are facts in human experience or no, those which make us what we are as men are not so determined. The man whom we call the slave of his appetite, the enlightened pleasure-hunter, the man who lives for his family, the artist, the enthusiast for humanity, are alike in this, that the desire which moves their action is itself determined not by the recurring image of a past pleasure, but by the conception of self. The self may be conceived of simply as a subject to be pleased, or may be a subject of interests, which, indeed, when gratified, produce pleasure but are not produced by it—interests in persons, in beautiful things, in the order of nature and society—but self is still not less the ‘punctum stans’ whose presence to each passing pleasure renders it a constituent of a happiness which is to be permanently pursued, than it is the focus in which the influences of that world which only self-conscious reason could constitute—the world of science, of art, of human society—must be regathered in order to become the personal interests which move the actions of individuals. It is in this self-consciousness involved in our motives, in that conversion into a conception by reference to self, which the image even of the merest animal pleasure must undergo before it can become an element in the formation of character, that the possibility of freedom lies. Without it we should be as sinless and as unprogressive, as free from remorse and aspiration, as incapable of selfishness and self-denial as the animals. Each pleasure would be taken as it came. We should have ‘the greatest happiness of which our nature is capable,’ without possibility of asking ourselves whether we might not have had more. It is only the conception of himself as a permanent subject to be pleased that can set man upon the invention of new pleasures, and then, making each pleasure a disappointment when it comes, produce the ‘vicious’ temper; only this that can suggest the reflection how much more pleasure he might have had than he has had, and thus produce what the moralists know as ‘cool selfishness’; only this, on the other hand, which, as ‘enlightened self-love,’ perpetually balances the attraction of imagined pleasure by the calculation whether it will be good for one as a whole. Nor less is it the conception of self, with a ‘matter’ more adequate to its ‘form,’ taking its content not from imagined pleasure, but from the work of reason in the world of nature and humanity, which determines that personal devotion to a work or a cause, to a state, a church, or mankind, which we call self-sacrifice.
Objects so constituted Locke should consistently exclude: But he finds room for them by treating every desire for an object, of which the attainment gives pleasure, as a desire for pleasure.
5. If, now, we ask ourselves whether Locke recognised this function of reason, as self-consciousness, in the determination of the will, the answer must be yes and no. His cardinal doctrine, as we have sufficiently seen, forbade him to admit that reason or thought could originate an object. The only possible objects with him are either simple ideas or resoluble into these, and the simple idea, as that which we receive in pure passivity, is virtually feeling. Now no combination of feelings (supposing it possible [1]) can yield the conception of self as a permanent subject even of pleasure, much less as a subject of social claims. It cannot, therefore, yield the objects, ranging from sensual happiness to the moral law, humanity, and God, of which this conception is the correlative condition. Thus, strictly taken, Locke’s doctrine excludes every motive to action, but appetite proper and such desire as is determined by the imagination of animal pleasure or pain, and in doing so renders vice as well as virtue unaccountable—the excessive pursuit of pleasure as well as that dissatisfaction with it which affords the possibility of ordinary reform. On the other hand, the same happy intellectual unscrupulousness, which we have traced in his theory of knowledge, attends him also here. Just as he is ready on occasion to treat any conceived object that determines sense as if it were itself a sensation, so he is ready to treat any object that determines desire, without reference to the work of thought in its construction, as if it were itself the feeling of pleasure, or of uneasiness removed, which arises upon satisfaction of the desire. In this way, without professedly admitting any motive but remembered pleasure—a motive which, if it were our only one, would leave ‘man’s life as cheap as beasts’’—he can take for granted any objects of recognised interest as accounting for the movement of human life, and as constituents of an utmost possible pleasure which it is his own fault if every one does not pursue.