INNATE IDEAS.—As for innate ideas, they are simply general ideas, which are general delusions. We believe, for instance, that every effect has a cause, or, to express it more correctly, that everything has a cause. What do we know about it? What do we see? That one thing follows another, succeeds to another. What tells us that the latter proceeds from the former, that the thing B must necessarily come, owing to the thing A existing? We believe it because every time the thing A has been, the thing B has come. Well, let us say that every time A has been (thus far) B has come; and say no more. There are regular successions, but we are completely ignorant whether there are causes for them.
THE LIBERTY AND MORALITY OF HUME.—It results from this that for Hume there is no liberty. Very obviously; for when we believe ourselves free, it is because we believe we can fix upon ourselves as a cause. Now the word "cause" means nothing. We are a succession of phenomena very absolutely determined. The proof is that we foresee and nearly always accurately (and we could always foresee accurately if we completely knew the character of the persons and the influences acting on them) what people we know will do, which would be impossible if they did as they wished. And I, at the very moment when I am absolutely sure I am doing such and such a thing because I desired to, I see my friend smile as he says: "I was sure you would do that. See, I wrote it down on this piece of paper." He understood me as a necessity, when I felt myself to be free. And he, reciprocally, will believe himself free in doing a thing I would have wagered to a certainty that he would not fail to do.
What system of morality can Hume have with these principles? First of all, he protests against those who should deduce from his principles the immorality of his system. Take care, said he wittily (just like Spinoza, by the way), it is the partisans of free-will who are immoral. No doubt! It is when there is liberty that there is no responsibility. I am not responsible for my actions if they have no connection in me with anything durable or constant. I have committed murder. Truly it is by chance, if it was by an entirely isolated determination, entirely detached from the rest of my character, and momentary; and I am only infinitesimally responsible. But if all my actions are linked together, are conditional upon one another, dependent on one another, if I have committed murder it is because I am an assassin at every moment of my life or nearly so, and then, oh! how responsible I am!
Note that this is the line taken up by judges, since they make careful investigation of the antecedents of the accused. They find him all the more culpable if he has always shown bad instincts.—Therefore they find him the more responsible, the more he has been compelled by necessity.—Yes.
Hume then does not believe himself "foreclosed" in morality; he does not believe he is forbidden by his principles to have a system of morality and he has one. It is a morality of sentiment. We have in us the instinct of happiness and we seek happiness; but we have also in us an instinct of goodwill which tends to make us seek the general happiness, and reason tells us that there is conciliation or rather concordance between these two instincts, because it is only in the general happiness that we find our particular happiness.
THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL: REID; STEWART.—The Scottish School (end of the eighteenth century) was pre-eminently a school of men who attached themselves to common sense and were excellent moralists. We must at any rate mention Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. They were bent especially on opposing the transcendent idealism of Berkeley and the scepticism of David Hume, also in some measure Locke's doctrine of the blank sheet. They reconstituted the human mind and even the world (which had been so to speak driven off in vapour by their predecessors), much as they were in the time of Descartes. Let us believe, they said, in the reality of the external world; let us believe that there are causes and effects; let us believe there is an ego, a human person whom we directly apprehend, and who is a cause; let us believe that we are free and that we are responsible because we are free, etc. They were, pre-eminently, excellent describers of states of the soul, admirable psychological moralists and they were the ancestors of the highly remarkable pleiad of English psychologists of the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER V. FRENCH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Voltaire a Disciple of Locke.