Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind

by James Mill

On a survey of the different theories of the mental origin of Benevolent impulses, we may reduce them under the following heads.

1. They have been ascribed to direct and immediate self-interest, either from the return of benefits in kind, or from the pleasure of praise and flattery. This is substantially the position of Mandeville.

2. It is said we are so constituted that the sight of misery is a pain to us; and that we work to rid ourselves of that pain, as we should work to assuage thirst, to banish toothache, or to escape reproach. This view was held by Hobbes. It is forcibly brought in in the following anecdote recorded of him by Aubrey (Lives II. p. 623).

“One time, I remember, goeing in the Strand, a poor and infirme old man begged his almes; he beholding him with eies of pitty and compassion, putt his hand in his pocket, and gave him 6d.; Sayd a divine [Dr. Jaspar Mayne] that stood by, ‘Would you have done this, if it had not been Christ’s Command?’ ‘Yea,’ sayd he: ‘Why?’ quoth the other; ‘Because,’ sayd he, ‘I was in paine to consider the miserable condition of the old man; and now my almes, giving him some relief, doth also ease me.’”

There is a certain amount of truth in this statement; and taking the fact by itself, we might find some difficulty in drawing the line between a volition moved by our own pain, and the acting out of the idea of pain in favour of the sufferer. The best reply, perhaps, is to compare the amount of pain incurred and of pleasure remitted or sacrificed by the sympathiser, with the utmost value fairly ascribable to his own mental pain. The pain of misery witnessed is frequent and habitual, and although it has a certain depressing effect upon the mind, yet we should generally bear it much more easily than the pains of self-sacrifice it often incites us to.

307 3. We may be endowed with a positive susceptibility to pleasure from acts of kindness to others; so that in doing good, we are still moved in exact proportion to our own gratification. This expresses very nearly Bentham’s view of Disinterestedness; which, however, equally with the foregoing, comes short of the facts. Supposing some such pleasure to exist, no one could show that in degree it fully corresponds to the effects prompted by benevolent impulse.

4. Habits of acting in favour of others may be formed to such an extent, that our virtuous actions, begun under our own pleasures and pains, may at last cease to have any reference to those pleasures and pains. Here, also, the appeal is to an undeniable fact of our mental constitution. Actions that begin as proper voluntary actions—on the spur of pleasure and pain—often pass into a mechanical routine, and are persisted in even when they thwart our pleasures. Any one placed for a number of years in a position of danger, and habituated to troublesome precautions, is almost sure to keep up the same routine, after the occasion has ceased; mothers are liable to this unreasonable continuance of solicitude about their children. The application of the fact to moral education is of great moment. If the young are initiated betimes into a regard to the feelings and interests of others, they will grow up with a sort of mechanical unquestioning tendency towards the same line of conduct.

These are the four different modes of stating the origin of disinterested conduct, apart from the assumption of a source of purely disinterested impulses in the constitution of the mind. Such a source has been indicated above, in what may be called the power of the “fixed idea,” having its seat in the region of the intellect, and operating to thwart the proper voluntary impulses, which are instigated by our pleasures and pains.—B.

I.

[⁵⁸] It had been pointed out, in a preceding [chapter], that Wealth, Power, Dignity, and many other things which are not 308 in their own nature pleasures, but only causes of pleasures and of exemption from pains, become so closely associated with the pleasures of which they are causes, and their absence or loss becomes so closely associated with the pains to which it exposes us, that the things become objects of love and desire, and their absence an object of hatred and aversion, for their own sake, without reference to their consequences. By virtue of the same law of association, it is pointed out in the present chapter that human actions, both our own and those of other people, standing so high as they do among the causes both of pleasure and of pain to us (sometimes by their direct operation, and sometimes through the sentiments they give birth to in other persons towards ourselves) tend naturally to become inclosed in a web of associated ideas of pleasures or of pains at a very early period of life, in such sort that the ideas of acts beneficial to ourselves and to others become pleasurable in themselves, and the ideas of acts hurtful to ourselves and to others become painful in themselves: and both kinds of acts become objects of a feeling, the former of love, the latter of aversion, which having, in our minds, become independent of any pleasures or pains actually expected to result to ourselves from the acts, may be truly said to be disinterested. It is no less obvious that acts which are not really beneficial, or not really hurtful, but which, through some false opinion prevailing among mankind, or some extraneous agency operating on their sentiments, incur their praise or blame, may and often do come to be objects of a quite similar disinterested love or hatred, exactly as if they deserved it. This disinterested love and hatred of actions, generated by the association of praise or blame with them, constitute, in the author’s opinion, the feelings of moral approbation and disapprobation, which the majority of psychologists have thought it necessary to refer to an original and ultimate principle of our nature. Mr. Bain, in the preceding note, makes in this theory a correction, to which the author himself would probably not have objected, namely, that the mere idea of a pain or pleasure, by whomsoever felt, is intrinsically painful or pleasurable, and when raised in 309 the mind with intensity is capable of becoming a stimulus to action, independent, not merely of expected consequences to ourselves, but of any reference whatever to Self; so that care for others is, in an admissible sense, as much an ultimate fact of our nature, as care for ourselves; though one which greatly needs strengthening by the concurrent force of the manifold associations insisted on in the author’s text. Though this of Mr. Bain is rather an account of disinterested Sympathy, than of the moral feeling, it is undoubtedly true that the foundation of the moral feeling is the adoption of the pleasures and pains of others as our own: whether this takes place by the natural force of sympathy, or by the association which has grown up in our mind between our own good or evil and theirs. The moral feeling rests upon this identification of the feelings of others with our own, but is not the same thing with it. To constitute the moral feeling, not only must the good of others have become in itself a pleasure to us, and their suffering a pain, but this pleasure or pain must be associated with our own acts as producing it, and must in this manner have become a motive, prompting us to the one sort of acts, and restraining us from the other sort. And this is, in brief, the author’s theory of the Moral Sentiments.