Note XXIX., page [229].
Chalmers and Bain on the Pleasure of Malevolence.
Dr Chalmers devotes a chapter of his 'Natural Theology' to the illustration of "the inherent pleasure of the virtuous, and misery of the vicious affections." I do not think the psychological doctrine of that chapter unexceptionable; but, at the same time, I cannot understand on what ground Prof. Bain imagines that it "implies doubts as to the genuineness of the pleasures of malevolence," and virtually denies that "the feeling of gratified vengeance is a real and indisputable pleasure."—See Emotions and the Will, pp. 187-189. The very passage which Prof. Bain quotes is quite inconsistent with this view. It is as follows: "The most ordinary observer of his own feelings, however incapable of analysis, must be sensible, even at the moment of wreaking the full indulgence of his resentment on the man who has provoked or injured him, that all is not perfect within; but that in this, and indeed in every other malignant feeling, there is a sore burden of disquietude, an unhappiness tumultuating in the heart, and visibly pictured in the countenance. The ferocious tyrant who has only to issue forth his mandate, and strike dead at pleasure the victim of his wrath, with any circumstance too of barbaric caprice and cruelty which his fancy, in the very waywardness of passion unrestrained and power unbounded, might suggest to him—he may be said through life to have experienced a thousand gratifications, in the solaced rage and revenge which, though ever breaking forth on some new subject, he can appease again every day of his life by some new execution. But we mistake it if we think otherwise than that, in spite of these distinct and very numerous, nay, daily gratifications, if he so choose, it is not a life of fierce internal agony notwithstanding."
The sentence which precedes these words leaves no doubt that Prof. Bain's interpretation of them is incorrect. "True, it is inseparable from the very nature of a desire, that there must be some enjoyment or other at the time of its gratification; but, in the case of these evil affections, it is not unmixed enjoyment." The following passage is, however, still more explicit: "There is a certain species of enjoyment common to all our affections. It were a contradiction in terms to affirm otherwise; for it were tantamount to saying, that an affection may be gratified without the actual experience of a gratification. There must be some sensation or other of happiness at the time when a man attains that which he is seeking for; and if it be not a positive sensation of pleasure, it will at least be the sensation of a relief from pain, as when one meets with the opportunity of wreaking upon its object that indignation which had long kept his heart in a tumult of disquietude. We therefore would mistake the matter if we thought that a state even of thorough and unqualified wickedness was exclusive of all enjoyment, for even the vicious affections must share in that enjoyment which inseparably attaches to every affection at the moment of its indulgence. And thus it is that even in the veriest Pandemonium might there be lurid gleams of ecstasy and shouts of fiendish exultation—the merriment of desperadoes in crime, who send forth the outcries of their spiteful and savage delight when some deep-laid villany has triumphed, or when, in some dire perpetration of revenge, they have given full satisfaction and discharge to the malignity of their accursed nature. The assertion, therefore, may be taken too generally, when it is stated that there is no enjoyment whatever in the veriest hell of assembled outcasts; for even there, might there be many separate and specific gratifications. And we must abstract the pleasure essentially involved in every affection at the instant of its indulgence, and which cannot possibly be disjoined from it, ere we see clearly and distinctively wherein it is that, in respect of enjoyment, the virtuous and vicious affections differ from each other. For it is true that there is a common resemblance between them; and that, by the universal law and nature of affection, there must be some sort of agreeable sensation in the act of their obtaining that which they are seeking after. Yet it is no less true that, did the former affections bear supreme rule in the heart, they would brighten and tranquillise the whole of human existence; whereas, had the latter the entire and practical ascendancy, they would distemper the whole man, and make him as completely wretched as he was completely worthless." Dr Chalmers, then, did not call in question the pleasures of malevolence.
Note XXX., page [232].
History of the Moral Proof.
Conscience has from the earliest times and among the rudest peoples exercised great influence in the formation of religious belief. Moral reasons weighed with men in their origination and elaboration of religion long before they expressed them in abstract propositions and logical forms. The historical proof of this truth is so ample that it would require a volume to do it justice: all literatures might be made to yield contributions to it.
The simplest form of the moral argument, and the one which has been most generally employed, is that of an inference from the moral law to a moral lawgiver. Closely associated with it are those forms which rest on the emotions involved in or accompanying virtue and guilt. These are the directest modes of exhibiting what Chalmers calls "the theology of conscience, which is not only of wider diffusion but of far more practical influence than the theology of academic demonstration."