might still find a copy in the breast of more than one scribbler of politics and fashion. Mr. Moore might not think without a pang of the author of Rimini sitting at his ease with the author of Childe Harold; Mr. Hobhouse might be averse to see my dogged prose bound up in the same volume with his Lordship’s splendid verse, and assuredly it would not facilitate his admission to the Clubs, that his friend Lord Byron had taken the Editor of the Examiner by the hand, and that their common friend Mr. Moore had taken no active steps to prevent it!
Those who have the least character to spare, can the least afford to part with their good word to others: a losing cause is always most divided against itself. If the Whigs are fastidious, the Reformers are sour. If the first are frightened at the least breath of scandal, the last are disgusted with the smallest approach to popularity. The one desert you, if all men do not speak well of you: the other never forgive your having shaken off the incognito which they assume so successfully, or your having escaped from the Grub into the Butterfly state. The one require that you should enjoy the public favour in its newest gloss: with the other set, the smallest elegance of pretension or accomplishment is fatal. The Whigs never stomached the account of the ‘Characters of Shakespear’s Plays’ in the Quarterly: the Reformers never forgave me for writing them at all, or for being suspected of an inclination to the belles-lettres. ‘The Gods,’ they feared, ‘had made me poetical’; and poetry with them is ‘not a true thing.’ To please the one, you must be a dandy: not to incur the censure of the other, you must turn cynic. The one are on the alert to know what the world think or say of you: the others make it a condition that you shall fly in the face of all the world, to think and say exactly as they do. The first thing the Westminster Review did was to attack the Edinburgh. The fault of the one is too great a deference for established and prevailing opinions: that of the other is a natural antipathy to every thing with which any one else sympathises. They do not trim, but they are rivetted to their own sullen and violent prejudices. They think to attract by repulsion, to force others to yield to their opinion by never giving up an inch of ground, and to cram the truth down the throats of their starveling readers, as you cram turkeys with gravel and saw-dust. They would gain proselytes by proscribing all those who do not take their Shiboleth, and advance a cause by shutting out all that can adorn or strengthen it. They would exercise a monstrous ostracism on every ornament of style or blandishment of sentiment; and unless they can allure by barrenness and deformity, and convince you against the grain, think they have done nothing. They abjure Sir Walter’s novels and Mr. Moore’s poetry as light and frivolous: who but they! Nothing satisfies or gives them pleasure that does not give others pain: they scorn to win you by flattery and fair words; they set up their grim, bare idols, and expect you to fall down and worship them; and truth is with them a Sphinx, that in embracing pierces you to the heart. All this they think is the effect of philosophy; but it is temper, and a bad, sour, cold, malignant temper into the bargain. If the Whigs are too effeminate and susceptible of extraneous impressions, these underlings are too hard and tenacious of their own.[[71]] They are certainly the least amiable people in the world. Nor are they likely to reform others by their self-willed dogmatism and ungracious manner. If they had this object at heart, they would correct both (for true humanity and wisdom are the same), but they would rather lose the cause of human kind than not shock and offend while they would be thought only anxious to convince, as Mr. Place lost Mr. Hobhouse his first election by a string of radical resolutions, which so far gained their end.—One is hard-bested in times like these, and between such opposite factions, when almost every one seems to pull his own way, and to make his principles a stalking-horse to some private end; when you offend some without conciliating others; when you incur most blame, where you expected most favour; when a universal outcry is raised against you on one side, which is answered by as dead a silence on the other; when none but those who have the worst designs appear to know their own meaning or to be held together by any mutual tie, and when the only assurance you can obtain that your intentions have been upright, or in any degree carried into effect, is that you are the object of their unremitting obloquy and ill-will. If you look for any other testimony to it, you will look in vain. The Tories know their enemies: the People do not know their friends. The frown and the lightning glance of power is upon you, and points out the path of honour and of duty: but you can hope to receive no note of encouragement or approbation from the painted booths of Whig Aristocracy, or the sordid styes of Reform!
AN ESSAY ON THE PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN ACTION
TO WHICH ARE ADDED
SOME REMARKS ON THE SYSTEMS OF HARTLEY AND HELVETIUS
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Published anonymously in 1805 in one vol. 8vo (264 pp.) with the following title-page: ‘An Essay on the Principles of Human Action: Being an Argument in favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind. To which are added, Some Remarks on the Systems of Hartley and Helvetius. London: Printed for J. Johnson, No. 72 St. Paul’s Church-Yard. 1805.’ The volume was ‘printed by E. Hemsted, New-street, Fetter-lane.’ The last page contained a list of errata. These have been corrected in the present edition, which is a reprint verbatim of the first. A second edition was published in 1836 by the author’s son, in one vol. 8vo (176 pp.), the title-page of which runs as follows:—‘Essays on the Principles of Human Action; on the Systems of Hartley and Helvetius; and on Abstract Ideas. By the late William Hazlitt. Edited by his Son. “A work full of original remarks, and worthy a diligent perusal.” Bulwer’s England and the English. London: John Miller, 404 Oxford Street.’ The volume was printed by Walter Spiers, 399 Oxford Street. The Editor stated in an Advertisement that the new edition had been ‘considerably improved’ from marginal corrections in the author’s copy. The essay on Abstract Ideas, which had never before been published, will be included in a later volume of the present edition.
AN ARGUMENT
IN DEFENCE OF THE
NATURAL DISINTERESTEDNESS OF THE HUMAN MIND
It is the design of the following Essay to shew that the human mind is naturally disinterested, or that it is naturally interested in the welfare of others in the same way, and from the same direct motives, by which we are impelled to the pursuit of our own interest.
The objects in which the mind is interested may be either past or present, or future. These last alone can be the objects of rational or voluntary pursuit; for neither the past, nor present can be altered for the better, or worse by any efforts of the will. It is only from the interest excited in him by future objects that man becomes a moral agent, or is denominated selfish, or the contrary, according to the manner in which he is affected by what relates to his own future interest, or that of others. I propose then to shew that the mind is naturally interested in it’s own welfare in a peculiar mechanical manner, only as far as relates to it’s past, or present impressions. I have an interest in my own actual feelings or impressions by means of consciousness, and in my past feelings by means of memory, which I cannot have in the past, or present feelings of others, because these faculties can only be exerted upon those things which immediately and properly affect myself. As an affair of sensation, or memory, I can feel no interest in any thing but what relates to myself in the strictest sense. But this distinction does not apply to future objects, or to those impressions, which determine my voluntary actions. I have not the same sort of exclusive, or mechanical self-interest in my future being or welfare, because I have no distinct faculty giving me a direct present interest in my future sensations, and none at all in those of others. The imagination, by means of which alone I can anticipate future objects, or be interested in them, must carry me out of myself into the feelings of others by one and the same process by which I am thrown forward as it were into my future being, and interested in it. I could not love myself, if I were not capable of loving others. Self-love, used in this sense, is in it’s fundamental principle the same with disinterested benevolence.
Those who have maintained the doctrine of the natural selfishness of the human mind have always taken it for granted as a self-evident principle that a man must love himself, or that it is not less absurd to ask why a man should be interested in his own personal welfare, than it would be to ask why a man in a state of actual enjoyment, or suffering likes what gives him pleasure, and dislikes what gives him pain. They say, that no such necessity, nor any positive reason whatever can be conceived to exist for my promoting the welfare of another, since I cannot possibly feel the pleasures, or pains which another feels without first becoming that other, that our interests must be as necessarily distinct as we ourselves are, that the good which I do to another, in itself and for it’s own sake can be nothing to me. Good is a term relative only to the being who enjoys it. The good which he does not feel must be matter of perfect indifference to him. How can I be required to make a painful exertion, or sacrifice a present convenience to serve another, if I am to be nothing the better for it? I waste my powers out of myself without sharing in the effects which they produce. Whereas when I sacrifice my present ease or convenience, for the sake of a greater good to myself at a future period, the same being who suffers afterwards enjoys, both the loss and the gain are mine, I am upon the whole a gainer in real enjoyment, and am therefore justified to myself: I act with a view to an end in which I have a real, substantial interest. The human soul, continue some of these writers, naturally thirsts after happiness; it either enjoys, or seeks to enjoy. It constantly reaches forward towards the possession of happiness, it strives to draw it to itself, and to be absorbed in it. But as the mind cannot enjoy any good but what it possesses within itself, neither can it seek to produce any good but what it can enjoy: it is just as idle to suppose that the love of happiness or good should prompt any being to give up his own interest for the sake of another, as it would be to attempt to allay violent thirst by giving water to another to drink.
Now I can conceive that a man must be necessarily interested in his own actual feelings, whatever these may be, merely because he feels them. He cannot help receiving pain from what gives him pain, or pleasure from what gives him pleasure. But I cannot conceive how he can have the same necessary, absolute interest in whatever relates to himself, or in his own pleasures and pains, generally speaking, whether he feels them, or not. This kind of reasoning, which in itself is all along founded on a mere play of words, could not have gained the assent of thinking men but for the force with which the idea of self habitually clings to the mind of every man, binding it as with a spell, deadening it’s discriminating powers, and spreading the confused associations which belong only to past and present impressions over the whole of our imaginary existence. It therefore becomes difficult to separate ideas which have been thus knit together by custom, or ‘by a long tract of time, by the use of language, and want of reflection.’ If it were possible for a man’s particular successive interests to be all bound up in one general feeling of self-interest as they are all comprehended under the same word, self, or if a man on the rack really felt no more than he must have done from the apprehension of the same punishment a year before, there would be some foundation for this reasoning, which supposes the mind to have the same absolute interest in it’s own feelings both past, present, and to come. I say the sophism here employed consists in comparing the motives by which we are interested in the welfare of others with the mechanical impulses of self-love, as if because we are mechanically affected by the actual impression of objects on our senses in a manner in which we cannot be affected by the feelings of others, all our feelings with respect to ourselves must be of the same kind, and we could feel no interest in any thing but what was excited in the same way. It is plain we are not interested in our general, remote welfare in the same manner, or by the same necessity that we are affected by the actual sense of pleasure, or pain. We have no instinctive secret sympathy with our future sensations by which we are attracted either consciously or unconsciously to our greatest good; we are for the most part indifferent to it, ignorant of it. We certainly do not know, and we very often care as little what is to happen to ourselves in future: it has no more effect upon us in any way, than if it were never to happen. Were it not for this short-sightedness, and insensibility, where would be the use, or what would become of the rules of personal prudence?