I have thus far attempted to shew by a logical deduction that the human mind is naturally disinterested: I shall at present try to shew the same thing somewhat differently, and more in detail.
To suppose that the mind is originally determined in it’s choice of good and rejection of evil solely by a regard to self is to suppose a state of indifference to both, which would make the existence of such a feeling as self-interest utterly impossible. If there were not something in the very notion of good, or evil which naturally made the one an object of immediate desire and the other of aversion, it is not easy to conceive how the mind should ever come to feel an interest in the prospect of obtaining the one or avoiding the other. It is great folly to think of deducing our desire of happiness and fear of pain from a principle of self-love, instead of deducing self-love itself from our natural desire of happiness and fear of pain. This sort of attachment to self could signify nothing more than a foolish complacency in our own idea, an idle dotage, and idolatry of our own abstract being; it must leave the mind indifferent to every thing else, and could not have any connection with the motives to action, unless some one should chuse to make it the foundation of a new theory of the love of life and fear of death. So long as the individual exists, and remains entire, this principle is satisfied. As to the manner in which it exists, by what objects it shall be affected, whether it shall prefer one mode of being to another, all this is left undetermined. If then by self-love be meant a desire of one mode of being and aversion to another, or a desire of our own well-being, what is it that is to constitute this well-being? It is plain there must be something in the nature of the objects themselves which of itself determines the mind to consider them as desirable or the contrary previously to any reference of them to ourselves. They are not converted into good and evil by being impressed on our minds, but they affect our minds in a certain manner because they are essentially good or evil. How shall we reconcile this with supposing that the nature of those objects or their effect on the mind is entirely changed by their being referred to this or that person? I repeat it that self-interest implies certain objects and feelings for the mind to be interested in: to suppose that it can exist separately from all such objects, or that our attachment to certain objects is solely deduced from, and regulated by our attachment to self is plain, palpable nonsense.
Take the example of a child that has been burnt by the fire, and consequently conceives a dread of it. This dread we will say does not consist simply in the apprehension of the pain itself abstractedly considered, but together with this apprehension of pain he connects the idea (though not a very distinct one) of himself as about to feel it. Let us consider in what way the intervention of this idea can be supposed to cause or increase his dread of the pain itself. In the first place then it is evident that the fire actually burns the child, not because he is thinking of himself, or of it’s burning him, but because it is the nature of fire to burn and of the child’s hand to feel pain, and his dislike of the pain while it actually exists is the immediate, necessary and physical consequence of the sense of pain, surely not an indirect and reflex result of the child’s love to himself, or after-consideration that pain is an evil as it affects himself. Again I apprehend that after the actual pain has ceased, it continues to be thought of and is afterwards recollected as pain, or in other words, the feeling or sense of pain leaves a correspondent impression in the memory which adheres to the recollection of the object, and makes the child involuntarily shrink from it by the same sort of necessity, that is from the nature of the human mind and the recollected impression, and not from his referring it historically to his own past existence. In like manner I conceive that this idea of pain when combined by the imagination with other circumstances and transferred to the child’s future being will still retain its original tendency to give pain, and that the recurrence of the same painful sensation is necessarily regarded with terror and aversion by the child, not from it’s being conceived of in connection with his own idea, but because it is conceived of as pain.[[77]] It should also be remembered as the constant principle of all our reasonings, that the impression which the child has of himself as the subject of future pain is never any thing more than an idea of imagination, and that he cannot possibly by any kind of anticipation feel that pain as a real sensation a single moment before it exists. How then are we to account for his supposed exclusive attachment to this ideal self so as to make that the real source of the dislike and dread which the apprehension of any particular pain to be inflicted on himself causes in the mind? There are two ways in which this may at first sight appear to be satisfactorily made out. The first is from the notion of personal identity: this has been considered already and will be again considered by and by. The other is something as follows. The child having been burned by the fire and only knowing what the pain of a burn is from his recollecting to have felt it himself, as soon as he finds himself in danger of it again, has a very vivid recollection of the pain it formerly gave him excited in his mind; and by a kind of sudden transposition substituting this idea in the place of his immediate apprehension, in thinking of the danger to which he is exposed he confounds the pain he is to feel with that which he has already actually felt, and in reality shrinks from the latter. I mean that the child strongly recollects that particular sort of pain as it has affected himself, and as it is not possible for him to have a recollection of it’s effect on any one else, he only regards it as an evil in future in connection with the same idea, or as affecting himself, and is entirely indifferent to it as it is supposed to affect any one else. Or in other words he remembers being burnt himself as an actual sensation, and he does not remember the actual sensations of any one but himself: therefore being able to trace back his present feelings to his past impressions, and struck with the extreme faintness of the one compared with the other, he gives way to his immediate apprehensions and imaginary fears only as he is conscious of, and dreads, the possibility of their returning into the same state of actual sensation again.
I do not deny that some such illusion of the imagination as I have here attempted to describe begins to take place very soon in the mind, and continues to acquire strength ever after from various causes. What I would contend for (and this is all that my argument requires) is that it is and can be nothing more than an illusion of the imagination, strengthening a difference in subordinate, indirect, collateral circumstances into an essential difference of kind. The objection would indeed hold good if it were true that the child’s imaginary sympathy with the danger of another must be derived as it were in a kind of direct line from that other’s actual sense of past pain, or its immediate communication to his own senses, which is absurd. It is not supposed that the child can ever have felt the actual pains of another as his own actual pains, or that his sympathy with others is a real continuation and result of this original organic sympathy in the same way that his dread of personal pain is to be deduced from his previous consciousness of it. His sympathy with others is necessarily the result of his own past experience: if he had never felt any thing himself, he could not possibly feel for others. I do not know that any light would be thrown upon the argument by entering into a particular analysis of the faculty of imagination; nor shall I pretend to determine at what time this faculty acquires sufficient strength to enable the child to take a distinct interest in the feelings of others. I shall content myself with observing that this faculty is necessary to the child’s having any apprehension or concern about his own future interest, or that of others; that but for this faculty of multiplying, varying, extending, combining, and comparing his original passive impressions he must be utterly blind to the future and indifferent to it, insensible to every thing beyond the present moment, altogether incapable of hope, or fear, or exertion of any kind, unable to avoid or remove the most painful impressions, or to wish for or even think of their removal, to withdraw his hand out of the fire, or to move his lips to quench the most burning thirst; that without this faculty of conceiving of things which have not been impressed on his senses and of inferring like things from like, he must remain totally destitute of foresight, of self-motion, or a sense of self-interest, the passive instrument of undreaded pain and unsought-for pleasure, suffering and enjoying without resistance and without desire just as long as the different outward objects continued to act upon his senses, in a state of more than ideot imbecility; and that with this faculty enabling him to throw himself forward into the future, to anticipate unreal events and to be affected by his own imaginary interest, he must necessarily be capable in a greater or less degree of entering into the feelings and interests of others and of being consequently influenced by them. The child (by the time that his perceptions and actions begin to take any thing of a consistent form so that they can be made the subject of reasoning) being supposed to know from experience what the pain of a burn is, and seeing himself in danger a second time is immediately filled with terror, and strives either by suddenly drawing back his hand, catching hold of something, or by his cries for assistance to avoid the danger to which he is exposed. Here then his memory and senses present him with nothing more than certain external objects in themselves indifferent, and the recollection of extreme pain formerly connected with the same or similar objects. If he had no other faculties than these, he must stop here. He would see and feel his own body moved rapidly towards the fire, but his apprehensions would not outrun it’s actual motion: he would not think of his nearer approach to the fire as a consequence of the force with which he was carried along, nor dream of falling into the fire till he found it actually burning him. Even if it were possible for him to foresee the consequence, it would not be an object of dread to him; because without a reasoning imagination he would not and could not connect with the painted flame before him the idea of violent pain which the same kind of object had formerly given him by it’s actual contact. But in fact he imagines his continued approach to the fire till he falls into it; by his imagination he attributes to the fire a power to burn, he conceives of an ideal self endued with a power to feel, and by the force of imagination solely anticipates a repetition of the same sense of pain which he before felt. If then he considers this pain which is but an ideal sensation impressed on an ideal being as an object of real, present, necessary, and irresistible interest to him, and knowing that it cannot be avoided but by an immediate exertion of voluntary power, makes a sudden and eager effort to avoid it by the first means he can think of, why are we to suppose that the apprehension of the same pain to be inflicted on another whom he must believe to be endued with the same feelings, and with whose feelings he must be capable of sympathizing in the same manner as with his own imaginary feelings, should not affect him with the same sort of interest, the same sort of terrour, and impel him to the same exertions for his relief?[[78]]
Because, it is said, in his own case there is a natural deception, by which he confounds his future being with his past being, and the idea of a future imaginary pain with the recollection of a past conscious pain. At any rate, this must be unconsciously: if the sense of present danger acts so powerfully on his mind as to bring back the recollection of a past sensation, and set that before him in the place of the real object of his fear, so that, while he is endeavouring to avoid an immediate danger, he is in fact thinking only of past suffering without his perceiving this confusion of ideas, surely the same thing must take place in a less degree with respect to others. If it be thought necessary for him, before he can seek his own future interest, to confound it with his past interest by the violent transition of an immediate apprehension into the stronger recollection of an actual impression, then I say that by the same sort of substitution he will identify his own interest with that of others, whenever a like obvious danger recalls forcibly to his mind his former situation and feelings, the lenses of memory being applied in the one case to excite his sympathy and in the other to excite personal fear, the objects of both being in themselves equally imaginary and according to this hypothesis both perfectly indifferent. But I should contend that the assumption here made that the direct and proper influence of the imagination is insufficient to account for the effects of personal fear, or of no force at all in itself is without any foundation. For there is no reason to be shewn why the ideas of the imagination should not be efficient, operative, as well as those of memory, of which they are essentially compounded. Their substance is the same. They are of one flesh and blood. The same vital spirit animates them both. To suppose that the imagination does not exert a direct influence over human actions is to reject the plain inference from the most undoubted facts without any motive for so doing from the nature and reason of things. This notion could not have gained ground as an article of philosophical faith but from a perverse restriction of the use of the word idea to abstract ideas, or external forms, as if the essential quality in the feelings of pleasure, or pain, must entirely evaporate in passing through the imagination; and, again, from associating the word imagination with merely fictitious situations and events, that is, such as never will have a real existence, and as it is supposed never will, and which consequently do not admit of action.[[79]] Besides, though it is certain that the imagination is strengthened in its operation by the indirect assistance of our other faculties, yet as it is this faculty which must be the immediate spring and guide of action, unless we attribute to it an inherent, independent power over the will, so as to make it bend to every change of circumstances or probability of advantage, and a power at the same time of controuling the blind impulses of associated mechanical feelings, and of making them subservient to the accomplishment of some particular purpose, in other words without a power of willing a given end for itself, and of employing the means immediately necessary to the production of that end, because they are perceived to be so, there could be neither volition, nor action, neither rational fear nor steady pursuit of any object, neither wisdom nor folly, generosity or selfishness: all would be left to the accidental concurrence of some mechanical impulse with the immediate desire to obtain some very simple object, for in no other case can either accident or habit be supposed likely to carry any rational purpose into effect. To return however to what I have said above in answer to this objection, it is evident that all persons are more inclined to compassionate those pains and calamities in others by which they have been affected themselves, which proves that the operation of that principle, even supposing it to be the true one, is not confined to selfish objects. Our sympathy is always directly excited in proportion to our knowledge of the pain, and of the disposition and feelings of the sufferer. Thus with respect to ourselves we are little affected by the apprehension of physical pain which we have never felt and therefore can know little of; and we have still less sympathy with others in this case. Our incredulity and insensibility with respect to what others frequently suffer from the toothache and other incidental disorders must have been remarked by every one, and are even ludicrous from the excess to which they are carried. Give what account you will of it, the effect is the same;—our self-love, and sympathy depend upon the same causes, and constantly bear a determinate proportion to each other, at least in the same individual. The same knowledge of any pain, which increases our dread of it, makes us more ready to feel for others who are exposed to it. When a boy I had my arm put out of joint, and I feel a kind of nervous twitching in it to this day whenever I see any one with his arm bound up in consequence of a similar accident. This part of my subject has been so well detailed by Smith and others that it is needless to insist on it farther. There are certain disorders which have a disgusting appearance, that shock and force attention by their novelty; but they do not properly excite our sympathy, or compassion, as they would do if we had ever been subject to them ourselves. Children seem to sympathize more naturally with the outward signs of passion in others without inquiring into the particular causes by which it is excited, whether it is that their ideas of pain are more gross and simple, therefore more uniform and more easily substituted for each other, or that grown-up persons, having a greater number of ideas and being oftener able to sympathize with others from knowing what they feel, habitually make this knowledge the foundation of their sympathy.[[80]] In general it seems that those physical evils, which we have actually experienced, and which from their nature must produce nearly the same effect upon every one, must excite a more immediate and natural sympathy than those which depend on sentiment or moral causes. It is however neither so complete nor durable, as these last being the creatures of imagination, appeal more strongly to our sympathy, which is itself an act of the imagination than mere physical evils can ever do, whether they relate to ourselves or others. Our sympathy with physical evil is also a more unpleasant feeling, and therefore submitted to with more reluctance. So that it is necessary to take another circumstance into the account in judging of the quantity of our sympathy, besides the two above mentioned, namely, the nature of the pain or it’s fitness to excite our sympathy. This makes no difference in the question.
To say that the child recollects the pain of being burnt only in connection with his own idea, and can therefore conceive of it as an evil only with respect to himself, is in effect to deny the existence of any such power as the imagination. By the same power of mind which enables him to conceive of a past sensation as about to be re-excited in the same being, namely, himself, he must be capable of transferring the same idea of pain to a different person. He creates the object, he pushes his ideas beyond the bounds of his memory and senses in the first instance, and he does no more in the second. If his mind were merely passive in the operation, he would not be busy in anticipating a new impression, but would still be dreaming of the old one. It is of the very nature of the imagination to change the order in which things have been impressed on the senses, and to connect the same properties with different objects, and different properties with the same objects; to combine our original impressions in all possible forms, and to modify these impressions themselves to a very great degree. Man without this would not be a rational agent: he would be below the dullest and most stupid brute. It must therefore be proved in some other way that the human mind cannot conceive of or be interested in the pleasures or pains of others because it has never felt them.
The most subtle way of putting this objection is to represent the tendency of the child’s apprehension of danger to deter him from going near the fire as caused not simply by the apprehension or idea itself, which they say would never have strength enough for a motive to action, but by his being able to refer that idea to an actual sensation in his own mind, and knowing that with respect to himself it will pass into the same state of serious reality again, if he exposes himself to the same danger. Now here we have nothing but a reflection on a reflection. It is supposed that the direct idea of a terrible and well-known pain has no effect at all upon the mind, but that the idea of this idea as about to be converted into, or succeeded by the pain itself in the same conscious being will immediately excite the strongest efforts to prevent it. Certainly the near expectation of the object of your dread actually realized to the senses strengthens the fear of it; but it strengthens it through the imagination. Just as the knowing that a person whom you wished anxiously to see and had not seen for many years was in the next room would make you recal the impression of their face or figure almost with the same vividness and reality as if they were actually present. The force then with which the mind anticipates future pain in connection with the idea of continued consciousness can only tend to produce voluntary action by making the idea stronger: but it could not have this effect at all if it were not of the nature of all pain when foreseen by the mind to produce a tendency that way, that is to excite aversion, and a will to prevent it, however slight this may sometimes be. The sophism which lurks at the bottom of this last objection seems to be the confounding the idea of future pain as the cause or motive of action with the after-reflection on that idea as a positive thing, itself the object of action. Finding in many cases that the first apprehension and momentary fear of danger was gone by, but that the reason for avoiding it still remained the same, the mind would be easily led to seek for the true cause of action in something more fixed and permanent than the fleeting ideas of remote objects, and to require that every object whether of desire or aversion should have some stronger hold on the individual than it’s momentary effect on his imagination before it became an object of serious pursuit, or the contrary. But in rejecting the ideas of things as themselves the ultimate grounds and proper objects of action, and referring the mind to the things themselves as the only solid basis of a rational and durable interest, what do we do but go back to the first direct idea of the object, which as it represents that object is as distinct from any secondary reflection on, or oblique consciousness of, itself as an absolute thing, the object of thought, as a sensation can be different from an idea, or a present impression from a future one. There is nothing in the foregoing theory which has any tendency to overturn the fundamental distinctions between truth and falsehood, or the common methods of judging what these are: all the old boundaries and land-marks remain just where they were. It does not surely by any means follow because the reality of future objects can only be judged of by the mind, that therefore it has no power of distinguishing between the probable consequences of things, and what can never happen, that it is to take every impulse of will or fancy for truth, or because future objects cannot act upon the mind from without, that therefore our ideas cannot have any reference to, or properly represent those objects, or anything external to the mind, but must consist entirely in the conscious contemplation of themselves.
There is another feeling in a great measure the same with the former, but distinguishable from it and still more strongly connected with a sense of self-interest, namely, that of continued personal identity. This has been already treated of: I shall here resume the question once for all, as it is on this that the chief stress of the argument lies. The child seeing himself in danger of the fire does not think of his present and future self as two distinct beings, but as one and the same being: he as it were projects himself forward into the future, and identifies himself with his future being. He knows that he shall feel his own future pleasures and pains, and that he must therefore be as much interested in them as if they were present. In thinking of the future, he does not conceive of any change as really taking place in himself, or of any thing intermediate between his present and future being, but considers his future sensations as affecting that very same conscious being in which he now feels such an anxious and unavoidable interest. We say that the hand which the child snatches back from the fire is the same hand which but for his doing so would the next moment be exposed to the most excessive pain. But this is much more true of that inward conscious principle which alone connects the successive moments of our being together, and of which all our outward organs are but instruments, subject to perpetual changes both of action and suffering. To make the difference of time the foundation of an essential distinction and complete separation between his present and future being as if this were the only thing to be attended to, is to oppose an unmeaning sophism to plain matter of fact, since mere distance of time does not destroy individuality of consciousness. He is the same conscious being now that he will be the next moment, or the next hour, or a month or a year hence. His interests as an individual as well as his being must therefore be the same. At least this must be the case as long as he retains the consciousness of his past impressions connecting them together in one uniform or regular train of feeling: for the interruption of this sense of continued identity by sleep, inattention or otherwise seems from it’s being afterwards renewed to prove the point more clearly, as it seems to shew that there is some deep inward principle which remains the same in spite of all particular accidental changes.
The child does no doubt consider himself as the same being, or as directly and absolutely interested in his own welfare, as far as he can distinctly foresee the consequences of things to himself. But this very circumstance of his identifying himself with his future being, of feeling for this imaginary self as if it were incorporated with his actual substance, and weighed upon the pulses of his blood, is itself the strongest instance that can be given of the force of the imagination, which the advocates of the selfish hypothesis would represent as a faculty entirely powerless.
No one, I should think, will be disposed seriously to maintain that this future imaginary self is, by a kind of metaphysical transubstantiation, virtually embodied in his present being, so that his future impressions are indirectly communicated to him before-hand. For whatever we may imagine, or believe concerning the substance itself, or elementary principle in which thought is supposed to reside, it is plain that that principle as acted upon by external objects, or modified by particular actual thoughts and feelings (which alone can be the motives of action, or can impel the mind in this, or that direction) is perpetually changing; and it is also plain that the changes which it has to undergo at any time can have no possible effect on those which it has previously undergone, which may be the cause indeed but cannot be the effect of subsequent changes. In this sense the individual is never the same for two moments together. What is true of him at one time is never (that we know of) exactly and particularly true of him at any other time. It is idle to say that he is the same being generally speaking; that he has the same general interest. For he is also a man in general; and this argument would prove that he has a general interest in whatever concerns humanity. Indeed the terms mean nothing as applied to this question. The question is whether the individual is the same being in such sort or manner as that he has an equal, absolute interest in every thing relating to himself, or that his future impressions affect him as much and impel him to action with the same mechanical force as if they were actually present. This is so far from being true that his future impressions do not exert the smallest influence over his actions, they do not affect him mechanically in any degree. The catechism of this philosophy would run thus. You are necessarily interested in your future sensations? Yes. And why so? Because I am the same being. What do you mean by the same being? The same being is the same individual, that is, one who has the same interests, the same feelings, the same consciousness; so that whatever affects him at any one time must extend to his whole existence. He must therefore be at all times interested in it alike. Do you then feel your future sensations before they really exist? No. How then, if you do not feel them, can you be affected by them? Because as the same individual, &c. That is, by the very supposition, the pain which the child is to suffer does not exist, of course he does not feel it, nor can he be moved, affected or interested by it as if it did: and yet in the same breath, by a shrewd turn of logic it is proved that as he is the same being, he must feel, be interested in and affected by it as much as he ever will. But then it will as shrewdly follow that with this implication he is not the same being, for he cannot be affected in the same manner by an object before it is impressed on his senses that he is afterwards; and the fear or imaginary apprehension of pain is a different thing from the actual perception of it. There is just the same difference between feeling a pain yourself and believing that another will feel it.