It will be easy to perceive in this manner how notwithstanding the contradiction involved in the supposition of a general, absolute self-interest, the mind comes to feel a deep and habitual conviction of the truth of this opinion. Feeling in itself a continued consciousness of it’s past impressions, it is naturally disposed to transfer the same sort of identity and consciousness to the whole of it’s being, as if whatever is said generally to belong to itself must be inseparable from it’s very existence. As our actual being is constantly passing into our future being, and carries this internal feeling of consciousness along with it, we seem to be already identified with our future being in that permanent part of our nature, and to feel by anticipation the same sort of necessary sympathy with our future selves, that we know we shall have with our past selves. We take the tablets of memory, reverse them, and stamp the image of self on that, which as yet possesses nothing but the name. It is no wonder then that the imagination constantly outstripping the progress of time, when it’s course is marked out along the strait unbroken line of individuality, should confound the necessary differences of things, and confer on my future interests a reality, and a connection with my present feelings which they can never have. The interest which is hereafter to be felt by this continued conscious being, this indefinite unit, called me, seems necessarily to affect me in every part of my existence. In the first place, we abstract the successive modifications of our being, and particular temporary interests into one simple nature, and general principle of self-interest, and then make use of this nominal abstraction as an artificial medium to compel those particular actual interests into the same close affinity and union with each other, as different lines meeting in the same centre must have a mutual communication with each other.—On the other hand, as I always remain perfectly distinct from others, the interest which I take in their past or present feelings being (like that which I take in their future feelings) never any thing more than the effect of imagination and sympathy, the same illusion and preposterous transposition of ideas cannot take place with regard to them, namely the confounding a physical impulse with the rational motives of action. Indeed the uniform nature of my feelings with respect to others (my interest in their welfare having always the same source, sympathy) seems by analogy to confirm the supposition of a similar simplicity in my relation to myself, and of a positive, natural, absolute interest in whatever relates to that self, not confined to my actual existence, but extending over the whole of my being. Every sensation that I feel, or that afterwards recurs vividly to my memory strengthens the sense of self, which increased strength in the mechanical feeling is transferred to the general idea, and to my remote, future, imaginary interest: whereas our sympathy with the feelings of others being always imaginary, having no sensible interest, no restless mechanical impulse to urge it on, the ties by which we are bound to others hang loose upon us, the interest we take in their welfare seems to be something foreign to our own bosoms, to be transient, arbitrary, and directly opposite to the necessary, absolute, permanent interest which we have in the pursuit of our own welfare.
There is however another consideration (and that the principal) to be taken into the account in explaining the origin and growth of our selfish feelings, arising out of the necessary constitution of the human mind, and not founded like the former in a mere arbitrary association of ideas. There is naturally no essential difference between the motives by which I am impelled to the pursuit of my own good and those by which I am impelled to pursue the good of others: but though there is not a difference in kind, there is one in degree. I know better what my future feelings will be than what those of others will be in the like case. I can apply the materials of memory with less difficulty and more in a mass in making out the picture of my future pleasures and pains, without frittering them away or destroying their original sharpnesses, in short I can imagine them more plainly and must therefore be more interested in them. This facility in passing from the recollection of my past impressions to the imagination of my future ones makes the transition almost imperceptible, and gives to the latter an apparent reality and presentness to the imagination, so that the feelings of others can never be brought home to us to the same degree. It is chiefly from this greater readiness and certainty with which we can look forward into our own minds than out of us into those of other men, that that strong and uneasy attachment to self which comes at last (in most minds) to overpower every generous feeling takes it’s rise, not, as I think I have shewn, from any natural hardness of the human heart, or necessary absorption of all it’s thoughts and purposes in an exclusive feeling of self-interest.
It confirms the account here given that we always feel for others in proportion as we know from long acquaintance what the nature of their feelings is, and that next to ourselves we have the strongest attachment to our immediate relatives and friends, who from this intercommunity of feelings and situations may more truly be said to be a part of ourselves than from the ties of blood. Moreover a man must be employed more continually in providing for his own wants and pleasures than those of others. In like manner he is employed in providing for the immediate welfare of his family and connections much more than in providing for the welfare of those, who are not bound to him by any positive ties. And we consequently find that the attention, time and pains bestowed on these several objects give him a proportionable degree of anxiety about, and attachment to his own interest and that of those connected with him, but it would be absurd to conclude that his affections are therefore circumscribed by a natural necessity within certain limits which they cannot pass, either in the one case, or in the other. This general connection between the pursuit of any object and our habitual interest in it will also account for the well-known observation that the affection of parents to children is the strongest of all others, frequently even overpowering self-love itself. This fact is however inconsistent with the supposition that the social affections are all of them ultimately to be deduced from association, or the repeated connection of the idea of some other person with immediate selfish gratification. If this were the case, we must feel the strongest attachment to those from whom we had received, instead of those to whom we had done the greatest number of kindnesses, or where the greatest quantity of selfish enjoyment had been associated with an indifferent idea. Junius has remarked, that friendship is not conciliated ‘by the power of conferring benefits, but the equality with which they are received, and may be returned.’
I have hitherto purposely avoided saying any thing on the subject of our physical appetites, and the manner in which they may be thought to affect the principle of the foregoing reasonings. They evidently seem at first sight to contradict the general conclusion which I have endeavoured to establish, as they all of them tend either exclusively or principally to the gratification of the individual, and at the same time refer to some future or imaginary object as the source of this gratification. The impulse which they give to the will is mechanical, and yet this impulse, blind as it is, constantly tends to, and coalesces with the pursuit of some rational end. That is, here is an end aimed at, the desire and regular pursuit of a known good, and all this produced by motives evidently mechanical, and which never impel the mind but in a selfish direction. It makes no difference in the question whether the active impulse proceeds directly from the desire of positive enjoyment, or a wish to get rid of some positive uneasiness. I should say then that setting aside what is of a purely physical, or (for aught I can tell) instinctive nature in the case, the influence of appetite over our volitions may be accounted for consistently enough with the foregoing hypothesis from the natural effects of a particularly irritable state of bodily feeling, rendering the idea of that which will heighten and gratify it’s susceptibility of pleasurable feeling, or remove some painful feeling proportionably vivid, and the object of a more vehement desire than can be excited by the same idea, when the body is supposed to be in a state of indifference, or only ordinary sensibility to that particular kind of gratification. Thus the imaginary desire is sharpened by constantly receiving fresh supplies of pungency from the irritation of bodily feeling, and it’s direction is at the same time determined according to the bias of this new impulse, first indirectly by having the attention fixed on our own immediate sensations; secondly, because that particular gratification, the desire of which is increased by the pressure of physical appetite, must be referred primarily and by way of distinction to the same being, by whom the want of it is felt, that is, to myself. As the actual uneasiness which appetite implies can only be excited by the irritable state of my own body, so neither can the desire of the correspondent gratification subsist in that intense degree which properly constitutes appetite, except when it tends to relieve that very same uneasiness by which it was excited. As in the case of hunger. There is in the first place the strong mechanical action of the nervous and muscular systems co-operating with the rational desire of my own relief, and forcing it it’s own way. Secondly, this state of uneasiness continues to grow more and more violent, the longer the relief which it requires is withheld from it:—hunger takes no denial, it hearkens to no compromise, is soothed by no flattery, tired out by no delay. It grows more importunate every moment, it’s demands become louder the less they are attended to. The first impulse which the general love of personal ease receives from bodily pain will give it the advantage over my disposition to sympathize with others in the same situation with myself; and this difference will be increasing every moment, till the pain is removed. Thus if I at first either through compassion or by an effort of the will am regardless of my own wants, and wholly bent upon satisfying the more pressing wants of my companions, yet this effort will at length become too great, and I shall be incapable of attending to any thing but the violence of my own sensations, or the means of alleviating them. It is plain with respect to one of our appetites, I mean the sexual, where the gratification of the same passion in another is the means of gratifying our own, that our physical sensibility stimulates our sympathy with the desires of the other sex, and on the other hand this feeling of mutual sympathy increases the physical desires of both. This is indeed the chief foundation of the sexual passion, though I believe that it’s immediate and determining cause depends upon other principles not to be here lightly touched on.[[87]] It would be easy to shew from many things that mere appetite (generally at least in reasonable beings) is but the fragment of a self-moving machine, but a sort of half-organ, a subordinate instrument even in the accomplishment of it’s own purposes; that it does little or nothing without the aid of another faculty to inform and direct it. There are several striking examples of this given by Rousseau in relating the progress of his own passions. (See the first volume of his Confessions.) Before the impulses of appetite can be converted into the regular pursuit of a given object, they must first be communicated to the understanding, and modify the will through that. Consequently as the desire of the ultimate gratification of the appetite is not the same with the appetite itself, that is mere physical uneasiness, but an indirect result of its communication to the thinking or imaginative principle, the influence of appetite over the will must depend on the extraordinary degree of force and vividness which it gives to the idea of a particular object; and accordingly we find that the same cause, which irritates the desire of selfish gratification, increases our sensibility to the same desires and gratification in others, where they are consistent with our own, and where the violence of the physical impulse does not overpower every other consideration.
Make the most of the objection,—it can only apply to the determinations of the will while it is subject to the gross influence of another faculty, with which it has neither the same natural direction, nor is it in general at all controuled by it. The question which I have proposed to examine is whether there is any general principle of selfishness in the human mind, or whether it is not naturally disinterested. Now the effects of appetite are so far from being any confirmation of the first supposition, that we are even oftener betrayed by them into actions contrary to our own well-known, clear, and lasting interest than into those which are injurious to others. The ‘short-lived pleasure’ and the ‘lasting woe’ fall to the lot of the same being.—I will give one more example and then have done. A man addicted to the pleasures of the bottle is less able to govern this propensity after drinking a certain quantity and feeling the actual pleasure and state of excitement which it produces, than he is to abstain entirely from it’s indulgence. When once the liquor gets into his head, to use the common phrase, the force which it gives to his predominant feeling gets the better of every other idea, and he from that time loses all power of self-controul. Both before, and after this, however, the same feeling of actual excitement, which urges him on, makes him enter more cordially into the convivial dispositions of his companions, and a man is always earnest that others should drink as he becomes unwilling to desist himself.
To add that there is but one instance in which appetite hangs about a man as a perpetual clog and dead-weight upon the reason, namely the sexual appetite, and that here the selfish habit produced by this constant state of animal sensibility seems to have a direct counterpoise given to it by nature in the mutual sympathy of the sexes. Quere also whether this general susceptibility is not itself an effect of an irritable imagination exerted on that particular subject. (See Notes to the Essay on the Inequality of Mankind.) I hope this will be sufficient to break the force of the objection as above stated, and may perhaps furnish a clue to a satisfactory account of the subject itself.
I do not think I should illustrate the foregoing reasoning so well by any thing I could add on the subject as by relating the manner in which it first struck me.—There are moments in the life of a solitary thinker which are to him what the evening of some great victory is to the conqueror and hero—milder triumphs long remembered with truer and deeper delight. And though the shouts of multitudes do not hail his success, though gay trophies, though the sounds of music, the glittering of armour, and the neighing of steeds do not mingle with his joy, yet shall he not want monuments and witnesses of his glory, the deep forest, the willowy brook, the gathering clouds of winter, or the silent gloom of his own chamber, ‘faithful remembrancers of his high endeavour, and his glad success,’ that, as time passes by him with unreturning wing, still awaken the consciousness of a spirit patient, indefatigable in the search of truth, and a hope of surviving in the thoughts and minds of other men. I remember I had been reading a speech which Mirabeau (the author of the System of Nature) has put into the mouth of a supposed atheist at the Last Judgment; and was afterwards led on by some means or other to consider the question whether it could properly be said to be an act of virtue in any one to sacrifice his own final happiness to that of any other person or number of persons, if it were possible for the one ever to be made the price of the other. Suppose it were my own case—that it were in my power to save twenty other persons by voluntarily consenting to suffer for them: why should I not do a generous thing, and never trouble myself about what might be the consequence to myself the Lord knows when?—The reason why a man should prefer his own future welfare to that of others is that he has a necessary, absolute interest in the one which he cannot have in the other, and this again is a consequence of his being always the same individual, of his continued identity with himself. The difference I thought was this, that however insensible I may be to my own interest at any future period, yet when the time comes I shall feel differently about it. I shall then judge of it from the actual impression of the object, that is truly and certainly; and as I shall still be conscious of my past feelings and shall bitterly regret my own folly and insensibility, I ought as a rational agent to be determined now by what I shall then wish I had done when I shall feel the consequences of my actions most deeply and sensibly. It is this continued consciousness of my own feelings which gives me an immediate interest in whatever relates to my future welfare, and makes me at all times accountable to myself for my own conduct. As therefore this consciousness will be renewed in me after death, if I exist again at all—But stop—As I must be conscious of my past feelings to be myself, and as this conscious being will be myself, how if that consciousness should be transferred to some other being? How am I to know that I am not imposed upon by a false claim of identity?—But that is ridiculous because you will have no other self than that which arises from this very consciousness. Why then this self may be multiplied in as many different beings as the Deity may think proper to endue with the same consciousness, which if it can be renewed at will in any one instance, may clearly be so in an hundred others. Am I to regard all these as equally myself? Am I equally interested in the fate of all? Or if I must fix upon some one of them in particular as my representative and other self, how am I to be determined in my choice?—Here then I saw an end put to my speculations about absolute self-interest, and personal identity. I saw plainly that the consciousness of my own feelings which is made the foundation of my continued interest in them could not extend to what had never been, and might never be, that my identity with myself must be confined to the connection between my past and present being, that with respect to my future feelings or interests, they could have no communication with, or influence over my present feelings and interests merely because they were future, that I shall be hereafter affected by the recollection of my past feelings and actions, and my remorse be equally heightened by reflecting on my past folly and late-earned wisdom whether I am really the same being, or have only the same consciousness renewed in me, but that to suppose that this remorse can react in the reverse order on my present feelings, or give me an immediate interest in my future feelings, before it exists, is an express contradiction in terms. It can only affect me as an imaginary idea, or an idea of truth. But so may the interests of others; and the question proposed was whether I have not some real, necessary, absolute interest in whatever relates to my future being in consequence of my immediate connection with myself, independently of the general impression which all positive ideas have on my mind. How then can this pretended unity of consciousness which is only reflected from the past, which makes me so little acquainted with the future that I cannot even tell for a moment how long it will be continued, whether it will be entirely interrupted by or renewed in me after death, and which might be multiplied in I don’t know how many different beings and prolonged by complicated sufferings without my being any the wiser for it, how I say can a principle of this sort identify my present with my future interests, and make me as much a participator in what does not at all affect me as if it were actually impressed on my senses? It is plain as this conscious being may be decompounded, entirely destroyed, renewed again, or multiplied in a great number of beings, and as, whichever of these takes place, it cannot produce the least alteration in my present being, that what I am does not depend on what I am to be, and that there is no communication between my future interests, and the motives by which my present conduct must be governed. This can no more be influenced by what may be my future feelings with respect to it than it will then be possible for me to alter my past conduct by wishing that I had acted differently. I cannot therefore have a principle of active self-interest arising out of the immediate connection between my present and future self, for no such connection exists, or is possible. I am what I am in spite of the future. My feelings, actions, and interests must be determined by causes already existing and acting, and are absolutely independent of the future. Where there is not an intercommunity of feelings, there can be no identity of interests. My personal interest in any thing must refer either to the interest excited by the actual impression of the object which cannot be felt before it exists, and can last no longer than while the impression lasts, or it may refer to the particular manner in which I am mechanically affected by the idea of my own impressions in the absence of the object. I can therefore have no proper personal interest in my future impressions, since neither my ideas of future objects, nor my feelings with respect to them can be excited either directly or indirectly by the impressions themselves, or by any ideas or feelings accompanying them, without a complete transposition of the order in which effects follow one another in nature.—The only reason for my preferring my future interest to that of others must arise from my anticipating it with greater warmth of present imagination. It is this greater liveliness and force with which I can enter into my future feelings, that in a manner identifies them with my present being; and this notion of identity being once formed, the mind makes use of it to strengthen it’s habitual propensity, by giving to personal motives a reality and absolute truth which they can never have. Hence it has been inferred that my real, substantial interest in any thing must be derived in some indirect manner from the impression of the object itself, as if that could have any sort of communication with my present feelings, or excite any interest in my mind but by means of the imagination, which is naturally affected in a certain manner by the prospect of future good or evil.
REMARKS
ON
THE SYSTEMS OF HARTLEY AND HELVETIUS
I find I owe the reader two explanations, one relating to the association of ideas, from which Hartley and other writers have deduced the origin of all our affections, even of self-love itself, the other relating to the mechanical principle of self-interest stated by Helvetius.[[88]] It was my first intention to have given at the end of the preceding essay a general account of the nature of the will, and to have tried at least to dig down a little deeper into the foundation of human thoughts and actions than I have hitherto done. At present I have laid aside all thoughts of this kind as I have neither time nor strength for such an undertaking; and the most that I shall attempt is to point out such contradictions and difficulties in both these systems as may lessen the weight of any objections drawn from them against the one I have stated, and leave the argument as above explained in it’s original force.
To begin with the doctrine of association.