S. We shall be there soon enough, without hurrying. Reason, I conceive, in the sense that you would appeal to it, may signify any one of three things, all of them insufficient as tests and standards of moral sentiment, or (if that word displeases) of moral conduct:—1. Abstract truth, as distinct from local impressions or individual partialities; 2. Calm, inflexible self-will, as distinct from passion; 3. Dry matter of fact or reality, as distinct from sentimentality or poetry.
R. Let me hear your objections; but do for once adhere to the track you have chalked out.
S. ‘Thereafter as it happens.’ You may drag your grating go-cart of crude assumptions and heavy paralogisms along your narrow iron rail-way, if you please: but let me diverge down ‘primrose paths,’ or break my neck over precipices, as I think proper.
R. Take your own course. A wilful man must have his way. You demur, if I apprehend you right, to founding moral rectitude on the mere dictates of the Understanding. This I grant to be the grand arcanum of the doctrine of Utility. I desire to know what other foundation for morals you will find so solid?
S. I know of none so flimsy. What! would you suspend all the natural and private affections on the mere logical deductions of the Understanding, and exenterate the former of all the force, tenderness, and constancy they derive from habit, local nearness or immediate sympathy, because the last are contrary to the speculative reason of the thing? I am afraid such a speculative morality will end in speculation, or in something worse. Am I to feel no more for a friend or a relative (say) than for an inhabitant of China or of the Moon, because, as a matter of argument, or setting aside their connection with me, and considered absolutely in themselves, the objects are, perhaps, of equal value? Or am I to screw myself up to feel as much for the Antipodes (or God knows who) as for my next-door neighbours, by such a forced intellectual scale? The last is impossible; and the result of the attempt will be to make the balance even by a diminution of our natural sensibility, instead of an universal and unlimited enlargement of our philosophic benevolence. The feelings cannot be made to keep pace with our bare knowledge of existence or of truth; nor can the affections be disjoined from the impressions of time, place, and circumstance, without destroying their vital principle. Yet, without the sense of pleasure and pain, I do not see what becomes of the theory of Utility, which first reduces everything to pleasure and pain, and then tramples upon and crushes these by its own sovereign will. The effect of this system is, like the touch of the torpedo, to chill and paralyse. We, notwithstanding, find persons acting upon it with exemplary coolness and self-complacency. One of these ‘subtilised savages’ informs another who drops into his shop that news is come of the death of his eldest daughter, adding, as matter of boast—‘I am the only person in the house who will eat any dinner to-day: they do not understand the doctrine of Utility!’ I perceive this illustration is not quite to your taste.
R. Is it any thing more than the old doctrine of the Stoics?
S. I thought the system had been wholly new—the notable project of a ‘few and recent writers.’ I could furnish you with another parallel passage in the Hypocrite.[[30]]
R. Is it not as well, on any system, to suppress the indulgence of inordinate grief and violent passion, that is as useless to the dead as it is hurtful to the living?
S. If we could indulge our affections while they run on smoothly, and discard them from our breasts the instant they fail of their objects, it might be well. But the feelings, the habitual and rooted sentiments of the soul, are not the creatures of choice or of a fanciful theory. To take the utmost possible interest in an object, and be utterly and instantaneously indifferent to the loss of it, is not exactly in the order of human nature. We may blunt or extirpate our feelings altogether with proper study and pains, by ill-humour, conceit, and affectation, but not make them the playthings of a verbal paradox. I fancy if Mr. —— had lost a hundred pounds by a bad debt, or if a lump of soot had fallen into his broth, it would have spoiled his dinner. The doctrine of Utility would not have come to his aid here. It is reserved for great and trying occasions; or serves as an excuse for not affecting grief which its professors do not feel. So much for reason against passion.
R. But if they do not possess all the softness and endearing charities of private life, they have the firmness and unflinching hardihood of patriotism and devotion to the public cause.