The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin
natural as well as any other, to curb and restrain.”3
Thus the rational moralists, however close they came to Deism, shared with Puritanism the traditional view of the passions as a source of falsehood and evil. Like all philosophers since Plato, and all Christians, they taught that the perfection of man consists in his union with God through his mind, that his imperfection comes of the mind’s union with the body. Moreover, they made it just as difficult to question the moral law discovered by reason as it was to escape the commands of the Kirk. The advocates of rational morality were no more willing than the Predestinarian preachers to accept different interpretations of virtue. They, too, insisted that all men must live in the same way, and that this meant denying, or somehow overcoming, all that was not pure spirit. Their outlook was not much exaggerated by Steele’s paraphrase, “To love is a passion, ’Tis a desire, and we must have no desires.”
For Hume, the rational moralists underscored the fact that philosophy as well as religion, reason as easily as faith, could be used to subject all men to the same inflexible and unsuitable rules. Philosophy, he decided, had been bent to the uses of theology. Philosophers had become divines in disguise; they had “warped” reasoning and even language “from their natural course,” and endeavoured to establish distinctions “where the difference of the objects was, in a manner, imperceptible”; they disregarded nature and the “unbiased” sentiments of the mind in favour of unreal abstractions.1 Not only superstition and enthusiasm had to be combated, but perhaps even more the philosophers’ practice of discussing morality in the abstract, of deducing a “variety of inferences and conclusions” from a few general abstract principles. This abstract method did not suit the “imperfection of human nature”; it had been rejected in natural philosophy, and it had now to be abandoned by moral philosophy as well: “Men are now cured of their passion for hypotheses and systems in natural philosophy and will hearken to no arguments but those which are derived from experience. It is full time they should attempt a like reformation in all moral disquisitions; and reject every system of ethics, however subtle or ingenious, which is not founded on fact and observation.”2
The direction Hume had to follow in order to construct a new view of man was suggested by a fellow Scotsman, Francis Hutcheson, probably the most outstanding and influential opponent of the Covenanters’ creed. He led the Moderates in their attempt to strip Calvinist theology of its gloom and dogmatism, to describe God as a lawgiver and the source of morality, a Deity that reigned rather than governed. The problem, as Hutcheson saw it, was to show that man was not essentially depraved or egoistic, but benevolent.
The germ of his theory came from Shaftesbury, whose assimilation of morals to art and beauty readily attracted anyone in revolt against Puritanism. Although he, too, had been influenced by Plato, Shaftesbury emphasized an other aspect of Platonic philosophy. He reaffirmed, against the scientific and mathematical current, the importance of beauty. He valued beauty more than logic, fought his opponents with ridicule rather than geometry, and tried to feel the harmony of the universe, not to reduce it to a barren system or set of formulae. The quality of a man’s taste and the style of his life mattered more to Shaftesbury than his declared principles and reasonings. By saying that the moral perfection of man is akin to the perfection of a work of art, that a good man can arouse in a spectator a pleasure like that aroused by any beautiful object, Shaftesbury seemed to free life from the ugliness with which Puritanism had encased it. He placed the foundation for morality in the human constitution itself, not in a power to transcend it, and so removed from man the stigma of natural depravity.
On what Shaftesbury described as a “rational affection” for goodness, Hutcheson built a more definite system. He traced morality to an internal sense, the moral sense, which he described as a passive power of receiving ideas of good and likened to the sense for beauty. Neither the exact relation between the moral sense and the sense of beauty, nor the character of motives, nor the ultimate end of moral behaviour was ever made perfectly clear by Hutcheson. But he did definitely distinguish the moral sense from reason, and rest moral judgements on feeling, rather than on any rational process. Nature had given man, he asserted, “immediate monitors,” independent of calculation and reflection, for distinguishing good from evil. Moral judgements were not then the results of ratiocination about, or of insights into the relations of things or ideas; they were an immediate feeling of approval or disapproval:
The Weakness of our Reason … [is] so great, that very few Men could ever have form’d those long Deductions of Reason which show some Actions to be on the whole advantageous to the Agent and their Contrary pernicious. The Author of Nature has much better furnish’d us for a virtuous Conduct, than our Moralists seem to imagine, by almost as quick and powerful Instructions as we have for the Preservation of our Bodys. He has given us strong Affections to be the Springs of each virtuous Action; and made Virtue a lovely Form, that we might easily distinguish it from its Contrary, and be made happy in the Pursuit of it.1
There could be no abstract, general rules, because “everyone judges the affections of others by his own Sense, so that it seems not impossible that in these Senses men may differ as they do in Taste.”1 Nevertheless, there was order and universality in moral judgements. Although he never explained very satisfactorily how there could be variety amidst uniformity in morals, Hutcheson maintained firmly that morality was neither arbitrary, nor perfectly uniform in the sense of the rational moralists. Instead of proposing any single moral idea that all men had to follow, he affirmed simply that man was good.
What was most striking about Hutcheson’s theory, certainly to someone in search of a new foundation for ethics, was that he reversed the roles of reason and passion.2 As he used “passion” to cover all types of feeling, it followed that the passions, far from being simply the source of human corruption, were the seat of man’s best propensities. The function of reason was not to hold the passions in check, but rather to serve at least some of the passions, to adjust the general direction given by the passions to particular circumstances. Hutcheson himself stopped there; neither he nor Shaftesbury wished to deny the established view that human nature was divided between reason and passion, but merely to adjust it towards more amiable conclusions. Shaftesbury described reason as man’s dignity, the source of virtue and happiness. Hutcheson frequently retreated altogether from the radical implications of his theory, and restored to reason much of its traditional importance, calling it a “divine” faculty that “frames the ideal of a truly good life.” He even tried to develop the relevance of mathematical calculation for morality, so much so that Sterne remarked: “Hutcheson, in his philosophic treatise on beauty, harmony, and order, plus’s and minus’s you to heaven or hell, by algebraic equations—so that none but an expert mathematician can ever be able to settle his accounts with St. Peter—and perhaps St. Matthew, who had been an officer in the customs, must be called in to audit them.”1
After all, Hutcheson’s system was linked with an optimistic theology. It was designed to demonstrate the wisdom and benevolence that ruled the universe. Besides, Hutcheson stressed the more ascetic of the Christian virtues—suffering, he said, gave opportunity for practising “the most sublime virtues, such as resignation to the Will of God, forgiving of injuries, returning good for evil. …”2 Despite his love for classical authors, Hutcheson was Christian, in just the sense that Hume wished to oppose. But he had planted a suggestion for a truly radical departure.
Where Hutcheson’s suggestion might lead, Hume discovered through the French writers whom he began reading in Edinburgh. In Bayle, and in a number of writers of the seventeenth century—Fontenelle, l’Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Malebranche—Hume found the view that man was in fact moved by his passions, and reason was but a passive onlooker. They did not deny the dichotomy between reason and passion, nor the holiness of one and the corruption of the other, but suggested that whatever he tried to be, man was after all nothing like God. Bayle said that reason did not always calm the passions, its decrees were not always executed, indeed reason often only increased the chaos within man. For since the Fall, man no longer inhabited the world of reason, but had become “plunged into sense.”3 Bayle even went so far as to say that the passions made the world go ’round, and prevented anarchy as well as caused it.
In Montaigne, however, Hume found more—a