LECTURE LXXIX.

EXAMINATION OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM AND ITS MODIFICATIONS, CONTINUED.

A GREAT part of my last Lecture, Gentlemen, was employed in considering that theory of morals which would represent all the feelings that appear to us most disinterested, as only the results of selfish calculation;-the generous sacrifices of friendship as the barter of some good which we value less for a good which we value more; without any regard to the happiness of those whom it is our policy to distinguish by the flattering term of friends, but who are merely the purchasers and sellers of the different wares of wealth, or power, or honour, or sensual pleasures, which it is our trade, as human beings, to sell and buy. In that wretched exhibition which is made to us of the social intercourse of the world, the friendship of any one,-as implying, in every instance, some stratagem or invention of deceit on his part,-is, therefore, in every instance to be dreaded and shunned far more than absolute indifference, or even, perhaps, than avowed enmity. Nor is it only common friendship which this system would represent as the simulation, and nothing more than the simulation of the generous feelings that are professed. The virtues which gather us under the domestic roof in delightful confidence of affection, of which we never question the sincerity in others, because we feel it to be sincere in ourselves, when it prompts in us the kindnesses which we delight to receive, because we have known the delight of conferring them ;-these gentle virtues which almost consecrate to us our home,—as if, in the midst of that wide scene in which the anxieties and vices of the world may rage, it were some divine and sacred place, where distrust and fear cannot enter,-would be driven, by this cold and miserable sophistry, from the roof under which they delighted to repose,-if human folly could prevail over an influence so celestial, and if man could, indeed, become that wretched thing which he would so laboriously represent himself to be. In the tenderness of connubial love, which years of affection have only rendered more vivid, how many are there who, in their chief wishes of happiness, scarcely think of themselves; or, at

least, think of themselves far less as objects of exclusive interest, than as beings whose happiness is necessary to the enjoyment of those whom they delight to render happy! This seeming devotion, we are told, may, indeed, be a selfishness a little more refined; but it is not less the growth or development of absolute and exclusive self-regard. It is a selfishness which sees and seeks its own individual good at a little greater distance; but, since it is its own individual good which alone, at whatever distance, it is incessantly wishing to see, and as incessantly labouring to obtain, it is still selfishness, as much when it pursues the distant as when it grasps the near;-a selfishness to which the happiness of those who appear to be loved, is as the mere happiness of another, if we analyze our desires with sufficient subtility, far more uninteresting than the acquisition of the idlest gewgaw which vanity, with all its covetous eagerness, would scarcely stoop to add to its stores.

The fallacy of this system, as I endeavoured to show you, arises chiefly from the pleasure which truly attends our virtuous affections; but which, though universally attending them, it seems to require no very great nicety of discrimination to distinguish, as their consequence, not their cause. We have pleasure, indeed, in conferring a kindness; but it is because we confer the kindness, and have had the previous desire of conferring it, that we feel this pleasure of being kind; not because we feel this pleasure, that we confer the kindness; and if we had never been beneficent, we should as little have known the delight of beneficence, as we should have known what external beauty is, without the previous perception of the forms and colours of the objects which we term beautiful. It would, indeed, have been as just a theory of the primary sensations of vision, to say,—that it is because we have a pleasing emotion in beholding the proportions and colours of certain forms, we see those forms and colours which excite in us the pleasing emotion; as, of our moral approbation or disapprobation, to say,-that it is because we have pleasure in the performance and contemplation of virtuous actions, and pain in the contemplation and performance of vicious actions, we perceive that very virtue and vice,-and form those very desires, virtuous or vicious, to which, as previously existing, we owe the pleasure and the pain, that have resulted from them, not produced them, and that cannot even be conceived as pleasure and pain, without necessarily presupposing them. acting virtuously, we do what it is pleasant to do; but it is not on account of the pleasure that we perform the action, which it is delightful to us to do, and almost as delightful to us to have done. Indeed, to destroy our pleasure altogether, nothing more would be necessary, than to impress us with the belief, that the actions were performed by us, with no other view than to the

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selfish gratification which we might feel in thinking of them; and with a total carelessness as to the happiness of those to whose welfare the world conceived us to be making a generous sacrifice. If conformity to selfish gain were all which constitutes virtue, why should our pleasure in this case cease? It ceases for the best of all reasons, that it arises from virtue, and can arise only from virtue; and that in such a case, as there would no longer be any virtue, there would, therefore, no longer be any thing to be contemplated with satisfaction. Such is that gross and revolting system which would represent all the seeming moral excellencies of the world,-every generous exertion, every magnanimous forbearance, as one universal deceit,-one constant unwearied search of personal good, in which not a single wish ever wanders beyond that personal enjoyment of the individual.

There is another form in which the selfish system may be presented to us, less unjust to our nature than that which we have been considering. It may be said, that we now do truly wish. for the happiness of others, without any regard to our own immediate interest; but that we have become thus disinterested, by the very influence of selfishness, only because our own interest has formerly been felt to be connected with the interest of others; diminishing and increasing with theirs in so many instances, that the love, which was originally confined, and confined in the strictest sense of exclusion to ourselves, is now diffused in some measure to them, as if almost parts of ourselves; that we have learned to value their happiness, however, only on account of the relation which it has been found to bear to ours; but for which relation, as evolved to us more and more distinctly in the whole progress of social life, we should be absolutely incapable of a single wish for their happiness,-of a single wish for their freedom from the severest agony, even when their agony was beneath our very view, and could be suspended by our utterance of a single word of command, to him who waited in dreadful ministry on the rack or on the stake; or at least, if, in such circumstances, we could have wished any relief to their torture, it must have been merely to free our ears from the noise of groans or shrieks, that, like any other noise, might be a little too loud to be agreeable to us. According to this system, the happiness of others is loved as representative of our own-in the same way, as any object with which our own pleasure has been associated, becomes itself an object of pleasure to us. Our virtues, therefore, arising in every case from the discovery of some relation which the happiness of others bears to our own physical happiness, are not so much the causes of enjoyment, as the results of it; they depend, then, on circumstances that are accidental, varying as the accidental relations to our pleasure vary; and, if they seem to us to have any uniformity, it is only because the

circumstances of pleasure, on which they depend, may be regarded as nearly uniform in all the nations of the earth. Every where the parent, the wife, the child, must have been useful to the son, the husband, the father;-everywhere, therefore, these relations, as productive of happiness, or protection, or comfort, in some degree, are relations of love, and everywhere, in consequence of this factitious love, there are corresponding factitious feelings of duty, filial, connubial, parental.

This modification of the selfish system, as distinguished from the former, has at least the comparative merit of not being in absolute opposition to almost every feeling of our nature; and, since it allows us to be at present disinterested, and refers us for the period of absolute moral indifference, to a time, antecedent to that which our remembrance can reach, it is not so easy to expose its falsehood, as to expose the gross and obvious falsehood of the system which ascribes to us one lasting selfishness, -a selfishness so unremitting as to be, not for the first years of our life only, but in infancy, in youth, in mature manhood, in the last sordid wishes of a long age of sordid wishes, absolutely incompatible with any affection that is directly and purely bene volent. But though it may be less easy to show the inaccuracy of the view of the great principles of our moral nature, which such a modification of the doctrine of general selfishness presents; the view, which even this modification of the doctrine presents, is false to the noble principles, of a nature, that, even in the sophist himself, is far nobler than that which his degrading sophistries would represent him as possessing. There are feelings of moral approbation, independent of all views of personal interest. The happiness of others is to us more than the representation of our own; and the way in which it contributes most powerfully to our own, is by the generous disinterested wishes which it has previously excited in our breast.

I trust, it is superfluous for me to say, that, in contending for the independence and originality of our moral feelings, I do not contend, that we are capable of these feelings, at a period, at which we are incapable of forming any conception of the nature and consequences of actions-that, for example, we must feel instant gratitude, to our mother or our nurse, for the first sustenance or first cares, which we receive, before we are conscious of any thing but of our momentary pleasure or pain-and, far from knowing the existence of those kind hearts which watch over us, scarcely know that we have ourselves an existence which is capable of being prolonged. This blind virtue, it would, indeed, be manifestly absurd to suppose; but this no philosopher has maintained. All which a defender of original tendencies to the emotions that are distinctive of virtue and vice, can be supposed to assert, is, that when we are capable of understanding

the circumstances of actions, we then have those feelings of moral approbation or disapprobation, which, in their various relations to time, as present, past, or future, I suppose to constitute our moral notions of virtue, merit, obligation. It then becomes impossible for us, not to feel, that in giving pain, for the mere pleasure of giving pain, to one whose delight it has been to contribute to our happiness, we should do that, which we could not contemplate without a feeling of self-reproach,-as we should have an opposite feeling of self-approbation, in every sacrifice which we might make of our own convenience, to the happiness or the comfort of a person, to whom our mutual services were so justly due. An action, I have already frequently repeated, is, as a moral object, not the mere production of good or evil, but the intentional production of good or evil. It has no moral meaning whatever, but as it is significant of the frame of mind of the agent himself, willing and producing a particular result: and where the frame of mind of the agent cannot be supposed to be known, or even guessed, it is not to be supposed that any moral feeling should arise, whatever susceptibility the mind may possess of being affected with certain moral emotions, by the contemplation of certain frames of mind of the voluntary producers of good or evil. There is a knowledge then of intention on which our moral sentiments unquestionably depend; but it is only on this knowledge they do depend; and it would be as absurd to refuse to them the appellation of original feelings, on this account, as it would be to refuse to the mind any original susceptibility of the sensations of vision, because there can be no vision, till a luminous object be present, nor, even then, any distinct perception till we have opened our eyelids. There was, indeed, a period, at which we had no moral feelings, as there was a period at which we had no sensations of colour; but though we had not the actual feelings, from the absence of the circumstances which are necessary for producing them, we could as little be said to be blind to morality in the one case, as blind to all the splendour and beauty of light on the other.

To return, however, to that form of the selfish system of morals, which is under our review,-I may remark, in the first place, that, as this theory of our affections admits them to be at present disinterested, and refers us for the period of exclusive self-regard, to a time of which the consciousness is absolutely lost to our memory, it would not be entitled to the praise of certainty, even though no objection could be urged against it. It would still be only an hypothesis, and an hypothesis, which, even by the confession of those who maintain it, supposes a state of our feelings absolutely opposite to that which they have continued to display, during all that long period of our consciousness which we are capable of remembering. It is an hypothesis, all VOL. III-B b