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a pure Platonism; setting up virtue as something superior to God, a relation, an idea, which he did not create, and cannot control, but which exists independently of him, and controls him; thus, in fact, abandoning the fundamental doctrine of mysticism, which explains every thing as the act or work of a personal deity.

46. Assuming that the pursuit of happiness is the only impulse of human action; supposing that impulse to be single and uncompounded; and giving to it the name of Self-love, Self-interest, or Selfishness; it certainly follows logically enough, as the ancient Epicureans contended, and as Hobbes maintained, that Self-interest is the only possible motive of human action; and that to suppose actions to originate in a mere desire to promote the pleasure of others— a characteristic which we have pointed out as essential to virtuous actions-is to suppose what is incompatible with human nature.

Investigation, however, will show that this conclusion, though logically right, is scientifically false; the assumed premises upon which it is founded not corresponding with the facts of human action; and the term Self-love, or Selfishness, being frequently used in a double sense, which produces a sad confusion of ideas.

47. When we come to look narrowly into the springs of human action, we shall find, as Locke did, that all human actions originate in pains.* Pains

* See the Essay on the Human Understanding, Book II. Chap. xxi. Sect. 31 et seq. No part of that celebrated work exhibits a keener spirit of observation. The leading ideas, as is usual with Locke, had been partially anticipated by Hobbes. See the Leviathan, Part I. ch. 6.

are the perpetual spurs which, from the cradle to the grave, urge men to act. Pleasures, of whatever kind, while actually in fruition, have not the slightest tendency to produce action; whence it was well argued by the Epicureans, that if the gods enjoyed, as it was said they did, an existence of perpetual bliss, it was absurd to suppose them to interfere in the affairs of men; since, being perpetually and completely happy, they must be destitute of any motives to act. This coincidence between pleasure and repose has even led many philosophers to suppose them identical. Pleasures become motives of action only secondarily; that is, when the contemplation of them produces in us that peculiar sort of pains, called desires; a sort of pains which frequently rise to the very highest pitch of which human nature is capable; for it is to be observed, that both pleasures and pains have a certain limit, beyond which they cannot be carried without putting an end to life.

48. By the word, happiness, as employed in the schools, has been signified an ideal state of continuous pleasure, supposed to be the end of human existence and effort, and the impulse to human action. But happiness, in this scholastic sense of the word, and as distinguished from what are called fleeting or temporary pleasures, is purely an imaginary state, which never entered into the minds of the vastly greater number of human beings, whose thoughts are almost entirely limited to the present hour, or the present day; and which could not actually be enjoyed without a total revolution in the nature and constitution of man; a revolution which

would change him from an active, into a merely passive, contemplative being; a revolution inconsistent with his whole perceptive and sensitive nature - a nature in which perceptions and emotions are indissolubly commingled. This scholastic sense of the word led several Oriental sects to hold, that happiness is a state of pure contemplation; and to teach that those who aspire to be happy, ought not to allow themselves to be affected by any thing, a doctrine, indeed, which was not unknown to the Stoic philosophy of the Greeks; while other Oriental schools, more mystically inclined, have placed happiness in absorption into the deity; and others yet, conscious of its inconsistency with human nature as at present existing, have held happiness to be synonymous with annihilation.†

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49. Happiness, in any sense in which it is practically an object of human pursuit, consists merely in the avoidance of, or escape from, present pains, whether those pains be pains commonly so called, or that great class of pains usually designated as de(sires and it may be safely alleged, that no action, from the most trivial up to the most important, is ever performed, of which some present pain, either a simple pain, or a pain of desire, is not the immediate

motive.

* "Nil admirari propè res est una, Numici,

Solaque, quæ possit facere et servare beatum," etc. Horat. Epist. I. VI. v. 1, 2. + Hobbes was well aware of the futility of this scholastic notion of happiness, and briefly but ably exposed it. See Leviathan, Part I. ch. 11. This opinion, however, still keeps its ground, and figures conspcuously in almost all popular discussions on moral questions.

Indeed it is obvious, that pleasures, even should we suppose them to possess in themselves a power of impulse, could operate only to a very trifling extent as motives of action; since for the most part, they are of very transitory existence, indeed scarcely more than momentary; while pains frequently last us a whole lifetime, with hardly any intermission, at least during waking hours.

50. While a vast deal of labor, though, for the most part, to little purpose, has been expended in investigating what is called the Intellectual nature of man, that is, Reason coöperative with the senses and the conceptive faculty; pleasures and pains, or what is called man's Sensitive nature, have been strangely neglected.* And yet the perceptive and sensitive natures of man are not, as so many philosphers have supposed, two distinct natures, but inseparable parts of the same nature. They may be conceived of as distinct, as parts; but as they exist they form together a single indissoluble whole. According to our experience, Perception and Emotion constitute one continuous process, in which sometimes the one, and sometimes the other, apparently takes the lead, but in the completion of which, both are uniformly present. We may, perhaps, form an idea of a being that perceives and does not feel; or who perceives at one time and feels at another; but man is not such a being; and all reasoners who proceed upon a supposition of that sort, have involved

* In his Essay, Locke bestows one chapter of about four pages upon that subject; and in this respect followed the example of preceding writers, as most subsequent writers have followed his.

themselves, and always will involve themselves, in endless contradictions.

51. The following list of simple Pleasures and Pains is here submitted as absolutely essential to our present purpose. Some of the heads, it should be noticed, embrace a great variety of particulars.

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5. Pleasures and Pains of Muscular Activity,

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In common phraseology, the sensibility to some of these pleasures and pains, and the desires growing out of that sensibility, are confounded together, under the epithet of Appetites; the sensibility to some others is called Sentiment, or, when aroused and active, Passion. Various modifications and combinations of these sensibilities are distinguished in all languages by numerous names; while some of

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