“The happiness of mankind is the end of virtue, and truth is the knowledge of the means; which he will never seriously attempt to discover who has not habitually interested himself in the welfare of others.”—Bristol Address
1. THE SCIENCE VERSUS SCHEMES OF MORALS
IT followed from Coleridge’s general theory of rational knowledge as the apprehension of Ideas, in the sense of organizing, individualizing principles, that no true theory of morals could be evolved from mere generalizations from sense experience. Sense experience might show us the conditions under which the good life has to be lived, and from which rules of prudence, varying necessarily according to circumstances, might be derived. But any claim to universality and necessity, in other words any claim to possess a system of truth that could rightly be called a moral science, must be founded on deductions from the idea of the Will itself. This is the view he expounds in the careful statement of Aphorism CIXc. 26, in the Aids to Reflection: “By a Science I here mean any chain of Truths that are either absolutely certain, or necessarily true for the human mind from the laws and constitution of the mind itself. In neither case is our conviction derived, or capable of receiving any addition, from outward experience, or empirical data—i.e. matters of fact given to us through the medium of the senses— though these data may have been the occasion, or may even be an indispensable condition, of our reflecting on the former and thereby becoming conscious of the same. On the other hand, a connected series of conclusions grounded on empirical data, in contradistinction from science, I beg leave (no better term occurring), in this place and for this purpose, to denominate a Scheme.”
As illustrations of such schemes he goes on in Aphorism CXI,1 to give all those which, as founded on calculations of self-interest, or on the average Consequences of Action, supposing them general, form a branch of Political Economy: “to which let all honour be given. Their utility is not here questioned. But, however estimable within their own sphere such schemes, or any one of them in particular, may be, they do not belong to Moral Science, to which both in kind and purpose they are in all cases foreign and, when substituted for it, hostile. Ethics, or the Science of Morality, does indeed in nowise exclude the consideration of Action; but it contemplates the same in its originating spiritual Source without reference to Space or Time or Sensible Existence. Whatever springs out of ‘the perfect Law of Freedom’, which exists only by its unity with the Will of God … that (according to the principles of Moral Science) is Good”
After so careful a definition of a subject so closely related to Coleridge’s central interest in the renovation of religion, we might have expected a large portion of a work expressly written “to establish the distinct characters of prudence, morality and religion” to have been devoted to the development of this “science”.
Yet neither here nor in any of his other published works do we have any attempt of the kind. With these mainly before him in 1856, the author of the able essay on Coleridge in Cambridge Essays of that date2 noted as “the most striking fact about Coleridge’s moral philosophy, considering the universal supremacy which moral considerations held in his mind”, that “there is so little to say about it”. This he goes on to find all the more remarkable as there existed, in the work of his great fellow-countryman Butler, a body of doctrine, which only required to be reinterpreted and freed from ambiguous elements to form the basis of just such a science as Coleridge had in mind. The explanation doubtless is partly to be found in the singular fact, which this writer also notices, of Coleridge’s apparent entire ignorance of Butler,3 but also partly in the popular character of his own chief published works. It is therefore natural to expect that in the more systematic unpublished works on which he was later engaged, there should be some attempt to supply what was wanting.
Nor are we wholly disappointed. If these do not supply us with anything approaching a complete theory of Ethics, yet they give us invaluable hints as to what must always constitute the method and the elements of such a theory. In reading them we have always to bear in mind the jungle of unanalysed notions and ambiguous terms, through which at that time anyone who sought to do justice to the moral consciousness had to hack his way. Coleridge might seem to some to be oddly equipped for such a task and to suggest rather a Don Quixote than a St. George. As a matter of fact, he possessed just that fine sense of psychological and linguistic distinctions that was most required for this work, and, comparatively meagre as his results may now appear, it is not too much to say that they all point in the right direction.
Seeing that the science of morals takes the form of a deduction from the Idea of the Will, it would seem that its foundations must be laid in the demonstration of the reality that corresponds to the idea. It was precisely this reality that was denied by “the scheme of pure mechanism, which, under all disguises, tempting or repulsive, Christian or infidel, forms the groundwork of these systems of modern and political philosophy, political economy and education, which began by manufacturing mind out of sense and sense out of sensation (and) which reduce all form to shape and all shape to impression from without”.4
Yet here, as in the case of Ideas in general, we are faced with the difficulty of any direct proof by way of conceptual logic. Coleridge admits that no such proof is possible, but holds that “indirect arguments from extreme improbability, and motives of strongest inducement to the reconsideration of the point denied may be brought forward”.5 What makes it worth while bringing them forward is that the denier, as often as not, is unaware of all that is involved in his position: he “goes but half way, pursuing the line of declination far enough to lose sight of the true road, and yet not so far as to be aware of the whirlpool in the outward eddy of which he is wheeling round and round”.6 On the other hand, the generality of mankind are so carried along, among other things by the inertia of the moral system into which they are born, “custom, habit, imitation, the necessity of preserving character, the sympathy and supports derived from superior rank and fortune, and the consequent absence of temptation”, that “they may pass through life without a single principle, and never feel the want of it from the multitude and variety of its substitutes and its counterfeits”.
Negatively, then, the method will consist in forcing the mechanistic view “by a stern logic, into all its consequences”; positively it will consist in starting from the general assent to the postulate of Will, in order to “mature this into distinct conceptions and by means of these to bring a consistency of thought and language in (to) all other important conceptions included in the same class truly or falsely, and in the latter instance for the purpose of transferring them to their proper department or birth-place”.
It would be difficult to find a better statement of the true method of ethics or one more in harmony both with the logic which teaches that the ultimate ground of the validity of any idea is, in Bosanquet’s phrase, “this or nothing”, and with the definition of philosophy in general as “a criticism of categories”. Anyway, it is such a form of demonstration, which, as the writer tells us, is the aim of the chapters he devotes in this work to the analysis of some of the leading moral conceptions.
Disregarding the particular order of his exposition, we may start from the most comprehensive of these in the idea of the Self. In the ethical philosophy of the time, the idea of Self-love was a central one. But both the parts of this hyphenated compound were ambiguous. Leaving the latter part for the present, what, Coleridge asks, do we mean by “self”?
The prevalent empiricism, as it resolved mind into a series of sensations, resolved the active self into a series of sensory impulses, and particularly of impulses directed to pleasure as an object. To Coleridge this meant losing hold of the unity which is of the very essence of a self. If the self is to be a real unity and not “the semblance produced by an aggregate on the mind of the beholder”, we must conceive of it as “anterior to all our sensations and to all the objects towards which they are directed”, seeing that without it “nothing can become the object of reflection—not even the things of perception”. As that which brings unity into the variety, as the universal that expresses itself in the particulars of experience, the self is manifested to consciousness as an Idea. But ideas are known through representatives (meanings, as we might say, through images), which need not be always the same. In the case of the idea of the self it is not fixed by nature, but, on the contrary, “varies with the growth, bodily, moral and intellectual, in each individual”.
So far is the body, for instance, from being the only representative, that it is not even the first: in the early periods of infancy the mother or the nurse is the self of the child. And “who has not experienced in dreams the attachment of our personal identity to forms the most remote from our own”?7 Nor is the body—given though it is to sense, and habitually thought of as the self— prescribed by necessity as the only object of love. “Even in his life of imperfection there is a state possible in which a man might truly say, ‘myself loves a or b’, freely constituting the object in whatever it wills to love, commanding what it wills and willing what it commands.” We only in fact know what we mean by a soul or self, as the subject of weal or woe, when we cease to look for it in a single soul as one of a class, and “have learned the possibility of finding a Self in another (yea, even in an enemy)”.
Taking the word in this sense, everything may be said to be self-love. But we apply the term rightly only when we mean “a less degree of distance and a comparatively narrowness of our moral view” : its grossness being diminished “no less by distance in time than by distance in space”.
Short though the treatment here is, Coleridge shows in it that he has clearly grasped the Kantian notion of all human action as a form of self-realization; further, that he is feeling his way to the all-important distinction between self-affirmation and selfishness, and to a view of moral value as dependent on the extent to which a man organizes the passing moments of his temporal self into a whole, representative of what is most permanent in him. “The good man”, he wrote elsewhere, “organizes the hours and gives them a soul, and to that, the very essence of which is to fleet and to have been, he communicates an imperishable and a spiritual nature. Of the good and faithful servant whose energies are thus methodized, it is less truly affirmed that he lives in time than that time lives in him. His days, months, and years, as the stops and punctual marks in the records of duties performed, will survive the wreck of worlds and remain extant when Time itself shall be no more.”8
Leaving for the moment the question of the good self, we have here reached a point of view from which the meaning of will and motive and their relation to each other can be more clearly defined. The common idea of will is that of a power of responding, whether freely or in a way antecedently determined, to motives conceived of as acting upon it from the outside. Coleridge saw the error of this idea, whether held by libertarian or necessitarian. “For what”, he asks, “is a motive? Not a thing, but the thought of a thing. But as all thoughts are not motives, in order to specify the class of thoughts, we must add the predicate ‘determining’, and a motive must be defined as a determining thought. But again, what is a Thought? Is this a thing or an individual? What are its circumscriptions, what the interspaces between it and another? Where does it begin? Where does it end? Far more readily could we apply these questions to an ocean billow, or the drops of water which we may imagine as the component integers of the ocean. As by a billow we mean no more than a particular movement of the sea, so neither by a thought can we mean more than the mind thinking in some one direction. Consequently a motive is neither more nor less than the act of an intelligent being determining itself, and the very watchword of the necessitarian is found to be at once an assertion and a definition of free agency, i.e. the power of an intelligent being to determine its own agency”.9
After this account of the essential continuity of the practical intelligence, Coleridge goes on to explain similarly that what we mean by will is not the source of isolated actions but “an abiding faculty or habit or fixed predisposition to certain objects”. So far therefore from the will originating in the motive and the motive governing the man, “it is the man that makes the motives: and these indeed are so various, unstable, and chameleon-like that it is often as difficult as fortunately it is a matter of comparative indifference, to determine what a man’s motive is for this or that particular action. A wise man will rather inquire what the man’s general objects are—what does he habitually wish. Iago’s apparent vacillation in assigning now one, now another motive of his action, is the natural result of his own restless nature, distempered by a keen sense of his own intellectual superiority and a vicious habit of assigning the precedence to the intellectual instead of the moral. Yet how many of our modern critics have attributed to the profound author this the appropriate inconsistency of the character itself.”10
While realizing that motives are the ideas of objects that attract us by reason of their harmony with the internal predisposition or permanent will of a man, Coleridge would do justice to the force of external circumstances. He had asked in Aids to Reflection11: “Will any reflecting man admit that his own Will is the only and sufficient determinant of all he is and all he does? Is nothing to be attributed to the harmony of the system to which he belongs and to the pre-established Fitness of the Objects and Agents, known and unknown, that surround him, as acting on his will, though, doubtless, with it likewise?” In the passage before us he illustrates the same point from the contrast between a change of character gradually wrought from within and the sudden change wrought by some violent influence from without: “A violent motive may revolutionize a man’s opinions and professions—a flash of lightning turn at once the polarity of the compass needle—though more frequently his honesty dies away imperceptibly from evening into twilight and from twilight into utter darkness.”
From the point of view of modern psychology the analysis here given is again meagre enough, but Coleridge has seized the essential point of the true relation between will and motive, and on the basis of it is prepared to discuss the nature of the Good and, incidentally, to define his position in relation both to current hedonistic theories and the deeper ethics of Kant.
What he says on the former has particular interest in view of the discussion of the value of pleasure in the good life, that was to occupy so large a place in later nineteenth-century ethics. Coleridge was himself prepared to define the whole scope of moral philosophy in terms of this controversy: “The sum total of moral philosophy”, he held,12 “is found in this one question: Is Good a superfluous word, or mere lazy synonym for the pleasurable and its causes—at most a mere modification to express degree and comparative duration of pleasure?” But he also held that a general case against the identification of good with pleasure could be established by an appeal to universal usage, on the principle that a distinction, which is common to all languages of the civilized world, “must be the exponent, because it must be the consequent, of a common consciousness of man as man”. The very phrase “pleasure is a good” implies the recognition of other goods. Otherwise it would be a mere pleonasm = “pleasure is pleasure”. If the universality of the desire for pleasure is urged in favour of the theory, he is prepared to show that this involves the confusion between “things which are good because they are desired, and things which are or ought to be desired because they are good”, as in the simple case of different kinds of food. Here also language refutes the theory: “the mere difference between the particles ‘to’ and ‘for’ is sufficient to destroy the sophism”.13 The distinctions here drawn between good and pleasure-value, and again between the desirable and the actually desired are of fundamental importance for ethical theory, and remind one of the confusions, that even so clear a thinker as John Stuart Mill would have avoided, had he been able to learn them from Coleridge.
Not less helpful to Mill and others would have been Coleridge’s carefully drawn out distinction between the different kinds of pleasure or satisfaction, depending on the nature of the activity of which it is the accompaniment. Starting with the ambiguity of “Happiness”, he distinguishes between the state that depends on favourable outward circumstances, into which chance or “hap” enters, and the state that depends more on our own inward and spiritual endeavours. In the latter again he distinguishes that which is more purely spiritual, and to which he would assign the name “blessedness”, from that which results “when the intellectual energies are exerted in conformity with the laws of the intellect and its inherent forms”, for which he proposes the name “eunoia”. From both of these he finally distinguishes hedone or pleasure, as comprising “all the modes of being which arise from the correspondence of the external stimuli in kind and degree to the sensible life”. Taking pleasure in this sense, we may say that the only ground of preference is the amount. But he acutely observes that even in extending the idea of pleasure from present amount to comparative duration and causative influence (two of Bentham’s “dimensions”), we already suppose the intervention and union of motives, which are not derived from the relation between the animal life and the stimulants, but from the idea of the will or self as above defined.
Coming to the relation of these different kinds of satisfaction to “good”, he sets down as alone unconditionally good that which results from the whole moral nature. But he claims a place also for eunoia, when the intellect is employed in the service of such spiritual good, as itself good— when not employed in its disservice, as innocent; and similarly for pleasure, under the same conditions. It was in their confusion between eunoia and hedone and in their inclusion of both in the same condemnation that he found the main error of Kant and Fichte. Eunoia is not, indeed, spiritual in the highest sense, but may yet be an instrument of the spirit, being to it “as body is to soul”.
But Coleridge’s criticism, both of the current empiricism and of Kantian rationalism strikes deeper than the rejection of their treatment of pleasure. Beyond this there was the acceptance by the former of the “consequences” as the ultimate criterion of the goodness of an action, the total rejection of them by the latter, and going along with this a similar antagonism in the acceptance and rejection of the sympathetic affections as a factor in the good life.
(a) To the first of these questions Coleridge gives his answer in the carefully elaborated criticism of Paley’s doctrine that “the general consequences are the chief and best criterion of the right and wrong of particular actions”, to be found in Section I, Essay XV, of The Friend.14 The doctrine aims in the first place at giving us a criterion, which does not, like others, depend on the notions of the individual. But this criterion, so far from giving us this, is itself dependent on what is most individual in man, the power derived from the accidental circumstances of natural talent and education instead of from “that part of our nature which in all men may and ought to be the same: in the conscience and common sense”. In the second place it aims at giving us a criterion of morality. As a matter of fact, it confounds morality with law, and “draws away the attention from the will and from the inward motives and impulses, which constitute the essence of morality, to the outward act”. To suggest further, as Paley does, that Divine Justice will be regulated in its final judgment by this rule, is to remove the grounds of the appeal to “a juster and more appropriate sentence hereafter”, which is “one of the most persuasive, if not one of the strongest arguments for a future state”.
It is this appeal to the inward motive that the Apostle means by faith when he appeals to it as the sole principle of justification. Nothing could be more groundless than the alarm that this doctrine may be prejudicial to utility and active welldoing. “To suppose that a man should cease to be beneficent by becoming benevolent seems to me scarcely less absurd than to fear that a fire may prevent heat or that a perennial fountain may prove the occasion of drought.” True, man (and God relatively to man) must judge by works, seeing that “man knows not the heart of man; scarcely does anyone know his own”. But since good works may exist without saving principles, “they cannot contain in themselves the principle of salvation”. On the other hand, saving principles never did and never can exist without good works : “For what is love without kind offices (including thoughts and words) whenever these are possible?” and “what noble mind would not be offended if he were supposed to value the serviceable offices equally with the love that produced them, or if he were supposed to value the love for the sake of the services, and not the services for the sake of the love?” The doctrine of faith and the doctrine of works are “one truth considered in its two principal bearings”. What man sees and can alone judge by is the outward fruits, but “what God sees and what alone justifies is the inward spring.”
If we pursue the doctrine of general consequences further, we can see that to anyone who believes (as Paley docs) in an overruling Providence, the criterion must be a merely imaginary one, seeing that he must hold that all actions, the crimes of Nero not less than the virtues of the Antonines, work for good. Finally it can be shown to be “either nugatory or false”, seeing that the appeal is to the “general consequences” that will result on condition that all men do as we do. Passing over the source of self-delusion and sophistry that is here opened up and supposing the mind in its sanest state, “how can it possibly form a notion of the nature of an action considered as indefinitely multiplied unless it has previously a distinct notion of the single action itself, which is the multiplicand? … But if there be any means of ascertaining the action in and for itself, what further do we want? Would we give light to the sun? or look at our own fingers through a telescope? The nature of every action is determined by all its circumstances ; alter the circumstances and a similar set of motions may be repeated, but they are no longer the same or a similar act.”
To all this it is vain to reply that “the doctrine of the general consequences was stated as the criterion of the action, not of the agent”. For, apart from the oversight of attributing it in that sense to the Supreme Judge, the distinction itself “is merely logical, not real and vital”. The character of the agent is determined by his view of the action; and “that system of morals is alone true and suited to human nature which unites the intention and the motive, the warmth and the light, in one and the same act of mind. This alone is worthy to be called a moral principle”.
(b) It was on this ground that Coleridge was prepared to reject no less emphatically than he rejected Paley’s doctrine of consequence as the sole criterion, what he calls the “Stoic hypocrisy”,15 that would separate goodness from all idea of the consequences. “I know”, he wrote, “that in order to the idea of virtue we must suppose the pure good will, or reverence for the law as excellent in itself ; but this very excellence supposes consequences though not selfish ones. … For if the Law be barren of all consequences, what is it but words? To obey the Law for its own sake is really a mere sophism in any other sense—you might as well put Abracadabra in its place.” He is there speaking of consequences extending for the individual beyond this life, but that he would apply it also to consequences, individual and social, in this life, is clear both from the above-quoted passage from The Friend, and from a long and interesting entry in the philosophical diary Semina Rerum16 on the place of knowledge or, as he calls it, “Sense” in the good life, as necessarily implying a reference to “interests”. After distinguishing knowing for the sake of knowing as Science, from knowing for the sake of being as Sense, and in the latter that which has “exclusive reference to the responsibility of personal being”, as Moral Sense, from the Natural Sense which has regard to the peculiar interests of the individual, he goes on :
“The perfection of human nature arises when the first (i.e. science) is allowed to be an end, but yet in subordination to the second (i.e. moral sense) as the alone ultimate end, and when the second existing in combination with the third (i.e. natural sense) elevates and takes it up into its own class by the habit of contemplating both the common and the peculiar interests of all individuals, as far as they lie within his sphere of influence, as his own individual interests. Here we have the man of practical Rectitude, with right principle, prescribing the rule, Discretion determining the objects, and Judgment guiding the application. He seeks his own happiness, and he seeks the happiness of his neighbours, and he seeks both in such a way and by such means as enables him to find each in the other.”17
There is a certain confusion here between the moral sense and the interests that are sensed. Only the latter can, strictly speaking, be an “end”. But the meaning is plain, namely, the impossibility of separating the two in actual fact. That in the fullest exercise of spirit both are merged in a higher comes out in his fine treatment of Love, which brings us to the second of the above-mentioned contrasts between his own view and that both of Kant and of current empiricism, and therewith to the point at which his moral philosophy merges in his philosophy of religion.
7. LOVE THE FULFILLING OF THE LAW
It seems doubtful whether Coleridge was familiar with Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiments and the place in the moral life assigned by writers of his school to Sympathy. In one of his longer contributions to Southey’s Omniana he contrasts the “Good Heart” with Pharisaic righteousness and would have “the wisdom of love preceding the love of wisdom”, and goes on to pay a tribute to “those who act from good-hearted impulses, a kindly and cheerful mood and the play of minute sympathies, continuous in their discontinuity like the sand-thread of the hour-glass”, and to the part they have in carrying on “the benignant scheme of social nature”. But he was as far as Adam Smith from trusting to what he calls these “temperamental virtues”, as the sustaining principle of the good life. Something sterner was required, which he was prepared to find with Kant in the good will alone,18 only differing from him “so far as he differs from the Christian code”. He does not here tell us wherein the difference consists, but it is not difficult to gather it from other passages. His dissent from Kant’s attempt to dissociate the good will from all regard to consequences has been already mentioned. But his criticism went deeper and challenged Kant’s whole conception of the independence of will and affection.
So long ago as in a contribution to Southey’s Omniana (1812) and without reference to Kant, he had written :19 “Love, however sudden, as when we fall in love at first sight (which is perhaps always the case of love in its highest sense), is yet an act of the will, and that too one of its primary, and therefore ineffaceable acts. This is most important ; for, if it be not true, either love itself is all a romantic hum, a mere connection of desire with a form appropriated to excite and qualify it, or the mere repetition of a day-dream; or if it be granted that love has a real, distinct, and excellent being, I know not how we could attach blame and immorality to inconstancy, when confined to the affections and sense of preference. Either, therefore, we must brutalize our notions with Pope,20 or we must dissolve and thaw away all bonds of morality by the irresistible shocks of an irresistible sensibility with Sterne.”
We are not therefore surprised to find this view directly applied21 to Kant’s statement that “love is a matter of feeling not of will”. “If I say I doubt this independence of love on the will, and doubt love’s being in its essence a mere matter of feeling, i.e. a somewhat formed in us which is not of us and from us … I mean only that my thoughts are not distinct, much less adequate, on the subject —and I am not able to convey any grounds of my belief of the contrary. But the contrary I do believe. What Kant affirms of man in the state of Adam, an ineffable act of Will choosing evil, and which is underneath or within consciousness, though incarnate in the conscience, inasmuch as it must be conceived as taking place in the Homo Noumenon not the Homo Phaenomenon—something like this I conceive of Love, in that higher sense of the word which Petrarch understood.” What he held that sense to be may perhaps be gathered from what he says in the same connection about Love “as not only contradistinguished from lust, but as disparate even from the personal attachments of habit and complex associations”, which pass for it “in the vast majority of instances and into which true Love enters at best only as an element”.22
Yet in the end it remains to him “one of the five or six magna mysteria of human nature.23 … There are two mighty mysteries—action and passion (or passive action), and love is synthesis of these, in which each is the other—and it is only a synthesis, or one of the syntheses of action and passion; other discoveries must be made in order to know the principle of Individuation in general and then the principle of Personality.”
For what he has further to say of the mystery, we have to go to his Philosophy of Religion, and to his belief that the ground of it has to be sought in the still greater mystery of the union of men with one another by reason of their union with God. This doubtless stamps his ethical theory as a form of mysticism, but not, he would have insisted, in any other sense than that “omnia exeunt in mysteria”.
To Coleridge, moreover (and this was the sum and substance of his whole ethical and religious philosophy alike), it did not mean the loss of the individual in the Whole. In the passage just quoted the principle of Love is assumed to be in the end the principle of individuation. It was the growing conviction of his later years that individuality, in the only sense in which it was of moral and religious significance, consisted, not in the narrowing down of life to an exclusive point, but in the expansion of it towards the inclusion of the Whole —Man in God, doubtless, but also God in Man.
Expanded in the light of these passages and comments, we can find in the continuation of the Aphorism with which we started a summary of the answer which Coleridge was prepared to give to the one-sided ethical “schemes” of his time, whether empirical or rational, individualistic or pantheistic: “The object of Ethical Science”, he there writes, “is no Compost, Collectorium, or Inventory of Single Duties ; nor does it seek in the ‘multitudinous Sea’, in the predetermined waves, tides, and currents of Nature, that freedom which is an exclusive attribute of Spirit. For as the Will or Spirit, the Source and Substance of Moral Good, is one and all in every part; so must it be the totality, the whole articulated series of Single Acts, taken as Unity, that can alone, in the severity of Science, be recognized as the proper Counterpart and adequate Representative of a good Will. Is it in this or that limb, or not, rather, in the whole body, the entire Organismus, that the Law of Life reflects itself? Much less then, can the Law of the Spirit work in fragments.”
Coleridge’s thought, both in his published and in his unpublished writings, was too much dominated by the religious interest, and in that too much occupied with the problem of original sin, to leave him free to develop anything that could be called a balanced system of ethics. But there was no one living at the time who had a clearer idea of what was necessary as the foundation of such a system, or who went further by the acuteness of his criticism of prevalent abstractions in preparing materials for it. That English philosophy had to wait nearly half a century after his time—in fact, till the publication of Bradley’s Ethical Studies in 1876, for anything better or even as good, is an interesting comment of the loss it sustained in his failure to make these materials available to the next generation.
1 Under the title, “Paley not a Moralist”. Cp. Table Talk, 1884 ed., p. 155.
2 F. J. A. Hort, M.A. See p. 336.
3 This is confirmed by the occurrence of the name of Butler in Aids to Reflection, XLIIIc, 10 and 13, but in a context which shows that he has Samuel and not Joseph in his mind. His hatred of the bad Butler, who wrote Hudibras, seems to have blinded him to the good Butler, who wrote the Analogy and the Sermons.
4 MS. B III. See Snyder, op. cit., pp. 330. On the distinction between form and shape, see Chap. IV, p. 125 above.
5 MS. B II. Snyder, p. 129. I have here combined the gist of these two passages.
6 MS. B III, loc. cit., supra.
7 Yes ! but why only in dreams?
8 Preliminary Treatise on Method, 3rd ed., p. 24.
9 MS. B II. Snyder, p. 132.
10 Ibid. See Snyder, op. cit., p. 152–3, and cp. Omniana Ed. T. Ashe, 1834, p. 361, on “Motives and Impulses”, where this passage occurs in slightly different form—the impulses deducible from men’s habitual objects of pursuit being definitely called “the true efficient causes of their conduct”.
11 Aphorism XLIIIc, 2.
12 See Table Talk (ed, cit.), p. 155.
13 He quotes the contemporary analyst “who has confounded the taste of mutton with the taste for mutton, and gravely sought for the origin of the latter in the same place with that of the former viz. the papillae of the tongue and palate”.
14 Edition of 1818; but it was also contained in the 1812 edition, p. 374 foll. That he marks it with a note for quotation in MS. B, where he is dealing with the same subject, shows the importance he attached to it as a statement of his own view.
15 Marginal note on p. 344 of Kant’s Vermischte Schriften.
16 MS. C, p. 15, representing, I think, a later stage of his own reflections, and an attempt to assign its place to the “moral sense” that had played so great a part in the ethical theories of the preceding generation. See J. Bonar’s Moral Sense, Library of Philosophy (1930).
17 The passage reminds us of Aristotle’s treatment of the Intellectual Virtues in Ethics, vi, with which we may also compare what he says of the different kinds of Prudence in Aids to Reflection, Aphorism XXIX.
18 He quotes (MS. B) the famous passage from the Metaphysic of Ethics, Kant’s Werke (Hartenstein), vol. iv. p. 241: “It is impossible to think of anything in the world, nay of anything even outside the world, which could without limitation be held to be good except a good Will”—probably for the first time in English ethical literature.
19 Ed. cit., p. 410.
20 He quotes :
“Lust, thro’ some certain strainers well refined,
Is gentle love and charms all woman-kind.”
21 In a marginal note on Kant’s treatment of Menschenliebe, which may perhaps be judged to be later on the ground both of the greater hesitation and the greater maturity of the thought.
22 Table Talk, p. 117. Cp. “Sympathy constitutes friendship ; but in love there is a sort of antipathy or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.”
23 Others he mentions are Will, Conscience, Carnate Evil, Identity, Growth, and Progression.