In this chapter, we turn to Hume’s treatment of morals and politics, areas in which the imagination looms large, although one would hard hardly know it from the secondary literature, much of which tends either to gloss over the issue or ignore it entirely.1 Hume regards morals and politics as two sides of the same coin – and for that reason it makes sense to consider them in the same chapter – though, as an exegetical matter, it is possible to disentangle the two and trace the way he draws on the imagination in each case. On the side of morals, the faculty is implicated in the process of moral judgement through which virtue and vice and their attendant sentiments are constituted, a process that depends in turn on the capacity to sympathise with others and the ability to put oneself in the disinterested attitude that Hume calls the ‘general point of view’, both desiderata furnished by the imagination. The capacity to sympathise depends on the mimetic power of the faculty to copy the sentiment of the other as an idea in the observer; its productive power to draw connections between the object (the sentiment in the other) and the observer; and the capacity to feel the pleasure that sympathetic connection with others produces. The ‘general point of view’ relies on the imagination to produce an ideal standard from which to reflect upon and correct the consequences of partiality and prejudice.
On the side of politics, the imagination makes an appearance in two ways. First, in its preference for the contiguous over the remote, the faculty encourages short-term gain over long-term interests; the result is an ongoing threat to social order, a problem for which the imagination also provides the solution in the form of the general point of view and reflection, from which arise the institutions and various contrivances that ensure furtherance of the public good. Imagination also enters, second, to explain the rules that determine property. These, too, arise with a view to public utility, but are only possible through the tendency of the imagination to make as easy a transition as possible among its ideas, and its power to invent a vulgar fiction that inspires a firstorder natural belief. Property, Hume urges, is a species of cause and effect that binds persons to objects in an invisible relation of constant possession that cannot be traced to experience or matter of fact. Once established, property follows its own natural history, each subsequent rule generated by the tendency of the imagination to create a new relation that resembles those that already exist. The imagination might seem a weak basis on which to build so substantial an edifice as government or property, but that makes the fact of its role no less true nor, indeed, does it make those institutions any less stable.
Moral Judgement
Hume’s ethical writings are concerned fundamentally with the nature of moral value, its source and subsequent expression in the form of virtues and their respective vices, which he sorts according to utility and agreeableness and their origin as sentiments in ourselves (the possessor) or in others. This yields four categories of qualities: those useful to the others (the ‘social virtues’) promote the public good (laws between nations encourage trade, for example, chastity further the nurturing of young, and allegiance to government ensures peace and social order); those useful to ourselves promote the good of the individual who possesses them (discretion furthers success, as industry leads to good fortune); those immediately agreeable to ourselves raise pleasure in the possessor (including greatness of mind, dignity of character and a proper degree of pride and self-value); and those immediately agreeable to others (the ‘companionable virtues’) raise pleasure in the observer who witnesses them (such as wit and ingenuity, for instance, the spirit of dialogue and conversation, eloquence and cleanliness). Some virtues, Hume emphasises, ‘derive their merit from complicated sources’ and thus fall into more than one category. Honesty, fidelity and truth, for example, are praised for promoting the interests of society (useful to others), but once established are seen as ‘advantageous to the person himself’ (useful to the possessor) (EPM 6.13/SBN 238). Similarly, chastity promotes good reputation (useful to the possessor) and strengthens the stability of relationships for nurturing the young (useful to others), while courage is a quality useful to the ‘public and person possessed of it’ and, due to its ‘peculiar luster’, the source of ‘sublimity and daring confidence’ (agreeable to the possessor) that also catches the eye of every spectator (agreeable to others) (EPM 7.11–15/SBN 254–5).
Hume argues, further, that whereas all virtues and vices depend ultimately on pleasure and pain, they are not ‘entirely natural’ in origin. A specific set – the social virtues connected with the institutions of government and political society – arise from utility alone, and are appropriately termed ‘artificial’ because they form as ‘mere contrivances for the interest of society’ (T 3.3.1.9/SBN 577), to solve, that is, problems posed by scarce resources, limited benevolence and human impotence, contingencies that otherwise prevent or interfere with the progress of a commodious and well-ordered life. Hume conducts a thought experiment to prove his point: a country with either profuse abundance or extended benevolence would avoid the obstacles – competition over limited resources and the acquisitive effects of self-interest – that hinder the fair and peaceful distribution of goods and services, thus obviating the need for artifice to regulate the whole. At the same time, Hume is careful to emphasise (thought experiments notwithstanding) that wherever human beings form society, the institutions of government and the associated virtues always do emerge. Once established, moreover, these artificial virtues require the same affective power as their entirely natural counterparts if they are to raise specifically moral sentiments. While the origin of these artificial virtues is singular, the process through which they are constituted as virtues is the same: all virtues (and vices), whether natural or artificial, arise from an amiableness or beauty that affects a person prior to ‘all precept and education’ (EPM 5.4/SBN 214), and they are explicable in terms of moral judgement in which, as we will see in what follows, the imagination takes centre stage. The distinction between natural and artificial virtues, on the one side, and between utility and agreeableness, on the other, overlaps but does not coincide.
As the title of the second Enquiry makes clear, Hume develops these distinctions in pursuit of a philosophical principle to understand and explain virtue and vice, and in this endeavour the imagination is involved only indirectly, insofar as it enters into the practice of philosophy itself. We shall see in the final chapter that Hume has a good deal to say about this matter, but in his approach to morals, at least, the imagination plays quite a different role, that of providing the condition that facilitates and makes possible the practice of moral judgement through which pleasure and pain are transformed into moral sentiments, and ‘qualities’ of persons, actions and events become virtues and vices. Hume supposes that people possess certain stable features that compose the underlying disposition for the formation of what we call character. ‘If any action be either virtuous or vicious’, he proposes, ‘’tis only as a sign of some quality or character. It must depend upon durable principles of the mind, which extend over the whole conduct, and enter into the personal character’ (T 3.3.1.4/SBN 575). Hume need not commit to any particular position concerning the nature or origin of these dispositional qualities (although claims have been made on his behalf),2 since all he requires is that they are visible in the activities in which people engage, and when viewed cause ‘pleasure or uneasiness of a particular kind’ in the possessor or viewer of the quality. ‘To have the sense of virtue’, as Hume writes, ‘is nothing but to feel a satisfaction of a particular kind from the contemplation of a character. The very feeling constitutes our praise or admiration’ (T 3.1.2.3/SBN 471). On this view, qualities thus displayed produce sentiments of pleasure (or pain), which inspire in turn approbation (or disapprobation) through which the action (and by extension the person) is constituted as virtuous (or vicious). The virtue (or vice) can then be categorised under one or more headings of Hume’s fourfold principle, with the logic of the process varying slightly depending on whether the source of the praise lies in utility or agreeableness and/or in ourselves or others: with qualities useful to others, the feeling arises in an observer who sees the public good furthered; with qualities useful to ourselves, the pleasure arises in the observer who recognises that the good of an individual is furthered; and where the cause is immediate agreeableness the pleasure arises first either in the possessor or in the observer.
Sympathy
The crucial component in each of these four cases is that certain qualities of action and character are not simply agreeable but that the pleasure they produce is attended with moral approbation, and this is only possible, Hume urges, due to the singular human capacity for sympathy, a subject that (along with its conceptual kin, the ‘general point of view’), has generated a good deal of discussion in the literature even if the role of the imagination has been largely passed over in favour of emphasising it as a ‘mechanism’ of ‘communication’.3 The qualities that constitute the social virtues excite approbation due to ‘a sympathy with public interest’ (T 3.2.2.24/SBN 499); those that further the good of the individual presuppose that others partake in the ‘ideas of happiness, joy, triumph, and prosperity’ of the person whose good is furthered (EPM 6.3); those immediately agreeable to ourselves require that observers ‘enter into the same humour [as the possessor], and catch the sentiment, by a contagion or natural sympathy’ (EPM 7.2/SBN 251); and a quality that forms a companionable virtue works its magic by ‘communicating, on its first appearance, a lively joy and satisfaction to every one who has any comprehension of it’ (EPM 8.3/SBN 262).
Hume’s main discussion of sympathy occurs in T 2.1.11, which, as James Farr among others has observed, is considerably more elaborate than in the second Enquiry, by which time Hume seems to have doubted that it can be treated – as he does in the earlier work – as an ‘instantiation of association’. Sympathy remains important in the later work but, rather than attempt a psychological aetiology, Hume describes it simply as a ‘principle of human nature’ and subject to the proviso that ‘there are, in every science, some principles, beyond which we cannot hope to find any principle more general’; for this reason it is ‘needless to push our researches so far as to ask, why we have humanity or fellow-feeling with others’ (EPM 5.17n19/SBN 219–20n1, emphasis added).4 In the Treatise account he introduces it as a preamble to explaining the love of fame, a secondary cause of pride and humility explicable only through the relations we have with others. Praise and blame, reputation and infamy, are not original causes, Hume urges, because they are reducible to the more fundamental capacity we have to sympathise with others. This ‘remarkable’ quality of human nature means that sentiments arising first in other people produce, through some natural and unavoidable mechanism, a similar sentiment in us; it is nothing but the propensity ‘to receive by communication’ the ‘inclinations and sentiments’ of others, ‘however different from, or even contrary to our own’ (T 2.1.11.2/SBN 316). It enables an observer to conceive or create a sentiment or passion even though he or she may never have experienced it originally.
Sympathy, along with its effects, might be remarkable but it is not inexplicable, these being one instance of the general process whereby an idea of a passion or emotion is enlivened and ‘converted into an impression’.5 Indeed, Hume regards the ‘principle of sympathy or communication’ as ‘nothing but the conversion of an idea into an impression by the force of imagination’ (T 2.3.6.8/SBN 427). In order to understand what ‘conversion’ means in the context of sympathising with others, it is useful to consider first the analogous case of its operation in our own person. Recalling or imagining an occasion that produced or could produce anger, for example, gives rise to an impression of anger, which, though fainter than the original, gains sufficient force and vivacity to reach the status of a new impression and constitute a new feeling of anger. Like all impressions, it can then be copied to form a new idea, itself capable of conversion into another impression. We then become angry, not by witnessing an event or seeing an object but through effectively ‘converting’ an idea into an impression by imbuing it with increased forced and vivacity so that it approaches the original.6
‘Sympathy’, as Hume uses the term, is the same process whereby an idea of a passion is enlivened itself to become a passion, except that it takes place with other people; we do not, after all, sympathise with ourselves.7 ‘When I see the effects of passion in the voice and gesture of any person’, Hume writes, ‘my mind immediately passes from these effects to their causes, and forms such a lively idea of the passions, as is presently converted into the passion itself’ (T 3.3.1.7/SBN 576). In this way ‘an idea of a sentiment or passion, may . . . be so enliven’d as to become the very sentiment or passion’, and ‘we enter so deep into the opinions and affections of others, whenever we discover them’ (T 2.1.11.7/SBN 319, emphasis added); they thus ‘operate upon us . . . in the very same manner, as if they had been originally deriv’d from our own temper and disposition’ (T 3.3.2.3/SBN 592). The important difference, then, between converting an idea into an impression in my own person and entering into the sentiments of others is that the idea, which forms the object of the conversion, has its origin not in our own recollection of anger or in some imagined cause of it, but in an impression originally in somebody else, that is, their feeling of anger. Expressing this insight, Hume writes:
’Tis indeed evident, that when we sympathise with the passions and sentiments of others, these movements appear at first in our mind as mere ideas, and are conceiv’d to belong to another person, as we conceive any other matter of fact. ’Tis also evident, that the ideas of the affections of others are converted into the very impressions they represent, and that the passions arise in conformity to the images we form of them. (T 2.1.11.8/SBN 319)
These passions and emotions are not, moreover, mysterious mental items trapped in minds accessible only through some peculiar intuitive magic. On the contrary, Hume supposes that people ‘infer’ them routinely from their ‘effects’ as ‘external signs’ in ‘countenance and conversation’ (T 2.1.11.3/SBN 317) or in the ‘voice and gesture of any person’ (T 3.3.1.7/SBN 576). Through sympathy, the conversion takes place when the sentiment felt by the other and inferred from their behaviour is copied and represented in the observer as an idea, which is subsequently enlivened to form a new impression, that is, a sentiment similar to the one experienced by the other. It can be traced originally to the passion in somebody else, but the idea copied from it by the spectator ‘acquires such a degree of force and vivacity, as to become the very passion itself, and produce an equal emotion, as any original affection’ (T 2.1.11.3/SBN 317). Hume sometimes describes the entire process as ‘conversion’, although, strictly speaking (and as he generally makes clear), the object converted is not the passion of the other – which is copied – but the idea of that passion, which becomes an impression of the same kind as the sentiment that appeared first in somebody else. As the maxim concerning the relative force and vivacity of impressions and ideas would lead one to expect, the new sentiment is fainter than the original from which it is derived, although the difference is often imperceptible and the power of the feeling generated by sympathy considerable. Indeed, Hume suggests that through sympathy the enlivening of the idea is more intense precisely because ‘Our affections depend more upon ourselves, for which reason they arise more naturally from the imagination, and from every lively idea we form of them’ (T 2.1.11.7/SBN 319, emphasis added). For sympathy to function in this way presupposes capacities that only the imagination can provide: the mimetic power of that faculty to copy the sentiment of the other as an idea in the observer; its productive power to draw connections between the object (the sentiment in the other) and the observer; and the capacity to feel the pleasure that sympathetic connection with others produces. We can consider each in turn.
Sympathy and the Mimetic Power of Imagination
First, as should be clear already from the language Hume uses, the capacity to sympathise depends fundamentally on the mimetic power of the imagination to copy and represent the impression originally in the other (the sentiment or passion expressed in behaviour) as an idea in the observer. Hume’s various characterisations of the process suggest that sympathy occurs passively, adventitiously and spontaneously whenever we perceive, remember, or imagine the event in question: the sentiments of others are ‘thrown . . . upon me’, so that ‘I find myself’ in the same humour with others; or I feel myself ‘under the dominion of the beneficent affections’ and ‘transported’ by them.8 The sentiments of others ‘strike upon the soul’, are ‘communicated’ and ‘infused’; they ‘transfuse themselves’ and ‘diffuse over our minds’ or, to use Hume’s musical metaphor, a passion has a certain pitch that gives it motion like the sounds of an instrument that the listener cannot fail to hear. ‘As in strings equally wound up’, he remarks, ‘the motion of one communicates itself to the rest; so all the affections readily pass from one person to another, and beget correspondent movements in every human creature’ (T 3.3.1.7/SBN 576). In perhaps the most striking image, Hume describes the effect of sympathy as a ‘contagion’ that spreads like a disease or mood, affecting its victims as if by magic. ‘We enter, I shall suppose, into a warm, well-contrived apartment’, Hume writes, in an image that cannot fail to arouse sympathy in the reader. He continues:
We necessarily feel the pleasure from its very survey, because it presents us with pleasing ideas of ease, satisfaction, and enjoyment. The hospitable, good-humoured, humane landlord appears. . . . His whole family, by the freedom, ease, confidence, and calm enjoyment, diffused over their countenances, sufficiently express their happiness. I have a pleasing sympathy in the prospect of so much joy, and can never consider the course of it, without the most agreeable emotions. He tells me, that an oppressive and powerful neighbour had attempted to dispossess him of his inheritance, and had long disturbed all his innocent and social pleasures. I feel an immediate indignation arise in me against such violence and injury. (EPM 5.19–21/SBN 220–1)
The same movement is exemplified in other contexts where the imagination is touched by the drama or intensity of a passion. A crowd will always gather around the card game at which the most dramatic play is unfolding, even though it does not involve the best players; for the ‘view, or, at least, imagination of high passions, arising from great loss or gain, affects the spectator by sympathy, gives him some touches of the same passions, and serves him for a momentary entertainment’ (E 217). Similarly, somebody entering the theatre is ‘immediately struck with the view of so great a multitude, participating in one common amusement; and experiences, from their very aspect, a superior sensibility or disposition of being affected with every sentiment, which he shares with his fellow-creatures’ (EPM 5.24/SBN 221). That parents protect their children is explained by the same feature of human nature, as is the action of a generous man rushing to the aid of friends from a ‘direct tendency or instinct’, without calculation or even due regard for the possible consequences (EPM Appx.3.2/SBN 303).
Sympathy and the Productive Power of Imagination
While sympathy involves the imagination being moved by the sentiment of the other, the productive power of that faculty is also engaged actively in drawing connections between the object (the sentiment in the other) and ourselves, according to the principles of association, successfully effecting an easy transition between the two. Hume writes:
In a word, no ideas can affect each other, either by comparison, or by the passions they separately produce, unless they be united together by some relation, which may cause an easy transition of the ideas, and consequently of the emotions or impressions attending the ideas; and may preserve the one impression in the passage of the imagination to the object of the other. (T 2.2.8.20/SBN 380)
In sympathy, this unity is achieved primarily (though not exclusively) through resemblance rather than contiguity or cause and effect because there is a marked similarity between our own passions and those we recognise in others, even if – as is sometimes the case – we have not experienced the passion with the same intensity or, indeed, have no direct knowledge of it. Of course, the ‘stronger the relation is betwixt ourselves and any object’, Hume points out, ‘the more easily does the imagination make the transition, and convey to the related idea the vivacity of conception, with which we always form the idea of our own passion’ (T 2.1.11.5/SBN 318).9 We still have some notion of a friend’s distress at the death of a loved one, however, even when we have never lost anybody comparably dear. Indeed, there is such a ‘general resemblance’ among human beings with respect to the structure of mind and body, and human nature is sufficiently uniform that there is hardly a passion or principle in others ‘of which, in some degree or other, we may not find a parallel in ourselves’ (T 2.1.11.5/SBN 318).
We should note, also, that while resemblance is the primary principle of association operating in the mechanism of sympathy, it receives added force from the other two and, indeed, ‘must be assisted by [them]’ if we are to ‘feel the sympathy in its full perfection’ (T 2.1.11.8/SBN 320) or have the passions ‘communicate themselves entirely’ (T 2.1.11.6/SBN 318). Without contiguity of time and place, a person is effectively reduced to solitude, and sympathy fails ‘because the movements of his heart are not forwarded by correspondent movements in his fellow-creatures’ (EPM 5.18/SBN 220). Cause and effect, on the other hand, perfects the process by forming a ‘tie’ between self and others in relations of blood or acquaintance, according to the principle that ‘in the original frame of our mind, our strongest attention is confin’d to ourselves; our next is extended to our relations and acquaintance; and ’tis only the weakest which reaches to strangers and indifferent persons’ (T 3.2.2.8/SBN 488). The imagination is affected more by ties that are close – between parents and children, for example, or those we have come to know intimately over a long course of time – when the idea is most lively and vivacious; the degree of connection loosens, by contrast, as the vivacity decreases and the further we move from those with whom we share a form of life, from neighbours through colleagues and fellow countrymen to strangers, where, being struck with less force, the imagination can establish but weak connections. Through causality, then, sympathy forms a web of invisible threads that bind us with more or less strength to other human beings or, like a pebble dropped in a pond, we stand at the centre of progressively faint circles moving outwards, every one a more distant effect that weakens at each remove.
In addition to its mimetic and productive powers, the imagination is also required to register the pleasure and pain involved in the sympathetic movement of the sentiments.10 There are two ways in which these sensations are aroused. On the one hand, there is pleasure and pain involved in the communication of the passion through sympathy. When the idea of the original in somebody else is converted into a like impression in us, it naturally carries with it the same sensation of pleasure or pain depending on the passion in question: the ‘very aspects of happiness, joy, prosperity, gives pleasure; that of pain, suffering, sorrow, communicates uneasiness’ (EPM 5.18/SBN 220). Thus, Hume remarks:
In general, it is certain, that, wherever we go, whatever we reflect on or converse about, every thing still presents us with the view of human happiness or misery, and excites in our breast a sympathetic movement of pleasure or uneasiness. In our serious occupations, in our careless amusements, this principle still exerts its active energy. (EPM 5.23/SBN 221)
We do tend to receive more pleasure when sympathising with a man in the throws of passions that produce agreeable sentiments, however, and less when the effects are disagreeable. In the former case, ‘Our imagination, entering into his feelings and disposition, is affected in a more agreeable manner’, Hume observes, ‘than if a melancholy, dejected, sullen, anxious temper were presented to us’ (EPM 7.2/SBN 251).
On the other hand, distinct from the pleasure and pain that accompany a passion communicated through conversion, Hume considers the act of sympathy itself to be the source of a distinct pleasure that arises regardless of whether that passion communicates pain or pleasure; this sympathetic pleasure originates not in the passion aroused – pleasure at another’s prosperity, say, or pain in their suffering – but in the process of conversion through which an idea becomes a passion. Hume explains this phenomenon by emphasising again the universality of human nature, there being no greater pleasure possible, he thinks, than when we gain insight into the lives of others. The imagination responds to the equivalent of an entertainment involving new and foreign objects that produces a ‘lively sensation’ and ‘excites the spirits’. Hume writes:
On the appearance of such an object, it [the mind] awakes, as it were, from a dream: The blood flows with a new tide: The heart it elevated: And the whole man acquires a vigour, which he cannot command in his solitary and calm moments. (T 2.2.4.4/SBN )
The effect of this novelty is greatest, moreover, and the entertainment most satisfying when confronting another person:
the liveliest of all objects, viz. a rational and thinking being like ourselves, who communicates to us all the actions of his mind; . . . Every lively idea is agreeable, but especially that of a passion, because such an idea becomes a kind of passion, and gives a more sensible agitation to the mind, than any other image or conception. (T 2.2.4.4/SBN 353)
It should be emphasised again, however, that, like the imagination on which it depends, sympathy has its limits. Hume expresses confidence that ‘there is no human, and indeed no sensible, creature, whose happiness or misery does not, in some measure, affect us, when brought near to us, and represented in lively colours’ (T 3.2.1.12/SBN 481), but it does not follow that we are always moved, and when we have little or no acquaintance with the person or event in question, the colours grow so dim as to barely register at all. The imagination is like a keyboard upon which effects are registered most distinctly when they fall within the range of human hearing, or like a canvas on which objects stand within the scope of our perceptual field. At either end of its range – as the pitch grows higher and lower, as the object moves closer or farther away – the sounds and the images grow indistinct, and beyond a certain point nothing is audible or visible at all. Hume seems to regard one’s countrymen as the outer limits to which sympathy meaningfully reaches, though that one’s compatriot in another country (or a human on the moon) is a friend ‘proceeds only from the relation to ourselves; which in these cases gathers force by being confin’d to a few persons’ (T 3.2.1.12/SBN 482).11 When it comes to those qualities of character remote in time and place – the cruelty of Nero or Alexander’s dignity of mind – approval or condemnation is possible because the case resembles others that are contiguous and familiar. The fact remains that when objects are ‘very remote, our sympathy is proportionably weaker, and our praise or blame fainter and more doubtful’ (T 3.3.3.2/SBN 603). This is no moral failing for which people should be condemned but an outer limit beyond which sympathy cannot penetrate, a lack originating in the very faculty that makes sympathy possible.
The ‘General Point of View’
While sympathy is central to Hume’s approach to morals, and decisive for the process of moral judgement, it presupposes a further and more fundamental condition that the imagination also supplies, what Hume calls variously the ‘general point of view’, the perspective of the ‘unprejudiced’ or ‘judicious spectator’, and the viewpoint of a ‘man in general’. The presence of this concept in Hume’s thought has led to something of a puzzle for interpreters, since assigning it weight skews the whole tenor of his moral philosophy away from ‘sentimentalism’, where moral judgement is based on or identical to feelings of pleasure and pain, and towards that of an ‘ideal spectator’ – ‘fully informed, entirely objective and not self-interested’, as Elizabeth Radcliffe characterises it – that makes virtue and vice the product of projected rather than real sentiments.12 Different readers have tended to regard the choice between these options as disjunctive – Hume must be either a sentimentalist or an ideal observer theorist – though there seems no barrier to combining them, especially if one takes the spectator to be a position from which to reflect on and correct judgements that arise immediately and adventitiously. Moral judgements are, indeed, as the sentimentalist Hume argues, a matter of pleasure and pain, but these are not the final word and must succumb to some more reliable standard, even if scrutiny yields only better judgements – a new ‘appearance’ and revised ‘language’ – rather than altered sentiments, feelings often remaining ‘stubborn or unalterable’ (see EPM 5.41n24/SBN 228n1; and T 3.3.1.16/SBN 582). ‘The imagination is sure to be affected’, Hume acknowledges, ‘though the passions excited may not always be so strong and steady as to have a great influence on the conduct and behaviour’ (EPM 5.31/SBN 223). That reflection produces conclusions and courses of action contrary to feelings and desires is actually an accurate description of the phenomenology of our moral lives: sometimes one prevails and sometimes the other.
Hume’s appeal to the idea of a spectator, moreover, is part and parcel of the eighteenth-century discovery of ‘disinterestedness’, a philosophical concept that finds its first explicit formulation in the neo-Platonic aesthetics of Shaftesbury, and that in ethical theory receives its most sophisticated expression in the guise of the ‘impartial spectator’ developed by Hume’s friend and contemporary, Adam Smith.13 It also finds striking and underappreciated application in Lord Kames’ concept of ‘ideal presence’, a sort of ‘waking dream’ that imbues a fiction with the same ‘truth and reality’ as if it were a ‘real existence’.14 To speak of an ‘ideal’ in this sense is not to impute any perfection to the presence in question, but to emphasise its status as the product of mind. Very much in the same spirit, Hume also regards the general point of view as a mental state or attitude that effects an imaginary ‘change’ of ‘situation’ (T 3.3.3.2/SBN 603) in and through which one distances oneself psychically – as Edward Bullough later described the same phenomenon in the context of aesthetic experience – from the various interests and prejudices that otherwise interfere with calm reflection and sound judgement.15 It is from this ‘view’ – a term Hume uses to exploit the analogy with sight – that spectators free themselves to be moved by actions and characters, which, as described above, begin the process whereby pleasure is transformed into approbation and qualities into virtues. As everybody with normal eyesight brackets the variations following on different perspectives in order to see the same object, so individuals can transcend the particularities of their own person to view the same qualities and react to them in the proper way, as anybody would when freed of partiality and prejudice. Only through this imaginative projection can we explain how the ‘good qualities of an enemy are hurtful to us; but may still command our esteem and respect. ’Tis only when a character is consider’d in general’, Hume writes, ‘without reference to our particular interest, that it causes such a feeling or sentiment, as denominates it morally good or evil’ (T 3.1.2.4/SBN 472).
Indeed, as an impartial attitude in this sense, the general point of view is best understood as a remedy or solution for two weaknesses in human nature and the problem they pose. The first arises from self-interest, our ‘very limited . . . generosity’, which determines that we ‘remain constantly in that situation and point of view, which is peculiar to us’ (T 3.3.3.2/SBN 603). The second weakness follows from the limits of sympathy, whose effects tend to weaken the farther we move beyond the narrow circle of family and friends. Self-interest and limited sympathy raise barriers to the general intercourse of society and conversation, and undermine the universality that moral judgement requires and presupposes. The imagination, in the form of the general point of view, solves this problem by producing an ideal standard from which to reflect upon and correct the consequences of partiality and prejudice. The process is the internal analogue to the adjustments routinely made when objects of outer sense appear to diminish with distance. Our reaction is not to think that they actually grow smaller, but ‘correcting the appearance by reflection, [we] arrive at a more constant and establish’d judgement concerning them’ (T 3.3.3.2/SBN 603). In doing so, Hume urges, we effectively replace the ‘original standard’ given by sense with a ‘general unalterable’ alternative derived from reason.
The same is true in the sphere of morals. Judgement ‘corrects the inequalities of our internal emotions and perceptions in like manner, as it preserves us from error, in the several variations of images, presented to our external senses.’ Hume continues:
The same object, at a double distance, really throws on the eye a picture of but half the bulk; yet we imagine that it appears of the same size in both situations; because we know, that, on our approach to it, its image would expand on the eye, and that the difference consists not in the object itself, but in our position with regard to it. And, indeed, without such a correction of appearances, both in internal and external sentiment, men could never think or talk steadily on any subject; while their fluctuating situations produce a continual variation on objects, and throw them into such different and contrary lights and positions. (EPM 5.41/SBN 227–8)
In the case of both external and internal perception, the analogy suggests, initial judgements are corrected by considering what an object or action would look like were we to change our position and perspective. Moral perception provides an ‘original standard’, but the demands of social intercourse and the dictates of moral conduct require that individuals depart from their own perspective and ‘form some general and inalterable standard, by which we may approve or disapprove of characters and manners’ (T 3.3.3.2/SBN 603). The standard often presents views and courses of action that contradict our passions and desires, but this shows only the power of reason to correct the corrupting influences of the imagination on internal sentiments as it does the erroneous perceptions of outer sense. One discovers here, then, a curious cooperation between faculties more often than not in conflict and contradiction: imagination provides the general point of view that allows reason to reflect on judgements and courses of action, and reason enters to sift accidental circumstances from the efficacious causes and replace the unphilosophical species of probability born of imagination with the more reliable one supplied by the understanding.
The faculties cooperate in the same way to further the inculcation of morals and the progress of our own characters, found in that
constant habit of surveying ourselves, as it were, in reflection, [which] keeps alive all the sentiments of right and wrong, and begets, in noble creatures, a certain reverence for themselves as well as others; which is the surest guardian of every virtue. (EPM 9.10/SBN 276)
There is a twist, as Hume goes on to explain, because the motive to this habit lies in the propensity of the imagination to be affected by self-love or the love of fame, the opinions that others have of us throwing into relief the opinion we form of ourselves. It is thus from ‘our continual and earnest pursuit of a character, a name, a reputation in the world, [that] we bring our own deportment and conduct frequently in review, and consider how they appear in the eyes of those, who approach and regard us’ (EPM 9.10/SBN 276). To explain this phenomenon, Hume turns to sympathy and the process of conversion it facilitates. Affects are known by their effects in the form of those outward signs in countenance and conversation, and the ensuing idea is converted to an impression that acquires such vivacity to become the passion itself and produce the same affection as any original passion. The sentiments of others resemble ones we find in ourselves and the ‘stronger the relation is betwixt ourselves and any object, the more easily does the imagination make the transition, and convey to the related idea the vivacity of conception, with which we always form the idea of our own person’ (T 2.1.11.5/SBN 318). From the force of imagination, then, the other’s impression of us is converted into the same impression of ourselves, and this forms a motive for reflecting on our own conduct.
It is important to emphasise, however, that while the imagination works towards a corrective of its own corrupting influence, the general point of view does not alter in any material way the facts of human nature that produce the difficulty in the first place. In many instances, we continue to follow ‘the natural and usual force of the passions, when we determine concerning vice and virtue; . . . A man naturally loves his children better than his nephews’, Hume points out, ‘his nephews better than his cousins, his cousins better than strangers, where every thing else is equal. Our sense of duty always follows the common and natural course of our passions’ (T 3.2.1.18/SBN 483–4). For this reason we often cling tenaciously to our prejudices despite evidence to the contrary – that an ‘Irishman cannot have wit, and a Frenchman cannot have solidity’ (T 1.3.13.7/SBN 146) – where, as we saw in Chapter 2, general rules of the imagination persist and guide judgement beyond the original circumstances that first gave rise to them. Such errors can never be eradicated entirely, Hume suggests, but continue to arise and inspire belief from the powerful influence they have on the mind.
Imagination and Political Society
As we have already noted, Hume considers government and political society ‘mere contrivances’ designed to overcome threats to peace and stability that spring from limited benevolence and scarce resources. Actions that support these arrangements further the good of the whole and through the process of moral judgement are constituted as virtues. In addition to its function in explaining the virtues associated with political society, however, Hume also draws on the imagination to explain the origin of government and the complicated arrangements governing property.16
First, Hume emphasises the role of imagination in the foundation of government; the faculty is implicated both in the problems to which political society is a solution and in the solution itself. The problems spring from the fact that human beings are ‘mightily governed by the imagination’ and moved more by an object’s appearance than any ‘real intrinsic value’ it contains (T 3.2.7.2/SBN 534); the contiguous vanquishes what is remote and ‘present motives and inclinations’ obscure courses of action that would actually promote more valuable and worthy ends. Hume writes:
[When] objects approach nearer to us, or acquire the advantages of favourable lights and positions, which catch the heart or imagination; our general resolutions are frequently confounded, a small enjoyment preferred, and lasting shame and sorrow entailed upon us. And however poets may employ their wit and eloquence, in celebrating present pleasure, and rejecting all distant views to fame, health, or fortune; it is obvious, that this practice is the source of all dissoluteness and disorder, repentance and misery. (EPM 6.15/SBN 239)
Were this tendency felt only in the course of a few individual lives, its wider impact would be nugatory; the shame and sorrow of a minority would be of little consequence to society at large. Hume considers the tendency general, however, with trivial, present advantage being routinely preferred ‘to the maintenance of order in society, which so much depends on the observance of justice’ (T 3.2.7.1/SBN 534). The tendency of the imagination to be moved more by the contiguous than the remote inclines people to courses of action that undermine peace and order, and this ‘infirmity’ is a perennial threat with potentially devastating consequences; on a cursory view, moreover, it appears ‘incapable of remedy’ (T 3.2.7.4/SBN 535).
There is a remedy, however, and like the problem it lies in the imagination. The ‘infirmity of human nature becomes a remedy to itself’, Hume proposes, ‘and that provision we make against our negligence about remote objects, proceeds merely from our natural inclination to the negligence’ (T 3.2.7.5/SBN 536). Hume’s reasoning on this point is of a piece with his discussion of the attitude that defines the general point of view and the process of reflection and correction it facilitates. Again, drawing an analogy with the sense of sight illuminates his point. Objects seen close up have a detail and resolution that strikes the imagination with sufficient force and vivacity to incline the viewer towards them, but when the same are considered ‘at a distance, all their minute distinctions vanish, and we always give the preference to whatever is in itself preferable, without considering its situation and circumstances’ (T 3.2.7.5/SBN 536). When viewing the same object for a second time, it appears in a new light, details that made the object striking on a first view fading in comparison to what is now recognised as its real and intrinsic value. The same is true, Hume urges, with actions and their consequences in which – as in a future action one resolves to perform – the general point of view and the ‘general and more discernible qualities of good and evil’ reveal ‘circumstances . . . at first over-look’d’, and these are what now come to have an ‘influence on my conduct and affections’ (T 3.2.7.5/SBN 536). In this way, a new resolution comes to replace the old, nature remedying itself by providing a restraint where study, reflection, meditation, repeated resolution and advice of friends alone have limited effect.
The same reasoning discovers, second, the origin of political society and allegiance, a ‘cure’ for the ‘natural weakness’ that drives individuals with a ‘violent propension to prefer contiguous to remote’. This dangerous propensity requires correction, but since it is impossible to change anything ‘material in our nature’, the only recourse is to ‘change our circumstances and situation, and render the observance of the laws of justice our nearest interest, and their violation our most remote’ (T 3.2.7.6/SBN 537). This being impractical for everybody, the responsibility falls to a few who have little or no interest in acts of injustice, namely the civil magistrates, kings, ministers and other rulers deemed worthy or at least suitable for the fair administration of justice and impartial resolution of disputes concerning its statutes. In effect, government and the individuals who compose it embody the general point of view by ensuring that actions deriving from self-interest and prejudice are corrected by other actions that promote the common good. Large-scale cooperative action invariably occasions particular and therefore competing and contradictory points of view, which would render the planning and execution of any project impossible and impose expense and trouble upon a few. ‘Political society remedies both these inconveniences’, Hume observes, for officials who decide in favour of or against such plans and forward its completion ‘find no interest in it, either immediate or remote’. Their single motivation is the public good and only on such a basis can the long-term complex projects that define a full life be undertaken and completed: ‘bridges are built; harbours open’d; ramparts raised; canals form’d; and armies disciplined’ in spite of the ‘human infirmities’ that mark the individuals who execute and compose these and like plans (T 3.2.7.8/SBN 539).
Property and Its Natural History
The role of imagination in Hume’s discussion of property is both striking and original, and amounts to a case where the faculty invents an idea – a fiction – to reconcile contradictory and irreconcilable propositions that otherwise cause pain and bewilderment. Judgements about an apparently ‘real relation’ actually ‘rest upon an illusion’, as Miller describes the view that Hume develops.17 Hume’s discussion develops in response to two issues. The first concerns the origin of property, the explanation for which proceeds along the same lines proposed for the origin of government. Hume characterises property as ‘nothing but those goods, whose constant possession is establish’d by the laws of society; that is, by the laws of justice’ (T 3.2.2.11/SBN 491) and he traces property to the ‘same artifice’ as government and justice, it too being a contrivance to solve otherwise intractable problems caused by human nature. In this case Hume does not call the imagination by name, but its presence is clearly felt. The real and intrinsic value of objects is obscured by the force and vivacity excited by the ‘love of gain’, an affection so powerful that vanity, pity and revenge pale by comparison. ‘This avidity alone’, Hume writes, ‘of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society’ (T 3.2.2.12/SBN 491–2). Like the preference for what is contiguous over remote, this passion is a material part of our nature and cannot be expunged, although it can be redirected. As the origin of government proceeds from accepting the need to curb self-interest and the desire for short-term gain, so reflection teaches that ‘possession must be stable’, the acquisition and enjoyment of goods being more likely under conditions of social order than under its solitary, forlorn and violent alternative. Human nature is its own cure, for with the aid of reason the destructive passion constrains itself by submitting to a general rule of the understanding that it recognises as the best way to achieve its goal: restraint triumphs over wanton liberty, and the desire for gain succumbs to the rules of justice. The idea of stable or constant possession, then, is the first and most primitive idea of property, arising as it does spontaneously from reflection on the passion for acquisition.
This victory of reason over imagination, however, does not yet explain a second issue: namely how and why the stable possession is ‘determined’, that is, particularised in such a way as to assign ownership and enjoyment of certain goods to some while excluding others from the same. Hume rejects straight away the idea that such principles might be discovered in the advantage of objects to the persons who possess them, since it could never prevent multiple individuals from claiming the same relationship and the ensuing controversy would threaten the very stability required for property to arise and persist in the first place. The rule must be tight enough to remove the possibility of discord but sufficiently universal to transcend person and place: justice is blind, after all, to the miser, generous and spendthrift alike. Hume’s ensuing discussion takes the form, instead, of tracing a natural history of property, a narrative the moral scientist reconstructs by inference from experience, delineating the progress of property from the most simple through more complex societies, each subsequent rule being a stronger guarantor of stability than its predecessor: occupation (first possession), prescription (long possession), accession (acquiring new property by extending what one owns already), and succession (passing property on to others). Given Hume’s view of property as an artificial contrivance to remedy the infirmities of human nature, one might expect these rules to be explicable from social utility, and in the main body of the Treatise where Hume treats the question (T 3.2.3), with the exception of accession where the imagination alone is responsible, this is indeed where the emphasis lies: objects under present possession remain changeable and uncertain; rights from occupation grow obscure through time; prescription obviates disputes over objects potentially alienable from one’s property; and succession is passed to those ‘dearest to [the owners], in order to render them more industrious and frugal’ (T 3.2.3.11/SBN 510–11). In each case, progress is a product of reflection, the forming and framing of rules driven by the demands of utility to ensure the stability of external goods.
In the lengthy footnotes, however, Hume traces the causes not to reason and utility but to the imagination, ‘leaving it to the reader’s choice, whether he will prefer those deriv’d from public utility, or those deriv’d from the imagination’. Hume expresses some ambivalence throughout the discussion as to the final winner, but clearly ultimately favours the latter, for while there are ‘no doubt, motives of public interest for most of the rules, which determine property’, he ventures, ‘still I suspect, that these rules are principally fix’d by the imagination, or the more frivolous properties of our thought and conception’ (T 3.2.3n71.1/SBN 504n1). Utility might be a motive for the rule, but its formation is explicable only by the imagination. This nod to the imagination clearly springs from Hume’s appreciation of the concept of property, that it denotes at bottom an idea that expresses an intangible relation between an individual and an object, where owner and thing owned are connected as causes to their effects: ‘all relations are nothing but a propensity to pass from one idea to another’ (T 2.10.9.13/SBN 309). Hume writes:
We are said to be in possession of any thing, not only when we immediately touch it, but also when we are so situated with respect to it, as to have it in our power to use it; and may move, alter, or destroy it, according to our present pleasure or advantage. This relation, then, is a species of cause and effect; and as property is nothing but a stable possession, deriv’d from the rules of justice, or the conventions or men, ’tis to be consider’d as the same species of relation. (T 3.2.3.7/SBN 506, emphasis added)
The ‘species of causal power’ in question is not what we have seen to be the genuine idea arising from the power of memory to recall past experience of constantly conjoined events, but its fictional counterpart, an invention the imagination conjures when a quality of the mind is transferred to and taken to inhere in external objects. Without this propensity of the imagination to ‘spread itself on external objects’, the relation of possession and objects we call property could never arise. The idea transcends possible experience and cannot be traced to matter of fact, but it inspires a belief nonetheless, expressed in the rules that determine property and its natural history. The fiction is a natural one of vulgar reasoning that arises as a ‘natural instinct’ or ‘propensity of human nature’ that inspires a first-order natural belief and, however good our intentions or however well we understand their causes, they remain intractable. That the origin and stability of property should be a function of the imagination and arise from a fiction might seem paradoxical but, as Hume makes clear, the ensuing rules are no less universal or weaker for deriving from that source.
Evidence in favour of Hume’s proposed explanation can be marshalled from the fact that property and possession are a continual source of disputes that are not, moreover, easily resolved. This is precisely because they arise from the imagination:
’tis in many cases impossible to determine when possession begins or ends; nor is there any certain standard, by which we can decide such controversies. A wild boar, that falls into our snares, is deem’d to be in our possession, if it be impossible for him to escape. But what do we mean by impossible? How do we separate this impossibility from an improbability? And how distinguish that exactly from a probability? Mark the precise limits of the one and the other, and show the standard, by which we may decide all the disputes that may arise, and, as we find by experience, frequently do arise upon this subject? (T 3.2.3.7/SBN 506)
The imagination is affected by a complex of qualities that ‘run so insensibly and gradually into each other’ (T 3.2.3n73.1/SBN 504n1) as to leave the matter contingent or at least uncertain: a hare stolen from its hunter is theft due to the mobility of the hunter, for example, but the immobility of an apple makes it the property of whoever takes it first, even when plucked from the tree felicitously before another’s outstretched hand; similarly, where an object is hidden or obscure, sight is sufficient to establish possession, although proprietary intention is sometimes required as well. To drive home the ‘frivolous’ character of the imagination in such decisions, Hume relates a story from Plutarch of two Grecian colonies both claiming ownership of an uninhabited territory, the messenger from one having arrived in the city first, but not before a slower counterpart had landed a spear moments before at the gates. The ‘dispute is impossible to decide’, Hume concludes, ‘and that because the whole question hangs upon the fancy, which in this case is not possess’d of any precise or determinate standard, upon which it can give sentence’ (T 3.2.3.7n73.4/SBN 508n1). While imagination cannot determine a standard, however, its principles still furnish the rules that determine property, which are as hard and resilient as the physical objects they transform, as if by magic, from mere things into the property. In each case the imagination feigns a relation from its propensity to seek the path of least resistance and, as we saw with those fictions discussed under the rubric of metaphysics in the previous chapter, invents the idea of a relation where none previously existed; the rules of property are fictions, ideas not traceable to experience and matter of fact.
Thus, present possession, Hume proposes, expresses the natural affection for and attachment to what one owns already, there being a ‘natural propensity to join relations’, especially ‘resembling ones’ where the imagination ‘finds a kind of fitness and uniformity’ in the union (T 3.2.3.10n75.2/SBN 509n2). This love of order leads us to arrange resembling objects contiguously (books in a library), place them in corresponding positions (chairs in a parlour), or combine parts into wholes (institutions composing a society). So great in this propensity that, on some occasions, the imagination will ‘feign’ an ‘absurd’ relation, much as – to recall the discussion of reification in the previous chapter – it gives spatial location to the bitter taste of the olive and sweetness of the fig. ‘As property forms a relation betwixt a person and an object, ’tis natural to found it on some preceding relation’, Hume then proposes, ‘and as property is nothing but a constant possession, secur’d by the laws of society, ’tis natural to add it to the present possession, which is a relation that resembles it’ (T 3.2.3n71.2/SBN 504–5n). Once established, occupation proceeds from present possession in the same way, formed when the imagination adds to the existing relation an invented one that resembles it. Prescription follows from the same course, property ‘produc’d by time, . . . [being] not any thing real in the objects, but . . . the offspring of the sentiments, on which alone time is found to have any influence’ (T 3.2.3.9/SBN 509), as does succession, which ‘depends, in a great measure, on the imagination’ (T 3.2.4.11n76/SBN 513n1) as it moves easily from the established relation of children to parents and connects the former to the property of the latter. Hume also emphasises how the imagination determines the extent of occupied property. Somebody landing on a small island is deemed to have acquired the whole because the object is ‘bounded and circumscrib’d in the fancy, and at the same time is proportion’d to the new possessor’, but the same person arriving on a large island owns only that part he occupies. The same principle explains that where colonists are numerous they are ‘esteemed the proprietors of the whole from the instant of their debarkment’ (T 3.2.3.8/SBN 507).
Hume’s most elaborate consideration of the imagination and property concerns the acquisition of objects by accession, the cause of which, as noted above, Hume treats as wholly independent of and ‘unmix’d’ with any considerations of public utility: it is a ‘source of property [that] can never be explain’d but from the imagination’ (T 3.2.3.10n75.1/SBN 509n2). The rule determines that objects are acquired because connected with objects we already own – fruits from our garden or the offspring of our cattle – and this is explicable only through a ‘kind of taste or fancy, arising from analogy, and a comparison of similar instances’ (T 3.2.3.4n71.1/SBN 504n1):
Where objects are connected together in the imagination, they are apt to be put on the same footing, and are commonly suppos’d to be endow’d with the same qualities. We readily pass from one to the other, and make no difference in our judgements concerning them; especially if the latter be inferior to the former. (T 3.2.3.10/SBN 509)
As this observation makes clear, one would expect the principle of easy transition to determine that the imagination move from small to great, according to which the ‘right of accession must encrease in strength, in proportion as the transition of ideas is perform’d with greater facility’; it would then follow that ‘when we have acquir’d the property of any small object, we shall readily consider any great objects related to it as an accession, and as belonging to the proprietor of the small one’. Accession works in quite the opposite direction, however, as when a large island like Great Britain is given natural dominion over its contiguous islands, whereas authority over the latter carries no claim to the larger country. This seems to contradict the maxim ‘that the ascribing of property to accession is nothing but an effect of the relations of ideas, and of the smooth transition of the imagination’ (T 3.2.3.10n75.4/SBN 510n). As Hume points out, this very same maxim operates, albeit modified by the ‘agility and unsteadiness of the imagination’ and its capacity to place its objects in ‘different views’ (T 3.2.3.10n75.5/SBN 510n). The imagination naturally joins together objects that are the property of the same person, where the strength of the relation is proportional to the size of the object owned. Where a small and a great object are thus related and the owner strongly related to the larger, he is automatically related strongly to both; where strongly related to the smaller, by contrast, he will not be so strongly related to both, the reason being that the lesser part is ‘not apt to strike us in any great degree’ (T 3.2.3.10n75.5/SBN 511n). The mind thus moves from greater object to lesser – from Britain to its islands – but not vice versa where the idea contains less force and vivacity and the imagination is unmoved. Contrary to first appearances, then, the principle of easy transition still operates and the smooth passage among its ideas accounts for the rule of accession; where the transition is interrupted and no conjunction can be made, the property relation is terminated.
Hume collects a number of conspicuous examples to illustrate his point. The Rhine and Danube strike the imagination as ‘too large . . . to follow as an accession to the property of the neighbouring fields’ for which reason ownership falls to the larger entity of the nation, an object of ‘suitable bulk to correspond with them, and bear them such a relation in the fancy’ (T 3.2.3.10n75.7/SBN 511n). Similarly, the imagination grasps the idea of alluvial deposits on lands adjacent to rivers as a way of connecting one piece of property to another, and though the physical connection is made ‘insensibly and imperceptibly’, the ‘circumstances . . . mightily assist the imagination in the conjunction’. Concomitantly, a portion of land that breaks from one bank and settles on another fails to become the property of the latter ‘till the trees or plants have spread their roots into both. Before that, the imagination does not sufficiently join them’ (T 3.2.3.10n75.8/SBN 511n). The same principle is at work in deciding ownership of properties that are conjoined and cannot be separated. Where the objects can be divided but not separated – as in bushels of wheat mingled as one – the imagination supposes the whole to be common property and divides it proportionally according to the number of parts contributed by each owner.
As Hume points out, these considerations account for a distinction in Roman law between ‘confusion’ and ‘commixtion’: in the former, parts are mixed so as to become indistinguishable (as in different liquids), whereas in the latter bodies are blended but remain obviously and visibly separate (in the bushels of wheat). In cases of confusion, the imagination is unable to distinguish parts and will establish the object as property of an entire community and divide it proportionally; in cases of commixtion, by contrast, where it ‘is able to trace and preserve a distinct idea of the property of each’, the right of each proprietor is maintained, though, as Hume notes, the practical difficulties of such a conclusion may force the same division as that produced by confusion (T 3.2.3.10n75.10/SBN 512n). When neither division nor separation is possible – as when somebody builds a house on another’s land – the imagination is struck more strongly by what is greater and the whole is then regarded as the property of the person who owns the largest portion. This raises the further question of which quality makes something the ‘most considerable part, and most attractive to the imagination’ (T 3.2.3.10n75.12/SBN 512n) and, as one would expect from the faculty’s frivolous nature, these are often various and contradictory – constancy and durability, economic value, size, separate and independence existence – and, since human nature cannot fix a standard, the law steps in to decide by fiat so that decisions become effectively conventional.
Even where decisions of this sort have argument and reason in their favour, the principles of imagination are sure to be at work. Hume cites the dispute between Proclus and Sabinus, jurists of first-century Rome, over who owns a cup or ship made by one from the metal or wood of another. Sabinus, Hume reports, awarded the object to the owner of the raw material, arguing that the substance or matter is the incorruptible foundation and therefore superior to any form imposed on it, whereas Proclus gave it to the craftsman on the basis of the form, that being the main criterion in terms of which any given body is classified as one species of object rather than another. Hume discovers no grounds for preferring one side over the other in the dispute, but cites a solution offered later (in the sixth century) by Tribonia: ‘that the cup belongs to the proprietor of the metal, because it can be brought back to its first form: But that the ship belongs to the author of its form for a contrary reason’. Hume is quick to add that ‘however ingenious this reason may be, it plainly depends upon the fancy’, which ‘finds a closer connexion and relation betwixt a cup and the proprietor of its metal, than betwixt a ship and the proprietor of its wood, where the substance is more fix’d and unalterable’ (T 3.2.3.10n75.15/SBN 513n). In this case, a dispute appears to be resolved by reason and argument, but they belie the silent workings of the imagination beneath.
Hume’s final observation about property and imagination concerns transference: not a rule, strictly conceived, but clearly central to the stability of ownership. Like the rules determining property, the underlying convention springs from ‘plain utility and interest’; reflection finds a medium between rigid rules and uncertainty by fixing on the idea that possession should be stable except where the owner agrees to bestow his property on another. This solution alone, however, does not overcome a considerable difficulty in the way in which the property is transferred. Being a creation of the imagination, the quality that relates persons to property is ‘perfectly insensible, and even inconceivable’, and we can form no ‘distinct notion, either of its stability or translation’ unless that property is connected in some tangible way to our sentiments. It is then ‘from more trivial reasons’ – that is, from the imagination – that civil law requires ‘delivery, or a sensible transference of the object’ (T 3.2.4.2/SBN 515). Hume then proposes that:
In order to aid the imagination in conceiving the transference of property, we take the sensible object, and actually transfer its possession to the person, on whom we wou’d bestow the property. The suppos’d resemblance of the actions, and the presence of the sensible delivery, deceive the mind, and make it fancy, that it conceives the mysterious transition of the property. (T 3.2.5.2/SBN 515)
The result is an invented ‘symbolical delivery, to satisfy the fancy, where the real is impracticable’: the keys to the granary symbolise delivery of the corn, and samples of stone and earth represent the transference of a manor. Hume calls this a ‘superstitious practice in civil laws’ comparable to the way Roman Catholics represent and render present by a ‘taper, or habit, or grimace’ the ‘inconceivable mysteries’ of their religion. So ‘lawyers and moralists’, Hume remarks, ‘have run into like invention for the same reason, and have endeavour’d by those means to satisfy themselves concerning the transference of property by consent’ (T 3.2.4.2/SBN 515–16).
As we shall see with religious ideas (see Chapter 6), the fact that, in Hume’s view, imagination lies at the root of property – which is an artificial contrivance to remedy the infirmities of human nature – by no means impugns the power of the fiction involved, nor does it undermine the strength of the belief-like state it inspires, natural and born of an irresistible propensity. As we have seen in this chapter, the same is true of moral practice and political institutions in general, phenomena that arise and endure from the secret workings of the very faculty that also has the power to bring their continued existence into question.
Notes
1. Admittedly, specific issues discussed by commentators in one context or another often do not call for the imagination to be placed front and centre, which goes some way to explaining the neglect. It is still surprising, however, that a subject that plays a foundational role in Hume’s moral and political thought should have received so little attention in an extensive literature. See below, nn. 3 and 16. It is absent from the discussion of Hume in J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and the relevant chapter in Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’: 1640–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Even Jonathan Harrison’s Hume’s Moral Epistemology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), its title notwithstanding, does not have an index entry for the subject.
2. Some commentators have tended to regard these qualities as having some independent existence as metaphysical entities or physiological conditions that exist prior to and independent of the process of moral judgement. For a discussion of these views and an alternative to them, see Costelloe, ‘Beauty, Morals, and Hume’s Conception of Character’.
3. Substantial treatments of sympathy and the general point of view that either mention imagination only in passing or ignore it all together include Julia Driver, ‘Pleasure as the Standard of Virtue in Hume’s Moral Philosophy’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 85: 2 (2004), pp. 173–94; Jacqueline Taylor, ‘Hume on the Standard of Virtue’, Journal of Ethics, 6: 1 (2002), pp. 43–62, and the relevant sections (primarily Ch. 2) in her more recent Reflecting Subjects: Passion, Sympathy, & Society in Hume’s Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and ‘The General Point of View: Love and Moral Approval in Hume’s Ethics’, Hume Studies, 25: 1 and 2 (1999), pp. 3–41; John Bricke, Mind and Morality: An Examination of Hume’s Moral Psychology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); J. L. Mackie, Hume’s Moral Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); Harrison’s Hume’s Moral Epistemology; Carole Stewart, ‘The Moral Point of View’, Philosophy, 51: 196 (1976), pp. 177–87; and Páll S. Árdal, Passion and Value in Hume’s Treatise (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), Ch. 3. Árdal (pp. 133–7) appears to have little trouble recognising the role of the faculty in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, but overlooks it in the case of Hume, a tendency also evident in Phillip Mercer, Sympathy and Ethics: A Study of the Relationship between Sympathy and Morality with Special Reference to Hume’s Treatise (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), and, in the more distant past, Glenn R. Morrow, ‘The Significance of the Doctrine of Sympathy in Hume and Adam Smith’, Philosophical Review, 32: 1 (1923), pp. 60–78. The imagination is given brief consideration by Gerald J. Postema, ‘“Cemented with Diseased Qualities”: Sympathy and Comparison in Hume’s Moral Psychology’, Hume Studies, 31: 2 (2005), pp. 249–98 (see pp. 259 and 293–4 n. 36); hovers behind much of the discussion in Donald C. Ainslie, ‘Sympathy and the Unity of Hume’s Idea of the Self’, in Persons and Passions: Essays in Honor of Annette Baier, ed. Joyce Jenkins, Jennifer Whiting and Christopher Williams (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 143–72; and is mentioned en passant by A. E. Pitson, ‘Sympathy and Other Selves’, Hume Studies, 22: 2 (1996), p. 262. Cf. Ryu Susato, Hume’s Sceptical Enlightenment, pp. 39–46; James Baillie, Hume on Morality (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 190–5; Rachel Cohon, ‘The Common Point of View in Hume’s Ethics’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 57: 4 (1997), pp. 827–50, incorporated into Ch. 5 of Hume’s Morality: Feeling and Fabrication (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. pp. 139–42; the discussion in Jennifer A. Herdt, Religion and Faction in Hume’s Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 74–5; R. W. Altmann, ‘Hume on Sympathy’, Southern Journal of Philosophy, 18: 2 (1980), pp. 123–36; and Laird, Hume’s Philosophy of Human Nature, pp. 197 and 220.
4. See Farr, ‘Hume, Hermeneutics, and History’, pp. 292–6, and Taylor, Reflecting Subjects, who emphasises how Hume treats sympathy as something that ‘operates with an immediacy akin to instinct’ (p. 44). Farr speculates that one reason for the change between the Treatise and second Enquiry is that Hume came to recognise the limits of associationism, namely that it involves passivity, when sympathy is something Hume thinks we can ‘control and regulate’, and imagination – on which sympathy depends – is an ‘active, creative, and regulative propensity or faculty’ (p. 296). As we have seen, however, since the imagination is the basis for association and imagination is a creative faculty, imagination and association can hardly be opposites in the way Farr suggests. Besides, as Farr points out, the ‘important point, nonetheless, is that Hume retains sympathy, and the conclusions that can be drawn from it’ (p. 295).
5. Cf. Mercer, Sympathy and Ethics, who juxtaposes Hume’s mechanism of conversion with Smith’s appeal to imagination, as if the former excluded that faculty entirely: ‘Whereas Hume held that sympathy consists in the idea of an emotion being converted into the emotion itself through the enlivening association with the impression of self, according to Smith sympathy involves imagining oneself in the other person’s situation and thus, in one’s imagination, going through the emotional experiences he would be going through’ (p. 85).
6. Hume’s notion of conversion has been a source of debate on the part of readers, especially its use to solve the ‘problem of tragedy’ and explain how and why an object or event that would ordinarily cause pain and distress brings an ‘unaccountable pleasure’ to the spectator when represented in a literary work (E 216). As we shall see in the next chapter, when Hume speaks of ‘conversion’ in the context of tragedy, he assumes the discussion of the Treatise, but adds to it the pleasure aroused by aesthetic representation.
7. Sympathy does not, however, as Taylor rightly emphasises, ‘involve imagining oneself in the place of the other’. See Taylor, Reflecting Subjects, p. 42.
8. On this point I am indebted to the discussion in Samuel Fleischacker, ‘Sympathy in Hume and Smith: A Contrast, Critique, and Reconstruction’, in Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl, ed. Christel Fricke and Dagfinn Føllesdal (Frankfurt: Ontos), pp. 273–312. See also Miller, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought, pp. 53–4.
9. See Rachael M. Kydd, Reason and Conduct in Hume’s Treatise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 132–5, who emphasises the effect on the imagination of contiguity and distance in time and space; the result is that the imagination ‘distorts’ our ideas and passions (p. 135).
10. See in this context, Driver, ‘Pleasure as the Standard of Virtue in Hume’s Moral Philosophy’. Driver does not mention the role of imagination, but argues (incorrectly to my mind) that a trait is ‘reasonable or justified’ insofar as it is ‘beneficial and agreeable. And that is all the general point of view is’ (p. 180).
11. In this context, see Mark Collier, ‘Hume’s Theory of Moral Imagination’, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 27: 3 (2010), pp. 255–73, who distinguishes ‘associative’ sympathy (our capacity to feel vicariously the pain of others) from ‘cognitive’ sympathy (our ability to reflect what we would feel in somebody else’s place). The latter, Collier urges, is what enables us to enter the afflictions of distant strangers.
12. See Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, ‘Hume on Motivating Sentiments, the General Point of View, and the Inculcation of “Morality”’, Hume Studies, 20: 1 (1994), pp. 37–58; the quote is from p. 37. A similar emphasis is found in Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, ‘On Why Hume’s “General Point of View” Isn’t Ideal – and Shouldn’t Be’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 11: 1 (1994), pp. 202–28. The older interpretation of Hume as a proponent of the Ideal Observer model is to be found in an earlier generation of commentators, and appears now to be universally rejected. Harrison’s reading, Hume’s Moral Psychology, pp. 113–14, is typical of the now discredited view.
13. See Shaftesbury, Characteristicks 2: pp. 221–2, and Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 7 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1759] 1976), esp. 1: pp. 9–26.
14. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism. The Sixth Edition. With the Author’s Last Corrections and Additions, 2 vols (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, [1785; 1st ed. 1762] 2005), 1: pp. 66–77. See Timothy M. Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition. From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Ch. 3, and for an application of Kames’ theory in the field of aesthetics, Eva Dadlez, ‘Ideal Presence: How Kames Solved the Problem of Fiction and Emotion’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 9: 1 (2011), pp. 115–33.
15. See Edward Bullough, ‘Psychical Distance’, British Journal of Psychology, 5 (1912), pp. 87–117, and for a critique of the doctrine in general, George Dickie, Art and The Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974).
16. The role of imagination in Hume’s political thought has received more attention than it has in treatments of his moral philosophy, although it is still undervalued or (one assumes) simply not considered pertinent to the discussions at hand, which in many cases tend to focus on Hume’s science of politics per se rather than the philosophical underpinnings of it. By far the most extensive, comprehensive and sympathetic treatment is found in Miller, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought, esp. Chs. 3 and 4. It is touched on by Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 9–15, and figures in the relevant discussion in Baillie, Hume on Morality, Ch. 6. It is considered briefly by Mackie, Hume’s Moral Theory, pp. 95–6, who summarily dismisses it, and is raised in various contexts by Jonathan Harrison in Hume’s Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); this stands in contrast to his earlier Hume’s Moral Epistemology, where it is hardly mentioned, although even in the later work Harrison shows little patience with Hume’s view (see esp. pp. 96–103). Stewart, The Moral and Political Philosophy of David Hume, emphasises the importance of the faculty in Hume’s theory of belief formation but largely ignores it later in the book when discussing the political philosophy, and omits mention of it entirely in his later Opinion and Reform in Hume’s Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). The same is true of Whelan, Order and Artifice in Hume’s Political Philosophy, who devotes a section to the ‘principles of the imagination’ (pp. 96–117), but barely mentions it later when considering the substance of Hume’s political thought. It receives only passing mention in Neil McArthur, David Hume’s Political Theory: Law, Commerce, and the Constitution of Government (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), is largely absent from both Russell Hardin, David Hume: Moral and Political Theorist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Andrew Sabl, Hume’s Politics: Coordination and Crisis in the ‘History of England’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), although the latter does mention the importance of political principles (Magna Charta and settled rules of royal succession) being ‘vivid to the imagination’ (p. 143) and cites on more than one occasion ‘partiality and short-sightedness’ as psychological factors that make conventions necessary (see p. 31 passim). As noted above, the imagination finds no place at all in Árdal, Passion and Value in Hume’s Treatise, even in Ch. 8, which concerns the artificial virtue of justice.
17. Miller, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought, pp. 71–2. See also Forbes’ Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 9–12.