Hume Part 16

"Thus the distinct boundaries and offices of _reason_ and of _taste_ are easily ascertained. The former conveys the knowledge of truth and falsehood: The latter gives the sentiment of beauty and deformity, vice and virtue. The one discovers objects as they really stand in nature, without addition or diminution: The other has a productive faculty, and gilding and staining all natural objects with the colours borrowed from internal sentiment, raises in a manner a new creation. Reason being cool and disengaged, is no motive to action, and directs only the impulse received from appet.i.te or inclination, by showing us the means of attaining happiness or avoiding misery. Taste, as it gives pleasure or pain, and thereby const.i.tutes happiness or misery, becomes a motive to action, and is the first spring or impulse to desire and volition.

From circ.u.mstances and relations known or supposed, the former leads us to the discovery of the concealed and unknown. After all circ.u.mstances and relations are laid before us, the latter makes us feel from the whole a new sentiment of blame or approbation. The standard of the one, being founded on the nature of things, is external and inflexible, even by the will of the Supreme Being: The standard of the other, arising from the internal frame and const.i.tution of animals, is ultimately derived from the Supreme Will, which bestowed on each being its peculiar nature, and arranged the several cla.s.ses and orders of existence."--(IV. pp.

376-7.)

Hume has not discussed the theological theory of the obligations of morality, but it is obviously in accordance with his view of the nature of those obligations. Under its theological aspect, morality is obedience to the will of G.o.d; and the ground for such obedience is two-fold; either we ought to obey G.o.d because He will punish us if we disobey Him, which is an argument based on the utility of obedience; or our obedience ought to flow from our love towards G.o.d, which is an argument based on pure feeling and for which no reason can be given.

For, if any man should say that he takes no pleasure in the contemplation of the ideal of perfect holiness, or, in other words, that he does not love G.o.d, the attempt to argue him into acquiring that pleasure would be as hopeless as the endeavour to persuade Peter Bell of the "witchery of the soft blue sky."

In whichever way we look at the matter, morality is based on feeling, not on reason; though reason alone is competent to trace out the effects of our actions and thereby dictate conduct. Justice is founded on the love of one's neighbour; and goodness is a kind of beauty. The moral law, like the laws of physical nature, rests in the long run upon instinctive intuitions, and is neither more nor less "innate" and "necessary" than they are. Some people cannot by any means be got to understand the first book of Euclid; but the truths of mathematics are no less necessary and binding on the great ma.s.s of mankind. Some there are who cannot feel the difference between the _Sonata Appa.s.sionata_, and _Cherry Ripe_; or between a gravestone-cutter's cherub and the Apollo Belvidere; but the canons of art are none the less acknowledged.

While some there may be, who, devoid of sympathy are incapable of a sense of duty; but neither does their existence affect the foundations of morality. Such pathological deviations from true manhood are merely the halt, the lame, and the blind of the world of consciousness; and the anatomist of the mind leaves them aside, as the anatomist of the body would ignore abnormal specimens.

And as there are Pascals and Mozarts, Newtons and Raffaelles, in whom the innate faculty for science or art seems to need but a touch to spring into full vigour, and through whom the human race obtains new possibilities of knowledge and new conceptions of beauty: so there have been men of moral genius, to whom we owe ideals of duty and visions of moral perfection, which ordinary mankind could never have attained; though, happily for them, they can feel the beauty of a vision, which lay beyond the reach of their dull imaginations, and count life well spent in shaping some faint image of it in the actual world.

THE END