ETHICS 007 "general happiness" on the individual, ani to consider utilitarian duty as practically limited by reciprocity ; while J. S. Mill, who has done more than any other member of the school to spread and popularize utilitarianism in ethics and politics, exalts the " moral hero " for voluntarily sacri ficing bis own happiness to promote that of others a phe nomenon, it should be observed, which in Bentham s view is not even possible. et [ es The fact is that there are several different ways iu which tili- a utilitarian system of morality may be used, without de ciding whether the sanctions attached to it are always nue- adequate. (1 ) It may be presented as practical guidance to all who choose "general good" as their ultimate end, whether they do so on religious grounds, or through the predominance in their minds of impartial sympathy, or because their conscience acts in harmony with utilitarian principles, or for any combination of these or any other reasons ; or (2) it may be offered as a code to be obeyed not absolutely, but only so far as the coincidence of private and general interest may in any case be judged to extend ; or again (3) it may ba proposed as a standard by which men may reasonably agree to praise and blame the conduct of others, even though they may not always think fit to act on it. We may regard morality as a kind of supplementary legislation, supported by public opinion, which we may expect the public, when duly enlightened, to frame in accordance with the public interest. Still, even from this point of view, which is that of the legislator or social re former rather than the moral philosopher, our code of duty must be greatly influenced by our estimate of the degrees in which men are normally influenced by self-regard (in its ordinary sense of regard for interests not sympa thetic) and by sympathy or benevolence, and of the range within which sympathy may be expected to be gene rally effective. Thus, for example, the moral standard for which a utilitarian will reasonably endeavour to gain the support of public opinion must be essentially different in quality, according as he holds with Bentham that nothing but self-regard will " serve for diet," though " for a dessert bjnevolence is a very valuable addition ; " or with J. S. Mill. Mill that disinterested public spirit should be the prominent motive in the performance of all socially usoful work, and that even hygienic precepts should be inculcated, not chiefly on grounds of prudence, but because " by squandering our health we disable ourselves from rendering services to our fellow-creatures." Not less important is the interval that separates Ben tham s polemical attitude towards the moral sense from Mill s conciliatory position, that "the mind is not in a state conformable to utility unless it loves virtue as a thing desirable in itself." Such love of virtue Mill holds to be iu a sense natural, though not an ultimate and inexplicable fact of human nature ; it is to be explained by the "Law of Association" of feelings and ideas, through which objects originally desired as a means to some further end come to be directly pleasant or desir able. Thus, the miser first sought money as a means to comfort, but ends by sacrificing comfort to money; and similarly though the first promptings to justice (or any other virtue) spring from the non-moral pleasures gained or pains avoided by it, through the link formed by repeated virtuous acts the performance of them ultimately comas to have that immediate satisfaction attached to it which we distinguish as moral. Indeed, the acquired tendency to virtuous conduct may become so strong that the habit of willing it may continue, " even when the reward which the virtuous man receives from the conscious ness of well-doing is anything but an equivalent for the sufferings he undergoes or the wishes he may have to renounce." It is thus that the before-mentioned self-sacri fice of the moral hero is conceived by Mill to be possible and actual. The moral sentiments, on this view, are not phases of self-love as Hobbes held ; nor can they be directly identified with sympathy, either in Hume s way or in Adam Smith s ; in fact, though apparently simple they are really derived in a complex manner from self-love and sympathy combined with more primitive impulses. Justice (e.g.) is regarded by Mill as essentially resentment moralized by enlarged sympathy and intelligent self-interest ; what we mean by injustice is harm done to an assignable individual by a breach of some rule for which we desire the violator to be punished, for the sake both of the person injured and of society at large, including ourselves. As regards moral sentiments generally, the view suggested by Mill is more definitely given by the chief living representative of the associationist school, Professor Bain ; by whom the dis tinctive characteristics of conscience are traced to " educa tion under government or authority," though prudence, disinterested sympathy, and other emotions combine to swell the mass of feeling vaguely denoted by the term moral. The combination of antecedents is somewhat differently given by different writers; but all agree in representing the conscience of any individual as naturally correlated to the interests of the community of which he is a member, and thus a natural ally in enforcing utili tarian rules, or even a valuable guide when utilitarian calculations are difficult and uncertain. This substitution of hypothetical history for direct Associa- aualysis of the moral sense is really older than the utili- , aD tarianism of Paley and Bentham, which it has so profoundly ti 011 . modified. The effects of association in modifying mental phenomena were noticed by Locke, and made a cardinal point in the metaphysic of Hume; who also referred to the principle slightly in his account of justice and other " artificial " virtues. Some years earlier, Gay, 1 admitting Hutcheson s proof of the actual disinterestedness of moral and benevolent impulses, had maintained that these (like the desires of knowledge or fame, the delight of reading, hunting, and planting, &c.) were derived from self-love by " the power of association." But a thorough and syste matic application of the principle to ethical psychology is first found ia Hartley s Observation* on Man (1748). Hartley, too, was the first to conceive association as pro ducing, instead of mere cohesion of mental phenomena, a quasi-chemical combination of these into a compound apparently different from its elements. He shows elabo rately how the pleasures and pains of "imagination, ambition, self-interest, sympathy, theopathy, and the moral sense " are developed out of the elementary pleasures and pains of sensation ; by the coalescence into really complex but apparently single ideas of the " miniatures " or faint feelings which the repetition of sensations contemporaneously or in immediate succession tends to produce in cohering groups. His theory assumes the correspondence of mind and body, and is applied pari passu to the formation of ideas from sensations, and of " compound vibratiuucules in the medullary substance " from the original vibrations that arise in the organ of sense. 9 The same general view was afterwards developed on the psychical side alone by James Mill in his Analysis of tJif Human Mind, with much vigour and clearness. The whole theory has been 1 In the before-mentioned dissertation. Cf. note 2 to p. 605. Hartley refers to this treatise as having supplied the starting-point for his own system.
- It should be noticed that Hartley s sensationalism is far from lead
ing him to exalt the corporeal pleasures. On the contrary, he tries to prove elaborately that they (as well as the pleasures of imagination, ambition, self-interest) cannot be made an object of primary pursuit without a loss of happiness on the -whole, one of his arguments being that these pleasures occur earlier in time, and " that which is prior in
the order of nature is always less perfect than that which is posterior.