7.3.1. Chap. I
Of those Systems which deduce the Principle of Approbation from
Self-love
Those who account for the principle of approbation from
self-love, do not all account for it in the same manner, and
there is a good deal of confusion and inaccuracy in all their
different systems. According to Mr Hobbes, and many of his
followers,[15] man is driven to take refuge in society, not by
any natural love which he bears to his own kind, but because
without the assistance of others he is incapable of subsisting
with ease or safety. Society, upon this account, becomes
necessary to him, and whatever tends to its support and welfare,
he considers as having a remote tendency to his own interest;
and, on the contrary, whatever is likely to disturb or destroy
it, he regards as in some measure hurtful or pernicious to
himself. Virtue is the great support, and vice the great
disturber of human society. The former, therefore, is agreeable,
and the latter offensive to every man; as from the one he
foresees the prosperity, and from the other the ruin and disorder
of what is so necessary for the comfort and security of his
existence.
That the tendency of virtue to promote, and of vice to
disturb the order of society, when we consider it coolly and
philosophically, reflects a very great beauty upon the one, and a
very great deformity upon the other, cannot, as I have observed
upon a former occasion, be called in question. Human society,
when we contemplate it in a certain abstract and philosophical
light, appears like a great, an immense machine, whose regular
and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects. As
in any other beautiful and noble machine that was the production
of human art, whatever tended to render its movements more smooth
and easy, would derive a beauty from this effect, and, on the
contrary, whatever tended to obstruct them would displease upon
that account: so virtue, which is, as it were, the fine polish to
the wheels of society, necessarily pleases; while vice, like the
vile rust, which makes them jar and grate upon one another, is as
necessarily offensive. This account, therefore, of the origin of
approbation and disapprobation, so far as it derives them from a
regard to the order of society, runs into that principle which
gives beauty to utility, and which I have explained upon a former
occasion; and it is from thence that this system derives all that
appearance of probability which it possesses. When those authors
describe the innumerable advantages of a cultivated and social,
above a savage and solitary life; when they expatiate upon the
necessity of virtue and good order for the maintenance of the
one, and demonstrate how infallibly the prevalence of vice and
disobedience to the laws tend to bring back the other, the reader
is charmed with the novelty and grandeur of those views which
they open to him: he sees plainly a new beauty in virtue, and a
new deformity in vice, which he had never taken notice of before,
and is commonly so delighted with the discovery, that he seldom
takes time to reflect, that this political view, having never
occurred to him in his life before, cannot possibly be the ground
of that approbation and disapprobation with which he has always
been accustomed to consider those different qualities.
When those authors, on the other hand, deduce from self-love
the interest which we take in the welfare of society, and the
esteem which upon that account we bestow upon virtue, they do not
mean, that when we in this age applaud the virtue of Cato, and
detest the villany of Catiline, our sentiments are influenced by
the notion of any benefit we receive from the one, or of any
detriment we suffer from the other. It was not because the
prosperity or subversion of society, in those remote ages and
nations, was apprehended to have any influence upon our happiness
or misery in the present times; that according to those
philosophers, we esteemed the virtuous, and blamed the disorderly
characters. They never imagined that our sentiments were
influenced by any benefit or damage which we supposed actually to
redound to us, from either; but by that which might have
redounded to us, had we lived in those distant ages and
countries; or by that which might still redound to us, if in our
own times we should meet with characters of the same kind. The
idea, in short, which those authors were groping about, but which
they were never able to unfold distinctly, was that indirect
sympathy which we feel with the gratitude or resentment of those
who received the benefit or suffered the damage resulting from
such opposite characters: and it was this which they were
indistinctly pointing at, when they said, that it was not the
thought of what we had gained or suffered which prompted our
applause or indignation, but the conception or imagination of
what we might gain or suffer if we were to act in society with
such associates.
Sympathy, however, cannot, in any sense, be regarded as a
selfish principle. When I sympathize with your sorrow or your
indignation, it may be pretended, indeed, that my emotion is
founded in self-love, because it arises from bringing your case
home to myself, from putting myself in your situation, and thence
conceiving what I should feel in the like circumstances. But
though sympathy is very properly said to arise from an imaginary
change of situations with the person principally concerned, yet
this imaginary change is not supposed to happen to me in my own
person and character, but in that of the person with whom I
sympathize. When I condole with you for the loss of your only
son, in order to enter into your grief I do not consider what I,
a person of such a character and profession, should suffer, if I
had a son, and if that son was unfortunately to die: but I
consider what I should suffer if I was really you, and I not only
change circumstances with you, but I change persons and
characters. My grief, therefore, is entirely upon your account,
and not in the least upon my own. It is not, therefore, in the
least selfish. How can that be regarded as a selfish passion,
which does not arise even from the imagination of any thing that
has befallen, or that relates to myself, in my own proper person
and character, but which is entirely occupied about what relates
to you? A man may sympathize with a woman in child-bed; though it
is impossible that he should conceive himself as suffering her
pains in his own proper person and character. That whole account
of human nature, however, which deduces all sentiments and
affections from self-love, which has made so much noise in the
world, but which, so far as I know, has never yet been fully and
distinctly explained, seems to me to have arisen from some
confused misapprehension of the system of sympathy.
[15.]
Puffendorff, Mandeville.