Hutcheson.

This ingenious writer began to try his own strength by private letters, written in his early youth to Dr. Clarke, the metaphysical patriarch of his time; on whom young philosophers seem to have considered themselves as possessing a claim, which he had too much goodness to reject. His correspondence with Hutcheson is lost; but we may judge of its spirit by his answers to Butler, and by one to Mr. Henry Home, afterwards Lord Kames, then a young adventurer in the prevalent speculations. Nearly at the same period with Butler’s first publication, the writings of Hutcheson began to show coincidences with him, indicative of the tendency of moral theory to assume a new form, by virtue of an impulse received from Shaftesbury, and quickened to greater activity by the adverse system of Clarke. Lord Molesworth, the friend of Shaftesbury, patronised Hutcheson, and even criticised his manuscript; and though a Presbyterian, he was befriended by King, Archbishop of Dublin, himself a metaphysician; and aided by Mr. Synge, afterwards also a bishop, to whom speculations somewhat similar to his own had occurred.

Butler and Hutcheson coincided in the two important positions, that disinterested affections, and a distinct moral faculty, are essential parts of human nature. Hutcheson is a chaste and simple writer, who imbibed the opinions, without the literary faults of his master, Shaftesbury. He has a clearness of expression, and fulness of illustration, which are wanting in Butler. But he is inferior to both these writers in the appearance at least of originality, and to Butler especially in that philosophical courage which, when it discovers the fountains of truth and falsehood, leaves others to follow the streams. He states as strongly as Butler, that “the same cause which determines us to pursue happiness for ourselves, determines us both to esteem and benevolence on their proper occasions—even the very frame of our nature.” It is in vain, as he justly observes, for the patrons of a refined selfishness to pretend that we pursue the happiness of others for the sake of the pleasure which we derive from it; since it is apparent that there could be no such pleasure if there had been no previous affection. “Had we no affection distinct from self-love, nothing could raise a desire of the happiness of others, but when viewed as a mean of our own.” He seems to have been the first who entertained just notions of the formation of the secondary desires, which had been overlooked by Butler. “There must arise, in consequence of our original desires, secondary desires of every thing useful to gratify the primary desire. Thus, as soon as we apprehend the use of wealth, or power, to gratify our original desires, we also desire them. From their universality as means arises the general prevalence of these desires of wealth and power.” Proceeding farther in his zeal against the selfish system than Lord Shaftesbury, who seems ultimately to rest the reasonableness of benevolence on its subserviency to the happiness of the individual, he represents the moral faculty to be, as well as self-love and benevolence, a calm general impulse, which may and does impel a good man to sacrifice not only happiness, but even life itself, to Virtue.

As Mr. Locke had spoken of “an internal sensation;” Lord Shaftesbury once or twice of “a reflex sense,” and once of “a moral sense;” Hutcheson, who had a steadier, if not a clearer view of the nature of Conscience than Butler, calls it “a moral sense;” a name which quickly became popular, and continues to be a part of philosophical language. By “sense” he understood a capacity of receiving ideas, together with pleasures and pains, from a class of objects: the term “moral” was used to describe the particular class in question. It implied only that Conscience was a separate element in our nature, and that it was not a state or act of the Understanding. According to him, it also implied that it was an original and implanted principle; but every other part of his theory might be embraced by those who hold it to be derivative.

The object of moral approbation, according to him, is general benevolence; and he carries this generous error so far as to deny that prudence, as long as it regards ourselves, can be morally approved;—an assertion contradicted by every man’s feelings, and to which we owe the Dissertation on the Nature of Virtue, which Butler annexed to his Analogy. By proving that all virtuous actions produce general good, he fancied that he had proved the necessity of regarding the general good in every act of virtue;—an instance of that confusion of the theory of moral sentiments with the criterion of moral actions, against which the reader was warned at the opening of this Dissertation, as fatal to ethical philosophy. He is chargeable, like Butler, with a vicious circle, in describing virtuous acts as those which are approved by the moral sense, while he at the same time describes the moral sense as the faculty which perceives and feels the morality of actions.

Hutcheson was the father of the modern school of speculative philosophy in Scotland; for though in the beginning of the sixteenth century the Scotch are said to have been known throughout Europe by their unmeasured passion for dialectical subtilties, and though this metaphysical taste was nourished by the controversies which followed the Reformation, yet it languished, with every other intellectual taste and talent, from the Restoration,—first silenced by civil disorders, and afterwards repressed by an exemplary, but unlettered clergy,—till the philosophy of Shaftesbury was brought by Hutcheson from Ireland. We are told by the writer of his Life (a fine piece of philosophical biography) that “he had a remarkable degree of rational enthusiasm for learning, liberty, Religion, Virtue, and human happiness;” that he taught in public with persuasive eloquence; that his instructive conversation was at once lively and modest; and that he united pure manners with a kind disposition. What wonder that such a man should have spread the love of Knowledge and Virtue around him, and should have rekindled in his adopted country a relish for the sciences which he cultivated! To him may also be ascribed that proneness to multiply ultimate and original principles in human nature, which characterized the Scottish school till the second extinction of a passion for metaphysical speculation in Scotland. A careful perusal of the writings of this now little studied philosopher will satisfy the well-qualified reader, that Dr. Adam Smith’s ethical speculations are not so unsuggested as they are beautiful.