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CHAPTER 3

The Combat of Reason and Passion

When he surveyed the scene, Hume found enemies of an affable virtue also outside the Kirk. There were many alternatives to Presbyterian theology, ranging from what seemed to be rank materialism to a theology that offered redemption and virtue to all men. They differed in purpose and form from the Kirk’s doctrine, but not significantly, to Hume’s mind, in moral spirit.

Hobbes, who had provoked the philosophical speculation that dominated England in Hume’s time, did not attract Hume. By emphasizing man’s egoism and brutishness, Hobbes seemed only to have accepted the Calvinist portrait of man in order to support a different, but equally unappealing, conclusion. Yet Hobbes’s opponents, led by the Cambridge Platonists, were no more satisfactory. In trying to answer Hobbes by showing that morality was not arbitrary and variable, but eternal, objective, and demonstrative, they seemed just as bound to God’s service and quite as certain that they knew God’s purposes as any dogmatic Presbyterian.

Nevertheless, the Cambridge Platonists were reacting against Puritanism. Although many of them were connected with Emmanuel College, that “seminary of Puritans,” they had become impressed by an aspect of Calvinism that had for long been neglected in Scotland. Like the earlier Protestants, their feelings of closeness to God emboldened them to challenge and renounce whatever seemed to conflict with their duty to Him. When they found they could not accept the established interpretation of Calvinism, they transformed Emmanuel College from a haven for extreme puritans into the home of a vigorous, intellectual opposition to them. Against both Calvinism and Hobbes, the Cambridge Platonists argued that God had made man not a “sorry worthless piece fit for no use,”¹ but an image of Himself. They were repelled by the doctrine of predestination, and were convinced that man need believe only in his own power to perfect himself. Since God had written the moral law within the image He made, man had only to exercise his reason to discover it. Thus the Cambridge Platonists found in Scripture a gentler, more generous faith than the puritanism they had inhabited. Far from disdaining anyone who professed somewhat different words, they insisted that character mattered more than creed. Their emphasis fell not on sin or on dogma, but on reason—the “Light of Nature” and “the Candle of the Lord.”

But from Hume’s standpoint, this exaltation of reason was no great improvement on Presbyterian dogma. The doctrine of the Cambridge Platonists implied that moral truth could be discovered with the same certainty and precision as mathematical truth. And there was no dearth of valiant philosophers who would undertake the task of showing how morals could actually be reduced to an exact science. The most outstanding was Samuel Clarke, regarded during Hume’s youth as England’s leading intellectual light. In some ways Clarke was attractive to a rebel against the Church. His rational arguments for religion had helped to undermine Hume’s faith in the divinity of Christ, and he was in several circles suspected of heresy. He managed nevertheless to advance steadily up the ecclesiastical ladder until he became Rector of St. James, and he gathered around him the most vigorous controversialists and promising young philosophers of the day. The public flocked to hear his lectures against “those atheists Hobbes and Spinoza,” as well as his sermons, full of logic and obscurity, which set forth in cumbrous periods the official morality of the day.

Clarke’s success came partly from his ability to give a practical and popular form to the abstract, mathematical view of the universe that had been framed in the seventeenth century, under the inspiration of Descartes and Newton, and was now coming into its own. It was a view of the world that tried not to traffic with the textures, colours, and sounds of material things or the feelings of mortal beings, but emphasized quantity—“hard, cold, colourless, silent and dead.”² That this view might be extended to morals had been suggested by Locke, when he occasionally assimilated moral to mathematical truth. However much he differed from the Cambridge Platonists in metaphysics, he spoke their language about morality, about the “eternal and unalterable nature of right and wrong.” But whereas the Platonists had stressed the objective reality of good and evil, Locke’s emphasis fell on the possibility of demonstrating morality in the same way as mathematics. And Clarke went further. He undertook to demonstrate with mathematical exactitude the existence of God and the obligations of natural religion.

Although Clarke granted that there were many different moral relations, he was certain that they could all be classified and exactly described, and clear conclusions deduced from them. Some actions promoted the good of mankind, some made men miserable, others were neutral. But whatever the action, its tendency and results were always the same. The differences between good and bad actions were as clear and unvarying as the difference between black and white, or the magnitudes of numbers. To deny that I should do for another man what he in a like case should do for me was, according to Clarke, like asserting that “though two and three are equal to five, yet five is not equal to two and three.”¹ Wickedness was “the same absurdity and insolence in moral matters; as it would be in natural things,” to try to alter the relations of numbers or the properties of geometrical figures.² If men sometimes found it difficult to distinguish between good and evil tendencies, it was not because the nature or results of actions were ambiguous, changeable, or questionable, but because the observers were ignorant or deluded.

Human uncertainty was due to the senses, which presented man with nothing more than a shifting “phatasmagoria [sic] of unrealities,” and indistinguishably confused the accidental and essential. Reason, however, saw the invariable relations between ultimate facts, and the man of reason could no more withhold his assent from the eternal rules of right, derived from unalterable relations, than a man instructed in mathematics could deny a geometrical demonstration he had understood. Circumstances were irrelevant for Clarke, and were never permitted to muddle the clarity and certainty of moral judgements. He saw no problem about deciding what cases were alike, and had no use for the dissenting opinions of men who were prejudiced by education, laws, customs, and evil practices. Indeed, he considered any attempt to examine how men really behaved a concession to Satan. The human being rightly understood was for him an anonymous unit whose duties could be determined in the abstract by formulae. He was, as Pope said, “all seeing,” and daunted by nothing on the “high Priori road.”

This rational morality was made even more rigid by Clarke’s follower, Wollaston, who, in his monastic retirement in the City, produced a theory that seemed to define sin as lying. It was wrong to kill a man, he argued, because by “so doing I deny him to be a man,” and his theory was hailed as a discovery in morals equal to Newton’s discoveries in astronomy. Whereas Clarke was mainly interested in denying that morality was merely a matter of taste or power, Wollaston deliberately emphasized the uniformity of moral rules for all times and places. Following reason meant, Wollaston insisted even more strongly than Clarke, following universal, abstract rules. What reason commanded in one case inevitably applied to all other cases: “What is reasonable with respect to Quinctius, is so in respect of Naevius. Reason is performed in species.… The knowledge of a particular idea is only the particular knowledge of that idea or thing: there it ends. But reason is something universal, a kind of general instrument, applicable to particular things and cases as they occur.”¹

In some ways, there was nothing so severe in the moral teaching of Clarke and Wollaston that it should have offended Hume. They encouraged men to endeavour to live well; they did not deny any possibility of happiness on earth; nor did they impose any austerities. It is indeed difficult to discover from the exact science laid down by Clarke and Wollaston what their moral rules required, apart from commanding that a man should not “desire to gain some small profit to himself by doing violence and damage to his Neighbour”² or that he should “endeavour to appease with gentleness rather than exasperate with retaliation.”³ But the assumption underlying their morality was the same as that of the Cambridge Platonists, and of the Kirk, that man was a divided nature, torn between holy reason and brutish passion. Their faith in reason was much higher than the Kirk’s, but their opinion of their body or the passions no better.

The Cambridge Platonists had found Platonic and neo-Platonic doctrine attractive precisely because it taught that the spiritual world alone was real, that the soul was immortal and could ascend to heaven. It offered the metaphysical basis of Calvinism shorn of superstition and mystical dross, as well as the basis for a complete answer to Hobbes. When the Cambridge men and their followers departed from Plato, it was only to take a more, rather than less, doctrinaire view. They had none of Plato’s sense for the texture and difficulty of truth; they were as certain as their Puritan ancestors had been that they had discovered in Scripture clear answers to all questions about the soul, heaven and hell, and the nature of God. What worried them was not how man could know what he ought to do, but only how he could acquire the will to do what they knew for certain he should.

Plato’s latter-day followers learned from him mainly that spiritual man and carnal man saw very different worlds, that a true vision could be reached only by conquering fleshly lusts and unifying human nature with the Divine. The rational faculties, they believed, could come into their own only when the heart was purified and the will disciplined, when reason was not clouded over by a “dark, filthy mist of sin.” The good life meant then endeavouring “more and more to withdraw ourselves from these Bodily things, to set our soul as free as may be from its miserable slavery to this base Flesh.”¹ Imagination had to be transcended, and the “eyes of sense” shut before reason would be left free to see the true permanent realities. Clarke described the passions as “unbridled and furious,” the appetites as “inordinate,” and regretted that some men were robust enough to escape the “natural ill consequences of intemperance and debauchery.”² And Wollaston warned even more sternly against the corruption of human nature: “Unless there be some strong limitation added as a fence for virtue, men will be apt to sink into voluptuousness, as in fact the generality of Epicurus’s herd have done (notwithstanding all his talk of temperance, virtue, tranquillity, etc.), and the bridle will be usurped by those appetites which it is a principal part of all religion, natural as well as any other, to curb and restrain.”³

Thus the rational moralists, however close they came to Deism, shared with Puritanism the traditional view of the passions as a source of falsehood and evil. Like all philosophers since Plato, and all Christians, they taught that the perfection of man consists in his union with God through his mind, that his imperfection comes of the mind’s union with the body. Moreover, they made it just as difficult to question the moral law discovered by reason as it was to escape the commands of the Kirk. The advocates of rational morality were no more willing than the Predestinarian preachers to accept different interpretations of virtue. They, too, insisted that all men must live in the same way, and that this meant denying, or somehow overcoming, all that was not pure spirit. Their outlook was not much exaggerated by Steele’s paraphrase, “To love is a passion, ’Tis a desire, and we must have no desires.”

For Hume, the rational moralists underscored the fact that philosophy as well as religion, reason as easily as faith, could be used to subject all men to the same inflexible and unsuitable rules. Philosophy, he decided, had been bent to the uses of theology. Philosophers had become divines in disguise; they had “warped” reasoning and even language “from their natural course,” and endeavoured to establish distinctions “where the difference of the objects was, in a manner, imperceptible”; they disregarded nature and the “unbiased” sentiments of the mind in favour of unreal abstractions.¹ Not only superstition and enthusiasm had to be combated, but perhaps even more the philosophers’ practice of discussing morality in the abstract, of deducing a “variety of inferences and conclusions” from a few general abstract principles. This abstract method did not suit the “imperfection of human nature”; it had been rejected in natural philosophy, and it had now to be abandoned by moral philosophy as well: “Men are now cured of their passion for hypotheses and systems in natural philosophy and will hearken to no arguments but those which are derived from experience. It is full time they should attempt a like reformation in all moral disquisitions; and reject every system of ethics, however subtle or ingenious, which is not founded on fact and observation.”²

The direction Hume had to follow in order to construct a new view of man was suggested by a fellow Scotsman, Francis Hutcheson, probably the most outstanding and influential opponent of the Covenanters’ creed. He led the Moderates in their attempt to strip Calvinist theology of its gloom and dogmatism, to describe God as a lawgiver and the source of morality, a Deity that reigned rather than governed. The problem, as Hutcheson saw it, was to show that man was not essentially depraved or egoistic, but benevolent.

The germ of his theory came from Shaftesbury, whose assimilation of morals to art and beauty readily attracted anyone in revolt against Puritanism. Although he, too, had been influenced by Plato, Shaftesbury emphasized an other aspect of Platonic philosophy. He reaffirmed, against the scientific and mathematical current, the importance of beauty. He valued beauty more than logic, fought his opponents with ridicule rather than geometry, and tried to feel the harmony of the universe, not to reduce it to a barren system or set of formulae. The quality of a man’s taste and the style of his life mattered more to Shaftesbury than his declared principles and reasonings. By saying that the moral perfection of man is akin to the perfection of a work of art, that a good man can arouse in a spectator a pleasure like that aroused by any beautiful object, Shaftesbury seemed to free life from the ugliness with which Puritanism had encased it. He placed the foundation for morality in the human constitution itself, not in a power to transcend it, and so removed from man the stigma of natural depravity.

On what Shaftesbury described as a “rational affection” for goodness, Hutcheson built a more definite system. He traced morality to an internal sense, the moral sense, which he described as a passive power of receiving ideas of good and likened to the sense for beauty. Neither the exact relation between the moral sense and the sense of beauty, nor the character of motives, nor the ultimate end of moral behaviour was ever made perfectly clear by Hutcheson. But he did definitely distinguish the moral sense from reason, and rest moral judgements on feeling, rather than on any rational process. Nature had given man, he asserted, “immediate monitors,” independent of calculation and reflection, for distinguishing good from evil. Moral judgements were not then the results of ratiocination about, or of insights into the relations of things or ideas; they were an immediate feeling of approval or disapproval:

The Weakness of our Reason … [is] so great, that very few Men could ever have form’d those long Deductions of Reason which show some Actions to be on the whole advantageous to the Agent and their Contrary pernicious. The Author of Nature has much better furnish’d us for a virtuous Conduct, than our Moralists seem to imagine, by almost as quick and powerful Instructions as we have for the Preservation of our Bodys. He has given us strong Affections to be the Springs of each virtuous Action; and made Virtue a lovely Form, that we might easily distinguish it from its Contrary, and be made happy in the Pursuit of it.¹

There could be no abstract, general rules, because “everyone judges the affections of others by his own Sense, so that it seems not impossible that in these Senses men may differ as they do in Taste.”¹ Nevertheless, there was order and universality in moral judgements. Although he never explained very satisfactorily how there could be variety amidst uniformity in morals, Hutcheson maintained firmly that morality was neither arbitrary, nor perfectly uniform in the sense of the rational moralists. Instead of proposing any single moral idea that all men had to follow, he affirmed simply that man was good.

What was most striking about Hutcheson’s theory, certainly to someone in search of a new foundation for ethics, was that he reversed the roles of reason and passion.² As he used “passion” to cover all types of feeling, it followed that the passions, far from being simply the source of human corruption, were the seat of man’s best propensities. The function of reason was not to hold the passions in check, but rather to serve at least some of the passions, to adjust the general direction given by the passions to particular circumstances. Hutcheson himself stopped there; neither he nor Shaftesbury wished to deny the established view that human nature was divided between reason and passion, but merely to adjust it towards more amiable conclusions. Shaftesbury described reason as man’s dignity, the source of virtue and happiness. Hutcheson frequently retreated altogether from the radical implications of his theory, and restored to reason much of its traditional importance, calling it a “divine” faculty that “frames the ideal of a truly good life.” He even tried to develop the relevance of mathematical calculation for morality, so much so that Sterne remarked: “Hutcheson, in his philosophic treatise on beauty, harmony, and order, plus’s and minus’s you to heaven or hell, by algebraic equations—so that none but an expert mathematician can ever be able to settle his accounts with St. Peter—and perhaps St. Matthew, who had been an officer in the customs, must be called in to audit them.”¹

After all, Hutcheson’s system was linked with an optimistic theology. It was designed to demonstrate the wisdom and benevolence that ruled the universe. Besides, Hutcheson stressed the more ascetic of the Christian virtues—suffering, he said, gave opportunity for practising “the most sublime virtues, such as resignation to the Will of God, forgiving of injuries, returning good for evil. …”² Despite his love for classical authors, Hutcheson was Christian, in just the sense that Hume wished to oppose. But he had planted a suggestion for a truly radical departure.

Where Hutcheson’s suggestion might lead, Hume discovered through the French writers whom he began reading in Edinburgh. In Bayle, and in a number of writers of the seventeenth century—Fontenelle, l’Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Malebranche—Hume found the view that man was in fact moved by his passions, and reason was but a passive onlooker. They did not deny the dichotomy between reason and passion, nor the holiness of one and the corruption of the other, but suggested that whatever he tried to be, man was after all nothing like God. Bayle said that reason did not always calm the passions, its decrees were not always executed, indeed reason often only increased the chaos within man. For since the Fall, man no longer inhabited the world of reason, but had become “plunged into sense.”³ Bayle even went so far as to say that the passions made the world go ’round, and prevented anarchy as well as caused it.

In Montaigne, however, Hume found more—a whole “new scene of thought,” a totally different estimate of man that denied the established picture of the hierarchy of being. Montaigne saw human life as Hume had hoped men could. His essays were a continuous lesson in moderation, opposed to every kind of extremism. He taught men to accept themselves for what they were, and to obey the law of their own nature rather than pretend to divinity. Only the subject of holiness and Christian zeal aroused him to severity. Like Hume, he was more offended by Protestantism than by Catholicism because he felt it was less mischievous to bend the knee than the reason. And he, too, warned men to beware of those who bore a sanctified appearance and imposed a burden of austerities. No zeal, he said, produced so much misery as Christian zeal, which moved men to hate and cruelty, never to benignity, goodness, or temperance.

Montaigne’s descriptions of virtue could hardly have expressed better Hume’s own thoughts, and were echoed again and again in Hume’s work. Virtue was not, Montaigne said, “pitched on the top of a high, steep, or inaccessible hill”; she held her mansion “in a fair, flourishing, and pleasant plain”; she was “lovely, equally delicious and courageous, protesting herself to be a professed and irreconcilable enemy to all sharpness, austerity, fear, and compulsion; having nature for her guide, fortune and voluptuousness for her companions.”¹ The priests had taught men to disdain the joys of life on earth and they had produced as a result nothing but mischief.

For if men tried to behave like angels, they succeeded only in becoming monsters—“instead of uplifting themselves, they degrade themselves.” They might as well renounce breathing as bodily pleasures. Nature has seen to it that satisfying our necessities should also be pleasurable to us—“it does wrong to the great and all powerful Donor to refuse His gift, to impair it and deface it.”² The most difficult and the first thing for a man to know was how to live the life proper to man:

It is an absolute perfection, and as it were divine for a man to know how to enjoy his existence loyally. We seek for other conditions because we understand not the use of our own and we go outside of ourselves because we know not what is happening there. Thus it is in vain that we mount upon stilts, for, if we walk upon them, yet must we walk with our own legs; and though we sit upon the highest throne in the world, yet we do but sit upon our own behind.³

There was a remarkable correspondence, too, between Hume’s antipathy to the Kirk’s commands and to “the eternal and immutable relations” promulgated by the rational moralists, and Montaigne’s dislike of fixity, of general rules, of any rigid schemes. For Montaigne denied that man could commune with the Divine Intellect, or discover any simple coherent theory that could explain or direct human activity. Diversity, Montaigne insisted, was the rule on earth; there were no clear, hard lines between good and bad, virtue and vice, for all virtues were not equally salutary, and some vices were worse than others. Nor did any single set of choices deserve supremacy—that way lay the opposite of life. “We do not live, we only exist, if we hold ourselves bound and driven by necessity to follow one course alone. The finest spirits are those that show the largest choice, the greatest suppleness.”¹ Man’s life was like the wind; and the wind, “more wisely than we, loves to bluster, and to be in agitation and is content with its own functions, without desiring stability, solidity, qualities that are not its own.”²

Man was and should be a bundle of contradictory things, a flux of impressions—“in everything and everywhere … but patchwork and motley.”³ That was the moral of Montaigne’s essays, where he tried to draw a true man, with all his vacillation and mixture, not a pure, abstract kind of creature. For such a being, ready-made rules of conduct were neither possible nor desirable. He had better rely on experience and example, than on the lofty and elaborate reasonings of philosophers.

All this in Montaigne showed him to be a kindred spirit. How striking it was then to find his view of human life associated with a unique description of the relation between reason and passion, mind and body. Montaigne did not merely say that passion ruled, or that reason followed more often than the divines admitted. He came near to denying altogether that man was a divided nature, an animal endowed with reason, whose highest affinity was with God. His radical insight was that nature was not split between brutes and spirits, with the uncomfortable human mixture in between, but a continuous line in which spirit or reason played its part at every stage.

Man as seen by Montaigne had much more in common with the animals than he liked to admit. There was a natural language common to children and animals, and there were many evidences of intelligence in the animals. Man was conceived, born, and fed, he moved, acted, lived and died like the beasts. Only vanity and presumption led him to suppose he had a special place in creation. His true condition was not that of a holy spirit unhappily sullied by its bond with matter; it was a mingled, homely condition, with its own pleasures and privileges, and its own kind of guidance.

There was no conflict between spirit and matter, indeed nothing more than a narrow seam between mind and body. It was wrong for the soul to draw apart, to despise and desert the body; indeed it could not really do so except through some “ill-shaped, apish trick.” Instead the soul had better “strike fresh alliance with the body, embrace it, cherish it, control and counsel it… marry the body and serve it as a husband to the end that their poverty should not appear to be different and contrary, but one and the same.”¹ Not only passion and desire needed to be controlled; spirit and mind could just as easily exceed their proper limits, and when they did, they produced wild dreams and chimeras. Virtue depended not on suppressing nature, nor on climbing higher and higher toward God, but on knowing how to judge and circumscribe one’s ambitions. Whatever is sufficient is great—“There is nothing so fine and so justifiable as to play the man well and truly.”²

Thus Montaigne crystallized for Hume what others had suggested—the need to formulate a philosophy based on new assumptions about human nature, a philosophy that would restore man’s wholeness, and undo all the mischief wrought by a long tradition that had divided man between holy reason and brutish passion. Those who knew something more than hypotheses, who took the trouble to look at man as he really was, could see that the established formulas for human life had inflicted useless pain because they were not suited to the true human condition. There is no better statement of Hume’s guiding motive in his philosophical enterprise than his statement opening Book II of the Treatise:

Nothing is more usual in philosophy and even in common life than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and to assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform to its dictates. Every rational creature, ’tis said, is oblig’d to regulate his actions by reason; and if any other motive or principle challenge the direction of his conduct, he ought to oppose it, ’till it be entirely subdu’d or at least brought to conformity with that superior principle … nor is there an ampler field, as well for metaphysical arguments, and popular declamations, than this supposed preeminence of reason above passion. The eternity, invariableness, and divine origin of the former have been display’d to the best advantage: The blindness, unconstancy, and deceitfulness of the latter have been as strongly insisted on. In order to shew the fallacy of all this philosophy, I shall endeavour to prove first, that reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will; and secondly, that it can never oppose passion in the direction of the will.¹

In fact, Hume did more in the end. He established the principles of human nature on an entirely new foundation; not content with “taking now and then a castle or village on the frontier,” he marched up “directly to the capital or centre” of the sciences.² He attacked the basis of all traditional notions on which children had been brought up and societies governed, men discussed, praised, and blamed. He did not care to deny the existence of God. What he proposed was far more radical than any declared atheism.

It was no wonder that he drove himself feverishly, and then suffered depression, illness, and doubt. Shortly before leaving for France he wrote to Dr. Cheyne that at the age of eighteen,

there seem’d to be open’d up to me a new Scene of Thought which transported me beyond Measure, and made me, with an Ardor natural to young men, throw up every other Pleasure or Business to apply entirely to it.… I found that the moral Philosophy transmitted to us by Antiquity, labor’d under the same Inconvenience that has been found in their natural Philosophy, of being entirely Hypothetical, and depending more upon Invention than Experience. Every one consulted his Fancy in erecting Schemes of Virtue and of Happiness, without regarding human Nature, upon which every moral Conclusion must depend. This therefore I resolved to make my principal Study, and the Source from which I wou’d derive every Truth in Criticism as well as Morality… within these three Years, I find I have scribled many a Quire of Paper, in which there is nothing contain’d but my own Inventions. This with the Reading most of the celebrated Books in Latin, French, and English, and acquiring the Italian, you may think a sufficient Business for one in perfect Health. … But my Disease was a cruel Incumbrance on me.

He found himself, Hume explained, unable to concentrate, strangely ill at ease, and generally incapable of delivering his opinions “with such Elegance & Neatness as to draw to me the Attention of the World, & I wou’d rather live & dye in Obscurity than produce them maim’d & imperfect.”³ It was fitting that Hume should have recovered the strength to complete his task in France.