Note 293.1 — UTILITARIANISM.

It was necessary to be thus particular about Hartley’s doctrine on the generation of ideas, because, as expressed in the above passages, it is one of the broadest statements of Externalism possible, and if consistently followed out, as it has been by the Mills, neither morals nor mathematics can escape from its grasp. According to this doctrine there exists no morality founded on the eternal reasons and relations of things, but all notions of right and wrong proceed from association alone, from clusters of ideas which are only modified sensations,—all affection as well as all reasoning being the mere result of association—(i. 499.) Let us now inquire a little more closely what this Association is, which performs such marvels in the transmutation of sensations into ideas; for surely never was a word so largely used by philosophical writers in recent times, and so villainously abused. Association is a popular term, and therein precisely lies its large capacity of doing harm, when sophistically used. Now what it means in popular language is pretty plain. When I think of London I think of beauty, splendour, magnitude, multitude, wealth, din, incalculable noise of rattling cabs above ground and of screeching railways under ground. These are my associations with London. When I think of Oxford, I think of Greek and Grammars and square caps, of mitres, and lawn sleeves, High Church and Broad Church, learning and luxury, bigotry and boating, cricket, cram, and scholarly conceit. When I think of the Highlands, I think of Bens and Glens, of lochs and waterfalls, of steamboats and tourists, of salmon-fishing, grouse-shooting, deerstalking. Free Churches, untrousered legs, and Ossianic poems. There does not seem much mystery in this. Ideas must hang together somehow or other; if they did not, they would be like a swarm of mad bees in our head, and would reel about in an unmanageable chaos; if therefore they are to hang together in some way, what more natural than that those ideas which come in together should remain together, and that those which have a family likeness and affinity should arrange themselves into companies. Add to this the natural tendency of black to recall white, and of life to suggest death, and you have the whole three bonds of association among human thoughts and emotions—contiguity, similarity, and contrast—of which philosophical writers make parade. Now what is the place which belongs to this popular principle of association in a system of metaphysics or mental philosophy? To me its place appears a very secondary one; and to give it any place at all we must carefully distinguish between accidental and necessary, between ephemeral and eternal associations, the confounding of which rather seems to stand out as the prominent employment of the Sensation philosophers. There are two great classes of associations, the one principally of external and accidental, the other of internal and necessary origin; the one dominant in weak minds, the other in strong minds; the one common to us with the brutes, the other altogether impossible to brutes; the one more in the manner of a loose bundle, the other in the style of a stable architecture. With people not much given to think consecutively ideas are apt to hang together by certain mere superficial points of attachment; like drifted matter on an open beach, they lie just as they come in; the most incongruous things together all in a heap. Such associations, subjected to no controlling and discriminating power, are the fruitful source of all vain opinions, prejudices, senseless conceits, and hollow reasonings. With another class of people, again, in whom a strict watch is always kept over the materials with which sense supplies the mind, we find a totally opposite sort of associations. In this case the influence of the external factor diminishes, while the internal factor comes largely into play. The mind of such persons is not merely a mirror of such things as may chance to fall upon it, it is a commander-in-chief and a dictator, which discriminates, selects, and disposes according to an innate ordering faculty, which rejoices to trace out the cognate order which everywhere lives beneath the diverse surface of external things. The former of these forms of association is always more or less arbitrary; the latter is imperatorial and absolute; the one claims kinship with mere fancy and fashion; the other is reason in the realm of imagination rejoicing in the discovery of what under various guises is only a manifestation of the eternally Reasonable. Now the fault of the Association theory as used by moralists of the Utilitarian school, is that they have left reason altogether out of the account, and fixed their eyes exclusively on those external associations which form the principal furniture of the lower class of minds; nay, they have gone further than this, and systematically explained away the highest ideas, such as Beauty and Duty, into mere unsubstantial or monstrous products of some abnormal association! The applause which Alison received in Edinburgh by the publication of a treatise on Beauty, the drift of which was to resolve all our ideas of what is excellent in form or expression into mere arbitrary association; is one of the great reproaches of the Scottish philosophy. Similar ideas with regard to Duty are vented by Professor Bain.[293.1] Here, as in every other case, we see that it has been the business of the successors of Locke in this country to exaggerate his errors and to omit his truths. With regard to association Mr. Locke (iii. 33) did the wiser thing when he treated it not as the handmaid, much less as the substitute, for reason, but rather as its great enemy; and in the domain of morals, particularly, Professor Ferrier does not overstate the matter when he says in his own eloquent way that the Utilitarian philosophy presents to us “not the picture of a man, but that of a weathercock shifting helplessly in the winds of sensibility, a wretched association-machine, through which ideas pass, linked together by laws over which the machine has no control.”[293.2] And another sturdy Scotch thinker, yet alive, justly indignant at the juggle which has been played with this word, bursts out into the exclamation, “The Association psychology,—that barren bastard, between Materialism and Idealism, which, but intended as a jeer to the priest, is a disgrace to common-sense.” Thus the Scottish interpreter of Hegel; but though these strong words, in the fulness of their meaning, may be applicable to his successors, Hartley certainly never intended by his curious interplay of vibrations and vibratiuncles to jeer the ministers or to damage the cause of Christianity. In this respect he was a perfect parallel to Locke. He had inherited the central idea of all true philosophy,—the idea of God,—from Christianity; and he stuck by that. And if in his first volume he seemed to derive the noblest thing internal from the basest things external, to turn the whole miraculous world of thought and feeling, as Ferrier says, into a wretched “association-machine,” it was not so bad after all; for behind the machine he believed also in the steam, and the imperial mind of Him who made the machine; so in theology he remained a sound theist, and in morals he went so far as literally to stumble on the paradoxical love of “self-annihilation,” so prominent in the transcendental ethics of Budd. Hartley was the most pious and the most pure of metaphysical writers; and while he balanced his first proposition that “sensations beget ideas” by a second, that “God is the source of all Good” (i. 114), and a third, that “Final causes are the key to all mystery” (i. 366), he might launch his book into the world with a good conscience, and the sure hope of a good result, if only people would take him as a whole. This, however, unfortunately, people had not the thought or the will to do; the fewest people, Goethe said, can comprehend a whole; so they took up his sensuous association, and left his spiritual piety to float. He fared in this like St. Paul, whose sound sense, we read, certain persons lightly dismissed, who were forward to wrest his more obscure doctrines to their own destruction.