Note 93 — REMARKS ON THE SYSTEMS OF HARTLEY AND HELVETIUS

I have always had the same feeling with respect to Hartley (still granting his power to the utmost) which is pleasantly expressed in an old author, Roger Bacon, quoted by Sir Kenelm Digby in his answer to Brown. ‘Those students,’ he says, ‘who busy themselves much with such notions as relate wholly to the fantasie, do hardly ever become idoneous for abstracted metaphysical speculations; the one having bulky foundation of matter or of the accidents of it to settle upon, (at the least with one foot:) the other flying continually, even to a lessening pitch, in the subtil air. And accordingly, it hath been generally noted, that the exactest mathematicians, who converse altogether with lines, figures, and other differences of quantity, have seldom proved eminent in metaphysicks or speculative divinity. Nor again, the professors of these sciences in the other arts. Much less can it be expected, that an excellent physician, whose fancy is always fraught with the material drugs that he prescribeth his apothecary to compound his medicines of, and whose hands are inured to the cutting up, and eyes to the inspection of anatomized bodies, should easily and with success, flie his thoughts at so towring a game, as a pure intellect, a separated and unbodied soul.’—I confess I feel in reading Hartley something in the way in which the Dryads must have done shut up in their old oak trees. I feel my sides pressed hard, and bored with points of knotty inferences piled up one upon another without being able ever to recollect myself, or catch a glimpse of the actual world without me. I am somehow wedged in between different rows of material objects, overpowering me by their throng, and from which I have no power to escape, but of which I neither know nor understand any thing. I constantly see objects multiplied upon me, not powers at work, I know no reason why one thing follows another but that something else is conjured up between them, which has as little apparent connection with either as they have with one another;—he always reasons from the concrete object, not from the abstract or essential properties of things, and in his whole book I do not believe that there is one good definition. It would be a bad way to describe a man’s character to say that he had a wise father or a foolish son, and yet this is the way in which Hartley defines ideas by stating what precedes them in the mind, and what comes after them. Thus he defines the will to be ‘that idea, or state of mind which precedes action,’ or ‘a desire, or aversion sufficiently strong to produce action,’ &c. He gives you the outward signs of things in the order in which he conceives them to follow one another, never the demonstration of certain consequences from the known nature of their causes, which alone is true reasoning. Nevertheless, it is not to be forgotten, that he was also a great man. See his Chapter on Memory, &c.