Imatges de pàgina
PDF
EPUB

our affection and its accompanying, nay, inseparable pleasure, was the most effectual argument that could be brought to bear against the selfish system of morals. The virtuous affection that is in a man's breast simply leads him to do what he ought; and in that object he rests and terminates. Like every other affection, there must be a pleasure conjoined with the prosecution of it; and at last, a full and final gratification in the attainment of its object. But the object must be distinct from the pleasure, which itself is founded on a prior suitableness between the mind and its object. When a man is actuated by a virtuous desire; it is the virtue itself that he is seeking, and not the gratification that is in it. His single object is to be or to do rightly-though, the more intent he is upon this object, the greater will, the greater must be his satisfaction if he succeed in it. Nevertheless, it is not the satisfaction which he is seeking; it is the object which yields the satisfaction-the object too for its own sake, and not for the sake of its accompanying or its resulting enjoyment. Nay, the more strongly and therefore the more exclusively set upon virtue for its own sake; the less will he think of its enjoyment, and yet the greater will his actual enjoyment be. In other words, virtue, the more disinterested it is, is the more prolific of happiness to him who follows it; and then it is, that, when freest of all from the taints of mercenary selfishness, it yields to its votary the most perfect and supreme enjoyment. Such is the constitution of our nature, that virtue loses not its disinterested character; and yet man loses not

his reward; and the author of this constitution. He who hath ordained all its laws and its consequences, has given signal proof of His own supreme regard for virtue, and therefore of the supreme virtue of His own character, in that He hath so framed the creatures of His will, as that their perfect goodness and perfect happiness are at one. Yet the union of these does not constitute their unity. The union is a contingent appointment of the Deity; and so is at once the evidence and the effect of the goodness that is in His own nature.

16. This then is our second argument for the moral character of God, grounded on the moral constitution of man; and prior, as yet, to any view of its adaptation to external nature. It is distinct from the first argument, as grounded on the phenomena of conscience, which assumes the office of a judge within the breast, all whose decisions are on the side of benevolence and justice; and which is ever armed with a certain power of enforcement, both in the pains of remorse and the pleasures of self-approbation. These, however, are distinct and ought to be distinguished from the direct pleasures of virtue in itself, and the direct pains of vice in itself, which form truly separate ingredients, on the one hand of a present and often very painful correction, on the other hand, of a present and very precious reward.

CHAPTER IV.

The Power and Operation of Habit.

1. WE have as yet been occupied with what may be termed the instant sensations, wherewith morality is beset in the mind of man-with the voice of conscience which goes immediately before, or with the sentence whether of approval or condemnation, which comes immediately after it; and latterly, with those states of feeling which are experienced at the moment when under the power of those affections, to which any moral designation, be it of virtue or vice, is applicable-the pleasure which there is in the very presence and contact of the one, the distaste, the bitterness which there is in the presence and contact of the other.

2. These phenomena of juxtaposition, as they may be termed; these contiguous antecedents and consequents of the moral and the immoral in man, speak strongly the purpose of Him who ordained our mental constitution, in having inserted there such a constant power of command and encouragement on the side of the former, and a like constant operation of checks and discouragements against the latter. But, perhaps, something more may be collected of the design and character of God, by stretching forward our observation prospectively in the history of man, and so extending our regards to the more distant consequences of virtue or vice, both on the frame of his character and the state of

his enjoyments. By studying these posterior results, we approximate our views towards the final issues of that administration under which we are placed. That defensive apparatus, wherewith the embryo seed of plants is guarded and protected, might indicate a special care or design in the preserver of it. What that design particularly is comes to be clearly and certainly known, when, in the future history of the plant, we learn what the functions of the seed are, after it has come to maturity; and then observe, that, had it been suffered universally to perish, it would have led -not to the mortality of the individual, for that is already an inevitable law, but to the extinction and mortality of the species.

3. For tracing forward man's moral history, or the changes which take place in his moral state, it is necessary that we should advert to the influence of habit. Yet it is not properly the philosophy of habit wherewith our argument is concerned, but with the leading facts of its practical operation. A beneficial effect might still remain an `evidence of the divine goodness, by whatever steps it should be efficiently or physically brought about its power in this way depending not on the question how it is, but on the fact that so it is. It were really, therefore, deviating from our own strict and pertinent line of inquiry, did we stop to discuss the philosophic theory of habit, or suspend our own independent reasoning till that theory was settled-beside most unwisely and unnecessarily attaching to our theme, all the discredit of an obscure or questionable speculation. It is with

palpable and sure results both in the material and mental world, more than with the recondite processes in either, that theism has chiefly to do; and it is by the former more than by the latter that the cause of theism is upholden.

4. We might only observe, in passing, that the modification introduced by Dr. Thomas Brown into the theory of habit, was perhaps uncalled for, even for the accomplishment of his own purpose, which was to demonstrate that it required no peculiar or original law of the human constitution to account for its phenomena. He resolves the whole operation of habit into the law of suggestion-only, he would extend that law to states of feelings, as well as to thoughts or states of thought.* We are all aware that if two objects have been seen or thought of together on any former occasion, then the thought of one of them is apt to suggest the thought of the other, and the more apt the more frequently that the suggestion has taken place-insomuch, that, if the suggestion have taken place very often,

* The following is the passage taken from his forty-third lecture, in which Dr. Brown seems to connect feeling with feeling by the same mental law which connects thought with thought. "To explain the influence of habit in increasing the tendency to certain actions I must remark-what I have already more than once repeated-that the suggesting influence which is usually expressed in the phrase association of ideas, though that very improper phrase would seem to limit it to our ideas or conceptions only, and has unquestionably produced a mistaken belief of this partial operation of a general influence-is not limited to those more than to any other states of mind, but occurs also with equal force in other feelings, which are not commonly termed ideas or conceptions; that our desires or other emotions, for example, may, like them, form a part of our trains of suggestion," &c. See another equally ambiguous passage in his sixty-fourth lecture. VOL. I.

R

« AnteriorContinua »