Logic, Metaphysics, and the Natural Sociability of Mankind. Francis Hutcheson

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      The last part of Hutcheson’s lecture (pp. 206-14) was a response to critics who thought that he was mistaken in his understanding of moral motivation; in the judgment of these critics, the motives that prompt us to be virtuous and permit us to live in society are reducible to self-liking or desire for esteem. Two works, both critical of Hutcheson’s moral philosophy on these grounds, were published in the months preceding the inaugural lecture. Bernard Mandeville had written a second volume of The Fable of the Bees (1729) in which he expanded upon his critique of Shaftesbury’s theory of the natural sociability of man³⁶ and also invited Mr. Hutcheson to consider how much real benevolence and love of country men have, abstracted from their desire to be thought to have such benevolence, even though they feel none.³⁷ In the previous year (1728) Archibald Campbell’s work Arete-logia; or, An Enquiry into the Original of Moral Virtue was published; the last third of Campbell’s work was devoted to an extended critique of Hutcheson’s moral psychology.^{38 In Campbell’s understanding of moral life, other persons are extensions of oneself: children, relatives, friends, persons distant from one in time and place are all perceived to be connected, if only in imagination or by sympathy, with oneself. It is this association, direct or indirect, of others with ourselves that is the source of virtue and morality; we approve of the virtue and good conduct of others because we perceive it to be advantageous to ourselves. And we depend upon the approval or esteem of others to provide a motive for us to be virtuous. It is self-love, as it exhibits itself in the desire for esteem, that is “the great commanding Motive” of moral life.39 In this light, Campbell held that the benevolence or the instinctive determination to promote the good of others that Hutcheson claimed to find in human nature could be nothing but “an Occult Quality; which is a Part of Philosophy far beyond my Comprehension.”40}

      In opposition to his critics, Hutcheson put before his listeners a number of considerations. He invited all in his audience to consider whether they do not have a natural desire for the happiness of others, even when they expect no advantage to themselves to follow from such a desire. He acknowledged that natural desires also include anger, desire for vengeance, avarice, and ambition, but he reminded his auditors that there are other desires, other senses, of the beautiful and the fitting, which direct and control our basic desires. He objected to the narrow characterization of sociality offered by Mandeville, who thought love of company a quality more likely to be found among fox hunters or sailors on leave than among men of sense; and Campbell, who insisted that each of us is properly selective about the company he keeps.⁴¹ Hutcheson was dismissive of these reservations; he appears to have regarded these criticisms as a caricature of the position he defended: “As if we could be benevolent or have kind and sociable dispositions only toward those whom we would wish to choose as companions and intimates.”^{42 It had been complained of Hutcheson’s idea of virtue that it gives us “dark melancholy views of those Pursuits to which we are invited. …”43 Not so, Hutcheson countered:}

      Nor when we exhort men to live a good life, harmless, temperate, friendly and beneficent, should anyone think that there is laid upon him anything sour, vexatious, repulsive, or sorrowful, which nature shuns.⁴⁴

      He concluded with an appeal to students in his audience: “Go forward, then, in virtue, beloved young men, the hope of this generation and the glory, I trust, of the generation to come. …”⁴⁵

      The Dating of Hutcheson’s Logic and Metaphysics

      It is possible to date the month and the year of Hutcheson’s inaugural lecture: November 1730. It seems clear that he composed the lecture sometime in the same year, subsequent to his election in December 1729 to the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow. It is more difficult to fix the dates of composition of the Logic and Metaphysics. As the Professor of Moral Philosophy, Hutcheson did not teach logic and metaphysics (ontology and pneumatology) at the University of Glasgow. Those subjects were taught by the Professor of Logic, John Loudon, who continued to teach them until he died in December 1750, more than four years after Hutcheson’s death in August 1746. Hutcheson taught only the third and last part of metaphysics, natural theology, at Glasgow; the more animated rhetorical style of that part of his metaphysics may reflect this circumstance.

      Hutcheson had last taught logic and metaphysics at his academy, in Dublin, in the 1720s. He told Henry Home, in the spring of 1739, in a letter of thanks for the gift of David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, books I and II, that “these metaphysical subjects have not been much in my thoughts of late: tho a great many of these sentiments and reasonings had employed me 10 or 12 years ago.”^{46 As the master of a dissenting academy, Hutcheson was preparing students for study at a university in Scotland; for most Irish students, the university of choice was Glasgow. It seems most probable that Hutcheson composed A Compend of Logic and A Synopsis of Metaphysics in the 1720s for the instruction of students in his Dublin academy. Moreover, there is no argument in the text of the Logic (as distinct from the prefatory “Dissertation on the Origin of Philosophy”) or in the first edition of the Metaphysics (1742) that would require a date of composition later than the 1720s. The case is otherwise with respect to the prefatory Dissertation and the second edition of the Metaphysics. In those parts of his work, it will be evident that he was responding to arguments advanced in writings published in the 1730s (in the second edition of the Metaphysics, 1744), and he was adapting for his own use work published in the 1740s (in the dissertation prefaced to the Logic).}

      What prompted Hutcheson to publish A Synopsis of Metaphysics in 1742? It appears that it was first published without his knowledge; “It was first most imperfectly and foolishly printed without my knowledge, from some loose hastily wrote papers.”⁴⁷ The publisher was his former student and friend Robert Foulis. It is not known how Foulis came to be in possession of the text; Hutcheson may have given it to Foulis with a view to a later publication of a revised version. In the event, Hutcheson remained unhappy with the second edition (1744), which “tho much enlarged and altered, yet I have not leisure, either to examine the whole thoroughly or correct the Latin.”⁴⁸ The second edition contained 123 duodecimo pages, compared with 89 pages in the first edition. It is possible to recognize in the alterations made in the second edition a number of notable additions.

      Aristotelians, Stoics, and Eclectics

      The most conspicuous new material was a chapter (Part I, chapter 5) devoted to the categories of Aristotle. We have seen that it was part of Hutcheson’s strategy, in his Metaphysics as in his Logic, to demonstrate that the things or entities or beings discussed by Aristotelian scholastics could be better understood as ideas brought to mind by an internal sense. In his review of the categories of Aristotle—substance, quantity, quality, and so on—Hutcheson argued again that these categories were best conceived as ideas of internal sensation. In the third edition (1749) he referred the reader to Locke for a parallel treatment of the ideas of substance and time.^{49 He appears to have been enlisting the authority of Locke to reinforce an argument that ideas of substance, space, relation, and so on are real ideas that have reference to an objective reality, to things in the world. They are not, like the idea of number, ideas that can be imagined in the absence of things.}

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