Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 5.djvu/52

112 who have twisted the principles of the author into excuses for vice and immorality, and the destruction of all inducements to the practice of virtue, deserve only the fame of being themselves the fabricators of the crooked morality of which they have endeavoured to cast the odium upon another. When Mr Hume says, "The necessity of justice to the support of society is the sole foundation of that virtue : and since no moral excellence is more highly esteemed, we may conclude, that this circumstance of usefulness has, in general, the strongest energy, and most entire command over our sentiments. It must, therefore, be the source of a considerable part of the merit ascribed to humanity, benevolence, friendship, public spirit, and other social virtues of that stamp; as it is the sole source of the moral approbation paid to fidelity, justice, veracity, integrity, and those other estimable and useful qualities and principles:" it was not difficult for those benevolent guardians of the public mind, who sat in watch to intercept such declarations, to hold such an opinion up to public indignation, and to maintain that it admitted every man to examine his actions by his own sense of their utility, and to commit vice by the application of a theory of expediency appropriated to the act. It is not necessary to be either a vindicator or assailant of Mr Hume's theory, to perceive that what he has traced bade to the original foundation of expediency, is not by him made different in its practice and effects, from those which good men of all persuasions in religion and philosophy admit While he told men that he had traced the whole system of the morality they practised, to certain principles different from those generally admitted, he did not tell men to alter their natural reverence for virtue or abhorrence towards vice; the division betwixt good and evil had been formed, and while giving his opinion how it had been formed, he did not dictate a new method of regulating human actions, and except in the hands of those who applied his theories of the origin of virtue and vice, to the totally different purpose of an application to their practice in individual cases, he did no more to break down the barriers of distinction betwixt them, than he who first suggested that the organs of sight merely presented to the mind the refactions of visible objects, may be supposed to have done to render the mind less certain of the existence of external objects. "There is no spectacle," says the author, " so fair and beautiful as a noble and generous action; nor any which gives us more abhorrence than one which is cruel and treacherous. No enjoyment equals the satisfaction we receive from the company of those we love and esteem; as the greatest of all punishments is to be obliged to pass our lives with those we hate or contemn. A very play or romance may afford us instances of this pleasure which virtue conveys to us, and the pain which arises from vice;" and it would be difficult to find in this elaborate essay, any remark to contradict the impression of the author's views, which every candid mind must receive from such a declaration.

The neglect with which his first production was received by the public, while it did not abate the steady industry of its author, turned his attention for a time to subjects which might be more acceptable to general readers, and in the calm retirement of his brother's house at Ninewells, where he pursued his studies with solitary zeal, he prepared two volumes of unconnected dissertations, entitled "Essays Moral and Philosophical," which he published in 1742. These essays he had intended to have published in weekly papers, after the method pursued by the authors of the Spectator; " but," he observes, in an advertisement prefixed to the first edition, " having dropped that undertaking, partly from laziness, partly from want of leisure, and being willing to make trial of my talents for writing before I ventured upon any more serious compositions, I was induced to commit these trifles to the judgment of the public." A