Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/256

 234 THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE. the habit of sympathetically passing moral judgment on the actions of others, and of seeing our own judged by them, is developed the further one of keeping a constant watch over ourselves and of considering our dispositions and deeds from the standpoint of the good of others. This custom is called conscience. Allied to this is the love of reputation, which continually leads us to ask, How will our behavior appear in the eyes of those with whom we associate? Within the fourth and most important class, the social virtues, Hume distinguishes between the natural virtues of humanity and benevolence and the artificial virtues of justice and fidelity. The former proceed from our inborn sympathy with the good of others, while the latter, on the other hand, are not to be derived from a natural passion, an instinctive love of humanity, but are the product of reflection and art, and take their origin in a social convention. In order that an action may gain the approval of the spectator two other things are required besides its salutary effects: it must be a mark of character, of a permanent dis- position, and it must proceed from disinterested motives. Hume is obliged by this latter position to show that disin- terested benevolence actually exists, that the unselfish affec- tions do not secretly spring from self-love. To cite only one of the thousand examples of benevolence in which no dis- cernible interest is concerned, we desire happiness for our friends even when we have no expectation of participating in it. The accounts of human selfishness are greatly over- drawn, and those who deduce all actions from it make the mistake of taking the inevitable consequences of virtue — the pleasure of self-approval and of being esteemed by others — for the only motives to virtue. Because virtue, in the out- come, produces inner satisfaction and is praised by others, it does not follow that it is practiced merely for the sake of these agreeable consequences. Self-love is a secondary impulse, whose appearance at all presupposes primary impulses. Only after we have experienced the pleasure which comes from the satisfaction of such an original im- pulse {e. g., ambition), can this become the object of a con- scious reflective search after pleasure, or of egoism. Power brings no enjoyment to the man by nature devoid of ambi-