Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/626

610 expounder of a purely conventional system of morality, based on an absurd theory of human nature. The estimate of his opponents has passed into history, and he is regarded as a modern Protagoras maintaining the relativity of all morality. Neither the Cambridge school nor Cumberland, nor even the moral sense writers, seem to have grasped the meaning of Hobbes' problem nor the strength of his solution. While he has given a clear-cut answer to the question of authority, they, with the exception of the aesthetic school, continued to force questions of metaphysics.

It is impossible here to do more than restate briefly the main points in Hobbes' system so far as they concern our special problem. The two main charges against him were that he made morality a thing of convention, and that he libeled human nature by calling it wholly selfish. Cudworth and the intellectualists brought the former charge; Cumberland and the moral sense writers, the other. The two points are so closely related that they may be best treated together by a short statement of Hobbes' position.

The basis for his ethics is his psychology. Man is conceived as a bundle of irrational appetites, the objects of which constitute his good. The motion transmitted through the senses to the heart is in some way transmuted into "Appetite or Aversion to or from the object moving. But the apparence or sense of that motion is that wee either call Delight or Trouble of Mind. This Motion, which is called Appetite, and for the apparence of it Delight and Pleasure, seemeth to be a corroboration of Vitall Motion, and a help thereunto. ... Pleasure therefore (or Delight) is the apparence or sense of Good." Hobbes has here carried his mechanical conception over from nature, attempting to explain the nature of man in terms of the persistence of force or motion. Self-preservation is thus the law of life, the Good being that which aids in this, and Pleasure its reflex and index. In his constructive work, however, pleasure is used interchangeably as the end and as