Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/370

354 those who, from one point of view or another, opposed the egoistic position of Hobbes. But of all those moralists, Cumberland alone can properly be termed a Utilitarian, and even he, it will be remembered, had carried through 'the perfection of body and mind' as a principle parallel to that of 'the greatest happiness of all.' Hume, then, was the first to hold the Utilitarian doctrine in its unmistakable form and at the same time to admit, and defend, the altruistic tendencies of human nature.

Gay had vigorously, and more or less successfully, opposed the 'moral sense' theory, as held by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. However, while he was greatly in advance of those writers in clearness and simplicity of ethical theory, he by no means equalled them in his grasp of the fundamental facts of our moral experience. Hume was as sure as Gay had been that we must not explain the phenomena of our moral life by referring them, or any part of them, to a special faculty like the 'moral sense'; but he took a much broader view of human nature than Gay had done, and, from first to last, attributed more importance to the part played by the affective side of our nature in the formation of moral judgments. In fact, he has sometimes been misjudged on account of this very catholicity of treatment. As we have had occasion to note, there are even those who hold that he never quite departed from the 'moral sense' theory. I can only regard this view as a serious mistake. We have seen again and again, that, while he always begins with the fact of moral approbation, as applying to a particular class of actions, it is his special endeavor to show how this approbation arises, according to the recognized principles of human nature. With all his faults as a philosopher and as a moralist, Hume was far too scientific, both in his ideals and his methods, to be guilty of any flagrant form of 'faculty psychology.'

We can only speculate as to just what Hume's system might have become, if the author had given up his artificial and somewhat misleading classification of the virtues. It is fair to remark, however, that, if he had been more thorough in his