Page:Philosophical Review Volume 7.djvu/581

567 his subordination of reason to feeling, too, he arrives at the same view as the later Utilitarians. "What is reason," he asks, "but that sagacity which we have in prosecuting any end?" "It must be an instinct, or a determination previous to reason, which makes us pursue private good, as well as publick good, as our end." Nor will Hutcheson hear of resolving benevolence into self-love. We cannot be "truly virtuous, if we intend only to obtain the pleasure which accompanies beneficence, without the love of others: nay, this very pleasure is founded on our being conscious of disinterested love to others, as the spring of our actions."

In the stress which he lays on benevolence or love of others, making it the whole of virtue, Hutcheson passes beyond the circle of a merely utilitarian ethics. His moral sense is rather a sense of beauty or excellence in actions than a sense of pleasure; its content is objective rather than subjective, universal rather than particular. It is not so much in the production of happiness, even of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, as in the will or intention to produce the general happiness, that virtue consists. It is the essential dignity or excellence of benevolence, rather than the resultant pleasure, that constitutes its virtue. Moreover, "we have an immediate sense of a dignity, a perfection, or beatifick quality in some kinds [of pleasure], which no intenseness of the lower kinds can equal, were they also as lasting as we could wish." And when we ask him for a final explanation of virtue, a final theory of its basis, Hutcheson's answer reminds us more of Butler than of the Utilitarians. "If any enquire, 'Whence arises this love of esteem, or benevolence, to good men, or to mankind in general, if not from some nice views of self-interest?' Or, 'How we can be moved to desire the happiness of others, without any view to our own?' It may be answered, 'that the same cause which determines us to pursue happiness for ourselves, determines us both to esteem and benevolence on their proper occasions; even the very frame of our nature, or a generous instinct, which shall be afterwards