(1) He lays down the principle that morality is not affected by the way in which we explain the rise of the moral emotion, whether we trace it to moral reason, to an original feeling, or to association.I am not prepared to give in to this.If it is to be ascribed with Brown to mere feeling, it will always be competent to argue that the distinction between good and evil depends on human temperament, and does not imply an original, a necessary, and eternal distinction between good and evil.If it is regarded with Mackintosh, as a mere feeling gendered by association, then it is simply the product of circumstances, and may shift with circumstances.It is vain on this theory to appeal, as Mackintosh would wish to do, to conscience as having {358} authority, and supreme authority; it has merely the authority of association, and cannot claim the authority of God, or even of our essential constitution.I rather think that Mackintosh would have shrunk from his doctrine, had he foreseen how physiologists, by means of heredity and undesigned natural selection, manufacture moral feeling out of animal sensations.The authority of conscience depends on the source from which it is derived.
According to Brown, conscience is a mere class of feelings, and Mackintosh follows him.But Mackintosh makes the feelings to be gendered by association.In order to support this theory, he is obliged to give to association a larger power than was given to it even by Brown.He correct, the erroneous but prevalent notion, that the law of association produces only such a close union of thought as gives one the power of reviving the other; " and insists that " it forms them into a new compound, in which the properties of the component parts are no longer discoverable, and which may itself become a substantive principle of human nature.They supposed the condition, produced by its power, to resemble that of material substances in a state of mechanical diffusion; whereas, in reality, it may be better likened to a chemical combination of the same substances from which a totally new product arises" (Sect.VII).But what does he mean by association? Isuppose merely the succession of ideas.The laws of the association of ideas are merely the laws of their succession.It is quite a straining of the word to give association the power of creating a new idea.We place oxygen and hydrogen in a certain relation to each other, and water is the product; and the water possesses properties not discernible in the elements separately.But chemists do not ascribe this to the mere association of the two: they derive it from the properties of the oxygen and the hydrogen.In like manner when a new idea springs up, we are not to attribute it to the association of feelings, but to a property of the feelings, a property proceeding from a power actual or potential.We have thus to go back to a power deeper and more fundamental, and to get a source of ideas, not in mere association, but in the <intellectus ipse> of Leibnitz, or in the feelings themselves; and this is the moral power.
(2) If we thus prove that there is an original moral faculty {359} of the nature of moral perception, discerning between good and evil, we are in a position to settle the further question: Whether virtue can be resolved into benevolence? Mackintosh stands up for the existence and authority of conscience as a class of feeling.He holds that our business is to follow conscience, even when we do not see the consequences of the acts we perform.But what is the common quality in the acts which conscience approves of? He maintains that, in the last resort, it is beneficial tendency which distinguishes virtuous acts, and dispositions from those which we call vicious.He allows that the virtuous man may not see the beneficial consequences of the acts he performs, that the man who speaks truth may never think that to speak truth leads to happiness: he does it simply because it is right.Still, if we inquire into it, it will be found that beneficial tendency is the essential quality in virtuous acts.I dispute this statement, appealing to conscience as the arbiter.For conscience affirms that justice, that veracity, that candor, are good, quite as much so as benevolence itself, and it is difficult, I believe impossible, to resolve justice and the virtues embraced under it, such as veracity and the love of truth, into benevolence.
Altogether Sir James Mackintosh never fulfilled the expectations that were formed by Robert Hall and his other friends.He went from medicine to law, and from law to politics; and with first-rate intellectual powers, failed to reach the highest positions in any one of these departments.
He was without firmness of purpose to resist temptation and concentrate his energies on what he acknowledged to be his life-work, and so was at the mercy of circumstances, and attained the highest eminence only as a <talker> in the best social circles of London, where he had a perpetual stimulus to excel.If he had only had the courage to devote himself to what he knew to be his forte, but which could not bring him immediate fame; had he read systematically, instead of discursively, and made himself as well acquainted with the higher forms of the Greek and German philosophy, as he did with the later forms and of British philosophy, -- he might have ranked with the highest thinkers of his age, As it is he has left us little that will endure beyond these able and candid sketches of ethical writers.{360}