LECTURES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE HUMAN MIND. LECTURE LXVI. III. PROSPECTIVE EMOTIONS.-I. CONSIDERATION OF THE DESIRE OF CONTINUED EXISTENCE, CONCLUDED.—II. DESIRE OF PLEASURE. IN my last Lecture, Gentlemen, I began the consideration of that order of our emotions, which, from their relation to objects as future, I distinguished, from our immediate and retrospective emotions, by the name of prospective,-an order which comprehends our desires and fears, the most important of all the affections of our mind, as the immediate directors of our conduct, which our other mental affections, of whatever species, influence only indirectly, through the medium of our wishes. With respect to this order in general, I endeavoured to explain to you, how the same objects, agreeable or disagreeable, may, in different circumstances of our relation to these objects, as present or absent, give rise both to hope and to fear; and how different the feeling of the mere desirableness of an object,which is nothing more than the relation of certain objects perceived or conceived, as antecedents to our desires as consequents,-is from the feeling of the greater amount of personal advantage, or of the moral propriety of certain actions; both which considerations, indeed, may produce the tendency to desire, in some cases, but do not necessarily constitute it in all;the clearest perception of greater advantage from certain actions, which it would be worldly prudence to prefer, and of moral proVOL. III.-B priety in certain actions, which it would be virtue to prefer, be ing often insufficient to overcome other circumstances of momentary attraction, which thus obtain our momentary preference, even though felt to be in absolute opposition to our good upon the whole, and to that virtue, which is itself, indeed, a part, and the most important part of this general good. Since the objects of desire,-which are so various to different persons, that perhaps, no two objects are regarded with the same. interest and choice by any two individuals,-are not limited, even to the infinity of existing things, but comprehend whatever the wildest imagination can conceive, I stated to you the impossibility of any exact enumeration of these objects, such as might enable us to treat compendiously of the whole boundless variety of human wishes. All which I could venture to do, therefore, was to class the principal objects, that seem, in their nature, to involve that species of attraction, which, as immediately antecedent to all our wishes, I have termed desirableness,-that is to say, the most important of those objects, which cannot, in the ordinary circumstances of our nature, be contemplated by us, without exciting the emotion of desire. Of these, I enumerated the following:-Our desire of the mere continuation of our being,our desire of pleasure,—our desire of action,-our desire of society, our desire of knowledge,-our desire of power, whether of direct power, as in what is commonly termed ambition, or of indirect power, as in avarice,-our desire of the affection or esteem of those around us,-our desire of glory,-our desire of the happiness of others,-our desire of the unhappiness of those whom we hate. All these desires, however, I stated, may exist in various forms, according to the different degrees of probability of attainment, a simple wish, hope, expectation, confidence, being the most remarkable gradations in the scale,-though there are various intervening shades of difference, to which no name is given. They are not species of desires essentially distinct, but modes of all our desires. Our wishes, when they exist with little force and permanence, are termed simple desires,-when they rise more vividly, and occupy the mind more exclusively, they are termed passions. The vividness and permanence, therefore, are the only circumstances, which distinguish our passions,-not any essential difference in the particular nature of the desires themselves. The slightest wish, which we scarcely feel as a very vivid emotion, becomes a passion, when it affects us strongly and lastingly. The most ardent passion, which may have occupied our whole soul for half our life, if it were to rise only slightly and faintly, would be termed a mere desire. After these general preliminary distinctions, I proceeded to the consideration of our particular desires; and, in my last Lecture, offered some remarks on the first of these, in my order of enumeration. Of the great fact of that desire of life, which you must see operating universally around you, you could not need to be informed; and my observations, therefore, were chiefly illustrative of that beautiful adaptation of our nature to the scene on which we have to discharge the various duties of men, that is effected by this principle of our constitution,-a principle, which renders the scene of those duties itself delightful, as the scene of our continued being,-of that life, which we love in itself, and which is associated, in our conception, with the scene on which every moment of our life has passed. Instead, therefore, of viewing, in our love of life, a principle disgraceful to our nature, we may see in it, far more truly, a principle which does honour to our nature, because it answers admirable purposes in our moral constitution. What happiness would it be, to those who were to be confined in the most gloomy prison for a series of years, if during all this long period of confinement, the very prison itself were to seem to them a delightful habitation, and when the hour of deliverance came, we had only to open the gate, and lead the prisoner forth to sunshine and the balmy breeze, which were not to be the less delightful, then, on account of the captivity in which his former years were spent! I need not point out to you, how exactly the case, now imagined, corresponds in every circumstance, except in the gloom and narrowness of the prisoner's dismal abode, with that which truly constitutes our situation as temporary inhabitants of this delightful earth. It is not the mere love of life, which is disgraceful in itself, but the cowardly love of it, which does not yield to nobler desires. Every wish which we can feel for objects that are apt to affect ourselves, has of course, relation to the future, and therefore, to some protraction of our existence, the wish of which must consequently be involved in every other personal wish, the most honourable which the mind can form. To desire the continuation of life, is to fear the loss of it; and to fear the loss of it, is to fear every thing which may bring it into danger. Even the brave man, then, will avoid danger, where no virtue would lead to the exposure; but, when virtue requires exposure, he will scarcely feel that it is peril to which he is exposing himself. Glory, the good of mankind, the approbation of his own heart, the approbation of God,-these are all which the brave man sees; and he, who, seeing these, can sacrifice them to the love of mere animal life, is indeed, unworthy, I will not say of vanquishing in a cause in which it is noble to prevail, but even of perishing in a cause in which it is noble to perish. The next desire, to the consideration of which I proceed, is our desire of pleasure; to which the fear of pain may be regarded as opposed. Annihilation, indeed, seems to us an evil, independently of the happiness or misery, of which it may deprive us, or from which it may free us. We love the mere contentment of our being, but we love still more our well-being; and existence is valuable to us, chiefly as that which can be rendered happy. He, who formed us to be happy, of course formed us to be deserving of happiness. The desire, indeed, may be considered as almost involved in the very notion of happiness itself, which could scarcely be conceived by us as happiness, if it were not conceived as that which is an object of desire. I may say, of the love of pleasure, what I have said of the love of life. As it is not the love or preservation of life which is unworthy of a brave and honourable man, but the love of a life that is inconsistent with nobler objects of desire; it is, in like manner, not the love of pleasure which is unworthy of us,-for pleasure, in itself, when arising from a pure source, is truly as pure as the source from which it flows; but the love of pleasure that is inconsistent with our moral excellence. The delight which virtue gives, and which devotion gives, is no small part of the excellence, even of qualities so noble as devotion and virtue. We love men more, we love God more, because it is impossible for us to love them more, without an increase of our delight. In this sense, indeed, to borrow a beautiful line, which expresses much in a very few words, "Pleasure is nought but Virtue's gayer name.”* Even of pleasures, which do not flow immediately from virtue, but of which virtue is far from forbidding the enjoyment, how many are there which nature is continually inviting us to enjoy! There are seasons, in which we cannot move a single step, or look around us, or inhale a single breath of air, without some additional happiness. To move is delightful; to rest is delightful. It seems almost, as if the same sun, which is every where diffusing light, were diffusing every where happiness; and not to be happy, and not to love the sources of happiness around us, seem to us almost like ingratitude to the Author of these, and a sort of rebellion against that benevolence, which so manifestly wills our enjoyment. The words with which Beattie concludes one of the most beautiful stanzas of his principal poem, express, in this respect, a sentiment, with which it is impossible for us not to sympathize. "O, how canst thou renounce the boundless store * Young's Night Thoughts, B. VIII. v. 573. The warbling woodland, the resounding shore, And all that echoes to the song of even, O, how canst thou renounce—and hope to be forgiven!"† The love of pleasure, then, is far from being unworthy of man; since all which we admire in the universe, all which raises us to admiration of the author of the universe, is accompanied with it. We cannot love virtue without loving a source of delight; we cannot love him, who has made us capable of loving virtue, without a delight still more ardent. We must love pleasure, if we love whatever is worthy of being loved. But the pleasures which attend virtue, or which virtue approves, are not the only pleasures which man is capable of feeling. He may have a sort of dreadful satisfaction in the fulfilment of the most malignant desires, or he may become the selfdegraded slave of his own appetites. There are several gratifications, of which, though virtue may not forbid the temperate use, she forbids the intemperate excess,-not because they are pleasures, but because they render us incapable of discharging duties which we have to perform, or, which is a still greater evil, deprive us even of the very wish of discharging our duties. In a former Lecture, I endeavoured to describe to you the melancholy progress of a mind which has yielded itself gradually, with fewer and fewer struggles, a slave to the tyranny of sensual passions, of passions which stupify still more than they enslave. It is this stupefaction of better powers and feelings, which far more than the loss of mere fortune and health, is the most pathetic, or the most dreadful image, in every such description of the sacrifices of the dissolute : "Your friends avoid you. Brutishly transform'd They hardly know you ;-or if one remains, To wish you well, he wishes you in heaven. A name still to be utter'd with a sigh." Even if nothing more than mere sensual pleasure were to be taken into account, without comprehending, in our estimate, the miseries of shame and remorse, and ruined fortune, and without any regard to those sublimer delights, which the sensual lose, and which they perhaps care not for losing, because they are incapable of conceiving them;-there can be no question, that in this least important part of happiness, which alone they value, † Minstrel, Book I. Stanza IX. |