by Roy Porter
Mandeville imagined a successful ‘hive’. All the bees were ambitious egoists, buzzing to get on by all possible means – to turn an honest penny by labour, trade and other ways, but also through shadier enterprises, such as swindles, frauds and theft:
All trades and Places knew some Cheat,
No Calling was without Deceit.67
In macrocosm, collective conduct replicated the individual: the national hive at large was, in other words, proud, aggressive and warlike. Being thus active and assertive, individuals and community flourished alike:
Thus every Part was full of Vice,
Yet the whole Mass a Paradise;
Flatter'd in Peace, and fear'd in Wars,
They were th'Esteem of Foreigners,
And lavish of their Wealth and Lives,
The Ballance of all other Hives.
Such were the Blessings of that State;
Their Crimes conspired to make 'em Great.68
What was the secret, the grand arcanum, of the thriving hive? Mandeville's answer was provocative: what made the world go round was vice – or, translated from Christian censure into plain English, self-interest.
Thus Vice nurs'd Ingenuity,
Which join'd with Time and Industry
Had carry'd Life's Conveniences
It's real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease,
To such a Height, the very Poor
Liv'd better than the Rich Before,
And Nothing could be added more.69
Or rather nothing, that is, until moral rigorism had its say. Corruption was rife, thundered the godly; the system fostered vanity and greed and it created artificial desires which outran needs; it was wanton and wasteful; it excited the appetites of the flesh instead of quelling them; it begat the itch for luxury and debauchery. All this, they insisted, must end.
What happened, then, when, in virtue's name, a regime of self-denial was inaugurated? Frugality became king, double-dealing was outlawed – and the consequence was abject decline. Rectitude and austerity had no need for a bustling market economy; demand disappeared and idleness and poverty set in. If righteousness was to rule, he concluded, you had to forsake the gratifications of civilization and take to munching acorns.
So, for the cynical Mandeville – ironically, no less than for his Stoic adversaries – choice was of the essence. It was possible to have wealth, employment and pleasure, refinement, sophistication and politeness – in a word, the Addisonian trappings – by pursuit of what the morality-mongers dubbed vice. Or you could be, in the well-worn phrase, poor but honest. What irked or amused him was the myopic folly or flagrant hypocrisy of those who blithely berated profligacy, deaf to the implications of their own oratory.
Why did ‘morality’ precipitate untoward consequences? It was because of false consciousness, induced by clergy and others, about the nature and purposes of morality itself. That was why Mandeville appended to the 1723 edition of the Fable a ‘Search into the Nature of Society’. Properly understood, true morality should be a matter not of the denial of desires but of their regulation.70 Human nature was nakedly selfish. In the state of nature, Mandevillian man was essentially Hobbesian, driven by basic wants (food, survival, sex, and so on) and seeking to satisfy them in the crudest ways. Such barefaced egoism inevitably bred conflict, and conflict-management had to be undertaken by a wise legislator decreeing conventional codes so as to civilize egoism. Possessive instincts were to be governed by property laws, and lust tamed by matrimony. The envy which initially led to filching other people's belongings became normalized into labour, exchange and the love of lucre. Thus, properly understood, society was a cunningly contrived mill for refining naked egoism into more peaceful and profitable means for the fulfilment of wants, at the cost of some deferral of gratification and much moral posturing. And why not? After all, even respectability has its pleasures.
Moral codes and conduct were identity cards to be carried to ensure observation of the niceties. Honour and shame provided the spur. Those abiding by the rules of the game, no matter how cynically, would be esteemed, while others would be showered in obloquy. Given human vanity, the distribution of acclaim and disgrace provided powerful inducements to ensure that the merry-go-round of life kept turning.
Ultimately, what made the system tick was ‘that strong Habit of Hypocrisy, by the Help of which, we have learned from our Cradle to hide even from ourselves the vast Extent of Self-Love, and all its different Branches’;71 and what preachers dubbed baseness was, when suitably masked, a vital social energy. ‘Vices are inseparable from great and potent Societies,’ taunted Mandeville, ‘and it is impossible their Wealth and Grandeur should subsist without.’72 And the ultimate moral of it all?
Then leave complaints; Fools only strive
To make a great an honest hive…
Fraud, luxury and pride must live
While we the benefits receive.73
Mandeville, in other words, would deny his contemporaries the easy moral self-congratulation they craved:
T'enjoy the world's conveniences,
Be famed in war, yet live in ease,
Without great vices, is a vain
Eutopia seated in the brain.74
Inevitably, he was reviled by Christian moralists (as the ‘man devil’) for having had the temerity to stand up for depravity. ‘Vice and luxury have found a Champion and a Defender,’ carped the critic John Dennis, ‘which they never did before.’75
Relentlessly reminding readers that human nature was depraved, that greed and envy were vicious, and love of money the root of all evil, Mandeville was, so to speak, confirming what rigorists had been preaching all along. But the message of The Virgin Unmask'd and The Fable of the Bees was not repentance: quite the reverse. Man was indeed self-interested, but was that not desirable? Greed, lust, vanity and ambition were beneficial, if pursued in socially sanctioned ways. Properly directed on the world's stage, selfishness produced social harmony. Long before Hume or Smith, Mandeville was thus suggesting that ‘private vices’ would beget ‘public benefits’ – Mandeville looked to a legislator to effect them, Smith for his part to an ‘invisible hand’.
Such transvaluations were far from unique. Did not Pope propose in his An Essay on Man that, rightly managed, ‘self love and social’ would prove the same?76 Mandeville, however, took unique delight in playing the enfant terrible, twitting Shaftesbury's lofty idealism.77 In return, as we have seen, Shaftesbury's acolyte Hutcheson retaliated, upholding human decency under a benevolent God;78 and numerous other moralists developed philosophies, examined in chapter 11, which unequivocally repudiated vice and aligned virtue with enlightened self-interest.
The great advocate of exploring man scientifically was David Hume, whose A Treatise of Human Nature, appearing in 1739–40, was, as specified in its subtitle, ‘An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects’.79 Partly perhaps for personal reasons – he had had a nervous breakdown in his twenties – Hume made it clear that the ‘science of man’ was necessarily sceptical in tendency: it was essential to ask ‘Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return?’80 From this standpoint he explored the grounding of belief – received ‘truth’ was largely wishful thinking, betraying a readiness to be deceived – and he famously criticized sloppy metaphysicians and theologians for illegitimate thought leaps from ‘is’ to ‘ought’. Aspiring to become the ‘Newton of the moral sciences’, Hume sought to establish a rigorous account of the mind derived from ‘careful and exact experiments’, the ‘only solid foundation’ being grounded in ‘experience and observation’.81A priorism was out: ‘any hypothesis, that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature, ought at first to be rejected as presumptuous and chimerical’.82
Hume, indeed, drove Locke's empiricism further, dissolving the latter's category of knowledge (‘demonstration’) into ‘belief’. It was not that Hume was bent upon showing that it was
a random or unintelligible universe, only that man's mental equipment for understanding it was imperfect: ‘When I reflect on the natural fallibility of my judgment, I have less confidence in my opinions than when I only consider the objects concerning which I reason.’83 He was, however, prepared to fall back on the general experience of uniformity: ‘Would you know,’ he famously asked, ‘the sentiments, inclinations, and course of life of the Greeks and Romans? Study well the temper and actions of the French and English… Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places.’ And on that basis, he was confident of the feasibility of a science meant to ‘discover the constant and universal principles of human nature’.84
The first book of the Treatise addressed key topics relating to the mental faculties, knowledge and belief. Claiming to eliminate all concepts not derived from experience and observation, Hume held that our knowledge of the self and of the world was limited to perceptions (impressions) derived from observation and introspection. All legitimate ideas or thoughts were to be traced back to sense impressions or to internal impressions or feelings, and to associations derived therefrom. The old scholastic doctrine of substance was empty verbiage, and neither could causal powers be discovered – one must submit to ‘constant conjunctions’ which stopped short at belief in the uniformity of nature.85
For these reasons, no fixed self was knowable (or, by implication, there at all). Taking up Locke's discussion of identity (see above), Hume drove it to sceptical conclusions: since experience was made up of ‘impressions’, and these – for Hume, as for Collins – were discrete, there was, in truth, no such demonstrably constant unity as a ‘person’, merely atomized impressions of continuity. Personal identity was thus highly contingent and wreathed in doubt. Truths still self-evident to the theist Locke could not survive the sceptical Hume's scrutiny. Peering into himself he discovered, he reported, no coherent, sovereign self, only a flux of perceptions. During sleep, existence in effect ceased. Given the inability to meld disparate perceptions, identity was thus ‘merely a quality which we attribute to them, because of the union of their ideas in the imagination when we reflect on them… Our notions of personal identity proceed entirely from the smooth and uninterrupted progress of the thought along a train of connected ideas.’86
If the first book of the Treatise was thus shockingly sceptical in its thrust, the second and third, on the passions and morals respectively, struck more positive notes. Analysis of such desires as pride and humility, love and hate, uncovered an internal feeling or sentiment called the ‘moral sense’.87 In delineating the workings of propensities integral to human existence, Hume noted that Christian theologians and Platonists alike had condemned the appetites, the former deploring them as sinful, the latter demanding their mastery by reason. For Hume, by contrast, feelings were the true springs of such vital social traits as the love of family, attachment to property and the desire for reputation. Pilloried passions like pride were the very cement of society. Dubbing its denigrators ‘monkish’, Hume defended pride when well regulated; indeed, magnanimity, that quality attributed to all the greatest heroes, was ‘either nothing but a steady and well-establish'd pride and self-esteem, or partakes largely of that passion’. Besides, ‘hearty pride’ was essential to society, whose hierarchy of ranks, fixed by ‘our birth, fortune, employments, talents or reputation’, had to be maintained if it were to function smoothly. A person needed pride to acquit himself well in his station – indiscriminate humility would reduce social life to chaos. Much that had traditionally been reproved as egoistically immoral he reinstated as beneficial.88
Hume drew attention to the logical chasm between the real world and the duties commanded by sacred books, commended by authorities, or rationally deduced, as by Clarke or Wollaston, from the fitnesses of things. Telling man that he ‘ought’ to struggle against his nature was about as useful as urging planets to resist gravity. Unlike the cynical Mandeville, the complacent and socially conservative Hume wanted not to outrage readers but to reconcile them to the actualities of human emotions, beliefs and conduct, and to guide them to social usefulness.89
What mattered in that respect was that desirable social conduct arose not from reason but out of feelings. Hence, in a celebrated paradox, Hume maintained that reason was and ought to be ‘the slave of the passions’ – since the emotions, like gravity, constituted motives and hence controlled what people were actually moved to do.90 Reason per se could not initiate action, for it was not of itself a motive. ‘Tis not contrary to reason,’ he reflected outrageously, ‘to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.’ Strictly speaking, there was no such thing as the civil war between reason and the passions, as imagined by Plato – that question had been badly posed: reason ‘can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey’ the passions.91
Hence mankind should cultivate rather than curb natural leanings. Immense harm could result, as in the English Civil War, when normal inclinations were abandoned and men became the pawns of wild imaginings which invariably proved disorienting and destructive. Since there were no transcendental truths, innate ideas or a priori precepts, it paid to follow custom, that ‘great guide of human life’. The Enlightenment's most uncompromising investigator of human nature thus ironically reached conclusions whose implications were highly conservative, for as a moralist Hume was a down-to-earth pragmatist, basing his prescriptions on utility and the need for social reassurance.
Conduct was thus programmatically naturalized. Society had developed so as to meet certain basic needs – for security, self-esteem, and so forth. The science of human nature confirmed that these pragmatic actions were grounded in psychological realities, and hence were not to be disavowed lightly in the name of any specious transcendental value system, abstract metaphysics or utopian vision. What Mandeville showed in satire, Hume demonstrated through science.
The two Davids – Hume and Hartley – were very different individuals but their philosophies are surprisingly convergent. Like Hume, Hartley's thinking involved an inquiry into human nature that was conceptually radical, upending conventional ideas of the make-up of the mind; and, as with Hume, the implications of his analysis were in practice rather conservative. Indeed, Hartley's was even more conventional, since, by contrast to the unbeliever Hume, he upheld the essentials of Christianity, albeit occasionally giving them a rather eccentric twist.92
The son of a poor Anglican clergyman, Hartley studied at Cambridge at precisely the time when Newtonian mathematics and Lockean philosophy were coalescing to form the core curriculum. He went on to hold a fellowship at Jesus College until he was forced to relinquish it, as was normal practice, upon his marriage in 1730.93 While sincere as a Christian, Hartley had doubts about the Thirty-nine Articles. These precluded him, like many others, from taking holy orders, and so he studied medicine instead. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society, Hartley moved in superior intellectual circles, his friends including the Society's president, Sir Hans Sloane, the Revd Stephen Hales (famous for his physiological experiments) and Joseph Butler, the leading Anglican theologian.
Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations, published in 1749, presented a comprehensive philosophy of man considered in respect both of his earthly existence and a future state. Convinced that all knowledge was derived from experience, Hartley drew heavily upon Locke's associationist empiricism, but whereas the wary Locke had avoided entangling himself with the material basis of thought,94 the younger man plunged in boldly, persuaded that the mysteries of the mind could be resolved by modern physical science.
Hartley also digested the innovative associationist utilitarianism of the Revd John Gay's Preliminary Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality (1731), which proposed a pleasure and pain psychology as the key to a philosophy of action. Following Locke and Gay,95 Hartley dismissed innatist theories of cognition and morality, holding that complex ideas were concatenated from simple ones by repeat
ed inputs of the ‘sensations of the soul’: anything else was mystery-mongering. Through the principle of association, primary sensations were capable of being compounded via complex combinations into pleasures and pains, which came in six different classes – imagination, ambition, self-interest (divided into gross and refined), sympathy, theopathy and the moral sense – each of which was factitious.
Man was thus a machine programmed for happiness, and Christianity's transcendental teleology of human improvement was validated by experience itself. ‘Some Degree of Spirituality,’ declared Hartley ‘is the necessary Consequence of passing through Life. The sensible Pleasures and Pains must be transferred by Association more and more every day, upon things that afford neither sensible Pleasure nor sensible Pain in themselves, and so beget the intellectual Pleasures and Pains.’96 This was beyond dispute, since on balance pleasures outnumbered pains, so that ‘Association… has a Tendency to reduce the State of those who have eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, back again to a paradisiacal one’.97 The mind had been divinely designed in such a way that experience and association invariably led to higher truths. A child, for instance, came to associate its parents with the pleasures derived from them, and would in due course, forgetting the original motive, learn to love them. Conversely, the miser, initially associating money with the pleasure derived from what it would buy, would equally forget the original association and in the end experience pure greed.98 Feelings and values were thus constructs arising out of mental activity, and educational and environmental influences should optimally be organized so as to secure the association of pleasure with socially desirable objects. Man might never rise to altruism in the strictest sense, but he was certainly capable of benevolence. And benevolence, held Hartley,