686 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



ble. Although, from some change in us or in our circumstances, we have 

 ceased to find any pleasure in the action, or perhaps to anticipate any 

 pleasure as the consequence of it, we still continue to desire the action, and 

 consequently to do it. In this manner it is that habits of hurtful excess 

 continue to be practiced although they have ceased to be pleasurable ; and 

 in this manner also it is that the habit of willing to persevere in the course 

 which he has chosen, does not desert the moral hero, even when the re- 

 ward, however real, which he doubtless receives from the consciousness of 

 well-doing, is any thing but an equivalent for the sufferings he undergoes, 

 or the wishes which he may have to renounce. 



A habit of willing is commonly called a purpose ; and among the causes 

 'of our volitions, and of the actions which flow from them, must be reckon- 

 ed not only likings and aversions, but also purposes. It is only when our 

 purposes have become independent of the feelings of pain or pleasure from 

 which they originally took their rise, that we are said to have a confirmed 

 character. "A character," says Novalis, "is a completely fashioned will:" 

 and the will, once so fashioned, may be steady and constant, Avhen the pas- 

 sive susceptibilities of pleasure and pain are greatly weakened or material- 

 ly changed. 



With the corrections and explanations now given, the doctrine of the 

 causation of our volitions by motives, and of motives by the desirable ob- 

 jects offered to us, combined with our particular susceptibilities of desire, 

 may be considered, I hope, as sufficiently established for the purposes of 

 this treatise.* 



CHAPTER III. 



THAT THERE IS, OB MAY BE, A SCIENCE OF HUMAN NATURE. 



§ 1. It is a common notion, or at least it is implied in many common 

 modes of speech, that the thoughts, feelings, and actions of sentient beings 

 are not a subject of science, in the same strict sense in which this is true 

 of tlie objects of outward nature. This notion seems to involve some con- 

 fusion of ideas, which it is necessary to begin by clearing up. 



Any facts are fitted, in themselves, to be a subject of science which fol- 

 low one another according to constant laws, although those laws may not 

 have been discovered, nor even be discoverable by our existing resources. 

 Take, for instance, the most familiar class of meteorological phenomena, 

 those of rain and sunshine. Scientific inquiry has not yet succeeded in as- 

 certaining the order of antecedence and consequence among these phenome- 

 na, so as to be able, at least in our regions of the earth, to predict them with 

 certainty, or even wdth any high degree of probability. Yet no one doubts 

 that the phenomena depend on laws, and that these must be derivative 

 laws resulting from known ultimate laws, those of heat, electricity, vapori- 

 zation, and elastic fluids. Nor can it be doubted that if we were acquaint- 

 ed with all the antecedent circumstances, we could, even from those more 

 general laws, predict (saving difiiculties of calculation) the state of the 

 weather at any future time. Meteorology, therefore, not only has in itself 

 every natural requisite for being, but actually is, a science ; though, from 

 the difficulty of observing the facts on whicli the phenomena depend (a dif- 



* Some arguments and explanations, supplementary to those in the text, will be found in 

 An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, chap. xxvi. 



