552 



LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



causes of our volitions, and of the 

 actions which flow from them, must 

 be reckoned not only likings and aver- 

 sions, but also purposes. It is only 

 when our purposes have become inde- 

 pendent of the feelings of pain or 

 pleasure from which they originally 

 took their rise that we are said to 

 have a confirmed character. " A char- 

 acter," says Novalis, "is a completely 

 fashioned will ; " and the will, once 

 so fashioned, may be steady and con- 

 stant, when the passive susceptibili- 

 ties of pleasure and pain are greatly 

 weakened or materially changed. 



With the corrections and explana- 

 tions 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 suffi- 

 ciently established for the purposes of 

 this treatise.* 



CHAPTER III. 



THAT THERE IS, OR MAY BE, A SCIENCE 

 OF HUMAN NATURE. 



§ I. 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 the objects of outward nature. This 

 notion seems to involve some confu- 

 sion 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 



* Some arguments and explanations, 

 Bupplementaiy to those in the text, will be 

 found in An Examination of Sir William 

 Hamilton'i Philoiophy, chap. xxvi. 



inquiry has not yet succeeded in 

 ascertaining the order of antecedence 

 atjd consequence among these pheno- 

 mena, so as to be able, at least in our 

 regions of the earth, to predict them 

 with certainty or even with any high 

 degree of probability. Yet no one 

 doubts that the phenomena depend 

 on laws, and that these must be deri- 

 vative laws resulting from known 

 ultimate laws, those of heat, elec- 

 tricity, vaporisation, and elastic fluids. 

 Nor can it be doubted that if we were 

 acquainted with all the antecedent 

 circumstances, we could, even from 

 those more general laws, predict (sav- 

 ing difficulties 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 observ- 

 ing the facts on which the phenomena 

 depend, (a difficulty inherent in the 

 peculiar nature of those phenomena, ) 

 the science is extremely imperfect ; 

 and were it perfect, might probably 

 be of little avail in practice, since the 

 data requisite for applying its prin- 

 ciples to particular instances would 

 rarely be procurable. 



A case may be conceived of an 

 intermediate character between the 

 perfection of science and this its ex- 

 treme imperfection. It may happen 

 that the greater causes, those on 

 which the principal part of the pheno- 

 mena depends, are within the reach 

 of observation and measurement ; so 

 that if no other causes intervened, a 

 complete explanation could be given 

 not only of the phenomenon in gene- 

 ral, but of all the variations and 

 modifications which it admits of. 

 But inasmuch as other, perhaps many 

 other causes, separately insignificant 

 in their effects, co-operate or conflict 

 in many or in all cases with those 

 greater causes, the effect, accordingly, 

 presents more or less of aberration 

 from what would be produced by the 

 greater causes alone. Now if these 

 minor causes are not so constantly 

 accessible, or not accessible at all 



