There had long been an antipathy.Mackintosh,said Mill in 1820,'lives but for London display;parler et faire parler de lui in certain circles is his heaven.'102Mackintosh would have been most at home in a professorial chair.He was,indeed,professor at Haileybury from 1818to 1824,and spoken of as a probable successor to Brown at Edinburgh.
But he could never decidedly concentrate himself upon one main purpose.
Habits of procrastination and carelessness about money caused embarrassment which forced him to write hastily.His love of society interfered with study,and his study was spread over an impossible range of subjects.His great abilities,wasted by these infirmities,were seconded by very wide learning.Macaulay describes the impression which he made at Holland House.103He passed among his friends as the profound philosopher;the man of universal knowledge of history;of ripe and most impartial judgment in politics;the oracle to whom all men might appeal with confidence,though a little too ,apt to find out that all sides were in the right.When he went to India he took with him some of the scholastic writers and the works of Kant and Fichte,then known to few Englishmen.One of Macaulay's experiences at Holland House was a vision of Mackintosh verifying a quotation from Aquinas.104It must have been delightful.The ethical 'dissertation,'however,had to be shortened by omitting all reference to German philosophy,and the account of the schoolmen is cursory.It is easy to see why the suave and amiable Mackintosh appeared to Mill to be a 'dandy'philosopher,an unctuous spinner of platitudes to impose upon the frequenters of Holland House,and hopelessly confused in the attempt to make compromises between contradictory theories.It is equally easy to see why to Mackintosh the thoroughgoing and strenuous Mill appeared to be a one-sided fanatic,blind to the merits of all systems outside the narrow limits of Benthamism,and making even philanthropy hateful.Had Mackintosh lived to read Mill's Fragment,he would certainly have thought it a proof that the Utilitarians were as dogmatic and acrid as he had ever asserted.
Mackintosh's position in ethics explains Mill's antagonism.Neither Aquinas nor Kant nor Fichte influenced him.His doctrine is the natural outcome of the Scottish philosophy.
Hutcheson had both invented Bentham's sacred formula,and taught the 'Moral Sense'theory which Bentham attacked.To study the morality from the point of view of 'inductive psychology'is to study the moral faculty,and to reject the purely 'intellectual'system.To assign the position of the moral faculty in the psychological system is to show its utility.On the other hand,it was the very aim of the school to avoid the sceptical conclusions of Hume in philosophy,and in ethics to avoid the complete identification of morality with utility.There must be a distinction between the judgments,'this is right,'and 'this is useful'even 'useful to men in general.'
Hence,on the one hand,morality is immediately dictated by a special sense or faculty,and yet its dictates coincide with the dictates of utility.
I have spoken of this view as represented by Dugald Stewart;and Brown had,according to his custom,moved a step further by diminishing the list of original first principles,and making 'virtue'simply equivalent to 'feelings'of approval and disapproval.105Virtue,he said,is useful;the utility 'accompanies our moral approbation;but the perception of that utility does not constitute our moral approbation,nor is it necessarily presupposed by it.'106He compares the coincidence between virtue and utility to Leibniz's pre-established harmony.107The position is familiar.The adaptation of an organism to its conditions may be taken either as an explanation of its development or as a proof of a creative purpose.
Mackintosh takes nearly the same position.Ethical inquiries,he says,relate to 'two perfectly distinct subjects.'We have the problem of the 'criterion'(What is the distinction between right and wrong?)and the problem of the 'moral sentiments'(What are the feelings produced by the contemplation of right and wrong?).In treating of the feelings,again,we must avoid the confusion caused in the older philosophy by the reduction of 'feeling'to 'thought.'108Reason and sensation are distinct though inseparably combined;and hence,he argues,it is a fallacy to speak with Clarke as if reason could by itself be a motive.An argument to influence conduct must always be in the last resort an appeal to a 'feeling.'109It is idle to tell a man that conduct is infamous unless he feels infamy to be painful.We have then to ask what are the feelings which prompt to morality.So far as the criterion is concerned,Mackintosh fully agrees with Hume,whose theory that 'general utility constitutes a general ground of moral distinctions can never be impugned until some example can be produced of a virtue generally pernicious or a vice generally beneficial.'110Hume,however,overlooks the 'rightful supremacy of the moral faculty over every other principle of human action.'Mackintosh thought that his best service,as he told Macvey Napier,111had been his 'endeavour to slip in a foundation under Butler's doctrine of the supremacy of the conscience,which he left baseless.'To slip in a foundation is a very delicate operation in logical as in material architecture;and the new foundation seems here to be in danger of inverting the edifice.The 'supremacy of conscience'112means with him that the 'moral sentiments'form a separate class.They are the feelings with which we contemplate voluntary actions in general,and therefore those aroused by the character and conduct of the agent.
