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CHAPTER 5 Virtue in a Bundle of Perceptions Having tumbled reason from her high throne to set her on earth judging facts and thus removed the divine imprint from man's soul, Hume used the same means to show that man bore no mark of Satan. For man restored to nature, he described a virtue that required no struggle with sin, no repression, no divine intervention, nothing but what could come naturally to human beings. The passions, in which Hume casually included animal instincts and passions , along with moral sentiments and natural beliefs, were reduced, like everything else, to a form of sensation. Instead of being the unruly elements of the soul, opposed to reason, they became innocuous "reflective impressions ." They arose, Hume said, as internal responses to "original impressions ," that is, to sensations caused by external objects or operations of the body. In other words, they were responses to bodily pleasures and pains. Some, like the sense of beauty and deformity, were calm; others, like love and hatred, grief, joy, pride and humility, were violent; all were equally natural and capable of being beneficial. They were secondary, internal, reflective impressions and neither good nor evil. They were the results of causes that "operated after the same manner thro' the whole animal creation"1 and were therefore, like reason, common to man and animals. By describing passions as responses to impressions, Hume made it impossible for them to be ruled by reason. Reason, in Hume's sense, could only judge abstract relations between ideas, or the relations between ideas and matters of fact. With neither of these judgements could reason excite desire or aversion, that is, give rise to passion or influence iU Passions themselves 1. Treatise, p. 328. 2. A passion is complete in itself. Unlike ideas, but like all other sensations, it bears no correspondence to something outside itself. The anger of an angry man is merely a fact, like illness or thirst, or the blackness of his hair. A passion can be neither true nor false nor inconsistent. Reason, Virtue in a Bundle ofPerceptions 55 are called into being by nothing but impressions, and they can be opposed only by contrary passions. What is taken for the combat between reason and passion, Hume explained, is in reality a "calm" passion opposing a "violent" one: "Thus it appears that the principle which opposes our passions cannot be the same with reason, and is only call'd so in an improper sense. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."1 Man is not then a divided nature but all one, and he is moved, not by two opposing principles, but by a variety of sensations.2 Thus Hume denied the basis for the traditional account of virtue. He had ruled out even the possibility of giving reason ascendancy in Spinoza's manner . Spinoza, too, had reversed the order of reason and passion, but in his account the master governing passion is the passion to act rationally for its own sake. In the end, Spinoza differentiated man from beast, and the free man from the slave, by his power of making reason and judgement control action and passion. For the only passion reason could not examine was the passion to reason. According to Hume, however, reason is always controlled by passion, by any and every desire which may happen to employ reason as a means to its fulfilment. Reason could never make an all-inclusive survey of all passions or desires. however, can only pronounce things true or false or inconsistent; it discovers whether ideas correspond to other ideas or to matters of fact. A passion may seem to be opposed to truth and reason when it is founded on a false or insufficient judgement. But then it is really the judgement, not the passion, that is false or insufficient. As long as a passion is neither founded on a false supposition, nor chooses inadequate means, reason can offer nothing to oppose it. "'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.... 'Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg'd lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter" (A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 416). As he had in his analysis of reason denied the possibility of...

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