Logic, Metaphysics, and the Natural Sociability of Mankind. Francis Hutcheson
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judgments which depend upon a third idea or discourse (Part III); how ideas should be ordered to avoid fallacious reasoning, or method (appendix). It will also be evident, however, that while the logic of ideas provided the form or framework of the presentation, the substance of Hutcheson’s Logic was drawn very largely from scholastic discussions of terms (Part I); of propositions (Part II); of the rules of syllogism (Part III); and topics (appendix).
This combination of the way of ideas and of scholastic or Aristotelian logic was a characteristic of the teaching of Hutcheson’s former professor and senior colleague at the University of Glasgow, John Loudon. Loudon taught philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1699 until his death in 1750; from 1727 to 1750 he was Professor of Logic (and metaphysics). In his elementary course, Compendium Logicae, he lectured on scholastic or Aristotelian logic.5 In his more advanced course, or Logica, he expanded on the logic of ideas.6 In his advanced treatment of logic, Loudon introduced a class of ideas that would have particular significance for Hutcheson. Following Antoine Arnauld and Nicholas Malebranche, Loudon maintained that our ideas of spiritual things do not originate in sensation or imagination; such ideas are better understood as ideas of pure intellect, inspired in us directly by God. And Loudon went on to argue that spiritual ideas are not the only ideas conceived in this way. Ideas of pure intellect also include universal ideas, ideas of affirmation and negation, ideas of truth and virtue.7
Hutcheson would employ ideas of pure intellect to comprehend and account for an even wider range of mental phenomena. He included among pure intellections all ideas of its own operations formed by the understanding; all judgments and reasonings; abstract ideas; ideas of primary qualities; ideas of certainty and doubt, of desire and aversion, of virtue and vice. Hutcheson did not discover the origin of these ideas of pure intellect in divine inspiration, as Loudon did.8 He proposed instead that such ideas are brought to mind by an internal sense. The importance of ideas of internal sensation, which he also called concomitant ideas, has been recognized by students of Hutcheson’s moral philosophy.9 It will be evident in what follows that ideas of internal sensation were of central significance for Hutcheson’s metaphysics.
The second and third parts of A Compend of Logic, on judgment and discourse, derive very largely from the scholastic logics of Sanderson and Aldrich.10 And it is remarkable that Hutcheson did not avail himself of the opportunity (as Loudon did) to illustrate his logic by lessons drawn from his metaphysics and his moral philosophy. The lack of originality that characterizes the latter part of A Compend of Logic may explain why it was not published in Hutcheson’s lifetime. It would appear, however, that there was a demand among students at the University of Glasgow for the text. A student’s transcription of the Logic was made in 1749 and bound with the Synopsis Metaphysicae in a duodecimo volume entitled “Logica et Metaphysica Hutcheson.”11 This transcription has been used in this edition to clarify some anomalies in the published version of the Logicae Compendium.12
A Synopsis of Metaphysics
Hutcheson’s A Synopsis of Metaphysics is a work of much greater significance than A Compend of Logic for an appreciation of Hutcheson’s philosophy. Every part of the book exhibits Hutcheson’s distinctive cast of mind. But A Synopsis of Metaphysics was also a derivative work. It was based upon the text regularly assigned students of metaphysics at the University of Glasgow during the first half of the eighteenth century: the Determinationes Pneumatologicae et Ontologicae of the Dutch metaphysician Gerard de Vries. John Loudon informed the faculty that his lectures on metaphysics were based on the work of de Vries.13 He supplemented that work with arguments of his own, designed to counter “wrong notions some authors endeavour to infuse … [and] the unreasonable pains they are at to introduce skepticism in their Metaphysics. …” He had in mind the writings of Jean Le Clerc, which were, he thought, “industriously stuff ’d with doctrines of a very dangerous tendency. …”14 Loudon continued to base his lectures on metaphysics on the work of de Vries to the end of his long career. As late as the 1740s, students recalled much later, Loudon “used in solemn peripatetic step to illustrate his own mysterious Compend [of logic] and the still more metaphysical subtleties of de Vries.”15
Hutcheson designed his metaphysics to serve as a counterpart to the work of de Vries. He wrote to Thomas Drennan, of A Synopsis of Metaphysics: “I am sure it will match de Vries, and therefore I teach the 3rd part of it De Deo.”16 In the first part of A Synopsis, he provided a critical commentary on de Vries’s ontology. In opposition to de Vries, for whom the immediate concern of ontology was the traditional Aristotelian preoccupation with being or entities or things, Hutcheson explained being and its modes in terms of ideas. He objected to the identification by scholastics of essence and existence as equivalent terms: existence is suggested to the mind by every sensation and reflection, whereas essences are ideas abstracted from existence and denote the primary attributes of things. Hutcheson’s ontology consisted very largely in the translation of scholastic terms of being into the language of ideas. He considered it a great mistake on the part of scholastic metaphysicians that they had often attributed real or objective existence to their terms: “We must be careful … not to attribute to external things or to objects of ideas those things that belong only to ideas or to words.”17 He reviewed the various entities or things which were supposed by metaphysicians like de Vries to stand between being and nothing: relations, possibles, entities of reason. Hutcheson argued that these things are nothing but ideas; they may or may not signify objects external to the mind.18 Hutcheson was working his way through the ontology of de Vries and scholastic metaphysicians to his own distinctive theory of concomitant ideas or ideas of internal sensation which accompany perceptions of the external senses. He would attempt to align his theory of ideas with Locke and use it to counter skeptical uses of the theory of ideas that would deny reality to objects external to the mind.19
Finally, he examined the principal divisions of being: independent and dependent; necessary and contingent; finite and infinite; substance and accident; cause and effect. The last particularly requires comment. Hutcheson dispensed with the fourfold classification of causes taken over from the philosophy of Aristotle. He objected to the classification of formal and material causes as causes. He considered efficient causes to include, in effect, both formal and material causes. But he also left a place for final causation that could be best determined by an internal or external sense.20 He rejected the possibility of an infinite series of causes. And he found no place for contingency in the physical or the moral world. He invoked the Stoic idea that all things, including human actions, were “set and foreseen by God himself.”21 These were some of the most notable of Hutcheson’s arguments concerning ontology in the first edition of his Metaphysics. He would find other uses for the categories of being that were identified by Aristotle and the scholastics in the second edition of his Metaphysics.22
In Part II of his metaphysics, Hutcheson turned to the study of the mind or the spirit or soul, the subject of pneumatics or pneumatology, as it was called by de Vries and other early modern metaphysicians. It was of the first importance in the study of pneumatics to demonstrate that spirits or souls are different from bodies, that the immateriality of the soul provides reasons to believe in the soul’s immortality. Hutcheson rehearsed those arguments—the self-consciousness, the simplicity, the capacity for action of the soul, in contrast with the thoughtlessness, the disaggregation, the inertia of bodies—in the third (originally the first) chapter of Part II. But in order to appreciate the nature of the soul, Hutcheson thought, like Locke, that one must examine the distinctive powers of the human mind, which Hutcheson took to be the understanding and the will. He located the sources of human understanding, as Locke did, in the senses. He attached particular importance to what Locke had called ideas of reflection, which Hutcheson called ideas of internal sensation. Hutcheson liked to remind his readers that Locke too had called ideas of reflection ideas of internal sensation.23 It is controversial, however, whether Locke would have endorsed many of Hutcheson’s uses for ideas of internal sensation. Locke had been wary of distinguishing faculties of the understanding, on the grounds that this had “misled many into a confused notion of so many distinct agents in us.”24 Hutcheson entertained no such apprehension. He distinguished a bewildering