A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

105.
order, and the rest II would "spring up in the mindI1 •• that the stream of
impressions ll would ·!shape themselves into the great moral ideas, without
conscious effort or willed action. II 30 He was the first to use the term
"moral sense" and to found morality on a view of human nature that contained
more than the self-love of Hobbes or Mandeville. D. D. Raphael
defines Shaftesbury's term as lithe capacity to experience feelings of
approval and disapproval. It 31 As well as contributing the term,
Shaftesbury sketched in the general background of an analogy between
moral and aesthetic judgements.
Both of these aspects of his thought were taken up and developed
by Hutcheson; they were elaborated further and with greater subtlety by
David Hume,''Hutcheson'sfriend and spiritual son in moral theory. II 32
According to Hutcheson, the reactions of the moral sense are akin to the
kind of love or admiration that naturally arises towards beauty. Virtue,
therefore, is a kind of beauty, a moral beauty. To say this, is simply
to express the thought that our warm reaction to benevolence 1s like
our warm reaction to physical beauty, in t hat it i;; natural, immediate,
and a species of love. Hutcheson claimed that the moral sense was an
original datum of human nature. Hume shared most of his preoepts but
introduced an all-important modification. He believed that the moral
sense was the result of sympathy.
Critics of the theory of the moral sense were quick to seize on
this feeling of sympathy which was regarded by Hume in--the~-e1:ghteenth
~tury, as well as by those nineteenth century vr.riters I have been
examining, as/so essential. These critics were alert to the difficulty
that to see morality in this v~y
is to place too great an emphasis on
subjective feeling. They claimed that vdthout an objective, external
criterion, morality can easily become daneerously relativistic.
Hume anticipated these criticisms. He stressed that the "imagination ll