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354
ETHICS
Hobbes's Attitude to Human Nature. So far as the
individual is concerned, the most important conclusion
derived by Hobbes from his egoistic psychology is a com*
plctcly subjcctivist theory of good. Good, he holds, is
whatever conduces to the individual's advantage. This
type of theory has a certain affinity with what in a previous
connection I have called the scientific view of human
nature, 1 that is to say, the view of human nature which
interprets its present condition in terms of its origins.
Hobbes, as we shall see later, makes a distinction between
man in the state of nature and man in society. What is
called morality is, he holds with Glaucon* in, Plato's
Republic, a creation of society. Granted, therefore, that
there was a pre-social condition of man, it will follow
that pre-social man or, as Hobbes calls him "natural"
man, will be non-moral, and the correct method for the
approach and understanding of man will be the sort of
method which we should adopt with any other kind of
animal. What, we shall have to ask, is his natural dis-
position, what sort of faculties has he, what is the mode of
behaviour appropriate to him, by what sort of motives
will the actions of a creature possessing such and such a
disposition and such and such faculties be prompted?
We are asked, then, to adopt a standpoint for our enquiry
into human nature, from which man is regarded as a
creature sprung from certain origins and endowed, as a
result, with certain propensities, psychological and physiological,
which determine his reactions to the environment in
which he is placed. If, then, we can discover the nature of
man's propensities, if we can determine the character of
man's environment, we shall understand those reactions
of the propensities to the environment which constitute
human behaviour. In searching for the origin of those
propensities which are our mqral notions, it is upon
physiology that Hobbes chiefly relies. Looking to man's
primitive equipment of appetite and desire, he concludes
that whatever satisfies appetite, whatever attracts desire,
1 Sec Chapter VII, pp. 231-241. 'See Chapter I, p. *i.