Flesh in the Age of Reason (53 page)

As they become perfect, Hartley explained, many types of actions, just like those of the hands, become secondary and automatic, dependent ‘upon the most diminutive sensations, ideas, and motions, such as the mind scarce regards’. The more automatic a complex action becomes, the less the agent has to mind it, and consequently the more attention can be freed from direct concerns and fixed upon more demanding ones.

Hartley’s interest in habit-formation was doubtless linked to the fact that he was an acute observer of children. (Freud’s wife, we are told, insisted that psychoanalysis stopped at the nursery door: Hartley stepped boldly in and observed how his own offspring grew.) In particular, he divined the key role in psychological development of the transference of emotion. Through association, primary sensations become compounded, through complex combinations, into the pleasurable and the painful. These come in six different classes: imagination, ambition, self-interest (subdivided into gross and refined), sympathy, theopathy and the moral sense. Each manifestation of pleasure is factitious, that is, a learnt response.

Man being a divinely designed machine programmed for ultimate happiness, the teleology of spiritual improvement (blessedness or salvation) which Hartley found at the heart of the Christian gospel is validated by experience itself. ‘Some Degree of Spirituality’, he declared, ‘is the necessary Consequence of passing through Life. The sensible [that is, of the senses] Pleasures and Pains must be transferred by Association more and more every day, upon things that afford neither sensible Pleasure nor sensible Pain in themselves, and so beget the intellectual Pleasures and Pains.’ Experience, in other words, teaches us to value higher things, the intellectual over the sensual. And the divine plan is beyond dispute, since on balance
pleasures do actually outweigh pains, the result being that ‘Association… has a Tendency to reduce the State of those who have eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, back again to a paradisiacal one.’

Human nature has been designed by God in such a way that experience and association invariably lead, by trial and error, to higher pursuits and nobler feelings. A baby, for instance, initially associates its parents with the
pleasures
which it derives from them: babies are selfish. In due course, forgetting the original motive (gaining gratification), the infant learns to
respect
and
love
them: a purely self-centred motive thus matures into a benevolent one. Conversely, someone who initially links money with the satisfaction it can buy might forget, over time, the original association (money buys pleasure) and experience naked greed pure and simple – and thus turn into a miser. Affects and attitudes are thus all artifacts, arising out of psychological and mental activity. It is therefore up to parents and teachers to structure education and environmental influences so as to secure the association of pleasure with socially and morally desirable objects. Man may rarely rise to pure altruism, but he is certainly capable of benevolence. And that, held Hartley,

has also a high Degree of Honour and Esteem annexed to it… and is most closely connected with the Hope of Reward in a future State, and with the Pleasures of Religion, and of Self-approbation, or the Moral Sense.… It is easy therefore to see, how such Associations may be formed in us, as to engage us to forego great Pleasure, or endure great Pain, for the sake of others.

Such transference and transformation of emotion through associations was, in Hartley’s system, what explained the evolution of the personality, grounded in material reality but operating within frameworks of cultural conventions and expectations. Consider his perceptive account of laughter. Newborns, he observed, do not laugh. When they begin to do so, ‘the first occasion of doing this seems to be a surprize, which brings on a momentary fear first, and then a momentary joy in consequence of the removal of that fear’. Laughter
is thus at first a purely physical response (shock, surprise) to some specific stimulus, occasioned by a moment of fear followed at once by relief. It is the product of breaking the ambiguous pleasure–pain barrier: ‘if the same surprize’, noted this acute observer, ‘which makes young children laugh, be a very little increased, they will cry’ – tickling being a good case in point. When tickled, a child experiences ‘a momentary pain and apprehension of pain, with an immediately succeeding removal of these’.

Originating thus in the discharge of fear and the attainment of relief, laughter shifts its nature in course of development, from immediate and physical occasions (like tickling) to more social situations, in which learnt cultural factors come to play their part: ‘The progress in each particular is much accelerated and the occasions multiplied, by imitation.’ Children, he noted, ‘learn to laugh, as they learn to talk and walk; and are more apt to laugh profusely, when they see others laugh’. As with all other emotions, laughter is thus not a given or a constant, it is the product of psycho-social growth and thus ‘a principal source’ of the pleasures of sociability and benevolence, emergent at later stages of development.

With the ability to speak, the objects prompting laughter change: there is an enlargement from the physical to the cultural, symbolic and abstract. As with other expressions of emotions, laughter tends to become imaginative and vicarious. ‘As children learn to use the language,’ observed Hartley,

they learn also to laugh at sentences or stories, by which sudden alarming emotions and expectations are raised in them, and again dissipated instantaneously. And as they learnt before by degrees to laugh at sudden unexpected noises, or motions, where there was no fear, or no distinguishable one, so it is after some time in respect of words. Children, and young persons, are diverted by every little jingle, pun, contrast, or coincidence, which is level to their capacities.… And this is the origin of that laughter, which is level to that excited by wit, humour, buffoonery, etc.

The escape from fear to relief is still what causes laughter, but the fear and relief are now derived at several removes – for example, from
frightening stories: a tale that arouses ‘sudden alarming emotions and expectations’ which are not dissipated in laughing might be stored away and might cause nightmares – evidence of further layers, chambers and motions of the psyche.

The complex learning processes thus outlined were, insisted Hartley, overall conducive to happiness. Why this confidence? It was because God had endowed the brain with such powers as to be self-adjusting and regulatory. People naturally attempt to do what will produce happiness and prevent pain. When they inadvertently act in ways inimical to those ends – for example, through gluttony – those contrary tendencies are automatically brought into line by self-rectifying mechanisms. Gross gratifications (for instance, bingeing on a certain food) lose their relish, and bad habits which produce pain (drunkenness, for example, with its throbbing hangovers) will correct themselves.

All form part of the grand design of God. But Hartley felt obliged boldly to address a further issue, the very presence of ‘the idea of God, as it is found in fact among men, particularly amongst Jews and Christians’. How do we have a knowledge of God? It was a question not usually posed by Christians. Hartley’s view was that there is a series of stages – all was gradual in Hartley – in the process by which children, or the ignorant, come to possess an emergent idea of God. It is part of the culture at large, noted Hartley, that ‘many actions and attributes belonging to men are… in common language, applied to God’. For that reason, ‘in their first attempts to decypher the word’, children would suppose ‘God’ to stand for ‘a man whom they have never seen, and of whom consequently they form a compound fictitious idea’. They first imagine God as some
real
stranger; but the young soon realize that adults attribute things to God which are true of no actual person whom they personally know. This is puzzling:

When they hear or read, that god resides in heaven, (i.e. according to their conceptions, in the sky, amongst the stars,) that he made all things, that he sees, hears, and knows all things, can do all things, &c.… vivid ideas,
which surprise and agitate the mind, (lying upon the confines of pain,) are raised in it; and if they are far advanced in understanding, as to be affected with apparent inconsistencies and impossibilities in their ideas, they must feel great perplexity of imagination, when they endeavour to conceive and form definite ideas agreeable to the language of this kind.

The child is at this point thrown into cognitive dissonance – he is expected to picture God as a person, but as a person who can do the impossible. The child’s image of God thereby becomes unclear while, at the same time, the emotional charge carried by the notion of God intensifies – he is told this mysterious person is a loving father, whom he must revere. Thus, ‘this perplexity will add to the vividness of the ideas, and all together will transfer upon the word
God
… such secondary ideas, as may be referred to the heads of magnificence, astonishment, and reverence’.

Bewilderment linked to emotional vividness will further increase when the child learns that God has qualities which it is
inconceivable
for any human to possess:

When children hear that God cannot be seen, having no visible shape, no parts; but that he is a spiritual infinite being; this adds much to their perplexity and astonishment, and by degrees destroys the association of the fictitious visible ideas before mentioned with the word
God
.

So, in course of time, the label ‘God’ ceases to be associated with the picture of a venerable white-bearded fellow, dwelling in the sky. ‘However, it is probable’, added Hartley, ‘that some visible ideas, such as those of the heavens, a fictitious throne placed there, a multitude of angels, &c., still continue to be excited by the word
God
and its equivalents.’ Thus, while the idea of that venerable gentleman may in time be obliterated by the more sophisticated teaching that God is a ‘spiritual infinite being’ with no limbs or face, certain anthropomorphic images, however, may not fade: the throne in the palace, the hovering angels.

As the visual imagery associated with God grows ever more vague, the emotions excited by the term become more vivid, in a process
perhaps comparable to Edmund Burke’s contemporary notion of the aesthetics of the sublime: obscurity makes things intense. This emotional charge is particularly heightened, he explained, ‘when the child hears, that God is the rewarder of good actions, and the punisher of evil ones, and that the most exquisite future happiness and misery (described by a great variety of particulars and emblems) are prepared by him for the good and bad respectively’. By associating the concrete idea of an inescapable judge with such nebulous notions raised by ‘spiritual infinite being’, the child ‘feels strong hopes and fears arise alternately in his mind’.

Summarizing these steps in the evolution of the idea of God and its emotional associations, Hartley concluded that

it will appear that, amongst Jews and Christians, children begin probably with a definite visible idea of God; but that by degrees this is quite obliterated, without anything of a stable precise nature succeeding in its room; and that, by farther degrees, a great variety of strong secondary ideas,
i.e
. mental affections, (Attended indeed by visible ideas, to which proper words are affixed, as of angels, general judgement, &c.) recur in their turns, when they think upon God.

Christians, in other words, do not have anything like what Descartes might have termed a ‘clear and distinct’ idea of God at all. They end up entertaining an imprecise visual picture, vaguely associated with clusters of abstractions –
infinite
,
almighty
,
all-knowing
,
eternal
,
spiritual
. Nevertheless, through association, they fix powerful feelings upon God – feelings deriving partly from their perplexities and, more importantly, from their sense that this Infinite Being minds deeply about their conduct, and will reward or punish them accordingly. God holds the key to ‘the greatest happiness possible’, and it is in their rational self-interest to be among those God counts as
good
.

Hartley’s discussion of God is pregnant with many possibilities and may be read on several different levels. It was, for one thing, a perceptive psychological narrative (whether empirical or conjectural) of the emergence and transformation of the notion of God in someone
undergoing education and emotional maturation. It was also meant by Hartley to be a vindication of the more sophisticated notions of the Deity held by such as himself – the anthropomorphic image of the old man with the beard was naïve or childish. Evidently he was also painfully aware how hard it was for ordinary people, stuck with their ignorant literal-mindedness, to grasp the truth. It was also further proof of the point, central to his philosophy, that no ideas were innate. Somewhat inconsistently, Locke had assumed that belief in God was somehow self-evident to reason: Hartley, by contrast, felt it incumbent upon him to show how, like everything else, God-talk would emerge. But that thought also unfolded the more subversive possibility, as broached by cynics and freethinkers: might the idea of God (perhaps like that of witches) be simply a phantom, a mere projection of the fears and errors of the confined and childish mind, confused by the tricks of words? This was not of course Hartley’s intention – he believed the notion of God was a true product of authentic experience. But his psychological reconstruction had seemingly left the door open to anyone minded, like Hume, to claim that ‘God’ was no more than a word or an image, a product of the meanderings of the mind, not a faithful perception of reality.