52 “Benevolence ... has also a high degree of honour and esteem annexed to it, procures us many advantages and returns of kindness, both from the person obliged and others, and is most closely connected with the hopes of reward in a future state, and of self-approbation or the moral sense; and the same things hold with respect to generosity in a much higher degree. It is easy therefore to see how such associations may be formed as to engage us to forego great pleasure, or endure great pain for the sake of others, how these associations may be attended with so great a degree of pleasure as to overrule the positive pain endured or the negative one from the foregoing of a pleasure, and yet how there may be no direct explicit expectation of reward either from God or man, by natural consequence or express appointment, not even of the concomitant pleasure that engages the agent to undertake the benevolent and generous action; and this I take to be a proof from the doctrine of association that there is and must be such a thing as pure disinterested benevolence; also a just account of the origin and nature of it.”—Hartley _On Man_, vol. i. pp. 473-474. See too Mill’s _Analysis_, vol. ii. p. 252. 53 Mill’s _Analysis_, vol. ii. pp. 244-247. 54 “With self-interest,” said Hartley, “man must begin; he may end in self-annihilation;” or as Coleridge happily puts it, “Legality precedes morality in every individual, even as the Jewish dispensation preceded the Christian in the world at large.”—_Notes Theological and Political_, p. 340. It might be retorted with much truth, that we begin by practising morality as a duty—we end by practising it as a pleasure, without any reference to duty. Coleridge, who expressed for the Benthamite theories a very cordial detestation, sometimes glided into them himself. “The happiness of man,” he says, “is the end of virtue, and truth is the knowledge of the means.” (_The Friend_, ed. 1850, vol. ii. p. 192.) “What can be the object of human virtue but the happiness of sentient, still more of moral beings?” (_Notes Theol. and Polit._ p. 351.) Leibnitz says, “Quand on aura appris à faire des actions louables par ambition, on les fera après par inclination.” (_Sur l’ Art de connaître les Hommes._) 55 E.g. Mackintosh and James Mill. Coleridge in his younger days was an enthusiastic admirer of Hartley; but chiefly, I believe, on account of his theory of vibrations. He named his son after him, and described him in one of his poems as:— “He of mortal kind Wisest, the first who marked the ideal tribes Up the fine fibres through the sentient brain.” _Religious Musings._