David Hartley, 1705–1757. Born, at Luddenden, Halifax, June (?) 1705; baptized, 21 June. At Bradford Grammar School. To Jesus College, Cambridge, as “ordinary sizar,” 21 April 1722; B.A., 14 Jan. 1726; Fellow, 13 Nov. 1727 to 8 June 1730; M.A., 17 Jan. 1729. Married, June 1730. Married second time, Nov. 1735; settled in London. Removed to Bath, May 1742. Died there, 28 Aug. 1757. Works: “Some Reasons why the Practice of Inoculation ought to be introduced into the town of Bury,” 1733; “Ten Cases of Persons who have taken Mrs. Stephens’s Medicines,” 1738; “A View of the present Evidence for and against Mrs. Stephens’s Medicines,” 1739; “De Lithotriptico a Joanna Stephens nuper invento,” 1741; “Observations on Man,” 1749; “Ad … R. Mead, Epistola,” 1751. Posthumous: “Prayers, and Religious Meditations,” 1809. Life: by his son, in 1791 edn. of “Observations on Man.”

Personal

  His person was of the middle size and well proportioned. His complexion fair, his features regular and handsome. His countenance open, ingenuous, and animated. He was peculiarly neat in his person and attire. He was an early riser, and punctual in the employments of the day; methodical in the order and disposition of his library, papers, and writings, as the companions of his thought.

  I now devoted myself to poetry and to the study of ethics and psychology; and so profound was my admiration at this time of Hartley’s “Essay on Man,” that I gave his name to my first born.

  Hartley died on the 25th of August, 1757, aged fifty-two, and left a name so distinguished for piety and goodness, that it in a great measure shielded his doctrines from the reprobation they have often incurred when promulgated by others.

  Hartley’s was a quiet, useful, unromantic life,—unromantic in all respects, except in that steady devotion to truth and fact which tinges the most uneventful life with a hue of romance,—too often of pathos. Eminently typical of the century in which he lived,—comfortable, and ready to comfort others,—disposed to ponder and wait, not very prone to action, unambitious,—he was always in a mood to make allowances for the frailty of others, and to take things as they came, while he was utterly destitute of the “passion for reforming the world,” which possessed James Mill. On the other hand, if his life was not lit by other aims as that of his great successor, he had all the compensating advantages incidental to a lack of enthusiasm. While he was not to the same extent as Mill the cause of good to unseen masses of men, he made far more friends and intimates out of those whom he did know. The bitterness and violence, which in Mill’s case were engendered by consuming earnestness, were unknown to him. No zeal could eat him up. His philosophical system was not converted by him into a dogma or discipline; by thus having no practical reference, while it won him no partisans, it made him no enemies. Though accurate and precise in his reasoning, and methodical in his daily habits, Hartley was far removed alike from pedantry and fussiness. He was polished and gay in society, and eloquent in conversation, without becoming importunate or a bore; and he was entirely without the vices of pride, selfishness, sensuality, or disingenuousness.

General

  Hartley has investigated the principal of Association more deeply, explained it more accurately, and applied it more usefully, than even his great and venerable predecessor, Mr. Locke.

  This tract is printed from the second volume of Dr. Hartley’s “Observations on Man;” it is written with singular closeness of thought, and to be well understood must be read with great attention.

  He thus united all the talents of his own mind for natural and moral science, conformably to that universal system of final morality, which he inculcates, by which each effort of sensation or science in the various gradations of life must be esteemed defective, until it shall have attained to its corresponding moral consummation. It arose from the union above mentioned, of talents in the moral science with natural philosophy, and particularly from the professional knowledge of the human frame, that Dr. Hartley was enabled to bring into one view the various arguments for his extensive system, from the first rudiments of sensation through the maze of complex affections and passions in the path of life, to the final, moral end of man.

  It was a reference to “Dr. Hartley’s Observations on Man,” in the course of our Lectures, that first brought me acquainted with that performance, which immediately engaged my closest attention, and produced the greatest, and in my opinion the most favourable effect on my general turn of thinking through life. It established me in the belief of the doctrine of Necessity, which I first learned from Collins; it greatly improved that disposition to piety which I brought to the academy, and freed it from the rigour with which it had been tinctured. Indeed, I do not know whether the consideration of Dr. Hartley’s theory contributes more to enlighten the mind, or improve the heart; it affected both in so supereminent a degree.

  The intentions of both [Bonnet and Hartley] are allowed, by those who best knew them, to have been eminently pure and worthy; but it cannot be said of either, that his metaphysical writings have contributed much to the instruction or to the improvement of the public. On the contrary, they have been instrumental in spreading a set of speculative tenets very nearly allied to that sentimental and fantastical modification of Spinozism which for many years past has prevailed so much and produced such mischievous effects in some parts of Germany.

  It is fashionable to smile at Hartley’s vibrations and vibratiuncles; and his work has been re-edited by Priestly, with the omission of the material hypothesis. But Hartley was too great a man, too coherent a thinker, for this to have been done, either consistently or to any wise purpose. For all other parts of his system, as far as they are peculiar to that system, once removed from their mechanical basis, not only lose their main support, but the very motive which led to their adoption.

  It is the first attempt to join the study of intellectual man to that of physical man.

  The capital fault of Hartley is that of a rash generalization, which may prove imperfect, and which is at least premature. All attempts to explain instinct by this principle have hitherto been unavailing: many of the most important processes of reasoning have not hitherto been accounted for by it.

  The writer who has built most upon Hobbes, and may be reckoned, in a certain sense, his commentator, if he who fully explains and develops a system may deserve that name, was Hartley…. Hartley also resembles Hobbes in the extreme to which he has pushed the nominalist theory, in the proneness to materialize all intellectual processes, and either to force all things mysterious to our faculties into something imaginable, or to reject them as unmeaning, in the want, much connected with this, of a steady perception of the difference between the Ego and its objects, in an excessive love of simplifying and generalizing, and in a readiness to adopt explanations neither conformable to reason nor experience, when they fall in with some single principle, the key that was to unlock every ward of the human soul.

  While acknowledging the defect of Hartley’s system, let us not forget its excellence. If the doctrine of Association was not first applied by him, it was by him first made a physiologico-psychological basis. He not only applied it to the explanation of mental phenomena; he applied it, and with great ingenuity, to those physiological phenomena which still interest and perplex philosophers, namely the voluntary and involuntary actions. His twenty-first proposition, and the elucidations which follow, deserve to be read, even in the present day.

  That there is great value to be attached to much which Hartley has drawn from the law of association, and that he has afforded an explanation of many phenomena, before very imperfectly understood, cannot be denied. The very ardour, however, with which he threw himself into his system, and the very closeness with which he analysed the facts in the case, necessarily imparted a one-sidedness to his philosophy, and led to the neglect of some other facts equally important.

  A majority, probably, of those who have followed his track of thought have considered his Theopathy and his Christianity were rather extraneous grafts upon the rest of his teaching. It has puzzled them to discover what these had to do with the spinal marrow or the white medullary substance of the brain. But there have been others, and perhaps more than we know of, who have taken, along with the associations and the vibrations, Hartley’s whole conception of a moral sense which recognizes beauty and revolts at deformity, and his belief of a divine revelation which touches chords that respond to it in the nature of man. Some have for a time been enabled through him to attain perceptions of the harmony of the world which have afterwards blended with principles that seem most to clash with his. And perhaps his illustrations of the facts of association will be welcomed most cordially by those who most demand a ground for association which he has not discovered to them. Perhaps the moralist and metaphysician are destined to receive the greatest aid from the anatomist and physiologist in tracing the vibratiuncles in the human body to those vibrations which they find first within, and which are produced, as their hearts tell them, by an invisible Musician.

  Hartley clearly distinguished the synchronous and successive cases or forms of association. He also noticed that the strength of associations is twofold, depending on the vividness of the feelings or ideas associated, and the frequency with which any association is repeated. He shows that as ideas become complex, so they become decomplex by association. Indeed, it would be difficult to find any distinction or principle of the more recent forms of the associational psychology which was not anticipated by Hartley. The more recent discoveries in physiology and in the comparative sciences of nature are more largely used by the later writers, as Bain and H. Spencer, but always in the interest of the principles common to themselves and Hartley.

  The difference between Hartley and the older metaphysicians may be described by saying that, with them the type of all reasoning is to be found in pure mathematics, whilst with him it is to be found applied mathematics. He seeks to do for human nature what Newton did for the solar system. Association is for man what gravitation is for the planets; and as Newton imagined that God’s will must be the efficient cause of gravitation, so Hartley imagined the same will to be the cause of those movements in the human organism which are the immediate cause of all mental phenomena. He is about the last writer who affects the mathematical form common to the metaphysicians of the previous generation, but in his mind the analogy is not with the pure mathematics which, dealing with ideas of space and time, seem to have an a priori validity, but with those laws of motion which he would have asserted (as indeed he would have asserted of all axiomatic truths) to be derived from experience.

  The styles of the two philosophers were as dissimilar as possible. Hartley was gifted with the “copia fandi,” while Mill’s style and mode of reasoning were severely simple. The two, indeed, were alike in their formal and scholastic methods, and in their love of packing their doctrines into a syllogism or pocket formula. But Hartley was not prevented by these precise and orderly habits from giving free vent to those sentiments, which Mill and his school would have scorned as sentimentalities, nor from many a gay excursus into a variety of intellectual domains, from which the austerer bent of the latter restrained him. Hartley’s rambling and gossiping style, his queer mathematical mysticism (which Mr. Leslie Stephen notices), his medical fancies and digressions, his theories of biblical interpretation, his minute observations of the customs of young children, and the inferior animals, his interest in philosophical languages and dictionaries, his liking for theology and discussion of the theopathetic faculties,—all these were foreign to the mental habits and constitution of James Mill. The preciseness of method apparently reflected in Hartley’s Propositions, Corollaries, and Scholia did not extend beneath the surface, whereas that observable in Mill’s works was radical, and answered to a certain analytical twist in his mind. Indeed the mathematical forms of the former, when applied to the abstrusest and most ethereal subjects, serve rather, by quaintness of contrast, to intensify our recognition of his love of mysticism than to suggest his predilection for formalism.

  His [Coleridge’s] greatest favourite among the modern metaphysicians was Hartley, “he of mortal tribe wisest,” as he calls him in the “Religious Musings.”

  Hartley is in the highest sense of the phrase a man of one book, which he began to write before he was twenty-five, published when he was forty-four, and continued to revise until his death. This is his “Observations on Man, His Fame, Duty, and Expectations” (1749). He defined his own contribution to moral philosophy in these words: “I take it to be proved 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.” A side doctrine of his which was much discussed is the theory of vibrations, and of man as a cluster of “vibratiuncles.”