David Hartley

“ Now the actions which flow from desire and aversion, are entirely the result of associated powers and circumstances, agreeable to the twentieth, twenty-first, and twenty-second propositions, with their corollaries. The young child learns to grasp and go up to the play-thing that pleases him, and to withdraw his hand from the fire that burns him, at first from the mechanism of his nature, and without any deliberate purpose of obtaining pleasure, and avoiding pain, or any explicit reasoning about them. ”

“ Eleventhly, Joy and grief take place when the desire and aversion, hope and fear, are at an end; and are love and hatred, exerted towards an object which is present either in a sensible manner, or in a rational one, i.e. so as to occupy the whole powers of the mind, as sensible objects, when present, and attended to, do the external senses. It is very evident, that the objects of the intellectual pleasures and pains derive their power of thus affecting the mind from association. ”

“ Tenthly, Hope and fear are, as just now observed, the attendants upon desire and aversion. These affect us more or less, according to the more or less frequent recurrency of the pleasing and painful ideas, according to the greater or less probability of the expected event, according to the greater or less distance of time, &c. the power of association displaying itself every where in the agitations of mind excited by these passions. ”

“ And, whoever will be sufficiently attentive to the workings of his own mind, and the actions resulting therefrom, or to the actions of others, and the affections which may be supposed to occasion them, will find such differences and singularities in different persons, and in the same person at different times, as no way agree to the notion of an essential, original, perpetual desire of happiness, and endeavour to attain it ”

“ Fourthly, As all the passions arise thus from pleasure and pain, their first and most general distribution may be into the two classes of love and hatred, i.e. we may term all those affections of the pleasurable kind, which objects and incidents raise in us, love; all those of the painful kind, hatred. ”

“ In like manner the five grateful passions, love, desire, hope, joy, and pleasing recollection, all enhance one another; as do the five ungrateful ones, hatred, aversion, fear, grief, and displeasing recollection. And the whole ten, taken together, comprehend, as appears to me, all the general passions of human nature. ”

“ Thus we are said to love not only intelligent agents of morally good dispositions, but also sensual pleasures, riches, and honours; and to hate poverty, disgrace, and pain, bodily and mental.
Fifthly, When our love and hatred are excited to a certain degree, they put us upon a variety of actions, and may be termed desire and aversion; by which last word I understand an active hatred. ”

“ And, because mankind are for the most part pursuing or avoiding something or other, the desire of happiness, and the aversion to misery, are supposed to be inseparable from, and essential to, all intelligent natures. But this does not seem to be an exact or correct way of speaking. The most general of our desires and aversions are factitious, i.e. generated by association ”

“ And the experience of this painful process, in a few particular instances, will at last, as in other cases of the same kind, beget a habit of ceasing to pursue things, which we perceive by a few trials, or by rational arguments, to be hurtful to us upon the whole. ”

“ By degrees he learns, partly from the recurrency of these mechanical tendencies, inspired by God, as one may say, by means of the nature which He has given us, and partly from the instruction and imitation of others, to pursue every thing which he loves and desires, fly from every thing which he hates ”