future interests, and the motives by which my present conduct must be governed. This can no more be influenced by what may be my future feelings with respect to it than it will then be possible for me to alter my past conduct by wishing that I had acted differently. I cannot therefore have a principle of active self-interest arising out of the immediate connection between my present and future self, for no such connection exists, or is possible. I am what I am in spite of the future. My feelings, actions, and interests must be determined by causes already existing and acting, and are absolutely independent of the future. Where there is not an intercommunity of feelings, there can be no identity of interests. My personal interest in any thing must refer either to the interest excited by the actual impression of the object which cannot be felt before it exists, and can last no longer than while the impression lasts, or it may refer to the particular manner in

which I am mechanically affected by the idea of my own impressions in the absence of the object. I can therefore have no proper personal interest in my future impressions, since neither my ideas of future objects, nor my feelings with respect to them can be excited either directly or indirectly by the impressions themselves or by any ideas or feelings accompanying them without a complete transposition of the order in which effects follow one another in nature. The only reason formy preferring my future interest to that of others must arise from my anticipating it with greater warmth of present imagination. It is this greater liveliness and force with which I can enter into my future feelings, that in a manner identifies them with my present being; and this notion of identity being once formed, the mind makes use of it to strengthen it's habitual propensity, by giving to personal motives a reality and absolute truth which they can never have. Hence it has been inferred that my real, sub

stantial interest in any thing must be derived in some indirect manner from the impression of the object itself, as if that could have any sort of communication with my present feelings, or excite any interest in my mind but by means of the imagination, which is naturally affected in a certain manner by the prospect of future good or evil.

REMARKS

ON

THE SYSTEMS OF

HARTLEY AND HELVETIUS.

I FIND I owe the reader two explanations, one relating to the association of ideas, from which Hartley and other writers have deduced the origin of all our affections, even of self-love itself, the other relating to the mechanical principle of self-interest stated by Helvetius. It was my first in

* I do not mean that Helvetius was the first who conceived the hypothesis here spoken of (for I do not think he had wit enough to invent even an ingenious absurdity) but it was through him I believe that this notion has obtained it's present popularity, and in France particularly it has hąd, I am certain, a very general influence on the national character. It was brought forward in the most forcible manner by the writers of the last century, and it is expressly stated, and clearly answered by Bishop Butler in the Preface to his Sermons at the Rolls' Chapel. After Berkeley's Essay on Vision, I do

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