The Senses

It is appropriate, perhaps obligatory, to begin any discussion of the partnership between the beautiful and the good with the senses, and likewise to enter into that topic with the ideas of Francis Hutcheson. The formation of Hutcheson’s theory of parallel aesthetic and moral senses, it is often agreed, was one of the most influential and far reaching contributions of Scottish Enlightenment thought in general. Taking up where Lord Shaftesbury left off, Hutcheson (1694-1746)—whose famous voice as chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow had a profound effect in formulating Scotland’s intellectual stature internationally—presented his argument in favor of sentiments, as opposed to reason, as the basis of morals, that moral disposition and actions stemmed from feelings, not from propositions that are either true or false. But to Hutcheson, the senses are even more complex than the conduits of sentiment. The moral sense, one of the five internal senses which he identifies, is an operation supplemental to the external senses that allows us to perceive virtue and vice in ourselves and others. The internal senses, like the external ones, are natural to human nature and operate independently of the will, but internal and external senses are quite distinct from one another. Hutcheson gives them separate labels:

For there are many sorts of Objects, which please, or displease us as necessarily as material Objects do when they operate on our Organs of Sense … These Determinations to be pleas’d with any Forms, or Ideas which occur to our Observation, the Author [Hutcheson] chuses to call Senses; distinguishing them from the Powers which commonly go by that Name, by calling our Power of perceiving the Beauty of Regularity, Order, Harmony, an Internal Sense; and that Determination to be pleas’d with the Contemplation of those Affections, Actions, or Characters of rational Agents, which we call virtuous, he marks by the name of Moral Sense. ¹