3 Gratitude in the Early Eighteenth Century

The ideas Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza had presented in the seventeenth century—especially those concerning the place of the passions in human life, the fundamental sources of human motivation, and the power and perfectibility of human reason—inspired a range of late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers either to augment and complement or to critique and dismantle the Cartesian, Hobbesian, and Spinozist accounts. The concept of gratitude, and the related concepts of reason, compassion, and the motives for generosity, played a key role in these reassessments. Reason should not be regnant, Hume felt, and his fellow sentimentalists of the Scottish Enlightenment agreed. Once the sentiments assumed a more prominent place in their models of ethical conduct, gratitude assumed a new place—not as something functional or most often motivated by a desire for future beneficence—but as a sentiment that was more exalted and exalting. Those writers—Hume, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Smith—will occupy the next chapter. This chapter focuses on those writers who wrote in the generation before the Scottish Enlightenment and began by addressing just what was at stake in Hobbes’ and Spinoza’s thinking about gratitude in particular. The four writers we will examine here—Samuel Pufendorf, Bernard Mandeville, Shaftesbury, and Joseph Butler—all covered new ground, and made some important points that demonstrate that they were not just repudiating or repeating what Hobbes and Spinoza had said about the place of gratitude in human nature, but drawing out the implications and elaborating the deeper conceptions of motivation that underlie what they said.

Although Pufendorf is not a Hobbesian in the way we can say Mandeville is, he does sufficiently draw on and echo Hobbes in a way on which Leibniz, for instance, picked up in his reading of The Whole Duty of Man. The “paradoxes” one finds in Pufendorf’s discussion of duty and law, according to Leibniz, are precisely the same ones “proposed and sustained by Hobbes in particular.” This comment raised the ire of Jean Barbeyrac, Pufendorf’s French translator, editor, and defender. He dismisses Leibniz’s comment on the substantive points, but he was particularly annoyed at the implication Leibniz was making: “Why draw an odious parallel with Hobbes’s principles,” Barbeyrac asked, “which are so diametrically opposed to those of our author?”¹ They are less diametrically opposed than Barbeyrac suggests, although they are sufficiently different in their thinking on the important topics of “natural goodness,” the degree to which humans are motivated by self-interest, and free-will that we can appreciate Barbeyrac’s insistence.² One point where we can at least sense the tensions between the two writers is a point on which they seem to agree, and that is their discussions of gratitude.

In his commentary on the relationship between benefactor and beneficiary, Pufendorf presents a thoroughly Hobbesian description of what gratitude is and what social role it plays. Indeed, he cites Hobbes’ De Cive in that section, and echoes Hobbes’ precise words in saying that we ought to be grateful to benefactors in order that the “Giver shall never have Cause to repent of what he has done for us.” He continues by using Hobbes’ own words to describe the effects of ingratitude: “And truly if no grateful Returns were to be made upon the Receipt of the Benefits, it would be unreasonable for any Man to cast away what he has,” and thus “would be lost among Men” all “Beneficence, Good-Will, and Brotherly-Love.”³

Unlike Hobbes, though, who does not exert much energy in discussing ingratitude, Pufendorf does spend some time and spirit in vehemently condemning it. Although the “ungrateful Man, cannot be precisely said to do a Wrong,” he writes, “the Charge of Ingratitude is look’d upon as more base, more odious, and detestable than that of Injustice; because ’tis judged a Sign of an abject and rascally Soul” (107). Despite its being a sign of “profligate Villany and Baseness of . . . Mind,” ingratitude is something that cannot be criminally prosecuted, Pufendorf insists, because doing so would then render gratitude suspect (“it would cease to be a generous Action”), since we would then presumably be grateful to avoid punishment rather than being grateful out of love and appreciation for our benefactor’s benevolence (108, 107).

Here, I suggest, we can see something of how Pufendorf has a distinct moral outlook that differs from Hobbes’. Pufendorf’s generous indignation at the baseness of ingrates demonstrates what seems an abiding belief that benevolence and benefaction are examples of such “natural goodness” that should not be so offended. Whereas Hobbes might have shrugged off ingratitude as an example of precisely what in human nature is most troubling, and thereby confirming his point about the need for the laws of nature, Pufendorf finds in it something more objectionable about a human nature in which he had more faith than Hobbes. Like Hobbes, he believes that the human being is “most solicitous for the Preservation of Himself,” as Pufendorf phrased it, but he also argues that humans esteem and value themselves and feel “somewhat of Dignity in the Appellation of Man” (100). That dignity, of course, Pufendorf traces to God, and he argues that it should establish our natural equality with each other, while Hobbes insists neither on the dignity nor on God’s role in granting it while holding firmly to the belief that equality is important for the sustenance of a peaceful civil society.⁴

As well, as we suggested above, Pufendorf believed, as Hobbes did not, that humans could possess “Good Nature.” For Pufendorf, the reason for the necessity of “Promises and Contracts” is that “all Men are not endowed with so much Good Nature as that they will do all good Offices to every Man out of meer Kindness, except they have some certain Expectation of receiving the like again” (109). These are not sentences Hobbes could have written, ideas Hobbes held, or premises and distinctions Hobbes could accept.

The final point we can make about Pufendorf is that he is more interested in addressing the conflicts that arise in social life than is Hobbes. For that reason, we can see how he creates systems of descending kinds of obligations when there are such conflicts. So, even with his generous indignation at the baseness of ingrates, Pufendorf still held to a firm hierarchy in which acts of gratitude had their distinct place. First, he believed that contracts needed to be fulfilled before gratitude could be performed (that is, gratitude in which we make a return gift, not express our thanks in words). In the case when there are competing covenants, he writes, we must first honor the “perfectly mutual” before we can honor the “imperfectly mutual” obligation. In practice, that means we must first pay the debt we contract before we can give what is “due from [us] upon free Promise or Gratitude.” Likewise, just as we can’t give our benefactor a gift of thanks until we’ve paid our contracted debt, we also can’t become benefactors ourselves until we have made an adequate return to our own benefactors. “What I am obliged to do out of Gratitude, must be preferr’d before what I am obliged to out of Generosity” (165). Gratitude, in Pufendorf’s system, follows a strict protocol and has its firm place in a sequence of obligations. We must first pay our contracted debts, then our debts of gratitude, and then, and only then, can we ourselves become benefactors.

We can say that Pufendorf is both more and less tolerant of human nature than Hobbes—more tolerant in assuming that some people at least possess a good nature that permits them to act benevolently in a disinterested manner, but less tolerant in that he condemned the failures of human nature more vehemently and created systems of order that he hoped would clarify just what obligations fell due, and where and how they must be met.⁵ We will not find that kind of order, nor the desire for it, in the next philosopher who addressed the question of gratitude from a Hobbesian perspective.

Bernard Mandeville is usually considered a disciple of Hobbes, a nemesis of Shaftesbury, a foil for Francis Hutcheson, and a springboard for Adam Smith. He has been a difficult figure to place in the history of moral philosophy because he has struck different scholars as either a precursor of another school of thought, anarchism or utilitarianism, say, or as someone who dwelt in a fundamental paradox in which he argued for both the irreducible knavery of human nature and a rigorous definition of what constituted truly ethical behavior.⁶ He has also been largely confined to being someone whom later philosophers rebutted or modified in a way that made his ideas more palatable for their own systems. Adam Smith, who did just that, begins his discussion of Mandeville by noting that his ideas are “in almost every respect erroneous,” before conceding, with many qualifications, that there are “some appearances in human nature, which, when viewed in a certain manner, seem at first sight to favour” those ideas.⁷ Mandeville might be best described by the term J.B. Schneewind uses: a “mischief maker.”⁸ For our purposes, we are most interested in him precisely because he represents a nodal point in the history of moral philosophy between those seventeenth-century philosophers, Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza, who had varying degrees of faith in human reason, and those eighteenth-century ones, Butler, Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, who had varying degrees of skepticism about human reason and varying beliefs about the role of human passions in ethical conduct. Mandeville is particularly important for us because of what in Hobbes he echoes, what he disputes, and where he exceeds. Mandeville wrote, as Schneewind phrased it, “in a fashion everyone took to be Hobbesian,” and his “vision of human nature is that of Hobbes and Pufendorf.”⁹

There are places, though, where Mandeville appears to depart from Hobbes, and others where he seems to be even more Hobbesian than the original. Consider this example of the former. In one of his last works, An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War (1732), Mandeville argued that “All Human Creatures are sway’d and wholly govern’d by their Passions.” Even those who seem to “follow the Dictates of their Reason,” he continues, “are not less compell’d so to do by some Passion or other, that sets them to Work.”¹⁰ It is a thought that Hobbes would never have expressed, nor is it one that Hume, who argued something similar, would have expressed in quite that way. While Hobbes did sometimes speak of “ratiocination” as purely calculative (the “computation” of numbers and “thoughts” through addition and subtraction), he nonetheless valued the process of reasoning precisely because it could control unruly passions. As he put it in De Cive, “the natural state hath the same proportion to the civil” as “passion hath to reason, or a beast to a man.” In Leviathan, in what was both a dig at theologians and an affirmation of secular thought, he called “our naturall Reason” the only “undoubted Word of God.” He concluded his delineation of the laws of nature with a similar point: weigh your actions against another’s, he says, and they will appear “very reasonable” to the degree that your “own passions, and selfe-love, may adde nothing to the weight.”¹¹ Reason is as balanced as that—insofar as passions are weighed and placed in abeyance—not, as Mandeville has it: that passions are always at the root of reason. And while Hume will suggest that the passions are indeed our motive for and spur to action, he, unlike Mandeville, does not see the dynamic between reason and passion in cynical terms, nor, as Mandeville does, believe that true benevolence is impossible.

To see an example of the latter—where Mandeville exceeds Hobbes—we can turn to his discussion of the terms “virtue” and “vice.” Hobbes had made the point that “in reasoning, a man must take heed of words; which besides the signification of what we imagine of their nature, have a signification also of the nature, disposition, and interest of the speaker; such as are the names of Vertue, and Vices.”¹² His point is that the terms are rhetorical—that is, used to persuade others more than they are used to describe phenomena—and he uses these two as an example. Mandeville, on the other hand, indulges in these two terms to make a quite different point. The subtitle of his book is: “Private Vices, Publick Benefits.” Vices, in other words, are not opposed to virtues, either rhetorically or in fact; they are simply what people do when they indulge in rational self-interested behavior; and that behavior, he insists, leads to a better society, and is the only way to lead to a better society. In the poem, he describes the bee-hive as precisely an example of that point: “Thus every Part was full of Vice, / Yet the whole Mass a Paradise.” In his commentary on the poem, he says that those who urge “Virtue,” by which they mean conscious “Publick-spiritedness,” do so hypocritically “that they might reap the Fruits of the Labour and Self-denial of others,” while they indulge “their own Appetites with less disturbance.” Virtue, for Mandeville, which he claims those hypocrites call “the Conquest of [one’s] own Passions out of a Rational Ambition of being good,” is delusive.¹³ Mandeville’s point, which is that all action issues from rational self-love, is true to Hobbes’ principle, but stated with more vigor and relish than Hobbes, and using examples that sometimes threaten to undermine what Hobbes sought.¹⁴

The best place for us to see that point is to see what Mandeville has to say about gratitude. In his commentary on his poem, Mandeville develops the argument that gratitude is not a sincere emotion, but one expressed only with an eye toward ensuring future benefits, and therefore motivated by self-interest. The relevant lines in the poem are about how the “minister” bees in the hive cheat their king for their own gain—“For there was not a Bee but would / Get more, I won’t say, than he should.” Mandeville then offers a simile comparing the cheating bees to human gamblers. It should be noted that Mandeville was here offering a doubly humorous take on how poets before him conventionally used bees in epic similes. Homer in the Iliad and Virgil in the Aeneid used the simile of communal, industrious bees to illustrate cooperative human activity. Mandeville, on the other hand, uses the simile of virtuously questionable humans to illustrate the dishonesty and self-interest of bees. The simile runs: “as Gamesters do, / That, tho’ at fair Play, ne’er will own / Before the Losers what they’ve won.”¹⁵

Mandeville uses his commentary on these lines to invoke and support a series of Hobbesian themes and principles. “That Gamesters generally endeavour to conceal their Gains before the Losers,” he writes, “seems to me to proceed from a mixture of Gratitude, Pity, and Self-Preservation” (82). Hobbes, as we saw, argued that gratitude was largely contractual, pity a sentiment in which one imagines his or her own pain, and self-preservation the primary principle of human life and principal motivation for entering into society. Mandeville briskly comments on the latter two motives, pity and self-preservation. The gamblers pity those who lose because they have a “consciousness of the Vexation there is in losing,” and they are driven by self-preservation because they know the losers’ “Ill-will and Envy” can manifest themselves in violence. It is the topic of gratitude in which Mandeville seems most interested, and most interesting, and where he seems the least obviously indebted to Hobbes for his argument.

Mandeville makes three relevant arguments about gratitude.

First, gratitude is dynamic; it is not an abiding sentiment, but one that begins in strength and then wanes. He begins by noting that “All Men are naturally grateful while they receive a Benefit, and what they say or do, while it affects and feels warm about them, is real, and comes from the Heart” (82). It is in the actual moment of being benefited, of receiving the gift, that gratitude is most “natural,” most sincere, and at its zenith. For Mandeville, this is the sentiment or feeling of gratitude; it is what later commentators in the eighteenth-century will call an “affection” of gratitude. The actual expression of gratitude, though, is something else altogether. When “that is over,” Mandeville continues, when the gift has been received and the feeling of gratitude naturally diminished, “the Returns we make generally proceed from Virtue, good Manners, Reason, and the Thoughts of Duty, but not from Gratitude, which is a Motive of the Inclination” (82). It is not at all clear to me what Mandeville means by gratitude’s being “a Motive of the Inclination,” or whether he means that this motive is or is not in abeyance during the expressing of gratitude.¹⁶ Whatever he might mean by that peculiar phrase, Mandeville’s unambiguous point is that we feel grateful when we receive a gift, but gratitude is not what we feel when we make an appropriate “return,” saying “thank you,” for instance, or giving our benefactor a gift of thanks. Instead of feeling grateful, we feel the rather more onerous and burdensome sense of having to be mannerly, virtuous, or dutiful. Mandeville’s first point, then, is that gratitude is both a sentiment and a social form, and that these do not coincide. One feels grateful, but expresses that gratitude from a different range of emotions, sense of obligations, and motives.

Mandeville’s second point is that one motive in particular is supreme. The one word that stands out in his list is “Reason,” which seems at odds with all the other practices (etiquette, virtue, obligation). What the reference to reason does, I suggest, is situate the expression of gratitude back into the Hobbesian sphere; we recall that in Leviathan, “reason” was a key point that Hobbes elaborated in his discussion of gratitude as a natural law. Like Hobbes, Mandeville insists that we need to express gratitude because otherwise we risk offending our benefactor and thereby endangering future benefits. In another work, “An Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools,” Mandeville had made the same point by referring to “the artful Gratitude of the Receivers” (264). Gratitude, felt or not, is necessary to express because otherwise the benefactors’ actions become unreasonable.

Mandeville’s final point serves partially to undo the distinction he had made in his first, that is, the distinction between what we feel when we receive a gift (genuine gratitude) and what we express when we thank our benefactor (not gratitude). He begins by repeating and then exceeding what he took to be the Hobbesian description of human nature. If the reader is perhaps wondering how a gambler’s winning money from a loser could possibly inspire gratitude—instead of simply feeling accomplished, say—Mandeville provides an answer:

If we consider how tyrannically the immoderate Love we bear to our selves, obliges us to esteem every body that with or without design acts in our favour, and how often we extend our affections to things inanimate, when we imagine them to contribute to our present Advantage: If, I say, we consider this, it will not be difficult to find out which way our being pleased with those whose Money we win is owing to a Principle of Gratitude. (82)

Mandeville is doing more than following Hobbes in arguing that our gratitude is at bottom an expression of our self-interest. It is assuredly that, both agree, since we express gratitude in order to ensure future benefits. But it is also more. Mandeville argues that we feel gratitude—something with which Hobbes was not at all concerned—by dint of the same motive. Our immoderate self-love gives us the feeling of gratitude whenever anything benefits us—animate or not, intentional or not. Mandeville, in other words, is challenging some of the basic premises of what is conventionally thought to inspire gratitude, and when it does or should occur. We respond to unintended benefits with gratitude, he argues, and we respond to inanimate forces similarly. Whatever benefits us, by whatever means, is the proper object of our gratitude, whether or not the benefit is intended.

He had made a similar point earlier in his commentary by suggesting that gratitude is not a result of volition. When someone kindly takes less of something than one could have, and leaves the “Best remain[ing] for others,” he writes, the others respond as follows: the “more they Love themselves, the more they are forc’d to approve of his Behavior, and Gratitude stepping in, they are oblig’d almost whether they will or not, to think favourably of him” (78). Gratitude is passive (it steps in rather than is felt), grudging (forced), and beyond volition (whether they will or not).

So what then is gratitude for Mandeville? He makes the important distinction that it is both a personal sentiment and a social practice, something we feel and something we express. But he undoes that distinction by arguing that our feelings are really not ours in the sense that they are volitional and heartfelt. They are instead dictated by self-interested reason or by the necessity of circumstances beyond our control. He also challenges the long-standing principle that our gratitude is owed, or felt, when our benefactors act intentionally and consciously to do us good. An accidental benefit usually does not, and, for most moralists, ought not to inspire gratitude in us. If we do feel gratitude for what we acknowledge to be unintentional and often inanimate benefits, we are likely feeling what has been called “cosmic gratitude,” that is, the feeling we have in the face of natural beauty or the awe and reverence we feel toward some indefinite entity or for creation itself.

Even though his observations on gratitude for the unintended and the inanimate are suggestive, Mandeville has little else to say about the possibility of cosmic gratitude. It is enough for him to have suggested its possibility as a way for him to strengthen the argument more central to him, which is that our immoderate self-love governs all our perceptions. Elsewhere, though, Mandeville does address the question of sacred gratitude (that is, the cosmic gratitude felt toward God), but, as we might expect, only to dismiss it. In the “Fifth Dialogue” between Horatio and Cleomenes, Mandeville comments on the origins and inclinations behind religious sensibility. When it comes to worship, Mandeville has Cleomenes say, “Fear is an elder Motive to Religion, than Gratitude is.” When Horatio demurs, arguing that perhaps fear might have motivated what he calls “Savages,” but gratitude marks civilized Christian worship, Cleomenes begins by disagreeing with the premise—“there is no Difference between the original Nature of a Savage, and that of civiliz’d Man,” he asserts—and then forcefully affirms his primary point: “for every one Instance, that Men have address’d themselves to an invisible Cause, from a Principle of Gratitude,” he argues, there are a thousand others in which “Divine Worship, and Men’s Submission to Heaven, have always proceeded from their Fear.”¹⁷ Even Hobbes does not go that far when he argues that worship does indeed express gratitude, even though our obedience is based on God’s “Irresistible Power.”

In the end, then, Mandeville seems to exceed Hobbes in two meaningful ways. In the more general way, Mandeville goes beyond Hobbes in arguing that there “is nothing so universally sincere upon Earth” as the “Love which all Creatures . . . bear to themselves.” This self-love, he argues “is the Law of Nature” (200).¹⁸ Hobbes had not in the end reduced the law of nature to self-preservation or self-love in quite those terms. In arguing how the Golden Rule exemplified the law of nature, he had urged that self-love had to be placed beyond the balance. There were times when for Hobbes it was not the only measure of what one should do. In the more specific instance of gratitude, Mandeville challenges and seems on the verge of undermining what Hobbes had argued, especially in granting to self-love an irrational feeling of gratitude for any beneficial unintended consequences that the universe might provide. Gratitude for Hobbes had focused on either animate or divine beings—either the father or God for whom one should feel grateful out of principle, or the social superior whose benefactions ought to inspire gratitude. And gratitude, as his fourth law insisted, was necessary precisely because it made possible the appearance and flourishing of benevolence. Mandeville’s discussion of gratitude seems not to appreciate just what Hobbes was saying about gratitude, or why it served the social role it did. Because of those departures, though, Mandeville ends up raising some intriguing new ideas, including the fascinating one that gratitude is beyond volition, and his conception of gratitude for inanimately granted benefits is ingenious in ways that go beyond his stated purpose of showing how immoderately we are given to self-love.

Mandeville and Shaftesbury are usually cast as being direct antagonists, but the truth is that they barely acknowledged each other at first. Shaftesbury wrote before Mandeville, having published his treatise on ethics in 1699, while Mandeville’s poem and commentary weren’t published until 1714 (the poem alone was published in 1705). Moreover, Mandeville does not refer to Shaftesbury at all until the enlarged second edition of 1723. By the sixth edition of 1732, he seems to have made up for his earlier negligence, as he defined his philosophy as diametrically opposed to Shaftesbury’s. The reader, he says, will perceive that “two Systems cannot be more opposite than his Lordship’s and mine.” The mild graciousness Mandeville exhibits at the outset of this essay quickly gives way to pusillanimous ad hominem attacks in which he condemns what he claims is Shaftesbury’s failure to be either a soldier or public servant for his country. As for his ethical system, Mandeville sniffs, it is “good for nothing but to breed Drones, and might qualify a Man for the stupid Enjoyments of a Monastick Life, or at best a Country Justice of the Peace.”¹⁹ It is an ethics that has no place in the rough-and-tumble social world in which war and finances are things one cannot avoid, a Hobbesian world, one might say.

Shaftesbury’s ethical system was in fact directly contesting Hobbes’, and doing so unapologetically. There are, for Shaftesbury, three kinds of affections: “natural Affections, which lead to the Good of the publick”; “Self-affections, which lead only to the Good of the private”; and “unnatural Affections,” which are based on a consideration of neither private nor public good.²⁰ After a lengthy discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each kind of affection, Shaftesbury concludes that only natural affections, that is, a conscious desire to work toward the public good, can produce happiness (73). On virtually all possible grounds, he disagrees with Hobbes: self-interest is not our only or even our most basic motive, man is by no means a “wolf” to man, as Hobbes had suggested, and the transition from a state of nature to a civil society was not premised on the need for self-preservation or to end the putative state of war of all against all (175–81). There is, as he put it in another essay in the first volume of Characteristicks, “a social Feeling or Sense of Partnership with human Kind” in which fellowship and community are more organic entities and public good a discernible and communally desirable goal. Indeed, he continues, “If any Appetite or Sense be natural, the Sense of Fellowship is the same.” What is in our “nature,” pace Hobbes, Shaftesbury insists, is an undeniable sociability, a desire not only for the protection that a larger society provides, but the fellowship on which it is premised. It is there, he says, that we can find the “social Love, and common Affection, which is natural to Mankind.”²¹

As we might expect, Shaftesbury also disputes Hobbes on the topic of gratitude, just as he implicitly disputes Pufendorf on that of ingratitude. For Shaftesbury, as for other less secular thinkers, the opposite of a virtue is cast as a privation rather than a positive vice. “Treachery and Ingratitude,” he gives as examples, “are in strictness mere negative Vices; and, in themselves, no real Passions; having neither Aversion or Inclination belonging to them; but are deriv’d from the Defect, Unsoundness, or Corruption of the Affections in general” (96). Whereas instances of ingratitude had raised Pufendorf’s ire—and that of other philosophers, as we will see—Shaftesbury saw with more equanimity that ingratitude was rather defective than malicious; he did not ascribe to it the intentionality Pufendorf did.

Shaftesbury likewise saw gratitude as more intentional and more invested in virtuous desire than did either Pufendorf or Hobbes. “This we know for certain,” writes Shaftesbury: “That all social Love, Friendship, Gratitude, or whatever else is of this generous kind, does by its nature, take place of the self-interesting Passions, draws us out of our-selves, and makes us disregardful of our own Convenience and Safety” (46). Gratitude is not and should not be an instance of “the most narrowly confin’d Self-interest,” a practice that ensures the smooth operation of human society because it prevents the erosion of beneficence (46). Instead, he held gratitude to be something that exalts us as it “draws us out of our-selves.” We do not think of ourselves when we are grateful—of how we are exhibiting propriety, or how we are ensuring future benevolence from our benefactor. We place ourselves humbly and firmly into a different realm in which we are not safe, nor are we seeking our present or future convenience. We think not of our selves at all when we are truly grateful. We think of the gift, the giver, and the kind of benign social relations presupposed and supported in that wonderful and complex relationship. Moreover, unlike the gratitude Mandeville offered as an exhibit, in which what is felt quickly dissolves into something else when it is expressed, Shaftesbury is here describing a total practice in which what we feel and say and do are of a piece.

He describes such a model in a comment he makes elsewhere in a different essay in the first volume. In that instance, he focuses not on the response to the gift, but the spirit in which a gift is given. To “make a Gift free indeed,” he writes, “there must be nothing in it which takes from Another, to add to Our-self.” Giving is an act that requires complete “Generosity, and Good-will.”²² Anything else, or less, or more, is an act that threatens to dominate, to treat the gift precisely as a way of adding to our sense of self what this faux act of charity takes from our beneficiary. If given in the right spirit, though, a “free Gift” is precisely that—something not onerous to accept, something that expresses the love and benevolence behind the benefit. Like the gratitude he describes, the gift also ought to make us “disregardful” of our convenience and safety. The vulnerability in both giving and receiving, Shaftesbury implies, is what makes both gift and gratitude the kind of social practices they are, since they take us out of our “confin’d” selves and make us open to genuine affections. It is not only the “interest” in “self-interest” that Shaftesbury wishes to dispel; it is the “self” too.

We can see just to what extent Shaftesbury challenged the Hobbesian model of gratitude by turning to his commentary on the three kinds of gratitude he identifies. Shaftesbury has his two interlocutors Philocles and Palemon debate these three forms in his “Philosophical Rhapsody.”²³ The first and most basic model of gratitude is that we exhibit when we are benefited by a benefactor. Suppose, though, that the benefactor is discovered to have “several Failings.” Does this discovery “exclude the Gratitude,” he asks, or “make the Exercise of Gratitude less pleasing”? “Not in the least,” responds the other interlocutor; in fact, when one finds oneself “depriv’d of other means of making a Return,” one can “rejoice” in showing “Gratitude to [one’s] Benefactor, by bearing his Failings as a Friend” (136).

The second kind of gratitude is aimed at a larger object, and is not based on a specific benefit. “To what shou’d we be true or grateful in the World,” asks one interlocutor rhetorically, “if not to Mankind, and that Society to which we are so deeply indebted?” A “grateful Mind” that feels that love and feels that social debt makes “grateful kind return” through exhibiting all the traits of “Good-breeding” and “Good-nature.” Such a grateful mind shows “Civility, Courteousness, Obligingness, seeks Objects of Compassion,” and is pleased with each opportunity “to do some service even to People unknown,” to “help, assist, relieve all who require it, in the most hospitable, kind, and friendly manner” (137).

The third and final kind of gratitude Shaftesbury explicates is sacred gratitude. He writes that the “only true and liberal Service” paid to “that supreme Being” is that which “proceeds from an Esteem or Love of the Person serv’d, a Sense of Duty or Gratitude, and Love of the dutiful and grateful Part, as good and amiable, in it-self” (154).²⁴ Shaftesbury here appears to be disputing Hobbes most directly. Hobbes, we recall, had insisted that while we can feel grateful toward God and express it in our praise and prayers, our obedience to God is premised not on our gratitude but rather on our submission to God’s “Irresistible Power.” For Shaftesbury, though, our gratitude is but one of the social passions—including love and esteem—that inspires our obedience. Gratitude is not just the subject of prayer to or praise for God; it is an abiding condition of our relationship with God.

What we see in Shaftesbury, then, is a concerted effort to contest each of the relationships Hobbes described. While Hobbes had insisted that gratitude served to make possible the continuance of unequal social relations—benefactors, who, remember, Hobbes had said are our “superiors”—Shaftesbury sees instead a way in which failed humanity can use gratitude to augment our social relations in more meaningful—and equal—ways. We can exhibit gratitude by making all kinds of returns, Shaftesbury insists, including the return of fidelity and tolerance. Likewise, in describing the operation of gratitude toward society and humanity, Shaftesbury goes well beyond Hobbes. He describes a world in which benevolence is both what gratitude rewards and exhibits. We are thankful for one gift by giving someone else another; we are grateful to our benefactor by becoming benefactors ourselves. This array of social beneficence was exactly the kind of chaotic disorder that Pufendorf eschewed, as he wanted to describe quite precisely what sequence of actions were obligatory, and how and in what order agents are obliged.

What Shaftesbury has to say about gratitude, while drawing on his opposition to Hobbes for its impetus, seems in the end to lead to original and fresh new insights. He describes gratitude as part of what constitutes our sociability in a way that has nothing to do with Hobbes, or with anything Hobbes said. In suggesting that gratitude was an act in which we opened ourselves up to the world, and in which we faced it in all our needful vulnerability, Shaftesbury was transforming what had been an attitude of reverence for divinity into a more secular sensibility toward our fallen friends, our society, the other humans with whom we share the world. There is such a thing as a “free Gift,” and there is such a thing as a completely sincere act of gratitude.

In the first of his two sermons on compassion, Joseph Butler took issue with the three seventeenth-century philosophers whose ideas we explored in the previous chapter. He began by addressing what Hobbes argued was the source of our pity and compassion. In a lengthy four-page footnote, he claims that it is a “False contention, that pity is self-regard,” which must be “confuted.” Alluding to Hobbes directly, he writes that “some persons, who have a system which excludes every affection of this sort, have taken a pleasant method to solve it; and tell you that it is not another you are at all concerned about, but your self only, when you feel the affection called compassion.” Butler then took up precisely the questions Spinoza had addressed about the relationship of reason to the passions or affections. Although it is Hobbes who appears to be Butler’s antagonist, he is addressing the topic in a way that revisits the very terms Spinoza had employed. Do “not passion and affection of every kind perpetually mislead us?,” Butler asks in a tone of irony. Indeed, are “not passion and affection [themselves] a weakness, and what a perfect being must be entirely free from?” In helping the distressed, should we not rather act from “reason and duty” rather than compassion? This is the discourse of Spinoza—insisting on a “perfect being” in a way that Hobbes could not, and eschewing passions of all sorts in a way that Hobbes would not. Butler’s answer to these questions is directly opposed to Spinoza. “Reason alone,” Butler insists, “whatever anyone may wish, is not in reality a sufficient motive of virtue in such a creature as man.” Affections, he concludes, are not a “defect” in our nature, but rather a constituent and important part of it. Compassion, the topic of the sermon in which he makes this case, is, he concludes in allusively Cartesian language, “an original, distinct, particular affection in human nature.”²⁵

Other than Hobbes, to whom he refers when he quotes his definition of compassion, Butler does not name his antagonists here; he refers to “some persons” and “men of speculation” when he talks about those philosophers who eschew the passions or create moral systems that exclude them. Yet we can see that he indirectly alludes to them by using Cartesian terms and criticizing Spinozist principles in Spinozist language.²⁶

In his critique, Butler makes three major points. The first is that passions or affections do not require “healing” as Descartes had put it, or rigorous control or elimination as Hobbes hinted at and Spinoza declared outright, because our affections are part of what make us human. Affections “belong to our condition of nature, and are what we cannot be without” (98). They do not “imply disease,” he writes, nor do they “imply deficiency or imperfection of any sort” (99). His second point is that, on the contrary, affections or passions are not opposed to reason, but rather corrective of reason’s imperfections. The “higher principles of reason,” he writes, “plainly require these affections” in order “to supply to the deficiencies” of reason itself (100). The “defect,” in other words, is not where those “men of speculation” thought it was. His third point is that reason and the passions are not in the end opposed in the way Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza had suggested. He defines “public spirit,” for instance, as “a settled reasonable principle of benevolence to mankind” (103). Benevolence, a passion, is reasonable, or can be. Like some of our contemporary philosophers who argue that the emotions are forms of what Robert C. Solomon calls cognitive judgment or what Robert C. Roberts terms a concern-based construal, or like his predecessor Blaise Pascal who thought that “the heart has its reasons which reason itself does not know,” Butler could imagine a passion that is reasonable.²⁷ And, indeed, he concluded that benevolence is a reasonable passion that requires the other passions, “the under affections, which are its assistants, [to] carry it forward and mark out particular courses for it” (103). Of course, Butler did not mean to suggest that the passions were what should entirely govern ourselves and our behaviors. He acknowledged and warned against what he in another context called “the tyranny of our own lawless passions” (373). Passions could be reasonable or lawless, appropriately directed or randomly unruly.

Although his critique of Descartes and Spinoza is important to the ethical system Butler is proposing, it is in the end Hobbes who makes the argument with which Butler becomes most involved, the argument that self-love is the final determinant of human motivation. Like Shaftesbury, Butler believes that Hobbes had described a partial truth, and what he did instead was not repudiate outright the point Hobbes made about the importance of self-interest, but rather examine more closely the dialectic between self-interest and benevolence.

A good introduction to the way Butler approached Hobbes, to the genuine frustrations he felt in reading him, and to the method he employed in responding to him can be found in a manuscript of what appear to be some notes Butler was writing for himself. “Hobbes’s Definition of Benevolence, that ’tis the Love of Power is base and false,” he begins. He then immediately proceeds: “But there is more of Truth in it than appears at first sight: the real Benevolence of men being, I think for the most Part, not indeed the single Love of Power, but the Love of Power to be exercised in the way of doing good.”²⁸ Here, in the privacy of his own notes, he first dismisses Hobbes’ idea with some disdain (it is both untrue and “base”), before considering it more closely and seeing that the idea possesses more than a grain of truth, and indeed can be put to valuable use in presenting what Butler already believed about the topic. He changes what he thinks Hobbes might have meant about the nature of “power” and then explicates his own ideas about benevolence by incorporating that altered idea of power into them.

It is worth making this point about how Butler transforms and employs the insights of Hobbes into his own thinking because it is almost always the case that his editors display extreme uneasiness whenever Butler cites Hobbes or when he seems to be alluding to him. In fact, Butler makes only one reference to Hobbes in the whole of The Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed, and it is not in the book proper but rather in one of the two dissertations he appends to The Analogy. In that one reference, he agrees with Hobbes that everyone makes a distinction “between injury and mere harm.” Even here, though, the editors seem to fear a misunderstanding, and they record in the footnote a caveat lest the reader think Butler is in any way under Hobbes’ influence: “Evidently, Butler’s intention is rather to record as against Hobbes generally this valuable admission, than to imply that the opposite opinion was one anywhere held.”²⁹ The editor also appended a lengthy footnote introducing the dissertation in which he quotes an earlier editor, Joseph Angus, who goes out of his way to argue that Butler “refutes” and “condemns” Hobbes (397). As we saw above, in his informal thinking Butler does not simply do that, but rather he disputes, somewhat alters, and then incorporates Hobbes into his own work. And although Butler does not cite Hobbes even once in his lengthy discussion of the dialectic of benevolence in The Analogy, and, as we saw, only once to agree with him in the appended dissertation, the editor’s introduction nonetheless argues that Butler “animadverted,” and exposed “the false reasoning of Mr. Hobbes.”³⁰ Butler is considerably more nuanced—and more intellectually fair—in his assessment and use of Hobbes than his nineteenth-century editors suggest.

We can see that clearly in his considered discussion of the idea of Hobbes that most exercised Butler, and to which he devoted the most energy, which is not what might be the source of benevolence (a love of power) but rather what many perceived to be its opposite: self-interest and self-love. Butler discusses and elaborates on the meaning of that dialectic in both his sermons and in his 1736 treatise, The Analogy.

In both the “Dissertation on the Nature of Virtue” and in The Analogy, Butler argues for a more temperate view of benevolence, claiming that benevolence, as he puts it in the former, is not “the whole of virtue” (407, 409) or, as he phrases it in the latter, that it is best considered but one “practical principle of action” (112). Or, even more telling, consider a passage in The Analogy in which he seems to draw directly on that manuscript note to himself we examined earlier. In a society, he writes, virtue has a “tendency to procure superiority and additional power. . . . And it has this tendency, by rendering public good.” A society in which members are virtuous is one in which all are united. Virtuous activity, he concludes, is responsible for “uniting a society within itself, and so increasing its strength; and, which is particularly to be mentioned, uniting it by means of veracity and justice” (83).³¹ These last two things (truth and justice), he concludes, are the “principal bonds of union.” Butler, in other words, ends his point by showing how rational forms of human sociability (the discernment of truth, the application of justice) ground the sentiments. Any sort of “benevolence or public spirit, undirected, unrestrained by them,” he writes ominously, “is nobody knows what” (83). Benevolence, then, is a principle that requires restraint, and the best restraints for it are the distinctly less spiritual and more social virtues of truth and justice. Benevolence for Butler needs these counterbalances, and he seems to argue that it needs them precisely because he does agree with Hobbes about the ways that benevolence can accrue social power. He widens the scope of that love of power by arguing that it can manifest virtue, but he does not dispute that the love of power even in that form can become dangerous without other social forces to keep it in check.

The other force that works alongside benevolence is the one that the editors find themselves primarily trying to explain away rather than understand: self-love.³² In The Analogy, Butler argues for what he calls “a reasonable self-love,” a phrase that likewise causes his editor some chagrin (97).³³Self-love, Butler argues, is “an active principle leading us to pursue our chief interest,” both in the form of prudence and in the form of seeking happiness (134). It is, like benevolence, and other affections and maxims of life, something that he argues requires tempering. In the case of self-love, he urges “habits of resignation.” By repeated and regular exercise, resignation and obedience to God’s will, he concludes, have a tendency “to habituate the mind, to be easy and satisfied with that degree of happiness which is allotted to us, i.e. to moderate self-love” (134). Self-love, then, in The Analogy is “moderate,” “reasonable,” and, he hints, a necessary complement to benevolence. It is in the Sermons rather than in The Analogy that Butler more clearly explains the dynamics and meaning of that complementary relationship.

Primarily in the first of his two sermons “Upon the Love of Our Neighbour,” Butler describes more fully how “Benevolence and self-love are not in conflict” (186). He begins by showing the limitations of self-love, which, if not tempered properly, can lead us to activities destructive to our happiness. “Immoderate self-love,” he argues, “does very ill consult its own interest” (191). Once he raises the question of “interest,” Butler addresses his most important point: the falsity of that conventional distinction of benevolence as disinterested and self-love as only self-interested. Both, he argues, “are equally interested, or equally disinterested” (194–95). The happiness produced by either, he maintains, is a result of the “gratification” of the affection in question. Happiness does not come from our self-love, but rather from our enjoyment of the objects to which self-love directs us. And benevolence, too, directs us to endeavor to promote the good of others, but the gratification we feel “consists in the actual accomplishment of this endeavour” (201). Seen in this light, he concludes, “benevolence and the pursuit of public good hath at least as great respect to self-love and the pursuit of private good, as any other particular passions, and their respective pursuits” (201–02). Here, I think, we can see the ways that Butler draws on Hobbes in a way that is rarely acknowledged. First, like Hobbes, he wants to acknowledge the role that a desire for power plays in human activity, including virtuous activity. Second, he, like Hobbes, also sees that an ethics that requires the veneer of saintliness is inapt and counterproductive. Instead of casting rational and prudent self-love as selfish and benevolence as purely selfless, Butler argues that we are better off seeing that neither is wholly interested nor wholly disinterested; both are both. Finally, like Hobbes, he concludes that benevolence too has an end, and that end—including the love of power of doing good for others—is a form of gratification.³⁴

Butler suggests that the “false idea of opposition of benevolence to self-love” is probably a result of “our notions of property” (204). “People,” he writes, “are so very much taken up with this one subject” that they have misapplied the ways of thinking about property—that is, about having an interest or no interest in it, in the form of being or not being invested in it—to subjects “that have nothing to do with it” (204). Butler urges us to stop falsely thinking of happiness, say, as a property that operates within a zero-sum game—as if “by promoting the happiness of another, you must lessen your own happiness” (205). Once we do, Butler suggests, we will see not only that there is “no peculiar rivalship or competition between self-love and benevolence,” but indeed, he concludes, that “every particular affection, benevolence among the rest, is subservient to self-love” (205). This is not the argument of someone who “refutes,” “condemns,” “animadverts,” and “exposes” the “false reasoning of Mr. Hobbes.” This is the argument of someone who sees the grain of truth in what Hobbes had said, and developed from it a more nuanced way of thinking about human motivations and behaviors. Benevolence, like self-love, is reasonable, that is, “a principle in reasonable creatures, and so to be directed by their reason” (223). Instead, then, of reducing his own systematic analysis of human ethics so that it was diametrically opposed to Hobbes’, Butler admits and acts within his belief that “human nature is not one simple uniform thing” (225).

If we were to apply a term to what we can call Butler’s habits of thinking, to his wonted method for analysis, we would say that it is “comprehensive”—not in the sense of attempting to encapsulate all within one system, but rather in the sense of being able to absorb what seems antagonistic to it into its own ideas. To use Hegelian terms, Butler strove to be neither the thesis nor the antithesis, but rather the synthesis. In his debate with his seventeenth-century predecessors, he did just that, as he took what he found unappealing in Hobbes and then delineated it in a way that made it palatable within his own ethical system. We should keep this mind as we now turn to what Butler has to say about the dynamics and operation of gratitude, where he equally exhibits that “comprehensive” mode of thinking.

We can note three things at the outset about Butler’s commentary on gratitude. First, Butler makes the important point that the object of gratitude is not the gift or benefit that the benefactor offers but rather the affection motivating the gift or benefit. The majority of the world, Butler writes in The Analogy, feel disposed toward gratitude “not merely because such an one has been the occasion of good to them, but under the view, that such good offices implied kind intention and good desert in the doer” (75).³⁵ Gratitude, in other words, is less for beneficence than it is for the benefactor’s benevolence.

Second, Butler, unlike Pufendorf but like Shaftesbury, does not reserve any special animosity for ingrates. In The Analogy, he insists that ingratitude is “not contrary to immutable morality” (239). He develops this point more fully in the Sermons. Like earlier theologians, he sees all forms of sinning as privations rather than positive traits. Just as there is no such thing as “self-hatred,” so too, he argues, “there is no such thing as love of injustice, oppression, treachery, ingratitude” (46). Where those things do occur, where we find “injury, injustice, oppression, the baseness of ingratitude,” we are resentful because these kinds of acts are “the natural objects of indignation” (165). Nonetheless, he continues, those who perform or exhibit them should be considered “likewise the objects of compassion” since these traits, as he puts it, “are their own punishment” (165). Ingratitude, then, is not what other philosophers will call it—a “crime” or inhuman monstrosity—but rather a privation of good that is nothing less than its own punishment.

Third, Butler makes important distinctions in the objects of our gratitude. He focuses on three forms: the gratitude we express to our fellow human beings, what we have been calling secular gratitude; that we owe and express to a divine being, which we call sacred gratitude; and the most contested form of gratitude, what some believe we feel, and should, and some that we don’t and shouldn’t feel, for those who govern us, political gratitude.³⁶ It would seem obvious that someone whose primary commitment is the advocacy of Christianity and whose duty is the care of the soul of his parishioners should focus on the gratitude owed to God, and this Butler does. Butler also makes two further distinctions: that sacred gratitude becomes a salient concept only when we focus on revealed religion (as opposed to natural religion), and that different forms of gratitude are due to Christ and to God. It is only under the dispensation of revealed religion, Butler affirms, that “gratitude as immediately becomes due to Christ, from his being the voluntary minister of this dispensation, as it is due to God the Father, from his being the fountain of all good” (203).

As for political gratitude, Butler has two things to say, one focused on local communities and the other on the larger governance of the state. On both points, we might add, he seems to be in a dialogue with Hobbes. Like Hobbes, he uses class distinctions to argue that gratitude is genuine when it is expressed from a lower- to a superior-ranking person. Gratitude, in Butler’s scheme, becomes the equivalent to charity. Whereas the “good or charitable man of superior rank” should be a “social blessing to his neighbours,” he writes in one of his sermons, those “inferiors” who possess this “good principle” should instead pay “respect, gratitude, [and] obedience as due” (221). When he turns to the governance of the state, Butler departs from Hobbes. Hobbes, as we saw, argued that gratitude could not be the basis of sovereignty, but argued that ingratitude could justify the breaking of the covenant on which sovereignty depended. Butler agrees with Hobbes on the first and disagrees on the second point. Since for Butler, “free government” is a gift from God, the ingratitude of citizens cannot be directed to the sovereign. In his sermon before the House of the Lords commemorating the anniversary of the execution, or what he calls “the martyrdom,” of King Charles I, Butler says that where citizens abuse the “free government, which the good providence of God has preserved to us,” our “ingratitude to him in abusing it must be great in proportion to the greatness of the blessing” (336). Unlike Hobbes, then, Butler argues that there are occasions where what might be considered political gratitude must instead be identified as sacred gratitude.

What, then, is it that Butler says about gratitude as a virtue, as a practice, as a significant expression of, and recognition of, benevolence? To understand that, I argue, we need to see how he most frequently represents gratitude. Unlike Descartes and Spinoza, he does not define gratitude as a particular kind of passion, and designate its dynamics or even detail under what conditions it exists or becomes obligatory. Instead, with only the exceptions noted above, Butler almost always mentions gratitude within a suite of other affections. In The Analogy, he refers in one place to the “joy of heart” that accompanies “the exercise, the real exercise, of gratitude, friendship, benevolence” (73); and, in another, he mentions “the religious regards of reverence, honour, love, trust, gratitude, fear, hope” (199).³⁷ Likewise, in his Sermons he consistently placed gratitude within a series that sometimes included civic virtues, as in his listing together “friendship, gratitude, natural affection, love to their country, common justice” (26), but more often, as in The Analogy, indicated either secular virtues (“friendship, compassion, gratitude” [12]), or religious ones: “with joy, gratitude, reverence, love, trust, and dependence” (237). Butler did this throughout his career, right through to what might be his last work. In his Charge to the Clergy of Durham, Butler tells those who minister that they too must endeavor to raise in their hearts such a sense of God as shall be “an habitual, ready principle of reverence, love, gratitude, hope, trust, resignation, and obedience.”³⁸

What Butler seems to be doing in offering us gratitude within the suite of affections, as he so consistently and meaningfully does, is suggesting something about the nature of affections themselves. Here, I think, is where we can see clearly what I have been calling the “comprehensive” approach Butler exhibits in his thinking. In the case of Hobbes, he had transformed and then incorporated Hobbes’ point about prudence and self-love in human motivation into his own argument about the sources of ethical behavior. In this case, I think we can look to what Butler seems to be implicitly saying about the other two seventeenth-century philosophers—Spinoza, who believed in rationality and the “perfect man,” and Descartes, who argued for healing the defects of passions through more “clear and distinct perception.” The project on which Butler is embarked is clearly distinct from those of Descartes and Spinoza. Both of them were striving, with geometric precision, to identify what they claimed were elemental passions, the six (for Descartes) or three (for Spinoza) basic emotions of which all the other compound ones are formed. Butler implicitly dismisses this imperative, and in practice always suggests that the passions cannot be so neatly divided or categorized. He does not dispute that there are differences between, say, trust and gratitude, but he chooses not to mark that distinction, nor to claim that either one is composed of more basic emotional elements. Descartes and Spinoza were striving to identify the foundational grounds of our emotional range, while Butler saw that “human nature,” as he put it, is not so simple, or uniform, or to be understood through the separation of whatever constituent affections it felt and expressed.

Butler also took especial issue with Descartes and his belief that ideas could be clear and distinct. Descartes had defined “distinct” in his Principles of Philosophy as a perception that “as well as being clear” is also “so separated and cut off from all others that it contains absolutely nothing that is not clear.”³⁹ For Butler, that very idea seems misguided. It is not the separation of one perception or one affection from all others that he seeks, but rather precisely the opposite—their connections. Descartes is the sort of anatomist who dissects in order to identify the separate parts of the body, while Butler is the kind who believes it is more important to examine the sinews and tendons and nerves that connect them.

Consider this example. In a sermon given before the House of Lords on the anniversary marking the king’s accession to the throne, Butler uses the occasion to comment on what we owe “to kings, and those who are in authority under them” (371). The “first duty,” he writes, is “that we make prayers and thanksgivings for them.” He continues: “And in it is comprehended, what yet may be considered as another, paying them honour and reverence” (371). Here we see the ways Butler thinks, in contrast to the Cartesian method he was implicitly criticizing. Instead of distinguishing between devotion (praying), gratitude (thanksgiving), honoring, and reverencing, he suggests that these are all “comprehended” together; that is, they exist in an indistinct sequence in which there are no clear markers signaling that gratitude has ended and reverence begun. Affections, for Butler, are not clear and distinct; they are synthetic and comprehensive.

Or consider another example: a key moment in Butler’s sermon on the love of God. Having in earlier sermons treated the love of self and the love of neighbor, he now turns to the entity “Who alone [is] the adequate object of our affections” (240). Butler contends that the love we have felt for self and neighbor is the same as that we feel for God. “Religion does not demand new affections,” he writes, “but only claims the direction of those you already have, those affections you daily feel” (240). He reminds us that we cannot think of love as a “property”—that is, loving God more means loving ourselves less. In then making his concluding point about the love of God, he exhibits what I have been calling his comprehensive approach to affections. When we think of what “goodness God already exercised towards us, our present dependence upon him, and our expectation of future benefits, [we] ought, and have a natural tendency” to feel “the affection of gratitude, and greater love towards him” (242). Butler does not explicate what differences are important between these two affections. Presumably, we feel gratitude for what God has given, but he implies that we also feel it for what God continues and will continue to give; and so the gratitude is not necessarily confined to the past—the way secular gratitude is. Moreover, the “greater love” we feel when we reflect on these gifts is either a result of our gratitude or another way of expressing it.

For Descartes, gratitude had been what he called “a species of love aroused in us by some action.”⁴⁰ What Descartes sees as speciation, Butler believes is comprehension. Gratitude, for Descartes, is a particular and distinct form of love; for Butler, they are not distinct, but synergistic parts of a whole practice. For Butler, speciation is not the way to understand the relationship of gratitude and love, just as a reductive distinguishing of elemental passions is not the way to understand human nature. What Butler is doing in melding together love and gratitude, as I suggest he has been doing in placing gratitude within a suite of affections, is making the case that passions are part of a spectrum that is not easy to distinguish or separate.

This love and gratitude, he continues, are expressed in other acts—the obedience and resignation that “we owe to our Creator,” for instance (247)—and other affections that are then transformed into acts. He refers to “devotion” as “this temper put in act” (247). What he has been listing—resignation, obedience, “faith, and honesty, and fairness of mind,” “fear and hope and other passions”—constitute a “temper exerted into [the] act” of devotion (246-47). And devotion, which Butler describes as employing “our attention wholly upon him as upon an object actually present,” it turns out, not only expresses these affections, but reconstitutes them: devotion gives “full scope to the affections of gratitude, love, reverence, trust, and dependence” (247–48). By the end of his sermon, Butler has made it clear that “love of God” is a manifold thing because of the exalted nature of what we love, but also because love contains all the other affections that devotion expresses, including gratitude.⁴¹

I would like to clarify what precisely I am arguing Butler is doing here by drawing a comparison with his near contemporary David Hume.⁴² Like Butler, Hume also allusively challenged Descartes’ confidence in what was a “clear and distinct” idea. In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume made the point that while “the mathematical sciences” could reveal or produce ideas that were “clear and determinate,” moral philosophy could not. What moral philosophy studied—“the finer sentiments of the mind, the operations of the understanding, the various agitations of the passions”—could not be so easily rendered clear and distinct. So far, then, Hume agrees with Butler in his critique of the inapplicability of Cartesian principles in moral philosophy. Unlike Butler, though, Hume believes that those sentiments and passions are “really in themselves distinct,” but that we cannot determine precisely where they begin and end in our own thinking about them. They “easily escape us, when surveyed by reflection,” he concludes.⁴³ For Hume, then, what is important here is the inescapable fact that we are limited intellectual beings, and that therefore a modest skepticism is appropriate. That is why he focuses less on the objects of our pretended knowledge (the passions and sentiments) and more on the cognitive limitations of our methods of comprehending them.

Butler, on the other hand, was not the kind of skeptic Hume was, and his focus was less on the objects of our affections and more on the ways that different affections could imperceptibly merge into others, or, as he put it, how some affections could “comprehend” others. As we will see in our discussion of Hume in the following chapter, he too sometimes catalogued a range of sentiments in the same way Butler does, but, unlike Butler, he did not do so to suggest the fluidity of one sentiment into the next, but rather to show how one set of passions belonged together and were distinct from another set. (We will also see that Hume did not always keep too “distinct” what are arguably different sentiments.)

Whereas Descartes had attempted to argue by dissecting himself into a distinct mind that could then logically prove the existence of God, Butler wanted instead to demonstrate the intricate and indissoluble connections. Instead of separating the component features of human nature, Butler wished to view it comprehensively, to see the interconnections between and among what he did not believe to be distinct affections or practices. The connection between one passion and another is, in his worldview, akin to and, perhaps, an “analogy” to the connection between one person and another, between one community and another, and, ultimately, between humanity and its Creator. Gratitude for Butler was part of a comprehensive set of affections that determined the nature and values of those connections, and attested to them.