failure of communication 5
Joseph Butler offered a brilliant characterization of moral sense, considering it ‘as a sentiment of the understanding, or as a perception of the heart, or, which seems the truth, as including both’. [1]
Dugald Stewart wasn’t having it: ‘There is here, I suspect, a typographical mistake. Butler, I have no doubt, wrote a perception of the understanding, or a sentiment of the heart’. [2]
John King backed him up in 1838.
« Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point; on le sait en mille choses» (‘The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things.’) [3] I tried this out on Quine in my parents’ drawing room about fifty years ago, before I’d taken up philosophy: Quine wasn't having it. I can’t remember his exact reply, but it was humorous, and to the effect that the heart most certainly had nothing to do with reason.
Butler, J. (1736) ‘Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue’ in The Analogy of Religion, 2nd edition (London: Knapton).
Stewart, D. (1828/1829) The Philosophy of the Active Powers of Man, in Works vol. 5 (Cambridge: Hillard and Brown).
Pascal, B. (c1640-62/1965) Pensées revised edition, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin), §423 (277).