William Hazlitt - Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)

The Collected Works of

WILLIAM HAZLITT

(1778-1830)

Contents

Delphi Classics 2015

Version 1

The Collected Works of

WILLIAM HAZLITT

By Delphi Classics, 2015

Collected Works of William Hazlitt

First published in the United Kingdom in 2015 by Delphi Classics.

Delphi Classics, 2015.

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William Hazlitt was born in Mitre Lane (no longer exists), Maidstone, Kent, in 1778. The house was demolished many years ago.

The plaque commemorating the birth site in Maidstone

Maidstone High Street from Gabriels Hill by George Sidney Shepherd, 1829

The Hazlitts family home in Wem, Shropshire, where Hazlitts parents lived during the authors childhood

A self-portrait of Hazlitt, c. 1802

TO WHICH ARE ADDED SOME REMARKS ON THE SYSTEMS OF HARTLEY AND HELVETIUS

This essay was first published in 1805, although Hazlitt had worked on it steadily for the past decade or so. Initially, he had been educated at the Unitarian New College at Hackney, with a view to becoming a nonconformist minister. Instead, the broad curriculum, together with the climate of intense intellectual turmoil and political change following the French Revolution led to the young Hazlitt losing his religious faith and turning instead to philosophy. Reading widely in English and Scottish philosophy, Hazlitt decided that he had at last found his vocation.

His education and independent reading had left him with a belief in liberty and the rights of man, and of the mind as an active force, which, by disseminating knowledge, through both the sciences and the arts, could reinforce the natural tendency in humanity towards goodness. Although he had lost his religious faith, his time at the seminary had impressed upon him the ability of the individual, working both alone and within a mutually supportive community, to effect beneficial change by adhering to strongly held principles. The belief of many Unitarian thinkers in the natural disinterestedness of the human mind had also laid a foundation for Hazlitts own philosophical explorations along those lines. And, though harsh experience and disillusionment later compelled him to qualify some of his early ideas about human nature, he was left with a hatred of tyranny and persecution that he retained to his last days. The work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a particular influence.

The subject of An Essay on the Principles of Human Action is the natural disinterestedness of the human mind and it is an attempt to disprove the widespread notion of the time that man is naturally selfish. Instead, Hazlitt emphasises mans sympathetic imagination, based on the idea that individual human experience is so intensely founded on sensation (either in the present or in memory) that an individuals hypothetical future state is unlikely to influence his thoughts about his welfare in the present moreover, an idea of personal welfare cannot be distinct from consideration of the welfare of others, since a shared basis of experience leads to a natural and inescapable affinity. It remains a classic statement of humanist thought.

Title page of the first edition

Charles Lamb, the essayist, whom Hazlitt met shortly before the publication of the essay and who became one of his closest friends

Published anonymously in 1805 in one vol. 8vo (264 pp.) with the following title-page: An Essay on the Principles of Human Action; Being an Argument in favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind. To which are added, Some Remarks on the Systems of Hartley and Helvetius. London: Printed for J. Johnson, No, 72 St, Pauls Church-Yard. 1805. The volume was printed by E. Hemsted, New-street, Fetter-lane. The last page contained a list of errata. These have been corrected in the present edition, which is a reprint verbatim of the first. A second edition was published in 1836 by the authors son, in one vol. 8vo (176 pp.), the title-page of which runs as follows: Essays on the Principles of Human Action; on the Systems of Hartley and Helvetius; and on Abstract Ideas. By the late William Hazlitt. Edited by his Son. A work full of original remarks, and worthy a diligent perusal. Bulwer s England and the English, London: John Miller, 404 Oxford Street. The volume was printed by Walter Spiers, 399 Oxford Street. The Editor stated in an Advertisement that the new edition had been considerably improved from marginal corrections in the authors copy. The essay on Abstract Ideas, which had never before been published, will be included in a later volume of the present edition.

IT is the design of the following Essay to shew that the human mind is naturally disinterested, or that it is naturally interested in the welfare of others in the same way, and from the same direct motives, by which we are impelled to the pursuit of our own interest.

The objects in which the mind is interested may be either past or present, or future. These last alone can be the objects of rational or voluntary pursuit; for neither the past, nor present can be altered for the better, or worse by any efforts of the will. It is only from the interest excited in him by future objects that man becomes a moral agent, or is denominated selfish, or the contrary, according to the manner in which he is affected by what relates to his own future interest, or that of others. I propose then to shew that the mind is naturally interested in its own welfare in a peculiar mechanical manner, only as far as relates to its past, or present impressions. I have an interest in my own actual feelings or impressions by means of consciousness, and in my past feelings by means of memory, which I cannot have in the past, or present feelings of others, because these faculties can only be exerted upon those things which immediately and properly affect myself. As an affair of sensation, or memory, I can feel no interest in any thing but what relates to myself in the strictest sense. But this distinction does not apply to future objects, or to those impressions, which determine my voluntary actions. I have not the same sort of exclusive, or mechanical self-interest in my future being or welfare, because I have no distinct faculty giving me a direct present interest in my future sensations, and none at all in those of others. The imagination, by means of which alone I can anticipate future objects, or be interested in them, must carry me out of myself into the feelings of others by one and the same process by which I am thrown forward as it were into my future being, and interested in it. I could not love myself, if I were not capable of loving others. Self-love, used in this sense, is in its fundamental principle the same with disinterested benevolence.