A ‘new system of metaphysics’

Abstract

The only pretension, of which I am tenacious, is that of being a metaphysician.1 Throughout Hazlitt’s studies at New College in the early 1790s he had immersed himself in the principal topics of philosophical controversy. His interest in the subject never diminished. His debut publication, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805), was a densely argued treatise that developed a thesis on the natural disinterestedness of the mind. Inspired by ‘an important metaphysical discovery’2 that he had made as a student in Hackney in 1795, it set out to refute the longestablished vein in English philosophy, first articulated in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, that all human action — even the most apparently altruistic — is motivated by the principle of self-love.3 His career thus began by championing the benevolent, sociable, candid aspects of human nature. In subsequent writings such as An Abridgment of Abraham Tucker’s Light of Nature Pursued (1807), A New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue (1810), and Lectures on English Philosophy (delivered early in 1812) he worked to develop this theory by constructing a comprehensive system of metaphysics that renounced ‘the material, or modern philosophy’. ‘According to this philosophy’, he explained, ‘all thought is to be resolved into sensation, all morality into the love of pleasure, and all action into mechanical impulse.’4