anthropomorphism is the use of human characteristics to describe ideas or inanimate objects.
the use of human characteristics to describe ideas or inanimate objects?
anthropomorphism
the fourth step in his argument concerns an inversion of subject and object. it is not just that the commercial relationships between things being traded begins to dominate and reshape human behaviour, and remake social relations. in addition, human relations become the property of things. inanimate things, and the relationships between them, are endowed with human characteristics. they become "actors" relating in their own right to which people much adjust their behaviour, and they are also theorized in that way. this is a special case of anthropomorphism because it occurs "within" human relations, not in relation to an object external to them.
character mask
hume is thus left endorsing a moral sentimentalism somewhat like that of hutcheson: "morality... is more properly felt than judg'd of". the moral evaluations in our mind are impressions—"nothing but "particular" pains or pleasures"—and hume's task is to explain how certain kinds of "action, or sentiment, or character" produce these special moral sentiments in us. but a problem arises: since pleasant or painful feelings can be produced by inanimate objects, why doesn't sentimentalism succumb to the same objection hume has just raised against rationalism? first, he contends there are many different kinds of pleasure and pain, and that the moral sentiments (which arise "only when a character is consider'd in general, without reference to our particular interest") have a distinctive feeling, noticeably different than the feelings called up by inanimate objects (or matters of self-interest). second, he reminds us that the four indirect passions are produced by pleasant or unpleasant qualities in "ourselves or other persons", not inanimate objects. this objection dispatched, hume closes with two points about the psychological origin of moral sentiments. first, on the working assumption that nature tends to produce variety from "a few principles", he hopes to find "general principles" underlying our moral psychology. second, to the question of whether these principles are "natural", he replies that it depends on the meaning of "natural": they are not "miraculous", nor are they "rare", but they might sometimes draw on human "artifice" (his system will include both natural virtues and artificial virtues), adding that none of these meanings can sustain the popular view (defended by butler) that "virtue is the same with what is natural, and vice with what is unnatural". before proceeding to his detailed examination of moral psychology, hume takes a parting shot at moral rationalism and its "incomprehensible relations and qualities, which never did exist in nature, nor even in our imagination, by any clear and distinct conception".
a treatise of human nature