Francis Hutcheson was a preacher, a thinker and teacher who when he was 52, died on August the 8th 1746 in Dublin. He had a thing for the senses and in his Essay on the "The Nature and Conduct of the Passions" he worked on a list of six "Senses."
The first was Consciousness. By which a man had a sense of himself and all that is going on in his mind.
The second was an internal sense of Beauty. This sense allowed a man to sense beauty in objects. It was internal because it was a little bit personal.
The third sense was, sensus communis. This was "a determination to be pleased with the happiness of others and to be uneasy at their misery."
The Fourth sense was also a sense of beauty to the extent, as Hutcheson saw, we people had a moral sense of beauty in "actions and affections, by which we perceive virtue or vice, in ourselves or others."
The fifth was a sense of honor, which Hutcheson thought of as the other side of shame. He saw it as the pleasure of doing the right thing as opposed to the discomfort of doing the wrong thing.
A sixth sense was the sense of the ridiculous, which in Hutcheson's day was a word more closely aligned to an ancient idea that imbalance in the humours, or bodily fluids, could be cured by amusement and laughter.
The thing about Hutcheson, his influential thinking gave the minds he impressed with his charismatic teaching and his writing a sense of an enlightened world that he saw as having been designed by an " Author of nature... who had.... much better furnished us for a virtuous conduct than our moralists seem to imagine, by almost as quick and powerful instructions as we have for the preservation of our bodies. He has made virtue a lovely form, to excite our pursuit of it, and has given us strong affections to be the springs of each virtuous action."
Adam Smith who wrote Wealth of Nations, and coined the phrase "The Invisible Hand," had been taught Moral Philosophy by Hutcheson at Glasgow University..
