DIFFERENT SYSTEMS WHICH HAVE BEEN

ED CONCERNING THE PRINCIPLE OF APPRON.

the inquiry concerning the nature of virtue, the tion of importance in Moral Philosophy is cone principle of approbation; concerning the power of the mind which renders certain characters or disagreeable to us; makes us prefer one tenor to another; denominate the one right and the g; and consider the one as the object of approbair, and reward; the other as that of blame, cenunishment.

fferent accounts have been given of this principle ion. According to some, we approve and disth of our own actions and of those of others, from ly, or from some view of their tendency to our own r disadvantage; according to others, reason, the y by which we distinguish between truth and nables us to distinguish between what is fit and In actions and affections; according to others, ion is altogether the effect of immediate sentieling, and arises from the satisfaction or disgust the view of certain actions or affections inspires ve, reason, and sentiment, therefore, are the

three different sources which have been assigned for the principle of approbation.

Before I proceed to give an account of those different systems, I must observe, that the determination of this second question, though of the greatest importance in speculation, is of none in practice. The question concerning the nature of virtue necessarily has some influence upon our notions of right and wrong in many particular cases. That concerning the principle of approbation can possibly have no such effect. To examine from what contrivance or mechanism within those different notions or sentiments arise, is a mere matter of philosophical curiosity.

who account for the principle of approbation from do not all account for it in the same manner, and good deal of confusion and inaccuracy in all their ystems. According to Mr Hobbes and many of ers,* man is driven to take refuge in society, not tural love which he bears to his own kind, but without the assistance of others, he is incapable of with ease or safety. Society, upon this account, ecessary to him, and whatever tends to its supwelfare, he considers as having a remote tendency interest; and, on the contrary, whatever is likely or destroy it, he regards as in some measure pernicious to himself. Virtue is the great supvice the great disturber of human society. The refore, is agreeable, and the latter offensive, to ; as from the one he foresees the prosperity, and her the ruin and disorder, of what is so necessary fort and security of his existence.

e tendency of virtue to promote, and of vice to order of society, when we consider it coolly and ally, reflects a very great beauty upon the one, great deformity upon the other, cannot, as I have pon a former occasion, be called in question. iety, when we contemplate it in a certain abphilosophical light, appears like a great, an imine, whose regular and harmonious movements

produce a thousand agreeable effects. As in any other beautiful and noble machine that was the production of human art, whatever tended to render its movements more smooth and easy, would derive a beauty from this effect, and, on the contrary, whatever tended to obstruct them, would displease upon that account; so virtue, which is, as it were, the fine polish to the wheels of society, necessarily pleases; while vice, like the vile rust which makes them jar and grate upon one another, is as necessarily offensive. This account, therefore, of the origin of approbation and disapprobation, so far as it derives them from a regard to the order of society, runs into that principle, which gives beauty to utility, and which I have explained upon a former occasion; and it is from thence that this system derives all that appearance of probability which it possesses. When those authors describe the innumerable advantages of a cultivated and social above a savage and solitary life; when they expatiate upon the necessity of virtue and good order for the maintenance of the one, and demonstrate how infallibly the prevalence of vice and disobedience to the laws tends to bring back the other, the reader is charmed with the novelty and grandeur of those views which they open to him; he sees plainly a new beauty in virtue, and a new deformity in vice, which he had never taken notice of before; and is commonly so delighted with the discovery, that he seldom takes time to reflect that this political view, having never occurred to him in his life before, cannot possibly be the ground of that approbation and disapprobation with which he has always been accustomed to consider those different qualities.

When those authors, on the other hand, deduce from selflove the interest which we take in the welfare of society, and the esteem which, upon that account, we bestow upon virtue, they do not mean, that when we in this age applaud the virtue of Cato, and detest the villany of Catiline, our

sentiments are influenced by the notion of any benefit we receive from the one, or of any detriment we suffer from the other. It was not because the prosperity or subversion of society, in those remote ages and nations, was apprehended to have any influence upon our happiness or misery in the present times, that, according to those philosophers, we esteemed the virtuous and blamed the disorderly character. They never imagined that our sentiments were influenced by any benefit or damage which we supposed actually to redound to us from either; but by that which might have redounded to us, had we lived in those distant ages and countries; or by that which might still redound to us, if, in our own times, we should meet with characters of the same kind. The idea, in short, which those authors were groping about, but which they were never able to unfold distinctly, was that indirect sympathy which we feel with the gratitude or resentment of those who received the benefit or suffered the damage resulting from such opposite characters; and it was this which they were indistinctly pointing at when they said that it was not the thought of what we had gained or suffered which prompted our applause or indignation, but the conception or imagination of what we might gain or suffer, if we were to act in society with such associates.

Sympathy, however, cannot, in any sense, be regarded as a selfish principle. When I sympathize with your sorrow or your indignation, it may be pretended, indeed, that my emotion is founded in self-love, because it arises from bringing your case home to myself, from putting myself in your situation, and thence conceiving what I should feel in the like circumstances. But though sympathy is very properly said to arise from an imaginary change of situations with the person principally concerned, yet this imaginary change is not supposed to happen to me in my own person and character, but in that of the person with whom I sympathize.