very agreeable. His mind, at the thought of it, is filled with chearfulness, ferenity, and compofure. He is in friendship and harmony with all mankind, and looks upon his fellowcreatures with confidence and benevolent fatisfaction, fecure that he has rendered himfelf worthy of their most favourable regards. In the combination of all these fentiments confifts the consciousness of merit, or of deferved reward.

CHA P. III.

Of the utility of this conflitution of nature.

Tis thus that man, who can fubfift on

ly in fociety, was fitted by nature to that fituation for which he was made. All the members of human society stand in need of each others affiftance, and are likewife expofed to mutual injuries. Where the neceffary affiftance is reciprocally afforded from love, from gratitude, from friendship and efteem, the fociety flourishes and is happy. All the different members of it are bound together by the agreeable bands of love and affection, and are, as it were, drawn to one common centre of mutual good offices.

But though the neceffary affiftance fhould not be afforded from fuch generous and difinterested motives, though among the different members of the fociety there fhould be no mutual love and affection, the fociety, though

lefs

lefs happy and agreeable, will not neceffarily be diffolved. Society may fubfift among different men, as among different merchants, from a sense of its utility, without any mutual love or affection; and though no man in it should owe any obligation, or be bound in gratitude to any other, it may ftill be upheld by a mercenary exchange of good offices according to an agreed valuation.

Society, however, cannot fubfift among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another. The moment that injury begins, the moment that mutual refentment and animofity take place, all the bands of it are broke afunder, and the different members of which it confifted are, as it were, diffipated and fcattered abroad by the violence and oppofition of their difcordant affections. If there is any fociety among robbers and murderers, they muft at least, according to the trite obfervation, abstain from robbing and murdering one another. another. Beneficence, therefore, is lefs effential to the existence of fociety than juftice. Society may fubfift, though not in the moft comfortable state, without beneficence; but the prevalence of injuftice must utterly deftroy it.

Though nature, therefore, exhorts mankind to acts of beneficence, by the pleasing consciousness of deferved reward, she has not thought it neceffary to guard and enforce the practice of it by the terrors of merited punishment in cafe it fhould be neglected. It is the ornament, which embellishes, not the

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the foundation which fupports the building, and which it was, therefore, fufficient to recommend, but by no means necessary to impose. Juftice, on the contrary, is the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice. If it is removed, the great, the immenfe fabric of human fociety, that fabric which to raise and support seems in this world, if I may say so, to have been the peculiar and darling care of nature, must in a moment crumble into atoms. In order to enforce the obfervation of juftice, therefore, nature has implanted in the human breaft that confciousness of illdefert, those terrors of merited punishment which attend upon its violation, as the great fafe-guards of the affociation of mankind, to protect the weak, to curb the violent, and to chaftize the guilty. Men, though naturally fympathetic, feel fo little for another, with whom they have no particular connection, in comparison of what they feel for themfelves; the mifery of one, who is merely their fellow-creature, is of fo little importance to them in comparison even of a small conveniency of their own; they have it fo much in their power to hurt him, and may have fo many temptations to do fo, that if this principle did not stand up within them in his defence, and overawe them into a refpect for his innocence, they would, like wild beafts, be at all times ready to fly upon him; and a man would enter an affembly of men as he enters a den of lions.

In

In every part of the universe we observe means adjusted with the niceft artifice to the ends which they are intended to produce; and in the mechanism of a plant, or animal body, admire how every thing is contrived for advancing the two great purposes of nature, the fupport of the individual, and the propagation of the fpecies. But in these, and in all fuch objects, we ftill distinguish the efficient from the final caufe of their feveral motions and organizations. The digeftion of the food, the circulation of the blood, and the fecretion of the feveral juices which are drawn from it, are operations all of them neceffary for the great purposes of animal life. Yet we never endeavour to account for them from those purposes as from their efficient caufes, nor imagine that the blood circulates, or that the food digefts of its own accord, and with a view or intention to the purposes of circulation or digeftion. The wheels of the watch are all admirably adjusted to the end for which it was made, the pointing of the hour. All their various motions confpire in the nicest manner to produce this effect. If they were endowed with a defire and intention to produce it, they could not do it better. Yet we never afcribe any fuch defire or intention to them, but to the watch-maker, and we know that they are put into motion by a fpring, which intends the effect it produces as little as they do. But though, in accounting for the operations of bodies, we never fail to distinguish in this manner the efficient

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efficient from the final caufe, in accounting for those of the mind we are very apt to confound these two different things with one. another. When by natural principles we are led to advance thofe ends, which à refined and enlightened reafon would recommend to us, we are very apt to impute to that reason, as to their efficient caufe, the fentiments and actions by which we advance thofe ends, and to imagine that to be the wisdom of man, which in reality is the wisdom of God. Upon a fuperficial view this cause seems fufficient to produce the effects which are ascribed to it; and the system of human nature seems to be more fimple and agreeable when all its different operations are in this manner deduced from a fingle principle.

As fociety cannot fubfift unless the laws of juftice are tolerably observed, as no focial intercourse can take place among men who do not generally abstain from injuring one another; the confideration of this neceffity, it has been thought, was the ground upon which we approved of the enforcement of the laws of justice by the punishment of those who violated them. Man, it has been said, has a natural love for fociety, and defires that the union of mankind fhould be preserved for its own fake, and though he himself was to derive no benefit from it. The orderly and flourishing state of fociety is agreeable to him, and he takes delight in contemplating it. Its diforder and confufion, on the contrary, is the object of his averfion, and he is cha