slight dislike, and this again, when the bribe is increased, become at length some slight emotion of approbation, which may rise, with the still increasing bribe, through all the stages of love,-through esteem, respect, veneration, till we feel ultimately for the tyrant, whose power is to us a source of so much happiness, all that devotion of the heart which we so readily yield to power that is exerted for the benefit of mankind. When we labour to think of this progressive transmutation of moral sentiment, while the guilty object of it continues the same, in every respect, but as he offers a greater or less bribe for our affection,-do we not feel, by the inconsistency which strikes us at every supposed stage of the progress, that affection, -the pure affection which loves virtue and hates vice, is not any thing which could be bought, but by that noble price which is the virtue itself, that is honoured by us ;-and that to bribe us to love what is viewed by us with horror, or to hate what is viewed by us with tenderness, or reverence, is an attempt as hopeless, as it would be to bribe us to regard objects as purple, which are yellow, or yellow which are purple? We may, indeed, agree, by a sacrifice of truth, to call that purple which we see to be yellow, as we may agree, by a still more profligate sacrifice of every noble feeling, to offer to tyranny the homage of our adulation,—to say to the murderer of Thrasia Poetus, "Thou hast done well,"—to the parricide who murdered Agrippina, "Thou hast done more than well." As every new victim falls, we may lift our voice in still louder flattery. We may fall at the proud feet, we may beg, as a boon, the honour of kissing that bloody hand which has been lifted against the helpless, we may do more, we may bring the altar, and the sacrifice, and implore the God not to ascend too soon to Heaven. This we may do, for this we have the sad remembrance, that beings of a human form, and soul, have done. But this is all which we can do. We can constrain our tongue to be false; our features to bend themselves to the semblance of that passionate adoration which we wish to express; our knees to fall prostrate ;-but our heart we cannot constrain. There, virtue must still have a voice which is not to be drowned by hymns and acclamations,-there the crimes which we laud as virtues, are crimes still, and he whom we have made a God is the most contemptible of mankind-if, indeed, we do not feel perhaps that we are ourselves still more contemptible. When is it, I may ask, that the virtue of any one appears to us most amiable? Is it when it seems attended with every thing that can excite the envy even of the wicked,--with wealth, with power, with all which is commonly termed good fortune; and when, if its influence on our emotions depend on the mere images of enjoyment which it suggests, these may surely be supposed to arise most readily? It is amiable, indeed, even in such circumstances; but how much more interesting is it to us, when it is loaded with afflictions from which it alone can derive happiness? It is Socrates in the prison of whom we think-Aristides in exile, and perhaps Cato, whatever comparative esteem he might have excited, would have been little more interesting in our eyes than Cæsar himself, if Cæsar had not been a successful usurper. It is in describing the retreat and disasters to which that last defender of Roman freedom was exposed, that Lucan exclaims, with a sympathy almost of exultation, Hunc ego per Syrtes, Libiæque extrema, triumphum Ducere maluerim, quam ter Capitolia, curru What proof can be imagined, stronger than this, that virtue and the source of personal gain are not identical phrases; since no accession of personal interest can make that a virtue which was before a vice; nor any loss of personal interest make that a vice which was before a virtue? If, in any physical science, a similar error were maintained, there is not a philosopher who would not instantly reject it. Let us conceive, for example, some one ignorant enough, or bold enough to affirm, that the gravity of bodies depends on their quantity of heat. We should think that we had nothing more to do, for showing the absurdity of such an opinion, than to try the effect of increasing and diminishing the warmth of the gravitating bodies; and, if we found the weight to remain the same during all these changes,-if we found one body to be warmer than another and yet heavier, colder than a third body and yet heavier, we should think ourselves fairly entitled to infer, that warmth and gravity were not the same; that a body might gravitate and be warm,-as, indeed, every body which gravitates may be said to have some heat, as every substance which is warm has some weight, but that the gravity did not depend on the warmth, and bore no measurable proportion to it. This, in external physics, we should think a sufficient demonstration. But, in morals, the sophist finds a sort of shelter in the indistinct conceptions of those to whom he addresses himself. It is proved, as indubitable, that our admiration of virtue has no measurable proportion to our feeling of personal profit which may be reaped from it; that the profit may be increased, indefinitely, without the slightest diminution of our abhorrence of vice; and the loss increased, indefinitely, without any diminution of our admiration of virtue. But, notwithstanding this demonstration, that virtue is conceived by us as something more than a mere source of personal enjoyment to us, he still asserts that they are strictly synonymous; and renews, with as brilliant ingenuity as before, that sly logic, which would be irresistible if an epigram were an argument, and a series of epigrams a perfect demonstra tion. We have seen, then, that the admiration of actions as virtuous, is not affected by calculations of loss and gain; and must, therefore, be something more than that loss or gain which, in our calculation, we perceive to be manifestly increased or diminished. There is another demonstration which seems not less irresistible. If what we admire in the virtue of others be nothing more than its tendency, more or less direct, to our individual advantage, the relations on which this tendency depends must be perceived by us before we admire; and the discernment of these is not a simple and easy intellectual effort. The mind that is matured by long observation of society, and by profound reflection on those ties which make the action of one man a source of profit or injury to remote individuals, may, indeed, look with esteem on certain actions, and with indignation on others. Our love of virtue and hatred of vice, if they arise from such knowledge, must be in every case progressive as the knowledge itself, from infancy to old age. To relate, to a child, some action of cruelty, must be to speak to an indifferent heart,—to a heart which cannot have made these nice reflections, and which cannot, therefore, feel what is not to be felt without the knowledge which those reflections give * Lib. IX. v. 598–600. Every nursery, then, exhibits a fair field for an experiment that may be said to be decisive; and will the selfish moralist submit his theory to the test? Will he take upon his knee that little creature which has, perhaps, scarcely felt a pain since it entered into life; which knows only that it has a friend in every living being that has met its eye; and which has never thought of its own misery as a thing that is possible? Will he watch that listening countenance, every look of which is fixed on his own, as he repeats verse after verse of the ballad which describes some act of injustice and atrocious cruelty, and will he expect to see no tear in those eyes,-to hear no sobbings when the misery is extreme, to discover no demonstrations of an indignant wrath, that thinks not of itself at the time, but thinks only of the oppressed whom it would gladly succour,-of the oppressor on whom it would gladly inflict vengeance? It will be well for that child if, in the corruption of the world, he retain a sympathy with the good and the wretched, and a hatred of guilt, as ardent as he feels in those years of ignorance,-if, on learning the relations of virtue to his own happiness, he love it merely as he loved it when he had never thought of the relation. The love of virtue, then, I conclude, is different, and essentially different, from the mere love of selfish gain. It is an affection which leads us to esteem often what is directly injurious to us,-which makes it impossible for the good man not to honour in his heart, as well as in the praise which might seem forced from him, the virtues of that rival by whom he is outstripped in the competition of public dignity,—which gains from the commander of an army a respect which nothing can suppress, for the valour and all the military virtues of the commander opposed to him; though these very virtues have disquieted him more than the vices of half a nation,-though they have robbed him of repose, and, which is still worse, have robbed him of the glory which was his great object,-by bringing on the army, which he has led in vain to successive fields, disaster after disaster. It is an affection which can find objects in lands the most remote ;-which makes us feel delight in the good qualities of those who lived in ages, of which the remembrance of their virtues are the only relics; and which preserves to our indignation and abhorrence, the crimes of those whom the tomb itself, already in ruins, has rendered powerless to injure us. It is an affection which is itself the truest prosperity of him who feels it; and which, when the virtuous man does truly seem to suffer what the world calls adversity, endears to him in his very afflictions, still more, that virtue, without which he might have been what the world terms prosperous. LECTURE LXXIX. EXAMINATION OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM, AND ITS MODIFICATIONS, CONTINUED. A GREAT part of my last Lecture, gentlemen, was employed in considering that theory of morals which would represent all the feelings that appear to us most disinterested, as only the results of selfish calculation;-the gene ; rous sacrifices of friendship as the barter of some good which we value less for a good which we value more; without any regard to the happiness of those whom it is our policy to distinguish by the flattering term of friends, but who are merely the purchasers and sellers of the different wares of wealth, or power, or honour, or sensual pleasures, which it is our trade as human beings, to sell and buy. In that wretched exhibition which is made to us of the social intercourse of the word, the friendship of any one, as implying in every instance, some stratagem or invention of deceit on his part,-is, therefore, in every instance, to be dreaded and shunned far more than absolute indifference, or, even, perhaps, than avowed enmity. Nor is it only common friendship which this system would represent as the simulation, and nothing more than the simulation of the generous feelings that are professed. The virtues which gather us under the domestic roof in delightful confidence of affection, of which we never question the sincerity in others, because we feel it to be sincere in ourselves, when it prompts in us the kindnesses which we delight to receive, because we have known the delight of conferring them these gentle virtues which almost consecrate to us our home, as if, in the midst of that wide scene in which the anxieties and vices of the world may rage, it were some divine and sacred place, where distrust and fear cannot enter, would be driven, by this cold and miserable sophistry, from the roof under which they delighted to repose,-if human folly could prevail over an influence so celestial, and if a man could, indeed, become that wretched thing which he would so laboriously represent himself to be. In the tenderness of connubial love, which years of affection have only rendered more vivid, how many are there who, in their chief wishes of happiness, scarcely think of themselves; or, at least think of themselves far less as objects of exclusive interest, than as beings whose happiness is necessary to the enjoyment of those whom they delight to render happy! This seeming devotion, we are told, may, indeed, be a selfishness a little more refined; but it is not less the growth or developement of absolute and exclusive self-regard. It is a selfishness which sees and seeks its own individual good at a little greater distance; but, since it is its own individual good, which alone, at whatever distance, it is incessantly wishing to see, and as incessantly labouring to obtain, it is still selfishness, as much when it pursues the distant as when it grasps the near; -a selfishness to which the happiness of those who appear to be loved, is as the mere happiness of another, if we analyze our desires with sufficient subtility,-far more uninteresting than the acquisition of the idlest gewgaw which vanity, with all its covetous eagerness, would scarcely stoop to add to its stores. The fallacy of this system, as I endeavoured to show you, arises chiefly from the pleasure which truly attends our virtuous affections; but which, though universally attending them, it seems to require no very great nicety of discrimination to distinguish, as their consequence, not their cause. We have pleasure, indeed, in conferring a kindness,but it is because we confer the kindness, and have had the previous desire of conferring it, that we feel this pleasure of being kind; not because we feel this pleasure, that we confer the kindness, and if we had never been beneficent, we should as little have known the delight of beneficence, as we should have known what external beauty is, without the previous perception of the forms and colours of the objects which we term beautiful. It would, indeed, have been as just a theory of the primary sensations of vision, to say, -that it is because we have a pleasing emotion in beholding the proportions VOL. II. 37 and colours of certain forms, we see those forms and colours which excite in us the pleasing emotion; as, of our moral approbation or disapprobation, to say,--that it is because we have pleasure in the performance and contemplation of virtuous actions, and pain in the contemplation and performance of vicious actions, we perceive that very virtue and vice, and form those very desires, virtuous or vicious, to which, as previously existing, we owe the pleasure and the pain, that have resulted from them, not produced them, and that cannot even be conceived as pleasure and pain, without necessarily presupposing them. In acting virtuously, we do what it is pleasant to do; but it is not on account of the pleasure that we perform the action, which it is delightful to us to do, and almost as delightful to us to have done. Indeed, to destroy our pleasure altogether, nothing more would be necessary, than to impress us with the belief, that the actions were performed by us, with no other view than to the selfish gratification which we might feel in thinking of them; and with a total carelessness as to the happiness of those to whose welfare the world conceived us to be making a generous sacrifice. If conformity to selfish gain were all which constitutes virtue, why should our pleasure in this case cease? It ceases for the best of all reasons, that it arises from virtue, and can arise only from virtue; and that in such a case, as there would no longer be any virtue, there would, therefore, no longer be any thing to be contemplated with satisfaction. Such is that gross and revolting system which would represent all the seeming moral excellencies of the world,— every generous exertion, every magnanimous forbearance,-as one universal deceit, one constant unwearied search of personal good, in which not a single wish ever wanders beyond that personal enjoyment of the individual. There is another form in which the selfish system may be presented to us, less unjust to our nature than that which we have been considering. It may be said, that we now do truly wish for the happiness of others, without any regard to our own immediate interest; but that we have become thus disinterested by the very influence of selfishness, only because our own interest has formerly been felt to be connected with the interest of others, diminishing and increasing with theirs in so many instances, that the love, which was originally confined, and confined in the strictest sense of exclusion so ourselves, is now diffused in some measure to them, as if almost parts of ourselves; that we have learned to value their happiness, however, only on account of the relation which it has been found to bear to ours; but for which relation, as evolved to us more and more distinctly in the whole progress of social life, we should be absolutely incapable of a single wish for their happiness,-of a single wish for their freedom from the severest agony, even when their agony was beneath our very view, and could be suspended by our utterance of a single word of command, to him who waited in dreadful ministry on the rack or on the stake; or at least, if, in such circumstances we could have wished any relief to their torture, it must have been merely to free our ears from the noise of groans or shrieks, that, like any other noise, might be a little too loud to be agreeable to us. According to this system, the happiness of others is loved as representative of our own-in the same way, as any object with which our own pleasure has been associated, becomes itself an object of pleasure to us. Our virtues, therefore, arising in every case from the discovery of some relation which the happiness of others bears to our own physical happiness, are not so much the causes of enjoyment, as the results |