of all that is generous and heroic in man-I would almost say, the selfishness which is most divine in God.

Obvious as the distinction is, however, it has not been made by many philosophers, or, at least, by many writers who assume that honourable name,-the superficial but dazzling lovers of paradox, who prefer to truths that seem too simple to stand in need of defence, any errors, if only they be errors, that can be defended with ingenuity, though, in the present case, even this small praise of ingenuity scarcely can be allowed; and the errors which would seduce men into the belief of general selfishness, from which their nature shrinks, are fortunately as revolting to our understanding as they are to our heart. The fuller discussion of these, however, I defer, till that part of the Course which treats of virtue as a system of conduct. At present, I merely point out to you the fallacy which has arisen from the pleasing nature of the emotions in which love consists, or which precede love,-as if the pleasure in which love is necessarily presupposed were itself all to which the love owes its rise, and for the direct sake of which the love itself is felt.

I may remark, however, even now, the unfortunate effect of the poverty of our language, in aiding the illusion. The word selfishness, or, at least, self-love, has various meanings, some of which imply nothing that is reprehensible, while, in other senses, it is highly so. It may mean either the satisfaction which we feel in our own enjoyment, which, when there is no duty violated, is far from being, even in the slightest degree, unworthy of the purest mind; or it means that exclusive regard to our own pleasures, at the expense of the happiness of others, which is as degrading to the individual as it is pernicious to society. All men, it may, indeed, be allowed, are selfish, in the first of these meanings of the term, but this is only one meaning of a word, which has also a very different sense. The difference, however, is afterwards forgotten by us, because the same term is used; and we ascribe to self-love, in the one sense, what is true of it only in the other.

Much of the obscurity and confusion of the moral system of Pope, in his Essay on Man, arises from this occasional transition from one of the senses of the term to the other, without perceiving that a transition has been made. It is impossible to read some of the most beautiful passages of that poem, without feeling the wish, that we had some term to express the first of these senses, without any possibility of the suggestion of the other. It is not self-love, for example, which gives us to make our neighbour's blessing ours,-it scarcely even can be called self-love which first stirs the peaceful mind

-it is simply pleasure; and the enjoyment may or must accompany all the delightful progress of our moral affections; it is not any self-love, reflecting on the enjoyments that are thus to be obtained.

Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake,
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake ;
The centre moved, a circle straight succeeds;
Another still, and still another spreads :
Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace,
His country next, and next all human race.
Wide and more wide-the o'erflowings of the mind
Take every creature in of every kind.

Earth smiles around, with boundless bounty blest,
And Heaven beholds its image in his breast.*

In all these cases there is a diffusion of love, indeed, but not of self-love,-a pleasure attending in every stage the progressive benevolence, but affording it only, not producing it; and without which, if it were possible for benevolence to exist without delight, it would still, as before, be the directing spirit of every generous breast.

Ep. IV. v. 363-372.

381

LECTURE LX.

I. IMMEDIATE EMOTIONS, IN WHICH SOME MORAL FEELING IS NECESSARILY INVOLVED.-2. LOVE-HATE, CONTINUED.—RELATIONS WHICH THEY BEAR TO THE HAPPINESS OF MAN, AND TO THE BENEVOLENCE OF GOD.

IN my last Lecture, Gentlemen, I began the consideration of that order of our emotions, in which some moral relation is involved; and considered, in the first place, those vivid feelings, which arise in the mind on the contemplation of virtuous or vicious actions, and which, as we shall afterwards find, are truly all that distinguishes these actions to our moral regard, as vice or virtue. At present, however, they are not considered by us ethically, in their relation to conduct,-for, in this light, they are to be reviewed by us afterwards-but merely as mental phenomena-feelings or affections indicative of certain susceptibilities in the mind of being thus affected.

Next to these, in our arrangement, are the emotions of love and hatred,—to the consideration of which, therefore, I proceeded. The remarks which I made, were chiefly illustrative of a distinction, which is of great importance in the theory of morals, with respect to the pleasure excited by the objects of our regard,--a pleasure, which is, indeed, inseparable from the regard,--and without which, therefore, of course, no regard can be felt, but which is not, itself, the cause or object of the affection. My wish in these remarks, was to guard you against the sophistry of many philosophers, who seem to think that they have shewn man to be necessarily selfish, merely by shewing that it is delightful for him to love those, whom it is virtue to love; and whom it would have been impossible for him not to love, even though no happiness had attended the affection, as it is impossible for him not to despise or dislike the mean and the profligate, though no pleasure attends the contemplation. A little attention to this opposite class of feelings, which are not more essential to our nature than the others, might have been sufficient to shew, that the delight of loving

is not the cause of love. We depise, without any pleasure in despising, certainly, at least, not on account of any pleasure that can be imagined to be felt in despising. We love, in like manner, not for the pleasure of loving, but on account of the qualities which it is at once delightful for us to love, and impossible for us not to love. We cannot feel the pleasure of loving, unless we have previously begun to love; and it is surely as absurd an error, in this as in any other branch of physics, to ascribe to that which is second in a progressive scale, the production of that very primary cause, of which itself is the result.

The pleasure which accompanies the benevolent affections, that has been thus most strangely converted into the cause of those very benevolent affections, which it necessarily presupposes, is a convincing proof, how much the happiness of his creatures must have been in the contemplation of Him, who thus adapted their nature as much to the production of good, as to the enjoyment of it. We are formed to be malevolent in certain circumstances, as in other circumstances we are formed to be benevolent; but we are not formed to have equal enjoyment in both. The benevolent affections, of course, lead to the actions, by which happiness is directly diffused,-there is no moment, at which they may not operate, with advantage to society; and the more constant their operation, and the more widely spread, the greater, consequently, is the result of social good. The Deity, therefore, has not merely rendered us susceptible of these affections-he has made the continuance of them delightful, that we may not merely indulge them, but dwell in the indulgence.

"Thus hath God,

Still looking to his own high purpose, fix'd
The virtues of his creatures; thus he rules
The parent's fondness, and the patriot's zeal,
Thus the warm sense of honour and of shame,
The vows of gratitude, the faith of love,-

The joy of human life, the earthly Heaven.”

The moral affections, which lead to the infliction of evil, are occasionally as necessary, as the benevolent affections. If vice exist, it must be loathed by us, or we may learn to imiIf an individual have injured another individual, there must be indignation, to feel the wrong which has been done, and a zeal to avenge it. The malevolent affections, then, are evidently a part of virtue, as long as vice exists; but they are necessary only for the occasional purposes of nature, not for her general and permanent interest, in our welfare. If all

men were uniformly benevolent, the earth, indeed, might exhibit an appearance, on the contemplation of which it would be delightful to dwell. But a world of beings, universally and permanently hating and hated, is a world that fortunately could not exist long; and that, while it existed, could be only a place of torture, in which crimes were every moment punished, and every moment renewed,-or rather, in which crimes, and the mental punishment of crimes, were mingled in one dreadful confusion.

In such circumstances, what is it which we may conceive to be the plan of the Divine Goodness? It is that very plan, which we see at present executed, in our moral constitution. We are made capable of a malevolence, that may be said to be virtuous, when it operates, for the terror of injustice, that otherwise would walk, not in darkness, through the world, but in open light, perpetrating its iniquities, without shame or remorse, and perpetrating them with impunity. But that even this virtuous malevolence may not outlast the necessity for it, it is made painful for us to be malevolent, even in this best sense. We require to warm our mind, with the repeated image of every thing which has been suffered by the good; or of every thing which the good would suffer, in consequence of the impunity of the wicked, before we can bring ourselves to feel delight in the punishment, even of the most wicked, at least when the insolence of power and impunity is gone, and the offender is trembling at the feet of those whom he had injured. There are gentle feelings of mercy, that continually rise upon the heart, in such a case,—feelings that check even the pure and sacred resentment of indignation itself, and make rigid justice an effort, and, perhaps, one of the most painful efforts of virtue.

"To love is to enjoy," it has been said, "to hate is to suffer;" and, in conformity with this remark, the same writer observes, that "though it may not be always unjust, it must be always absurd to hate for any length of time, since it is to give him whom we hate, the advantage of occupying us with a painful feeling. Of two enemies, therefore, which is the more unhappy? He, we may always answer, whose hatred is the greater. The mere remembrance of his enemy, is an incessant uneasiness and agitation; and he endures, in his long enmity, far more pain than he wishes to inflict."

The annexation of pain to the emotions, that would lead to the infliction of pain, is, as I have said, a very striking proof, that he who formed man, did not intend him for purposes of malignity, as the delight, attached to all our benevolent emotions, may be considered as a positive proof, that it was for