| Good sense and genius beget esteem: Wit and humour excite love. |
| [Footnote 27 Love and esteem are at the bottom the same passions, and arise from like causes. |
| The qualities, that produce both, are agreeable, and give pleasure. |
| But where this pleasure is severe and serious; or where its object is great, and makes a strong impression; or where it produces any degree of humility and awe: In all these cases, the passion, which arises from the pleasure, is more properly denominated esteem than love. |
| Benevolence attends both: But is connected with love in a more eminent degree.] |
| Those, who represent the distinction betwixt natural abilities and moral virtues as very material, may say, that the former are entirely involuntary, and have therefore no merit attending them, as having no dependance on liberty and free-will. |
| But to this I answer, first, that many of those qualities, which all moralists, especially the antients, comprehend under the title of moral virtues, are equally involuntary and necessary, with the qualities of the judgment and imagination. |
| Of this nature are constancy, fortitude, magnanimity; and, in short, all the qualities which form the great man. |
| I might say the same, in some degree, of the others; it being almost impossible for the mind to change its character in any considerable article, or cure itself of a passionate or splenetic temper, when they are natural to it. |
| The greater degree there is of these blameable qualities, the more vicious they become, and yet they are the less voluntary. |
| Secondly, I would have anyone give me a reason, why virtue and vice may not be involuntary, as well as beauty and deformity. |
| These moral distinctions arise from the natural distinctions of pain and pleasure; and when we receive those feelings from the general consideration of any quality or character, we denominate it vicious or virtuous. |
| Now I believe no one will assert, that a quality can never produce pleasure or pain to the person who considers it, unless it be perfectly voluntary in the person who possesses it. |
| Thirdly, As to free-will, we have shewn that it has no place with regard to the actions, no more than the qualities of men. |
| It is not a just consequence, that what is voluntary is free. |
| Our actions are more voluntary than our judgments; but we have not more liberty in the one than in the other. |
| But though this distinction betwixt voluntary and involuntary be not sufficient to justify the distinction betwixt natural abilities and moral virtues, yet the former distinction will afford us a plausible reason, why moralists have invented the latter. |
| Men have observed, that though natural abilities and moral qualities be in the main on the same footing, there is, however, this difference betwixt them, that the former are almost invariable by any art or industry; while the latter, or at least, the actions, that proceed from them, may be changed by the motives of rewards and punishments, praise and blame. |
| Hence legislators, and divines, and moralists, have principally applied themselves to the regulating these voluntary actions, and have endeavoured to produce additional motives, for being virtuous in that particular. |
| They knew, that to punish a man for folly, or exhort him to be prudent and sagacious, would have but little effect; though the same punishments and exhortations, with regard to justice and injustice, might have a considerable influence. |
| But as men, in common life and conversation, do not carry those ends in view, but naturally praise or blame whatever pleases or displeases them, they do not seem much to regard this distinction, but consider prudence under the character of virtue as well as benevolence, and penetration as well as justice. |