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Click on the phrases to see them in context. The original texts by Immanuel Kant and David Hume are available from the Gutenberg Projet.
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The virtue and vice must be part of our character in order to excite pride or humility. Even when the vice of inhumanity rises not to this extreme degree, our sentiments concerning it are very much influenced by reflections on the harm that results from it. Nothing causes greater vanity than any shining quality in our relations; as nothing mortifies us more than their vice or infamy. In general, it may be affirmed, that there is no such passion in human minds, as the love of mankind, merely as such, independent of personal qualities, of services, or of relation to ourseit It is true, there is no human, and indeed no sensible, creature, whose happiness or misery does not, in some measure, affect us when brought near to us, and represented in lively colours: But this proceeds merely from sympathy, and is no proof of such an universal affection to mankind, since this concern extends itself beyond our own species. But if we are called upon to explain what we mean by substance, and wish to avoid the vice of reasoning in a circle, the answer is by no means so easy. You will receive a manual that explains how, why and what we are doing, a video where you'll meet us and see exactly how our business works and an audiotape to further help you with your decision. In giving a reason, therefore, for the pleasure or uneasiness, we sufficiently explain the vice or virtue. All the difference is, that our superior reason may serve to discover the vice or virtue, and by that means may augment the blame or praise: But still this discovery supposes a separate being in these moral distinctions, and a being, which depends only on the will and appetite, and which, both in thought and reality, may be distinguished from the reason. The very essence of virtue, according to this hypothesis, is to produce pleasure and that of vice to give pain.