| Though we refuse to natural abilities the title of virtues, we must allow, that they procure the love and esteem of mankind; that they give a new lustre to the other virtues; and that a man possessed of them is much more intitled to our good-will and services, than one entirely void of them. |
| It may, indeed, be pretended. that the sentiment of approbation, which those qualities produce, besides its being inferior, is also somewhat different from that, which attends the other virtues. |
| But this, in my opinion, is not a sufficient reason for excluding them from the catalogue of virtues. |
| Each of the virtues, even benevolence, justice, gratitude. |
| integrity, excites a different sentiment or feeling in the spectator. |
| The characters of Caesar and Cato, as drawn by Sallust, are both of them virtuous, in the strictest sense of the word; but in a different way: Nor are the sentiments entirely the same, which arise from them. |
| The one produces love; the other esteem: The one is amiable; the other awful: We could wish to meet with the one character in a friend; the other character we would be ambitious of in ourselves. |
| In like manner, the approbation. which attends natural abilities, may be somewhat different to the feeling from that, which arises from the other virtues, without making them entirely of a different species. |
| And indeed we may observe, that the natural abilities, no more than the other virtues, produce not, all of them, the same kind of approbation. |
| 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. |