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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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No quality in another gives rise to humility by comparison, unless it would have produced pride by being placed in ourselves; and vice versa no object excites pride by comparison, unless it would have produced humility by the direct survey. But supposing this hypothesis of moral philosophy should be allowed to be false, it is still evident, that pain and pleasure, if not the causes of vice and virtue, are at least inseparable from them. Any great elevation of place communicates a kind of pride or sublimity of imagination, and gives a fancyed superiority over those that lie below; and, vice versa, a sublime and strong imagination conveys the idea of ascent and elevation. Secondly, I would have anyone give me a reason, why virtue and vice may not be involuntary, as well as beauty and deformity. The virtue of a brother must make me love him; as his vice or infamy must excite the contrary passion. To continue the experiment, I change anew the relation of ideas, and suppose the vice to belong to myself. To begin, with vice and virtue; which are the most obvious causes of these passions; it would be entirely foreign to my present purpose to enter upon the controversy, which of late years has so much excited the curiosity of the publick. Things are coexistent, when in empirical intuition the perception of the one can follow upon the perception of the other, and vice versa-- which cannot occur in the succession of phenomena, as we have shown in the explanation of the second principle. The passions do not always follow our corrections; but these corrections serve sufficiently to regulate our abstract notions, and are alone regarded, when we pronounce in general concerning the degrees of vice and virtue.