xml:lang="en" lang="en" dir="ltr">

Transcribe Bentham: A Collaborative Initiative

From Transcribe Bentham: Transcription Desk

Keep up to date with the latest news - subscribe to the Transcribe Bentham newsletter; Find a new page to transcribe in our list of Untranscribed Manuscripts

JB/096/131/001

Jump to: navigation, search
Completed

Click Here To Edit

be said that riches and power have any particular
tendency to confer it. duty there No body ever
are always are to fulfill thought yet of saying that there were not duties
to fulfill or that a man was not as able
to fulfill his duties as well without as
with them.

If riches and power therefore are good for
any thing it is for the physical pleasures benefits
they procure. What else then should
esteem be good for? Esteem is good, it is a source of pleasure nobody
can doubt of it. It is a means sometimes
of procuring sometimes physical pleasures directly,
at other times riches and power which
procure them: nobody can doubt of that
neither. We know no instance where
it is a source of pleasure, but where
it may procure them. Where we conceive In The cases

---page break---
where we can conceive it as being
no source of physical pleasure, we perceive
immediately that it can not be
the source of pleasure at all. It is not
comprized in our author's list catalogue of mental
pleasures. It follows that it gives pleasure
as being a source of physical
pleasure and no otherwise.

To which ever of these sources therefore
we refer the pleasure that a man takes
is fulfilling his duty, it appears that
it howe great soever the pleasures which it
confers, it is none strictly speaking of itself. It gives pleasure, because it gives
a view of others. - but suppose no others to
exist, and it would give none.

Hitherto we have consider'd an instance
of private duty: if we take one of public

---page break---
duty, + +the question it will stand just upon the same
footing.

Let that instance be the refusing of a bribe
by a man in public trust. If he finds
a pleasure in it it will be on one or
other or all of the three first accounts out
of the four we assigned before. If we
suppose in him a strong affection for his
country, (a strong passion tho' not unexampled
hitherto unhappily in public men but too rare) and that this
was his motive, the gratification of this his
pleasure; we must point out the original of a mans love for his country besides that this pleasure does
not appear to be strictly the same with
that in question: it may be said we must observe: that Either
1st the person k is conscious of the motives
the causes of that affection, in which case
he is conscious that they are partly the sense
of the <add>physical benefits</add> he in common with the

---page break---
rest of the citizens derives from the condition
which it is in, the constitution which
it enjoys; a constitution which would be
prejudiced by the act we suppose him
to abstain from: partly to the sense of the
esteem the honour that will redound to him in particular from that
particular act of patriotic self-denial
and from the character which he must it is necessary
he should put it in practise to maintain:
in short, to the pain every man
must feel after having render'd one course
of conduct habitual to him to run at
once into a quite opposite one.

Or else he is not conscious of those motives,
and then his conduct was once the fruit
of a good education given him by persons
acting under the consciousness of these motives,
or from the precepts of some who (to
come to the last) who were.


---page break---
IV Maupertuis



Identifier: | JB/096/131/001
"JB/" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 96.

Date_1

Marginal Summary Numbering

Box

096

Main Headings

legislation

Folio number

131

Info in main headings field

maupertuis iv

Image

001

Titles

Category

text sheet

Number of Pages

1

Recto/Verso

recto

Page Numbering

Penner

jeremy bentham

Watermarks

[[watermarks::gr [crown motif] [britannia with shield motif]]]

Marginals

Paper Producer

Corrections

Paper Produced in Year

Notes public

ID Number

31135

Box Contents

UCL Home » Transcribe Bentham » Transcription Desk