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be said that riches and power have any particular tendency to confer it. No body ever 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 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 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. In The cases 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 how 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 considered an instance of private duty: if we take one of public duty, it /the question/ 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 passion tho' not unexampled hitherto unhappily in public men but too rare) and that this was his motive, the gratification of this his pleasure;a besides that this pleasure does not appear to be strictly the same with that in question: we must observe: that either 1\TstT\ the person is conscious of the motives the causes of that affection, in which case he is conscious that they are partly the sense of the physical benefits he in common with the 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 it is necessary he should put it in practise to maintain: in short, to the pain every man must feel after having rendered 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 the fruit of a good education given him by persons acting under the consciousness of these motives, or from the precepts of some (to [...?]come to the last) who were. Maupertuis
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Identifier: | JB/096/131/001"JB/" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 96. |
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legislation |
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maupertuis iv |
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jeremy bentham |
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