Our natural love and hatred for others Simplified

²⁰ In smaller offences and greater crimes, a person of sensibility is frequently much more hurt by the unjust imputation, than the real criminal is by the actual guilt.

A woman of gallantry laughs even at the well-founded surmises circulated about her conduct. The worst founded surmise of the same kind is a mortal stab to an innocent virgin. We may lay as a general rule, that the person who is deliberately guilty of a disgraceful action can seldom have much sense of the disgrace. The person who is habitually guilty of it, can scarce ever have any sense of disgrace

²¹ Why does unmerited reproach can severely mortify men of the best judgement?

²² In almost all cases, pain is a more pungent sensation than pleasure.

Pain almost always depresses us far below our natural state of happiness than pleasure raises us above it. A man of sensibility is more humiliated by just censure than he is ever elevated by just applause. A wise man always rejects unmerited applause with contempt.

But he often feels the injustice of unmerited censure very severely.

He feels that he is guilty of a mean falsehood by:

• being applauded for something that he has not done,
• assuming a merit which does not belong to him, and
• deserving the contempt of those persons who admired him by mistake.

He might be pleased to find that he has been thought capable by many people of doing something that he did not do.

But he would think himself guilty of the greatest baseness if he did not immediately undeceive them.

It gives him little pleasure to look on himself as how others would actually look on him.

When he is conscious that, if they knew the truth, they would see him in a very different light. A weak man, however, is often much delighted with viewing himself in this false and delusive light.

He assumes the merit of every laudable action that is ascribed to him. He pretends to the merit of many actions which nobody ever thought of ascribing to him. He pretends to: have done what he never did, have written what another wrote, have invented what another discovered.

He is led into all the miserable vices of plagiarism and common lying. No man of middling good sense can derive much pleasure from the imputation of a laudable action which he never performed. Yet a wise man may suffer great pain from the serious imputation of a crime which he never committed.

In this case, Nature has rendered the pain more pungent than the opposite and correspondent pleasure. She has rendered it so in a much greater than the ordinary degree.

A denial rids a man at once of the foolish and ridiculous pleasure. But it will not always rid him of the pain. When he refuses the merit ascribed to him, nobody doubts his veracity. It may be doubted when he denies the crime which he is accused of.

He is at once enraged at the falsehood of the imputation. He is mortified to find that any credit should be given to it. He feels that his character is insufficient to protect him. He feels that his brethren, far from looking on him in that light in which he anxiously desires to be viewed by them, think him capable of being guilty of what he is accused of.

He knows perfectly:

• that he has not been guilty
• what he has done but perhaps scarce any man can know perfectly what he himself is capable of

Every person might doubt what his own mind may or may not admit of.

The trust and good opinion of his friends and neighbours, relieves him the most from this doubt. Their distrust and unfavourable opinion to increase it

He may think himself very confident that their unfavourable judgment is wrong: but this confidence can seldom be so great as to hinder that judgment from making some impression upon him.

This impression will likely be greater the greater his:

The greater his sensibility, the greater his delicacy, the greater his worth in short