What is Prudence?

Introduction

¹ We naturally view an individual’s character under two aspects=

1. As it may affect his own happiness
2. As it may affect the happiness of others

² Nature first recommends the body’s preservation and healthful state to every individual’s care. Hunger and thirst, pleasure and pain, heat and cold, etc. are lessons delivered by the voice of Nature herself. Nature directs him what he should choose and avoid. Most of his first lessons from his parents also teaches him how to keep out of harm’s way.

³ As he grows up, he soon learns that some care and foresight are necessary for=

• gratifying those natural appetites,
• procuring pleasure and avoiding pain, and
• procuring the agreeable and avoiding the disagreeable temperatures.

This care and foresight guides him to preserve and increase his external fortune.

⁴ The advantages of external fortune are originally recommended to us to supply the body’s needs. But we cannot live long in the world without perceiving that our external fortune very much determines:

• the respect of our equals, and
• our credit and rank in our society.

The strongest of all our desires is perhaps the desire of:

• becoming the proper objects of this respect, and
• deserving and obtaining this credit and rank among our equals

Our anxiety to obtain the advantages of fortune is accordingly much more excited and irritated by this desire, than by the desire of supplying all the body’s necessities and conveniencies. The latter are always very easily supplied.

⁵ Our rank and credit among our equals depend very much on:

• our character and conduct, or
• the confidence, esteem, and good-will, which these naturally excite in the people we live with

A virtuous man would perhaps wish our rank and credit to depend entirely on these.

⁶ His comfort and happiness in this life are supposed principally to depend on the care of the individual’s:

• health
• fortune
• rank and reputation

These objects are the proper business of Prudence.

⁷ We suffer more when we fall from a better to a worse situation, than we ever enjoy when we rise from a worse to a better.

Therefore, security is the first and the principal object of prudence. It is averse to expose our health, fortune, rank, or reputation, to any hazard. It is rather:

• cautious than enterprising
• anxious to preserve our existing advantages, than forward to prompt us to acquire more advantages

It principally recommends to us the following methods to improve our fortune without exposing us to loss or hazard:

• real knowledge and skill in our trade or profession
• assiduity and industry in their exercise
• frugality and even some parsimony, in all our expences.

The Prudent Man

⁸ The prudent man is simple and modest. His talents may not always be very brilliant, but they are always perfectly genuine. He does not try to be an artful impostor, assuming pedant, or an imprudent pretender.

He is averse to all the quackish arts. Other people frequently use such arts to make themselves popular. For professional reputation, he relies on the solidity of his knowledge and abilities.

He does not try to gain the favour of those little clubs and cabals who:

• often call themselves as the supreme judges of merit in the superior arts and sciences
• make it their business to celebrate each other’s talents and virtues and decry whatever competes with them.

If he ever connects with such a cabal, it is merely for self-defence. It is to prevent the public from being imposed on by that cabal’s clamours or intrigues to his disadvantage.

⁹ The prudent man is always sincere and feels horror in falsehood. But he is not always frank and open. He tells the truth, but not the whole truth when unnecessary. He is cautious in his actions and reserved in his speech. He never rashly obtrudes his opinion.

¹⁰ The prudent man is not always distinguished by the most exquisite sensibility. His friendship is often a transitory affection, not ardent and passionate.

It is a sedate, but steady and faithful attachment to a few well-chosen friends. His choice of friends is not guided by the giddy admiration of shining accomplishments, but by the sober esteem of modesty, discretion, and good conduct.

He is not always sociable. He rarely frequents those convivial, jolly societies in which their way of life might:

• interfere with his temperance’s regularity, his industry’s steadiness, or his frugality’s strictness.

¹¹ His conversation might not always be very sprightly, but it is always inoffensive.

He is never rude and is commonly willing to place himself below his equals. He observers decency in his conduct and conversation. He religiously respects all the established decorums and ceremonials of society. Talented and virtuous men have the most improper and insolent contempt of life’s ordinary decorums, from the age of:

• Socrates and Aristippus, down to the age of Dr. Swift and Voltaire, and
• Philip and Alexander the Great, down to the age of Peter the Great.

In this respect, he sets a much better example of observing decorum than those virtuous men. Those men set the most pernicious example to people who merely imitate their follies without attaining their perfections.

¹² The impartial spectator’s approbation rewards the prudent man in his industry, frugality, and his sacrifice of present ease for a more distant but greater ease.

The impartial spectator does not feel himself:

• worn out by the present labour of the people whose conduct he surveys
• solicited by the importunate calls of their present appetites

To him, their present and future situation are very nearly the same. However, he knows that to those persons, the present and the future=

• are very far from being the same
• naturally affect them in a very different way

He therefore approves self-command which enables them to act as if their present and future situation affected them in the same way they affect him.

¹³ The man who lives within his income is naturally contented with his own situation. It grows better everyday through small, continual accumulations.

He is enabled gradually to relax in the:

• rigour of his parsimony
• severity of his application

He feels doubly satisfied with this gradual increase of ease and enjoyment from having previously felt the hardship of poverty. He has no anxiety to change his comfortable situation.

He does not seek out new enterprises and adventures which might endanger but not increase his current security. He only enters into new projects or enterprises that are well-prepared. He can never be hurried or driven into them by any necessity. He always has time and leisure to deliberate coolly what their consequences will be.

¹⁴ The prudent man is not willing to subject himself to any responsibility which his duty does not impose on him. He does not meddle in other people’s affairs nor gives advice when nobody is asking for it.

He minds his own business. When called on, he will agree to serve his country. But he will not cabal to force himself into it. He would be more pleased that the public business were well managed by some other person, than by himself.

¹⁵ In short, prudence is a most respectable, and even an amiable quality when it is directed at one’s health, fortune, rank and reputation.

But it is not the most ennobling of the virtues. It commands a certain cold esteem, but is not entitled to any ardent love or admiration.

¹⁶ Wise and judicious conduct is properly called prudence when it directed to greater and nobler purposes than to the care of the individual’s health, fortune, rank and reputation.

We talk of the prudence of the great general, statesman, and legislator. In all these cases, prudence is combined with many greater virtues such as:

• valour
• extensive and strong benevolence
• a sacred regard to the rules of justice
• a proper self-command which supports all these virtues

When perfected, this superior prudence:

• leads to the talent and the habit of acting with perfect propriety in every situation
• leads to the perfection of all the intellectual and moral virtues
• is the best head joined to the best heart
• is the most perfect wisdom combined with the most perfect virtue
• makes up the the character of the Platonist or the Aristotlean sage, just as the inferior prudence makes up the character of the Epicurean man

¹⁷ Mere imprudence is the lack of the capacity to take care of oneself. It is the object of compassion of the people who are generous and humane, and have:

• less delicate sentiments,
• neglect, and
• contempt, at worst.

But imprudence is never the object of hatred. However, mere imprudence aggravates its own disgrace when combined with other vices. The artful scammer has enough skill to avoid disgrace, but not from suspicion. The foolish scammer is convicted because of his lack of skill and is hated.

In countries where great crimes are unpunished, the most atrocious actions become almost familiar. They cease to impress the people with that horror felt in countries where justice is exactly administered. The injustice is the same in both countries, but the imprudence is often very different.

• In the latter, great crimes are great follies.
• In the former, they are not always so.

In Italy, during most of the 16th century, assassinations, murders, and even murders under trust, were familiar among the upper class. Caesar Borgia invited four of the little princes in his neighbourhood to a friendly conference at Senigaglia. They all had little sovereignties and little armies of their own. As soon as they arrived, he had them all killed. This murder was certainly not approved of even in that time. But it contributed=

• very little to his discredit, and
• not in the least to his ruin.

That ruin happened a few years after from causes disconnected with this crime. Niccolo Machiavelli did not have the nicest morality even for his own times.

When that murder was committed, he was resident at Caesar Borgia’s court, as minister from the republic of Florence. He writes about it coolly, in that pure, elegant, and simple language which distinguishes all his writings. He is pleased with how Caesar Borgia conducted it. He hated the dupery and the sufferers’ weakness.

But he has:

• no compassion for their miserable and untimely death, and
• no indignation at their murderers’ cruelty and falsehood.

The violence and injustice of great conquerors are often foolishly admired. Those of petty thieves, robbers, and murderers are always hated and even feared.

Great conquerors are 100 times more mischievous and destructive. Yet when successful, they often pass as heroically magnanimous. Their injustice is at least as great as that of petty thieves. But their folly and imprudence are not as great.

Petty thieves and murderers are always hated. Their crimes are viewed as the lowest and most worthless. A wicked and worthless man of parts often gets much more credit than he deserves.

A wicked and worthless fool is always the most contemptible of all mortals. Prudence, combined with other virtues, constitutes the noblest characters. Imprudence combined with other vices, constitutes the vilest of all characters.