REFLECTIONS;
OR, SENTENCES AND MORAL MAXIMS
Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.
[This epigraph which is the key to the system of La Rochefoucauld, is found in another form as No. 179 of the maxims of the first edition, 1665, it is omitted from the 2nd and 3rd, and reappears for the first time in the 4th edition, in 1675, as at present, at the head of the Reflections.—Aimé Martin. Its best answer is arrived at by reversing the predicate and the subject, and you at once form a contradictory maxim equally true, our vices are most frequently but virtues disguised.]
1.—What we term virtue is often but a mass of various actions and divers interests, which fortune, or our own industry, manage to arrange; and it is not always from valour or from chastity that men are brave, and women chaste.
"Who combats bravely is not therefore brave, He dreads a death-bed like the meanest slave; Who reasons wisely is not therefore wise, His pride in reasoning, not in acting, lies." Pope, Moral Essays, Ep. i. line 115.
2.—Self-love is the greatest of flatterers.
3.—Whatever discoveries have been made in the region of self-love, there remain many unexplored territories there.
[This is the first hint of the system the author tries to develope. He wishes to find in vice a motive for all our actions, but this does not suffice him; he is obliged to call other passions to the help of his system and to confound pride, vanity, interest and egotism with self love. This confusion destroys the unity of his principle.—Aimé Martin.]
4.—Self love is more cunning than the most cunning man in the world.