SENTIMENTS BELOW MORALS
Pasley remarked last night (2nd August 1805), and with great precision and originality, that men themselves, in the present age, were not so much degraded as their sentiments. This is most true! almost all men nowadays act and feel more nobly than they think—yet still the vile, cowardly, selfish, calculating ethics of Paley, Priestley, Locke, and other Erastians do woefully influence and determine our course of action.
TIME AND ETERNITY
O the complexities of the ravel produced by time struggling with eternity! a and b are different, and eternity or duration makes them one—this we call modification—the principle of all greatness in finite beings, the principle of all contradiction and absurdity.
THE PASSION FOR THE MOT PROPRE August 3, 1805 Saturday
It is worthy notice (shewn in the phrase "I envy him such and such a thing," meaning only, "I regret I cannot share with him, have the same as he, without depriving him of it, or any part of it,") the instinctive passion in the mind for a one word to express one act of feeling—[one] that is, in which, however complex in reality, the mind is conscious of no discursion and synthesis a posteriori. On this instinct rest all the improvements (and, on the habits formed by this instinct and [the] knowledge of these improvements, Vanity rears all the Apuleian, Apollonian, etc., etc., corruptions) of style. Even so with our Johnson.
BULLS OF ACTION