CXXXIV. Vulgar prejudices are those which arise out of accident, ignorance, or authority. Natural prejudices are those which arise out of the constitution of the human mind itself.
CXXXV. Nature is stronger than reason: for nature is, after all, the text, reason but the comment. He is indeed a poor creature who does not feel the truth of more than he knows or can explain satisfactorily to others.
CXXXVI. The mind revolts against certain opinions, as the stomach rejects certain foods.
CXXXVII. The drawing a certain positive line in morals, beyond which a single false step is irretrievable, makes virtue formal, and vice desperate.
CXXXVIII. Most codes of morality proceed on a supposition of Original Sin; as if the only object was to coerce the headstrong propensities to vice, and there were no natural disposition to good in the mind, which it was possible to improve, refine, and cultivate.
CXXXIX. This negative system of virtue leads to a very low style of moral sentiment. It is as if the highest excellence in a picture was to avoid gross defects in drawing; or in writing, instances of bad grammar. It ought surely to be our aim in virtue, as well as in other things, ‘to snatch a grace beyond the reach of art.’
CXL. We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation.
CXLI. There is neither so much vice nor so much virtue in the world, as it might appear at first sight that there is. Many people commit actions that they hate, as they affect virtues that they laugh at, merely because others do so.
CXLII. When the imagination is continually led to the brink of vice by a system of terror and denunciations, people fling themselves over the precipice from the mere dread of falling.
CXLIII. The maxim—Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor—has not been fully explained. In general, it is taken for granted, that those things that our reason disapproves, we give way to from passion. Nothing like it. The course that persons in the situation of Medea pursue has often as little to do with inclination as with judgment: but they are led astray by some object of a disturbed imagination, that shocks their feelings and staggers their belief; and they grasp the phantom to put an end to this state of tormenting suspense, and to see whether it is human or not.