A. I might be half-tempted to do so.
B. Well; and if you were to find me admiring a fine picture, or speaking in terms of high praise of the person or qualities of another, would you not set it down equally to an excess of coxcombry and self-conceit?
A. How, in the name of common sense, should I do so?
B. Nay, how should you do otherwise upon your own principles? For if sympathy with another is to be construed into self-love because it is I who feel it, surely, by the same rule, my admiration and praise of another must be resolved into self-praise and self-admiration, and I am the whole time delighted with myself, to wit, with my own thoughts and feelings, while I pretend to be delighted with another. Another’s limbs are as much mine, who contemplate them, as his feelings.
A. Now, my good friend, you go too far: I can’t think you serious.
B. Do I not tell you that I have a most grave Bishop (equal to a whole Bench) on my side?
A. What! is this illustration of the looking-glass and picture his? I thought it was in your own far-fetched manner.
B. And why far-fetched?
A. Because nobody can think of calling the praise of another self-conceit—the words have a different meaning in the language.
B. Nobody has thought of confounding them hitherto, and yet they sound to me as like as selfishness and generosity. If our vanity can be brought to admire others disinterestedly, I do not see but our good-nature may be taught to serve them as disinterestedly. Grant me but this, that self-love signifies not simply, ‘I love,’ but requires to have this further addition, ‘I love myself.’ understood in order to make sense or grammar of it, and I defy you to make one or the other of Helvetius’s theory, if you will needs have it to be his. If, as Fielding says, all our passions are selfish merely because they are ours, then in hating another we must be said to hate ourselves, just as wisely as in loving another, we are said to be actuated by self-love. I have no patience with such foolery. I respect that fine old sturdy fellow Hobbes, or even the acute pertinacious sophistry of Mandeville; but I do not like the flimsy, self-satisfied repetition of an absurdity, which with its originality has lost all its piquancy.