240 HUME xi 



of escape from debasement, they are in a bad ease. 

 For they will assuredly find that virtue presents 

 no very close likeness to the sportive leader of the 

 joyous hours in Hume's rosy picture; but that she 

 is an awful Goddess, whose ministers are the 

 Furies, and whose highest reward is peace. 



It is not improbable that Hume would have 

 qualified all this as enthusiasm or fanaticism, or 

 both; but he virtually admits it: 



" Now, as virtue is an end, and is desirable on its own 

 account, without fee or reward, merely for the immediate 

 satisfaction which it conveys, it is requisite that there should 

 be some sentiment which it touches ; some internal taste or 

 feeling, or whatever you please to call it, which distinguishes 

 moral good and evil, and which embraces the one and re- 

 jects the other. 



" Thus the distinct boundaries and offices of reason and 

 of taste are easily ascertained. The former conveys the 

 knowledge of truth and falsehood : The latter gives the sen- 

 timent of beauty and deformity, vice and virtue. The one 

 discovers objects as they really stand in nature, without 

 addition or diminution : The other has a productive faculty, 

 and gilding and staining all natural objects with the col- 

 ours borrowed from internal sentiment, raises in a manner 

 a new creation. Reason being cool and disengaged, is no 

 motive to action, and directs only the impulse received from 

 appetite or inclination, by showing us the means of attain- 

 ing happiness or avoiding misery. Taste, as it gives pleas- 

 ure or pain, and thereby constitutes happiness or misery, 

 becomes a motive to action, and is the first spring or im- 

 pulse to desire and volition. From circumstances and rela- 

 tions known or supposed, the former leads us to the discov- 

 ery of the concealed and unknown. After all circumstances 

 and relations are laid before us, the latter makes us feel 

 from the whole a new sentiment of blame or approbation. 

 The standard of the one, being founded on the nature of 



