The result of all this was that men agreed to stigmatise under the term “vice” whatever was injurious, and to eulogise as “virtue” whatever was beneficial to society. The opinions of Mandeville attracted, when they were published, an attention greatly beyond their intrinsic merit, but they are now sinking rapidly into deserved oblivion. The author, in a poem called the “Fable of the Bees,” and in comments attached to it, himself advocated a thesis altogether inconsistent with that I have described, maintaining that “private vices were public benefits,” and endeavouring, in a long series of very feeble and sometimes very grotesque arguments, to prove that vice was in the highest degree beneficial to mankind. A far greater writer had however already framed a scheme of morals which, if somewhat less repulsive, was in no degree less selfish than that of Mandeville; and the opinions of Hobbes concerning the essence and origin of virtue, have, with no very great variations, been adopted by what may be termed the narrower school of Utilitarians. According to these writers we are governed exclusively by our own interest.(3) Pleasure, they assure us, is the only good,(4) and moral good and moral evil mean nothing more than our voluntary conformity to a law that will bring it to us.(5) To love good simply as good, is impossible.(6) When we speak of the goodness of God, we mean only His goodness to us.(7) Reverence is nothing more than our conviction, that one who has power to do us both good and harm, will only do us good.(8) The pleasures of piety arise from the belief that we are about to receive pleasure, and the pains of piety from the belief that we are about to suffer pain from the Deity.(9) Our very affections, according to some of these writers, are all forms of self-love. Thus charity springs partly from our desire to obtain the esteem of others, partly from the expectation that the favours we have bestowed will be reciprocated, and partly, too, from the gratification of the sense of power, by the proof that we can satisfy not only our own desires but also the desires of others.(10) Pity is an emotion arising from a vivid realisation of sorrow that may befall ourselves, suggested by the sight of the sorrows of others. We pity especially those who have not deserved calamity, because we consider ourselves to belong to that category; and the spectacle of suffering against which no forethought could provide, reminds us most forcibly of what may happen to ourselves.(11) Friendship is the sense of the need of the person befriended.(12)