Admiration is an essentially disinterested sentiment. See whether there is any interest in the world that has the power to give you admiration for any thing or any person. If you were interested, you might feign admiration, but you would not feel it. A tyrant with death in his hand, may constrain you to appear to admire, but not to admire in reality. Even affection does not determine admiration; whilst a heroic trait, even in an enemy, compels you to admire. The phenomenon opposed to admiration is indignation. Indignation is no more anger than admiration is desire. Anger is wholly personal. Indignation is never directly related to us; it may have birth in the midst of circumstances wherein we are engaged, but the foundation and the dominant character of the phenomenon in itself is to be disinterested. Indignation is in its nature generous. If I am a victim of an injustice, I may feel at once anger and indignation, anger against him that injures me, indignation towards him who is unjust to one of his fellow-men. We may be indignant towards ourselves; we are indignant towards every thing that wounds the sentiment of justice. Indignation covers a judgment, the judgment that he who commits such or such an action, whether against us, or even for us, does an action unworthy, contrary to our dignity, to his own dignity, to human dignity. The injury sustained is not the measure of indignation, as the advantage received is not that of admiration. We felicitate ourselves on possessing or having acquired a useful thing; but we never admire, on that account, either ourselves or the thing that we have just acquired. So we repel the stone that wounds us, we do not feel indignant towards it. Admiration elevates and ennobles the soul. The generous parts of human nature are disengaged and exalted in presence of, and as it were in contact with, the image of the good. This is the reason why admiration is already by itself so beneficent, even should it be deceived in its object. Indignation is the result of these same generous parts of the soul, which, wounded by injustice, are highly roused and protest in the name of offended human dignity.