Another difficulty is, that sentiments pertain to sensibility, and borrow from it something of its relative and changing nature. It is, then, very necessary that all men should be made to enjoy with the same delicacy the pleasures of the heart. There are gross natures and natures refined. If your desires are impetuous and violent, will not the idea of the pleasures of virtue be in you much more easily overcome by the force of passion than if nature had given you a tranquil temperament? The state of the atmosphere, health, sickness, calm or rouse our moral sensibility. Solitude, by delivering man up to himself, leaves to remorse all its energy, the presence of death redoubles it; but the world, noise, force of example, habit, without power to smother it, in some sort stun it. The spirit has a little season of rest. We are not always in the vein of enthusiasm. Courage itself has its intermissions. We know the celebrated expression: He was one day brave. Humor has its vicissitudes that influence our most intimate sentiments. The purest, the most ideal sentiment still pertains on some side to organization. The inspiration of the poet, the passion of the lover, the enthusiasm of the martyr, have their languors and shortcomings that often depend on very pitiable material causes. On those perpetual fluctuations of sentiment, is it possible to ground a legislation equal for all? Sympathy and benevolence do not escape the conditions of all the phenomena of sensibility. We do not all possess in the same degree the power of feeling what others experience. Those who have suffered most best comprehend suffering, and consequently feel for it the most lively compassion. With mere imagination one also represents to himself better and feels more what passes in the souls of his fellow-man. One feels more sympathy for physical pleasures and pains, another for pleasures and pains of soul; and each of these sympathies has in each of us its degrees and variations. They not only differ, they often oppose each other. Sympathy for talent weakens the indignation that outraged virtue produces. We overlook many things in Voltaire, in Rousseau, in Mirabeau, and we excuse them on account of the corruption of their century. The sympathy caused by the pain of a condemned person renders less lively the just antipathy excited by his crime. Thus turns and wavers at each step that sympathy which some would set up as the supreme arbiter of the good. Benevolence does not vary less. We have souls naturally more or less affectionate, more or less animated. And, then, like sympathy, benevolence receives the counter-stroke of different passions that are mingled with it. Friendship, for example, often renders us, in spite of ourselves, more benevolent than justice would wish.