There are actions that are agreeable or disagreeable to us, that procure us advantages or injure us, in a word, that are, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, addressed to our interest. We are rejoiced with actions that are useful to us, and shun those that may injure us. We seek earnestly and with the greatest effort what seems to us our interest. This is an incontestable fact. Here is another fact that is not less incontestable. There are actions that have no relation to us, that, consequently, we cannot estimate and judge on the ground of our interest, that we nevertheless qualify as good or bad. Suppose that before your eyes a man, strong and armed, falls upon another man, feeble and disarmed, whom he maltreats and kills, in order to take away his purse. Such an action does not reach you in any way, and, notwithstanding, it fills you with indignation.[216] You do every thing in your power that this murderer may be arrested and delivered up to justice; you demand that he shall be punished, and if he is punished in one way or another, you think that it is just; your indignation is appeased only after a chastisement proportioned to the crime committed has been inflicted on the culprit. I repeat that in this you neither hope nor fear any thing for yourself. Were you placed in an inaccessible fortress, from the top of which you might witness this scene of murder, you would feel these sentiments none the less. This is only a rude picture of what takes place in you at the sight of a crime. Apply now a little reflection and analysis to the different traits of which this picture is composed, without destroying their nature, and you will have a complete philosophic theory. What is it that first strikes you in what you have experienced? It is doubtless the indignation, the instinctive horror that you have felt. There is, then, in the soul a power of raising indignation that is foreign to all personal interests! There are, then, in us sentiments of which we are not the end! There is an antipathy, an aversion, a horror, that are not related to what injures us, but to acts whose remotest influence cannot reach us, that we detest for the sole reason that we judge them to be bad!