The same remarks are applicable to all the virtues, of which the observance is essential to public order: what method would plain reasoning take to persuade a single man, that he ought not to deprive a husband of the affections of his wife? Where would you assign him a distinct recompense for the sacrifice of his passion? What windings should we not be obliged to run over, to demonstrate to an ambitious man, that he ought not, in secret, to calumniate his rival; to the solitary miser, armed with indifference, that he ought not to remove himself from every occasion of doing good; to a disposition ardent and revengeful, that he ought not to obey those urgent impulses which hurry him away; to a man in want, that he ought not to have recourse to falsehood to procure attention, or to deceive in any other manner? And how many other positions would offer the same difficulties, and still greater? Abstract ideas, the best arranged, can never conquer us but by long arguments, since the peculiar nature of these ideas is to disengage our reasoning from the feelings, and consequently from striking and sudden impressions; besides, political morality, like every thing which the mind only produces, would be always for us merely an opinion; an opinion from which we should have a right to appeal, at any time, to the tribunal of our reason. The lessons of men are nothing but representations of their judgment; and the sentiments of some draw not the will of others. There is not any principle of morality, which, under forms absolutely human, would not be susceptible of exceptions, or of some modification; and there is nothing so compounded as the idea of the connexion of virtue with happiness: in short, while our understanding has a difficulty in comprehending and clearly distinguishing that union, the objects of our passions are every where apparent, and all our senses are preengaged by them. The miser beholds gold and silver; the ambitious man, those honours which are conferred on others; the debauchee, the objects of his luxury; virtue has nothing left but reasoning; and is then in want of being sustained by religious sentiments, and by the enlivening hopes which accompany them.