The inference here stated, that benevolence is merely a reflection from self-love, is founded on the assumption that we always feel for others in proportion to the advantage they are of to us, and this assumption is a false one. That the habitual or known connexion between our own welfare and that of others, is one great source of our attachment to them, one bond of society, is what I do not wish to deny: the question is whether it is the only one in the mind, or whether benevolence has not a natural basis of its own to rest upon, as well as self-love. Grant this, and the actual effects which we observe in human life will follow from both principles combined: but to say that our attachment to others is in the exact ratio of our obligations to them, is contrary to all we know of human nature. I would ask whether the affection of a mother for her child is owing to the good received or bestowed; to the child’s power of conferring benefits, or its standing in need of assistance? Are not the fatigues which the mother undergoes for the child, its helpless condition, its little vexations, its sufferings from ill health or accidents, additional ties upon maternal tenderness, which by increasing the attention to the wants of the child and anxiety to supply them, produce a proportionable interest in an attachment to its welfare? Helvetius justly observes that we prefer a friend to a stranger, but the reason which he assigns for it, that our interests and pleasures are more closely allied, is not the only one. We participate in the successes of our friends, it is true, but we also participate in their distresses and disappointments, and it is not always found that this lessens our regard for them. Benevolence, therefore, is not a mere physical reflection from self-love. His account of friendship agrees exactly with that which the grave historian of Jonathan Wild has given of the friendship between his hero and Count La Ruse: ‘Mutual interest, the greatest of all purposes, was the cement of this alliance, which nothing of consequence but superior interest was capable of dissolving.’ The mechanical principle of association, understood in a strict sense, will not account for the multifarious and mixed nature of our affections, and if we do not understand it in a strict sense, it will then only be another name for sympathy, imagination, or any thing else.