The little sympathy which we feel with bodily pain, is the foundation
of the propriety of constancy and patience in enduring it. The man,
who under the severest tortures allows no weakness to escape him,
vents no groan, gives way to no passion which we do not entirely enter
into, commands our highest admiration. His firmness enables him to
keep time with our indifference and insensibility. We admire and
entirely go along with the magnanimous effort which he makes for this
purpose. We approve of his behaviour, and from our experience of the
common {30} weakness of human nature, we are surprised, and wonder how
he should be able to act so as to deserve approbation. Approbation,
mixed and animated by wonder and surprise, constitutes the sentiment
which is properly called admiration, of which, applause is the natural
expression, as has already been observed.
-----
CHAP. II.--_Of those Passions which take their Origin from a
particular Turn or Habit of the Imagination._
EVEN of the passions derived from the imagination, those which take
their origin from a peculiar turn or habit it has acquired, though
they may be acknowledged to be perfectly natural, are, however, but
little sympathized with. The imaginations of mankind, not having
acquired that particular turn, cannot enter into them; and such
passions, though they may be allowed to be almost unavoidable in some
part of life, are always, in some measure, ridiculous. This is the
case with that strong attachment which naturally grows up between two
persons of different sexes, who have long fixed their thoughts upon
one another. Our imagination not having run in the same channel with
that of the lover, we cannot enter into the eagerness of his emotions.
If our friend has been injured, we readily sympathize with his
resentment, and grow angry with the very person with whom he is angry.
If he has received a benefit, we readily enter into his gratitude, and
have a very high sense of the merit of his benefactor. But if he is in
love, though we may think his passion just as reasonable as any of the
kind, yet we never think ourselves bound to conceive a passion of the
same kind, and for the same person for whom he has conceived it. The
passion appears to every body, but the man who feels it, entirely
disproportioned to the value of the object; and love, though it is
pardoned in a certain age because we know it is natural, is always
laughed at, because we cannot enter into it. All serious and strong
expressions of it appear ridiculous to a third person; and though a
lover may be good company to his mistress, he is so to nobody else. He
himself is sensible of this; and as long as he continues in his sober
senses, endeavours to treat his own passion with raillery and
ridicule. It is the only style in which we care to hear of it; because
it is the only style in which we ourselves are disposed to talk of it.
We grow weary of the grave, pedantic, and long-sentenced love of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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