person; and that prince, notwithstanding his social and harmless
disposition, appears to have lived and died without a friend. The
whole gentry and nobility of England exposed their lives and fortunes
in the cause of Charles I., his more frugal and distinguishing son,
notwithstanding the coldness and distant severity of his ordinary
deportment.
2. Secondly, I say, That wherever the conduct of the agent appears to
have been entirely directed by motives and affections which we
thoroughly enter into and approve of, we can have no sort of sympathy
with the resentment of the sufferer, how great soever the mischief
which may have been done to him. When two people quarrel, if we take
part with, and entirely adopt the resentment of one of them, it is
impossible that we should enter into that of the other. Our sympathy
with the person whose motives we go along with, and whom therefore we
look upon as in the right, cannot but harden us against all
fellow-feeling with the other, whom we necessarily regard as in the
wrong. Whatever this last, therefore, may have suffered, while it is
no more than what we ourselves should have wished him to suffer, while
it is no more than what our own sympathetic indignation would have
prompted us to inflict upon him, it cannot either displease or provoke
us. When an inhuman murderer is brought to the scaffold, though we
have some compassion for his misery, we can have no sort of
fellow-feeling with his resentment, if he should be so absurd as to
express any against either his prosecutor or his judge. The natural
tendency of their just indignation against so vile a criminal is
indeed the most fatal and {67} ruinous to him. But it is impossible
that we should be displeased with the tendency of a sentiment, which,
when we bring the case home to ourselves, we feel that we cannot avoid
adopting.
-----
CHAP. IV.--_Recapitulation of the foregoing Chapters._
1. WE do not therefore thoroughly and heartily sympathize with the
gratitude of one man towards another, merely because this other has
been the cause of his good fortune, unless he has been the cause of it
from motives which we entirely go along with. Our heart must adopt the
principles of the agent, and go along with all the affections which
influenced his conduct, before it can entirely sympathize with and
beat time to, the gratitude of the person who has been benefited by
his actions. If in the conduct of the benefactor there appears to have
been no propriety, how beneficial soever its effects, it does not seem
to demand, or necessarily to require, any proportionable recompense.
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