What I have said of pride is equally true of humility. The sensation of
humility is uneasy, as that of pride is agreeable; for which reason the
separate sensation, arising from the causes, must be reversed, while
the relation to self continues the same. Though pride and humility are
directly contrary in their effects, and in their sensations, they have
notwithstanding the same object; so that it is requisite only to change
the relation of impressions, without making any change upon that
of ideas. Accordingly we find, that a beautiful house, belonging to
ourselves, produces pride; and that the same house, still belonging to
ourselves, produces humility, when by any accident its beauty is
changed into deformity, and thereby the sensation of pleasure, which
corresponded to pride, is transformed into pain, which is related to
humility. The double relation between the ideas and impressions subsists
in both cases, and produces an easy transition from the one emotion to
the other.
In a word, nature has bestowed a kind of attraction on certain
impressions and ideas, by which one of them, upon its appearance,
naturally introduces its correlative. If these two attractions or
associations of impressions and ideas concur on the same object, they
mutually assist each other, and the transition of the affections and
of the imagination is made with the greatest ease and facility. When
an idea produces an impression, related to an impression, which is
connected with an idea, related to the first idea, these two impressions
must be in a manner inseparable, nor will the one in any case be
unattended with the other. It is after this manner, that the particular
causes of pride and humility are determined. The quality, which operates
on the passion, produces separately an impression resembling it; the
subject, to which the quality adheres, is related to self, the object of
the passion: No wonder the whole cause, consisting of a quality and of a
subject, does so unavoidably give rise to the pass on.
To illustrate this hypothesis we may compare it to that, by which I
have already explained the belief attending the judgments, which we form
from causation. I have observed, that in all judgments of this kind,
there is always a present impression and a related idea; and that
the present impression gives a vivacity to the fancy, and the relation
conveys this vivacity, by an easy transition, to the related idea.
Without the present impression, the attention is not fixed, nor the
spirits excited. Without the relation, this attention rests on its
first object, and has no farther consequence. There is evidently a great
analogy betwixt that hypothesis and our present one of an impression
and idea, that transfuse themselves into another impression and idea by
means of their double relation: Which analogy must be allowed to be no
despicable proof of both hypotheses.
SECT. VI LIMITATIONS OF THIS SYSTEM