Aids to Reflection
Format: Paperback
ISBN13: 9780217675819
Paperback|9780217675819
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: REFLECTIONS INTRODUCTORY TO MORAL AND RELIGIOUS APHORISMS. ON SENSIBILITY. If prudence, though practically inseparable from morality, is not to be confounded with the moral principle; still less may sensibility, that is, a constitutional quickness of sympathy with pain and pleasure, and a keen sense of the gratifications that accompany social intercourse, mutual endearments, and reciprocal preferences, be mistaken, or deemed a substitute, for either. Sensibility is not even a sure pledge of a good heart, though among the most common meanings of that many-meaning and too commonly misapplied expression. So far from being either morality, or one with the moral principle, it ought not even to be placed in the same rank with prudence. For prudence is at least an offspring of the understanding; but sensibility (the sensibility, I mean, here spoken of) is for the greater part a quality of the nerves, and a result of individual bodily temperament. Prudence is an active principle, and implies a sacri fice of self, though only to the same self projected, as it were, to a distance. But the very term sensibility, marks its passive nature; and in its mere self, apart from choice and reflection, it proves little more than the coincidence or contagion of pleasurable or painful sensations in different persons. Alas how many are there in this over-stimulated age, in which the occurrence of excessive and unhealthy sensitiveness is so frequent, as even to have reversed the current meaning of the word, nervous. How many are there whose sensibility prompts them to remove those evils alone, which by hideous spectacle or clamorous outcry are present to their senses and disturb their selfish enjoyments. Provided the dunghill is not before their parlour window, they are well conten...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217675819 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217675816 |
| Weight | 0.89 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.61 In |
| List Price | $26.99 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 272 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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