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Updated: May 17, 2025
The associations of Disgrace, even when not sufficient to restrain the performance of acts abhorred by mankind, are able to produce the horrors of Remorse, the most intense of human sufferings. The love of praise leads by one step to the love of Praiseworthiness; the dread of blame, to the dread of Blameworthiness.
Then, we form further associations with the causes of praise and blame and thus acquire the sentiments of 'praiseworthiness' and 'blameworthiness. The sensibility to praise and blame generally forms the 'popular sanction, and this, when praiseworthiness is concerned, becomes the moral sanction.
But he was not the hero descending from heaven bright-sworded to smite a woman's fetters of her limbs and deliver her from the yawning mouth-abyss. His logical coolness of expostulation with her when she cast aside the silly mission entrusted to her by Sir Willoughby and wept for herself, was unheroic in proportion to its praiseworthiness.
The fact that there is a competition in such matters implies, no doubt, a temptation, the temptation to set a higher value upon praise than upon praiseworthiness; but I think it not only possible that the competitors in such rivalries may keep to the honourable path, but probable that, as a matter of fact, they frequently, I hope that I may say generally, do so.
This whole school of metaphysicians, indeed, from Calvin down to Emmons, can make God the author of our evil acts, by an exertion of his omnipotence, and yet assert that because they are voluntary we are justly blameworthy and punishable for them; but though our virtuous acts are also voluntary, they still insist the praiseworthiness of them is to be ascribed exclusively to Him by whom they were produced.
Similarly there are produced in him feelings of inclination or repugnance towards other lines of conduct that have become established or interdicted, because they are beneficial or injurious to the tribe; though neither the young nor the adults know why they have become established or interdicted. Instance the praiseworthiness of wife-stealing, and the viciousness of marrying within the tribe.
In this passage, therefore, when the phrase "conspicuous for the praiseworthiness of their lives" is used, it is evident that the wise, in other words the philosophers, were so called less because of their erudition than by reason of their virtuous lives. In what sobriety and continence these men lived it is not for me to prove by illustration, lest I should seem to instruct Minerva herself.
"The Italian school," he says, "had as its founder Pythagoras of Samos, who, it is said, originated the very word 'philosophy. Before his time those who were regarded as conspicuous for the praiseworthiness of their lives were called wise men, but he, on being asked of his profession, replied that he was a philosopher, that is to say a student or a lover of wisdom, because it seemed to him unduly boastful to call himself a wise man."
By teaching Bressant love, she had, by implication, done him deadly injury, yet was the love itself so pure and genuine as to prompt him to resign its object; he being rendered unworthy of her by that same moral dereliction which she herself had occasioned. But the very quality which enables us to do a noble deed dulls our appreciation of our own praiseworthiness.
In regard to praiseworthiness, Shaftesbury, according to Mandeville, was the first to affirm that virtue could exist without self-denial. This was opposed to the prevailing opinion, and to the view taken up and criticised by Mandeville. His own belief was different.
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