r inclinations, to go where they take us,
and to ask no questions whether we are in the right road or no.
Inclination is never slumbering: this gives us excitement enough to save
us from weariness, without the effort of awakening our conscience too.
Therefore society, expressing in its rules the feelings of its
individual members, prescribes exactly such a style of conversation as
may keep in exercise all other parts of our nature except that one which
should be sovereign of all, and whose exercise is employed on
things eternal.

Not being, then, properly in earnest,--that is, our conscience and our
choice of moral good and evil being in a state of repose,--our language
is happily contrived so as that it shall contain nothing to startle our
sleeping conscience, if her ears catch any of its sounds. We still
commend good and dispraise evil, both in the general and in the
particular. But as good and evil are mixed in every man, and in various
proportions, he who commends, the little good of a bad man, saying
nothing of his evil,--or he who condemns the little evil of a good man,
saying nothing of his good,--leads us evidently to a false practical
conclusion; he leads us to like the bad man and to dislike the good.
Again, the lesser good becomes an evil if it keeps out a greater good;
and, in the same way, the lesser evil becomes a good. If we have no
thought of comparing good things together, if our sovereign nature be
asleep, then we shall most estimate the good to which we are most
inclined; and where we find this we shall praise it, not observing that
it is taking up the place of a greater good which the case requires,
and, therefore, that it is in fact an evil. So that our moral judgments
may lead practically to great evil: we may join with bad men and despise
good; we may approve of qualities which, are, in fact, ruining a man;
and despise others which, in the particular case, are virtues; without
ever in plain words condemning virtue or approving vice.

But, farther, this habit of never being in earnest greatly lowers the
strength of our feelings even towards the good which we praise and
towards the evil which we condemn. It was an admirable definition of
that which excites laughter, that it was that which is out of rule, that
which is amiss, that which is unsightly, (these three ideas, and other
similar ones, are alike contained in the single Greek word [Greek:
aischron],) provided that it was unaccompanied by pain