love.

[Footnote 27 Love and esteem are at the bottom the same
passions, and arise from like causes. The qualities, that
produce both, are agreeable, and give pleasure. But where
this pleasure is severe and serious; or where its object is
great, and makes a strong impression; or where it produces
any degree of humility and awe: In all these cases, the
passion, which arises from the pleasure, is more properly
denominated esteem than love. Benevolence attends both: But
is connected with love in a more eminent degree.]

Those, who represent the distinction betwixt natural abilities and
moral virtues as very material, may say, that the former are entirely
involuntary, and have therefore no merit attending them, as having no
dependance on liberty and free-will. But to this I answer, first, that
many of those qualities, which all moralists, especially the antients,
comprehend under the title of moral virtues, are equally involuntary and
necessary, with the qualities of the judgment and imagination. Of this
nature are constancy, fortitude, magnanimity; and, in short, all the
qualities which form the great man. I might say the same, in some
degree, of the others; it being almost impossible for the mind to
change its character in any considerable article, or cure itself of a
passionate or splenetic temper, when they are natural to it. The greater
degree there is of these blameable qualities, the more vicious they
become, and yet they are the less voluntary. Secondly, I would have
anyone give me a reason, why virtue and vice may not be involuntary, as
well as beauty and deformity. These moral distinctions arise from the
natural distinctions of pain and pleasure; and when we receive those
feelings from the general consideration of any quality or character,
we denominate it vicious or virtuous. Now I believe no one will assert,
that a quality can never produce pleasure or pain to the person who
considers it, unless it be perfectly voluntary in the person who
possesses it. Thirdly, As to free-will, we have shewn that it has no
place with regard to the actions, no more than the qualities of men. It
is not a just consequence, that what is voluntary is free. Our actions
are more voluntary than our judgments; but we have not more liberty in
the one than in the other.

But though this distinction betwixt voluntary and involuntary be not
sufficient to justify the distinction betwixt natur