eas flow along with easiness and
facility. In this disposition, the imagination, passing, as is usual,
from the consideration of the distance to the view of the distant
objects, gives us a proportionable veneration for it; and this is the
reason why all the relicts of antiquity are so precious in our eyes, and
appear more valuable than what is brought even from the remotest parts
of the world.

The third phaenomenon I have remarked will be a full confirmation of
this. It is not every removal in time, which has the effect of producing
veneration and esteem. We are not apt to imagine our posterity
will excel us, or equal our ancestors. This phaenomenon is the more
remarkable, because any distance in futurity weakens not our ideas so
much as an equal removal in the past. Though a removal in the past, when
very great, encreases our passions beyond a like removal in the future,
yet a small removal has a greater influence in diminishing them.

In our common way of thinking we are placed in a kind of middle station
betwixt the past and future; and as our imagination finds a kind of
difficulty in running along the former, and a facility in following the
course of the latter, the difficulty conveys the notion of ascent, and
the facility of the contrary. Hence we imagine our ancestors to be, in
a manner, mounted above us, and our posterity to lie below us. Our fancy
arrives not at the one without effort, but easily reaches the other:
Which effort weakens the conception, where the distance is small; but
enlarges and elevates the imagination, when attended with a suitable
object. As on the other hand, the facility assists the fancy in a
small removal, but takes off from its force when it contemplates any
considerable distance.

It may not be improper, before we leave this subject of the will, to
resume, in a few words, all that has been said concerning it, in order
to set the whole more distinctly before the eyes of the reader. What
we commonly understand by passion is a violent and sensible emotion of
mind, when any good or evil is presented, or any object, which, by the
original formation of our faculties, is fitted to excite an appetite.
By reason we mean affections of the very same kind with the former; but
such as operate more calmly, and cause no disorder in the temper: Which
tranquillity leads us into a mistake concerning them, and causes us to
regard them as conclusions only of our intellectual faculties. Both
the causes