Christian theorist, with the idea of offences that
else would unfit you for heaven being washed out by repentance. But
hearken a moment. Figure the case of those innumerable people that,
having no temptation, small or great, to commit murder, _would_ have
committed it cheerfully for half-a-crown; that, having no opening or
possibility for committing adultery, _would_ have committed it in case
they had. Now, of these people, having no possibility of repentance (for
how repent of what they have not done?), and yet ripe to excess for the
guilt, what will you say? Shall they perish because they _might_ have
been guilty? Shall they not perish because the potential guilt was not,
by pure accident, accomplished _in esse_?

Here is a mistake to be guarded against. If you ask why such a man,
though by nature gross or even Swift-like in his love of dirty ideas,
yet, because a gentleman and moving in corresponding society, does not
indulge in such brutalities, the answer is that he abstains through the
modifications of the sympathies. A low man in low society would not be
doubtful of its reception; but he, by the anticipations of sympathy (a
form that should be introduced as technically as Kant's anticipations of
perception), feels it would be ill or gloomily received. Well now, I,
when saying that a man is altered by sympathy so as to think _that_,
through means of this power, which otherwise he would not think, shall
be interpreted of such a case as that above. But wait; there is a
distinction: the man does not think differently, he only acts as if he
thought differently. The case I contemplate is far otherwise; it is
where a man feels a lively contempt or admiration in consequence of
seeing or hearing such feelings powerfully expressed by a multitude, or,
at least, by others which else he would not have felt. Vulgar people
would sit for hours in the presence of people the most refined, totally
unaware of their superiority, for the same reason that most people (if
assenting to the praise of the Lord's Prayer) would do so
hyper-critically, because its real and chief beauties are negative.

Not only is it false that my understanding is no measure or rule for
another man, but of necessity it is so, and every step I take towards
truth for myself is a step made on behalf of every other man.

We doubt if the world in the sense of a synthesis of action--the
procession and carrying out of ends and purposes--_could_ consist with