joyment of the means of animal life,
and doing this at as little expense as possible. He thought that the wants
and happiness of men were not to be provided for, as we provide for those
of a herd of cattle, merely by attending to their physical necessities. He
thought more nobly of his fellows. He knew that man had affections and
passions and powers of imagination, as well as hunger and thirst and the
sense of heat and cold. He took his idea of political society from the
pattern of private life, wishing, as he himself expresses it, to
incorporate the domestic charities with the orders of the state, and to
blend them together. He strove to establish an analogy between the compact
that binds together the community at large, and that which binds together
the several families that compose it. He knew that the rules that form the
basis of private morality are not founded in reason, that is, in the
abstract properties of those things which are the subjects of them, but in
the nature of man, and his capacity of being affected by certain things
from habit, from imagination, and sentiment, as well as from reason.

Thus, the reason why a man ought to be attached to his wife and children
is not, surely, that they are better than others, (for in this case every
one else ought to be of the same opinion) but because he must be chiefly
interested in those things which are nearest to him, and with which he is
best acquainted, since his understanding cannot reach equally to every
thing; because he must be most attached to those objects which he has
known the longest, and which by their situation have actually affected him
the most, not those which in themselves are the most affecting, whether
they have ever made any impression on him or no; that is, because he is by
his nature the creature of habit and feeling, and because it is reasonable
that he should act in conformity to his nature. Burke was so far right in
saying that it is no objection to an institution that it is founded in
_prejudice_, but the contrary, if that prejudice is natural and right;
that is, if it arises from those circumstances which are properly subjects
of feeling and association, not from any defect or perversion of the
understanding in those things which fall strictly under its jurisdiction.
On this profound maxim he took his stand. Thus he contended, that the
prejudice in favour of nobility was natural and proper, and fit to be
encouraged by the positive instituti