hat
virtue presents no very close likeness to the sportive leader of the
joyous hours in Hume's rosy picture; but that she is an awful Goddess,
whose ministers are the Furies, and whose highest reward is peace.

It is not improbable that Hume would have qualified all this as
enthusiasm or fanaticism, or both; but he virtually admits it:--

"Now, as virtue is an end, and is desirable on its own account,
without fee or reward, merely for the immediate satisfaction which
it conveys, it is requisite that there should be some sentiment
which it touches; some internal taste or feeling, or whatever you
please to call it, which distinguishes moral good and evil, and
which embraces the one and rejects the other.

"Thus the distinct boundaries and offices of _reason_ and of
_taste_ are easily ascertained. The former conveys the knowledge of
truth and falsehood: The latter gives the sentiment of beauty and
deformity, vice and virtue. The one discovers objects as they
really stand in nature, without addition or diminution: The other
has a productive faculty, and gilding and staining all natural
objects with the colours borrowed from internal sentiment, raises
in a manner a new creation. Reason being cool and disengaged, is no
motive to action, and directs only the impulse received from
appetite or inclination, by showing us the means of attaining
happiness or avoiding misery. Taste, as it gives pleasure or pain,
and thereby constitutes happiness or misery, becomes a motive to
action, and is the first spring or impulse to desire and volition.
From circumstances and relations known or supposed, the former
leads us to the discovery of the concealed and unknown. After all
circumstances and relations are laid before us, the latter makes us
feel from the whole a new sentiment of blame or approbation. The
standard of the one, being founded on the nature of things, is
external and inflexible, even by the will of the Supreme Being: The
standard of the other, arising from the internal frame and
constitution of animals, is ultimately derived from the Supreme
Will, which bestowed on each being its peculiar nature, and
arranged the several classes and orders of existence."--(IV. pp.
376-7.)

Hume has not discussed the theological theory of the obligations of
morality, but it is obviously in ac