SEC. 1: THE OBJECT AND CAUSES OF LOVE AND HATRED • It is impossible to define love and hatred. ◦ Because they produce merely a simple impression, without any mixture or composition. • It would be as unnecessary to describe them from their nature, origin, causes and objects because they are sufficiently known from our common feeling and experience. ◦ We have already observed this concerning pride and humility. • There is a great resemblance between these two sets of passions. ◦ We shall abridge of our reasonings on pride and humility to explain love and hatred. • The immediate object of pride and humility is self or that identical person whose thoughts, actions, and sensations we are intimately conscious of. ◦ The object of love and hatred is some other person, whose thoughts, actions, and sensations we are not conscious of. • This is sufficiently evident from experience. ◦ Our love and hatred are always directed to some sensible being external to us. ◦ When we talk of self-love, it is not in a proper sense, ◦ the sensation it produces does anything in common with that tender emotion excited by a friend or mistress. • It is the same case with hatred. ◦ We may be mortified by our own faults and follies. ◦ but never feel any anger or hatred except from the injuries of others. • But though the object of love and hatred is always some other person. ◦ It is plain that the object is not the cause of these passions or alone sufficient to excite them. • Love and hatred: ◦ are directly contrary in their sensation ◦ have the same object in common. ▪ If that object were also their cause, it would produce these opposite passions in an equal degree. ▪ They must, from the very first moment, destroy each other. ▪ None of them would ever be able to make its appearance. • Therefore, there must be some cause different from the object. • The causes of love and hatred: ◦ are very much diversified. ◦ do not have many things in common. • The virtue, knowledge, wit, good sense, good humour of any person, produce love and esteem, and hatred and contempt. ◦ The same passions arise from: ▪ bodily accomplishments, such as beauty, force, swiftness, dexterity; and their contraries ▪ from the external advantages and disadvantages of family, possession, clothes, nation and climate. • From these causes, we derive a new distinction between: ◦ the quality that operates ◦ the subject on which it is placed. • A prince that has a stately palace, commands the esteem of the people: ◦ at first, by the beauty of the palace ◦ secondly, by the relation of property, which connects the beauty with him. • The removal of either of these destroys the passion. ◦ It proves that the cause is a compounded one. • It would be tedious to trace the passions of love and hatred, through all our observations on pride and humility equally applicable to both. • Generally: ◦ the object of love and hatred is some thinking person ◦ the sensation of the love is always agreeable, and of hatred is uneasy. • We can show with probability, that ◦ the cause of both passions is always related to a thinking being ◦ the cause of love produces a separate pleasure ◦ the cause of of the latter a separate uneasiness. • The supposition, that the cause of love and hatred must be related to a thinking being in order to produce them, is: ◦ probable ◦ too obvious to be contested. • The following excite no love or hatred, esteem or contempt towards those unrelated to them: ◦ virtue and vice in the abstract ◦ beauty and deformity, when placed on inanimate objects ◦ poverty and riches when belonging to a third person. • A person looking out at a window sees me in the street and a beautiful palace unrelated to me. ◦ This person will not pay me the same respect, as if I were owner of the palace. • It is not so evident at first sight, that: ◦ a relation of impressions is requisite to these passions ◦ because in the transition the one impression is so much confounded with the other, that they become indistinguishable. • But as in pride and humility, we have easily been able to: ◦ make the separation ◦ prove that every cause of these passions produces a separate pain or pleasure • I might use this method to examine the causes of love and hatred. ◦ But I delay this examination for a moment. • Instead, I shall convert all my reaaonings on pride and humility to my present purpose, by an argument founded on unquestionable examination. • Persons satisfied with their own character, genius, or fortune desire to: ◦ show themselves to the world ◦ acquire mankind’s love and approbation. • The very same qualities and circumstances which cause pride or self-esteem also cause vanity. ◦ We always view those particulars which best satisfies ourselves. • But if love and esteem were not produced by the same qualities as pride, as these qualities are related to ourselves or others, this method would be very absurd. ◦ Men could not expect a correspondence in the sentiments of every other person, with those themselves have entertained. • Few can form exact systems of the passions, or make reflections on their general nature and resemblances. • But without such a progress in philosophy, we are not subject to many mistakes in this. • We are guided by common experience and a kind of presentation which tells us what will operate on others, by what we feel immediately in ourselves. • The same qualities that produce pride or humility cause love or hatred. ◦ All the arguments to prove that the causes of pride and humility excite a pain or pleasure, will be applicable with equal evidence to the causes of love and hatred.