SECTION XIV. 477 And indeed as mankind are brought into the world, accord- ing to the order of nature, they become social creatures as it were from their very birth. They are born and grow up into numerous unions, relationsand bonds of society, both natural, civil and religi- ous, and they have perpetual need of each other's assistance, and naturally seek it. It was therefore wisely ordered by the God of nature that there should be some principles wrought in its of the affectionate kind, inorder to make our mutual services to each other easy and delightful, and to awaken us to the vigorous and unwearied practice of those duties towards our fellow-creatures, for which perhapsreason andconscience might have too feeble in- fluence in our present state. V. Though the affections have much to do in the activeparts of human life, yet they have very little to do in matters of speculation and judgment, as will appear immediately by what follows. Since it is the very nature of our passions to fix all our na- tural powers with the strongest attention to the object of them ; and particularly to those properties that raised them, they do ge- nerally increase the first apprehension we hadofthe object, whether it be true or false, and confirm the first judgment,we passed upon it, whether we apprehend the object to be good or evil. It is evident that fear, anger, hatred, sorrow, all tend to impressour minds more powerfully with a sense ofthe evil contained in the object, and to representit in its worst colours : And in the same manner, hope, love, desire, delight, and joy, persuade us more powerfully that the objectof them is good, and rather add new ex- cellencies to it. E ven the pàssionofadmiration sometirnesmakes us think the object of it, to bemore strange and more consider- able than really it is : And all the passions derived from love or hatred tend,to represent the good or evil of the object to be grea- ter and more important than really it is ; I mean chiefly in tem- poral things. Hence it follows, with great evidence, that the passions, are not fit to be our guides in determining truth and falsehood ; they werenever given us to search out the true nature of things, or to judge concerning their qualities, or the degree of them. For in order to consider aright, wemust consider, with an impartial view all the properties and circumstances of any object, and attend to all the reasonings that belong to it, both on one side and on the other ; whereas every passion confines our thoughts only to one side of the question. It is the nature of passion to fix our minds only on those properties, qualities, and circumstances that first raised it, and to make them appear more considerable ; and in- deed it suffers Us not to 'attend with impartiality to any thing else. Passion generally tends to make us blind and deaf to all circum- stances and reasoning, but those which confirm itself.
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