est
attention is confined to ourselves; our next is extended to our
relations and acquaintance; and it is only the weakest which reaches to
strangers and indifferent persons. This partiality, then, and unequal
affection, must not only have an influence on our behaviour and conduct
in society, but even on our ideas of vice and virtue; so as to make
us regard any remarkable transgression of such a degree of partiality,
either by too great an enlargement, or contraction of the affections,
as vicious and immoral. This we may observe in our common judgments
concerning actions, where we blame a person, who either centers all
his affections in his family, or is so regardless of them, as, in any
opposition of interest, to give the preference to a stranger, or
mere chance acquaintance. From all which it follows, that our natural
uncultivated ideas of morality, instead of providing a remedy for the
partiality of our affections, do rather conform themselves to that
partiality, and give it an additional force and influence.

The remedy, then, is not derived from nature, but from artifice; or
more e properly speaking, nature provides a remedy in the judgment and
understanding, for what is irregular and incommodious in the affections.
For when men, from their early education in society, have become
sensible of the infinite advantages that result from it, and have
besides acquired a new affection to company and conversation; and when
they have observed, that the principal disturbance in society arises
from those goods, which we call external, and from their looseness and
easy transition from one person to another; they must seek for a remedy
by putting these goods, as far as possible, on the same footing with
the fixed and constant advantages of the mind and body. This can be
done after no other manner, than by a convention entered into by all the
members of the society to bestow stability on the possession of those
external goods, and leave every one in the peaceable enjoyment of what
he may acquire by his fortune and industry. By this means, every one
knows what he may safely possess; and the passions ale restrained
in their partial and contradictory motions. Nor is such a restraint
contrary to these passions; for if so, it coued never be entered into,
nor maintained; but it is only contrary to their heedless and impetuous
movement. Instead of departing from our own interest, or from that of
our nearest friends, by abstaining from t