stance and education of reason, be, if not
equally incapable of social intercourse, far more dangerous to the
happiness of society. A person governed by sympathy alone, must be
influenced by the bad as well as by the good passions of others; he
must feel resentment with the angry man; hatred with the malevolent;
jealousy with the jealous; and avarice with the miser: the more lively
his sympathy with these painful feelings, the greater must be his
misery; the more forcibly he is impelled to action by this sympathetic
influence, the greater, probably, must be his imprudence and his
guilt. Let us even suppose a being capable of sympathy only with the
best feelings of his fellow-creatures, still, without the direction of
reason, he would be a nuisance in the world; his pity would stop the
hand, and overturn the balance of justice; his love would be as
dangerous as his pity; his gratitude would exalt his benefactor at the
expense of the whole human race; his sympathy with the rich, the
prosperous, the great, and the fortunate, would be so sudden, and so
violent, as to leave him no time for reflection upon the consequences
of tyranny, or the miseries occasioned by monopoly. No time for
reflection, did we say? We forgot that we were speaking of a being
destitute of the reasoning faculty! Such a being, no matter what his
virtuous sympathies might be, must act either like a madman or a fool.
On sympathy we cannot depend, either for the correctness of a man's
moral sentiments, or for the steadiness of his moral conduct. It is
very common to talk of the excellence of a person's heart, of the
natural goodness of his disposition; when these expressions distinctly
mean any thing, they must refer to natural sympathy, or a superior
degree of sensibility. Experience, however, does not teach us, that
sensibility and virtue have any certain connection with each other. No
one can read the works of Sterne, or of Rousseau, without believing
these men to have been endowed with extraordinary sensibility; yet,
who would propose their conduct in life as a model for imitation? That
quickness of sympathy with present objects of distress, which
constitutes compassion, is usually thought a virtue, but it is a
virtue frequently found in persons of an abandoned character.
Mandeville, in his essay upon Charity Schools, puts this in a strong
light.

"Should any one of us," says he, "be locked up in a ground room,
where, in a yard joining to it, there w