Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions (1728)

and consequently every man may come to certainty in these points, without much art or knowledge of other matters.

Whatever confusion the Schoolmen introduced into philosophy, some of their keenest adversaries seem to threaten it with a worse kind of confusion, by attempting to take away some of the most immediate simple perceptions, and to explain all approbation, condemnation, pleasure, and pain, by some intricate relations to the perceptions of the external senses. In like manner, they have treated our desires or affections, making the most generous, kind, and disinterested of them proceed from self-love, by some subtle trains of reasoning to which honest hearts are often wholly strangers.