Book III. Of Morals.

that the question lies within human comprehension; which, in other cases of this nature, we are likely to have some doubt about. Without this advantage, I never should have ventured upon a third volume of such abstruse philosophy in an age where the majority of men seem to have agreed to turn reading into an amusement and to reject everything that requires any significant degree of attention to be understood.

Sect. I. Moral distinctions not derived from reason.

IT has been observed that nothing is ever present to the mind but its perceptions; and that all the actions of seeing, hearing, judging, loving, hating, and thinking fall under this category. The mind can never exert itself in any action that we cannot include under the term perception; and consequently, that term is no less applicable to those judgments by which we distinguish moral good and evil than to every other operation of the mind. To approve of one character and to condemn another are only so many different perceptions.

Now as perceptions divide themselves into two kinds, namely impressions and ideas, this distinction gives rise to a question with which we shall open our present inquiry concerning morals: Whether it is by means of