Appendix No.  II. is a discussion of SELF-LOVE.  The author adverts first to the position that benevolence is a mere pretence, a cheat, a gloss of self-love, and dismisses it with a burst of indignation.  He next considers the less offensive view, that all benevolence and generosity are resolvable in the last resort into self-love.  He does not attribute to the holders of this opinion any laxity in their own practice of virtue, as compared with other men.  Epicurus and his followers were no strangers to probity; Atticus and Horace were men of generous dispositions; Hobbes and Locke were irreproachable in their lives.  These men all allowed that friendship exists without hypocrisy; but considered that, by a sort of mental chemistry, it might be made out self-love, twisted and moulded by a particular turn of the imagination.  But, says Hume, as some men have not the turn of imagination, and others have, this alone is quite enough to make the widest difference of human characters, and to stamp one man as virtuous and humane, and another vicious and meanly interested.  The analysis in no way sets aside the reality of moral distinctions.  The question is, therefore, purely speculative.

As a speculation, it is open to these objections. (1) Being contrary to the unprejudiced notions of mankind, it demands some very powerful aid from philosophy.  On the face of things, the selfish passions and the benevolent passions are widely distinguished, and no hypothesis has ever yet so far overcome the disparity as to show that the one could grow out of the other; we may discern in the attempts that love of simplicity, which has done so much harm to philosophy.

The Animals are susceptible of kindness; shall we then attribute to them, too, a refinement of self-interest?  Again, what interest can a fond mother have in view who loses her health in attendance on a sick child, and languishes and dies of grief when relieved from the slavery of that attendance?

(2) But farther, the real simplicity lies on the side of independent and disinterested benevolence.  There are bodily appetites that carry us to their objects before sensual enjoyment; hunger and thirst have eating and drinking for their end; the gratification follows, and becomes a secondary desire. [A very questionable analysis.] So there are mental passions, as fame, power, vengeance, that urge us to act, in the first instance; and when the end is attained, the pleasure follows.  Now, as vengeance may be so pursued as to make us neglect ease, interest, and safety, why may we not allow to humanity and friendship the same privileges? [This is Butler, improved in the statement.]

Appendix III. gives some farther considerations with regard to JUSTICE.  The point of the discussion is to show that Justice differs from Generosity or Beneficence in a regard to distant consequences, and to General Rules.  The theme is handled in the author’s usual happy style, but contains nothing special to him.  He omits to state what is also a prime attribute of Justice, its being indispensable to the very existence of society, which cannot be said of generosity apart from its contributing to justice.