warm admiration of Voltaire, ’Magnanimity owes no account of its motives to prudence,’ is only true on condition that by magnanimity we understand a mood not out of accord with the loftiest kind of prudence.[34] But in the eighteenth century reason and prudence were words current in their lower and narrower sense, and thus one coming like Vauvenargues to see this lowness and narrowness, sought to invest ideas and terms that in fact only involved modifications of these, with a significance of direct antagonism.  Magnanimity was contrasted inimically with prudence, and instinct and nature were made to thrust from their throne reason and reflection.  Carried to its limit, this tendency developed the speculative and social excesses of the great sentimental school.  In Vauvenargues it was only the moderate, just, and most seasonable protest of a fine observer, against the supremacy among ideals of a narrow, deliberative, and calculating spirit.

His exaltation of virtuous instinct over reason is in a curious way parallel to Burke’s memorable exaltation over reason of prejudice.  ‘Prejudice,’ said Burke, ’previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved.  Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts; through just prejudice his duty becomes a part of his nature.’[35] What Burke designated as prejudice, Vauvenargues less philosophically styled virtuous instinct; each meant precisely the same thing, though the difference of phrase implied a different view of its origin and growth:  and the side opposite to each of them was the same—­namely, a sophisticated and over-refining intelligence, narrowed to the consideration of particular circumstances as they presented themselves.

Translated into the modern equivalent, the heart, nature, instinct of Vauvenargues all mean character.  He insisted upon spontaneous impulse as a condition of all greatest thought and action.  Men think and work on the highest level when they move without conscious and deliberate strain after virtue:  when, in other words, their habitual motives, aims, methods, their character, in short, naturally draw them into the region of what is virtuous. ’It is by our ideas that we ennoble our passions or we debase them; they rise high or sink low according to the man’s soul.’[36] All this has ceased to be new to our generation, but a hundred and thirty years ago, and indeed much nearer to us than that, the key to all nobleness was thought to be found only by cool balancing and prudential calculation.  A book like Clarissa Harlowe shows us this prudential and calculating temper underneath a varnish of sentimentalism and fine feelings, an incongruous and extremely displeasing combination, particularly characteristic of certain sets and circles in that century.  One of the distinctions of Vauvenargues is that exaltation of sentiment did not with him cloak a substantial adherence to a low prudence, nor to that fragment of reason which has so constantly usurped the name and place of the whole.  He eschewed the too common compromise which the sentimentalist makes with reflection and calculation, and it was this which saved him from being a sentimentalist.