Page:Observations on Man 1834.djvu/313

 External Advantages and Disadvantages.

I begin with the consideration of external advantages or disadvantages.—The principal of these are fine clothes, riches, titles, and high birth; with their opposites, rags, poverty, obscurity, and low birth.

Now it is evident, that these external advantages and disadvantages become such by being made known to others: that the first gain men certain privileges and pleasures; and the last subject them to inconveniences and evils only, or chiefly, when they are discovered to the world. It follows therefore that every discovery of this kind to others, also every mark and associate of such discovery, will, by association, raise up the miniatures of the privileges and pleasures, inconveniences and evils, respectively; and thus afford, in each instance, a peculiar compound pleasure or pain, which, by the use of language, has the word honour or shame respectively annexed to it.

This is the gross account of the generation of these pleasures and pains; but the subordinate particulars contain many things worthy of observation.

Thus fine clothes please both children and adults, by their natural or artificial beauty; they enhance the beauty of the person; they excite the compliments and caresses of the attendants in a peculiarly vivid manner; they are the common associates of riches, titles, and high birth; they have vast encomiums bestowed upon them; and are sometimes the reward of mental accomplishments and virtue. Rags, on the contrary, are often attended with the most loathsome and offensive ideas, with bodily infirmity, poverty, contempt, and vice. It is easy therefore to see, that in our progress through life, a compound associated desire of fine clothes, and abhorrence of rags, will spring up so early as to be deemed a natural one. And if a person passes of a sudden from rags to fine clothes, or vice versâ, the pleasure or pain will be enhanced accordingly, by the juxta-position of the opposites.

Now these pleasures and pains which thus attend a person’s being actually dressed in fine clothes, or in rags, will, by farther associations, be transferred upon all the concomitant circumstances, the possession of fine clothes, the hopes of them, or the fear of rags; and particularly upon all narrations and symbols, whereby others are first informed of the person’s dress, or discover their prior knowledge of it; so that the person shall have his vanity gratified, or his shame excited, by all such narrations, and by all the concomitant circumstances and symbols.

Riches, titles, and high birth, are attended with associates of the same kind as fine clothes; with this difference, however, that it requires a farther progress in life to be sufficiently affected with the compound pleasure resulting from the associates of these, and consequently for acquiring a taste for those pleasures