Page:Treatise of Human Nature (1888).djvu/669

645 idea accounts for everything; (c) the cause of the firm conception explains all there is to be explained, 626; (d) the influence of a firm conception on the passions accounts for all effects of belief, 625 (cf. 119); the feeling which distinguishes belief from conception is only a firmer conception, 627; vagueness of terms, force, vivacity, solidity, firmness, steadiness, 629.

§ 5. Belief in existence of body (g.v.), 187; continued existence of perceptions not only supposed but believed, aog; belief whether in senses and imagination or in reason never justifiable; carelessness and inattention the only remedy for sceptical doubt, 218 (cf. 186, 268, 146, 632).

§ 6. Influence of belief on the passions, 119, 625, on imagination, e.g. in poetry, no; reaction of imagination on belief, 123.

Benevolence.

§ 1. A calm desire or passion, 417; 'strictly speaking, produces good and evil, and proceeds not from them,' 439.

§ 2. Conjoined with love by the 'original constitution of the mind,' by 'nature,' by an arbitrary and original instinct: but 'abstractedly considered' this conjunction is not necessary; there is no contradiction in supposing love joined to a desire of producing misery, 368; an instinct originally implanted in our natures like love of life and kindness to children, 417, 439.

§ 3. 'No such passion in human minds as a love of mankind merely as such, 481; man in general not the cause but the object of love and hatred, 482; public benevolence not the original motive to justice, 480, nor private benevolence, 482; 'strong extensive benevolence' would render justice unnecessary, 495; we must only expect a man to be useful in his own sphere, 602.

§ 4. The merit of benevolence depends on our possession of a fixed unalterable standard by which we praise and blame, 603; love immediately agreeable and hatred painful to the person actuated by it, hence we praise the passion which partakes of the former and blame that which partakes of the latter, 604; the transition from love to love peculiarly easy, hence the peculiar merit of benevolence in all its shapes and appearances, 605; not praised from prospect of advantage to self or others, 604.

Berkeley—theory of abstract ideas, 17.

Body.

1. Its real nature undiscoverable, only its external properties knowable, 64; power and necessity not qualities of bodies but of perceptions, 166.

§ 2. A. &#39;'Tis vain to enquire whether there be body or not: that is a point we must take for granted in all our reasonings,' 187. But why do we believe in the existence of body? i.e. (a) why do we attribute continued existence to perceptions when they are not