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The Works of Thomas Chalmers (5); Sketches of Moral and Mental Philosophy
The Works of Thomas Chalmers Sketches of Moral and Mental Philosophy - 5 Author:Thomas Chalmers Volume: 5 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1840 Original Publisher: R. Carter Subjects: Theology Presbyterian Church Religion / Christian Theology / General Religion / Christian Theology / History Religion / Christian Theology / Systematic Religion / Christianity / Presbyterian Religion / Theo... more »logy Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER V. On the Morality of the Emotions, 1. Having illustrated the distinction between the passive and the voluntary, in those processes the terminating result of which is some particular state of an emotion, and which emotion in that state often impels to a particular act or series of acts -- we would now affirm the all-important principle, that nothing is moral or immoral which is not voluntary. We have often been struck with writers upon Moral Science, in that, even though professing a view or an argument altogether elementary, they seldom come formally or ostensibly forth with this principle. They presume it, and they proceed upon it, often without having so much as ever announced it. They bestow upon it a treatment more axiomatic, if we may be allowed the expression, than Euclid hath bestowed upon his mathematical axioms, and of which many do think that he might have taken the immediate use, without the previous ceremony of such an introduction as he has given to them. All men, it has been thought, do so certainly know and so irresistibly believe a whole to be greater than any of its parts, that any step of a geometrical demonstration which implied it would have been held to be as firm without any initial statement of it at all, and without the appeal of any marginal reference to it in the subsequent trains of reasoning. Now it is...« less