"Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hume David)

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Copyright 1995, James Fieser ([email protected]). See end note for
details on copyright and editing conventions. This is a working draft;
please report errors.[1]

Editor's note: "Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion" appeared in 1741
in Volume one of Hume's Essays, Moral and Political. The text file
here is based on the 1777 edition of Hume's Essays and Treatises on
Several Subjects. Spelling and punctuation have not been modernized.

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Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion

SOME People are subject to a certain delicacy of passion,
which makes them extremely sensible to all the accidents of
life, and gives them a lively joy upon every prosperous event,
as well as a piercing grief, when they meet with misfortunes
and adversity. Favours and good offices easily engage their
friendship; while the smallest injury provokes their
resentment. Any honour or mark of distinction elevates them
above measure; but they are as sensibly touched with contempt.
People of this character have, no doubt, more lively
enjoyments, as well as more pungent sorrows, than men of cool
and sedate tempers: But, I believe, when every thing is
balanced, there is no one, who would not rather be of the
latter character, were he entirely master of his own
disposition. Good or ill fortune is very little at our
disposal: And when a person, that has this sensibility of
temper, meets with any misfortune, his sorrow or resentment
takes entire possession of him, and deprives him of all relish
in the common occurrences of life; the right enjoyment of
which forms the chief part of our happiness. Great pleasures
are much less frequent than great pains; so that a sensible
temper must meet with fewer trials in the former way than in
the latter. Not to mention, that men of such lively passions
are apt to be transported beyond all bounds of prudence and
discretion, and to take false steps in the conduct of life,
which are often irretrievable.

There is a delicacy of taste observable in some men, which
very much resembles this delicacy of passion, and produces the
same sensibility to beauty and deformity of every kind, as
that does to prosperity and adversity, obligations and
injuries. When you present a poem or a picture to a man
possessed of this talent, the delicacy of his feeling makes
him be sensibly touched with every part of it; nor are the