27 Nov 1813

Jug Util or Articles

Ch. Punish t misseated & Atonement

4

§. Error Causes

Unhappily the appetite for the spectacle of another's pain /human suffering/ is not confined to any such /comparatively/ narrow and /uniformly/ /clearly/ salutary case. Cases there are, and that to a deplorably extensive amount, in which the appetite [is produced] for this barbarous feast is produced, not only without antecedent experience of injury /received pain injuriously inflicted on the person by whom this appetite/ but without so much as the belief or supposition of it. Created by any difference in opinion, created by any difference in taste, what is this subject of difference by which it is not capable of being created?

Unfortunately too when the appetite is thus /causeless/ groundless, produced without any specific /particular/ assignable cause produced as it were in the way of equivocal generation, it is in these cases that it is apt to be most [...?]: produced by injury, it has for its limits and its measure and its limit the magnitude of the injury: produced without injury, its magnitude is without limit: it has no other measure than the strength of the irascible appetite /dissocial passion/ in the breast in which this appetite has place and operates.