1817 Dec 12

Not Paul

III. Doctrine

Ch. Asceticism

Physical abhorrence ends in abstention

/ abstinence/: moral goes on to

intolerance and prosecution.

So far from persecuting those who are disposed to take up with gratifications of an

inferior order, government ought to regard itself as obliged to them. Punish them: as

reasonably might you punish a man who in a time of scarcity in a blockaded town were

seen like a Chinese taking up with carrion for food, or searching for it on a

dunghill or in a common sewer.

Were the several distinguishable senses, and other faculties and the modes of

gratification, physical and psychological, of which they are respectively the

instruments, ever so much more numerous than they are, the same rules of limitation

might with equal and incontestable propriety serve for all of them: 1. the rule of

self-regarding prudence—2. the rule of probity including legal justice—and 3. the

rule of benevolence, which in so far as it is carried into

effect and practice is the rule of beneficence.

Of these rules a sample /sort of rudiment/ though not /howsoever scarcely/

sufficiency extensive /neither correct nor compleat/ may be seen in the rule of Roman

law— Sic utere tuo ut alienam non lædere: so use that which

belongs to thyself, that nothing which belongs to another may be hurt.

 Define these rules—then proceed to say

By /In/ these rules the gratifications of that appetite on which the preservation of

the individual depends finds its proper limit: in these same rules so does that on

which the preservation of the species depends: in these same rules so does that on

which that desire which is produced by itching, and gratified by scratching where it

itches. No rational /tenable/ reason can be assigned why in any one of these cases

the desire of pleasure and immunity from pain should have any other limits /be

confined /[...?]// than those by which as above it is restrained /circumscribed/

/bounded/ in the two others.