The theory of moral sentiments: By Adam Smith, ...

account, therefore, of the origin of appro|bation and disapprobation, so far as it derives them from a regard to the order of society, runs into that principle which gives beauty to utility, and which I have explained upon a former occasion; and it is from thence that this system derives all that appearance of pro|bability which it possesses. When those authors describe the innumerable advantages of a cultivated and social, above a savage and solitary life; when they expatiate upon the necessity of virtue and good order for the maintainance of the one, and demonstrate how infallibly the prevalence of vice and dis|obedience to the laws tend to bring back the other, the reader is charmed with the no|velty and grandeur of those views which they open to him; he sees plainly a new beauty in virtue, and a new deformity in vice, which he had never taken notice of before, and is commonly so delighted with the discovery, that he seldom takes time to reflect, that this political view, having never occurred to him in his life before, cannot possibly be the ground of that approbation and disapprobation with which he has always been accustomed to consider those different qualities.