 Tho’ the approbation of moral excellence is a grateful action or sensation of the mind, ’tis plain the good approved is not this tendency to give us a grateful sensation. As, in approving a beautiful form, we refer to the beauty of the object; we do not say that it is beautiful because we reap some little pleasure in viewing it, but we are pleased in viewing it because it is antecedently beautiful. Thus, when we admire the virtue of another, the whole excellence, or that quality which by nature we are determined to approve, is conceived to be in that other; we are pleased in the contemplation because the object is excellent, and the object is not judged to be therefore excellent because it gives us pleasure. (System, 54; see also Norton 1985: 410)