influence as well as others, but considered as a faculty in kind and
in nature supreme over all others, and which bears its own authority
of being so.

This PREROGATIVE, this NATURAL SUPREMACY, of the faculty which
surveys, approves, or disapproves the several affections of our mind
and actions of our lives, being that by which men ARE A LAW TO
THEMSELVES, their conformity or disobedience to which law of our
nature renders their actions, in the highest and most proper sense,
natural or unnatural, it is fit it be further explained to you; and
I hope it will be so, if you will attend to the following
reflections.

Man may act according to that principle or inclination which for the
present happens to be strongest, and yet act in a way
disproportionate to, and violate his real proper nature. Suppose a
brute creature by any bait to be allured into a snare, by which he
is destroyed. He plainly followed the bent of his nature, leading
him to gratify his appetite: there is an entire correspondence
between his whole nature and such an action: such action therefore
is natural. But suppose a man, foreseeing the same danger of
certain ruin, should rush into it for the sake of a present
gratification; he in this instance would follow his strongest
desire, as did the brute creature; but there would be as manifest a
disproportion between the nature of a man and such an action as
between the meanest work of art and the skill of the greatest master
in that art; which disproportion arises, not from considering the
action singly in ITSELF, or in its CONSEQUENCES, but from COMPARISON
of it with the nature of the agent. And since such an action is
utterly disproportionate to the nature of man, it is in the