give the description and position of each of these members. But
should you ask the description and position of its beauty, they
would readily reply, that the beauty is not in any of the parts
or members of a pillar, but results from the whole, when that
complicated figure is presented to an intelligent mind,
susceptible to those finer sensations. Till such a spectator
appear, there is nothing but a figure of such particular
dimensions and proportions: from his sentiments alone arise its
elegance and beauty.

Again; attend to Cicero, while he paints the crimes of a Verres
or a Catiline. You must acknowledge that the moral turpitude
results, in the same manner, from the contemplation of the whole,
when presented to a being whose organs have such a particular
structure and formation. The orator may paint rage, insolence,
barbarity on the one side; meekness, suffering, sorrow, innocence
on the other. But if you feel no indignation or compassion arise
in you from this complication of circumstances, you would in vain
ask him, in what consists the crime or villainy, which he so
vehemently exclaims against? At what time, or on what subject it
first began to exist? And what has a few months afterwards become
of it, when every disposition and thought of all the actors is
totally altered or annihilated? No satisfactory answer can be
given to any of these questions, upon the abstract hypothesis of
morals; and we must at last acknowledge, that the crime or
immorality is no particular fact or relation, which can be the
object of the understanding, but arises entirely from the
sentiment of disapprobation, which, by the structure of human
nature, we unavoidably feel on the apprehension of barbarity or
treachery.