Note note 56 — ANALYSIS OF THE PHENOMENA OF THE HUMAN MIND James Mill

56 This paragraph, unexplained, might give the idea that the author regarded praiseworthiness and blameworthiness as having the meaning not of deserving praise or blame, but merely of being likely to obtain it. But what he meant is, that the idea of deserving praise is but a more complex form of the association between our own or another person’s acts or character, and the idea of praise. To deserve praise, is, in the great majority of the cases which occur in life, the principal mode of obtaining it; though the praise is seldom accurately proportioned to the desert. And the same may be said of blame. A powerful association is thus, if circumstances are favourable, generated between deserving praise and obtaining it; and hence between deserving praise, and all the pleasurable influences on our lives, of other people’s good opinion. And this association may become sufficiently strong to overcome the direct motive of obtaining praise, where it is to be obtained by other means than desert; the rather, as the desire of undeserved praise is greatly counteracted by the thought that people would not bestow the praise if they knew all. That what has now been stated was really the author’s meaning, is proved by his going on to say, that praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, as motives to action, have reference “not to what is, or to what shall be, but to what ought to be, the sentiments of mankind.”—Ed.