1. It has been shown that pleasure and uneasiness cause the passions of love and hatred toward others. It remains to examine the specific pleasures and uneasinesses that cause us to love and hate.

2. Love and hatred are caused by a double relation of impressions and objects. [The impression of pleasure or uneasiness resembles the feeling of the passion, and the subject associated with the pleasure or uneasiness is related to the object.] The author now notices that the third relation, between ourselves and the object whom we love or hate, can excite the relation “or more properly speaking, . . . is always attended with both of the others.” The very fact that someone is closely united to me incites my love, to a degree proportionate to the closeness of the relation, “without enquiring into his other qualities.” Not only blood relations have this effect, but relations of fellow countryman, neighbor, fellow professional, or even having the same name as mine also produce love in this way.

3. Acquaintance [rather than a real relation as in the last paragraph] also produces this effect. “When we have contracted a habitude and intimacy with any person, tho’ in frequenting his company we have not been able to discover any very valuable quality, of which he is possess’d; yet we cannot forbear preferring him to strangers, of whose superior merit we are fully convinc’d.” The phenomena of relation and acquaintance illuminate each other, and are explained by the same principle.

4. The author agrees with the view that the human mind is unable to provide for its own amusement. (The opinion is usually advanced by those who “take a pleasure in declaiming against human nature.”) So we seek foreign objects to enliven our minds: as it were, awakening us from a dream. Company does the best job of this because it presents us with rational beings like ourselves, “the liveliest of all objects.” The idea we have of other people’s passions “becomes a kind of passion, and gives a more sensible agitation to the mind, than any other image or conception.”

5. The explanation of the phenomena described in paragraphs 2 and 3 follows from this. The company of strangers is agreeable for a short time; but that of relations and acquaintances has a greater effect and more durable influence. The relation to us facilitates the transition from ourselves to the related object, as with cause and effect. Acquaintance (custom) also enlivens the idea of any object, as with education. The production of a stronger, livelier idea is the only thing relation and acquaintance have in common, and so it is the causal factor. [See Book I, Part III, Section 15, Paragraph 5 for the causal principle invoked here.] The agreeableness of the idea of the other “makes us have an affectionate regard for everything that produces it, when the proper object of kindness and good-will.”

6. Another phenomenon is that of sympathy that arises between similar characters. When the resemblance is noted, the same effect is produced as is produced by a relation. If it is not noted, “it operates by some other principle.” If the principle upon which it does operated is similar to that operating in cases of relation, this is further confirmation of the system.

7. Here the author invokes a new mechanism, by which an idea can become an impression. The lively idea of ourselves transfers a degree of vivacity to an object related to us, and that idea changes into an impression. What adds fuel to this reinforcement of vivacity is resemblance. The causal feature which stands behind relation, acquaintance and resemblance is sympathy.

8. A related phenomenon is that of pride, to which we have a “great propensity.” We take pride in ourselves when we are related to objects that have become very familiar. “They appear in a stronger light; are more agreeable; and consequently fitter subjects of pride and vanity, than any other.” This is due to the way in which familiarity smooths the transitions of the mind, overcoming the fact that the familiar object might be originally disagreeable or have little merit in itself.

9. The last five paragraphs deal with a “some pretty curious phænomena” involving relations and the passions associated with them. A child’s esteem for his mother is weakened if she re-marries rather than remains a widow, and this is not due to hardships associated with the new family. But it happens to a lesser degree if the father re-marries, even though the diminution in ties of blood are the same.

10. Now the author goes back to his psychology of the association of ideas. It seems as though on his theory, if idea A is associated with idea B by resemblance, contiguity, or cause and effect, idea B ought to be associated with idea A with equal force. The transition should be symmetrical, in other words. But this conclusion is mistaken. It may be that idea B has an association of idea C, toward which the imagination moves the mind. In that case, any tendency to go back to A is weakened. To get a “perfect relation” between A and B, then, the transition from one to the other must be equally smooth. “The double motion is a kind of a double tie, and binds the objects together in the closest and most intimate manner.”

11. This is applied to the cases at hand. The relation of child and parent is not broken by the mother’s re-marriage, so the child’s imagination moves easily between the idea of himself and that of his mother. But now there are new relations C to which the mother is bound, and this prevents the imagination from returning to the child. “The thought has no longer the vibration, requisite to set it perfectly at ease, and indulge its inclination to change. It goes with facility, but returns with difficulty.” So the relation is weakened.

12. This explains why the relation is not weakened so much when the father re-marries. Here the author appeals to what he has already established, that the imagination runs from the view of a lesser object to that of a stronger. The idea of the second husband is stronger than that of a second wife, which is why the new relations of the mother are so compelling. But the superiority of the relation of the father to his second wife prevents the transition. “he is not sunk in the new relation he acquires; so that the double motion or vibration of thought is still easy and natural.”

13. A final potential problem is that the relation between mother and son might be thought to be weakened because the son is also related to the father. Doesn’t this relation prevent the “vibration” between the idea of herself and that of her son? The author says not, because “the third object is here related to the first, as well as to the second; so that the imagination goes and comes along all of them with the greatest facility.” [We would now say that the three form an “equivalence class,” in which case the relation between mother and son is symmetrical.]

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