François de La Rochefoucauld, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Moral psychology is the study of what actually moves men — not what they say moves them, not what they believe moves them, but the hidden engine beneath the declared motive. It is, in short, the anatomy of self-love. I wrote at the outset of the Maxims that our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised, and that self-love is the greatest of flatterers.12
These two sentences contain the whole of what the schools would call moral psychology, if only the schools had the patience to look at a man rather than at a system. Self-love does not merely pursue its interest; it transforms itself, changes the very appearance of things, and deceives first of all the one it inhabits.3 A man believes himself generous; examine what his generosity costs him, and what esteem it returns, and you will find the account balances in his favour.
The virtue is real enough to the eye; the motive is another matter. Interest is the soul of self-love, as the soul is to the body — deprive it of interest and it neither sees nor moves.4 This is why the same man who will exhaust himself for his own affairs becomes suddenly inert when asked to attend to yours; the mechanism is the same, only the fuel is withdrawn.
Moral psychology, then, is the discipline of noticing this — of watching where the energy goes, and refusing the flattering name the man gives it. Pride is the subtlest case. Humility itself is often a feigned submission, one of the devices of pride to lower itself in order to rise.5 When a virtue wears the face of its opposite so perfectly that even the one performing it is deceived, you are at the heart of the subject.
There remain, as I noted, many unexplored territories in the region of self-love, and I do not pretend the map is complete.6 But the method is fixed: take the declared motive, hold it against the light, and ask what the man gains — in esteem, in ease, in the pleasure of thinking well of himself — by the doing of it. That question, applied without flinching, is moral psychology.
Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Self-love is the greatest of flatterers.Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
not only does it so well disguise them that it is itself deceived, but it even changes the state and nature of things.Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Interest is the soul of self-love, in as much as when the body deprived of its soul is without sight, feeling or knowledge, without thought or movement, so self-love, riven so to speak from its interest, neither sees, nor hears, nor smells, nor moves.Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Humility is often a feigned submission which we employ to supplant others. It is one of the devices of Pride to lower us to raise us.Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Whatever discoveries have been made in the region of self-love, there remain many unexplored territories there.Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims