perform similar corrections for our senses and our aesthetic judgements. Of course, our passions may resist correction, so that only our language is changed; but we still know that our emotional favoritism of some over others would go away if we were equally close to them all, which is perhaps enough to settle "a general calm determination of the passions". Second, moral luck: how can sympathy explain cases where unusual external circumstances have prevented someone's internal character from having its usual effects? Hume's answer is that the imagination follows general rules, focusing more on something's general tendencies than its actual effects, and that our moral sentiments are influenced accordingly. Naturally, we will feel even stronger approval when the general tendency is actually realised, but we deliberately set aside moral luck to correct our general moral judgements. This explains how we can manage such "extensive sympathy" in morality despite our "limited generosity" in practice: it takes "real consequences" and particular cases to "touch the heart" and "controul our passions", but "seeming tendencies" and general trends are enough to "influence our taste". He finishes this general treatment of the natural virtues with a fourfold classification: every natural virtue is either (1) useful to others, (2) useful to the person himself, (3) immediately agreeable to others, or (4) immediately agreeable to the person himself. Of these "four sources of moral distinctions", the most important are the virtues of usefulness, which please us even when mere private interest is at stake: thus we approve of prudence and frugality, and while the vice of "indolence" is sometimes indulged (as an excuse for the unsuccessful or a veiled boast of sophistication), "dexterity in business" wins approval by sheer sympathy with the person's private interest. The two categories of useful virtues are often blended together by sympathy: what hurts me ends up paining others as they sympathise with me, and what hurts others ends up paining me as I sympathise with them. Less important are the virtues of immediate agreeableness: instead of reflecting on the positive tendencies of a mental quality, we simply find it pleasant in and of itself (e.g. wit, insouciance). And even here sympathy plays a major role: we approve of these virtues in large part because they bring pleasure to others or the person himself. Hume concludes with "a general review of the present hypothesis"—viz., that we evaluate character by sympathetically considering its