the old). Natural abilities also influence our evaluations by making an able person more consequential in life, for good or ill. The question of why we are less inclined to value a person according to the quickness and accuracy of their memory Hume explains by noting that (unlike the intellect) "the memory is exerted without any sensation of pleasure or pain; and in all its middling degrees serves almost equally well in business and affairs". Thus far Hume's account has dealt exclusively with mental qualities, but he goes some way to accommodate "bodily advantages" and "the advantages of fortune", which are equally capable of eliciting "love and approbation". Thus women love a strong man in sympathy with the utility a lover of his could be expected to receive, everyone finds beauty in healthy and useful body parts, and an immediate pleasure or dismay arises from the perception of regular features or "a sickly air", respectively. Thus we esteem the wealthy by sympathy with the pleasure their riches give them, reinforced by their being more consequential. Hume notes that, though he cannot explain why, the feeling of approval is more determined by the kind of subject contemplated (e.g., an inanimate object, or a person) than by the kind of mechanism driving the approval (e.g., sympathy with utility, or immediate agreeableness). Section 6 The conclusion of Book 3, and therefore the Treatise as a whole, briefly recapitulates the reasoning for Hume's thesis that "sympathy is the chief source of moral distinctions". Indeed, most would agree that justice and "the useful qualities of the mind" are valued for their usefulness, and what besides sympathy can explain why we care about the public good or "the happiness of strangers"? This "system of ethics" is not only supported by "solid argument", Hume adds, but it can help moralists show the "dignity" and the "happiness" of virtue. First, it puts morality in a good light to see it derived from "so noble a source" as sympathy: we end up approving of virtue, the sense of virtue, and even the psychological principles underlying the sense of virtue. And while the artificiality of justice may seem unattractive at first, this disappears when we remember that since "[t]he interest, on which justice is founded, is the greatest imaginable, and extends to all times and place", therefore the rules of justice are "stedfast and immutable; at least, as immutable as