William Hazlitt's essay on Self-Love (from Literary Remains pub. 1836

Hazlitt said somewhere that his On the Principles of Human Action was a chokepear of a book. He didn’t lie. What is taken to be its distillation, Self-Love is certainly no better. As I was reading I kept thinking ‘maybe it will finish soon, can it take so long to say so little’. It’s really very simple. The spectrum of principles ranges from demonic self-will to angelic abnegation. To claim that disinterestedness is the main spring of action is not an arguable position no more perhaps than the felicific calculus but at least that has an initial plausibility, lasting ten seconds approximately, from chin stroking to brow smacking, when we come to ask – but how, who, how much, same as; in short the quantification of the imponderable.

William Hazlitt started the book when he was eighteen having made what he called a discovery in D’Holbach’s Systeme de la Nature. What that was is not clear and there is no attempt to offer an empirical launching pad for his insight. Is it like King Charles’s head which balked Mr. Dick in David Copperfield. He couldn’t get on with it and he couldn’t get past it. The proof of the inedible pudding is the turbid diction. This is the final sentence of his essay.

Consequently, as the desire of the ultimate gratification of the appetite is not the same with the appetite itself, that is mere physical uneasiness, but an indirect result of its communication to the thinking or imaginative principle, the influence of appetite over the will must depend on the extraordinary degree of force and vividness which it gives to the idea of a particular object; and we accordingly find that the same cause which irritates the desire of selfish gratification, increases our sensibility to the same desires and gratification in others, where they are consistent with our own, and where the violence of the physical impulse does no\ overpower every other consideration.