Education Quote by Bernard de Mandeville

Hypocrisy, Mandeville implies, is not a moral glitch but a social skill: the smoothest habit we pick up because society practically tutors us in it. The sting of the line is in its matter-of-fact certainty. He treats self-contradiction not as scandal but as fluency - a language learned early, spoken everywhere, rewarded often. That framing is deliberate. Mandeville is writing in an early modern world where “politeness” is becoming a civic technology and commerce is reshaping public life; appearing virtuous can matter more than being virtuous, because appearances lubricate transactions and keep status hierarchies intact.

The subtext is darker than simple cynicism. By pairing “deny the sentiments of our hearts” with “the principle we act from,” he targets two layers of concealment: we lie outwardly to others and inwardly to ourselves. Hypocrisy becomes a kind of self-management, a way to keep desire and ambition from looking like what they are. The sentence then pivots: passions are “seeds” already in us. That metaphor does two jobs. It naturalizes impulse - envy, pride, lust, fear - while also suggesting they can be cultivated, redirected, or pruned. We are born with combustible materials; society provides the choreography for pretending we aren’t on fire.

In the context of Mandeville’s broader project (think: private vice powering public benefit), this isn’t a call to be worse. It’s a provocation against moral innocence. He’s warning that any ethics built on the fantasy of pure motives will collapse the moment it meets actual human psychology - and that the real engine of “virtue” may be the careful, convenient performance of it.