This sufficiently proves that bodily pain and sickness are in themselves proper causes of humility; though the custom of estimating every thing by comparison more than by its intrinsic worth and value, makes us overlook these calamities, which we find to be incident to every one, and causes us to form an idea of our merit and character independent of them.
We are ashamed of such maladies as affect others, and are either dangerous or disagreeable to them.

Of the epilepsy; because it gives a horror to every one present: Of the itch; because it is infectious: Of the king's-evil; because it commonly goes to posterity.

Men always consider the sentiments of others in their judgment of themselves.

This has evidently appeared in some of the foregoing reasonings; and will appear still more evidently, and be more fully explained afterwards.
SECT.

IX OF EXTERNAL ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES But though pride and humility have the qualities of our mind and body that is self, for their natural and more immediate causes, we find by experience, that there are many other objects, which produce these affections, and that the primary one is, in some measure, obscured and lost by the multiplicity of foreign and extrinsic.