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And victory is a source of pleasure—not only to those who have a special and peculiar ‘fondness’ for it (τοῖς φιλονίκοις), but universally, to everybody; because it gives rise to (γίγνεται, there arises) an impression (fancy or notion) of superiority, of which all feel the desire either in a slight degree or more strongly. Comp. I 9. 39, δ᾽ ὑπεροχὴ τῶν καλῶν... ἐπείπερ ὑπεροχὴ δοκεῖ μηνύειν ἀρετήν. Superiority is a noble or right aim, or end of action; and indicative of ‘virtue’. This is one of the modes in which the ‘love of power’ manifests itself, to which, as a purely selfish instinct, Hobbes sought to trace all our feelings and springs of action. The Emotion of Power is, in Mr Bain's Classification of the Emotions as sources of action, one of the most important of a family of eleven which together compose our moral constitution. Bain, Emotions and Will, p. 59, and the admirable analysis, 145—162. See also Dugald Stewart on this subject, there quoted p. 145. ‘The objects of the sense of power may be described as the effects or consequences of our own agency surveyed under such a comparison as to set forth some kind of superiority.’ This is the ὑπεροχή in question.

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