The choice we make bears witness to the stage of our development and evolution. The better the attitude, the quicker would be our progress to the next stage of development. And the attitude we take settles our own greatness or meanness. The nobler the nature, the nobler the attitude. Nothing tests our goodness so well, or publicizes our nature so ably, as the view or the attitude we adopt from among the many possible views and attitudes to any thing or any person.
Magnanimity is the largeness of heart and greatness of soul.
It is generosity in sentiment and nobility in conduct. A magnanimous person derives the power of his strong and attractive personality from total freedom from all kinds of meanness, selfishness, vindictive nature. Sympathy Callousness finds a congenial soil in the heart that lacks, or loses, the capacity for sympathetic sensitiveness. If the spiritual individual, for purposes of a defence, and development, of the humaneness of humanity, is hard on anything, he is hard only on the granite heart. Scholars always laboured under a tendency that permits the pre-eminence of the economist in Adam Smith, to obscure the importance of the ardent ethical theorist in him.