188 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



imagination not possible for low intelligences. Let us glance at 

 each of these reasons. 



Every altruistic feeling presupposes experience of the cor- 

 responding egoistic feeling. As, until pain has been felt there 

 can not be sympathy with pain, and as one who has no ear for 

 music can not enter into the pleasure which music gives to oth- 

 ers ; so, the altruistic sentiment of justice can arise only after the 

 egoistic sentiment of justice has arisen. Hence where this has 

 not been developed in any considerable degree, or has been re- 

 pressed by a social life of an adverse kind, the altruistic senti- 

 ment of justice remains rudimentary. 



The complexity of the sentiment becomes manifest on observ- 

 ing that it is not concerned only with concrete pleasures and pains, 

 but is concerned mainly with certain of the circumstances under 

 which these are obtainable or preventable. As the egoistic senti- 

 ment of justice is gratified by maintenance of those conditions 

 which render achievement of satisfactions unimpeded, and irri- 

 tated by the breaking of those conditions, it results that the altru- 

 istic sentiment of justice requires for its excitement not only the 

 ideas of such satisfactions, but also the ideas of those condi- 

 tions which are in the one case maintained and in the other case 

 broken. 



Evidently, therefore, to be capable of this sentiment in a devel- 

 oped form, the faculty of mental representation must be relatively 

 great. Where the feelings with which there is to be sympathy 

 are simple pleasures and pains, the higher gregarious animals 

 occasionally display it : pity and generosity are from time to time 

 felt by them as well as by human beings. But to conceive simul- 

 taneously not only the feelings produced in another, but the plexus 

 of acts and relations involved in the production of such feelings, 

 presupposes the putting together in thought of more elements 

 than an inferior creature can grasp at the same time. And when 

 we come to those most abstract forms of the sentiment of justice 

 which are concerned with public arrangements, we see that only 

 the higher varieties of men are capable of so conceiving the ways 

 in which good or bad institutions and laws will eventually affect 

 their spheres of action, as to be prompted to support or oppose 

 them ; and that only among these, therefore, is there excited un- 

 der such conditions that sympathetic sentiment of justice which 

 makes them defend the political interests of fellow-citizens. 



There is, of course, a close connection between the sentiment 

 of justice and the social type. Predominant militancy, by the 

 coercive form of organization it implies, alike in the fighting 

 body and in the society which supports it, affords no scope for 

 the egoistic sentiment of justice ; but, contrariwise, perpetually 

 tramples on it, and at the same time the sympathies which origi- 



