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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



A rule of conduct once established, the mind, working quite inde- 

 pendently of the will of the individual, resents any attempt to impugn 

 its authority. Naturally enough, seeing that, to impugn its authority 

 means an unsettlement of all that the rule had settled. Take the case 

 now in question. We can not conceive the existence of any social 

 order, unless the principle is recognized that no man should, for selfish 

 purposes of his own, take the life of another. But, let a man be so 

 overmastered by his cupidity as to commit this crime, he can not by 

 that one act of rebellion undo the work already acconrplished in his 

 mind, by virtue of which he had learned to condemn murder on prin- 

 ciple. It is to his interest now to deny the principle, but he can not 

 do it without tearing his own mind to pieces ; for not more truly have 

 certain elements been compounded in his body, to form its various 

 organic substances, than have elementary experiences combined in his 

 mind to form those principles of thought which sustain its functional 

 activity and make it a living organism. And just as the true unit of 

 the body is not any elementary atom, but a cell, so the true unit of 

 the mind is not an isolated experience, or any cluster of unorganized 

 experiences, but a combination of experiences, a generalization from 

 experiences. 



The murderer in the case supposed by Mr. Smith has eluded the 

 law, and not only paid no material penalty whatever, but actually 

 reaped vast benefits from his crime. Could any case be possibly 

 imagined in which making, of course, allowance for the inferiority 

 of nature of a man who could commit murder at all the violated 

 authority of perhaps the most fundamental of all social principles 

 should make itself more keenly felt ? Had the man been caught red- 

 handed, and come promptly under the sentence of justice, his remorse 

 would have been slight in all probability ; possibly he might not have 

 felt any. But, escaping as he did, and prospering by his crime, his 

 mind would remain continually open to tbe upbraidings of that part 

 of his nature which he had outraged by his deed, to all the rea- 

 sons which the experiences of every day as well as his invokintary 

 thoughts would suggest why the deed shoiild not have been done. 

 Is not this enouah ? Must we still call in the Eumenides before 



*&' 



his act is determined by certain imagined proximate pleasures of relatively simple kinds, 

 rather than by less clearly-imagined possible pains that are more remote and of relatively 

 involved kinds. . . . Throughout the ascent from low creatures up to man, and from the 

 lowest types of man up to the highest, self-preservation has been increased by the sub- 

 ordination of simple excitations to compound excitations the subjection of immediate 

 sensations to the ideas of sensations to come the overruling of presentative feelings 

 by representative feelings, and of representative feelings by ?*e-representative feelings. As 

 life has advanced, the accompanying sentiency has become increasingly ideal ; and, among 

 feelings produced by the compounding of ideas, the highest, and those which have 

 evolved latest, are the re-compounded or doubly ideal. Hence it follows that as guides 

 the feelings have authorities proportionate to the degrees in which they are removed by 

 their complexity and ideality from simple sensations and appetites." 



