670 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tions. Consider the pleasure given by a painting representing a scene 

 which moves our sympathies, or the delight with which we read some 

 work of fiction in which kindly emotions are dealt with, and it will be 

 seen how large a portion of our aesthetic gratifications depend on our 

 sympathy with others. The hard and selfish care little for art and 

 nothing for fiction. How should we bear to lose the pleasures which 

 painting and sculpture, music and fiction, afford us ? How even 

 should we bear to change the pleasures given by the kindly and sym- 

 pathetic art of to-day for the harsher effects of the arts of harder 

 times when only deeds of conquest or ceremonial observances were 

 represented in paintings and sculptures, suggested in musical strains, 

 or recited in story or in song ? What material gains, what sensual 

 gratifications, what power, wealth, or fame, would make up (to us) for 

 the pleasure we dei'ive from the higher emotions ? and how largely do 

 these depend on the sympathies by which men are moved to loving 

 care for the well-being of their fellows ! 



It remains lastly to be noticed that as there should be thought for 

 others, and for the just rights and interests of others in the family, in 

 the society with which we are directly associated, and within the race 

 or nation, so there should be a wider altruism having regard to the 

 rights of other races and nations. Hitherto men have scarcely at all 

 recognized this duty. Very gradually the sense of altruistic duty 

 passed beyond the family to the conamunity of families, and thence 

 still widening to the nation formed of such communities. Men learned 

 that as personal selfishness is in the long-run opposed to the true inter- 

 ests of self, so family selfishness is only a degree less pernicious. The 

 selfishness of parochialism was in turn seen to be mischievous, though 

 it is still prevalent enough. But the selfishness of what is called pa- 

 triotism — though it is as unlike true patriotism as personal selfishness 

 is unlike due and wise self-regard — still remains as a virtue in the 

 minds of most men, though characterized by inherent defects akin 

 to those which belong to personal, family, and parochial selfishness. 

 Men fail, indeed, to recognize any selfishness in undue care for what 

 is called a man's own country — though with but vague and indefinite 

 meaning. Nay, a blind love of country is regarded as something so 

 directly the converse of selfishness, that Sir Walter Scott speaks of 

 the absence of this sort of patriotism as simple selfishness. After 

 asking if the man lives with soul so dead as never to have said to 

 himself, " This is my own, my native land ? " he goes on to say that such 

 a man, a " wretch concentered all in self," can be swelled by no min- 

 strel music, and is bound to go unmoumed and unsung to an unhon- 

 ored grave. The idea that patriotism could under any circumstances 

 be exaggerated, and become but a widened form of selfishness, would 

 doubtless have outraged utterly Scott's sense of the fitness of things. 

 Yet viewing matters from the outside, and, as far as possible, inde- 

 pendently of inbred ideas, there is nothing except its wider range to 



