354 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [PT. n, 



less obvious. A high development of sympathy cannot be 

 secured without a high development of representativeness, so 

 closely inter-related are our intellectual and moral natures. 

 A very feeble faculty of imagining objects and relations not 

 present to sense must necessitate an absence of active sym 

 pathetic emotion, save in its crudest form. It is a familiar 

 fact that many men are cruel, in word or deed, because they 

 are incapable of adequately representing to themselves the 

 pain, physical or mental, of which they are the cause. The 

 validity of such an interpretation is confirmed by the fact 

 that even where there is very high representative capacity, 

 the lack of the requisite elements of personal experience will 

 prevent the rise of sympathetic feeling. Thus it is notori 

 ously difficult for strong and healthy people to enter into 

 the feelings of those who are weak and nervous. These facts 

 show that the development of sympathy is largely deter 

 mined by the development of the representative faculty and 

 by increasing width and variety of experience. With the 

 simplest form of sympathy, such as the painful thrill felt 

 on seeing some one in a dangerous position, contrast such a 

 complex sentiment as the sense of injustice, and it becomes 

 evident that the latter feeling differs from the former mainly 

 in degree and quantity of representativeness. In the former 

 case there is a representation of the injury or death im 

 pending over some person immediately in sight; and it is 

 the shrinking from this detriment to the fulness of life of 

 another person which constitutes the sympathetic feeling. In 

 the latter case supposing, for example, the kind of injustice 

 in question to be that against which English-speaking people 

 have made provision in habeas corpus acts there is the 

 sympathetic excitement of that highly representative egoistic 

 sentiment known as the love of personal freedom. At first 

 a mere recalculation against whatever impedes the free action 

 of the limbs, this egoistic feeling has, through increased 

 power of representation, developed into a dislike and dread 



