28 EVOLUTION AND ETHICS 1 



of organic necessities of a different kind from 

 those upon which the constitution of the hive 

 depends. One of these is the mutual affection 

 of parent and offspring, intensified by the long 

 infancy of the human species. But the most 

 important is the tendency, so strongly 

 developed in man, to reproduce in himself ac 

 tions and feelings similar to, or correlated with, 

 those of other men. Man is the most con 

 summate of all mimics in the animal world; 

 none but himself can draw or model ; none comes 

 near him in the scope, variety, and exactness of 

 vocal imitation ; none is such a master of gesture ; 

 while he seems to be impelled thus to imitate 

 for the pure pleasure of it. And there is 

 no such another emotional chameleon. By a 

 purely reflex operation of the mind, we take 

 the hue of passion of those who are about us, 

 or, it may be, the complementary colour. It is 

 not by any conscious " putting one's self in the 

 place " of a joyful or a suffering person that the 

 state of mind we call sympathy usually arises ; 1 

 indeed, it is often contrary to one's sense of 



1 Adam Smith makes the pithy observation that the man 

 who sympathises with a woman in childbed, cannot be said 

 to put himself in her place. (" The Theory of the Moral Senti 

 ments," Part vii. sec. iii. chap, i.) Perhaps there is more 

 humour than force in the example ; and, in spite of this 

 and other observations of the same tenor, I think that the 

 one defect of the remarkable work in which it occurs is that 

 it lays too much stress on conscious substitution, too little 

 on purely reflex sympathy. 







