The Psychological Consequences of Heredity. 329 



soon as consciousness awakens, sentiment has always an object ; 

 it is always referable to a known or to a supposed cause ; it 

 accompanies cognition ; it wraps it round ; it is, as it were, its 

 radiation. Thus the evolution of intelligence and that of senti- 

 ment are parallel. Just as intelligence begins with slight per- 

 ceptions, both very simple and very gross, and by a process that 

 goes on for ages becomes able to embrace the system of the uni- 

 verse, and to state some complex problem in social philosophy ; 

 so sentiment starts with a very simple and very general manifesta- 

 tion, as the instinctive love of an animal for its young, and thence 

 rises to the most refined, exquisite, and cultured forms the religious 

 sentiment of Schleiermacher, and the aesthetic sentiment of 

 Goethe or Heinrich Heine. And this transition from simple 

 to complex is brought about, in the case of sentiment as in that 

 of intelligence, by an integration, a fusion into one harmonious 

 whole of many simple sentiments. It would require a power 

 of analysis such as not even contemporary psychology yet appears 

 to possess, to trace back, by successive decompositions, the sen- 

 timent of nature, as found in the great poets of the nineteenth 

 century, to the very simple sentiments and perceptions which 

 are its basis. 



Certain forms of sentiment are totally wanting among primi- 

 tive peoples. In the Australian language there are no words to 

 translate justice, sin, crime. These people understand neither 

 generosity, pity, nor clemency. They regard revenge as a duty. 

 The reason is that their understanding cannot grasp the highly 

 complicated moral relations from which these notions are derived. 

 It has also been observed that certain sentiments of a refined 

 nature, such as melancholy, charity, and the profound sentiment 

 of nature, have their rise at a later period in history. The 

 reason of this is easy to find : they presuppose the acquisition of 

 many notions, each one of which is highly complex. The human 

 soul must first have the idea of the infinite, of a vague and mys- 

 terious beyond, to feel the painful depression and the refined 

 emotion which that idea excites. It must have got beyond the 

 narrow, local ideas of antiquity with regard to the tribe, the city, 

 or the country, in order to experience a broader sentiment em- 

 bracing all humanity. The sentiment of charity also which is, 



