CH. XXII.] GENESIS OF MAN, MORALLY. 855 



of whatever possible combination of circumstances may in 

 any way, however remotely, interfere with the fullest legiti- 

 mate exercise of all the functions of physical and psychical 

 life. To have this complex feeling sympathetically excited 

 for persons whom one has never seen, and who are perhaps 

 yet unborn, — and still more, to be so far possessed by this 

 highly generalized and impersonal sympathy as to risk one's 

 own liberty and life in efforts to avert the possible evila 

 which are the objects of its dread, — implies a power of re- 

 presenting absent relations such as has yet been acquired by 

 only two or three of the most highly gifted families of man- 

 kind. And manifestly the sentiments which respond to the 

 notions of justice and injustice in the abstract, are still more 

 remotely representative, stiU more highly generalized, and 

 still more thoroughly disengaged from the consideration of 

 concrete instances of pleasure and pain. 



To this expansion of the power of sympathetically represent- 

 ing feelings detached from the incidents of particular cases, 

 until the sphere of its exercise has become even wider than 

 the human race, and includes all sentient existence, is due 

 our instinctive abhorrence of actions which the organically 

 registered experience of mankind has associated with pain 

 and evil, and our instinctive approval of actions similarly 

 associated with pleasure and increased fulness of life. It 

 is not that, as in intellectual progress, there has been a 

 registration of inferences, at first conscious, but finally auto- 

 matic ; but it is that there ha's been a registration of feelings 

 respectively awakened by pleasure-giving and pain-giving 

 actions. And just as mep's intellectual conceptions of the 

 causes of phenomena become more and more impersonal 

 IS they are extended ovei wider and wider groups of pheno- 

 mena, generating at last an abstract conception of Universal 

 Cause, so free from the element of personality that to less 

 cultivated minds it seems atheistic ; so in like manner, as 

 the sympathetic feelings are extended over Avider and wider 



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