x THE WILL IN DEVELOPMENT 173 



as a source of nerve-excitement may come to be an object 

 of desire, and it is probable that the physical foundation 

 of cruelty is the excitement of a perverted form of sympathy 

 which the sight of another's pain produces. The mob 

 that used to crowd to an execution and that still devours 

 the newspaper accounts of a murder or gluts itself with 

 details of the chase of a criminal, feels the thrill of the situ- 

 ation without the overwhelming physical or mental anguish 

 which in direct personal suffering soon comes in to quell 

 the hypertrophied lust of excitement. The interest that 

 so many people take in punishment, and that they attribute 

 to the fine development of their healthy moral indignation, 

 is more accurately to be referred to an unconscious lust 

 of a wholly morbid character the perverted desire for an 

 excitement which the suffering of others affords. 1 



Once again, then, we see how the rough and ready 

 methods by which instinct is correlated with actual require- 

 ment, account, on the one hand, for the broad adaptation 

 of organic pleasure and pain to the needs of health, and on 

 the other, for the discrepancies which make morbid feeling 

 possible and allow it to play its sinister part in human life. 



3. Articulate Correlation. Purpose. 



The impulsive act may spring from a feeling but is not 

 directed to an end. Such direction becomes possible in 

 proportion as the present experience becomes capable of 

 suggesting an idea of that which is to come an anticipa- 

 tion. Such an anticipation charged with feeling is a 

 Desire (or Aversion if the feeling be of the opposite sign), 

 and the action so determined is a purposive act, the content 

 of the idea being the Purpose. With the formation of 

 Purpose we cross the bridge which leads from the action 

 of blind (though felt and conscious) impulse and enter the 

 kingdom of Intelligence proper, and though the basis of the 

 feeling which underlies the Purpose may be wholly instinc- 

 tive, yet the purposive act will be justly ascribed to the 



^ 1 In detail these excitements depend for their satisfaction on much 

 higher developments than those at present under consideration. But the 

 point is that they have a basis in feeling of a morbid kind, whether 

 congenital or acquired. 



