COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



life. To have this complex feeling synipatheti- 

 cally 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 evils which are the objects of its dread, 

 — implies a power of representing absent rela- 

 tions such as has yet been acquired by only two 

 or three of the most highly gifted families of 

 mankind. And manifestly the sentiments which 

 respond to the notions of justice and injustice 

 in the abstract are still more remotely represen- 

 tative, still more highly generalized, and still 

 more thoroughly disengaged from the consider- 

 ation of concrete instances of pleasure and pain. 

 To this expansion of the power of sympa- 

 thetically representing 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 as- 

 sociated 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 automatic; but it is 

 that there has been a registration of feelings 

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