NECESSARY TRUTHS— EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. iiT6 



elementary ideas wliicli form the data of the case. Some of 

 these harmonies, no doubt, have to do with habit ; but 

 in respect to most of them our sensibility must assuredly 

 be a phenomenon of supernumerary order, correlated with 

 a brain-function quite as secondary as that which takes 

 cognizance of the diverse excellence of elaborate musical 

 compositions. No more than the higher musical sensibili- 

 ty can the higher moral sensibility be accounted for by the 

 frequency with which outer relations have cohered.* Take 

 judgments of justice or equity, for example. Instinctively, 

 one judges everything differently, according as it pertains 

 to one's self or to some one else. Empirically one notices 

 that everybody else does the same. But little by little 

 there dawns in one the judgment " nothing can be right for 

 me which would not be right for another similarly placed ;" 

 or " the fulfilment of my desires is intrinsically no more im- 

 perative than that of anyone else's ; " or " what it is reason- 

 able that another should do for me, it is also reasonable 

 that I should do for him ; " t and forthwith the whole mass 

 of the habitual gets overturned. It gets seriously over- 

 turned only in a few fanatical heads. But its overturning 

 is due to a back-door and not to a front-door process. 

 Some minds are preternaturally sensitive to logical con- 

 sistency and inconsistency. When they have ranked a 

 thing under a kind, they rmist treat it as of that kind's 

 kind, or feel all out of tune. In many respects we do class 

 ourselves with other men, and call them and ourselves by 

 a common name. They agree with us in having the same 

 Heavenly Father, in not being consulted about their birth, 



* As one example out of a thousand of exceptionally delicate idiosyn- 

 crasy in this regard, take this: "I must quit society. I would rather un- 

 dergo twice the danger from beasts and ten times the danger from rocks. 

 It is not pain, it is not death, that I dread,— it is the hatred of a man; there 

 is something in it so shocking that I would rather submit to any injury 



than incur or increase the hatred of a man by revenging it Another 



sufficient reason for suicide is that I was this morning out of temper with 

 Mrs. Douglas (for no fault of hers). I did not betray myself in the least, 

 but I reflected that to be exposed to the possibility of such an event once a 

 year, was evil enough to render life intolerable. The disgrace of using an 

 impatient word is to me overpowering." (Ellon Hammond, quoted in 

 Henry Crabb Robinson's Diary, vol. i. p. 424.) 



f Compare H. Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, bk. iii. chap. xiii. § 3. 



