NECESSARY TRUTHS— EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 679 



"Setting out with the unquestionable assumption, that every new 

 form of emotion making its appearance in the individual or the race is 

 a modification of some pre-existing emotion, or a compounding of 

 several pre-existing emotions, we should be greatly aided by knowing 

 what always are the pre-existing emotions. When, for example, we 

 find that very few, if any, of the lower animals show any love of accu- 

 mulation, and that this feeling is absent in infancy ; when we see that 

 an infant in arms exhibits anger, fear, wonder, while yet it manifests 

 no desire of permanent possession ; and that a brute which has no ac- 

 quisitive emotion can nevertheless feel attachment, jealousy, love of ap- 

 probation, — we may suspect that the feeling which property satisfies is 

 compounded out of simpler and deeper feelings. We may conclude 

 that as when a dog hides a bone there must exist in him a prospective 

 gratification of hunger, so there must similarly, at first, in all eases 

 where anything is secured or taken possession of, exist an ideal excite- 

 ment of the feeling which that thing will gratify. We may further con- 

 clude that when the intelligence is such that a variety of objects come to 

 be utilized for different purposes ; when, as among savages, divers wants 

 are satisfied through the articles appropriated for weapons, shelter, 

 clothing, ornament, — the act of appropriating comes to be one con- 

 stantly involving agreeable associations, and one which is therefore 

 pleasui'able, irrespective of the end subserved. And when, as in civ- 

 ilized life, the property acquired is of a kind not conducing to one order 

 of gratifications, but is capable of ministering to all gratifications, the 

 pleasure of acquiring property grows more distinct from each of the 

 various pleasures subserved — is more completely differentiated into a 

 separate emotion.* It is well known that on newly-discovered islands 

 not inhabited by man, birds are so devoid of fear as to allow them- 

 selves to be knocked over with sticks, but that in the course of genera- 



* This account of acquisitiveness differs from our own. Without de- 

 nying the associationist account to be a true description of a great deal of 

 our proprietary feeling, we admitted in addition an entirely primitive form 

 of desire. (See above, p. 420 ff .) The reader must decide as to the plausibili- 

 ties of the case. Certainly appearances are in favor of there being iu us some 

 cupidities quite disconnected with the ulterior uses of the things appro- 

 priated. The source of their fascination lies iu their appeal to our {esthetic 

 sense, and we wish thereupon simply to own tliem. Glittering, hard, 

 metallic, odd, pretty things ; curious tilings especially ; natural objects that 

 look as if they were artificial, or that mimic other objects, — these form a 

 class of things which human beings snatch at as magpies snatch rags. They 

 simply fascinate us. What house does not contain some drawer or cup- 

 board full of senseless odds and ends of this sort, with which nobody knows 

 ■what to do, but which a blind instinct saves from the ash-barrel ? Witness 

 people returning from a walk on the sea-shore or in the woods, each 

 carrying some lusus naturm in the shape of stone or shell, or strip of bark 

 or odd-shaped fungus, which litter the house and grow daily more unsightly, 

 until at last reason triumphs over blind propensity and sweeps them away 



