XXXII.] THE GKOUNDS OF THE MORAL NATURE. 59 



its root deeper than consciousness or sensation, in the 

 instinctive intelligence which prompts all organisms, 

 conscious and unconscious, animal and vegetable alike, to 

 minister to the life of the race as well as to their own; and 

 the same is true of the attachment, outlasting mere desire, 

 which some animals, at least among birds, feel for their 

 mates. The pleasures and pains, the hopes and fears of their roots 

 sympathy, all the unselfish emotions, and all that makes "^ *''. 



. . . organic 



of man a social being, grow, I believe, out of this root.^ So life. 

 far as I see, the origin and nature of the sympathetic and 

 social character of man neither need nor admit of any 

 other explanation than that which is here suggested. 



In speaking of the laws of habit, I hinted at another 

 and totally different way in which the sense of pleasure 

 and pain is to be directly referred to the elementary and 

 universal laws of life. We then saw that ereat changes of Great 

 the circumstances in which any organism has to live are are 'in-^ 

 injurious and destructive, while slight changes are bene- jurious, 

 ficial.^ We have subsequently seen that when organisms beneficial: 

 become sentient what is beneficial is felt as agreeable, and S'*^^* 



... o ' changes 



what is injurious is felt as painful. From these two laws, are 

 it follows by mere syllogistic inference that great changes gjjg'ijt ' 

 are felt as painful, but slight changes are felt as agreeable ; ones 

 and this is affirmed by all experience as a general fact of 

 our mental nature. We like familiar things and familiar 

 ways, and yet we weary of monotony and like novelty. 

 This sounds contradictory, yet we know that it is true. 

 The full statement of the truth, divested of its paradoxical 

 form, is that we like what is familiar, but we like it to 

 be diversified with slight novelty. It does not in the 

 least degree interfere with the truth of this statement as a 

 law, or rather a pair of laws, of the mind, that the love of 

 familiar things is relatively strong in some persons, and 



^ " Die Leidenschaft flieht, 



Die Leibe muss bleiben : 

 Die Bhime verbllilit, 



Die Frucht muss treiben. " — Schiller. 

 " Vol. i, p. 188. 



