all distraction from it, may arise from dwelling on the contrast between his own worth as he estimates it and the treatment he has received-either from his fellow-beings or from a power which he is prone to think of anthropomorphically. If he feels that he has deserved much while he has received little, and still more if instead of good there has come evil, the consciousness of this evil is qualified by the consciousness of worth, made pleasurably dominant by the contrast. One who contemplates his affliction as undeserved, necessarily contemplates his own merit as either going unrewarded, or as bringing punishment instead of reward: there is an idea of much withheld, and a feeling of implied superiority to those who withhold it.

If this is so, the sentiment ought not to exist where the evil suffered is one recognized by the sufferer as nothing more than is deserved. Probably few, if any, ever do recognize this; and from those few we are unlikely to get the desired information. That this explanation is the true one, I feel by no means clear. I throw it out simply as a suggestion confessing that this peculiar emotion is one which neither analysis nor synthesis enables me clearly to understand.

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CHAPTER VII.

EGO-ALTRUISTIC SENTIMENTS.

§ 519. To prevent a misapprehension apt to arise, let me, before going further in explaining the genesis of sentiments by accumulation of the effects of experience, define the word experience as here used. In its ordinary acceptation, experience connotes definite perceptions, the terms of which stand in observed relations; and is not taken to include connexions formed in the mind between states that occur together, when the relations between them, causal or other, are not consciously identified. But a reference to such chapters in the Special Synthesis as those on Reflex Action, Instinct, Memory, &c., or to chapters in the Physical Synthesis on the Genesis of Nervous Systems, Simple, Compound, and Doubly-Compound, will remind the reader that the effects of experience as there and everywhere else understood in this work, are the effects produced by the occurrence together of nervous states, with their accompanying states of consciousness when these exist; whether the relations between the states are or are not observed. Throughout the earlier stages of mental evolution, indeed, there cannot be that recognition of a relation which experience, in its limited meaning, implies. Habitual converse with the environment produces its effects without the recipient knowing them in the full sense of knowing; for there has not yet been evolved that notion of self which is essential to conscious experience.

Here the truth especially to be noted is, that this registration of unconscious experience continues after conscious experience has become distinct and even dominant. Along with the narrow stream of clear ideas definitely related, forming our conscious experience, there flow far more voluminous currents of connected impressions of all degrees of indistinctness, in an order that presents all gradations of vagueness. Only a certain central thread of consciousness consists of perceptions and thoughts; and in proportion to their remoteness from this central thread, the elements of consciousness are more and more loosely connected with one another and with the central thread: the incoherence reaching its extreme at the outskirts of consciousness (§ 180). Yet all these states and their connexions are in a sense present to us; and are producing effects proportionate to their strengths. Hence, when often repeated though never distinctly thought about, the relations among them become well established. On examining consciousness, we find ourselves possessed of much positive knowledge gathered without observing it (as instance our remembrance of the position on the page, of some striking sentence in a book) and of a still larger amount of indefinite knowledgebeliefs which possess us, though we cannot say why.

In this voluminous, heterogeneous, and only partiallydefinite region of consciousness, are formed those associations of complex states which, perpetually repeated, produce what we call sentiments. The genesis of emotions is distinguished from the genesis of ideas in this; that whereas the ideas, always contained in the narrow, central part of consciousness, are composed of simple elements definitely related, and (in the case of general ideas) constantly related; emotions are composed of greatly-involved assemblages of the outlying elements of consciousness, which are never twice quite the same, and which stand in relations that are never twice quite the same. In the building-up of an idea the successive experiences, be they of sounds, colours,

touches, tastes, or be they of the special objects that combine many of these into groups, have so much in common that each, when it occurs, can be definitely thought of as like those which preceded it. But in the building-up of an emotion, the successive experiences so far differ that each of them, when it occurs, suggests past experiences which are not specifically similar, but have only a general similarity; and, at the same time, it suggests benefits or evils in past experience which likewise are various in their special natures, though they have a certain community of nature. Hence it results that the consciousness aroused is a multitudinous, confused consciousness; in which, along with a certain kind of combination among the impressions received from without, there is a vague cloud of ideal combinations. akin to it, and a vague mass of ideal feelings of pleasure or pain that were associated with such combinations.

Carrying with us this general conception of the way in which mental states in the large, outlying, vaguer region of consciousness, become connected by repetition without our being aware of it, we shall render it a definite conception on observing what happens in cases readily recallable. From our past lives we may draw abundant proofs that feelings grow up without reference to recognized causes and consequences, and without our being able at once to say how we have got them; though analysis shows that they have been formed out of connected experiences. The familiar fact to which, I suppose, almost every one can testify, that a kind of jam which was, during childhood, repeatedly taken after medicine, may be rendered by simple association of feelings, so nauseous that it cannot be tolerated in after-life, illustrates clearly enough the way in which repugnances are frequently established, without any idea of causal connexion; or rather, in spite of the knowledge that there is no causal connexion. Similarly with pleasur able emotions. The cawing of rooks is not in itself an agreeable sound: musically considered, it is very much the

contrary. Yet the cawing of rooks usually produces pleasurable feelings-feelings which many suppose to result from the quality of the sound itself. Only the few who are given to self-analysis are aware that the cawing of rooks is agreeable to them because it has been connected with countless of their greatest gratifications-with the gathering of wild flowers in childhood; with Saturday-afternoon excursions in school-boy days; with midsummer-holidays in the country, when books were thrown aside and lessons were replaced by games and adventures in the field; with fresh, sunny mornings in after-years, when a walking excursion was an immense relief from toil. As it is, this sound, though not causally related to all these multitudinous and varied past delights, but only often associated with them, rouses a dim consciousness of these delights; just as the voice of an old friend unexpectedly coming into the house, suddenly raises a wave of that feeling which has resulted from the pleasures of past companionship.

And now having made this further explanation of the way in which feelings are evolved by the organization of experiences, let me resume the interpretation at the point reached with the close of the last chapter. From the egoistic sentiments we pass now to the ego-altruistic sentiments. By this name I mean sentiments which, while implying selfgratification, also imply gratification in others: the representation of this gratification in others being a source of pleasure not intrinsically, but because of ulterior benefits to self which experience associates with it.

§ 520. An infant in arms, that is old enough vaguely to recognize objects around, smiles in response to the laughing face and soft caressing voice of its mother. Let there come some one who, putting on an angry face, speaks to it in loud,

* This section, and a portion of the preceding section, originally formed parts of an article published in the Fortnightly Review for April 1, 1871, under the title of "Morals and Moral Sentiments."