Human Psychology; An Introduction to Philosophy. Being a Brief Treatise on Intellect, Felling, and Will Volume 2 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1885 edition. Excerpt: ...would prompt, the whole source and character of our happiness, if we gain any, is gone." (Hopkins, Moral Science, 131.) Simulated love may gain lower ends, satisfaction of desire or appetite, but it cannot bring the pleasure which is the reaction of pure altruistic affection; and this fact is quite generally recognized. Thus Mr. Herlert Spencer says, --"Pure egoism is, even in its immediate results, less successfully egoistic than is the egoism duly qualified by altruism, which, besides achieving additional pleasures, ac hieves also, through raised vitality, a greater capacity for pleasures in general." He also says that even among the lower animals "parental sacrifice is not accompanied by the consciousness of sacrifice, but is made from a direct desire to make it." And he adds, --" If we trace these relations up through the grades of mankind, and observe how largely love rather than obligation prompts the care of children, we see that achievement of parental happiness coincides with securing the happiness of offspring." (Data of Ethics 79 and 92.) The best type of altruistic Natural Affection is the love of a mother for her child. This is the direct result of the physical relation between them. In the lower animals it subsists only as long as the young netd the mother's care to sustain life. In the human race this care is needed for several years, and maternal love chances its character, though losing, generally) nothing of its strength with ti ne. In the progress of civilization or intellectual and spiritual culture, the mutual love of p rent and child becomes refined, until it is the highest ex less on for purity, and is used as the type of the relation between Gjd and the human race. As the exercise of...