Empirical Psychology (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. 1855 Excerpt: ...or an accusing conscience. From considerations of self-interest there also arise the many painful and dissocial feelings, which are directed against whatever is supposed to interfere with self-enjoyment. Envy and jealousy, hatred and malice, anger and revenge, are all aroused amid the collisions of opposing interests. These may all become moral vices from their connection with an evil will, but the animal nature alone has within it the spring to all such naturally selfish emotions. Section V. Disinterested Feelings.--There is in human nature a strong propensity to society. A rational and spiritual susceptibility elevates to social communion in much higher spheres, qualifying for scientific, moral, and religious intercourse; but the yearnings of the animal nature itself are for company and fellowship with those of its kind. Brutes are more or less gregarious, and even the animals that live mostly in solitude, seem to be forced to this isolation, from the scarcity of their prey or the necessity of their hiding places. This social propensity stands connected with many feelings which find their end in the welfare of others, and that have no reflex action and termination in self. Inasmuch as they refer to the interests of others, and are exclusive of self-interest, they may be termed the disinterested feelings. The self is gratified in their exercise, inasmuch as it is so constituted that it enjoys the play of these emotions for others; but the end of the feeling is in others, not in self, and it thus comes in as one of its own enjoyments, that it should feel for its fellows. Here are found all the natural sympathies of our nature. Other men have all the varied feelings which belong to our own experience, and the witness of these feelings in others naturally enk...