If, indeed, such men are separated from him by great differences in
appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shews us how long it is,
before we look at them as our fellow-creatures. Sympathy beyond the
confines of man, that is, humanity to the lower animals, seems to be
one of the latest moral acquisitions. It is apparently unfelt by
savages, except towards their pets. How little the old Romans knew of
it is shewn by their abhorrent gladiatorial exhibitions. The very idea
of humanity, as far as I could observe, was new to most of the Gauchos
of the Pampas. This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is
endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more
tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all
sentient beings. As soon as this virtue is honoured and practised by
some few men, it spreads through instruction and example to the young,
and eventually becomes incorporated in public opinion.
The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognise that
we ought to control our thoughts, and not even in inmost thought to
think again the sins that made the past so pleasant to us. (44.
Tennyson, Idylls of the King, p. 244.) Whatever makes any bad action
familiar to the mind, renders its performance by so much the easier. As
Marcus Aurelius long ago said, Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such
also will be the character of thy mind; for the soul is dyed by the
thoughts. (45. The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus,
English translation, 2nd edit., 1869. p. 112. Marcus Aurelius was born
A.D. 121.)
Our great philosopher, Herbert Spencer, has recently explained his
views on the moral sense. He says (46. Letter to Mr. Mill in Bain s
Mental and Moral Science, 1868, p. 722.), I believe that the
experiences of utility organised and consolidated through all past
generations of the human race, have been producing corresponding
modifications, which, by continued transmission and accumulation, have
become in us certain faculties of moral intuition certain emotions
responding to right and wrong conduct, which have no apparent basis in
the individual experiences of utility. There is not the least inherent
improbability, as it seems to me, in virtuous tendencies being more or
less strongly inherited; for, not to mention the various dispositions
and habits transmitted by many of our domestic animals to their
offspring, I have heard of authentic cases in which a desire to steal
and a tendency to lie appeared to run in families of the upper ranks;
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