Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/178

142 {[italic|More beautiful, but less valuable,}}—Picturesque morality; such is the immorality of high-aspiring passions and abrupt transitions, of pathetic, impressive, awful, solemn gestures and sounds, It is the semi-savage stage of morality: let us not be induced by its aesthetic charms to assign it a higher rank. —In order to understand another person, that is, to reproduce his feeling in ourselves, we often, indeed, sound his feelings to their very depths, by asking ourselves, for instance: Why is he grieved ? and then, in our turn, feeling grieved for the same reason; but as a rule we abstain from so doing and produce in ourselves the feeling according to the effects which it exhibits in the other person, by copying in our own persons the expression of his eyes, his voice, gait, attitude (or even their image in words, picture, music) to a slight resemblance at least of the play of the muscles and the nerves. A. similar feeling will thereupon arise in us, in consequence of an old association of movement aud sentiment, which is trained to move backwards and forwards. We have very highly developed this art of fathoming the feelings of others, and, in the presence of a human being, are almost spontaneously and incessantly practising it: one need only