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144 imitation of the feeling of others has become so familiar to us, the answer will not be wanting: man, as the most timid of all beings, owing to his subtle and fragile nature, has been tutored by his timidity in that sympathy and ready perception of the feelings of other persons and even animals. Throughout thousands of years, he accustomed himself to see a danger in everything strange and living: at such a sight he immediately copied the expression of the features and attitude, drawing his own conclusion as to the kind of evil intention concealed by them. Man has applied this interpretation of all movements and lineaments as intentions even to the nature of all inanimate things— in the delusion that there exists nothing inanimate: I believe that this is the origin of what we call enjoyment of nature at the sight of heaven, fields, rocks, forests, storm, stars, the sea, a landscape, spring; without the ancient habits of fear which made us view everything in the light of a second, remoter sense, we should now feel no delight in nature, any more than we should rejoice in man and beast without fear, that preceptor of our intellect. Joy and pleasant surprise, finally, the sense of the ridiculous, are the later-born children of sympathy and the much younger brothers and sisters of fear. The faculty of quick perception— which is based on that of quick dissembling—decreases in proud, vain-glorious men and nations, because they have less fear: on the other hand, all species of