Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/133

 and imperfect resemblance in the objects ought to produce proportionable effects. For example, the cries of a stranger's child in want of food are similar to those of my own when hungry, the expressions of the countenances are similar, wholesome food will produce similar effects upon both, and so on. I am not here inquiring into the degree of interest which the mind will feel for an entire stranger; (that question was well answered long ago by the story of the Samaritan.) My object is to shew that as to mere theory there is no essential difference between the two cases; that a continued habit of kindness to the same person implies the same power in the mind as a general disposition to feel for others in the same situation; and that the attempt to reason us out of a sense of right and wrong, and make men believe that they can only feel for themselves or their immediate connections is not only an indecent but a very bungling piece of sophistry. The child's being personally the same has nothing to do with the question. The idea of personal identity is a perfectly generical and abstract one, altogether distinct from association.

Any other artificial and general connection between our ideas (as that of the same species) might as well pass for association. The commentators on Hartley have either not studied or not understood him; if they had, his system could not have been supposed to favour the doctrine of selfishness. My quarrel with it is not that it proves any thing against the notion of disinterestedness, but that it proves nothing either way. He supposes that the human mind is neither naturally selfish, nor naturally benevolent; that we are equally indifferent to our own future happiness or that of others, and equally capable of becoming interested in either according to circumstances. [See his account of the origin of self-love, page 370.] The difference between this account,