Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/153

 interest in any object in consequence of its affecting me personally, or from the stronger and more immediate manner in which certain objects and impressions act upon me, then it cannot be affirmed without an absurdity that all affection whatever is self-love. So if I see a man wounded, and this sight occasions in me a painful feeling of sympathy, I do not in this case feel for myself, because between that idea or object impressed on my mind and the painful feeling which follows, there is no such positive connection as there is between the infliction of the same wound on my own body, and the physical pain which follows it. Will it be pretended by anyone, on whose brain the intricacies of metaphysics have not had the same effect as the reading of romances had on the renowned knight of La Mancha, that a piece of wood which I see a man cutting in pieces, and so is an object existing in my mind, is a part of myself in the same sense as a leg or an arm? For my own part, as I am not at all affected by the hacking and hewing which this piece of wood receives, or all the blows with which it rings, which are to me mere harmless flourishes in the air, it seems to me a very different thing. The one idea is myself in a simple, very abstract sense indeed; the other idea is myself, in the common emphatical sense; it is a reduplication or aggravation of the idea: the object becomes myself by a double right: I am sensible in the object as well as to it. I should say, then, that when the sight of another person wounded excites a feeling of compassion in my mind, this is not a selfish feeling in any narrow or degrading sense of the word, which is the only thing in question. (If selfishness is to mean generosity, there is an end at once of the dispute.) And that for this plain reason: that the connection between the visible impression and the feeling of pain is of a totally different kind from the con-