Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/39

 action do not depend so much on a real interest in the thing which is the object of pursuit as on a general disposition to serve that particular person, occasioned by a previous habit of kind offices, and by transferring the feeling of a real interest in a number of things conducive to that person's welfare, to the abstract idea of his good in general. I leave it with the reader to apply this to the cases of friendship, family attachments, the effects of neighbourhood, &c., and to consider the feuds, the partialities, the antipathies produced by these attachments, and the consequent unwillingness to attend to the natural feelings of compassion, humanity, and the love of justice: and then let him see if the same process, that is the ingrafting a general, or abstract interest on an habitual positive feeling will not account in the same way for the effects of self-love, without supposing this last, as an exclusive principle, to be natural to the human mind. For my own part, I believe that the cases are exactly parallel. Thus we may consider self-love as bearing the same relation to family affection as this does to the more general love of our neighbour, as the love of our neighbour does to that of our country, or as the love of our country does to that of mankind. The love of mankind is here to be taken for an already given, definite, and to a certain degree associated feeling. The comparison might be instituted with a slight shade of difference between self-love, the love of a relative or friend, of a neighbour, and of an entire stranger. It is in proportioning our anxiety to promote the welfare of any of these to our sense of the use our assistance may be of, to use a well known phrase, without respect of persons, that what may be called the natural balance of our affections seems to consist. By the bye, this supposes that our insensibility to the feelings of others does not arise from an unwillingness to sympathize