Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/51

 ideas, or external forms, as if the essential quality in the feelings of pleasure, or pain, must entirely evaporate in passing through the imagination; and, again, from associating the word imagination with merely fictitious situations and events, that is, such as never will have a real existence, and which consequently do not admit of action. Besides though it is certain that the imagination is strengthened in its operation by the indirect assistance of our other faculties, yet as it is this faculty which must be the immediate spring and guide of action (unless we attribute to it an inherent, independent power over the will, so as to make it bend to every change of circumstances or probability of advantage, and a power at the same time of controuling the blind impulses of associated mechanical feelings, and of making them subservient to the accomplishment of some particular purpose, or in words without a power of willing a given end for itself, and of employing the means immediately necessary to the production of that end, because they are perceived to be so), there could be neither volition, nor action, neither rational fear nor steady pursuit of any object, neither wisdom nor folly, generosity nor selfishness: all would be left to the accidental concurrence of some mechanical impulse with the immediate desire to obtain some very simple object: in no other case can either accident or habit be supposed likely to carry any rational purpose into effect. To return however to what I have said above in answer to this objection: it is evident that all persons are more inclined to compassionate those pains and calamities in others by which they have been affected themselves, and this proves that the operation of that principle, even supposing it to be the true one, is not confined to selfish objects. Our sympathy is