Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/57

 merely passive in the operation, he would not be busy in anticipating a new impression, but would still be dreaming of the old one. It is of the very nature of the imagination to change the order in which things have been impressed on the senses, and to connect the same properties with different objects, and different properties with the same objects; to combine our original impressions in all possible forms, and to modify these impressions themselves to a very great degree. Man without this would not be a rational agent; he would be below the dullest and most stupid brute. It must therefore be proved in some other way that the human mind cannot conceive of or be interested in the pleasure or pains of others because it has never felt them.

The most subtle way of putting this objection is to represent the tendency of the child's apprehension of danger to deter him from going near the fire as caused, not simply by the apprehension or idea itself, which they say would never be strong enough for a motive to action, but by his being able to refer that idea to an actual sensation in his own mind, and knowing that with respect to himself it will pass into the same state of serious reality again, if he exposes himself to the same danger. Now here we have nothing but a reflection on a reflection. It is supposed that the direct idea of a terrible and well-known pain has no effect at all upon the mind; but that the idea of this idea, as about to be converted into, or succeeded by the pain itself m the same conscious being, will immediately excite the strongest efforts to prevent it. Certainly the near expectation of the object of your dread, actually realized to the senses, strengthens the fear of it; but it strengthens it through the imagination. So, the knowing that a person, whom you wished anxiously to see, after a separation of many years, was in the next room, would make you