Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/85

 sical uneasiness, but an indirect result of its communication to the thinking or imaginative principle, the influence of appetite over the will must depend on the extraordinary degree of force and vividness which it gives to the idea of a particular object; and accordingly we find that the same cause which irritates the desire of selfish gratification, increases our sensibility to the same desires and gratification in others, where they are consistent with our own, and where the violence of the physical impulse does not overpower every other consideration.

Make the most of the objection:—it can only apply to the determinations of the will while it is subject to the gross influence of another faculty, with which it has neither the same natural direction, nor is in general at all controuled by. The question which I have proposed to examine is whether there is any general principle of selfishness in the human mind, or whether it is not naturally disinterested. Now the effects of appetite are so far from being any confirmation of the first supposition, that we are even oftener betrayed by them into actions contrary to our own well-known, clear, and lasting interest, than into those which are injurious to others. The "short-lived pleasure" and the "lasting woe" fall to the lot of the same being.—I will give one more example and then have done. A man addicted to the pleasures of the bottle is less able to check this propensity after drinking a certain quantity and feeling the actuulactual [sic] pleasure and state of excitement which it produces, than he is to abstain entirely from its indulgence. When once the liquor gets into his head, to use the common phrase, the force which it gives to his predominant feeling gets the better of every other idea, and he from that time loses all power of self-controul. After this, the trembling of actual excitement, which urges him on, makes him enter more cordially into the convivial dispo-