Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/239

 qualities of the external world, and set at work, in each instance, by our witnessing or hearing described certain events or circumstances, affecting others, which, by a reference to our own feelings, we can readily imagine as they would affect ourselves. Hence arise those various and potent emotions of sympathy which impel us to acts of benevolence, and which are the springs of conduct in almost the entire circle of our social relations.

A vivid conceptive power, in relation to the sufferings of others, is the prime element of the philanthropic character. Often enough we may meet with those whose feelings are humane, and who will act generously, if only, by the aid of some unusual circumstances, one can get them to realize mentally, the woes and wants of the wretched; but the conceptive faculty is itself so torpid, with such persons, that, ordinarily, no heed is taken of what others may be feeling. Selfishness is sometimes a deliberate and odious preference of the individual well-being to that of others: often it is only, as to its cause, a torpid or callous imagination. The HOWARD, is the man whose imagination puts him into the very place of the unhappy, and who labours to relieve the distress he knows of, as if it were actually pressing on himself. It is, moreover, a modification of the conceptive power which generates that nice and sensitive regard to the feelings of others which distinguishes the well-bred man; and it is the want of this species of Ideality that makes the low-bred man an annoyance in society. It is in great degree because the conceptive faculty much more readily repeats to itself the feelings of those who are always about us, than of strangers, that the vivacity of the parental sympathies so vastly exceeds, in most cases, the measure of general benevolence, in the same persons.

A hundred familiar illustrations of this principle of human nature might readily be adduced, and some such will no doubt occur to the reader’s own recollection. It would