Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/260

 THE LOGIC OF CLASSIFICATION. 247 the Association of Ideas : Similarity and Contiguity play the most conspicuous part in the explanation of intellectual and emotive phenomena. But these are the laws also that dominate moral phenomena and afford us the explanation of Character. They here go under the name of Habit ; and this change of name sometimes imposes upon us, and makes us believe that in changing the name we have effected a change in the guiding principles. But change of principles there is none ; and Habit just means the operation of psy- chological laws directed on ethical or moral data. There is a change of matter or content indeed ; but similarity and con- tiguity hold their sway here as elsewhere, and moral habits are built up after the same manner as we make our intellec- tual and other acquisitions. So, too, the ethical laws of Transference, of Distance in time, and of Sympathy are really applications of the psychological. By the law of Transfer- ence is meant the tendency to associate pleasures and pains with their adjuncts or their causes, as when the miser hugs his money-bags, or the rescued sailor cherishes the log that saved his life, or when the invalid contracts a dislike to the physician that cured him by some drastic process. The law of Distance is, that the nearer a pleasure or pain, the greater its influence over us ; the further removed, the less its motive power. We all know that " hope deferred maketh the heart sick," and an impending evil is prone to paralyse us. By the law of Sympathy is signified the tendency to realise the feelings and conditions of others, and to make them our own. This includes fellow-feeling with the pleasures as well as with the pains of others (the latter being Pity or Compassion), and extends to the lower animals as well as to our fellow-men. We have here an obvious con- nexion with the Fixed Idea. So with many other ethical facts that might be instanced for example, Conscience. But enough has now been adduced to show that Ethics presupposes psychology, is dependent on psychological laws and psychological methods. There is also a dependence of Ethics on Sociology. This, of course, arises from the circumstance that man is essentially a social being, and that his moral nature would have no meaning apart from his relations to his fellow-men. Indeed, we might go even the length of saying that, apart from social intercourse, Conscience could not be. For, were man a solitary individual, with no knowledge of and no con- nexion with others, it is not conceivable how duty, right and wrong, and other ethical notions could emerge. But place him in the midst of other sentient beings, more especially