Page:Observations on Man 1834.djvu/266

 Thirdly, As sensation is the common foundation of all these, so each in its turn, when sufficiently generated, contributes to generate and model all the rest. We may conceive this to be done in the following manner. Let sensation generate imagination; then will sensation and imagination together generate ambition; sensation, imagination, and ambition, self- interest; sensation, imagination, ambition, and self-interest, sympathy; sensation, imagination, ambition, self-interest, and sympathy, theopathy; sensation, imagination, ambition, self-interest, sympathy, and theopathy, the moral sense: and, in an inverted order, imagination will new model sensation; ambition, sensation and imagination; self-interest, sensation, imagination, and ambition; sympathy, sensation, imagination, ambition, and self-interest; theopathy, sensation, imagination, ambition, self-interest, and sympathy; and the moral sense, sensation, imagination, ambition, self-interest, sympathy, and theopathy: till at last, by the numerous reciprocal influences of all these upon each other, the passions arrive at that degree of complexness, which is observed in fact, and which makes them so difficult to be analysed.

Fourthly, As all the passions arise thus from pleasure and pain, their first and most general distribution may be into the two classes of love and hatred, i.e. we may term all those affections of the pleasurable kind, which objects and incidents raise in us, love; all those of the painful kind, hatred. Thus we are said to love not only intelligent agents of morally good dispositions, but also sensual pleasures, riches, and honours; and to hate poverty, disgrace, and pain, bodily and mental.

Fifthly, When our love and hatred are excited to a certain degree, they put us upon a variety of actions, and may be termed desire and aversion; by which last word I understand an active hatred. Now the actions which flow from desire and aversion, are entirely the result of associated powers and circumstances, agreeable to the twentieth, twenty-first, and twenty-second propositions, with their corollaries. The young child learns to grasp and go up to the play-thing that pleases him, and to withdraw his hand from the fire that burns him, at first from the mechanism of his nature, and without any deliberate purpose of obtaining pleasure, and avoiding pain, or any explicit reasoning about them. By degrees he learns, partly from the recurrency of these mechanical tendencies, inspired by God, as one may say, by means of the nature which He has given us, and partly from the instruction and imitation of others, to pursue every thing which he loves and desires, fly from every thing which he hates; and to reason about the method of doing this, just as he does upon other matters. And, because mankind are for the most part pursuing or avoiding something or other, the desire of happiness, and the aversion to misery, are supposed to be inseparable from, and essential to, all intelligent natures. But this does not seem to be an exact or correct way of speaking. The