Page:Observations on Man 1834.djvu/334

 revenge: the latter as a more settled habit of mind, disposing men to take a delight in inflicting misery and punishment, and in satiating their thirst after these, by beholding the tortures and anguish of the sufferers.

Anger and revenge may be analysed as follows. The appearance, idea, approach, actual attack, &c. of any thing from which a child has received harm, must raise in his mind, by the law of association, a miniature trace of that harm. The same harm often arises from different causes, and different harms from the same cause: these harms and causes have an affinity with each other: and thus they are variously mixed and connected together, so as that a general confused idea of harm, with the uneasy state of the nervous system, and the consequent activity of the parts, are raised up in young children upon certain appearances and circumstances. By degrees the denial of gratifications, and many intellectual aggregates, with all the signs and tokens of these, raise up a like uneasiness, in the manner before explained. And thus it happens, that when any harm has been received, any gratification denied, or other mental uneasiness occasioned, a long train of associated remainders of painful impressions enhance the displeasure, and continue it much beyond its natural period. This is the nascent state of the passion of anger, in which it is nearly allied to fear, being the continuance of the same internal feelings, quickened, on one hand, by the actual, painful, or uneasy impression, but moderated on the other by the absence of the apprehension of future danger.

By degrees the child learns, from observation and imitation, to use various muscular exertions, words, gestures, &c. in order to ward off or remove the causes of uneasiness or pain, so as to strike, talk loud, threaten, &c. and so goes on multiplying perpetually, by farther and farther associations, both the occasions of anger, and the expressions of it; and particularly associates a desire of hurting another with the apprehension, or the actual receiving, of harm from that other.

As men grow up to adult age, and distinguish living creatures from things inanimate, rational and moral agents from irrational ones, they learn to refer effects to their ultimate causes; and to consider all the intermediate ones as being themselves effects depending on the ultimate cause. And thus their resentment passes from the inanimate instrument to the living agent; and more especially, if the living agent be a rational and moral one. For, first, Living rational agents are alone capable of being restrained by threatenings and punishments from committing the injurious action. All our expressions of anger must therefore be directed against them.—Secondly, Inanimate things are incapable of feeling the harms which anger wishes: the desire of revenge must therefore be entirely confined to animals. And these two things have great influence on each other. Our threatening harm merely from a motive of security, leads us to wish it really;