Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/199

Rh the cult, he becomes a god, his injunctions become divine commands with dreaded punishments for breaches of them.

These four kinds of fear co-operate. The dread of retaliation, the dread of social dislike, the dread of legal punishment, and the dread of divine vengeance, united in various proportions, form a body of feeling which checks the primitive tendency to pursue the objects of desire without regard to the interests of fellow-men. Containing none of the altruistic sentiment of justice, properly so called, this pro-altruistic sentiment of justice serves temporarily to cause respect for one another's claims, and so to make social co-operation possible.

Creatures which become gregarious tend to become sympathetic in degrees proportionate to their intelligences. Not, indeed, that the resulting sympathetic tendency is exclusively, or even mainly, of that kind which the words ordinarily imply; for in some there is little beyond sympathy in fear, and in others little beyond sympathy in ferocity. All that is meant is that in gregarious creatures a feeling displayed by one is apt to arouse kindred feelings in others, and is apt to do this in proportion as others are intelligent enough to appreciate the signs of the feeling. In two chapters of the Principles of Psychology—Sociality and Sympathy and Altruistic Sentiments—I have endeavored to show how sympathy in general arises, and how there is eventually produced altruistic sympathy.

The implication is, then, that the associated state having been maintained among men by the aid of the pro-altruistic sentiment of justice, there have been maintained the conditions under which the altruistic sentiment of justice itself can develop. In a permanent group there occur, generation after generation, incidents simultaneously drawing from its members manifestations of like emotions—rejoicings over victories and escapes, over prey jointly captured, over supplies of wild food discovered; as well as laments over defeats, scarcities, inclemencies, etc. And to these greater pleasures and pains felt in common by all, and so expressing themselves that each sees in others the signs of feelings like those which he has and is displaying, must be added the smaller pleasures and pains daily resulting from meals taken together, amusements, games, and from the not infrequent adverse occurrences which affect several persons at once. Thus there is fostered that sympathy which makes the altruistic sentiment of justice possible.

But the altruistic sentiment of justice is slow in assuming a high form, partly because its primary component does not become highly developed until a late phase of progress, partly because it is relatively complex, and partly because it implies a stretch of