Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/117

 SENTIMENTS AND IDEALS 99

do so in detail would lead into a hopeless tangle of casuisti cal distinctions and controversies; but in a general way it can be done so as to be of some practical helpfulness.

It is obvious, first, that attachment to a material thing or to an animal is not of equal moral rank with attachment to a person. A special feeling for a house or a dog manifestly does not have as high a moral significance as a special feeling for a human being. There are persons who seem to have a stronger and more highly developed sentiment for a partic ular animal than they have for any person ; but it surely requires no argument to show that it is abnormal and indi cates a moral character that is either perverted or arrested in its development. Even when human associations are the chief factors in a sentiment organized about a material thing or an animal, though that fact elevates it in the scale of sentiments, we cannot attribute to it the same moral sig nificance that we do to a sentiment for a human being. This is true, first, for the reason that things are inferior to moral personalities and can not have the same reaction upon those who assume an attitude toward them ; second, for the reason that sentiments for them ordinarily determine con duct with respect to them only, or with respect to persons only as related to them, which means that an individual with sentiments so organized is in his feeling and conduct sub ordinating fellow men to things that are lower in the scale of being. His moral life is turned upside down.

In the second place, the sentiments we have for persons are not all of equal moral significance. Consider the senti ments for one s self. One may have for one s self the senti ment of self-love, pure and simple ; or the sentiment of self- respect, which is self-love blended with and controlled by the sentiment for personality as such, which involves a like re spect for other personalities. This is unquestionably of a far higher moral order than the pure egoism of self-love. The child is egoistic ; as it becomes mature the self-love, un less it is modified by the abstract sentiment for personality, will become selfishness ; or in so far as it manifests itself in

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