Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/80

64 sonal integrity and discreteness of person, and not be lost in the press and crowd of other persons. What is true of bodies is not less so of spirits. Here is a man with so little self-love, that his personality seems lost; he is no person, but now this man, now that, — a free port of trade, where all individualities are unloaded and protected; but he has none. His circumference is everywhere; his centre nowhere. He keeps other men's vineyards, not his own. This is a fault; doubtless a rare one, still a fault which destroys the individual character of the man.

There is, doubtless, a large difference amongst men in respect to the original power of the affections, — a differ- ence of nature ; a great difference in respect to the ac- quired power of love, — a difference of culture ; a difference, also, in respect to the mode of culture of the heart, which may be developed jointly with mind and conscience, or in- dependent of them, — a difference in proportion. Thus, practically, the affectional power of men varies as much as the intellectual or the moral power.

Look at the place which the affections occupy in the nature of man. In point of time they precede the intellectual and moral powers in their order of development, they have a wider range in the world than those other faculties. You find affection in animals. In some, love is very powerful. True, it appears there as rudimentary, and for a, short time, as in birds, grouping them into brief cohesions. In some animals it is continual, yet not binding one individual to another in a perpetual combination, but grouping many individuals into a flock. The flock remains ; all the individuals sustain a constant relation to the flock, but most unconstant relations to one another, — the male and female parting fellowship when the annual season of passion is over, the parents neglecting their child as soon as it outgrows the mother's care. Throughout the animal world love does not appear to exist for its own sake, but only as a means to a material end ; now to create, then to protect the individual and the race. Besides, it is purely instinctive, not also self-conscious and voluntary action. The animal seems not an agent, but only a tool of affection, his love necessitated, not spontaneous. Accordingly, in