Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative; Vol. 1 of 3: Library Edition (1891), Containing Seven Essays not before Republished, and Various other Additions.Spencer, Herbert
Philosophy
Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative; Vol. 1 of 3: Library Edition (1891), Containing Seven Essays not before Republished, and Various other Additions.
Spencer, Herbert
Philosophy; Political science; Science
Thus, in the very process of arranging the emotions into grades,
beginning with those involved in the lowest forms of conscious activity
and ending with those peculiar to the adult civilized man, the way is
opened for that ultimate analysis which alone can lead us to the true
science of the matter. For when we find both that there exist in a man
feelings which do not exist in a child, and that the European is
characterized by some sentiments which are wholly or in great part
absent from the savage--when we see that, besides the new emotions which
arise spontaneously as the individual becomes completely organized,
there are new emotions making their appearance in the more advanced
divisions of our race; we are led to ask--How are new emotions
generated? The lowest savages have not even the ideas of justice or
mercy: they have neither words for them nor can they be made to conceive
them; and the manifestation of them by Europeans they ascribe to fear or
cunning. There are æsthetic emotions common among ourselves, which are
scarcely in any degree experienced by some inferior races; as, for
instance, those produced by music. To which instances may be added the
less marked but more numerous contrasts that exist between civilized
races in the degrees of their several emotions. And if it is manifest,
both that all the emotions are capable of being permanently modified in
the course of successive generations, and that what must be classed as
new emotions may be brought into existence; then it follows that nothing
like a true conception of the emotions is to be obtained, until we
understand how they are evolved.
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