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
It is, I think, amply manifest that the processes here indicated are not
to be taken as intellectual processes--not as processes in which
recognized relations between pleasures and their antecedents, or
intelligent adaptations of means to ends, form the dominant elements.
The state of mind produced by an aggregate of picturesque objects is not
one resolvable into propositions. The sentiment does not contain within
itself any consciousness of causes and consequences of happiness. The
vague recollections of other beautiful scenes and other delightful days
which it dimly rouses, are not aroused because of any rational
co-ordinations of ideas that have been formed in bygone years. Mr.
Hutton, however, assumes that in speaking of the genesis of moral
feelings as due to inherited experiences of the pleasures and pains
caused by certain modes of conduct, I am speaking of reasoned-out
experiences--experiences consciously accumulated and generalized. He
overlooks the fact that the genesis of emotions is distinguished from
the genesis of ideas in this; that whereas the ideas are composed of
elements that are simple, definitely related, and (in the case of
general ideas) constantly related, emotions are composed of enormously
complex aggregates of elements that are never twice alike, and which
stand in relations that are never twice alike. The difference in the
resulting modes of consciousness is this:--In the genesis of an idea the
successive experiences, be they of sounds, colours, touches, tastes, or
be they of the special objects which combine many of these into groups,
have so much in common that each, when it occurs, can be definitely
thought of as like those which preceded it. But in the genesis of an
emotion the successive experiences so far differ that each of them, when
it occurs, suggests past experiences which are not specifically similar,
but have only a general similarity; and, at the same time, it suggests
benefits or evils in past experience which likewise are various in their
special natures, though they have a certain community in general nature.
Hence it results that the consciousness aroused is a multitudinous,
confused consciousness, in which, along with a certain kind of
combination among the impressions received from without, there is a
vague cloud of ideal combinations akin to them, and a vague mass of
ideal feelings of pleasure or pain which were associated with these. We
have abundant proof that feelings grow up without reference to
recognized causes and consequences, and without the possessor of them
being able to say why they have grown up; though analysis,
nevertheless, shows that they have been formed out of connected
experiences. The familiar fact that a kind of jam which was, during
childhood, repeatedly taken after medicine, may become, by simple
association of sensations, so nauseous that it cannot be tolerated in
after-life, illustrates clearly the way in which repugnances may be
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