Grief in its origin and its earlier occurrence is not the spontaneous and almost irresistible impulse of our adult human experience, but, like all emotion and all progressive psychism, is by effort of will. That is, we must suppose that grief has its origin in some such _nisus_ as a child exhibits when he is taught to be sorry for something he has done. Hence it is only gradually and with the lapse of many generations after its origin that sorrow becomes hereditary and spontaneous. At first sorrow was a distinct attainment, rarely and but occasionally reached by any individual, and it is comparatively late in psychic history that it becomes a permanent and innate power. Sorrow also very gradually widens its sphere. At first purely selfish, a retrospective reaction at one’s own hurt, it becomes at length, through sociality and its concurrent advantages, altruistic; sorrow is felt for others and the springs of sympathy and pity are developed. That this altruism is very late development is obvious, in that it has still to be taught even among the most advanced of the human race to their children. The child is taught to feel sorry for the cat he has hurt, for the blind man, for the cripple. And we must conclude that at one time in psychic history egoistic sorrow was likewise at the stage of development at which we now see altruistic, and we may suppose that in the far future the altruistic may come to the present _status_ of the egoistic sorrow. However, for both there is an indefinite field for expansion, for refinement of sensibility, and for readiness and appropriateness of manifestation. Sorrow also will develop more and more on ethical and religious grounds. Remorse arises and develops; and also the “godly sorrow for sin.” We learn to feel, not merely sorry over the past as affecting our disadvantage, but to feel sorry conscientiously as our deeds or those of others conflict with the law of right or with the law of God. Those who have no God-consciousness, and so no feeling about their action in the sight of God, no sense of sinfulness, have yet often acute moral sense and feelings. However, the origin and function of the moral and religious sense in the light of natural selection is a wide subject which can only be alluded to here; suffice it to say that sorrow is thereby lifted to a peculiar and new plane of self-contained spirituality. That is, the bearing of it is often without relation to physical life-function, and even adverse thereto, and throughout has its value and sanction in itself alone.