of the imagination; and these make the same direct appeal to that faculty, whether they relate to ourselves or to others, as the eye receives with equal directness the impression of our own external form or that of others. It will be easy to perceive by this train of reasoning how, notwithstanding the contradiction involved in the supposition of a generally absolute self-interest, the mind comes to feel a deep and habitual conviction of the truth of this principle. Finding in itself a continued consciousness of its past impressions, it is naturally enough disposed to transfer the same sort of identity and consciousness to the whole of its being. The objects of imagination and of the senses are, as it were, perpetually playing into one another’s hands, and shifting characters, so that we lose our reckoning, and do not think it worth while to mark where the one ends and the other begins. As our actual being is constantly passing into our future being, and carries the internal feeling of consciousness along with it, we seem to be already identified with our future being in this permanent part of our nature, and to feel by a mutual impulse the same necessary sympathy with our future selves that we know we shall have with our past selves. We take the tablets of memory, reverse them, and stamp the image of self on that which as yet possesses nothing but the name. It is no wonder then that the imagination, constantly disregarding the progress of time, when its course is marked out along the straight unbroken line of individuality, should confound the necessary differences of things, and convert a distant object into a present reality. The interest which is hereafter to be felt by this continued conscious being, this indefinite unit, called _me_, seems necessarily to affect me in every state of my existence,—‘thrills in each nerve, and lives along the line.’ In the first place we abstract the successive modifications of our being, and _particular_ temporary interests, into one simple nature and general principle of self-interest, and then make use of this nominal abstraction as an artificial medium to compel those particular actual interests into the closest affinity and union with each other, as different lines meeting in the same centre must have a mutual communication with each other. On the contrary, as I always remain perfectly distinct from others (the interest which I take in their former or present feelings being like that which I take in their future feelings, never any thing more than the effect of imagination and sympathy), the same illusion and transposition of ideas cannot take place with regard to these; namely, the confounding a physical impulse with the rational motives to action. Indeed the uniform nature of my feelings with regard to others (my interest in their welfare having always the same source and sympathy) seems by analogy to confirm the supposition of a similar simplicity in my relation to myself, and of a