both in regard to ourselves and others, except as it is filled up, animated, and set in motion by human thoughts and purposes. The ingredients of passion, action, and properly of interest are never positive, palpable matters-of-fact, concrete existences, but symbolical representations of events lodged in the bosom of futurity, and teaching us, by timely anticipation and watchful zeal, to build up the fabric of our own or others’ future weal. _A._ Do we not sometimes plot their woe with at least equal good-will? _B._ Not much oftener than we are accessory to our own. _A._ I must say that savours more to me of an antithesis than of an answer. _B._ For once, be it so. _A._ But surely there is a difference between a real and an imaginary interest? A history is not a romance. _B._ Yes; but in this sense the feelings and interests of others are in the end as real, as much matters of fact as mine or yours can be. The history of the world is not a romance, though you and I have had only a small share in it. You would turn every thing into autobiography. The interests of others are no more chimerical, visionary, fantastic than my own, being founded in truth, and both are brought home to my bosom in the same way by the force of imagination and sympathy. _D._ But in addition to all this sympathy that you make such a rout about, it is _I_ who am to feel a real, downright interest in my own future good, and I shall feel no such interest in another person’s. Does not this make a wide, nay a total difference in the case? Am I to have no more affection for my own flesh and blood than for another’s? _B._ This would indeed make an entire difference in the case, if your interest in your own good were founded in your affection for yourself, and not your affection for yourself in your attachment to your own good. If you were attached to your own good merely because it was _yours_, I do not see why you should not be equally attached to your own ill—both are equally yours! Your own person or that of others would, I take it, be alike indifferent to you, but for the degree of sympathy you have with the feelings of either. Take away the sense or apprehension of pleasure and pain, and you would care no more about yourself than you do about the hair of your head or the paring of your nails, the parting with which gives you no sensible uneasiness at the time or on after-reflection. _D._ But up to the present moment you allow that I have a particular interest in my proper self. Where then am I to stop, or how draw the line between my real and my imaginary identity?