Without dwelling on the fact that among the civilized, those who lead
the life of the senses are contrasted in the same way with those whose
lives are largely occupied with pleasures not of a sensual kind, let me
point out that there are analogous contrasts between guidance by the
less complex representative feelings, or lower emotions, and guidance
by the more complex representative feelings, or higher emotions. When
led by his acquisitiveness--a re-representative feeling which, acting
under due control, conduces to welfare--the thief takes another man's
property; his act is determined by certain imagined proximate pleasures
of relatively simple kinds, rather than by less clearly imagined
possible pains that are more remote and of relatively involved kinds.
But in the conscientious man, there is an adequate restraining motive,
still more re-representative in its nature, including not only ideas
of punishment, and not only ideas of lost reputation and ruin, but
including ideas of the claims of the person owning the property, and
of the pains which loss of it will entail on him: all joined with a
general aversion to acts injurious to others, which arises from the
inherited effects of experience. And here at the end we see, as we saw
at the beginning, that guidance by the more complex feeling, on the
average, conduces to welfare more than does guidance by the simpler
feeling.
The like holds with the intellectual co-ordinations through which
stimuli issue in motions. The lowest actions, called reflex, in which
an impression made on an afferent nerve causes by discharge through an
efferent nerve a contraction, shows us a very limited adjustment of
acts to ends: the impression being simple, and the resulting motion
simple, the internal co-ordination is also simple. Evidently when there
are several senses which can be together affected by an outer object;
and when, according as such object is discriminated as of one or other
kind, the movements made in response are combined in one or other way;
the intermediate co-ordinations are necessarily more involved. And
evidently each further step in the evolution of intelligence, always
instrumental to better self-preservation, exhibits this same general
trait. The adjustments by which the more involved actions are made
appropriate to the more involved circumstances, imply more intricate,
and, consequently, more deliberate and conscious co-ordinations; until,
when we come to civilized men, who in their daily business, taking into
account many data and conditions, adjust their proceedings to various
consequences, we see that the intellectual actions, becoming of the
kind we call judicial, are at once very elaborate and very deliberate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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