Here is a mistake to be guarded against. If you ask why such a man, though by nature gross or even Swift-like in his love of dirty ideas, yet, because a gentleman and moving in corresponding society, does not indulge in such brutalities, the answer is that he abstains through the modifications of the sympathies. A low man in low society would not be doubtful of its reception; but he, by the anticipations of sympathy (a form that should be introduced as technically as Kant's anticipations of perception), feels it would be ill or gloomily received. Well now, I, when saying that a man is altered by sympathy so as to think _that_, through means of this power, which otherwise he would not think, shall be interpreted of such a case as that above. But wait; there is a distinction: the man does not think differently, he only acts as if he thought differently. The case I contemplate is far otherwise; it is where a man feels a lively contempt or admiration in consequence of seeing or hearing such feelings powerfully expressed by a multitude, or, at least, by others which else he would not have felt. Vulgar people would sit for hours in the presence of people the most refined, totally unaware of their superiority, for the same reason that most people (if assenting to the praise of the Lord's Prayer) would do so hyper-critically, because its real and chief beauties are negative. Not only is it false that my understanding is no measure or rule for another man, but of necessity it is so, and every step I take towards truth for myself is a step made on behalf of every other man. We doubt if the world in the sense of a synthesis of action--the procession and carrying out of ends and purposes--_could_ consist with the [Greek: anti]-world (in a religious sense). Men who divide all into pious people and next to devils see in such a state of evil the natural tendency (as in all other _monstrous_ evils--which this must be if an evil at all) to correction and redress. But now assume a man, sober, honourable, cheerful, healthy, active, occupied all day long in toilsome duties (or what he believes duties) for ends not selfish; this man has never had a thought of death, hell, etc., and looking abroad on those who dwell in such contemplations, he regards them sincerely, not unkindly or with contempt; partially he respects them, but he looks on them as under a monstrous delusion, in a fever, in a panic, as in a case of broken equilibrium. Now he is right. And, moreover, secondly, two other feelings or suspicions come on, (1) of hypocrisy, (2) of the violation of inner shame in publishing the most awful private feelings.