with social sentiments, whether these be benign or the contrary; and then with those deep and intense emotions that spring from the moral sense. But these emotions also may reach the highest pitch, and yet may fail to include what is virtuous or praiseworthy.

626. The brigand of the Apennines is, in a word, the wild beast of a sensual, self-seeking existence. He risks all things that, at snatches, he may live like any cardinal, in the fullness of voluptuous satisfactions. But if his daily course of conduct, if its doings and its endurances were to be analyzed, the larger part of the whole of this outspend of energy, bodily and mental, would be claimable on behalf of his social sentiments. His pride and ambition as captain of the troop-his jealousies, his heart-burnings, his vanity, his moroseness, his generosity too-all these feelings have no meaning apart from the social sensibility—even those rudimental emotions which bind man to his fellows, and bind him, whether by antipathies or by sympathies.

627. Yet this lawless being, sensual as he is, and ferocious perhaps, nevertheless in a genuine sense is generous, and he is punctilious too in matters of honor; he is also, in a deep sense, the creature of moral feeling; and, moreover, he is devoutly religious-more truly, and far more seriously, is he a religious man than many a dignitary of his Church. His moral emotions are potent and unsophisticated, although they are grievously misdirected; and his fervent piety is not enfeebled by knowledge and disbelief. The brigand, in his gloomy hour, is fighting with his remorses, just as, in the dark, he might be striving to strangle snakes that had coiled under his pillow. Then he labors hard

to right the uneven balance at the foot of his Conscience-account by acts of mercy, by rescues effected for the widow and fatherless; and, above all, he would do much he would do any thing short of forsaking his profession-if he might only restore himself to favor with his patroness saint, who often, at dusk-light, gives him, he thinks, a reproving shake of the head and a frown. The brigand of the Apennines, who has merited the gallows a hundred times, and who lives for voluptuousness, is eminently the creature of social sentiments; he is intensely the moral being; and he is a man of worship-of worship without hypocrisy.

628. If we were to take as our guide, in going over the field of human history, certain systems of human nature, we must resolve to reduce all its infinitely diversified phenomena to the poor insignificance of a machine, upon which lines of suggestions, like parallels of ribbon in a silk-weaver's loom, are moving forward; and if self gives law to the volitions, then the will is determined always by the most glaring of the colors and patterns which catch the eye as they pass. This sort of philosophy fits well enough such an instance as that of the usurer bolted in with his bags, who is calculating the product at the year's end, and inquires, "Shall I lend my money at a low rate with a high security, or at a high rate and great risk?" After working this problem, he gives his answer accordingly to the importunate applicant who is knocking at the shutter.

629. Take the instance of the most thorough selfist we can find; but only let him be the creature of passion, and then his tumultuous and tempestuous course

will be explicable on no scheme whatever which frigidly resolves human nature into principles that may suffice for the explication of brute nature. Brute nature has its emotions, but they do not run into complications. In human nature the germ emotions collapse one upon another with organic vehemence, and out of these combinations spring boundless energies of action and of endurance. But, before we can comprehend any such course of action, we must allow ourselves to believe that, in human nature, love is more than a euphony for selfism-hatred, jealousy, remorse, more than the reflex motives of a defeated self-interest appetite. These words, and the cluster of associate terms, are significant of realities which take their sweep in depths that are not sounded by a closet-made philosophy.

630. It is enough if here we indicate the fact, already mentioned more than once, that as to human nature, whatever of greatness, whatever of energy for good or evil, whatever of individual coherence and unity of intention it exhibits, are the products, not of single elements, but of complications of elements, and that, as a rule, the more intricate the complication, the more distinctness and force is there in the product.

XVIII.

CEMENTING EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM.

631. ALMOST every writer upon the philosophy of Mind has had occasion to complain of the unfitness of language, laden as it is with colloquial ambiguities, for

conveying with precision and certainty abstract ideas and intellectual distinctions. These complaints are well founded, and the inconveniences referred to are to be obviated as best we may by aid of abundant illustrations and by some repetitions.

632. And yet this admitted defectiveness of popular language, when we must use it as the medium of analytic and abstract thought, is balanced by a compensation which we meet with on another ground. If language conveys intellectual and moral notions defectively, it nevertheless brings before us, in the most unexceptionable manner, that mass of facts with which we are concerned in the fields of Mental Philosophy. A language which well meets the wants of a people among whom human nature has freely developed itself, and which answers the requirements of the intellectual, the practical, the poetical, the moral, and the religious life, contains in its vast stores a trustworthy index to every fact of the people's consciousness: these stores are vouchers for every thing which the mind of the people has actually realized within reach of these departments of thought, of action, and of feeling.

633. To this voluminous index of the thought and feeling, and of the infinitely varied experiences of all orders of Mind, we may make our appeal with perfect confidence. This index will not-it can not lead us astray. Whatever is contained in the Language of a people is contained also in the Mind of the people. When words are put together in sentences or propositions, they may affirm what is not real or true, but the words which are so put together are infallible evidence of the existence either of things seen and known, or of notions or feelings proper to the human mind.

634. If I affirm that a ghost appeared to me yesternight, and gave me such and such information, this affirmation may be wholly untrue; for what actually occurred might be either a trick practiced upon me, or it might be a branular illusion. But now the word Ghost, which is a term colloquially current, and to which an idea of some sort, even if it be vague, is attached by all who hear it, this word is index to a fact in human nature, namely, the belief, every where prevalent, of unearthly or supernatural appearances. This belief, then, is a fact belonging to the philosophy of the human mind.

635. If I affirm that the hearing of music and the sight of beauty in nature excite emotions which are not derived from any "association of ideas," or from any circuitous or factitious sources, this may be true or not true. But it is certain that the words Harmony, Beauty, Melody, Sublimity, and also all those words that are expressive of the feelings and tastes excited by sounds, and by sights of a certain order, are sure indices of facts in human nature, and they are facts which Mental Philosophy ought to take account of.

636. Or if we take up, as the leading terms in a class, the words Love, Sympathy, Compassion, and others resembling these, or their synonyms, and then bring together, under and around these, the many hundred words and forms of speech which are of kindred import, we have then in view a vast mass of facts indicative of certain principal elements of human nature, and of certain usual combinations and interactions of these elements.

637. I may affirm concerning Love, and Sympathy,