the accents and gestures, significant of pain, are referred to the
feelings which they express, they awaken in the mind of the beholder
a desire that they should cease. Pain is thus apprehended to be evil
for its own sake, without any other necessary reference to the mind
by which its existence is perceived, than such as is indispensable
to its perception. The tendencies of our original sensations, indeed,
all have for their object the preservation of our individual being.
But these are passive and unconscious. In proportion as the mind
acquires an active power, the empire of these tendencies becomes
limited. Thus an infant, a savage, and a solitary beast, is selfish,
because its mind is incapable of receiving an accurate intimation
of the nature of pain as existing in beings resembling itself.
The inhabitant of a highly civilized community will more acutely
sympathize with the sufferings and enjoyments of others, than
the inhabitant of a society of a less degree of civilization. He
who shall have cultivated his intellectual powers by familiarity
with the highest specimens of poetry and philosophy, will usually
sympathize more than one engaged in the less refined functions
of manual labour. Every one has experience of the fact, that to
sympathize with the sufferings of another, is to enjoy a transitory
oblivion of his own.

The mind thus acquires, by exercise, a habit, as it were, of
perceiving and abhorring evil, however remote from the immediate
sphere of sensations with which that individual mind is conversant.
Imagination or mind employed in prophetically imaging forth its
objects, is that faculty of human nature on which every gradation
of its progress, nay, every, the minutest, change, depends. Pain
or pleasure, if subtly analysed, will be found to consist entirely
in prospect. The only distinction between the selfish man and the