6.—Mankind.

The word Mankind is the name of another of those remarkable associations, by which countless ideas are so combined, that their individuality is sunk, and the aggregate is, to appearance, one idea.

The Idea Mankind, like the Idea Country, is not made up wholly of indifferent ideas. It has in it all the trains of pleasurable ideas which we associate, either with individuals, or with subdivisions, of the whole mass.

We have interesting associations with the idea of a man, as a man. The idea of his pains, and his pleasures, call up, unavoidably, trains of the ideas of our own pains and pleasures. The Idea of a man, therefore, naturally includes, the love of his pleasures, hatred of his pains.

From our earliest Infancy, we have had experience of nothing more constantly than this; that a great proportion of our pleasures proceeded from a certain disposition towards us, on the part of those of our fellow-creatures who were near us; and a great proportion of our Pains from a certain other disposition on their part. Those Dispositions, taken in the most 230 general sense, are Kindness, which we have already explained; and its opposite, Unkindness. We have, therefore, very intense associations of Pleasure, with the idea of the Disposition towards us, called Kindness, in other men; and very intense associations of Pain with that of the Disposition in them called Unkindness towards us.

In our Idea of each individual man, therefore, is included not only the Love of his Pleasures and Aversion to his Pains; but, in addition to this, the Love of his Disposition of Kindness towards us, and Aversion to his Disposition of Unkindness towards us.

Now, as our complex Idea of Mankind, is made up of the aggregate of the ideas of Individuals, including the interesting trains called Love of their Pleasures, Hatred of their Pains; Love of their Kindness, Aversion to their Unkindness; the generation of the affection, called Love of Mankind, is, for our present purpose, sufficiently shewn.44 45

44 As carrying out the principle of association, in the domain of the Feelings, the foregoing chapters, from XIX. onwards, are unexceptionable and cogent. As furnishing the complete account of the Benevolent and Malevolent Affections, and of the Sympathies or disinterested impulses, they are defective. Indeed, the whole subject of the Emotions is placed by the author upon a too narrow basis. Any theory that looks solely to the circumstance of pleasure and pain, (important as that is) fails to grapple with all the facts. For example, there is no account rendered of the very familiar emotion of Wonder.

That the Emotions are all compounded of elements of Sense (in the widest comprehension, that is, with Muscularity included) may be maintained on good grounds. Nevertheless, in order to a satisfactory analysis of even the commoner emotions, such as Tenderness, there is wanted a more exhaustive detail of the pleasures and pains of sense than is furnished in the present work.

A few remarks on the generic example of the Tender Feeling, on which the author has expended the greatest part of his illustration, will show the method to be pursued. It is a case where certain primary sensibilities, correctly ranked under Sensation, together with the associating principle, seem to account for the whole of the phenomenon. In such a case as Wonder, the explanation involves an additional element.

The pleasures of Tender Feeling, or Love and the Affections, are no doubt, as remarked in the text, in a considerable part associations with other pleasures, such as nourishment. An animal and a child would contract a pleasurable association with the person that brings them their food, or ministers to their bodily wants. Still, there is something different from this in Tenderness or Love. The fact essential to the state is the gratification from the acts of caressing, fondling, and embracing; a pleasure that has its independent sources in the human and animal sensibilities, and does not need the association with being fed and cared for, although enhanced and stimulated by that association. Even apart from the powerful element of sexuality, there is a great mass of pleasurable animal feeling awakened in the loving embrace of two individuals of the warm-blooded species. We may instance, among these, the pleasures of Touch in the soft warm contact; the muscular pleasures co-operating; the organic feelings connected with secretions stimulated in the act, of which the lachrymal is the prominent but not the solitary case; the peculiar sensibility of the pharynx, which is probably the sign of a less acute but more extended influence in the alimentary canal generally; to all which, is to be added, in women, the genial secretion of the breasts, going on incessantly, although more profuse in nursing mothers. The coalition of these tactile, muscular, and organic sensibilities, is the pleasure of love by itself, or as it might be felt between two living sentient creatures, in no other way the givers or receivers of benefits. Nor does this exhaust the circle. The eye, and the ear, and even the smell, may be also included. The visible aspects of living beings are often highly agreeable from the first, and become so to a farther extent by association with the tactile and organic pleasures. Similarly, the ear may be charmed with the sounds emitted by another human being or animal, and may also form associations with the still more potent pleasures above named. Once more, the odour of one animal may be intrinsically sweet to another animal; while here too, associations may be added.

The pleasure of Tender feeling must therefore be pronounced to have an independent standing in the sentient framework, although susceptible of being analysed into the primary pleasures of the senses, together with the influence of association. All the affections derive the chief part of their strength from this complex source. For, although the acts of fondling and caressing are not universally practised between every two persons that have a mutual affection, or are so only in the very limited form of the shake of the hand, yet there is an echo of these, and a stimulus to the organic accompaniments, in the sight of each other, in the sounds of the voice, and in the more intellectual forms of indicating attachment. It can be proved that the two higher senses enter deeply into the tender emotion, (as they do into the Beautiful). The well-known Dr. Kitto, who was stone-deaf, in describing his experience, states that, as regarded his pleasures, the loss that affected him most was his inability to hear the voices of his children. It is evident that the same remark, as to the mutilation of an organ of tender feeling, is applicable to the blind. The pathos of the lines in Paradise Lost contains this implication.—B.

45 The two preceding subsections are almost perfect as expositions and exemplifications of the mode in which, by the natural course of life, we acquire attachments to persons, things, and positions, which are the causes or habitual concomitants of pleasurable sensations to us, or of relief from pains: in other words, those persons, things, and positions become in themselves pleasant to us by association; and, through the multitude and variety of the pleasurable ideas associated with them, become pleasures of greater constancy and even intensity, and altogether more valuable to us, than any of the primitive pleasures of our constitution. This portion of the laws of human nature is the more important to psychology, as they show how it is possible that the moral sentiments, the feelings of duty, and of moral approbation and disapprobation, may be no original elements of our nature, and may yet be capable of being not only more intense and powerful than any of the elements out of which they may have been formed, but may also, in their maturity, be perfectly disinterested: nothing more being necessary for this, than that the acquired pleasure and pain should have become as independent of the native elements from which they are formed, as the love of wealth and of power not only often but generally become, of the bodily pleasures, and relief from bodily pains, for the sake of which, and of which alone, power and wealth must have been originally valued. No one thinks it necessary to suppose an original and inherent love of money or of power; yet these are the objects of two of the strongest, most general, and most persistent passions of human nature; passions which often have quite as little reference to pleasure or pain, beyond the mere consciousness of possession, and are in that sense of the word quite as disinterested, as the moral feelings of the most virtuous human being.

The author, then, has furnished a most satisfactory and most valuable explanation of certain of the laws of our affections and passions, and has traced the origin and generation of a great number of them. But it must be remarked of the whole exposition, that it accounts truly, but only partially, for this part of human nature. It affords a sufficient theory of what we may call the mental, or intellectual element of the feelings in question. But it does not furnish, nor does the author anywhere furnish, any theory of what may be called the animal element in them. Yet this is no unimportant ingredient in the emotional and active part of human nature: and it is one greatly demanding analysis. Let us take the case of any of the passions: and as one of the simplest as well as one of the most powerful of them, let us take the emotion of Fear. The author gives no account of Fear but that it is the idea of a painful sensation, associated with the idea of its being (more or less uncertainly) future. Undoubtedly these elements are present in it; but do they account for the peculiar emotional character of the passion, and for its physiological effect, such as pallor, trembling, faltering of the voice, coldness of the skin, loss of control over the secretions, and general depression of the vital powers? The case would be simpler if these great disturbances of the animal functions by the expectation of a pain were the same in kind as the smaller modifications produced by the mere idea. This, however, is by no means the case; Ideas do produce effects on the animal economy, but not those particular effects. The idea of a pain, if it acts on the bodily functions at all, has an action the same in kind (though much less in degree) as the pain itself would have. But the passion of fear has a totally different action. Suppose the fear to be that of a flogging. The flogging itself, if it produced any physical demonstrations, would produce cries, shrinkings, possibly muscular struggles, and might by its remoter effects disturb the action of the brain or of the circulation; and if the fear of a flogging produced these same effects, in a mitigated degree, the power of fear might be merely the power of the idea of the pain. But none of these are at all like the characteristic symptoms of fear: while those characteristic symptoms are much the same whatever be the particular pain apprehended, and whether it be a bodily or a purely mental pain, provided it be sufficiently intense and sufficiently proximate. No one has ever accounted for this remarkable difference, and the author of the Analysis does not even mention it. The explanation of it is one of those problems, partly psychological and partly physiological, which our knowledge of the laws of animal sensibility does not yet enable us to resolve. In whatever manner the phenomena are produced, they are a case of the quasi-chemistry of the nervous functions, whereby the junction of certain elements generates a compound whose properties are very different from the sum of the properties of the elements themselves.

This is the point which the author’s explanations of the emotional part of human nature do not reach, and, it may even be said, do not attempt to reach. Until, however, it is reached, there is no guarantee for the completeness of his analysis of even the mental element in the passions: for when the effect exhibits so much which has not, in the known properties of the assigned cause, anything to account for it, there is always room for a doubt whether some part of the cause has not been left out of the reckoning. This doubt, however, does not seriously affect the most important of the author’s analyses, viz. those which, without resolving the emotions themselves into anything more elementary, expound their transfer by association from their natural objects to others; with the great increase of intensity and persistency which so often accompanies the transfer, and which is in general quite sufficiently accounted for by the causes to which the author refers it.—Ed.