be personally injured or even personally interfered with, to see how far-reaching and how susceptible has now become this most-highly-re-representative of all the sentiments-a sentiment having for its function the maintenance of those conditions which make complete life possible.

It must be added, however, that as in the last case, so here, this primarily-egoistic sentiment attains that final form just described, only by the aid of an altruistic sentiment; the co-operation of which will be indicated in a subsequent chapter.

§ 517. One who fails in some simple mechanical action feels vexation at his own inability-a vexation arising quite apart from any importance of the end missed. Contrariwise, a feat of skill achieved causes an emotional satisfaction, irrespective of the concrete result considered in itself—is just the same whether some ulterior purpose is or is not aided. These opposite feelings are experienced when there are no witnesses to the failures or successes. A careless step leading to accident, or some bungling manipulation, causes self-condemnation with its accompanying feeling of annoyance, though no one is by; and though no one is by, a successful leap over an obstacle, a skilful shot at a bird, or the landing of a fish under difficulties, excites a wave of selfsatisfaction. The like holds when the failures and achievements are purely mental. "What a fool I am!" is a common exclamation on discovering some intellectual blunder; and the vexation accompanying the discovery is felt when no word is uttered and when no one else is aware of the error. On the other hand, a glow of pleasure follows the solution of a puzzling question, even though the question be not worth solving. In the search for a forgotten name both effects are illustrated. Inability to remember it is a source of vexation; and when at length it is remembered there comes self-gratulation: each feeling being experienced without regard to any advantage gained by finding the name.

These emotions must inevitably be evolved along with increasing power of representation. A successful bodily or mental act, while it secures the gratification sought, vaguely revives the consciousness of kindred acts that have been followed by kindred gratifications. Each other kind of success, bodily or mental, is similarly associated in thought, not only with the immediate result, but with like results before achieved in like ways. Thus successful action in general, comes to be associated in consciousness with pleasure in general: both the two consciousnesses being re-representative. For the general consciousness of successful action is constituted not by the thought of any one successful act, nor by the representation of many previous successful acts of the same kind, but is one in which representations of past successful acts of multitudinous kinds are represented; and at the same time the accompanying consciousness of pleasure achieved by successful action, is one in which many kinds of represented pleasures are re-represented as components of a vague whole. Hence it happens that each success tends to arouse ideas of one's past self as acting successfully and thereby achieving satisfaction; and thus is produced the sentiment of self-estimation, which, when it rises to a considerable height, we call pride.

That continuous successes tend to bring about an habitual self-exaltation, and that a painful want of confidence follows perpetual failures, are familiar truths clearly implying that the sentiment of pride and the sentiment of humility are thus fostered in the individual. And seeing this, we cannot fail to see that they are thus evolved in the race. We may see also that, like the other egoistic sentiments we have considered, these sentiments have as their function the adjustment of conduct to surrounding conditions. Proper selfestimation is needful for due regulation of our efforts in relation to their ends. Under-estimation of self involves the letting-slip of advantages that might have been gained. Over-estimation of self prompts attempts which fail from

want of due capacity. In either case there is an average of evil experienced-benefit missed or effort thrown away. Hence this egoistic sentiment which we describe as a consciousness of personal worth, serves as a balance to the ambitious. And the experiences of each individual are continually tending to adjust its amount to the requirements of his nature.

§ 518. To pursue this synthesis in other directions would delay us too much; else something might be said of the modifications and the combinations af these ogoistic sentiments. For, as will be manifest when we consider the genesis of them, their limits are by no means definite. Within each there are qualitative differences dependent on the circumstances arousing it, and very generally they are excited together in different ways and degrees.

Here I will draw attention only to one other egoistic sentiment; and I do this chiefly because of its mysterious nature. It is a pleasurably-painful sentiment, of which it is difficult to identify the nature, and still more difficult to trace the genesis. I refer to what is sometimes called "the luxury of grief.”

The interpretation of this feeling implied by another name given to it-self-pity, does not seem to me a satisfactory one; because pity, under the form alone applying in this case, is itself difficult to interpret, as we shall presently see. After having discovered why pity itself, unaccompanied by any prompted activity, may become a source of pleasurable pain, it has to be shown that the interpretation applies when self is the object of the pity: the last solution depends upon the first, which is not yet found. I do not say that the hypothesis may not be a partially-true one; but only that the explanation is not ultimate, and that there are probably other components in the consciousness.

It seems possible that this sentiment, which makes a sufferer wish to be alone with his grief, and makes him resist

all distraction from it, may arise from dwelling on the contrast between his own worth as he estimates it and the treatment he has received either from his fellow-beings or from a power which he is prone to think of anthropomorphically. If he feels that he has deserved much while he has received little, and still more if instead of good there has come evil, the consciousness of this evil is qualified by the consciousness of worth, made pleasurably dominant by the contrast. One who contemplates his affliction as undeserved, necessarily contemplates his own merit as either going unrewarded, or as bringing punishment instead of reward: there is an idea of much withheld, and a feeling of implied superiority to those who withhold it.

If this is so, the sentiment ought not to exist where the evil suffered is one recognized by the sufferer as nothing more than is deserved. Probably few, if any, ever do recognize this; and from those few we are unlikely to get the desired information. That this explanation is the true one, I feel by no means clear. I throw it out simply as a suggestion: confessing that this peculiar emotion is one which neither analysis nor synthesis enables me clearly to understand.

CHAPTER VII.

EGO-ALTRUISTIC SENTIMENTS.

§ 519. To prevent a misapprehension apt to arise, let me, before going further in explaining the genesis of sentiments by accumulation of the effects of experience, define the word experience as here used. In its ordinary acceptation, experience connotes definite perceptions, the terms of which stand in observed relations; and is not taken to include connexions formed in the mind between states that occur together, when the relations between them, causal or other, are not consciously identified. But a reference to such chapters in the Special Synthesis as those on Reflex Action, Instinct, Memory, &c., or to chapters in the Physical Synthesis on the Genesis of Nervous Systems, Simple, Compound, and Doubly-Compound, will remind the reader that the effects of experience as there and everywhere else understood in this work, are the effects produced by the occurrence together of nervous states, with their accompanying states of consciousness when these exist; whether the relations between the states are or are not observed. Throughout the earlier stages of mental evolution, indeed, there cannot be that recognition of a relation which experience, in its limited meaning, implies. Habitual converse with the environment produces its effects without the recipient knowing them in the full sense of knowing; for there has not yet been evolved that notion of self which is essential to conscious experience.