ANTIPATHIES.

AN abuse has crept in upon the employment of the word Antipathy. It is frequently used in common speech, and also in written discourse, to denote a settled and unconquerable aversion. But, in philosophical language, this is rather that hate which is the result of antipathy. Strictly it does not mean hate,— not the feelings of one man set against the person of another, but that, in two natures, there is an opposition of feeling. With respect to the same object they feel oppositely. According to this view, it is exactly the reverse or ́antithesis to sympathy. Sympathy is the union or consent of feeling upon any point, or towards any object. Antipathy is the division, dissent, discord of feeling on any point; or, to speak still more absolutely, of affection under given circumstances; as sympathy is unity of affection under given circumstances. Sympathy and Antipathy may be correctly applied, in physiology, to natures which have not intelligence. Lord Bacon says,

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Tangible bodies have an antipathy with air; and any liquid body that is more dense, they will draw, condense, and in effect incorporate." "No contraries hold more antipathy than I and such a knave,” is a philosophic line in Shakspeare.

There can be no doubt that this must be the philosophical way of considering an antipathy. Such

is its essential and elemental being. The hate from antipathy, and the love from sympathy, must both be considered, therefore, as secondary and as corresponding feelings. With respect to sympathy, and the love arising from it, the distinction remains perfectly obvious and acknowledged by us: but, in antipathy and hate, there is a confusion to our common apprehension; because, the original, simple diversity of feeling, or of susceptibility, or of nature, is swallowed up, as it were, to our observation in the immediately resulting hostility.

Now, without being very anxious about words, it is clear that, in philosophy, there are two things carefully to be distinguished, and which actually do mark the more important cases of antipathy;-these are, the original dissimilarity of feeling, and the resulting aversion. Without, therefore, pretending to give any universal description of antipathies, under which all must fall, it cannot be doubted, that this is a proper description of some notable ones, and those of most moral significance,-that between two natures of like species, as two human minds, there is apprehended to be, in some points, an unlikeness, and that from this unlikeness there results, in certain cases, mutual hate.

Here it is proper to remark, that, in order that this effect may take place, it is necessary that there be, in some respects, a congruity, that is, a sympathy, in order that the unlikeness may produce much pain. For example, reptiles and other creatures that are hideous to us, are things that have our life, and yet with strange and, to us, shocking dissemblances; so that we are at once drawn to them forcibly, and at the same time driven back from them.

But, on the other hand, it is a curious observation, that this mixture of likeness and unlikeness often produces the highest degree of love,-as between man and woman,-as between the grey-headed and the child,-between the courageous and the timid,-between the melancholy and the gay,-and many other contrasts, which have been taken notice of as even a law of affection.

Now, in explanation of this difference of effect produced by apparently the same cause, it may be remarked, that in the latter case, where contrast is a law of love, there is a sympathy in that which is deeply essential, and there is diversity in that which is more apparent, being superficial and of less moment; and it is very conceivable that this should become a powerful cause of love. But dyspathy, if we may use the word, in essentials, with sympathy in what is slight and superficial, does not produce love ; or, if it do, a love that is very soon exhausted.

But, farther, in giving any account of dispositions of one person towards another, it is absolutely necessary to take in many other feelings than merely that arising from the perception of certain contrasts. Very often there is a feeling of beauty. An old man in a child sees his own spirit of life beautiful in form; and he feels his own spirit of life quickened and rekindled. The first is the sense of beauty blending with the feeling of life; and the second is a proper sympathy; for it is his own feeling, heightened by the same feeling existing in a much higher state of activity in others. Besides, there are, as it is needless to mention, many other moral feelings.

Now, any thing whatever that heightens in us a

natural feeling that is grateful, must be the object of our love. Whatever violently oppresses or destroys in us such a feeling, or excites the feeling of any painful consciousness lodged within us, is hateful. So the chambers of death, vaults, receptacles of corruption, gulfs of annihilation, are hateful. They not merely damp the joy of life, but, what is altogether distinct, they startle up in us fearful and odious consciousnesses, suspicions, anticipations, which are lodged in our nature, inextinguishable there; sometimes springing up of themselves, sometimes drowned, and sometimes roused up in this way by the presentation of something darkly or more plainly allied to such hideous thoughts. In such cases, too, there is something almost like tying the living to the dead. There is a sympathy with that which is in us, dragging down into horrible communion and participation with that which we see; and thus making us feel, by the dyspathy of that which is living in us, in utter opposition to this in which we are immersed, the struggles of a man who feels that he is suffocating in some noisome atmosphere, and gasps for the air which his life requires, and which he can nowhere find. In like manner a reptile lives; but in his life there is included something that is in deadly opposition to ours,-cold, colourless, and poisonous.

Antipathies, if the subject were to be pursued at full, might be considered under two divisions, individual and national, or perhaps rather individual, and of communities or societies; for, within a state, bodies of men have hatreds of this sort as strong perhaps as national, such as religious and political antipathies. With regard to the first class, it may be remarked,

that one of the chief causes of antipathy, or recoiling of one nature from another, is when one individual holds, or is supposed to hold, some essential belief that militates against an important law of nature. This feeling is raised suddenly high by any act that militates againts any such law. Such is the general hatred towards a murderer, which shews its violence by the retaliation it prompts. But a belief so militating would produce a fixed and durable hatred: for, in many instances, it might attest a deeper depravity, or at least a more essential and radical alienation from our nature, than a heinous act. The simple conception of antipathy, is from the comparison of individual nature with individual nature; but when we conceive of any thing offending against an essential law of our general nature, we then aid our own particular feelings by our sympathy with all mankind, and by theirs with us; and it is the feeling thus immeasurably augmented and strengthened that we oppose to the hostile feeling or act, and therefore the antipathy puts on a much stronger character, and looks to us even like a great and immutable law of our nature. The ancient character of punishment belongs, in part, to the feelings of antipathy. The criminal was separated and blotted out from the community by their hatred. They saw in him only that feeling in which he had perpetrated his crime. They felt in themselves only that vast mass of their feelings by which they existed in separation from his crime. Thus there was antipathy and hate of the whole community against one individual, and he perished. He was stoned by their hands, he was sentenced by their acclamations. A murderer, a parricide, a blasphemer,

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