BOOK I. $ 70. The self isolating type. § 71. The amuse or encroachment on the rights of the person feeling sullen; of some intrusion on his self-isolating position. Take away the self-isolation, or take away the irascibility, either of the two elements of the compound emotion, and the emotion loses its peculiar character which we call sullenness or sulkiness. 4. It was said in § 30. 2, ad fin. that the emotion which arises in reflection on self alone was the most deeply rooted of all the reflective emotions, the staple and basis of the character, upon which all others might be conceived as engrafted. Nothing is more true; unless this emotion is strong, there can be no strength of character; it is the fountain-head of moral, that is, of reflective life, the emotion which is inseparable from reflection on self or self-consciousness; the source of de facto energy, as justice is of de jure validity. But, as we have seen, it is parted immediately into two streams, pride and self-respect, with the honour which belongs to each, and which is again different from the honour of emulation. The two characters, based respectively upon pride and upon self-respect, or which draw their life from these opposite streams, may be considered as dividing the world of character between them. The proud man is self-centred, the man of self-respect submits to revolve, as it were, round the centre of the universe, and to live his life as a part in a vast whole. The opposition between the two is the opposition between self-will and willing submission to universal laws. The latter alone is fully compatible with habits founded on the sense of justice and the moral law. § 71. Perhaps we ought not to omit a type or ment-seeker. rather a class of characters which forms a prominent portion of mankind, but one not perhaps so numerous as usually supposed, the pleasure-seekers as they are commonly called. The types already mentioned scem to exclude these, or at least to furnish no emotional foundation for them; and yet we have now gone through all the groups of reflective emotion, except those only which are imaginative as well as reflective. The fact seems to be that the class in question is a residuum; consisting of those persons who have no reflective emotion sufficiently strong to lead them into a special direction of energy, and mould their character into a special type. They are left, then, to the direction given by the preponderance of the direct emotions or of the bodily organisation, and of the pleasures which belong to their exercise or activity. They are both intellectually and emotionally sluggish; they require the stimulation of novelty in sights and sounds. They rest in wonder and curiosity, without the logical instinct. Good-tempered they often are, but incapable of lasting passion. Their characteristic is that they always want amusement; indeed amusement-seekers would be the best name for them as a class. Now we are all amusementseekers at times; and those who never are so must have something morbid in their character; but never to want or seek anything else is a disease of a worse kind, a sort of original and incurable feebleness of mental constitution. It is clear that this type of character cannot claim any inherent promise of permanence from the interest which it has for desire, or as an object of volition, since its characteristic is, that volition does not rise to intensity in any of the objects or emotions which it embraces. § 72. 1. The classification of the types of character which are founded on the reflective emotions, BOOK I. $71. The amusement-seeker. not imaginative as well as reflective, being now complete, let us cast a glance back over them all generally, and consider in what way the emotions constituting these several types of character are subordinated to, and taken up into, the emotions of justice and the love of duty which constitute the highest and most central type. It is by no means an idle enquiry, what feelings and actions will combine with the moral sense, and what will not; as some might perhaps maintain, on the ground that all feelings are facts of consciousness, and have their causes and conditions in the physical functions of the organism, thus eliminating all strictly speaking de jure considerations from ethic, and leaving only de facto considerations. Yet even such persons, since they cannot overlook the facts of choice between pleasures, of procuring some in preference to others, of avoiding pains, and of instituting courses of conduct calculated for these ends, must in fact bring a certain kind of de jure considerations into the enquiry, only without including in them that particular pleasure which belongs to the moral sense; a pleasure which their mental analysis has either failed to reveal to them, or revealed as a sentiment founded solely on erroneous, perhaps theological, opinions, and destined to vanish with them. In this latter view the sense of moral right and wrong would appear to them as something "absolute" or ontological, and its claim to obedience as empty as its source fictitious. The most logical of such a school would therefore abstain from entering into any consideration of moral right or wrong; prudence or imprudence, certainly of a high order, as prudence for self or for others, is all that they would predicate of any person or conduct. Even such praise and blame as this would be to them valid only as a fact, that is, because they are naturally impelled to give it or withold it, just as they are naturally led to like and to dislike; and thus differences of judgment become ultimately, on this view, mere matters of taste, in which no man can judge for another. This view is incompatible with the discovery by analysis of a specific feeling founded on justice, the moral sense. All de jure considerations have their source in this specific feeling, which exists also de facto, as other feelings also do which either will or will not combine with it. This combination or non-combination with the moral sense is what makes actions and feelings morally right or wrong, and constitutes the meaning of the terms moral good and evil. If there is no moral good and no moral evil, there is no moral sense with its specific feeling of validity; but that there is such a specific feeling the analysis in Chapter ii. has sufficiently shown. The combination of other feelings with this is their moral justification. The question then is, in what way does this combination takes place. 2. The process is one of redintegration, and consists in holding together, either spontaneously or voluntarily, the total emotion and its framework, so as to see whether the latter has that equality in its parts which is the object of the emotion of justice. If it has, then the same framework is common both to the emotion of justice and to that emotion which is in question. We may feel this spontaneously or habitually, and then we are said to entertain habitually just and right feelings; or we may test it voluntarily, and then the process is one of reasoning. The more intense an emotion is, the less are we able to analyse its framework to discover its justice or equality. The movement which supports it in the brain is then energetic or violent, and the lines of the framework faint. Its connection with other objects or frameworks also is faint by the same rule; that is, the movements which support the formal element are less strong than those which support the emotional. The emotion may in this case be just, but we cannot test its justice. Only with the gradual return to energy in the movement supporting the form or framework, can the equality or inequality be discerned, and the emotion of justice arise. Anger, eros, love, envy, jealousy, pride, emulation, covetousness, and so on, may all be so intense as to obliterate the framework, and prevent its justice or injustice from appearing in consciousness. The return to vividness of the framework, and the production of other objects in redintegration, as means or as consequences of the object in immediate view, can only proceed pari passu with the decrease in intensity of the emotion pervading this immediate object. This is the phenomenon of reasoning calming the passions; and the habit of reasoning, of increasing the energy of the movements supporting frameworks, in cases of strong emotion, may be strengthened by exercise, so as to make the emotions themselves suggest the desire for reasoning on them, and this desire increase into a volition sufficiently powerful to bring the framework into prominence at the expense of the emotion. 3. There are three ways which the reasoning may take on the overcoming or the subsidence of the emotion. If it proceeds to analysing the content of its |