BOOK I CH. II. PART IV. $ 30. Emotions of Self alone. even by his attempted self-sufficiency. This is the condemnation of pride. But it is not without virtues. Its special virtue is honour. By the law of its being it is only qualities represented as noble reflection on which belong to pride, since everything that could possibly belong to shame is excluded at the origin. The law which the proud man is to himself is a law of honour. But as pride itself differs from scorn, so does the honour of pride differ from the honour of emulation; it is not chivalry, but it is adherence to the representation which any one has formed of himself; to fall short of this would be to him defeat and disgrace; he is his own rival and his own standard of rivalry. Whatever this standard consists in, whatever constitutes his image of himself, to that he is bound by the law of his being to conform. Hence the different kinds of characters which may be equally and alike proud; whatever consists with his standard of honour, and with his forgetfulness of circumstances of shame, may be included in the nature of the proud man. It is indifferent to many virtues and to many vices; noble characters and mean characters, as others judge them, may be proud; Milton's Satan and Shakespeare's Iago would both belong to the category. Lastly, pride in one or other of its two shapes, that is, either as pride strictly, or as self-respect, is the most intimate and ineradicable of the emotions, ἀναγκαιότατον πάθος, it ceases only with life; every one must have something to take pride in, some adytum of reflection, some sanctuary of refuge "when in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes." Good or bad, he retires into himself. Driven from one point, he takes refuge in another ; the thief says 'at least I am not a liar;' the liar 'at Book I. CH. II. PART IV. $ 30. Emotions of reflection on Self alone. $31. Reflective emotions arising from the form. Justice and Injustice. least I am not a thief.' Every one erects thus from time to time some theory of his life, some standard of attainment, which he can believe that he fulfils. Pride is the Proteus of the emotions; there is no shape which it cannot assume, no quality to which it cannot attach itself. At the same time, the emotion which arises in reflection on self alone, whether it takes the shape of self-respect, honour, pride, or their modifications, is the most deeply rooted of all the reflective emotions; the staple and basis of the character, the stem upon which all others may be conceived as engrafted, or out of which they may be conceived as growing. § 31. 1. In all the reflective emotions hitherto examined the pleasures and the pains appertaining to the emotions themselves, in their entirety, have been pleasures and pains of enjoyment. Or if they have arisen in comparison of two or more objects, as in the case of the emotions of comparison, they have not arisen directly from the comparison itself; or, in other words, the comparison has been not the object but the antecedent of an emotion, the object of which consisted in the persons compared, to which emotion the pleasure or the pain was attached, as in vanity or contempt, ashamedness or admiration of externals. But now comes for consideration the case of the comparison itself, the relation between the persons compared, being the object of an emotion with its peculiar pleasure or pain. The case is parallel to that of surprise and wonder containing the logical instinct, in the direct emotions. (See § 19. 2. The contrast or resemblance of the two persons and their emotions is itself the object or framework of the emotion now to be examined; and there will be as many kinds of this emotion as there are distinct kinds of pairs of objects compared or contrasted. The comparison of emotions in this way will be the objective framework of the emotion of Justice or Injustice, just as, in the direct emotions, the parallel comparison was the framework of the congruity aimed at, the incongruity avoided, by the logical instinct arising in the emotion of wonder. 2. Hitherto we have not met with the sense of justice, or with the sense of right and wrong, among the emotions. This is not because the emotions hitherto analysed are not always in experience bound up with these perceptions; for we may always, for instance, feel justified or right in loving and in expecting love, in retaliating injuries and expecting retaliation; but because we have hitherto attended only to those qualities in the concrete phenomena which were indicated by the name of the whole. But now it is necessary to attend to this other element in the emotions, and to endeavour to point out its origin and primal source. Justice and the sense of right and wrong are in their origin the same, and have their ground in the same thing, namely, comparison. The difference or resemblance of two objects of reflective emotion, as different or similar, is the object or framework, the emotion pervading which is justice or injustice, right or wrong. 3. It is clear, in the first place, that the sense or perception of justice and of injustice is not a mere repetition of the emotions hitherto analysed. The difference in their nature is a proof of some differentiation in their source. And the purpose of statical analysis is not to point out the moment of development, in the history of mankind or in that of the BOOK I. CH. II. PART IV.. § 31. Reflective emotions arising from the form. Justice and Injustice. BOOK I. PART IV. $31. Reflective emotions arising from the form. Justice and Injustice. individual, at which a certain new sense or new emo tion first arises; which could only be done by showing on the combination of what previously existing feelings the new feeling appeared as the result of their combination; but its púrpose is to point out to what elements in those combined feelings the new feeling, the result of their combination, is to be referred; upon which being done, the new feeling will appear to be or to represent those elements in the new compound. For instance, it is not statical metaphysical analysis when a lawyer gives the famous definition of the right of property as "adverse possession ripened by prescription;" for the time occupied by the prescription may indeed be the time during which the sense of right grew up and became attached to the sense of possession, by a process of strengthening the association, in the minds of other persons and of oneself, between the thing possessed and its possessor; but it does not account for this strengthened association ending in the peculiar sense of right, in the right of property. The analysis is carried quite far enough for the purposes of the philosophy of Law, but not far enough for those of the philosophy of consciousness generally. 4. Ever since the conceptions of Form and Matter, the gas and agor of Plato, were dropped out of use in speculation, philosophers have had no other logic to apply to the analysis of such phenomena as the present but that of the various combination of feelings already named and supposed to be fully known, and of the loosening or strengthening of these feelings, simple and compound, by habit or association. For instance, Mr. J. S. Mill in his "Utilitarianism" Chap. v. offers an analysis of justice which falls under this description. "Justice," he says at page 88, "is a name for certain classes of moral rules, which concern the essentials of human wellbeing more nearly, and are therefore of more absolute obligation, than any other rules for the guidance of life; and the notion which we have found to be of the essence of the idea of justice, that of a right residing in an individual, implies and testifies to this more binding obligation." In other words, while Mr. Mill insists upon the peculiar validity, moral obligation, and binding power, implied in the words, duty, law, rule of conduct, justice, right and wrong, he yet finds no other source for these feelings or conceptions than the "desire to repel or retaliate a hurt or damage to oneself or to those with whom one sympathizes, widened so as to include all persons, by the human capacity of enlarged sympathy, and the human conception of intelligent self-interest. From the latter elements the feeling derives its morality; from the former its peculiar impressiveness and energy of self-assertion." p. 79. Mr. Mill's conception, then, is that time and experience are sufficient to ripen retaliation and sympathy into right and justice, to ripen the acts which embody them into a rule, and the sentiments which accompany the acts into a sanction. The importance or intensity of the interests at stake are, in his view, sufficient to make us invest them with the character of moral validity; he holds this to be a case where a difference in degree is so great as to become a difference in kind; just as, in the case of the right of property quoted above, long possession ripened into right. Admirably as Mr. Mill has put his case, I must confess that neither this explanation, nor one BOOK I. CH. II. PART IV. § 31. Reflective emotions arising from the form. Justice and Injustice. |