Every one has experience of the fact, that to
sympathize with the sufferings of another, is to enjoy a transitory
oblivion of his own.
The mind thus acquires, by exercise, a habit, as it were, of
perceiving and abhorring evil, however remote from the immediate
sphere of sensations with which that individual mind is conversant.
Imagination or mind employed in prophetically imaging forth its
objects, is that faculty of human nature on which every gradation
of its progress, nay, every, the minutest, change, depends. Pain
or pleasure, if subtly analysed, will be found to consist entirely
in prospect. The only distinction between the selfish man and the
virtuous man is, that the imagination of the former is confined within
a narrow limit, whilst that of the latter embraces a comprehensive
circumference. In this sense, wisdom and virtue may be said to be
inseparable, and criteria of each other. Selfishness is the offspring
of ignorance and mistake; it is the portion of unreflecting infancy,
and savage solitude, or of those whom toil or evil occupations
have blunted or rendered torpid; disinterested benevolence is the
product of a cultivated imagination, and has an intimate connexion
with all the arts which add ornament, or dignity, or power,
or stability to the social state of man. Virtue is thus entirely
a refinement of civilized life; a creation of the human mind; or,
rather, a combination which it has made, according to elementary
rules contained within itself, of the feelings suggested by the
relations established between man and man.
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