A child at play
by itself will express its delight by its voice and motions; and
every inflexion of tone and every gesture will bear exact relation
to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions which
awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression;
and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away,
so the child seeks, by prolonging in its voice and motions the
duration of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the
cause. In relation to the objects which delight a child, these
expressions are, what poetry is to higher objects. The savage (for
the savage is to ages what the child is to years) expresses the
emotions produced in him by surrounding objects in a similar manner;
and language and gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation,
become the image of the combined effect of those objects, and of
his apprehension of them. Man in society, with all his passions and
his pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions and pleasures
of man; an additional class of emotions produces an augmented
treasure of expressions; and language, gesture, and the imitative
arts, become at once the representation and the medium, the pencil
and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and the
harmony. The social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from
its elements, society results, begin to develop themselves from
the moment that two human beings coexist; the future is contained
within the present, as the plant within the seed; and equality,
diversity, unity, contrast, mutual dependence, become the principles
alone capable of affording the motives according to which the
will of a social being is determined to action, inasmuch as he is
social; and constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment,
beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse of
kind.
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