[Gutenberg 43116] • Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (Vol. 1 of 3)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to [www.million-books.com](http://www.million-books.com) where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: for us that there is agony before our eyes. Without loving the sufferer, ?for though the feelings that oppress us, may not allow us to think of his atrocities at the moment, they certainly do not invest him with any amiable qualities, except that of being miserable, ?we feel for him what it is impossible for us not to feel for any living thing that is in equal anguish. We should feel this, ?if the anguish be of a kind that forces itself upon our senses in all its dreadful reality, ?though his crimes were whispered to us every moment; and when he lies mangled and groaning before us, if we were forced to inflict another stroke with our own hands, that was to break the last unbroken limb, or to receive the blow ourselves, it is not easy to say from which alternative we should shrink with a more frightful and sickly loathing. In all this, nature has consulted well. II our sympathy had been made to depend on our moral approbation, it would rise in many cases too late to be of profit. If compassion were to arise only after we had ascertained the moral character of the sufferer, and weighed all the consequences of good and evil which might result to society from the relief which it is in our power to offer, who would rush to the preservation of the drowning mariner, to the succour of the wounded, to the aid of him who calls for help against the ruffians who are assailing him ? Our powers of giving assistance have been better accommodated to the necessities which may be relieved by them. By the principle of compassion within us, we are benefactors almost without willing it;?we have already done the deed, when, if deliberation had been necessary, as a previous step, we should not have proceeded far in the calculation, which was to determine, by a due equipoise of opposite circumstances