Social statics, or, the conditions essential to human happiness specified, and the first of them developed / by Herbert Spencer.

  • Herbert Spencer
Date:
1868
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Social statics, or, the conditions essential to human happiness specified, and the first of them developed / by Herbert Spencer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    » accompanied by a sense of the rightness of those actions which give it gratification—tends to generate convictions that things are good or bad, according as they bring to it pleasure or pain; and would always generate such convic- tions, were it unopposed. As however there is a perpet- ual conflict amongst the feelings—some of them being in antagonism throughout life—there results a proportionate incongruity in the beliefs—a similar conflict amongst these also—a parallel antagonism. So that it is only where a desire is veiy predominant, or where no adverse desire exists, that this connection between the in- stincts and the opinions they dictate, becomes distinctly visible. Applied to the elucidation of the case in hand, these facts explain how from an impulse to behave in the way we call equitable, there will arise a perception that such behaviour is proper—a conviction that it is good. This instinct or sentiment, being gratified by a just action, and distressed by an unjust action, produces in us an approba- tion of the one, and a disgust toward the other; and these readily beget beliefs that the one is virtuous, and the other vicious. Or, referring again to the illustration, we may say that as the desire to accumulate property is accompanied by a sense of the value of property, so is the desire to act fairly, accompanied by a sense of what is fair. And tlifLis, limiting the word sense to the expression of this fact, there is nothiug wrong in attributing motor and percipient functions to the same agent. It will perhaps be needful here to meet the objection, that whereas according to the foregoing statement each feeling tends to generate notions of the rightness or wrongness of the actions toward which it is related; and whereas morality should determine what is correct in all departments of conduct, it is improper to confine the term “ moral sense ” to that which can afford directions in only
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