the time that he has a
peculiar delight in contemplating the good of his fellow-man.

The doctrine of the modern philosophers on this point, is in many ways
imbecil and unsound. It is inauspicious to their creed, that the
reflex act of the mind is purely the affair of experience. Why did the
liberal-minded man perform his first act of benevolence? The answer of
these persons ought to be, because the recollection of a generous deed
is a source of the truest delight. But there is an absurdity on the face
of this solution.

We do not experimentally know the delight which attends the recollection
of a generous deed, till a generous deed has been performed by us. We do
not learn these things from books. And least of all is this solution
to the purpose, when the business is to find a solution that suits the
human mind universally, the unlearned as well as the learned, the savage
as well as the sage.

And surely it is inconsistent with all sound reasoning, to represent
that as the sole spring of our benevolent actions, which by the very
terms will not fit the first benevolent act in which any man engaged.

The advocates of the doctrine of "self-love the source of all our
actions," are still more puzzled, when the case set before them is that
of the man, who flies, at an instant's warning, to save the life of the
child who has fallen into the river, or the unfortunate whom he
beholds in the upper story of a house in flames. This man, as might
be illustrated in a thousand instances, treats his own existence as
unworthy of notice, and exposes it to multiplied risks to effect the
object to which he devotes himself.

They are obliged to say, that this man anticipates the joy he will feel
in the recollection of a noble act, and the cutting and intolerable pain
he will experience in the consciousness that a human being has perished,
whom it was in his power to save. It is in vain that we tell them that,
without a moment's consideration, he tore off his clothes, or plunged
into the stream with his clothes on, or rushed up a flaming stair-case.
Still they tell us, that he recollected what compunctious visitings
would be his lot if he remained supine--he felt the sharpest uneasiness
at sight of the accident before him, and it was to get rid of that
uneasiness, and not for the smallest regard to the unhappy being he has
been the means to save, that he entered on the hazardous undertaking.

Uneasiness, the knowledge of what inwardl