hard and
submit to present discomfort for the sake of a distant reward. It is
also closely connected with the development of the sympathetic feelings.
The better we can imagine objects and relations not present to sense,
the more readily we can sympathize with other people. Half the cruelty
in the world is the direct result of stupid incapacity to put one's self
in the other man's place. So closely inter-related are our intellectual
and moral natures that the development of sympathy is very considerably
determined by increasing width and variety of experience. From the
simplest form of sympathy, such as the painful thrill felt on seeing
some one in a dangerous position, up to the elaborate complication of
altruistic feelings involved in the notion of abstract justice, the
development is very largely a development of the representative faculty.
The very same causes, therefore, deeply grounded in the nature of
industrial civilization, which have developed science and art, have also
had a distinct tendency to encourage the growth of the sympathetic
emotions.

But, as already observed, these emotions are still too feebly developed,
even in the highest races of men. We have made more progress in
intelligence than in kindness. For thousands of generations, and until
very recent times, one of the chief occupations of men has been to
plunder, bruise, and kill one another. The selfish and ugly passions
which are primordial--which have the incalculable strength of
inheritance from the time when animal consciousness began--have had but
little opportunity to grow weak from disuse. The tender and unselfish
feelings, which are a later product of evolution, have too seldom been
allowed to grow strong from exercise. And the whims and prejudices of
the primeval militant barbarism are slow in dying out from the midst of
peaceful industrial civilization. The coarser forms of cruelty are
disappearing, and the butchery of men has greatly diminished. But most
people apply to industrial pursuits a notion of antagonism derived from
ages of warfare, and seek in all manner of ways to cheat or overreach
one another. And as in more barbarous times the hero was he who had
slain his tens of thousands, so now the man who has made wealth by
overreaching his neighbours is not uncommonly spoken of in terms which
imply approval. Though gentlemen, moreover, no longer assail one another
with knives and clubs, they still inflict wounds with cruel words and