sitive checks upon this
development--negative, because sympathy cannot advance faster than
intelligence advances, since it presupposes the power of interpreting
the natural language of the various feelings, and of mentally
representing those feelings; positive, because the immediate needs of
self-preservation are often at variance with its promptings, as, for
example, during the predatory stages of human progress. For explanations
of the second process, I must refer to the _Principles of Psychology_ (Sec.
202, first edition, and Sec. 215, second edition) and to _Social Statics_,
part ii. chapter v.[36] Asking that in default of space these
explanations may be taken for granted, let me here point out in what
sense even sympathy, and the sentiments that result from it, are due to
experiences of utility. If we suppose all thought of rewards or
punishments, immediate or remote, to be left out of consideration, it is
clear that any one who hesitates to inflict a pain because of the vivid
representation of that pain which rises in his consciousness, is
restrained, not by any sense of obligation or by any formulated doctrine
of utility, but by the painful association established in him. And it is
clear that if, after repeated experiences of the moral discomfort he has
felt from witnessing the unhappiness indirectly caused by some of his
acts, he is led to check himself when again tempted to those acts, the
restraint is of like nature. Conversely with the pleasure-giving acts:
repetitions of kind deeds, and experiences of the sympathetic
gratifications that follow, tend continually to make stronger the
association between such deeds and feelings of happiness.

Eventually these experiences may be consciously generalized, and there
may result a deliberate pursuit of sympathetic gratifications. There may
also come to be distinctly recognized the truths that the remoter
results, kind and unkind conduct, are respectively beneficial and
detrimental--that due regard for others is conducive to ultimate
personal welfare, and disregard of others to ultimate personal disaster;
and then there may become current such summations of experience as
"honesty is the best policy." But so far from regarding these
intellectual recognitions of utility as preceding and causing the moral
sentiment, I regard the moral sentiment as preceding such recognitions
of utility, and making them possible. The pleasures and pains directly
resulting in experience f