Risus abest, nisi quem visi movere dolores, Nec fruitur somno, vigilantibus excita curis ; It is hence, by a sort of contradictory character, what one of the old theological writers has strongly stated it to be, "at once the justest of passions, and the most unjust,"-"ex omnibus affectibus iniquissimus simul et aequissimus;" the most unjust, in the wrongs which it is ever conceiving or perpetrating against him who is its object; the justest in the punishment with which it is ever avenging on itself the wrongs of which it has been guilty. If, even in thinking of the happiness of those whom they hate, the envious saw only that happiness, as it truly is, mixed with many anxieties that lessen the enjoyment of honours and dignities to their possessor, the misery with which those dignities of others are regarded would be less. But the chief misery of a mind of this cast is, that the happiness on which it dwells is a happiness which it creates in part to its own conception, a pure happiness that seems intense in itself only because it is intensely hated, and that continually grows more and more vivid to the hatred that is continually dwelling on it. The influence of happiness, as thus contemplated by a diseased heart, is like that of light on a diseased eye, that merely, as pained by rays which give no pain to others, imagines the faint colours which are gleaming on it to be of dazzling brilliancy. When a statue had been erected by his fellowcitizens of Thasos to Theagenes, a celebrated victor in the public games of Greece, we are told that it excited so strongly the envious hatred of one of his rivals, that he went to it every night, and endeavoured to throw it down by repeated blows, till at last, unfortunately successful, he was able to move it from its pedestal, and was crushed to death beneath it on its fall. This, if we consider the self-consuming misery of envy, is truly what happens to every envious man. He may perhaps throw down his rival's glory; but he is crushed in his whole soul, beneath the glory which he overturns. In thus making the malevolent wishes of the envious heart a source of internal misery, Nature has shown a provident regard for the happiness of mankind, which would have suffered far more general violation, if it had been as delightful to wish evil as to wish good. Nor is this true only in cases in which the malevolent wishes are misdirected against excellence, merely as excellence. The same gentle tempering influence has been provided, as we have seen, for the virtuous malevolence of those who are malevolent only to cruelty and injustice. It is necessary, indeed, that man should be capable of feeling indignation and resentment in these cases, as of feeling benevolence in the more ordinary happy intercourse of social life. But since excess in one of these classes of feelings might lead to far more dangerous consequences than excess in the other, Nature, as I took occasion to point out to you in a former lecture, has been careful to provide against the more hurtful excess, by rendering benevolence delightful in itself, even while its wishes exist merely as wishes, and resentment painful in itself, while its object is unattained, and unless in some very obdurate hearts, ready to be appeased by slight atonements, by the very acknowledgment of the evil done, or by the mere intervention of a few months or days between the injury and the moment of forgiveness. On the nature of these feelings it would be unnecessary, however, to dwell longer; my only object at present being to point out the place of their arrangement, as prospective emotions, capable of being separated by internal analysis from those immediate emotions of dislike which constitute the varieties of simple hatred. When I began the consideration of our prospective emotions those emotions which regard the future, and which may regard it either with desire or fear— I stated that it would be unnecessary to discuss at length, first, all our desires, and then all our fears; that there was no object which might not, in different circumstances, be an object of hope and fear alternately, according as the good or evil was present or remote, or more or less probable, and that the discussion of one set of the emotions might therefore be considered as supplying the place of a double and superfluous discussion. When, however, any important circumstance of distinction attended the fears opposed to the desires considered by us, I have endeavoured occasionally to point these out to you. I shall not therefore at present enlarge on them. In treating of our emotions, particularly of those which I have termed prospective, I have dwelt only on the more prominent forms which they assume; because in truth they exist in innumerable forms, as diversified by slight changes of circumstances. It is easy for us to invent generic names, and to class under these various affections of the mind, which, though not absolutely similar in every respect, are at least analogous in some important respects. But we must not forget, on that account, that the affections thus classed together, and most conveniently classed together, are still different in themselves; that what we have termed the desire of knowledge, for example, as if we had one simple desire of this kind, is generically inclusive of complex feelings as numerous as the objects existing in the universe; and even far more numerous, since they find objects in the abstract relations of things as much as in things themselves; emotions that have stimulated, and still stimulate, and will for ever continue to stimulate, every inquiry of man, from the first gaze of the infant's trembling eye, which he scarcely knows how to direct on the little object before him, to the sublimest speculations of the philosopher, who scarcely finds in infinity itself an object sufficient for his search. On many of our emotions that shadow into each other by gradations almost imperceptible, it would have been interesting, if my limits had permitted, to dwell at greater length, and to trace and develop them, as varied by the changes of circumstances in which they arise. Indeed, as I have before remarked, under this comprehensive and most interesting class of our mental affections, might be considered every thing which has immediate reference to the whole ample field of moral conduct, whatever renders man worthy or unworthy of the approving and tranquillizing voice within, and of that eternal approbation of the great Awarder of happiness, of whose judgment, in its blessings or its terrors, the voice of conscience itself, powerful as it may be, is but the short and feeble presage. The narrowness of my limits, then, I trust, will apologize sufficiently for a brevity of discussion, in many cases, which was unavoidable. In our view of those emotions, however, which by their peculiar complexity, or general importance, seemed to me worthy of nicer examination, I have endeavoured to direct your thought as much as possible to habits of minute analysis, without which there can be no advance in metaphysical science. This very minuteness of analysis, to which I wished to accustom you, as much for the sake of habit as for the nicer results of the particular inquiries themselves, may in some instances have led to distinctions, which to many of you, perhaps, may have seemed superfluous, or too subtile, as requiring from you a little more effort of thought than would have been necessary in following arrangements more familiar to you, though I conceive less accurate. You are not to suppose, however, that in analyzing our complex emotions, and arranging in different subdivisions, the various feelings that seem to me to be involved in them as elements, I object to the use of the common phraseology on the subject, which expresses in a single term many feelings that are truly in nature, either immediately consecutive, or intimately conjoined, though, in our stricter analysis, I may have found it necessary to divide them. This you are not to think, any more than you are to suppose that the chemist, who inquires into the elements of vegetable matter, which exist in a rose or a hyacinth, and who, after his decomposition of those beautiful aggregates, arranges their elementary particles in different orders, as if the aggregates themselves were nothing, and the elements all, objects to the use of the simple terms rose and hyacinth, as significant of the flowers which have been the subjects of his art, and which still continue to have a delightful unity to his senses, even while he knows them to have no real unity, and to be only a multitude of atoms, similar, or dissimilar. What the rose and the hyacinth are to him, our complex feelings are to us. We may know and consider separately, and arrange separately, their various elements, but when we consider them as they exist together, we may still continue to give them, as complex feelings, |