is at least a temporary feeling that the interests
of others are their own interests. Not only does
all strengthening of social ties, and all healthy growth
of society, give to each individual a stronger personal
interest in practically consulting the welfare of
others; it also leads him to identify his feelings
more and more with their good, or at least with an
ever greater degree of practical consideration for
it. He comes, as though instinctively, to be
conscious of himself as a being who of course
pays regard to others. The good of others becomes
to him a thing naturally and necessarily to be attended
to, like any of the physical conditions of our existence.
Now, whatever amount of this feeling a person has,
he is urged by the strongest motives both of interest
and of sympathy to demonstrate it, and to the utmost
of his power encourage it in others; and even if he
has none of it himself, he is as greatly interested
as any one else that others should have it. Consequently,
the smallest germs of the feeling are laid hold of
and nourished by the contagion of sympathy and the
influences of education; and a complete web of corroborative
association is woven round it, by the powerful agency
of the external sanctions. This mode of conceiving
ourselves and human life, as civilization goes on,
is felt to be more and more natural. Every step
in political improvement renders it more so, by removing
the sources of opposition of interest, and levelling
those inequalities of legal privilege between individuals
or classes, owing to which there are large portions
of mankind whose happiness it is still practicable
to disregard. In an improving state of the human
mind, the influences are constantly on the increase,
which tend to generate in each individual a feeling
of unity with all the rest; which feeling, if perfect,
would make him never think of, or desire, any beneficial
condition for himself, in the benefits of which they
are not included. If we now suppose this feeling
of unity to be taught as a religion, and the whole
force of education, of institutions, and of opinion,
directed, as it once was in the case of religion, to
make every person grow up from infancy surrounded
on all sides both by the profession and by the practice
of it, I think that no one, who can realize this conception,
will feel any misgiving about the sufficiency of the
ultimate sanction for the Happiness morality.
To any ethical student who finds the realization difficult,
I recommend, as a means of facilitating it, the second
of M. Comte’s two principal works, the Systeme
de Politique Positive. I entertain the strongest
objections to the system of politics and morals set
forth in that treatise; but I think it has superabundantly
shown the possibility of giving to the service of
humanity, even without the aid of belief in a Providence,
both the physical power and the social efficacy of
a religion; making it take hold of human life, and
colour all thought, feeling, and action, in a manner
of which the greatest ascendency ever exercised by
any religion may be but a type and foretaste; and
of which the danger is, not that it should be insufficient,
but that it should be so excessive as to interfere
unduly with human freedom and individuality.