Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/50

bring back the recollection of a past sensation, and set that before him in the place of the real object of his fear, so that, while he is endeavouring to avoid an immediate danger, he is in fact thinking only of past suffering without his perceiving this confusion of ideas, surely the same thing must take place in a less degree with respect to others. If it be thought necessary for him, before he can seek his own future interest, to confound it with his past interest by the violent transition of an immediate apprehension into the stronger recollection of an actual impression, then I say that by the same sort of substitution he will identify his own interest with that of others, whenever a like obvious danger recalls forcibly to his mind his former situation and feelings, the lenses of memory being applied in the one case to excite his sympathy and in the other to excite personal fear, the objects of both being in themselves equally imaginary and according to this hypothesis both perfectly indifferent. But I should contend that the assumption here made that the direct and proper influence of the imagination is insufficient to account for the effects of personal fear, or of no force at all in itself is without any foundation. For there is no reason why the ideas of the imagination should not be efficient, and operative, as well as those of memory, of which they are essentially compounded. Their substance is the same. They are of one flesh and blood. The same vital spirit animates both. To suppose that the imagination does not exert a direct influence over human actions is to reject the plain inference from the most undoubted facts without any motive for so doing from the nature and reason of things. This notion could not have gained ground as an article of Philosophical faith but from a perverse restriction of the use of the word idea to abstract