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THE ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE

MORAL INSTINCT.

CHAPTER XIV.

SYMPATHY AS A NATURAL MORALITY.

THE ELIMINATION OF UNSYMPATHETIC TYPES CAUSES NERVE DEVELOPMENT.

I HAD prepared an elaborate chapter relating the history of slavery among mankind, and showing how it begins to arise as an institution at the level of the highest savages, how it expands and reaches its most miserable phases at the highest barbarian level; how it still expands at the level of the lower civilisation, but loses much of its atrocity; how it then begins to die away, not as the result of teaching or any extraneous influence, but purely as the consequence of elimination, man as seen in a cultured community having a more sympathetic nerve reaction than man on the barbarian level. Then I had prepared a chapter on the history of religious animosity, showing that, in spite of the efforts of creeds and systems, men of all faiths have grown more tolerant. Religions generally teach a doctrine of brotherliness and mutual help within the circle of the faith, but of condemnation, abhorrence, or even of extirpation beyond it. Yet, by a steady expansion of the sympathetic tendencies, a tolerant feeling in the course of long ages spreads and embraces in an everwidening area men of other faiths. Such a history shows emphatically how very large a proportion of this change has belonged to the last century or two.

I had also written a chapter describing the mitigation of criminal treatment, showing how radically different must have been the nervous organisation of the crowds of former days who gathered in eager zeal to watch the torture of men and women, from that of a cultured lady or gentleman of our own

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time, who would shrink with horror from the thought of witnessing a scene so agonising, and would give a fortune rather than be compelled to take any part in what our ancestors undoubtedly enjoyed.

I have omitted these three chapters in order to keep this book within reasonable bounds, but if admitted they would have emphasised the truth already shown, that a huge expanse of sympathy has by natural means taken place between the savage and the cultured conditions of mankind. However, it has been amply shown that those preservative emotions which in the fish are purely parental and by no means strong, which in bird and mammal have been seen to grow both conjugal and social, and of intenser type, have continued their progress and quickened it throughout all grades of mankind, and that they are even now in full process of development. The result has been a distinct alteration in the nerve constitution of men; not an alteration to be seen perhaps for many a long century under the microscope of the histologist, but visible, plainly visible, in its effects. The society lady of ancient Rome could drive out in her chariot with eager expectation of a day's enjoyment in seeing the blood of gladiators flow, and their bodies stiffen in convulsive death upon the sands, or in beholding the limbs of women crunched by the jaws of wild beasts.

Ask the average lady of our own times to witness such a scene; take her to view a prisoner flogged or a bullock slaughtered, and the physical revulsion, ending perhaps in a deadly faint, will assert a manifest change in nerve conditions. Multitudes of all ranks used to hasten out in mediæval Spain and Portugal to see the heretic lowered into a bonfire, from which, lest he should be too soon broiled, he was hoisted out again by means of pulleys. Roars of laughter went up from the crowd at the contortions of the agonised victim. Now-a-days there are thousands of men unable to follow their choice of the surgeon's profession by reason of a physical incapacity to look on blood and wounds without horror. I have seen a strong young man faint when asked to give assistance in reducing a dislocated shoulder. In England, three centuries ago, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, and many kinds of sport involving cruelty, were greatly enjoyed. That

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