dary affections, relating the impressions of the environment
with one another and with our impulses in quite different ways from
those mere associations of coexistence and succession which are
practically all that pure empiricism can admit. Take the love of
drunkenness; take bashfulness, the terror {187} of high places, the
tendency to sea-sickness, to faint at the sight of blood, the
susceptibility to musical sounds; take the emotion of the comical, the
passion for poetry, for mathematics, or for metaphysics,--no one of
these things can be wholly explained by either association or utility.
They _go with_ other things that can be so explained, no doubt; and
some of them are prophetic of future utilities, since there is nothing
in us for which some use may not be found. But their origin is in
incidental complications to our cerebral structure, a structure whose
original features arose with no reference to the perception of such
discords and harmonies as these.

Well, a vast number of our moral perceptions also are certainly of this
secondary and brain-born kind. They deal with directly felt fitnesses
between things, and often fly in the teeth of all the prepossessions of
habit and presumptions of utility. The moment you get beyond the
coarser and more commonplace moral maxims, the Decalogues and Poor
Richard's Almanacs, you fall into schemes and positions which to the
eye of common-sense are fantastic and overstrained. The sense for
abstract justice which some persons have is as excentric a variation,
from the natural-history point of view, as is the passion for music or
for the higher philosophical consistencies which consumes the soul of
others. The feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritual
attitudes, as peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the
essential vulgarity of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoistic
fussiness, etc.,--are quite inexplicable except by an innate preference
of the more ideal attitude for its own pure sake. The nobler thing
_tastes_ better, and that is all that we can say. {188} 'Experience'
of consequences may truly teach us what things are _wicked_, but what
have consequences to do with what is _mean_ and _vulgar_? If a man has
shot his wife's paramour, by reason of what subtile repugnancy in
things is it that we are so disgusted when we hear that the wife and
the husband have made it up and are living comfortably together again?
Or if the hypothesis were offered us o