severally produced by trees, by fields, by streams, by cascades, by
rocks, by precipices, by mountains, by clouds, are aroused
together. Along with the sensations immediately received, there are
partially excited the myriads of sensations that have been in times
past received from objects such as those presented; further, there
are partially excited the various incidental feelings that were
experienced on all these countless past occasions; and there are
probably also excited certain deeper, but now vague combinations of
states, that were organized in the race during barbarous times,
when its pleasurable activities were chiefly among the woods and
waters. And out of all these excitations, some of them actual but
most of them nascent, is composed the emotion which a fine
landscape produces in us."

It is, I think, amply manifest that the processes here indicated are not
to be taken as intellectual processes--not as processes in which
recognized relations between pleasures and their antecedents, or
intelligent adaptations of means to ends, form the dominant elements.
The state of mind produced by an aggregate of picturesque objects is not
one resolvable into propositions. The sentiment does not contain within
itself any consciousness of causes and consequences of happiness. The
vague recollections of other beautiful scenes and other delightful days
which it dimly rouses, are not aroused because of any rational
co-ordinations of ideas that have been formed in bygone years. Mr.
Hutton, however, assumes that in speaking of the genesis of moral
feelings as due to inherited experiences of the pleasures and pains
caused by certain modes of conduct, I am speaking of reasoned-out
experiences--experiences consciously accumulated and generalized. He
overlooks the fact that the genesis of emotions is distinguished from
the genesis of ideas in this; that whereas the ideas are composed of
elements that are simple, definitely related, and (in the case of
general ideas) constantly related, emotions are composed of enormously
complex aggregates of elements that are never twice alike, and which
stand in relations that are never twice alike. The difference in the
resulting modes of consciousness is this:--In the genesis of an idea the
successive experiences, be they of sounds, colours, touches, tastes, or
be they of the special objects which combine many of these into groups,
hav