d) prove that he was guilty of the act,
as much as they prove that he was unconscious of the _crime_.(2) In
the same spirit, and I conceive with great metaphysical truth, Mr.
Coleridge, in his tragedy of _Remorse,_ makes Ordonio (his chief
character) wave the acknowledgment of his meditated guilt to his own
mind, by putting into his mouth that striking soliloquy:

Say, I had lay'd a body in the sun!
Well! in a month there swarm forth from the corse
A thousand, nay, ten thousand sentient beings
In place of that one man. Say I had _kill'd_ him!
Yet who shall tell me, that each one and all
Of these ten thousand lives Is not as happy
As that one life, which being push'd aside,
Made room for these unnumber'd.--Act ii. Sc. 2.

I am not sure, indeed, that I have not got this whole train of
speculation from him; but I should not think the worse of it on that
account. That gentleman, I recollect, once asked me whether I thought
that the different members of a family really liked one another so well,
or had so much attachment, as was generally supposed; and I said that
I conceived the regard they had towards each other was expressed by the
word _interest_ rather than by any other, which he said was the true
answer. I do not know that I could mend it now. Natural affection is
not pleasure in one another's company, nor admiration of one another's
qualities; but it is an intimate and deep knowledge of the things that
affect those to whom we are bound by the nearest ties, with pleasure
or pain; it is an anxious, uneasy fellow-feeling with them, a jealous
watchfulness over their good name, a tender and unconquerable yearning
for their good. The love, in short, we bear them is the nearest to that
we bear ourselves. _Home,_ according to the old saying, _is home, be it
never so homely._ We love ourselves, not according to our deserts, but
our cravings after good: so we love our immediate relations in the next
degree (if not, even sometimes a higher one), because we know best
what they have suffered and what sits nearest to their hearts. We are
implicated, in fact, in their welfare by habit and sympathy, as we are
in our own.

If our devotion to our own interests is much the same as to theirs, we
are ignorant of our own characters for the same reason. We are parties
too much concerned to return a fair verdict, and are too much in
the secret of our own motives or situation not to be able to give a
favourable turn to our act