st ourselves, that the objection vanishes when we fairly and
accurately investigate the circumstances of the case. With this view,
let us look a little into the nature of the affections of the human
mind, and endeavour to ascertain whence it is that they derive their
nutriment, and are found from experience to increase in strength.

The state of man is such, that his feelings are not the obedient
servants of his reason, prompt at once to follow its dictates, as to
their direction, and their measure. Excellence is the just object of
love; good in expectancy, of hope; evil to be apprehended, of fear; our
fellow creatures' misfortunes, and sufferings, constitute the just
objects of pity. Each of these passions, it might be thought, would be
excited, in proportion to what our reason should inform us were the
magnitude and consequent claims of its corresponding object. But this is
by no means the case. Take first for a proof the instance of pity. We
read of slaughtered thousands with less emotion, than we hear the
particulars of a shocking accident which has happened in the next
street; the distresses of a novel, which at the same time we know to be
fictitious, affect us more than the dry narrative of a battle. We become
so much interested by these incidents of the imagination (aware all the
while that they are merely such) that we cannot speedily banish them
from our thoughts, nor recover the tone of our minds; and often, we
scarcely bring ourselves to lay down our book at the call of real
misfortune, of which we go perhaps to the relief, on a principle of
duty, but with little sense of interest or emotion of tenderness. It
were easy to shew that it is much the same in the case of the other
affections. Whatever be the cause of this disproportion, which (as
metaphysics fall not within our province) we shall not stop to examine,
the fact is undeniable. There appears naturally to be a certain
strangeness between the passion and its object, which familiarity and
the power of habit must gradually overcome. You must contrive to bring
them into _close contact_; they must be jointed and glued together by
the particularities of little incidents. Thus in the production of heat
in the physical world, the flint and the steel produce not the effect
without collision; the rudest Barbarian will tell us the necessity of
attrition, and the chemist of mixture. Now, an object, it is admitted,
is brought into _closer contact_ with its correspon