Note 23 — Chapter VIII · CONCLUSION

“For the mass of mankind two motives serve to direct the main course of ethics. These are Prudence and Sympathy.... Prudence is the first step in morality.... Sympathy did not wait to be called into life by religion. It was born among the brutes.... In the case of man the sympathy which issues first through the natural emotions of family and sex is spread over an ever-widening area by the power of imagination. A greater faculty of entering into the feelings of others goes along with a deeper sensitiveness to their pains and joys. Their experience becomes ours. Our self is blended with theirs. We pity their actual sufferings, and, calling up in imagination the suffering our conduct might entail, we shrink from committing a wrong.... Pity is the characteristic mark of the later ethics.”23—F. J. Gould.