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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Section m. ALLIANCE OF THE MALIGN EMOTIONS WITH THE IMAGINATION. If nature denies to the irascible passions any attendant sense of pleasure, she absolutely refuses them also, at least in their simple state, the power of awakening the sympathy, or of exciting the admiration of those who witness their ebullition. These harsh elements of the moral system must be taken into combination with sentiments of a different, and a happier order, before they can assume any sort of beauty, or appear in splendour. That such combinations do actually take place, and in conformity too with the intentions of nature, is true; but it is true also, that, by the very means of the mixture, the worse or rancorous element is moderated and refined. Let it be granted, for example, that wars have often originated in the military ambition and false thirst of glory to which certain gorgeous sentiments give an appearance of virtue. This may be true, but can we easily estimate the degree in which war universally has been softened and relieved in its attendant horrors, by the corrective influence of these very mixed emotions, extravagant and false as they are ? And is it certain that there would have been altogether less bloodshed on earth, if mere sanguinary rage, and if the cupidity of empire, had been left to work their ends alone ? For every thousand victims immolated at the altar of martial pride, ten thousand have been rescued by the generous usages that have belonged to the system of warfare among all civilized nations. Surely it may be said that, unless the imaginative sentiments had thus blended themselves with the destructive passions, the ambition of men would have been like that of fiends, and the human family must long ago have suffered extermination. Ideas of chivalrous virtue and of royal ...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217718639 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217718639 |
| Weight | 0.73 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.51 In |
| List Price | $20.86 |
| Format | Paperback |
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| Pages | 222 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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