ABSTRACT
Sympathy, Sociability, Justice—these are the "mothers" to which, Faust-like, we must repair for the secret of natural goodness. For we are no longer free to reduce altruism to an extremely refined egoism, or to pronounce illusory the pains and pleasures felt on beholding the experiences of another. The beginnings of sympathy lie in the later developments of the reproductive function. With the advent of helpless mammalian young, sympathy acquires a high value for survival and is rapidly generated. Besides family selection, social selection works in many ways to put a premium on the more amiable type of man. We know that women, being less quarrelsome, learned to associate before their male companions did. Natural affection, while it is not the main pillar of the social edifice, has, no doubt, the leading role in forming family of to-day. It is sympathy, in the forms of sexual, parental, and conjugal love, that preserves and renews from generation to generation the family relations.
