ABSTRACT
Sensibility in living beings awakens with life. As regards histological sensibility proper, it is inherent in the primordial phenomena of the evolution of the embryonic cells; it is a hereditary legacy which accumulates incessantly, by the addition of new elements, and new tissues, in proportion as the organism completes and perfects itself. Moral sensibility undergoes the same developmental movement; intelligence and memory enrich these first manifestations every instant. As a man advances in life, his sensibility becomes gradually lessened—the senses become dull, the sight loses its sharpness, the skin its impressionability by external agents. A sort of general slackening of all his functions impends over the living creature thus arrived at the retrogade phases of his evolution. Henceforward the first links of family affection bind themselves round his heart, and thus become the origin of his first sentiments and emotions.
