The savage (for the savage is to ages what the
child is to years) expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding
objects in a similar manner; and language and gesture, together with
plastic or pictorial imitation, become the image of the combined effect
of those objects, and of his apprehension of them. Man in society,
with all his passions and his pleasures, next becomes the object of
the passions and pleasures of man; an additional class of emotions
produces an augmented treasure of expressions; and language, gesture,
and the imitative arts become at once the representation and the medium,
the pencil and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and
the harmony. The social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from
its elements, society results, begin to develop themselves from the
moment that two human beings coexist; the future is contained within
the present, as the plant within the seed: and equality, diversity,
unity, contrast, mutual dependence, become the principles alone capable
of affording the motives according to which the will of a social being
is determined to action, inasmuch as he is social; and constitute
pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in
reasoning, and love in the intercourse of kind.
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