Jeroen Pietryga

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Most men are at heart individualistic rebels against law or custom: the social instincts are later and weaker than the individualistic, and need reinforcement; man is not “good by nature,” as Rousseau was so disastrously to suppose. But through association, if even merely in the family, sympathy comes, a feeling of kind, and at last of kindness. We like what is like us; “we pity not only a thing we have loved, but also one which we judge similar to ourselves”;123 out of this comes an “imitation of emotions,”124 and finally some degree of conscience. Conscience, however, is not innate, but ...more
The Story of Philosophy
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