there is an involuntary and unconquerable element. There are many persons to whom we feel ourselves involuntarily drawn by the captivations of their person ality, and many others who, on the contrary, drive us away by a sort of repulsive radiation that they project to a distance. How often in the gamut of tender sentiments a .single look has sufficed to throw the whole being into commotion, and to excite all the sensitive fibres ! How in contrary circumstances, a mena i cing and imperious glance has sufficed to strike the individuals upon whom it has been darted, as with a thunderbolt, and fix them immovably to the spot ! We know, indeed, that both love and hatred, from the very fact that they express different conditions of our sensoriuin in agitation, are quite automatic and unconscious sentiments. They are inspired and expe rienced, not commanded by the intervention of the personality.
And it is remarkable that, just as in the sphere of in tellectual phenomena there is a necessary logical order according to which they succeed one another, so there is similarly a logic of sentiments and passions which imposes itself on ,this series of purely moral phenomena of the natural sensibility, and which, at a given moment, follows its regular course in the heart of man, like the series of ideas which are logically connected in his mind.
It is more or less profound knowledge of these spon taneous reactions of the human sensibility in presence of such a given circumstance, that enables great writers to know point by point, and express with precision, and put into the mouths of their personages, natural expres sions of the passions which are to be developed in them. It is because there is a logical order in the evolution of the sentiments and passions, that we can a priori infer the effects produced upon our fellows by a good and happy piece of news, and know—judging by ourselves, and representing to ourselves what we should feel in like circumstances—in what manner their sensibility will be touched, or what emotions they will naturally expe rience.