SENTIMENTS AND IDEALS 97
ence, but includes also his love of holiness, truth, benev olence, self-sacrifice, and all that goes to make up his con ception of moral and spiritual perfection as realized in Jesus. On the other hand, the abstract sentiments are built up out of the concrete and can hardly persist as vital elements of one s character except upon the basis of the concrete. If we do not love individual men our sentiment for humanity will hardly be kept alive. If our hearts do not respond properly to individual acts of justice or injustice, we shall not maintain a vigorous love of justice as an abstract prin ciple. The sentiment for a thing may be due solely to its symbolical meaning. Our country s flag arouses in us cer tain emotions, but it does so not as a few square yards of bunting with red, white and blue colours upon it ; but because it is a symbol of all the glorious meaning our country has for us. After a voyage abroad the sight of the shores of our native land starts a tide of emotion, not because those rocks and cliffs and stretches of sandy beach are so much more attractive than other rocks, cliffs and beaches, but because they bring innumerable suggestions of personal experiences, of human associations and of national principles and ideals, which are of the very warp and woof of our lives. It is obvious that while we may classify sentiments as concrete or as abstract according to the objects to which they relate, many of them are very complex, and not a few are com pounded of both factors.
(2) According to the second principle of classification the sentiments are ranged in a scale of moral values.
It should be said at once that there are no sentiments which are good or bad, per se, i.e., as feeling dispositions without respect to their objects. Our sentiments are tend encies to be attracted to or repelled by certain objects ; they are dispositions to feel in some of their forms, degrees and combinations with other feelings, the great generic emotions of tenderness and anger for objects. And attraction and re pulsion, love and hate, are never in themselves wrong. Their moral significance all depends upon what attracts or
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