SENTIMENTS AND IDEALS
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��ent. These emotional attitudes or tendencies, when devel oped into actual feelings may take a great many forms ac cording to circumstances. For instance, if my favourite dog is hurt, I feel pity for the animal and, perhaps, anger towards the person who injured it. If my mother is absent, I feel a longing for her; if she is in danger, the emotion of fear is aroused in me; if she has died, to my longing is added deep grief. Likewise if one has acquired a strong love of justice and sees it violated, sympathy is aroused for the vic tim of it and anger, or the moral form of it, indignation, for the perpetrator. These hypothetical examples are sufficient to make it apparent that the sentiment controls the primary emotions. It is not a feeling, but a disposition, a tendency to have certain feelings with respect to certain objects, ac cording to circumstances.
2. Classification of sentiments. Sentiments may be clas sified according to the kinds of objects around which the emotional dispositions are organized, or according to the moral import of the reactions which they call forth.
(i) According to the first principle of classification we have concrete or particular, and abstract or general senti ments. The concrete sentiments may, as intimated in the preceding paragraph, be classified as those organized around (a) inanimate things, (b) living beings below the human level, (c) individual persons, either the self or other selves, (d) groups of persons, (e) individual institutions. Among abstract sentiments are, first of all, the emotional disposi tions organized about generic institutions, using the term in a broad and somewhat indefinite sense as, for instance, the Church considered not as any particular denomination or local body, but as organized Christianity ; or the State not any special state, but organized political society; or Law meaning not any specific law or code, but the formu lated public will ; or the Family having reference not to any particular family, but to the organization of human beings on the basis of marital union ; or Property not any one s personal possessions, but the social institution; and
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