take more or less care of their young; when they act in virtue of vain fears; when they apprehend danger and fly from it, and sometimes defend themselves; when they quarrel among themselves about love or other matters, and terminate those quarrels by fighting; when they follow those leaders among themselves that presume to go first; and when they are either obedient to the shepherd and his dog or refractory. And why should man be deemed free in the performance of the same or like actions? He has indeed more knowledge than sheep. He takes in more things as matter of pleasure than they do, being sometimes moved with notions of honor and virtue, as well as with those pleasures he has in common with them. He is also more moved by absent things and things future than they are.[1] He is also subject to more vain fears, more mistakes and wrong actions, and infinitely more absurdities in notions. He has also more power and strength, as well as more art and cunning, and is capable of doing more good and more mischief to his fellow-men than they are to one another. But these larger powers and larger weaknesses which are of the same kind with the powers and weaknesses of sheep, cannot contain Liberty in them, and plainly make no perceivable difference between them and men as to the general causes of action, in finite intelligent and sensible beings, no more than the different degrees of these powers and weaknesses among the various kinds of beasts, birds, fishes, and reptiles do among them. Wherefore I need not run through the actions of foxes,
- ↑ This little sentence is pregnant with great meanings, and it shows how Collins had pondered the problem he was discussing. Imagination brings absent things present, and thus enlarges the field of moral motive. Without its aid we are at the mercy of the momentary solicitation of what is present to our senses; and this accounts for the strangely callous conduct of many amiable persons. The relation of imagination to morality is beautifully dealt with by Shelley in his Defence of Poetry, where he justly remarks that “A man to be greatly good must imagine intensely and comprehensively.”—G.W.F.
