Flowers and Fruit from the Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe

Excerpt: When we feel a thing ourselves, we can see very quick the same in others.
When a finely constituted nature wishes to go into baseness, it has first to bribe itself. Evil is never embraced, undisguised, as evil, but under some fiction which the mind accepts, and with which it has the singular power of blinding itself in the face of daylight. The power of imposing on one's self is an essential preliminary to imposing on others. The man first argues himself down, and then he is ready to put the whole weight of his nature to deceiving others.
Perhaps it is so, that souls once intimately related have ever after this a strange power of affecting each other, - a power that neither absence nor death can annul. When we feel a thing ourselves, we can see very quick the same in others.
When a finely constituted nature wishes to go into baseness, it has first to bribe itself. Evil is never embraced, undisguised, as evil, but under some fiction which the mind accepts, and with which it has the singular power of blinding itself in the face of daylight. The power of imposing on one's self is an essential preliminary to imposing on others. The man first argues himself down, and then he is ready to put the whole weight of his nature to deceiving others.
Perhaps it is so, that souls once intimately related have ever after this a strange power of affecting each other, - a power that neither absence nor death can annul.