Thus innocence is distinguished from virtue, and _vice versâ_. In both of them there is a positive, but in each opposite. A decomposition must take place in the first instance, and then a new composition, in order for innocence to become virtue. It loses a positive, and then the base attracts another different positive, by the higher affinity of the same base under a different temperature for the latter.
I stated the legal use of the innocent as opposed to mere _not guilty_ (he was not only acquitted, but was proved innocent), only to shew the existence of a _positive_ in the former--by no means as confounding this use of the word with the moral pleasurable feeling connected with it when used of little children, maidens, and those who in mature age preserve this sweet fragrance of vernal life, this mother's gift and so-seldom-kept keepsake to her child, as she sends him forth into the world. The distinction is obvious. Law agnizes actions alone, and character only as presumptive or illustrative of particular action as to its guilt or non-guilt, or to the commission or non-commission. But our moral feelings are never pleasurably excited except as they refer to a state of being--and the most glorious actions do not delight us as separate acts, or, rather, facts, but as representatives of the being of the agent--mental stenographs which bring an indeterminate extension within the field of easy and simultaneous vision, diffused being rendered visible by condensation. Only for the hero's sake do we exult in the heroic act, or, rather, the act abstracted from the hero would no longer appear to us heroic. Not, therefore, solely from the advantage of poets and historians do the deeds of ancient Greece and Rome strike us into admiration, while we relate the very same deeds of barbarians as matters of curiosity, but because in the former we refer the deed to the individual exaltation of the agent, in the latter only to the physical result of a given state of society. Compare the [heroism of that] Swiss patriot, with his bundle of spears turned towards his breast, in order to break the Austrian pikemen, and that of the Mameluke, related to me by Sir Alexander Ball, who, when his horse refused to plunge in on the French line, turned round and _backed_ it on them, with a certainty of death, in order to effect the same purpose. In the former, the state of mind arose from reason, morals, liberty, the sense of the duty owing to the independence of his country, and its continuing in a state compatible with the highest perfection and development; while the latter was predicative only of mere animal habit, ferocity, and unreasoned antipathy to strangers of a different dress and religion.