*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75145 ***
HUMAN NATURE AND THE SOCIAL ORDER
BY
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
INSTRUCTOR IN SOCIOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1902
COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published, September, 1902
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL
PAGE
Are Aspects of the Same Thing—The Fallacy of Setting Them in
Opposition—Various Forms of this Fallacy 1
CHAPTER II
SUGGESTION AND CHOICE
The Meaning of these Terms and their Relation to Each
Other—Individual and Social Aspects of Will or Choice—Suggestion
and Choice in Children—The Scope of Suggestion Commonly
Underestimated—Practical Limitations upon Deliberate
Choice—Illustrations of the Action of the _Milieu_—The Greater
or Less Activity of Choice Reflects the General State of
Society—Suggestibility 14
CHAPTER III
SOCIABILITY AND PERSONAL IDEAS
The Sociability of Children—Imaginary Conversation and its
Significance—The Nature of the Impulse to Communicate—There is
no Separation between Real and Imaginary Persons—Nor between
Thought and Intercourse—The Study and Interpretation of
Expression by Children—The Symbol or Sensuous Nucleus of
Personal Ideas—Personal Physiognomy in Art and Literature—In the
Idea of Social Groups—Sentiment in Personal Ideas—The Personal
Idea is the Immediate Social Reality—Society must be Studied in
the Imagination—The Possible Reality of Incorporeal Persons—The
Material Notion of Personality Contrasted with the Notion Based
on a Study of Personal Ideas—Self and Other in Personal
Ideas—Personal Opposition—Further Illustration and Defence of
the View of Persons and of Society Here Set Forth 45
CHAPTER IV
SYMPATHY OR COMMUNION AS AN ASPECT OF SOCIETY
The Meaning of Sympathy as here Used—Its Relation to Thought,
Sentiment, and Social Experience—The Range of Sympathy is a
Measure of Personality; _e.g._, as Regards Power, Goodness or
Badness, Sanity or Insanity—A Man’s Sympathies Reflect the
Social Order—Specialization and Breadth—Sympathy Reflects Social
Process in the Mingling of Likeness with Difference—Also in that
it is a Process of Selection Guided by Feeling—The Meaning of
Love in Social Discussion—Love in Relation to Self—The Study of
Sympathy Reveals the Vital Unity of Human Life 102
CHAPTER V
THE SOCIAL SELF—1. THE MEANING OF “I”
The “Empirical Self”—“I” as a State of Feeling—Does Not Ordinarily
Refer to the Body—As a Sense of Power or Causation—As a Sense of
Speciality or Differentiation in a General Life—The Reflected or
Looking-glass “I”—“I” is Rooted in the Past and Varies with
Social Conditions—Its Relation to Habit—To Disinterested
Love—How Children Learn the Meaning of “I”—The Speculative or
Metaphysical “I” in Children—The Looking-glass “I” in
Children—The Same in Adolescence—“I” in Relation to
Sex—Simplicity and Affectation—Social Self-feeling Universal 136
CHAPTER VI
THE SOCIAL SELF—2. VARIOUS PHASES OF “I”
Egotism and Selfishness—The Use of “I” in Literature and
Conversation—Intense Self-feeling Necessary to
Productivity—Other Phases of the Social Self—Pride versus
Vanity—Self-respect, Honor, Self-reverence—Humility—Maladies of
the Social Self—Withdrawal—Self-transformation—Phases of the
Self Caused by Incongruity between the Person and his
Surroundings 179
CHAPTER VII
HOSTILITY
Simple or Animal Anger—Social Anger—The Function of Hostility—The
Doctrine of Non-resistance—Control and Transformation of
Hostility by Reason—Hostility as Pleasure or Pain—The Importance
of Accepted Social Standards—Fear 232
CHAPTER VIII
EMULATION
Conformity—Non-conformity—The Two Viewed as Complementary Phases
of Life—Rivalry—Hero-worship 262
CHAPTER IX
LEADERSHIP OR PERSONAL ASCENDENCY
Leadership Defines and Organizes Vague Tendency—Power as Based
upon the Mental State of the Person Subject to It—The Mental
Traits of a Leader: Significance and Breadth—Why the Fame and
Power of a Man often Transcend his Real Character—Ascendency of
Belief and Hope—Mystery—Good Faith and Imposture—Does the Leader
really Lead? 283
CHAPTER X
THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF CONSCIENCE
The Right as the Rational—Significance of this View—The Right as
the Onward—The Right as Habit—Right is not the Social as against
the Individual—It is, in a Sense, the Social as against the
Sensual—The Right as a Synthesis of Personal Influences—Personal
Authority—Confession, Prayer, Publicity—Truth—Dependence of
Right upon Imagination—Conscience Reflects a Social Group—Ideal
Persons as Factors in Conscience 326
CHAPTER XI
PERSONAL DEGENERACY
Is a Phase of the Question of Right and Wrong—Relation to the Idea
of Development—Justification and Meaning of the Phrase “Personal
Degeneracy”—Hereditary and Social Factors in Personal
Degeneracy—Degeneracy as a Mental Trait—Conscience in
Degeneracy—Crime, Insanity, and Responsibility—General Aims in
the Treatment of Degeneracy 372
CHAPTER XII
FREEDOM
The Meaning of Freedom—Freedom and Discipline—Freedom as a Phase
of the Social Order—Freedom Involves Incidental Strain and
Degeneracy 392
INDEX 405
HUMAN NATURE AND THE
SOCIAL ORDER
CHAPTER I
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL
ARE ASPECTS OF THE SAME THING—THE FALLACY OF SETTING THEM IN
OPPOSITION—VARIOUS FORMS OF THIS FALLACY.
“Society and the Individual” is really the subject of this whole book,
and not merely of Chapter One. It is my general aim to set forth, from
various points of view, what the individual is, considered as a member
of a social whole; while the special purpose of this chapter is only to
offer a preliminary statement of the matter, as I conceive it, afterward
to be unfolded at some length and variously illustrated.
A separate individual is an abstraction unknown to experience, and so
likewise is society when regarded as something apart from individuals.
The real thing is Human Life, which may be considered either in an
individual aspect or in a social, that is to say a general, aspect; but
is always, as a matter of fact, both individual and general. In other
words, “society” and “individuals” do not denote separable phenomena,
but are simply collective and distributive aspects of the same thing,
the relation between them being like that between other expressions one
of which denotes a group as a whole and the other the members of the
group, such as the army and the soldiers, the class and the students,
and so on. This holds true of any social aggregate, great or small; of a
family, a city, a nation, a race; of mankind as a whole: no matter how
extensive, complex, or enduring a group may be, no good reason can be
given for regarding it as essentially different in this respect from the
smallest, simplest, or most transient.
So far, then, as there is any difference between the two, it is rather
in our point of view than in the object we are looking at: when we speak
of society, or use any other collective term, we fix our minds upon some
general view of the people concerned, while when we speak of individuals
we disregard the general aspect and think of them as if they were
separate. Thus “the Cabinet” may consist of President Lincoln, Secretary
Stanton, Secretary Seward, and so on; but when I say “the Cabinet” I do
not suggest the same idea as when I enumerate these gentlemen
separately. Society, or any complex group, may, to ordinary observation,
be a very different thing from all of its members viewed one by one—as a
man who beheld General Grant’s army from Missionary Ridge would have
seen something other than he would by approaching every soldier in it.
In the same way a picture is made up of so many square inches of painted
canvas; but if you should look at these one at a time, covering the
others, until you had seen them all, you would still not have seen the
picture. There may, in all such cases, be a system or organization in
the whole that is not apparent in the parts. In this sense, and in no
other, is there a difference between society and the individuals of
which it is composed; a difference not residing in the facts themselves
but existing to the observer on account of the limits of his perception.
A _complete_ view of society would also be a complete view of all the
individuals, and _vice versa_; there would be no difference between
them.
And just as there is no society or group that is not a collective view
of persons, so there is no individual who may not be regarded as a
particular view of social groups. He has no separate existence; through
both the hereditary and the social factors in his life a man is bound
into the whole of which he is a member, and to consider him apart from
it is quite as artificial as to consider society apart from individuals.
If this is true there is, of course, a fallacy in that not uncommon
manner of speaking which sets the social and the individual over against
each other as separate and antagonistic. The word “social” appears to be
used in at least three fairly distinct senses, but in none of these does
it mean something that can properly be regarded as opposite to
individual or personal.
In its largest sense it denotes that which pertains to the collective
aspect of humanity, to society in its widest and vaguest meaning. In
this sense the individual and all his attributes are social, since they
are all connected with the general life in one way or another, and are
part of a collective development.
Again, social may mean what pertains to immediate intercourse, to the
life of conversation and face-to-face sympathy—sociable in short. This
is something quite different, but no more antithetical to individual
than the other; it is in these relations that individuality most
obviously exists and expresses itself.
In a third sense the word means conducive to the collective welfare, and
thus becomes nearly equivalent to moral, as when we say that crime or
sensuality is unsocial or anti-social; but here again it cannot properly
be made the antithesis of individual—since wrong is surely no more
individual than right—but must be contrasted with immoral, brutal,
selfish, or some other word with an ethical implication.
There are a number of expressions which are closely associated in common
usage with this objectionable antithesis; such words, for instance, as
individualism, socialism, particularism, collectivism.[1] These appear
to be used with a good deal of vagueness, so that it is always in order
to require that anyone who employs them shall make it plain in what
sense they are to be taken. I wish to make no captious objections to
particular forms of expression, and so far as these can be shown to have
meanings that express the facts of life I have nothing to say against
them. Of the current use of individualism and socialism in antithesis to
each other, about the same may be said as of the words without the
_ism_. I do not see that life presents two distinct and opposing
tendencies that can properly be called individualism and socialism, any
more than that there are two distinct and opposing entities, society and
the individual, to embody these tendencies. The phenomena usually called
individualistic are always socialistic in the sense that they are
expressive of tendencies growing out of the general life, and,
contrariwise, the so-called socialistic phenomena have always an obvious
individual aspect. These and similar terms may be used, conveniently
enough, to describe theories or programmes of the day, but whether they
are suitable for purposes of careful study appears somewhat doubtful. If
used, they ought, it seems to me, to receive more adequate definition
than they have at present.
For example, all the principal epochs of European history might be, and
most of them are, spoken of as individualistic on one ground or another,
and without departing from current usage of the word. The decaying Roman
Empire was individualistic if a decline of public spirit and an
every-man-for-himself feeling and practice constitute individualism. So
also was the following period of political confusion. The feudal system
is often regarded as individualistic, because of the relative
independence and isolation of small political units—quite a different
use of the word from the preceding—and after this come the Revival of
Learning, the Renaissance, and the Reformation, which are all commonly
spoken of, on still other grounds, as assertions of individualism. Then
we reach the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sceptical,
transitional, and, again, individualistic; and so to our own time, which
many hold to be the most individualistic of all. One feels like asking
whether a word which means so many things as this means anything
whatever.
There is always some confusion of terms in speaking of opposition
between an individual and society in general, even when the writer’s
meaning is obvious enough: it would be more accurate to say either that
one individual is opposing many, or that one part of society is opposing
other parts; and thus avoid confusing the two aspects of life in the
same expression. When Emerson says that society is in a conspiracy
against the independence of each of its members, we are to understand
that any peculiar tendency represented by one person finds itself more
or less at variance with the general current of tendencies organized in
other persons. It is no more individual, nor any less social, in a large
sense, than other tendencies represented by more persons. A thousand
persons are just as truly individuals as one, and the man who seems to
stand alone draws his being from the general stream of life just as
truly and inevitably as if he were one of a thousand. Innovation is just
as social as conformity, genius as mediocrity. These distinctions are
not between what is individual and what is social, but between what is
usual or established and what is exceptional or novel. In other words,
wherever you find life as society there you will find life as
individuality, and _vice versa_.
I think, then, that the antithesis, society _versus_ the individual, is
false and hollow whenever used as a general or philosophical statement
of human relations. Whatever idea may be in the minds of those who set
these words and their derivatives over against each other, the notion
conveyed is that of two separable entities or forces; and certainly such
a notion is untrue to fact.
Most people not only think of individuals and society as more or less
separate and antithetical, but they look upon the former as antecedent
to the latter. That persons make society would be generally admitted as
a matter of course; but that society makes persons would strike many as
a startling notion, though I know of no good reason for looking upon the
distributive aspect of life as more primary or causative than the
collective aspect. The reason for the common impression appears to be
that we think most naturally and easily of the individual phase of life,
simply because it is a tangible one, the phase under which men appear to
the senses, while the actuality of groups, of nations, of mankind at
large, is realized only by the active and instructed imagination. We
ordinarily regard society, so far as we conceive it at all, in a vaguely
material aspect, as an aggregate of physical bodies, not as the vital
whole which it is; and so, of course, we do not see that it may be as
original or causative as anything else. Indeed many look upon “society”
and other general terms as somewhat mystical, and are inclined to doubt
whether there is any reality back of them.
This naïve individualism of thought—which, however, does not truly see
the individual any more than it does society—is reinforced by traditions
in which all of us are brought up, and is so hard to shake off that it
may be worth while to point out a little more definitely some of the
prevalent ways of conceiving life which are permeated by it, and which
anyone who agrees with what has just been said may regard as fallacious.
My purpose in doing this is only to make clearer the standpoint from
which succeeding chapters are written, and I do not propose any thorough
discussion of the views mentioned.
First, then, we have _mere individualism_. In this the distributive
aspect is almost exclusively regarded, collective phases being looked
upon as quite secondary and incidental. Each person is held to be a
separate agent, and all social phenomena are thought of as originating
in the action of such agents. The individual is the source, the
independent, the only human source, of events. Although this way of
looking at things has been much discredited by the evolutionary science
and philosophy of recent years, it is by no means abandoned, even in
theory, and practically it enters as a premise, in one shape or another,
into most of the current thought of the day. It springs naturally from
the established way of thinking, congenial, as I have remarked, to the
ordinary material view of things and corroborated by theological and
other traditions.
Next is _double causation_, or a partition of power between society and
the individual, thought of as separate causes. This notion, in one shape
or another, is the one ordinarily met with in social and ethical
discussion. It is no advance, philosophically, upon the preceding. There
is the same premise of the individual as a separate, unrelated agent;
but over against him is set a vaguely conceived general or collective
interest and force. It seems that people are so accustomed to thinking
of themselves as uncaused causes, special creators on a small scale,
that when the existence of general phenomena is forced upon their notice
they are likely to regard these as something additional, separate, and
more or less antithetical. Our two forces contend with varying fortunes,
the thinker sometimes sympathizing with one, sometimes with the other,
and being an individualist or a socialist accordingly. The doctrines
usually understood in connection with these terms differ, as regards
their conception of the nature of life, only in taking opposite sides of
the same questionable antithesis. The socialist holds it desirable that
the general or collective force should win; the individualist has a
contrary opinion. Neither offers any change of ground, any reconciling
and renewing breadth of view. So far as breadth of view is concerned a
man might quite as well be an individualist as a socialist or
collectivist, the two being identical in philosophy though antagonistic
in programme. If one is inclined to neither party he may take refuge in
the expectation that the controversy, resting, as he may hold that it
does, on a false conception of life, will presently take its proper
place among the forgotten _débris_ of speculation.
Thirdly we have _primitive individualism_. This expression has been used
to describe the view that sociality follows individuality in time, is a
later and additional product of development. This view is a variety of
the preceding, and is, perhaps, formed by a mingling of individualistic
preconceptions with a somewhat crude evolutionary philosophy.
Individuality is usually conceived as lower in moral rank as well as
precedent in time. Man _was_ a mere individual, mankind a mere
aggregation of such, but he has gradually become socialized, he is
progressively merging into a social whole. Morally speaking, the
individual is the bad, the social the good, and we must push on the work
of putting down the former and bringing in the latter.
Of course the view which I regard as sound, is that individuality is
neither prior in time nor lower in moral rank than sociality; but that
the two have always existed side by side as complementary aspects of the
same thing, and that the line of progress is from a lower to a higher
type of both, not from the one to the other. If the word social is
applied only to the higher forms of mental life it should, as already
suggested, be opposed not to individual, but to animal, sensual, or some
other word implying mental or moral inferiority. If we go back to a time
when the state of our remote ancestors was such that we are not willing
to call it social, then it must have been equally undeserving to be
described as individual or personal; that is to say, they must have been
just as inferior to us when viewed separately as when viewed
collectively. To question this is to question the vital unity of human
life.
The life of the human species, like that of other species, must always
have been both general and particular, must always have had its
collective and distributive aspects. The plane of this life has
gradually risen, involving, of course, both the aspects mentioned. Now,
as ever, they develop as one, and may be observed united in the highest
activities of the highest minds. Shakespeare, for instance, is in one
point of view a unique and transcendent individual; in another he is a
splendid expression of the general life of mankind: the difference is
not in him but in the way we choose to look at him.
Finally, there is _the social faculty view_. This expression might be
used to indicate those conceptions which regard the social as including
only a part, often a rather definite part, of the individual. Human
nature is thus divided into individualistic or non-social tendencies or
faculties, and those that are social. Thus, certain emotions, as love,
are social; others, as fear or anger, are unsocial or individualistic.
Some writers have even treated the intelligence as an individualistic
faculty, and have found sociality only in some sorts of emotion or
sentiment.
This idea of instincts or faculties that are peculiarly social is well
enough if we use this word in the sense of pertaining to conversation or
immediate fellow-feeling. Affection is certainly more social in this
sense than fear. But if it is meant that these instincts or faculties
are in themselves morally higher than others, or that they alone pertain
to the collective life, the view is, I think, very questionable. At any
rate the opinion I hold, and expect to explain more fully in the further
course of this book, is that man’s psychical outfit is not divisible
into the social and the non-social; but that he is all social in a large
sense, is all a part of the common human life, and that his social or
moral progress consists less in the aggrandizement of particular
faculties or instincts and the suppression of others, than in the
discipline of all with reference to a progressive organization of life
which we know in thought as conscience.
Some instincts or tendencies may grow in relative importance, may have
an increasing function, while the opposite may be true of others. Such
relative growth and diminution of parts seems to be a general feature of
evolution, and there is no reason why it should be absent from our
mental development. But here as well as elsewhere most parts, if not
all, are or have been functional with reference to a life collective as
well as distributive; there is no sharp separation of faculties, and
progress takes place rather by gradual adaptation of old organs to new
functions than by disuse and decay.
CHAPTER II
SUGGESTION AND CHOICE
THE MEANING OF THESE TERMS AND THEIR RELATION TO EACH OTHER—INDIVIDUAL
AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF WILL OR CHOICE—SUGGESTION AND CHOICE IN
CHILDREN—THE SCOPE OF SUGGESTION COMMONLY UNDERESTIMATED—PRACTICAL
LIMITATIONS UPON DELIBERATE CHOICE—ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE ACTION OF
THE _MILIEU_—THE GREATER OR LESS ACTIVITY OF CHOICE REFLECTS THE
STATE OF SOCIETY—SUGGESTIBILITY.
The antithesis between suggestion and choice is another of those
familiar ideas which are not always so clear as they should be.
The word suggestion is used here to denote an influence that works in a
comparatively mechanical or reflex way, without calling out that higher
selective activity of the mind implied in choice or will. Thus the
hypnotic subject who performs apparently meaningless actions at the word
of the operator is said to be controlled by suggestion; so also is one
who catches up tricks of speech and action from other people without
meaning to. From such instances the idea is extended to embrace any
thought or action which is mentally simple and seems not to involve
choice. The behavior of people under strong emotion is suggestive;
crowds are suggestible; habit is a kind of suggestion, and so on.
I prefer this word to imitation, which some use in this or a similar
sense, because the latter, as ordinarily understood, seems to cover too
little in some directions and too much in others. In common use it means
an action that results in visible or audible resemblance. Now although
our simple reactions to the influence of others are largely of this
sort, they are by no means altogether so; the actions of a child during
the first six months of life, for instance, are very little imitative in
this sense; on the other hand, the imitation that produces a visible
resemblance may be a voluntary process of the most complex sort
imaginable, like the skilful painting of a portrait. However, it makes
little difference what words we use if we have sound meanings back of
them, and I am far from intending to find fault with writers, like
Professor Baldwin and M. Tarde, who adopt the word and give it a wide
and unusual application. For my purpose, however, it does not seem
expedient to depart so far from ordinary usage.
The distinction between suggestion and choice is not, I think, a sharp
opposition between separable or radically different things, but rather a
way of indicating the lower and higher stages of a series. What we call
choice or will appears to be an ill-defined area of more strenuous
mental activity within a much wider field of activity similar in kind
but less intense. It is not sharply divisible from the mass of
involuntary thought. The truth is that the facts of the mind, of
society, indeed of any living whole, seldom admit of sharp division, but
show gradual transitions from one thing to another: there are no fences
in these regions. We speak of suggestion as mechanical; but it seems
probable that all psychical life is selective, or, in some sense,
choosing, and that the rudiments of consciousness and will may be
discerned or inferred in the simplest reaction of the lowest living
creature. In our own minds the comparatively simple ideas which are
called suggestions are by no means single and primary, but each one is
itself a living, shifting, multifarious bit of life, a portion of the
fluid “stream of thought” formed by some sort of selection and synthesis
out of simpler elements. On the other hand, our most elaborate and
volitional thought and action is suggested in the sense that it consists
not in creation out of nothing, but in a creative synthesis or
reorganization of old material.
The distinction, then, is one of degree rather than of kind; and choice,
as contrasted with suggestion, is, in its individual aspect, _a
comparatively elaborate process of mental organization or synthesis_, of
which we are reflectively aware, and which is rendered necessary by
complexity in the elements of our thought. In its social aspect—for all,
or nearly all, our choices relate in one way or another to the social
environment—it is _an organization of comparatively complex social
relations_. Precisely as the conditions about us and the ideas suggested
by those conditions become intricate, are we forced to think, to choose,
to define the useful and the right, and, in general, to work out the
higher intellectual life. When life is simple, thought and action are
comparatively mechanical or suggestive; the higher consciousness is not
aroused, the reflective will has little or nothing to do; the captain
stays below and the inferior officers work the ship. But when life is
diverse, thought is so likewise, and the mind must achieve the higher
synthesis, or suffer that sense of division which is its peculiar pain.
In short, the question of suggestion and choice is only another view of
the question of uniformity and complexity in social relations.
Will, or choice, like all phases of mental life, may be looked at either
in a particular or a general aspect; and we have, accordingly,
individual will or social will, depending upon our point of view, as to
whether we regard the activity singly or in a mass. But there is no real
separation; they are only different phases of the same thing. Any choice
that I can make is a synthesis of suggestions derived in one way or
another from the general life; and it also reacts upon that life, so
that my will is social as being both effect and cause with reference to
it. If I buy a straw hat you may look at my action separately, as my
individual choice, or as part of a social demand for straw hats, or as
indicating non-conformity to a fashion of wearing some other sort of
hats, and so on. There is no mystery about the matter; nothing that need
puzzle anyone who is capable of perceiving that a thing may look
differently from different standpoints, like the post that was painted a
different color on each of its four sides.
It is, I think, a mistake of superficial readers to imagine that
psychologists or sociologists are trying to depreciate the will, or that
there is any tendency to such depreciation in a sound evolutionary
science or philosophy. The trouble with the popular view of will,
derived chiefly from tradition, is not that it exaggerates its
importance, which would perhaps be impossible; but, first, that it
thinks of will only in the individual aspect, and does not grasp the
fact—plain enough it would seem—that the act of choice is cause and
effect in a general life; and, second, that it commonly overlooks the
importance of involuntary forces, or at least makes them separate from
and antithetical to choice—as if the captain were expected to work the
ship all alone, or in opposition to the crew, instead of using them as
subordinate agents. There is little use in arguing abstractly points
like these; but if the reader who may be puzzled by them will try to
free himself from metaphysical formulæ, and determine to _see_ the facts
as they are, he will be in a way to get some healthy understanding of
the matter.[2]
By way of illustrating these general statements I shall first offer a
few remarks concerning suggestion and choice in the life of children,
and then go on to discuss their working in adult life and upon the
career as a whole.
There appears to be quite a general impression that children are far
more subject to control through suggestion or mechanical imitation than
grown-up people are; in other words, that their volition is less active.
I am not at all sure that this is the case: their choices are, as a
rule, less stable and consistent than ours, their minds have less
definiteness of organization, so that their actions appear less rational
and more externally determined; but on the other hand they have less of
the mechanical subjection to habit that goes with a settled character.
Choice is a process of growth, of progressive mental organization
through selection and assimilation of the materials which life presents,
and this process is surely never more vigorous than in childhood and
youth. It can hardly be doubted that the choosing and formative vigor of
the mind is greater under the age of twenty-five than after: the will of
middle age is stronger in the sense that it has more momentum, but it
has less acceleration, runs more on habit, and so is less capable of
fresh choice.
I am distrustful of that plausible but possibly illusive analogy between
the mind of the child and the mind of primitive man, which, in this
connection, would suggest a like simplicity and inertness of thought in
the two. Our children achieve in a dozen years a mental development much
above that of savages, and supposing that they do, in some sense,
recapitulate the progress of the race, they certainly cover the ground
at a very different rate of speed, which involves a corresponding
intensity of mental life. After the first year certainly, if not from
birth, they share our social order, and we induct them so rapidly into
its complex life that their minds have perhaps as much novelty and
diversity to synthetize as ours do.
Certainly one who begins to observe children with a vague notion that
their actions, after the first few months, are almost all mechanically
imitative, is likely to be surprised. I had this notion, derived,
perhaps without much warrant, from a slight acquaintance with writings
on child-study current previous to 1893, when my first child was born.
He was a boy—I will call him R.—in whom imitativeness, as ordinarily
understood, happened to be unusually late in its development. Until he
was more than two years and a half old all that I noticed that was
obviously imitative, in the sense of a visible or audible repetition of
the acts of others, was the utterance of about six words that he learned
to say during his second year. It is likely that very close observation,
assisted by the clearer notion of what to look for that comes by
experience, would have discovered more: but no more was obvious to
ordinary expectant attention. The obvious thing was his constant use of
experiment and reflection, and the slow and often curious results that
he attained in this manner. At two and a half he had learned, for
instance, to use a fork quite skilfully. The wish to use it was perhaps
an imitative impulse, in a sense, but his methods were original and the
outcome of a long course of independent and reflective experiment. His
skill was the continuation of a dexterity previously acquired in playing
with long pins, which he ran into cushions, the interstices of his
carriage, etc. The fork was apparently conceived as an interesting
variation upon the hat-pin, and not, primarily, as a means of getting
food or doing what others did. In creeping or walking, at which he was
very slow, partly on account of a lame foot, he went through a similar
series of devious experiments, which apparently had no reference to what
he saw others do.
He did not begin to talk—beyond using the few words already
mentioned—until over two years and eight months old; having previously
refused to interest himself in it, although he understood others as
well, apparently, as any child of his age. He preferred to make his
wants known by grunts and signs; and instead of delighting in imitation
he evidently liked better a kind of activity that was only indirectly
connected with the suggestions of others.
I frequently tried to produce imitation, but almost wholly without
success. For example, when he was striving to accomplish something with
his blocks I would intervene and show him, by example, how, as I
thought, it might be done, but these suggestions were invariably, so far
as I remember or have recorded, received with indifference or protest.
He liked to puzzle it out quietly for himself, and to be shown how to do
a thing often seemed to destroy his interest in it. Yet he would profit
by observation of others in his own fashion, and I sometimes detected
him making use of ideas to which he seemed to pay no attention when they
were first presented. In short, he showed that aversion, which minds of
a pondering, constructive turn perhaps always show, to anything which
suddenly and crudely broke in upon his system of thought. At the same
time that he was so backward in the ordinary curriculum of childhood, he
showed in other ways, which it is perhaps unnecessary to describe, that
comparison and reflection were well developed. This preoccupation with
private experiment and reflection, and reluctance to learn from others,
were undoubtedly a cause of his slow development, particularly in
speech, his natural aptitude for which appeared in a good enunciation
and a marked volubility as soon as he really began to talk.
Imitation came all at once: he seemed to perceive quite suddenly that
this was a short cut to many things, and took it up, not in a merely
mechanical or suggestive way, but consciously, intelligently, as a means
to an end. The imitative act, however, was often an end in itself, an
interesting exercise of his constructive faculties, pursued at first
without much regard to anything beyond. This was the case with the
utterance of words, and, later, with spelling, with each of which he
became fascinated for its own sake and regardless of its use as a means
of communication.
In a second child, M., a girl, I was able to observe the working of a
mind of a different sort, and of a much more common type as regards
imitation. When two months and seven days old she was observed to make
sounds in reply to her mother when coaxed with a certain pitch and
inflection of voice. These sounds were clearly imitative, since they
were seldom made at other times, but not mechanically so. They were
produced with every appearance of mental effort and of delight in its
success. Only vocal imitations, of this rudimentary sort, were observed
until eight months was nearly reached, when the first manual imitation,
striking a button-hook upon the back of a chair, was noticed. This
action had been performed experimentally before, and the imitation was
merely a repetition suggested by seeing her mother do it, or perhaps by
hearing the sound. After this the development of imitative activity
proceeded much in the usual way, which has often been described.
In both of these cases I was a good deal impressed with the idea that
the life of children, as compared with that of adults, is less
determined in a merely suggestive way, and involves more will and
choice, than is commonly supposed. Imitation, in the sense of visible or
audible repetition, was not so omnipresent as I had expected, and when
present seemed to be in great part rational and voluntary rather than
mechanical. It is very natural to assume that to do what someone else
does requires no mental effort; but this, as applied to little children,
is, of course, a great mistake. They cannot imitate an act except by
learning how to do it, any more than grown-up people can, and for a
child to learn a word may be as complicated a process as for an older
person to learn a difficult piece on the piano. A novel imitation is not
at all mechanical, but a strenuous voluntary activity, accompanied by
effort and followed by pleasure in success. All sympathetic observers of
children must be impressed, I imagine, by the evident mental stress and
concentration which often accompanies their endeavors, whether imitative
or not, and is followed, as in adults, by the appearance of relief when
the action has come off successfully.[3]
The “imitative instinct” is sometimes spoken of as if it were a
mysterious something that enabled the child to perform involuntarily and
without preparation acts that are quite new to him. It will be found
difficult, if one reflects upon the matter, to conceive what could be
the nature of an instinct or hereditary tendency, not to do a definite
thing previously performed by our ancestors—as is the case with ordinary
instinct—but to do _anything_, within vague limits, which happened to be
done within our sight or hearing. This doing of new things without
definite preparation, _either in heredity or experience_, would seem to
involve something like special creation in the mental and nervous
organism: and the imitation of children has no such character. It is
quite evidently an acquired power, and if the act imitated is at all
complex the learning process involves a good deal of thought and will.
If there is an imitative instinct it must, apparently, be something in
the way of a taste for repetition, which stimulates the learning process
without, however, having any tendency to dispense with it. The taste for
repetition seems, in fact, to exist, at least in most children, but even
this may be sufficiently explained as a phase of the general mental
tendency to act upon uncontradicted ideas. It is a doctrine now
generally taught by psychologists that the idea of an action is itself a
motive to that action, and tends intrinsically to produce it unless
something intervenes to prevent. This being the case, it would appear
that we must always have some impulse to do what we see done, provided
it is something we understand sufficiently to be able to form a definite
idea of doing it.[4] I am inclined to the view that it is unnecessary to
assume, in man, a special imitative instinct, but that “as Preyer and
others have shown in the case of young children, mimicry arises mainly
from pleasure in activity as such, and not from its peculiar quality as
imitation.”[5] An intelligent child imitates because he has faculties
crying for employment, and imitation is a key that lets them loose: he
needs to do things and imitation gives him things to do. An indication
that sensible resemblance to the acts of others is not the main thing
sought is seen in such cases as the following: M. had a trick of raising
her hands above her head, which she would perform, when in the mood for
it, either imitatively, when someone else did it, or in response to the
words “How big is M.?” but she responded more readily in the second or
non-imitative way than in the other. This example well illustrates the
reason for my preference of the word suggestion over imitation to
describe these simple reactions. In this case the action performed had
no sort of resemblance to the form of words “How big is M.?” that
started it, and could be called imitative only in a recondite sense. All
that is necessary is that there should be a suggestion, that something
should be presented that is connected in the child’s mind with the
action to be produced. Whether this connection is by sensible
resemblance or not seems immaterial.
There seems to be some opposition between imitation of the visible,
external kind, and reflection. Children of one sort are attracted by
sensible resemblance and so are early and conspicuously imitative. If
this is kept up in a mechanical way after the acts are well learned, and
at the expense of new efforts, it would seem to be a sign of mental
apathy, or even defect, as in the silly mimicry of some idiots. Those of
another sort are preoccupied by the subtler combinations of thought
which do not, as a rule, lead to obvious imitation. Such children are
likely to be backward in the development of active faculties, and slow
to observe except where their minds are specially interested. They are
also, if I may judge by R., slow to interpret features and tones of
voice, guileless and unaffected, just because of this lack of keen
personal perceptions, and not quickly sympathetic.
Accordingly, it is not at all clear that children are, on the whole, any
more given to imitation of the mechanical sort, any more suggestible,
than adults. They appear so to us chiefly, perhaps, for two reasons. In
the first place, we fail to realize the thought, the will, the effort,
they expend upon their imitations. They do things that have become
mechanical to us, and we assume that they are mechanical to them, though
closer observation and reflection would show us the contrary. These
actions are largely daring experiments, strenuous syntheses of
previously acquired knowledge, comparable in quality to our own most
earnest efforts, and not to the thoughtless routine of our lives. We do
not see that their echoing of the words they hear is often not a silly
repetition, but a difficult and instructive exercise of the vocal
apparatus. Children imitate much because they are growing much, and
imitation is a principal means of growth. This is true at any age; the
more alive and progressive a man is the more actively he is admiring and
profiting by his chosen models.
A second reason is that adults imitate at longer range, as it were, so
that the imitative character of their acts is not so obvious. They come
into contact with more sorts of persons, largely unknown to one another,
and have access to a greater variety of suggestions in books.
Accordingly they present a deceitful appearance of independence simply
because we do not see their models.
Though we may be likely to exaggerate the difference between children
and adults as regards the sway of suggestive influences, there is little
danger of our overestimating the importance of these in the life of
mankind at large. The common impression among those who have given no
special study to the matter appears to be that suggestion has little
part in the mature life of a rational being; and though the control of
involuntary impulses is recognized in tricks of speech and manner, in
fads, fashions, and the like, it is not perceived to touch the more
important points of conduct. The fact, however, is that the main current
of our thought is made up of impulses absorbed without deliberate choice
from the life about us, or else arising from hereditary instinct, or
from habit; while the function of higher thought and of will is to
organize and apply these impulses. To revert to an illustration already
suggested, the voluntary is related to the involuntary very much as the
captain of a ship is related to the seamen and subordinate officers.
Their work is not altogether of a different sort from his, but is of a
lower grade in a mental series. He supplies the higher sort of
co-ordination, but the main bulk of the activity is of the mentally
lower order.
The chief reason why popular attention should fix itself upon voluntary
thought and action, and tend to overlook the involuntary, is that choice
is acutely conscious, and so must, from its very nature, be the focus of
introspective thought. Because he _is_ an individual, a specialized,
contending bit of psychical force, a man very naturally holds his will,
in its individual aspect, to be of supreme moment. If we did not feel a
great importance in the things we do we could not will to do them. And
in the life of other people voluntary action seems supreme, for very
much the same reasons that it does in our own. It is always in the
foreground, active, obvious, intrusive, the thing that creates
differences and so fixes the attention. We notice nothing except through
contrast; and accordingly the mechanical control of suggestion,
affecting all very much alike, is usually unperceived. As we do not
notice the air, precisely because it is always with us, so, for the same
reason, we do not notice a prevailing mode of dress. In like manner we
are ignorant of our local accent and bearing, and are totally unaware,
for the most part, of all that is common to our time, our country, our
customary environment. Choice is a central area of light and activity
upon which our eyes are fixed; while the unconscious is a dark,
illimitable background enveloping this area. Or, again, choice is like
the earth, which we unconsciously assume to be the principal part of
creation, simply because it is the centre of our interest and the field
of our exertions.
The practical limitations upon the scope of choice arise, first, from
its very nature as a selective and organizing agent, working upon
comparatively simple or suggestive ideas as its raw material, and,
second, from the fact that it absorbs a great deal of vital energy.
Owing to the first circumstance its activity is always confined to
points where there is a competition of ideas. So long as an idea is
uncontradicted, not felt to be in any way inconsistent with others, we
take it as a matter of course. It is a truth, though hard for us to
realize, that if we had lived in Dante’s time we should have believed in
a material Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, as he did, and that our doubts
of this, and of many other things which his age did not question, have
nothing to do with our natural intelligence, but are made possible and
necessary by competing ideas which the growth of knowledge has enabled
us to form. Our particular minds or wills are members of a slowly
growing whole, and at any given moment are limited in scope by the state
of the whole, and especially of those parts of the whole with which they
are in most active contact. Our thought is never isolated, but always
some sort of a response to the influences around us, so that we can
hardly have thoughts that are not in some way aroused by communication.
Will—free will if you choose—is thus a co-operative whole, not an
aggregation of disconnected fragments, and the freedom of the individual
is freedom under law, like that of the good citizen, not anarchy. We
learn to speak by the exercise of will, but no one, I suppose, will
assert that an infant who hears only French is free to learn English.
Where suggestions are numerous and conflicting we feel the need to
choose; to make these choices is the function of will, and the result of
them is a step in the progress of life, an act of freedom or creation,
if you wish to call it so; but where suggestion is single, as with
religious dogma in ages of faith, we are very much at its mercy. We do
not perceive these limitations, because there is no point of vantage
from which we can observe and measure the general state of thought;
there is nothing to compare it with. Only when it begins to change, when
competing suggestions enter our minds and we get new points of view from
which we can look back upon it, do we begin to notice its power over
us.[6]
The exhausting character of choice, of making up one’s mind, is a matter
of common experience. In some way the mental synthesis, this calling in
and reducing to order the errant population of the mind, draws severely
upon the vital energy, and one of the invariable signs of fatigue is a
dread of making decisions and assuming responsibility. In our
complicated life the will can, in fact, manage only a small part of the
competing suggestions that are within our reach. What we are all forced
to do is to choose a field of action which for some reason we look upon
as specially interesting or important, and exercise our choice in that;
in other matters protecting ourselves, for the most part, by some sort
of mechanical control—some accepted personal authority, some local
custom, some professional tradition, or the like. Indeed, to know where
and how to narrow the activity of the will in order to preserve its tone
and vigor for its most essential functions, is a great part of knowing
how to live. An incontinent exercise of choice wears people out, so that
many break down and yield even essentials to discipline and authority in
some form; while many more wish, at times, to do so and indulge
themselves, perhaps, in Thomas à Kempis, or “The Christian’s Secret of a
Happy Life.” Not a few so far exhaust the power of self-direction as to
be left drifting at the mercy of undisciplined passions. There are many
roads to degeneracy, and persons of an eager, strenuous nature not
infrequently take this one.
A common instance of the insidious power of _milieu_ is afforded by the
transition from university education to getting a living. At a
university one finds himself, if he has any vigor of imagination, in one
of the widest environments the world can afford. He has access to the
suggestions of the richest minds of all times and countries, and has
also, or should have, time and encouragement to explore, in his own way,
this spacious society. It is his business to think, to aspire, and grow;
and if he is at all capable of it he does so. Philosophy and art and
science and the betterment of mankind are real and living interests to
him, largely because he is in the great stream of higher thought that
flows through libraries. Now let him graduate and enter, we will say,
upon the lumber business at Kawkawlin. Here he finds the scope of
existence largely taken up with the details of this industry—wholesome
for him in some ways, but likely to be overemphasized. These and a few
other things are repeated over and over again, dinned into him,
everywhere assumed to be the solid things of life, so that he must
believe in them; while the rest grows misty and begins to lose hold upon
him. He cannot make things seem real that do not enter into his
experience, and if he resists the narrowing environment it must be by
keeping touch with a larger world, through books or other personal
intercourse, and by the exercise of imagination. Marcus Aurelius told
himself that he was free to think what he chose, but it appears that he
realized this freedom by keeping books about him that suggested the kind
of thoughts he chose to think; and it is only in some such sense as this
implies that the assertion is true. When the palpable environment does
not suit us we can, if our minds are vigorous enough, build up a better
one out of remembered material; but we must have material of some sort.
It is easy to feel the effect of surroundings in such cases as this,
because of the sharp and definite change, and because the imagination
clings to one state long after the senses are subdued to the other; but
it is not so with national habits and sentiments, which so completely
envelop us that we are for the most part unaware of them. The more
thoroughly American a man is the less he can perceive Americanism. He
will embody it; all he does, says, or writes, will be full of it; but he
can never truly see it, simply because he has no exterior point of view
from which to look at it. If he goes to Europe he begins to get by
contrast some vague notion of it, though he will never be able to see
just what it is that makes futile his attempts to seem an Englishman, a
German, or an Italian. Our appearance to other peoples is like one’s own
voice, which one never hears quite as others hear it, and which sounds
strange when it comes back from the phonograph.
The control of those larger movements of thought and sentiment that make
a historical epoch is still less conscious, more inevitable. Only the
imaginative student, in his best hours, can really free himself—and that
only in some respects—from the limitations of his time and see things
from a height. For the most part the people of other epochs seem
strange, outlandish, or a little insane. We can scarcely rid ourselves
of the impression that the way of life we are used to is the normal, and
that other ways are eccentric. Dr. Sidis holds that the people of the
Middle Ages were in a quasi-hypnotic state, and instances the crusades,
dancing manias, and the like.[7] But the question is, would not our own
time, viewed from an equal distance, appear to present the signs of
abnormal suggestibility? Will not the intense preoccupation with
material production, the hurry and strain of our cities, the draining of
life into one channel, at the expense of breadth, richness, and beauty,
appear as mad as the crusades, and perhaps of a lower type of madness?
Could anything be more indicative of a slight but general insanity than
the aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago?
An illustration of this unconsciousness of what is distinctive in our
time is the fact that those who participate in momentous changes have
seldom any but the vaguest notion of their significance. There is
perhaps no time in the history of art that seems to us now so splendid,
so dramatic, as that of the sudden rise of Gothic architecture in
northern France, and the erection of the church of St. Denis at Paris
was its culmination: yet Professor C. E. Norton, speaking of the Abbot
Suger, who erected it, and of his memoirs, says, “Under his watchful and
intelligent oversight the church became the most splendid and the most
interesting building of the century; but of the features that gave it
special interest, that make it one of the most important monuments of
mediæval architecture, neither Suger, in his account of it, nor his
biographer, nor any contemporary writer, says a single word.”[8] To
Suger and his time the Gothic, it would seem, was simply a new and
improved way of building a church, a technical matter with which he had
little concern, except to see that it was duly carried out according to
specifications. It was developed by draughtsmen and handicraftsmen,
mostly nameless, who felt their own thrill of constructive delight as
they worked, but had no thought of historical glory. It is no doubt the
same in our own time, and Mr. Bryce has noted with astonishment the
unconsciousness or indifference of those who founded cities in western
America, to the fact that they were doing something that would be
memorable and influential for ages.[9]
I have already said, or implied, that the activity of the will reflects
the state of the social order. A constant and strenuous exercise of
volition implies complexity in the surrounding life from which
suggestions come, while in a simple society choice is limited in scope
and life is comparatively mechanical. It is the variety of social
intercourse or, what comes to the same thing, the character of social
organization, that determines the field of choice; and accordingly there
is a tendency for the scope of the will to increase with that widening
and intensification of life that is so conspicuous a feature of recent
history. This change is bound up with the extension and diffusion of
communication, opening up innumerable channels by which competing
suggestions may enter the mind. We are still dependent upon
environment—life is always a give and take with surrounding
conditions—but environment is becoming very wide, and in the case of
imaginative persons may extend itself to almost any ideas that the past
or present life of the race has brought into being. This brings
opportunity for congenial choice and characteristic personal growth, and
at the same time a good deal of distraction and strain. There is more
and more need of stability, and of a vigorous rejection of excessive
material, if one would escape mental exhaustion and degeneracy. Choice
is like a river; it broadens as it comes down through history—though
there are always banks—and the wider it becomes the more persons drown
in it. Stronger and stronger swimming is required, and types of
character that lack vigor and self-reliance are more and more likely to
go under.
The aptitude to yield to impulse in a mechanical or reflex way is called
suggestibility. As might be expected, it is subject to great variations
in different persons, and in the same person under different conditions.
Abnormal suggestibility has received much study, and there is a great
body of valuable literature relating to it. I wish in this connection
only to recall a few well-known principles which the student of normal
social life needs to have in mind.
As would naturally follow from our analysis of the relation between
suggestion and choice, suggestibility is simply the absence of the
controlling and organizing action of the reflective will. This function
not being properly performed, thought and action are disintegrated and
fly off on tangents; the captain being disabled the crew breaks up into
factions, and discipline goes to pieces. Accordingly, whatever weakens
the reason, and thus destroys the breadth and symmetry of consciousness,
produces some form of suggestibility. To be excited is to be
suggestible, that is to become liable to yield impulsively to an idea in
harmony with the exciting emotion. An angry man is suggestible as
regards denunciation, threats, and the like, a jealous one as regards
suspicions, and similarly with any passion.
The suggestibility of crowds is a peculiar form of that limitation of
choice by the environment already discussed. We have here a very
transient environment which owes its power over choice to the vague but
potent emotion so easily generated in dense aggregates. The thick
humanity is in itself exciting, and the will is further stupefied by the
sense of insignificance, by the strangeness of the situation, and by the
absence, as a rule, of any separate purpose to maintain an independent
momentum. A man is like a ship in that he cannot guide his course unless
he has way on. If he drifts he will shift about with any light air; and
the man in the crowd is usually drifting, is not pursuing any settled
line of action in which he is sustained by knowledge and habit. This
state of mind, added to intense emotion directed by some series of
special suggestions, is the source of the wild and often destructive
behavior of crowds and mobs, as well as of a great deal of heroic
enthusiasm. An orator, for instance, first unifying and heightening the
emotional state of his audience by some humorous or pathetic incident,
will be able, if tolerably skilful, to do pretty much as he pleases with
them, so long as he does not go against their settled habits of thought.
Anger, always a ready passion, is easily aroused, appeals to resentment
being the staples of much popular oratory, and under certain conditions
readily expresses itself in stoning, burning, and lynching. And so with
fear: General Grant in describing the battle of Shiloh gives a picture
of several thousand men on a hill-side in the rear, incapable of moving,
though threatened to be shot for cowardice where they lay. Yet these
very men, calmed and restored to their places, were among those who
heroically fought and won the next day’s battle. They had been restored
to the domination of another class of suggestions, namely those implied
in military discipline.[10]
Suggestibility from exhaustion or strain is a rather common condition
with many of us. Probably all eager brain workers find themselves now
and then in a state where they are “too tired to stop.” The overwrought
mind loses the healthy power of casting off its burden, and seems
capable of nothing but going on and on in the same painful and futile
course. One may know that he is accomplishing nothing, that work done in
such a state of mind is always bad work, and that “that way madness
lies,” but yet be too weak to resist, chained to the wheel of his
thought so that he must wait till it runs down. And such a state,
however induced, is the opportunity for all sorts of undisciplined
impulses, perhaps some gross passion, like anger, dread, the need of
drink, or the like.
According to Mr. Tylor,[11] fasting, solitude, and physical exhaustion
by dancing, shouting, or flagellation are very generally employed by
savage peoples to bring on abnormal states of mind of which
suggestibility—the sleep of choice, and control by some idea from the
subconscious life—is always a trait. The visions and ecstasies following
the fastings, watchings, and flagellations of Christian devotees of an
earlier time seem to belong, psychologically, in much the same category.
It is well known that suggestibility is limited by habit, or, more
accurately stated, that habit is itself a perennial source of
suggestions that set bounds and conditions upon the power of fresh
suggestions. A total abstainer will resist the suggestion to drink, a
modest person will refuse to do anything indecent, and so on. People are
least liable to yield to irrational suggestions, to be stampeded with
the crowd, in matters with which they are familiar, so that they have
habits regarding them. The soldier, in his place in the ranks and with
his captain in sight, will march forward to certain death, very likely
without any acute emotion whatever, simply because he has the habits
that constitute discipline; and so with firemen, policemen, sailors,
brakemen, physicians, and many others who learn to deal with life and
death as calmly as they read a newspaper. It is all in the day’s work.
As regards the greater or less suggestibility of different persons there
is, of course, no distinct line between the normal and the abnormal; it
is simply a matter of the greater or less efficiency of the higher
mental organization. Most people, perhaps, are so far suggestible that
they make no energetic and persistent attempt to interpret in any broad
way the elements of life accessible to them, but receive the stamp of
some rather narrow and simple class of suggestions to which their
allegiance is yielded. There are innumerable people of much energy but
sluggish intellect, who will go ahead—as all who have energy must do—but
what direction they take is a matter of the opportune suggestion. The
humbler walks of religion and philanthropy, for instance, the Salvation
Army, the village prayer-meeting, and the city mission, are full of
such. They do not reason on general topics, but believe and labor. The
intellectual travail of the time does not directly touch them. At some
epoch in the past, perhaps in some hour of emotional exaltation,
something was printed on their minds to remain there till death, and be
read and followed daily. To the philosopher such people are fanatics;
but their function is as important as his. They are repositories of
moral energy—which he is very likely to lack—they are the people who
brought in Christianity and have kept it going ever since. And this is
only one of many comparatively automatic types of mankind. Rationality,
in the sense of a patient and open-minded attempt to think out the
general problems of life, is, and perhaps always must be, confined to a
small minority even of the most intelligent populations.
CHAPTER III
SOCIABILITY AND PERSONAL IDEAS
THE SOCIABILITY OF CHILDREN—IMAGINARY CONVERSATION AND ITS
SIGNIFICANCE—THE NATURE OF THE IMPULSE TO COMMUNICATE—THERE IS NO
SEPARATION BETWEEN REAL AND IMAGINARY PERSONS—NOR BETWEEN THOUGHT
AND INTERCOURSE—THE STUDY AND INTERPRETATION OF EXPRESSION BY
CHILDREN—THE SYMBOL OR SENSUOUS NUCLEUS OF PERSONAL IDEAS—PERSONAL
PHYSIOGNOMY IN ART AND LITERATURE—IN THE IDEA OF SOCIAL
GROUPS—SENTIMENT IN PERSONAL IDEAS—THE PERSONAL IDEA IS THE
IMMEDIATE SOCIAL REALITY—SOCIETY MUST BE STUDIED IN THE
IMAGINATION—THE POSSIBLE REALITY OF INCORPOREAL PERSONS—THE MATERIAL
NOTION OF PERSONALITY CONTRASTED WITH THE NOTION BASED ON A STUDY OF
PERSONAL IDEAS—SELF AND OTHER IN PERSONAL IDEAS—PERSONAL
OPPOSITION—FURTHER ILLUSTRATION AND DEFENCE OF THE VIEW OF PERSONS
AND SOCIETY HERE SET FORTH.
To any but a mother a new-born child hardly seems human. It appears
rather to be a strange little animal, wonderful indeed, exquisitely
finished even to the finger-nails; mysterious, awakening a fresh sense
of our ignorance of the nearest things of life, but not friendly, not
lovable. It is only after some days that a kindly nature begins to
express itself and to grow into something that can be sympathized with
and personally cared for. The earliest signs of it are chiefly certain
smiles and babbling sounds, which are a matter of fascinating
observation to anyone interested in the genesis of social feeling.
Spasmodic smiles or grimaces occur even during the first week of life,
and at first seem to mean nothing in particular. I have watched the face
of an infant a week old while a variety of expressions, smiles, frowns,
and so on, passed over it in rapid succession: it was as if the child
were rehearsing a repertory of emotional expression belonging to it by
instinct. So soon as they can be connected with anything definite these
rudimentary smiles appear to be a sign of satisfaction. Mrs. Moore says
that her child smiled on the sixth day “when comfortable,”[12] and that
this “never occurred when the child was known to be in pain.” Preyer
notes a smile on the face of a sleeping child, after nursing, on the
tenth day.[13] They soon begin to connect themselves quite definitely
with sensible objects, such as bright color, voices, movements, and
fondling. At the same time the smile gradually develops from a grimace
into a subtler, more human expression, and Dr. Perez, who seems to have
studied a large number of children, says that all whom he observed
smiled, when pleased, by the time they were two months old.[14] When a
child is, say, five months old, no doubt can remain, in most cases, that
the smile has become an expression of pleasure in the movements, sounds,
touches, and general appearance of other people. It would seem, however,
that personal feeling is not at first clearly differentiated from
pleasures of sight, sound, and touch of other origin, or from animal
satisfactions having no obvious cause. Both of my children expended much
of their early sociability on inanimate objects, such as a red Japanese
screen, a swinging lamp, a bright door-knob, an orange, and the like,
babbling and smiling at them for many minutes at a time; and M., when
about three months old and later, would often lie awake laughing and
chattering in the dead of night. The general impression left upon one is
that the early manifestations of sociability indicate less
fellow-feeling than the adult imagination likes to impute, but are
expressions of a pleasure which persons excite chiefly because they
offer such a variety of stimuli to sight, hearing, and touch; or, to put
it otherwise, kindliness, while existing almost from the first, is vague
and undiscriminating, has not yet become fixed upon its proper objects,
but flows out upon all the pleasantness the child finds about him, like
that of St. Francis, when, in his “Canticle of the Sun,” he addresses
the sun and the moon, stars, winds, clouds, fire, earth, and water, as
brothers and sisters. Indeed, there is nothing about personal feeling
which sharply marks it off from other feeling; here as elsewhere we find
no fences, but gradual transition, progressive differentiation.
I do not think that early smiles are imitative. I observed both my
children carefully to discover whether they smiled in response to a
smile, and obtained negative results when they were under ten months
old. A baby does not smile by imitation, but because he is pleased; and
what pleases him in the first year of life is usually some rather
obvious stimulus to the senses. If you wish a smile you must earn it by
acceptable exertion; it does no good to smirk. The belief that many
people seem to have that infants respond to smiling is possibly due to
the fact that when a grown-up person appears, both he and the infant are
likely to smile, each at the other; but although the smiles are
simultaneous one need not be the cause of the other, and many
observations lead me to think that it makes no difference to the infant
whether the grown-up person smiles or not. He has not yet learned to
appreciate this rather subtle phenomenon.
At this and at all later ages the delight in companionship so evident in
children may be ascribed partly to specific social emotion or sentiment,
and partly to a need of stimulating suggestions to enable them to
gratify their instinct for various sorts of mental and physical
activity. The influence of the latter appears in their marked preference
for active persons, for grown-up people who will play with them—provided
they do so with tact—and especially for other children. It is the same
throughout life; alone one is like fireworks without a match: he cannot
set himself off, but is a victim of _ennui_, the prisoner of some
tiresome train of thought that holds his mind simply by the absence of a
competitor. A good companion brings release and fresh activity, the
primal delight in a fuller existence. So with the child: what excitement
when visiting children come! He shouts, laughs, jumps about, produces
his playthings and all his accomplishments. He needs to express himself,
and a companion enables him to do so. The shout of another boy in the
distance gives him the joy of shouting in response.
But the need is for something more than muscular or sensory activities.
There is also a need of feeling, an overflowing of personal emotion and
sentiment, set free by the act of communication. By the time a child is
a year old the social feeling that at first is indistinguishable from
sensuous pleasure has become much specialized upon persons, and from
that time onward to call it forth by reciprocation is a chief aim of his
life. Perhaps it will not be out of place to emphasize this by
transcribing two or three notes taken from life.
“M. will now [eleven months old] hold up something she has found, _e.
g._, the petal of a flower, or a little stick, demanding your
attention to it by grunts and squeals. When you look and make some
motion or exclamation she smiles.”
“R. [four years old] talks all day long, to real companions, if they
will listen, if not to imaginary ones. As I sit on the steps this
morning he seems to wish me to share his every thought and sensation.
He describes everything he does, although I can see it, saying, ‘Now
I’m digging up little stones,’ etc. I must look at the butterfly, feel
of the fuzz on the clover stems, and try to squawk on the dandelion
stems. Meanwhile he is reminded of what happened some other time, and
he gives me various anecdotes of what he and other people did and
said. He thinks aloud. If I seem not to listen he presently notices it
and will come up and touch me, or bend over and look up into my face.”
“R. [about the same time] is hilariously delighted and excited when he
can get anyone to laugh or wonder with him at his pictures, etc. He
himself always shares by anticipation, and exaggerates the feeling he
expects to produce. When B. was calling, R., with his usual desire to
entertain guests, brought out his pull-book, in which pulling a strip
of pasteboard transforms the picture. When he prepared to work this he
was actually shaking with eagerness—apparently in anticipation of the
coming surprise.”
“I watch E. and R. [four and a half years old] playing McGinty on the
couch and guessing what card will turn up. R. is in a state of intense
excitement which breaks out in boisterous laughter and all sorts of
movements of the head and limbs. He is full of an emotion which has
very little to do with mere curiosity or surprise relating to the
card.”
I take it that the child has by heredity a generous capacity and need
for social feeling, rather too vague and plastic to be given any
specific name like love. It is not so much any particular personal
emotion or sentiment as the undifferentiated material of many: perhaps
sociability is as good a word for it as any.
And this material, like all other instinct, allies itself with social
experience to form, as time goes on, a growing and diversifying body of
personal thought, in which the phases of social feeling developed
correspond, in some measure, to the complexity of life itself. It is a
process of organization, involving progressive differentiation and
integration, such as we see everywhere in nature.
In children and in simple-minded adults, kindly feeling may be very
strong and yet very naïve, involving little insight into the emotional
states of others. A child who is extremely sociable, bubbling over with
joy in companionship, may yet show a total incomprehension of pain and a
scant regard for disapproval and punishment that does not take the form
of a cessation of intercourse. In other words, there is a sociability
that asks little from others except bodily presence and an occasional
sign of attention, and often learns to supply even these by imagination.
It seems nearly or quite independent of that power of interpretation
which is the starting-point of true sympathy. While both of my children
were extremely sociable, R. was not at all sympathetic in the sense of
having quick insight into others’ states of feeling.
Sociability in this simple form is an innocent, unself-conscious joy,
primary and unmoral, like all simple emotion. It may shine with full
brightness from the faces of idiots and imbeciles, where it sometimes
alternates with fear, rage, or lust. A visitor to an institution where
large numbers of these classes are collected will be impressed, as I
have been, with the fact that they are as a rule amply endowed with
those kindly impulses which some appear to look upon as almost the sole
requisite for human welfare. It is a singular and moving fact that there
is a class of cases, mostly women, I think, in whom kindly emotion is so
excitable as to be a frequent source of hysterical spasms, so that it
has to be discouraged by frowns and apparent harshness on the part of
those in charge. The chief difference between normal people and
imbeciles in this regard is that, while the former have more or less of
this simple kindliness in them, social emotion is also elaborately
compounded and worked up by the mind into an indefinite number of
complex passions and sentiments, corresponding to the relations and
functions of an intricate life.
When left to themselves children continue the joys of sociability by
means of an imaginary playmate. Although all must have noticed this who
have observed children at all, only close and constant observation will
enable one to realize the extent to which it is carried on. It is not an
occasional practice, but, rather, a necessary form of thought, flowing
from a life in which personal communication is the chief interest and
social feeling the stream in which, like boats on a river, most other
feelings float. Some children appear to live in personal imaginations
almost from the first month; others occupy their minds in early infancy
mostly with solitary experiments upon blocks, cards, and other
impersonal objects, and their thoughts are doubtless filled with the
images of these. But, in either case, after a child learns to talk and
the social world in all its wonder and provocation opens on his mind, it
floods his imagination so that all his thoughts are conversations. He is
never alone. Sometimes the inaudible interlocutor is recognizable as the
image of a tangible playmate, sometimes he appears to be purely
imaginary. Of course each child has his own peculiarities. R., beginning
when about three years of age, almost invariably talked aloud while he
was playing alone—which, as he was a first child, was very often the
case. Most commonly he would use no form of address but “you,” and
perhaps had no definite person in mind. To listen to him was like
hearing one at the telephone; though occasionally he would give both
sides of the conversation. At times again he would be calling upon some
real name, Esyllt or Dorothy, or upon “Piggy,” a fanciful person of his
own invention. Every thought seemed to be spoken out. If his mother
called him he would say, “I’ve got to go in now.” Once when he slipped
down on the floor he was heard to say, “Did you tumble down? No. _I_
did.”
The main point to note here is that these conversations are not
occasional and temporary effusions of the imagination, but are the naïve
expression of a socialization of the mind that is to be permanent and to
underly all later thinking. The imaginary dialogue passes beyond the
thinking aloud of little children into something more elaborate,
reticent, and sophisticated; but it never ceases. Grown people, like
children, are usually unconscious of these dialogues; as we get older we
cease, for the most part, to carry them on out loud, and some of us
practise a good deal of apparently solitary meditation and experiment.
But, speaking broadly, it is true of adults as of children, that the
mind lives in perpetual conversation. It is one of those things that we
seldom notice just because they are so familiar and involuntary; but we
can perceive it if we try to. If one suddenly stops and takes note of
his thoughts at some time when his mind has been running free, as when
he is busy with some simple mechanical work, he will be likely to find
them taking the form of vague conversations. This is particularly true
when one is somewhat excited with reference to a social situation. If he
feels under accusation or suspicion in any way he will probably find
himself making a defence, or perhaps a confession, to an imaginary
hearer. A guilty man confesses “to get the load off his mind;” that is
to say, the excitement of his thought cannot stop there but extends to
the connected impulses of expression and creates an intense need to tell
somebody. Impulsive people often talk out loud when excited, either “to
themselves,” as we say when we can see no one else present, or to anyone
whom they can get to listen. Dreams also consist very largely of
imaginary conversations; and, with some people at least, the mind runs
in dialogue during the half-waking state before going to sleep. There
are many other familiar facts that bear the same interpretation—such,
for instance, as that it is much easier for most people to compose in
the form of letters or dialogue than in any other; so that literature of
this kind has been common in all ages.
Goethe, in giving an account of how he came to write “Werther” as a
series of letters, discusses the matter with his usual perspicuity, and
lets us see how habitually conversational was his way of thinking.
Speaking of himself in the third person, he says: “Accustomed to pass
his time most pleasantly in society, he changed even solitary thought
into social converse, and this in the following manner: He had the
habit, when he was alone, of calling before his mind any person of his
acquaintance. This person he entreated to sit down, walked up and down
by him, remained standing before him, and discoursed with him on the
subject he had in mind. To this the person answered as occasion
required, or by the ordinary gestures signified his assent or dissent—in
which every man has something peculiar to himself. The speaker then
continued to carry out further that which seemed to please the guest, or
to condition and define more closely that of which he disapproved; and
finally was polite enough to give up his own notion.... How nearly such
a dialogue is akin to a written correspondence is clear enough; only in
the latter one sees returned the confidence one has bestowed, while in
the former one creates for himself a confidence which is new,
everchanging and unreturned.”[15] “Accustomed to pass his time most
pleasantly in society, he changed even solitary thought into social
converse,” is not only a particular but a general truth, more or less
applicable to all thought. The fact is that language, developed by the
race through personal intercourse and imparted to the individual in the
same way, can never be dissociated from personal intercourse in the
mind; and since higher thought involves language, it is always a kind of
imaginary conversation. The word and the interlocutor are correlative
ideas.
The impulse to communicate is not so much a result of thought as it is
an inseparable part of it. They are like root and branch, two phases of
a common growth, so that the death of one presently involves that of the
other. Psychologists now teach that every thought involves an active
impulse as part of its very nature; and this impulse, with reference to
the more complex and socially developed forms of thought, takes the
shape of a need to talk, to write, and so on; and if none of these is
practicable, it expends itself in a wholly imaginary communication.
Montaigne, who understood human nature as well, perhaps, as anyone who
ever lived, remarks: “There is no pleasure to me without communication:
there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it
does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to
tell it to.”[16] And it was doubtless because he had many such thoughts
which no one was at hand to appreciate, that he took to writing essays.
The uncomprehended of all times and peoples have kept diaries for the
same reason. So, in general, a true creative impulse in literature or
art is, in one aspect, an expression of this simple, childlike need to
think aloud or _to_ somebody; to define and vivify thought by imparting
it to an imaginary companion; by developing that communicative element
which belongs to its very nature, and without which it cannot live and
grow. Many authors have confessed that they always think of some person
when they write, and I am inclined to believe that this is always more
or less definitely the case, though the writer himself may not be aware
of it. Emerson somewhere says that “the man is but half himself; the
other half is his expression,” and this is literally true. The man comes
to be through some sort of expression, and has no higher existence apart
from it; overt or imaginary it takes place all the time.
Men apparently solitary, like Thoreau, are often the best illustrations
of the inseparability of thought and life from communication. No
sympathetic reader of his works, I should say, can fail to see that he
took to the woods and fields not because he lacked sociability, but
precisely because his sensibilities were so keen that he needed to rest
and protect them by a peculiar mode of life, and to express them by the
indirect and considerate method of literature. No man ever labored more
passionately to communicate, to give and receive adequate expression,
than he did. This may be read between the lines in all his works, and is
recorded in his diary. “I would fain communicate the wealth of my life
to men, would really give them what is most precious in my gift. I would
secrete pearls with the shell-fish and lay up honey with the bees for
them. I will sift the sunbeams for the public good. I know no riches I
would keep back. I have no private good unless it be my peculiar ability
to serve the public. This is the only individual property. Each one may
thus be innocently rich. I enclose and foster the pearl till it is
grown. I wish to communicate those parts of my life which I would gladly
live again.”[17] This shows, I think, a just notion of the relation
between the individual and society, privacy and publicity. There is, in
fact, a great deal of sound sociology in Thoreau.
Since, therefore, the need to impart is of this primary and essential
character, we ought not to look upon it as something separable from and
additional to the need to think or to be; it is only by imparting that
one is enabled to think or to be. Everyone, in proportion to his natural
vigor, necessarily strives to communicate to others that part of his
life which he is trying to unfold in himself. It is a matter of
self-preservation, because without expression thought cannot live.
Imaginary conversation—that is, conversation carried on without the
stimulus of a visible and audible response—may satisfy the needs of the
mind for a long time. There is, indeed, an advantage to a vigorously
constructive and yet impressible imagination in restricting
communication; because in this way ideas are enabled to have a clearer
and more independent development than they could have if continually
disturbed by criticism or opposition. Thus artists, men of letters, and
productive minds of all sorts often find it better to keep their
productions to themselves until they are fully matured. But, after all,
the response must come sooner or later or thought itself will perish.
The imagination, in time, loses the power to create an interlocutor who
is not corroborated by any fresh experience. If the artist finds no
appreciator for his book or picture he will scarcely be able to produce
another.
People differ much in the vividness of their imaginative sociability.
The more simple, concrete, dramatic, their habit of mind is, the more
their thinking is carried on in terms of actual conversation with a
visible and audible interlocutor. Women, as a rule, probably do this
more vividly than men, the unlettered more vividly than those trained to
abstract thought, and the sort of people we call emotional more vividly
than the impassive. Moreover, the interlocutor is a very mutable person,
and is likely to resemble the last strong character we have been in
contact with. I have noticed, for instance, that when I take up a book
after a person of decided and interesting character has been talking
with me I am likely to hear the words of the book in his voice. The same
is true of opinions, moral standards, and the like, as well as of
physical traits. In short, the interlocutor, who is half of all thought
and life, is drawn from the accessible environment.
It is worth noting here that there is no separation between real and
imaginary persons; indeed, to be imagined is to become real, in a social
sense, as I shall presently point out. An invisible person may easily be
more real to an imaginative mind than a visible one; sensible presence
is not necessarily a matter of the first importance. A person can be
real to us only in the degree in which we imagine an inner life which
exists in us, for the time being, and which we refer to him. The
sensible presence is important chiefly in stimulating us to do this. All
real persons are imaginary in this sense. If, however, we use imaginary
in the sense of illusory, an imagination not corresponding to fact, it
is easy to see that visible presence is no bar to illusion. Thus I meet
a stranger on the steamboat who corners me and tells me his private
history. I care nothing for it, and he half knows that I do not; he uses
me only as a lay figure to sustain the agreeable illusion of sympathy,
and is talking to an imaginary companion quite as he might if I were
elsewhere. So likewise good manners are largely a tribute to imaginary
companionship, a make believe of sympathy which it is agreeable to
accept as real, though we may know, when we think, that it is not. To
conceive a kindly and approving companion is something that one
involuntarily tries to do, in accordance with that instinctive
hedonizing inseparable from all wholesome mental processes, and to
assist in this by at least a seeming of friendly appreciation is
properly regarded as a part of good breeding. To be always sincere would
be brutally to destroy this pleasant and mostly harmless figment of the
imagination.
Thus the imaginary companionship which a child of three or four years so
naïvely creates and expresses, is something elementary and almost
omnipresent in the thought of a normal person. In fact, thought and
personal intercourse may be regarded as merely aspects of the same
thing: we call it personal intercourse when the suggestions that keep it
going are received through faces or other symbols present to the senses;
reflection when the personal suggestions come through memory and are
more elaborately worked over in thought. But both are mental, both are
personal. Personal images, as they are connected with nearly all our
higher thought in its inception, remain inseparable from it in memory.
The mind is not a hermit’s cell, but a place of hospitality and
intercourse. We have no higher life that is really apart from other
people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be
without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot; and in
the measure that a mind is lacking in this power it is degenerate. Apart
from this mental society there is no wisdom, no power, justice, or
right, no higher existence at all. The life of the mind is essentially a
life of intercourse.
Let us now consider somewhat more carefully the way in which ideas of
people grow up in the mind, and try to make out, as nearly as we can,
their real nature and significance.
The studies through which the child learns, in time, to interpret
personal expression are very early begun. On her twelfth day M. was
observed to get her eyes upon her mother’s face; and after gazing for
some time at it she seemed attracted to the eyes, into which she looked
quite steadily. From the end of the first month this face study was very
frequent and long-continued. Doubtless anyone who notices infants could
multiply indefinitely observations like the following:
“M., in her eighth week, lies in her mother’s lap gazing up at her
face with a frown of fixed and anxious attention. Evidently the play
of the eyes and lips, the flashing of the teeth, and the wrinkles of
expression are the object of her earnest study. So also the coaxing
noises which are made to please her.”
“She now [four months and twenty-one days old] seems to fix her
attention almost entirely upon the eyes, and will stare at them for a
minute or more with the most intent expression.”
The eye seems to receive most notice. As Perez says: “The eye is one of
the most interesting and attractive of objects; the vivacity of the
pupil set in its oval background of white, its sparkles, its darts of
light, its tender looks, its liquid depths, attract and fascinate a
young child....”[18] The mouth also gets much attention, especially when
in movement; I have sometimes noticed a child who is looking into the
eyes turn from them to the mouth when the person commences to talk: the
flashing of the teeth then adds to its interest. The voice is also the
object of close observation. The intentness with which a child listens
to it, the quickness with which he learns to distinguish different
voices and different inflections of the same voice, and the fact that
vocal imitation precedes other sorts, all show this. It cannot fail to
strike the observer that observation of these traits is not merely
casual, but a strenuous study, often accompanied by a frown of earnest
attention. The mind is evidently aroused, something important is going
on, something conscious, voluntary, eager. It would seem likely that
this something is the storing up, arrangement, and interpretation of
those images of expression which remain throughout life the
starting-point of personal imaginations.
The wrinkles about the eyes and mouth, which are perhaps the most
expressive parts of the countenance, would not be so noticeable at first
as the eyes, the lips, and the teeth, but they are always in the field
of vision, and in time their special significance as a seat of
expression comes to be noticed and studied. M. appeared to understand a
smile sufficiently to be pleased by it about the end of the tenth month.
The first unequivocal case of smiling in response to a smile was noticed
on the twenty-sixth day of this month. Even at this age smiling is not
imitative in the sense of being a voluntary repetition of the other’s
action, but appears to be merely an involuntary expression of pleasure.
Facial expression is one of the later things to be imitated, for the
reason, apparently, that the little child cannot be aware of the
expression of his own countenance as he can hear his own voice or see
his own hands; and therefore does not so soon learn to control it and to
make it a means of voluntary imitation. He learns this only when he
comes to study his features in the looking-glass. This children do as
early as the second year, when they may be observed experimenting before
the mirror with all sorts of gestures and grimaces.
The interpretation of a smile, or of any sort of facial expression, is
apparently learned much as other things are. By constant study of the
face from the first month the child comes, in time, to associate the
wrinkles that form a smile with pleasant experiences—fondling, coaxing,
offering of playthings or of the bottle, and so on. Thus the smile comes
to be recognized as a harbinger of pleasure, and so is greeted with a
smile. Its absence, on the other hand, is associated with inattention
and indifference. Toward the end of the fifth month M., on one occasion,
seemed to notice the change from a smile to a frown, and stopped smiling
herself. However, a number of observations taken in the tenth month show
that even then it was doubtful whether she could be made to smile merely
by seeing someone else do it; and, as I say, the first unequivocal case
was noticed toward the end of this month.
Such evidence as we have from the direct observation of children does
not seem to me to substantiate the opinion that we have a definite
instinctive sensibility to facial expression. Whatever hereditary
element there is I imagine to be very vague, and incapable of producing
definite phenomena without the aid of experience. I experimented upon my
own and some other children with frowns, attempts at ferocity, and
pictures of faces, as well as with smiles—in order to elicit instinctive
apprehension of expression, but during the first year these phenomena
seemed to produce no definite effect. At about fifteen months M.
appeared to be dismayed by a savage expression assumed while playing
with her, and at about the same period became very sensitive to frowns.
The impression left upon me was that after a child learns to expect a
smiling face as the concomitant of kindness, he is puzzled, troubled, or
startled when it is taken away, and moreover learns by experience that
frowns and gravity mean disapproval and opposition. I imagine that
children fail to understand any facial expression that is quite new to
them. An unfamiliar look, an expression of ferocity for example, may
excite vague alarm simply because it is strange; or, as is very likely
with children used to kind treatment, this or any other contortion of
the face may be welcomed with a laugh on the assumption that it is some
new kind of play. I feel sure that observation will dissipate the notion
of any _definite_ instinctive capacity to interpret the countenance.
I might also mention, as having some bearing upon this question of
definite hereditary ideas, that my children did not show that
instinctive fear of animals that some believe to be implanted in us. R.,
the elder, until about three years of age, delighted in animals, and
when taken to the menagerie regarded the lions and tigers with the
calmest interest; but later, apparently as a result of rude treatment by
a puppy, became exceedingly timid. M. has never, so far as I know, shown
any fear of any animal.
As regards sounds, there is no doubt of a vague instinctive
susceptibility, at least to what is harsh—sharp, or plaintive. Children
less than a month old will show pain at such sounds. A harsh cry, or a
sharp sound like that of a tin horn, will sometimes make them draw down
the mouth and cry even during the first week.
Darwin records that in one of his children sympathy “was clearly shown
at six months and eleven days by his melancholy face, with the corners
of his mouth well depressed, when his nurse pretended to cry.”[19] Such
manifestations are probably caused rather by the plaintive voice than by
facial expression; at any rate, I have never been able to produce them
by the latter alone.
Some believe that young children have an intuition of personal character
quicker and more trustworthy than that of grown people. If this were so
it would be a strong argument in favor of the existence of a congenital
instinct which does not need experience and is impaired by it. My own
belief is that close observation of children under two years of age will
lead to the conclusion that personal impressions are developed by
experience. Yet it is possibly true that children three years old or
more are sometimes quicker and more acute judges of some traits, such as
sincerity and good will, than grown people. In so far as it is a fact it
may perhaps be explained in this way. The faces that children see and
study are mostly full of the expression of love and truth. Nothing like
it occurs in later life, even to the most fortunate. These images, we
may believe, give rise in the child’s mind to a more or less definite
ideal of what a true and kindly face should be, and this ideal he uses
with great effect in detecting what falls short of it. He sees that
there is something wrong with the false smile; it does not fit the image
in his mind; some lines are not there, others are exaggerated. He does
not understand what coldness and insincerity are, but their expression
puzzles and alarms him, merely because it is not what he is used to. The
adult loses this clear, simple ideal of love and truth, and the sharp
judgment that flows from it. His perception becomes somewhat vulgarized
by a flood of miscellaneous experience, and he sacrifices childish
spontaneity to wider range and more complex insight, valuing and
studying many traits of which the child knows nothing. It will not be
seriously maintained that, on the whole, we know people better when we
are children than we do later.
I put forward these scanty observations for what little they may be
worth, and not as disproving the existence of special instincts in which
Darwin and other great observers have believed. I do not maintain that
there is no hereditary aptitude to interpret facial expression—there
must be some sort of an instinctive basis to start from—but I think that
it develops gradually and in indistinguishable conjunction with
knowledge gained by experience.
Apparently, then, voice, facial expression, gesture, and the like, which
later become the vehicle of personal impressions and the sensible basis
of sympathy, are attractive at first chiefly for their sensuous variety
and vividness, very much as other bright, moving, sounding things are
attractive; and the interpretation of them comes gradually by the
interworking of instinct and observation. This interpretation is nothing
other than the growth, in connection with these sensuous experiences, of
a system of ideas that we associate with them. The interpretation of an
angry look, for instance, consists in the expectation of angry words and
acts, in feelings of resentment or fear, and so on; in short, it is our
whole mental reaction to this sign. It may consist in part of
sympathetic states of mind, that is in states of mind that we suppose
the other to experience also; but it is not confined to such. These
ideas that enrich the meaning of the symbol—the resentment or fear, for
instance—have all, no doubt, their roots in instinct; we are born with
the crude raw material of such feelings. And it is precisely in the act
of communication, in social contact of some sort, that this material
grows, that it gets the impulses that give it further definition,
refinement, organization. It is by intercourse with others that we
expand our inner experience. In other words, and this is the point of
the matter, the personal idea consists at first and in all later
development, of a sensuous element or symbol with which is connected a
more or less complex body of thought and sentiment; the whole social in
genesis, formed by a series of communications.
What do we think of when we think of a person? Is not the nucleus of the
thought an image of the sort just mentioned, some ghost of
characteristic expression? It may be a vague memory of lines around the
mouth and eyes, or of other lines indicating pose, carriage, or gesture;
or it may be an echo of some tone or inflection of the voice. I am
unable, perhaps, to call up any distinct outline of the features of my
best friend, of my own mother, or my child; but I can see a smile, a
turn of the eyelid, a way of standing or sitting, indistinct and
flitting glimpses, but potent to call up those past states of feeling of
which personal memories are chiefly formed. The most real thing in
physical presence is not height, nor breadth, nor the shape of the nose
or forehead, nor that of any other comparatively immobile part of the
body, but it is something in the plastic, expressive features: these are
noticed and remembered because they tell us what we most care to know.
The judgment of personal character seems to take place in much the same
way. We estimate a man, I think, by imagining what he would do in
various situations. Experience supplies us with an almost infinite
variety of images of men in action, that is of impressions of faces,
tones, and the like, accompanied by certain other elements making up a
situation. When we wish to judge a new face, voice, and form, we
unconsciously ask ourselves where they would fit; we try them in various
situations, and if they fit, if we can think of them as doing the things
without incongruity, we conclude that we have that kind of a man to deal
with. If I can imagine a man intimidated, I do not respect him; if I can
imagine him lying, I do not trust him; if I can see him receiving,
comprehending, resisting men and disposing them in accordance with his
own plans, I ascribe executive ability to him; if I can think of him in
his study patiently working out occult problems, I judge him to be a
scholar; and so on. The symbol before us reminds us of some other symbol
resembling it, and this brings with it a whole group of ideas which
constitutes our personal impression of the new man.[20]
The power to make these judgments is intuitive, imaginative, not arrived
at by ratiocination, but it is dependent upon experience. I have no
belief in the theory, which I have seen suggested, that we unconsciously
imitate other people’s expression, and then judge of their character by
noting how we feel when we look like them. The men of uncommon insight
into character are usually somewhat impassive in countenance and not
given to facial imitation. Most of us become to some extent judges of
the character of dogs, so that we can tell by the tone of a dog’s bark
whether he is a biting dog or only a barking dog. Surely imitation can
have nothing to do with this; we do not imitate the dog’s bark to learn
whether he is serious or not; we observe, remember, and imagine; and it
seems to me that we judge people in much the same way.
These visible and audible signs of personality, these lines and tones
whose meaning is impressed upon us by the intense and constant
observation of our childhood, are also a chief basis of the
communication of impressions in art and literature.
This is evidently the case in those arts which imitate the human face
and figure. Painters and illustrators give the most minute study to
facial expression, and suggest various sentiments by bits of light and
shade so subtle that the uninitiated cannot see what or where they are,
although their effect is everything as regards the depiction of
personality. It is the failure to reproduce them that makes the
emptiness of nearly all copies of famous painting or sculpture that
represents the face. Perhaps not one person in a thousand, comparing the
“Mona Lisa” or the “Beatrice Cenci” with one of the mediocre copies
generally standing near them, can point out where the painter of the
latter has gone amiss; yet the difference is like that between life and
a wax image. The chief fame of some painters rests upon their power to
portray and suggest certain rare kinds of feeling. Thus the people of
Fra Angelico express to the eye the higher love, described in words by
St. Paul and Thomas à Kempis. It is a distinctly human and social
sentiment; his persons are nearly always in pairs, and, in his Paradise
for instance, almost every face among the blest is directed in rapture
toward some other face. Other painters, as Botticelli and Perugino—alike
in this respect though not in most—depict a more detached sort of
sentiment; and their people look out of the picture in isolated ecstasy
or meditation.
Sculpture appeals more to reminiscence of attitude, facial expression
being somewhat subordinate, though here also the difference between
originals and copies is largely in the lines of the eyes and mouth, too
delicate to be reproduced by the mechanical instruments which copy
broader outlines quite exactly.
As to literature, it is enough to recall the fact that words allusive to
traits of facial expression, and especially to the eye, are the
immemorial and chosen means of suggesting personality.[21] To poetry,
which seeks the sensuous nucleus of thought, the eye is very generally
the person; as when Shakespeare says:
“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state....”
or Milton:
“Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.”
Poetry, however, usually refrains from minute description of expression,
a thing impossible in words, and strikes for a vivid, if inexact,
impression, by the use of such phrases as “a fiery eye,” “a liquid eye,”
and “The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling.”[22]
We also get from every art a personal impression that does not come from
the imitation of features and tones, nor from a description of these in
words, but is the personality of the author himself, subtly communicated
by something that we interpret as signs of his state of mind. When one
reads Motley’s histories he gets a personal impression not only of the
Prince of Orange or Alexander of Parma, but also of Mr. Motley; and the
same is true or may be true of any work of art, however “objective” it
may be. What we call style, when we say “The style is the man,” is the
equivalent, in the artist’s way of doing things, of those visible and
audible traits of the form and voice by which we judge people who are
bodily present.[23] “Every work of genius,” says John Burroughs, “has
its own physiognomy—sad, cheerful, frowning, yearning, determined,
meditative.” Just as we are glad of the presence of certain forms and
faces, because of the mood they put us in, so we are glad of the
physiognomy of certain writers in their books, quite apart from the
intellectual content of what they say; and this is the subtlest, most
durable, most indispensable charm of all. Every lover of books has
authors whom he reads over and over again, whom he cares for as persons
and not as sources of information, who are more to him, possibly, than
any person he sees. He continually returns to the cherished companion
and feeds eagerly upon his thought. It is because there is something in
the book which he needs, which awakens and directs trains of thought
that lead him where he likes to be led. The thing that does this is
something personal and hard to define; it is in the words and yet not in
any definite information that they convey. It is rather an attitude, a
way of feeling, communicated by a style faithful to the writer’s mind.
Some people find pleasure and profit, for example, in perusing even the
somewhat obscure and little inspired portions of Goethe’s writings, like
the “Campaigns in France”; it would perhaps be impossible to tell why,
further than by saying that they get the feeling of something calm, free
and onward which is Goethe himself, and not to be had elsewhere.
And so anyone who practises literary composition, even of a pedestrian
sort, will find at least one reward for his pains in a growing insight
into the personality of great writers. He will come to feel that such a
word was chosen or such a sentence framed in just that way, under the
influence of such a purpose or sentiment, and by putting these
impressions together, will presently arrive at some personal
acquaintance with any author whose character and aims are at all
congenial with his own.
We feel this more in literature than in any other art, and more in prose
of an intimate sort than in any other kind of literature. The reason
appears to be that writing, particularly writing of a familiar kind,
like letters and autobiographies, is something which we all practise in
one way or another, and which we can, therefore, interpret; while the
methods of other arts are beyond our imaginations. It is easy to share
the spirit of Charles Lamb writing his Letters, or of Montaigne
dictating his Essays, or of Thackeray discoursing in the first person
about his characters; because they merely did what all of us do, only
did it better. On the other hand, Michelangelo, or Wagner, or
Shakespeare—except in his sonnets—remains for most of us personally
remote and inconceivable. But a painter, or a composer, or a sculptor,
or a poet, will always get an impression of personality, of style, from
another artist of the same sort, because his experience enables him to
feel the subtle indications of mood and method. Mr. Frith, the painter,
says in his autobiography that a picture “will betray the real character
of its author; who, in the unconscious development of his peculiarities,
constantly presents to the initiated signs by which an infallible
judgment may be pronounced on the painter’s mind and character.”[24] In
fact, it is true of any earnest career that a man expresses his
character in his work, and that another man of similar aims can read
what he expresses. We see in General Grant’s Memoirs, how an able
commander feels the personality of an opponent in the movements of his
armies, imagines what he will do in various exigencies, and deals with
him accordingly.
These personal impressions of a writer or other artist may or may not be
accompanied by a vague imagination of his visible appearance. Some
persons have so strong a need to think in connection with visual images
that they seem to form no notion of personality without involuntarily
imagining what the person looks like; while others can have a strong
impression of feeling and purpose that seems not to be accompanied by
any visual picture. There can be no doubt, however, that sensible images
of the face, voice, etc., usually go with personal ideas. Our earliest
personal conceptions grow up about such images; and they always remain
for most of us the principal means of getting hold of other people.
Naturally, they have about the same relative place in memory and
imagination as they do in observation. Probably, if we could get to the
bottom of the matter, it would be found that our impression of a writer
is always accompanied by some idea of his sensible appearance, is always
associated with a physiognomy, even when we are not aware of it. Can
anyone, for example, read Macaulay and think of a soft and delicately
inflected voice? I imagine not: these periods must be connected with a
sonorous and somewhat mechanical utterance; the sort of person that
speaks softly and with delicate inflections would have written
otherwise. On the other hand, in reading Robert Louis Stevenson it is
impossible, I should say, not to get the impression of a sensitive and
flexible speech. Such impressions are mostly vague and may be incorrect,
but for sympathetic readers they exist and constitute a real, though
subtle, physiognomy.
Not only the idea of particular persons but that of social groups seems
to have a sensible basis in these ghosts of expression. The sentiment by
which one’s family, club, college, state or country is realized in his
mind is stimulated by vague images, largely personal. Thus the spirit of
a college fraternity seems to come back to me through a memory of the
old rooms and of the faces of friends. The idea of country is a rich and
various one and has connected with it many sensuous symbols—such as
flags, music, and the rhythm of patriotic poetry—that are not directly
personal; but it is chiefly an idea of personal traits that we share and
like, as set over against others that are different and repugnant. We
think of America as the land of freedom, simplicity, cordiality,
equality, and so on, in antithesis to other countries which we suppose
to be otherwise—and we think of these traits by imagining the people
that embody them. For countless school children patriotism begins in
sympathy with our forefathers in resistance to the hateful oppression
and arrogance of the British, and this fact of early training largely
accounts for the perennial popularity of the anti-British side in
international questions. Where the country has a permanent ruler to
typify it his image is doubtless a chief element in the patriotic idea.
On the other hand, the impulse which we feel to personify country, or
anything else that awakens strong emotion in us, shows our imaginations
to be so profoundly personal that deep feeling almost inevitably
connects itself with a personal image. In short, group sentiment, in so
far as it is awakened by definite images, is only a variety of personal
sentiment. A sort of vague agitation, however, is sometimes produced by
mere numbers. Thus public opinion is sometimes thought of as a vast
impersonal force, like a great wind, though ordinarily it is conceived
simply as the opinion of particular persons, whose expressions or tones
are more or less definitely imagined.
In the preceding I have considered the rise of personal ideas chiefly
from the point of view of the visual or auditory element in them—the
personal symbol or vehicle of communication; but of course there is a
parallel growth in feeling. An infant’s states of feeling may be
supposed to be nearly as crude as his ideas of the appearance of things;
and the process that gives form, variety, and coherence to the latter
does the same for the former. It is precisely the act of intercourse,
the stimulation of the mind by a personal symbol, which gives a
formative impulse to the vague mass of hereditary feeling-tendency, and
this impulse, in turn, results in a larger power of interpreting the
symbol. It is not to be supposed, for instance, that such feelings as
generosity, respect, mortification, emulation, the sense of honor, and
the like, are an original endowment of the mind. Like all the finer and
larger mental life these arise in conjunction with communication and
could not exist without it. It is these finer modes of feeling, these
intricate branchings or differentiations of the primitive trunk of
emotion, to which the name sentiments is usually applied. Personal
sentiments are correlative with personal symbols, the interpretation of
the latter meaning nothing more than that the former are associated with
them; while the sentiments, in turn, cannot be felt except by the aid of
the symbols. If I see a face and feel that here is an honest man, it
means that I have, in the past, achieved through intercourse an idea of
honest personality, with the visual elements of which the face before me
has something in common, so that it calls up this socially achieved
sentiment. And moreover in knowing this honest man my idea of honest
personality will be enlarged and corrected for future use. Both the
sentiment and its visual associations will be somewhat different from
what they were.
Thus no personal sentiment is the exclusive product of any one
influence, but all is of various origin and has a social history. The
more clearly one can grasp this fact the better, at least if I am right
in supposing that a whole system of wrong thinking results from
overlooking it and assuming that personal ideas are separable and
fragmentary elements in the mind. Of this I shall say more presently.
The fact I mean is that expressed by Shakespeare, with reference to
love, or loving friendship, in his thirty-first sonnet:
“Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,
Which I by lacking have supposed dead,
And there reigns love, and all love’s loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought buried.
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
Who all their parts of me to thee did give;
That due of many now is thine alone:
Their images I loved I view in thee,
And thou (all they) hast all the all of me.”
In this sonnet may be discerned, I think, a true theory of personal
sentiment, quite accordant with the genetic point of view of modern
psychology, and very important in the understanding of social relations.
Facial expression, tone of voice, and the like, the sensible nucleus of
personal and social ideas, serve as the handle, so to speak, of such
ideas, the principal substance of which is drawn from the region of
inner imagination and sentiment. The personality of a friend, as it
lives in my mind and forms there a part of the society in which I live,
is simply a group or system of thoughts associated with the symbols that
stand for him. To think of him is to revive some part of the system—to
have the old feeling along with the familiar symbol, though perhaps in a
new connection with other ideas. The real and intimate thing in him is
the thought to which he gives life, the feeling his presence or memory
has the power to suggest. This clings about the sensible imagery, the
personal symbols already discussed, because the latter have served as
bridges by which we have entered other minds and therein enriched our
own. We have laid up stores, but we always need some help to get at them
in order that we may use and increase them; and this help commonly
consists in something visible or audible, which has been connected with
them in the past and now acts as a key by which they are unlocked. Thus
the face of a friend has power over us in much the same way as the sight
of a favorite book, of the flag of one’s country, or the refrain of an
old song; it starts a train of thought, lifts the curtain from an
intimate experience. And his presence does not consist in the pressure
of his flesh upon a neighboring chair, but in the thoughts clustering
about some symbol of him, whether the latter be his tangible person or
something else. If a person is more his best self in a letter than in
speech, as sometimes happens, he is more truly present to me in his
correspondence than when I see and hear him. And in most cases a
favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been
in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and
perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to
the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to
see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should
hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.
The world of sentiment and imagination, of all finer and warmer thought,
is chiefly a personal world—that is, it is inextricably interwoven with
personal symbols. If you try to think of a person you will find that
what you really think is chiefly sentiments which you connect with his
image; and, on the other hand, if you try to recall a sentiment you will
find, as a rule, that it will not come up except along with symbols of
the persons who have suggested it. To think of love, gratitude, pity,
grief, honor, courage, justice, and the like, it is necessary to think
of people by whom or toward whom these sentiments may be
entertained.[25] Thus justice may be recalled by thinking of Washington,
kindness by Lincoln, honor by Sir Philip Sidney, and so on. The reason
for this, as already intimated, is that sentiment and imagination are
generated, for the most part, in the life of communication, and so
belong with personal images by original and necessary association,
having no separate existence except in our forms of speech. The ideas
that such words as modesty and magnanimity stand for could never have
been formed apart from social intercourse, and indeed are nothing other
than remembered aspects of such intercourse. To live this higher life,
then, we must live with others, by the aid of their visible presence, by
reading their words, or by recalling in imagination these or other
symbols of them. To lose our hold upon them—as, for example, by long
isolation or by the decay of the imagination in disease or old age—is to
lapse into a life of sensation and crude instinct.
So far as the study of immediate social relations is concerned the
personal idea is the real person. That is to say, it is in this alone
that one man exists for another, and acts directly upon his mind. My
association with you evidently consists in the relation between my idea
of you and the rest of my mind. If there is something in you that is
wholly beyond this and makes no impression upon me it has no social
reality in this relation. _The immediate social reality is the personal
idea_; nothing, it would seem, could be much more obvious than this.
Society, then, in its immediate aspect, _is a relation among personal
ideas_. In order to have society it is evidently necessary that persons
should get together somewhere; and they get together only as personal
ideas in the mind. Where else? What other possible _locus_ can be
assigned for the real contact of persons, or in what other form can they
come in contact except as impressions or ideas formed in this common
_locus_? Society exists in my mind as the contact and reciprocal
influence of certain ideas named “I,” Thomas, Henry, Susan, Bridget, and
so on. It exists in your mind as a similar group, and so in every mind.
Each person is immediately aware of a particular aspect of society: and
so far as he is aware of great social wholes, like a nation or an epoch,
it is by embracing in this particular aspect ideas or sentiments which
he attributes to his countrymen or contemporaries in their collective
aspect. In order to see this it seems to me only necessary to discard
vague modes of speech which have no conceptions back of them that will
bear scrutiny, and look at the facts as we know them in experience.
Yet most of us, perhaps, will find it hard to assent to the view that
the social person is a group of sentiments attached to some symbol or
other characteristic element, which keeps them together and from which
the whole idea is named. The reason for this reluctance I take to be
that we are accustomed to talk and think, so far as we do think in this
connection, as if a person were a material rather than a psychical fact.
Instead of basing our sociology and ethics upon what a man really is as
part of our mental and moral life, he is vaguely and yet grossly
regarded as a shadowy material body, a lump of flesh, and not as an
ideal thing at all. But surely it is only common-sense to hold that the
social and moral reality is that which lives in our imaginations and
affects our motives. As regards the physical it is only the finer, more
plastic and mentally significant aspects of it that imagination is
concerned with, and with that chiefly as a nucleus or centre of
crystallization for sentiment. Instead of perceiving this we commonly
make the physical the dominant factor, and think of the mental and moral
only by a vague analogy to it.
Persons and society must, then, be studied primarily in the imagination.
It is surely true, _prima facie_, that the best way of observing things
is that which is most direct; and I do not see how anyone can hold that
we know persons directly except as imaginative ideas in the mind. These
are perhaps the most vivid things in our experience, and as observable
as anything else, though it is a kind of observation in which accuracy
has not been systematically cultivated. The observation of the physical
aspects, however important, is for social purposes quite subsidiary:
there is no way of weighing or measuring men which throws more than a
very dim side-light on their personality. The physical factors most
significant are those elusive traits of expression already discussed,
and in the observation and interpretation of these physical science is
only indirectly helpful. What, for instance, could the most elaborate
knowledge of his weights and measures, including the anatomy of his
brain, tell us of the character of Napoleon? Not enough, I take it, to
distinguish him with certainty from an imbecile. Our real knowledge of
him is derived from reports of his conversation and manner, from his
legislation and military dispositions, from the impression made upon
those about him and by them communicated to us, from his portraits and
the like; all serving as aids to the imagination in forming a system
that we call by his name. I by no means aim to discredit the study of
man or of society with the aid of physical measurements, such as those
of psychological laboratories; but I think that these methods are
indirect and ancillary in their nature and are most useful when employed
in connection with a trained imagination.
I conclude, therefore, that the imaginations which people have of one
another are the _solid facts_ of society, and that to observe and
interpret these must be a chief aim of sociology. I do not mean merely
that society must be studied _by_ the imagination—that is true of all
investigations in their higher reaches—but that the _object_ of study is
primarily an imaginative idea or group of ideas in the mind, that we
have to imagine imaginations. The intimate grasp of any social fact will
be found to require that we divine what men think of one another.
Charity, for instance, is not understood without imagining what ideas
the giver and recipient have of each other; to grasp homicide we must,
for one thing, conceive how the offender thinks of his victim and of the
administrators of the law; the relation between the employing and
hand-laboring classes is first of all a matter of personal attitudes
which we must apprehend by sympathy with both, and so on. In other
words, we want to get at motives, and motives spring from personal
ideas. There is nothing particularly novel in this view; historians, for
instance, have always assumed that to understand and interpret personal
relations was their main business; but apparently the time is coming
when this will have to be done in a more systematic and penetrating
manner than in the past. Whatever may justly be urged against the
introduction of frivolous and disconnected “personalities” into history,
the understanding of persons is the aim of this and all other branches
of social study.
It is important to face the question of persons who have no corporeal
reality, as for instance the dead, characters of fiction or the drama,
ideas of the gods and the like. Are these real people, members of
society? I should say that in so far as we imagine them they are. Would
it not be absurd to deny social reality to Robert Louis Stevenson, who
is so much alive in many minds and so potently affects important phases
of thought and conduct? He is certainly more real in this practical
sense than most of us who have not yet lost our corporeity, more alive,
perhaps, than he was before he lost his own, because of his wider
influence. And so Colonel Newcome, or Romola, or Hamlet is real to the
imaginative reader with the realest kind of reality, the kind that works
directly upon his personal character. And the like is true of the
conceptions of supernatural beings handed down by the aid of tradition
among all peoples. What, indeed, would society be, or what would any one
of us be, if we associated only with corporeal persons and insisted that
no one should enter our company who could not show his power to tip the
scales and cast a shadow?
On the other hand, a corporeally existent person is not socially real
unless he is imagined. If the nobleman thinks of the serf as a mere
animal and does not attribute to him a human way of thinking and feeling
the latter is not real to him in the sense of acting personally upon his
mind and conscience. And if a man should go into a strange country and
hide himself so completely that no one knew he was there, he would
evidently have no social existence for the inhabitants.
In saying this I hope I do not seem to question the independent reality
of persons or to confuse it with personal ideas. The man is one thing
and the various ideas entertained about him are another; but the latter,
the personal idea, is the immediate social reality, the thing in which
men exist for one another, and work directly upon one another’s lives.
Thus any study of society that is not supported by a firm grasp of
personal ideas is empty and dead—mere doctrine and not knowledge at all.
I believe that the vaguely material notion of personality, which does
not confront the social fact at all but assumes it to be the analogue of
the physical fact, is a main source of fallacious thinking about ethics,
politics, and indeed every aspect of social and personal life. It seems
to underlie all four of the ways of conceiving society and the
individual alleged in the first chapter to be false. If the person is
thought of primarily as a separate material form, inhabited by thoughts
and feelings conceived by analogy to be equally separate, then the only
way of getting a society is by adding on a new principle of socialism,
social faculty, altruism, or the like. But if you start with the idea
that the social person is primarily a fact in the mind, and observe him
there, you find at once that he has no existence apart from a mental
whole of which all personal ideas are members, and which is a particular
aspect of society. Every one of these ideas, as we have seen, is the
outcome of our experience of all the persons we have known, and is only
a special aspect of our general idea of mankind.
To many people it would seem mystical to say that persons, as we know
them, are not separable and mutually exclusive, like physical bodies, so
that what is part of one cannot be part of another, but that they
interpenetrate one another, the same element pertaining to different
persons at different times, or even at the same time: yet this is a
verifiable and not very abstruse fact.[26] The sentiments which make up
the largest and most vivid part of our idea of any person are not, as a
rule, peculiarly and exclusively his, but each one may be entertained in
conjunction with other persons also. It is, so to speak, at the point of
intersection of many personal ideas, and may be reached through any one
of them. Not only Philip Sidney but many other people call up the
sentiment of honor, and likewise with kindness, magnanimity, and so on.
Perhaps these sentiments are never precisely the same in any two cases,
but they are nearly enough alike to act in about the same manner upon
our motives, which is the main thing from a practical point of view. Any
kindly face will arouse friendly feeling, any suffering child awaken
pity, any brave man inspire respect. A sense of justice, of something
being due to a man as such, is potentially a part of the idea of every
man I know. All such feelings are a cumulative product of social
experience and do not belong exclusively to any one personal symbol. A
sentiment, if we consider it as something in itself, is vaguely,
indeterminately personal; it may come to life, with only slight
variations, in connection with any one of many symbols; whether it is
referred to one or to another, or to two or more at once, is determined
by the way one’s thoughts arrange themselves, by the connection in which
the sentiment is suggested.
As regards one’s self in relation to other people, I shall have more to
say in a later chapter; but I may say here that there is no view of the
self, that will bear examination, which makes it altogether distinct, in
our minds, from other persons. If it includes the whole mind, then, of
course, it includes all the persons we think of, all the society which
lives in our thoughts. If we confine it to a certain part of our thought
with which we connect a distinctive emotion or sentiment called
self-feeling, as I prefer to do, it still includes the persons with whom
we feel most identified. _Self and other do not exist as mutually
exclusive social facts_, and phraseology which implies that they do,
like the antithesis egoism _versus_ altruism, is open to the objection
of vagueness, if not of falsity.[27] It seems to me that the
classification of impulses as altruistic and egoistic, with or without a
third class called, perhaps, ego-altruistic, is empty; and I do not see
how any other conclusion can result from a concrete study of the matter.
There is no class of altruistic impulses specifically different from
other impulses: all our higher, socially developed sentiments are
indeterminately personal, and may be associated with self-feeling, or
with whatever personal symbol may happen to arouse them. Those feelings
which are merely sensual and have not been refined into sentiments by
communication and imagination are not so much egoistic as merely animal:
they do not pertain to social persons, either first or second, but
belong in a lower stratum of thought. Sensuality is not to be confused
with the social self. As I shall try to show later we do not think “I”
except with reference to a complementary thought of other persons; it is
an idea developed by association and communication.
The egoism-altruism way of speaking falsifies the facts at the most
vital point possible by assuming that our impulses relating to persons
are separable into two classes, the I impulses and the You impulses, in
much the same way that physical persons are separable; whereas a primary
fact throughout the range of sentiment is a fusion of persons, so that
the impulse belongs not to one or the other, but precisely to the common
ground that both occupy, to their intercourse or mingling. Thus the
sentiment of gratitude does not pertain to me as against you, nor to you
as against me, but springs right from our union, and so with all
personal sentiment. Special terms like egoism and altruism are
presumably introduced into moral discussions for the more accurate
naming of facts. But I cannot discover the facts for which these are
supposed to be names. The more I consider the matter the more they
appear to be mere fictions of analogical thought. If you have no
definite idea of personality or self beyond the physical idea you are
naturally led to regard the higher phases of thought, which have no
evident relation to the body, as in some way external to the first
person or self. Thus instead of psychology, sociology, or ethics we have
a mere shadow of physiology.
Pity is typical of the impulses ordinarily called altruistic; but if one
thinks of the question closely it is hard to see how this adjective is
especially applicable to it. Pity is not aroused exclusively by images
or symbols of other persons, as against those of one’s self. If I think
of my own body in a pitiable condition I am perhaps as likely to feel
pity as if I think of someone else in such a condition.[28] At any rate,
self-pity is much too common to be ignored. Even if the sentiment were
aroused only by symbols of other persons it would not necessarily be
non-egoistic. “A father pitieth his children,” but any searching
analysis will show that he incorporates the children into his own
imaginative self. And, finally, pity is not necessarily moral or good,
but is often mere “self-indulgence,” as when it is practised at the
expense of justice and true sympathy. A “wounding pity,” to use a phrase
of Mr. Stevenson’s, is one of the commonest forms of objectionable
sentiment. In short, pity is a sentiment like any other, having in
itself no determinate personality, as first or second, and no
determinate moral character: personal reference and moral rank depend
upon the conditions under which it is suggested. The reason that it
strikes us as appropriate to call pity “altruistic” apparently is that
it often leads directly and obviously to helpful practical activity, as
toward the poor or the sick. But “altruistic” is used to imply something
more than kindly or benevolent, some radical psychological or moral
distinction between this sentiment or class of sentiments and others
called egoistic, and this distinction appears not to exist. All social
sentiments are altruistic in the sense that they involve reference to
another person; few are so in the sense that they exclude the self. The
idea of a division on this line appears to flow from a vague presumption
that personal ideas must have a separateness answering to that of
material bodies.
I do not mean to deny or depreciate the fact of personal opposition; it
is real and most important, though it does not rest upon any such
essential and, as it were, material separateness as the common way of
thinking implies. At a given moment personal symbols may stand for
different and opposing tendencies; thus the missionary may be urging me
to contribute to his cause, and, if he is skilful, the impulses he
awakens will move me in that direction; but if I think of my wife and
children and the summer outing I had planned to give them from my
savings, an opposite impulse appears. And in all such cases the very
fact of opposition and the attention thereby drawn to the conflicting
impulses gives emphasis to them, so that common elements are overlooked
and the persons in the imagination seem separate and exclusive.
In such cases, however, the harmonizing or moralizing of the situation
consists precisely in evoking or appealing to the common element in the
apparently conflicting personalities, that is to some sentiment of
justice or right. Thus I may say to myself, “I can afford a dollar, but
ought not, out of consideration for my family, to give more,” and may be
able to imagine all parties accepting this view of the case.
Opposition between one’s self and someone else is also a very real
thing; but this opposition, instead of coming from a separateness like
that of material bodies, is, on the contrary, dependent upon a measure
of community between one’s self and the disturbing other, so that the
hostility between one’s self and a social person may always be described
as hostile sympathy. And the sentiments connected with opposition, like
resentment, pertain neither to myself, considered separately, nor to the
symbol of the other person, but to ideas including both. I shall discuss
these matters at more length in subsequent chapters; the main thing here
is to note that personal opposition does not involve mechanical
separateness, but arises from the emphasis of inconsistent elements in
ideas having much in common.
The relations to one another and to the mind of the various persons one
thinks of might be rudely pictured in some such way as this. Suppose we
conceive the mind as a vast wall covered with electric-light bulbs, each
of which represents a possible thought or impulse whose presence in our
consciousness may be indicated by the lighting up of the bulb. Now each
of the persons we know is represented in such a scheme, not by a
particular area of the wall set apart for him, but by a system of hidden
connections among the bulbs which causes certain combinations of them to
be lit up when his characteristic symbol is suggested. If something
presses the button corresponding to my friend A, a peculiarly shaped
figure appears upon the wall; when that is released and B’s button is
pressed another figure appears, including perhaps many of the same
lights, yet unique as a whole though not in its parts; and so on with as
many people as you please. It should also be considered that we usually
think of a person in relation to some particular social situation, and
that those phases of him that bear on this situation are the only ones
vividly conceived. To recall someone is commonly to imagine how this or
that idea would strike him, what he would say or do in our place, and so
on. Accordingly, only some part, some appropriate and characteristic
part, of the whole figure that might be lighted up in connection with a
man’s symbol, is actually illuminated.
To introduce the self into this illustration we might say that the
lights near the centre of the wall were of a particular color—say
red—which faded, not too abruptly, into white toward the edges. This red
would represent self-feeling, and other persons would be more or less
colored by it accordingly as they were or were not intimately identified
with our cherished activities. In a mother’s mind, for instance, her
child would lie altogether in the inmost and reddest area. Thus the same
sentiment may belong to the self and to several other persons at the
same time. If a man and his family are suffering from his being thrown
out of work his apprehension and resentment will be part of his idea of
each member of his family, as well as part of his self-idea and of the
idea of people whom he thinks to blame.
I trust it will be plain that there is nothing fantastic, unreal, or
impractical about this way of conceiving people, that is by observing
them as facts of the imagination. On the contrary, the fantastic,
unreal, and practically pernicious way is the ordinary and traditional
one of speculating upon them as shadowy bodies, without any real
observation of them as mental facts. It is the man as imagined that we
love or hate, imitate, or avoid, that helps or harms us, that moulds our
wills and our careers. What is it that makes a person real to us; is it
material contact or contact in the imagination? Suppose, for instance,
that on suddenly turning a corner I collide with one coming from the
opposite direction: I receive a slight bruise, have the breath knocked
out of me, exchange conventional apologies, and immediately forget the
incident. It takes no intimate hold upon me, means nothing except a
slight and temporary disturbance in the animal processes. Now suppose,
on the other hand, that I take up Froude’s “Cæsar,” and presently find
myself, under the guidance of that skilful writer, imagining a hero
whose body long ago turned to clay. He is alive in my thought: there is
perhaps some notion of his visible presence, and along with this the
awakening of sentiments of audacity, magnanimity and the like, that glow
with intense life, consume my energy, make me resolve to be like Cæsar
in some respect, and cause me to see right and wrong and other great
questions as I conceive he would have seen them. Very possibly he keeps
me awake after I go to bed—every boy has lain awake thinking of book
people. My whole after life will be considerably affected by this
experience, and yet this is a contact that takes place only in the
imagination. Even as regards the physical organism it is immeasurably
more important, as a rule, than the material collision. A blow in the
face, if accidental and so not disturbing to the imagination, affects
the nerves, the heart, and the digestion very little, but an injurious
word or look may cause sleepless nights, dyspepsia, or palpitation. It
is, then, the personal idea, the man in the imagination, the real man of
power and fruits, that we need primarily to consider, and he appears to
be somewhat different from the rather conventional and material man of
traditionary social philosophy.
According to this view of the matter society is simply the collective
aspect of personal thought. Each man’s imagination, regarded as a mass
of personal impressions worked up into a living, growing whole, is a
special phase of society; and Mind or Imagination as a whole, that is
human thought considered in the largest way as having a growth and
organization extending throughout the ages, is the _locus_ of society in
the widest possible sense.
It may be objected that society in this sense has no definite limits,
but seems to include the whole range of experience. That is to say, the
mind is all one growth, and we cannot draw any distinct line between
personal thought and other thought. There is probably no such thing as
an idea that is wholly independent of minds other than that in which it
exists; through heredity, if not through communication, all is connected
with the general life, and so in some sense social. What are spoken of
above as personal ideas are merely those in which the connection with
other persons is most direct and apparent. This objection, however,
applies to any way of defining society, and those who take the material
standpoint are obliged to consider whether houses, factories, domestic
animals, tilled land, and so on are not really parts of the social
order. The truth, of course, is that all life hangs together in such a
manner that any attempt to delimit a part of it is artificial. Society
is rather a phase of life than a thing by itself; it is life regarded
from the point of view of personal intercourse. And personal intercourse
may be considered either in its primary aspects, such as are treated in
this book, or in secondary aspects, such as groups, institutions, or
processes. Sociology, I suppose, is the science of these things.
CHAPTER IV
SYMPATHY OR COMMUNION AS AN ASPECT OF SOCIETY
THE MEANING OF SYMPATHY AS HERE USED—ITS RELATION TO THOUGHT,
SENTIMENT, AND SOCIAL EXPERIENCE—THE RANGE OF SYMPATHY IS A
MEASURE OF PERSONALITY, _e.g._, OF POWER, OF MORAL RANK, AND OF
SANITY—A MAN’S SYMPATHIES REFLECT THE STATE OF THE SOCIAL
ORDER—SPECIALIZATION AND BREADTH—SYMPATHY REFLECTS SOCIAL PROCESS
IN THE MINGLING OF LIKENESS WITH DIFFERENCE—ALSO IN THAT IT IS A
PROCESS OF SELECTION GUIDED BY FEELING—THE MEANING OF LOVE IN
SOCIAL DISCUSSION—LOVE IN RELATION TO SELF—THE STUDY OF SYMPATHY
REVEALS THE VITAL UNITY OF HUMAN LIFE.
The personal idea in its more penetrating interpretations involves
sympathy, in the sense of primary communication or an entering into and
sharing the mind of someone else. When I converse with a man, through
words, looks, or other symbols, I have more or less intelligence or
_communion_ with him, we get on common ground and have similar ideas and
sentiments. If one uses sympathy in this connection—and it is perhaps
the most available word—one has to bear in mind that it denotes the
sharing of any mental state that can be communicated, and has not the
special implication of pity or other “tender emotion” that it very
commonly carries in ordinary speech.[29] This emotionally colorless
usage is, however, perfectly legitimate, and is, I think, more common in
classical English literature than any other. Thus Shakespeare, who uses
sympathy five times, if we may trust the “Shakespeare Phrase Book,”
never means by it the particular emotion of compassion, but either the
sharing of a mental state, as when he speaks of “sympathy in choice,” or
mere resemblance, as when Iago mentions the lack of “sympathy in years,
manners and beauties” between Othello and Desdemona. This latter sense
is also one which must be excluded in our use of the word, since what is
here meant is an active process of mental assimilation, not mere
likeness.
In this chapter sympathy, in the sense of communion or personal insight,
will be considered chiefly with a view to showing something of its
nature as a phase or member of the general life of mankind.
The content of it, the matter communicated, is chiefly thought and
sentiment, in distinction from mere sensation or crude emotion. I do not
venture to say that these latter cannot be shared, but certainly they
play a relatively small part in the communicative life. Thus although to
get one’s finger pinched is a common experience, it is impossible, to me
at least, to recall the sensation when another person has his finger
pinched. So when we say that we feel sympathy for a person who has a
headache, we mean that we pity him, not that we share the headache.
There is little true communication of physical pain, or anything of that
simple sort. The reason appears to be that as ideas of this kind are due
to mere physical contacts, or other simple stimuli, in the first
instance, they are and remain detached and isolated in the mind, so that
they are unlikely to be recalled except by some sensation of the sort
originally associated with them. If they become objects of thought and
conversation, as is likely to be the case when they are agreeable, they
are by that very process refined into sentiments. Thus when the
pleasures of the table are discussed the thing communicated is hardly
the sensation of taste but something much subtler, although partly based
upon that. Thought and sentiment are from the first parts or aspects of
highly complex and imaginative personal ideas, and of course may be
reached by anything which recalls any part of those ideas. They are
aroused by personal intercourse because in their origin they are
connected with personal symbols. The sharing of a sentiment ordinarily
comes to pass by our perceiving one of these symbols or traits of
expression which has belonged with the sentiment in the past and now
brings it back. And likewise with thought: it is communicated by words,
and these are freighted with the net result of centuries of intercourse.
Both spring from the general life of society and cannot be separated
from that life, nor it from them.
It is not to be inferred that we must go through the same visible and
tangible experiences as other people before we can sympathize with them.
On the contrary, there is only an indirect and uncertain connection
between one’s sympathies and the obvious events—such as the death of
friends, success or failure in business, travels, and the like—that one
has gone through. Social experience is a matter of imaginative, not of
material, contacts; and there are so many aids to the imagination that
little can be judged as to one’s experience by the merely external
course of his life. An imaginative student of a few people and of books
often has many times the range of comprehension that the most varied
career can give to a duller mind; and a man of genius, like Shakespeare,
may cover almost the whole range of human sentiment in his time, not by
miracle, but by a marvellous vigor and refinement of imagination. The
idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great
variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.
One’s range of sympathy is a measure of his personality, indicating how
much or how little of a man he is. It is in no way a special faculty,
but a function of the whole mind to which every special faculty
contributes, so that what a person is and what he can understand or
enter into through the life of others, are very much the same thing. We
often hear people described as sympathetic who have little mental power,
but are of a sensitive, impressionable, quickly responsive type of mind.
The sympathy of such a mind always has some defect corresponding to its
lack of character and of constructive force. A strong, deep
understanding of other people implies mental energy and stability; it is
a work of persistent, cumulative imagination which may be associated
with a comparative slowness of direct sensibility. On the other hand, we
often see the union of a quick sensitiveness to immediate impressions
with an inability to comprehend what has to be reached by reason or
constructive imagination.
Sympathy is a requisite to social power. Only in so far as a man
understands other people and thus enters into the life around him has he
any effective existence; the less he has of this the more he is a mere
animal, not truly in contact with human life. And if he is not in
contact with it he can of course have no power over it. This is a
principle of familiar application, and yet one that is often overlooked,
practical men having, perhaps, a better grasp of it than theorists. It
is well understood by men of the world that effectiveness depends at
least as much upon address, _savoir faire_, tact, and the like,
involving sympathetic insight into the minds of other people, as upon
any more particular faculties. There is nothing more practical than
social imagination; to lack it is to lack everything. All classes of
persons need it—the mechanic, the farmer, and the tradesman, as well as
the lawyer, the clergyman, the railway president, the politician, the
philanthropist, and the poet. Every year thousands of young men are
preferred to other thousands and given positions of more responsibility
largely because they are seen to have a power of personal insight which
promises efficiency and growth. Without “calibre,” which means chiefly a
good imagination, there is no getting on much in the world. The strong
men of our society, however much we may disapprove of the particular
direction in which their sympathy is sometimes developed, or the ends
their power is made to serve, are very human men, not at all the
abnormal creatures they are sometimes asserted to be. I have met a fair
number of such men, and they have generally appeared, each in his own
way, to be persons of a certain scope and breadth that marked them off
from the majority.
A person of definite character and purpose, who comprehends our way of
thought, is sure to exert power over us. He cannot altogether be
resisted; because, if he understands us, he can make us understand him,
through the word, the look, or other symbol, which both of us connect
with the common sentiment or idea; and thus by communicating an impulse
he can move the will. Sympathetic influence enters into our system of
thought as a matter of course, and affects our conduct as surely as
water affects the growth of a plant. The kindred spirit can turn on a
system of lights, to recur to the image of the last chapter, and so
transform the mental illumination. This is the nature of all authority
and leadership, as I shall try to explain more fully in another chapter.
Again, sympathy, in the broad sense in which it is here used, underlies
also the moral rank of a man and goes to fix our estimate of his justice
and goodness. The just, the good, or the right under any name, is of
course not a thing by itself, but is a finer product wrought up out of
the various impulses that life affords, and colored by them. Hence no
one can think and act in a way that strikes us as right unless he feels,
in great part, the same impulses that we do. If he shares the feelings
that seem to us to have the best claims, it naturally follows, if he is
a person of stable character, that he does them justice in thought and
action. To be upright, public-spirited, patriotic, charitable, generous,
and just implies that a man has a broad personality which feels the
urgency of sympathetic or imaginative motives that in narrower minds are
weak or lacking. He has achieved the higher sentiments, the wider range
of personal thought. And so far as we see in his conduct that he feels
such motives and that they enter into his decisions, we are likely to
call him good. What is it to do good, in the ordinary sense? Is it not
to help people to enjoy and to work, to fulfil the healthy and happy
tendencies of human nature; to give play to children, education to
youth, a career to men, a household to women, and peace to old age? And
it is sympathy that makes a man wish and need to do these things. One
who is large enough to live the life of the race will feel the impulses
of each class as his own, and do what he can to gratify them as
naturally as he eats his dinner. The idea that goodness is something
apart from ordinary human nature is pernicious; it is only an ampler
expression of that nature.
On the other hand, all badness, injustice, or wrong is, in one of its
aspects, a lack of sympathy. If a man’s action is injurious to interests
which other men value, and so impresses them as wrong, it must be
because, at the moment of action, he does not feel those interests as
they do. Accordingly the wrong-doer is either a person whose sympathies
do not embrace the claims he wrongs, or one who lacks sufficient
stability of character to express his sympathies in action. A liar, for
instance, is either one who does not feel strongly the dishonor,
injustice, and confusion of lying, or one who, feeling them at times,
does not retain the feeling in decisive moments. And so a brutal person
may be such either in a dull or chronic way, which does not know the
gentler sentiments at any time, or in a sudden and passionate way which
perhaps alternates with kindness.
Much the same may be said regarding mental health in general; its
presence or absence may always be expressed in terms of sympathy. The
test of sanity which everyone instinctively applies is that of a certain
tact or feeling of the social situation, which we expect of all
right-minded people and which flows from sympathetic contact with other
minds. One whose words and bearing give the impression that he stands
apart and lacks intuition of what others are thinking is judged as more
or less absentminded, queer, dull, or even insane or imbecile, according
to the character and permanence of the phenomenon. The essence of
insanity, from the social point of view (and, it would seem, the only
final test of it) is a confirmed lack of touch with other minds in
matters upon which men in general are agreed; and imbecility might be
defined as a general failure to compass the more complex sympathies.
A man’s sympathies as a whole reflect the social order in which he
lives, or rather they are a particular phase of it. Every group of which
he is really a member, in which he has any vital share, must live in his
sympathy; so that his mind is a microcosm of so much of society as he
truly belongs to. Every social phenomenon, we need to remember, is
simply a collective view of what we find distributively in particular
persons—public opinion is a phase of the judgments of individuals;
traditions and institutions live in the thought of particular men,
social standards of right do not exist apart from private consciences,
and so on. Accordingly, so far as a man has any vital part in the life
of a time or a country that life is imaged in those personal ideas or
sympathies which are the impress of his intercourse.
So, whatever is peculiar to our own time, implies a corresponding
peculiarity in the sympathetic life of each one of us. Thus the age, at
least in the more intellectually active parts of life, is strenuous,
characterized by the multiplication of points of personal contact
through enlarged and accelerated communication. The mental aspect of
this is a more rapid and multitudinous flow of personal images,
sentiments, and impulses. Accordingly there prevails among us an
animation of thought that tends to lift men above sensuality; and there
is also possible a choice of relations that opens to each mind a more
varied and congenial development than the past afforded. On the other
hand, these advantages are not without their cost; the intensity of life
often becomes a strain, bringing to many persons an overexcitation which
weakens or breaks down character; as we see in the increase of suicide
and insanity, and in many similar phenomena. An effect very generally
produced upon all except the strongest minds appears to be a sort of
superficiality of imagination, a dissipation and attenuation of
impulses, which watches the stream of personal imagery go by like a
procession, but lacks the power to organize and direct it.
The different degrees of urgency in personal impressions are reflected
in the behavior of different classes of people. Everyone must have
noticed that he finds more real openness of sympathy in the country than
in the city—though perhaps there is more of a superficial readiness in
the latter—and often more among plain, hand-working people than among
professional and business men. The main reason for this, I take it, is
that the social imagination is not so hard worked in the one case as in
the other. In the mountains of North Carolina the hospitable inhabitants
will take in any stranger and invite him to spend the night; but this is
hardly possible upon Broadway; and the case is very much the same with
the hospitality of the mind. If one sees few people and hears a new
thing only once a week, he accumulates a fund of sociability and
curiosity very favorable to eager intercourse; but if he is assailed all
day and every day by calls upon feeling and thought in excess of his
power to respond, he soon finds that he must put up some sort of a
barrier. Sensitive people who live where life is insistent take on a
sort of social shell whose function is to deal mechanically with
ordinary relations and preserve the interior from destruction. They are
likely to acquire a conventional smile and conventional phrases for
polite intercourse, and a cold mask for curiosity, hostility, or
solicitation. In fact, a vigorous power of resistance to the numerous
influences that in no way make for the substantial development of his
character, but rather tend to distract and demoralize him, is a primary
need of one who lives in the more active portions of present society,
and the loss of this power by strain is in countless instances the
beginning of mental and moral decline. There are times of abounding
energy when we exclaim with Schiller,
“Seid willkommen, Millionen,
Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!”
but it is hardly possible or desirable to maintain this attitude
continuously. Universal sympathy is impracticable; what we need is
better control and selection, avoiding both the narrowness of our class
and the dissipation of promiscuous impressions. It is well for a man to
open out and take in as much of life as he can organize into a
consistent whole, but to go beyond that is not desirable. In a time of
insistent suggestion, like the present, it is fully as important to many
of us to know when and how to restrict the impulses of sympathy as it is
to avoid narrowness. And this is in no way inconsistent, I think, with
that modern democracy of sentiment—also connected with the enlargement
of communication—which deprecates the limitation of sympathy by wealth
or position. Sympathy must be selective, but the less it is controlled
by conventional and external circumstances, such as wealth, and the more
it penetrates to the essentials, of character, the better. It is this
liberation from convention, locality, and chance, I think, that the
spirit of the time calls for.
Again, the life of this age is more diversified than life ever was
before, and this appears in the mind of the person who shares it as a
greater variety of interests and affiliations. A man may be regarded as
the point of intersection of an indefinite number of circles
representing social groups, having as many arcs passing through him as
there are groups. This diversity is connected with the growth of
communication, and is another phase of the general enlargement and
variegation of life. Because of the greater variety of imaginative
contacts it is impossible for a normally open-minded individual not to
lead a broader life, in some respects at least, than he would have led
in the past. Why is it, for instance, that such ideas as brotherhood and
the sentiment of equal right are now so generally extended to all
classes of men? Primarily, I think, because all classes have become
imaginable, by acquiring power and means of expression. He whom I
imagine without antipathy becomes my brother. If we feel that we must
give aid to another, it is because that other lives and strives in our
imaginations, and so is a part of ourselves. The shallow separation of
self and other in common speech obscures the extreme simplicity and
naturalness of such feelings. If I come to imagine a person suffering
wrong it is not “altruism” that makes me wish to right that wrong, but
simple human impulse. He is my life, as really and immediately as
anything else. His symbol arouses a sentiment which is no more his than
mine.
Thus we lead a wider life; and yet it is also true that there is
demanded of us a more distinct specialization than has been required in
the past. The complexity of society takes the form of organization, that
is of a growing unity and breadth sustained by the co-operation of
differentiated parts, and the man of the age must reflect both the unity
and the differentiation; he must be more distinctly a specialist and at
the same time more a man of the world.
It seems to many a puzzling question whether, on the whole, the breadth
or the specialization is more potent in the action of modern life upon
the individual; and by insisting on one aspect or the other it is easy
to frame an argument to show either that personal life is becoming
richer, or that man is getting to be a mere cog in a machine.[30] I
think, however, that these two tendencies are not really opposite but
complementary; that it is not a case of breadth _versus_ specialization,
but, in the long run at least, of breadth _plus_ specialization to
produce a richer and more various humanity. There are many evils
connected with the sudden growth in our day of new social structures,
and the subjection of a part of the people to a narrow and deadening
routine is one of them, but I think that a healthy specialization has no
tendency to bring this about. On the contrary, it is part of a
liberating development. The narrow specialist is a bad specialist; and
we shall learn that it is a mistake to produce him.
In an organized life isolation cannot succeed, and a right
specialization does not isolate. There is no such separation between
special and general knowledge or efficiency as is sometimes supposed. In
what does the larger knowledge of particulars consist, if not in
perceiving their relation to wholes? Has a student less general
knowledge because he is familiar with a specialty, or is it not rather
true that in so far as he knows one thing well it is a window through
which he sees things in general?
There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it
earnestly at a particular point. If one takes his stand in a field of
corn when the young plants have begun to sprout, all the plants in the
field will appear to be arranged in a system of rows radiating from his
feet; and no matter where he stands the system will appear to centre at
that point. It is so with any standpoint in the field of thought and
intercourse; to possess it is to have a point of vantage from which the
whole may, in a particular manner, be apprehended. It is surely a matter
of common observation that a man who knows no one thing intimately has
no views worth hearing on things in general. The farmer philosophizes in
terms of crops, soils, markets, and implements, the mechanic generalizes
his experience of wood and iron, the seaman reaches similar conclusions
by his own special road; and if the scholar keeps pace with these it
must be by an equally virile productivity. It is a common opinion that
breadth of culture is a thing by itself, to be imparted by a particular
sort of studies, as, for instance, the classics, modern languages, and
so on. And there is a certain practical truth in this, owing, I think,
to the fact that certain studies are taught in a broad or cultural way,
while others are not. But the right theory of the matter is that
speciality and culture are simply aspects of the same healthy mental
growth, and that any study is cultural when taught in the best way. And
so the humblest careers in life may involve culture and breadth of view,
if the incumbent is trained, as he should be, to feel their larger
relations.
A certain sort of writers often assume that it is the tendency of our
modern specialized production to stunt the mind of the workman by a
meaningless routine; but fair opportunities of observation and some
practical acquaintance with machinery and the men who use it lead me to
think that this is not the _general_ fact. On the contrary, it is
precisely the broad or cultural traits of general intelligence,
self-reliance, and adaptability that make a man at home and efficient in
the midst of modern machinery, and it is because the American workman
has these traits in a comparatively high degree that he surpasses others
in the most highly specialized production. One who goes into our shops
will find that the intelligent and adaptive workman is almost always
preferred and gets higher wages; and if there are large numbers employed
upon deadening routine it is partly because there is unfortunately a
part of our population whose education makes them unfit for anything
else. The type of mechanic which a complex industrial system requires,
and which it is even now, on the whole, evolving, is one that combines
an intimate knowledge of particular tools and processes with an
intelligent apprehension of the system in which he works. If he lacks
the latter he requires constant oversight and so becomes a nuisance.
Anyone acquainted with such matters knows that “gumption” in workmen is
fully as important and much harder to find than mere manual skill; and
that those who possess it are usually given superior positions. During
the late war with Spain it became obvious that the complicated machinery
of a modern warship is ineffectual without intelligent, self-reliant,
and determined “men behind the guns” to work it; and, of course, the
same holds true of other kinds of machinery. And if we pass from tools
to personal relations we shall find that the specialized production so
much deprecated is only one phase of a wider general life, a life of
comparative freedom, intelligence, education, and opportunity, whose
general effect is to enlarge the individual. No doubt there are cases in
which intelligence seems to have passed out of the man into the machine,
leaving the former a mere “tender”; but I think these are not
representative of the change as a whole.
The idea of a necessary antagonism between specialization and breadth
seems to me an illusion of the same class as that which opposes the
individual to the social order. First one aspect and then another is
looked at in artificial isolation, and it is not perceived that we are
beholding but one thing, after all.
Not only does the sympathetic life of a man reflect and imply the
_state_ of society, but we may also discern in it some inkling of those
processes, or principles of change, that we see at large in the general
movement of mankind. This is a matter rather beyond the scope of this
book; but a few illustrations will show, in a general way, what I mean.
The act of sympathy follows the general law that nature works onward by
mixing like and unlike, continuity and change; and so illustrates the
same principle that we see in the mingling of heredity with variation,
specific resemblance with a differentiation of sexes and of individuals,
tradition with discussion, inherited social position with competition,
and so on. The likeness in the communicating persons is necessary for
comprehension, the difference for interest. We cannot feel strongly
toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable; nor
yet toward the wholly like because it is stale—identity must always be
dull company. The power of other natures over us lies in a stimulating
difference which causes excitement and opens communication, in ideas
similar to our own but not identical, in states of mind attainable but
not actual. If one has energy he soon wearies of any habitual round of
activities and feelings, and his organism, competent to a larger life,
suffers pains of excess and want at the same time. The key to the
situation is another person who can start a new circle of activities and
give the faculties concerned with the old a chance to rest. As Emerson
has remarked, we come into society to be played upon. “Friendship,” he
says again, “requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness,
that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other
party.... Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I
have in his being mine is that the _not mine_ is _mine_.... There must
be very two before there can be very one.”[31] So Goethe, speaking of
Spinoza’s attraction for him, remarks that the closest unions rest on
contrast;[32] and it is well known that such a contrast was the basis of
his union with Schiller, “whose character and life,” he says, “were in
complete contrast to my own.”[33] Of course, some sorts of sympathy are
especially active in their tendency, like the sympathy of vigorous boys
with soldiers and sea-captains; while others are comparatively quiet,
like those of old people renewing common memories. It is vivid and
elastic where the tendency to growth is strong, reaching out toward the
new, the onward, the mysterious; while old persons, the under-vitalized
and the relaxed or wearied prefer a mild sociability, a comfortable
companionship in habit; but even with the latter there must always be a
stimulus given, something new suggested or something forgotten recalled,
not merely a resemblance of thought but a “resembling difference.”
And sympathy between man and woman, while it is very much complicated
with the special instinct of sex, draws its life from this same mixture
of mental likeness and difference. The love of the sexes is above all a
need, a need of new life which only the other can unlock.
“Ich musst’ ihn lieben, weil mit ihm mein Leben
Zum Leben ward, wie ich es nie gekannt,”[34]
says the princess in Tasso; and this appears to express a general
principle. Each sex represents to the other a wide range of fresh and
vital experience inaccessible alone. Thus the woman usually stands for a
richer and more open emotional life, the man for a stronger mental
grasp, for control and synthesis. Alfred without Laura feels dull,
narrow, and coarse, while Laura on her part feels selfish and
hysterical.
Again, sympathy is selective, and thus illustrates a phase of the vital
process more talked about at present than any other. To go out into the
life of other people takes energy, as everyone may see in his own
experience; and since energy is limited and requires some special
stimulus to evoke it, sympathy becomes active only when our imaginations
are reaching out after something we admire or love, or in some way feel
the need to understand and make our own. A healthy mind, at least, does
not spend much energy on things that do not, in some way, contribute to
its development: ideas and persons that lie wholly aside from the
direction of its growth, or from which it has absorbed all they have to
give, necessarily lack interest for it and so fail to awaken sympathy.
An incontinent response to every suggestion offered indicates the
breaking down of that power of inhibition or refusal that is our natural
defence against the reception of material we cannot digest, and looks
toward weakness, instability, and mental decay. So with persons from
whom we have nothing to gain, in any sense, whom we do not admire, or
love, or fear, or hate, and who do not even interest us as psychological
problems or objects of charity, we can have no sympathy except of the
most superficial and fleeting sort. I do not overlook the fact that a
large class of people suffer a loss of human breadth and power by
falling into a narrow and exclusive habit of mind; but at the same time
personality is nothing unless it has character, individuality, a
distinctive line of growth, and to have this is to have a principle of
rejection as well as reception in sympathy.
Social development as a whole, and every act of sympathy as a part of
that development, is guided and stimulated in its selective growth by
feeling. The outgoing of the mind into the thought of another is always,
it would seem, an excursion in search of the congenial; not necessarily
of the pleasant, in the ordinary sense, but of that which is fitting or
congruous with our actual state of feeling. Thus we would not call
Carlyle or the Book of Job pleasant exactly, yet we have moods in which
these writers, however lacking in amenity, seem harmonious and
attractive.
In fact, our mental life, individual and collective, is truly a never
finished work of art, in the sense that we are ever striving, with such
energy and materials as we possess, to make of it a harmonious and
congenial whole. Each man does this in his own peculiar way, and men in
the aggregate do it for human nature at large, each individual
contributing to the general endeavor. There is a tendency to judge every
new influence, as the painter judges every fresh stroke of his brush, by
its relation to the whole achieved or in contemplation, and to call it
good or ill according to whether it does or does not make for a
congruous development. We do this for the most part instinctively, that
is, without deliberate reasoning; something of the whole past,
hereditary and social, lives in our present state of mind, and welcomes
or rejects the suggestions of the moment. There is always some profound
reason for the eagerness that certain influences arouse in us, through
which they tap our energy and draw us in their direction, so that we
cling to and augment them, growing more and more in their sense. Thus if
one likes a book, so that he feels himself inclined to take it down from
time to time and linger in the companionship of the author, he may be
sure he is getting something that he needs, though it may be long before
he discovers what it is. It is quite evident that there must be, in
every phase of mental life, an æsthetic impulse to preside over
selection.
In common thought and speech sympathy and love are closely connected;
and in fact, as most frequently used, they mean somewhat the same thing,
the sympathy ordinarily understood being an affectionate sympathy, and
the love a sympathetic affection. I have already suggested that sympathy
is not dependent upon any particular emotion, but may, for instance, be
hostile as well as friendly; and it might also be shown that affection,
though it stimulates sympathy and so usually goes with it, is not
inseparable from it, but may exist in the absence of the mental
development which true sympathy requires. Whoever has visited an
institution for the care of idiots and imbeciles must have been struck
by the exuberance with which the milk of human kindness seems to flow
from the hearts of these creatures. If kept quiet and otherwise properly
cared for they are mostly as amiable as could be wished, fully as much
so, apparently, as persons of normal development; while at the same time
they offer little or no resistance to other impulses, such as rage and
fear, that sometimes possess them. Kindliness seems to exist primarily
as an animal instinct, so deeply rooted that mental degeneracy, which
works from the top down, does not destroy it until the mind sinks to the
lower grades of idiocy.
However, the excitant of love, in all its finer aspects, is a felt
possibility of communication, a dawning of sympathetic renewal. We grow
by influence, and where we feel the presence of an influence that is
enlarging or uplifting, we begin to love. Love is the normal and usual
accompaniment of the healthy expansion of human nature by communion; and
in turn is the stimulus to more communion. It seems not to be a special
emotion in quite the same way that anger, grief, fear, and the like are,
but something more primary and general, the stream, perhaps, of which
these and many other sentiments are special channels or eddies.
Love and sympathy, then, are two things which, though distinguishable,
are very commonly found together, each being an instigator of the other;
what we love we sympathize with, so far as our mental development
permits. To be sure, it is also true that when we hate a person, with an
intimate, imaginative, human hatred, we enter into his mind, or
sympathize—any strong interest will arouse the imagination and create
some sort of sympathy—but affection is a more usual stimulus.
Love, in this sense of kindly sympathy, may have all degrees of
emotional intensity and of sympathetic penetration, from a sort of
passive good-nature, not involving imagination or mental activity of any
sort, up to an all-containing human enthusiasm, involving the fullest
action of the highest faculties, and bringing with it so strong a
conviction of complete good that the best minds have felt and taught
that God is Love. Thus understood it is not any specific sort of
emotion, at least not that alone, but a general outflowing of the mind
and heart, accompanied by that gladness that the fullest life carries
with it. When the apostle John says that God is love, and that everyone
that loveth knoweth God, he evidently means something more than personal
affection, something that knows as well as feels, that takes account of
all special aspects of life and is just to all.
Ordinary personal affection does not fill our ideal of right or justice,
but encroaches, like all special impulses. It is not at all uncommon to
wrong one person out of affection for another. If, for instance, I am
able to procure a desirable position for a friend, it may well happen
that there is another and a fitter man, whom I do not know or do not
care for, from whose point of view my action is an injurious abuse of
power. It is evident that good can be identified with no simple emotion,
but must be sought in some wider phase of life that embraces all points
of view. So far as love approaches this comprehensiveness it tends
toward justice, because the claims of all live and are adjusted in the
mind of him who has it.
“Love’s hearts are faithful but not fond,
Bound for the just but not beyond.”
Thus love of a large and symmetrical sort, not merely a narrow
tenderness, implies justice and right, since a mind that has the breadth
and insight to feel this will be sure to work out magnanimous principles
of conduct.
It is in some such sense as this, as an expansion of human nature into a
wider life, that I can best understand the use of the word love in the
writings of certain great teachers, for instance in such passages as the
following:
“What is Love, and why is it the chief good, but because it is an
overpowering enthusiasm.... He who is in love is wise and is becoming
wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing
from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it
possesses.”[35]
“A great thing is love, ever a great good; which alone makes light all
the heavy and bears equally every inequality. For its burden is not a
burden, and it makes every bitter sweet and savory.... Love would be
arisen, not held down by anything base. Love would be free, and
alienated from every worldly affection, that its intimate desire may
not be hindered, that it may not become entangled through any temporal
good fortune, nor fall through any ill. There is nothing sweeter than
love, nothing braver, nothing higher, nothing broader, nothing
joyfuller, nothing fuller or better in heaven or on earth, since love
is born of God, nor can rest save in God above all created things.
“He that loves, flies, runs, and is joyful; is free and not
restrained. He gives all for all and has all in all, since he is at
rest above all in the one highest good from which every good flows and
proceeds. He regards not gifts, but beyond all good things turns to
the giver. Love oft knows not the manner, but its heat is more than
every manner. Love feels no burden, regards not labors, strives toward
more than it attains, argues not of impossibility, since it believes
that it may and can all things. Therefore it avails for all things,
and fulfils and accomplishes much where one not a lover falls and lies
helpless.”[36]
The sense of joy, of freshness, of youth, and of the indifference of
circumstances, that comes with love, seems to be connected with its
receptive, outgoing nature. It is the fullest life, and when we have it
we feel happy because our faculties are richly employed; young because
reception is the essence of youth, and indifferent to conditions because
we feel by our present experience that welfare is independent of them.
It is when we have lost our hold upon this sort of happiness that we
begin to be anxious about security and comfort, and to take a
distrustful and pessimistic attitude toward the world in general.
In the literature of the feelings we often find that love and self are
set over against each other, as by Tennyson when he says:
“Love took up the harp of life and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight.”
Let us consider for a moment whether, or in what sense, this antithesis
is a just one.
As regards its relation to self we may, perhaps, distinguish two kinds
of love, one of which is mingled with self-feeling and the other is not.
The latter is a disinterested, contemplative joy, in feeling which the
mind loses all sense of its private existence; while the former is
active, purposeful, and appropriate, rejoicing in its object with a
sense of being one with it as against the rest of the world.
In so far as one feels the disinterested love, that which has no designs
with reference to its object, he has no sense of “I” at all, but simply
exists in something to which he feels no bounds. Of this sort, for
instance, seem to be the delight in natural beauty, in the landscape and
the shining sea, the joy and rest of art—so long as we have no thought
of production or criticism—and the admiration of persons regarding whom
we have no intentions, either of influence or imitation. It appears to
be the final perfection of this unspecialized joy that the Buddhist
sages seek in Nirvana. Love of this sort obliterates that idea of
separate personality whose life is always unsure and often painful. One
who feels it leaves the precarious self; his boat glides out upon a
wider stream; he forgets his own deformity, weakness, shame or failure,
or if he thinks of them it is to feel free of them, released from their
coil. No matter what you and I may be, if we can comprehend that which
is fair and great we may still have it, may transcend ourselves and go
out into it. It carries us beyond the sense of all individuality, either
our own or others’, into the feeling of universal and joyous life. The
“I,” the specialized self, and the passions involved with it, have a
great and necessary part to play, but they afford no continuing city;
they are so evidently transient and insecure that the idealizing mind
cannot rest in them, and is glad to forget them at times and to go out
into a life joyous and without bounds in which thought may be at peace.
But love that plans and strives is always in some degree self-love. That
is, self-feeling is correlated with individualized, purposeful thought
and action, and so begins to spring up as soon as love lingers upon
something, forms intentions and begins to act. The love of a mother for
her child is appropriative, as is apparent from the fact that it is
capable of jealousy. Its characteristic is not selflessness, by any
means, but the association of self-feeling with the idea of _her_ child.
It is no more selfless in its nature than the ambitions of a man, and
may or may not be morally superior; the idea that it involves
self-abnegation seems to spring from the crudely material notion of
personality which assumes that other persons are external to the self.
And so of all productive, specialized love. I shall say more of the self
in the next chapter, but my belief is that it is impossible to cherish
and strive for special purposes without having self-feeling about them;
without becoming more or less capable of resentment, pride, and fear
regarding them. The imaginative and sympathetic aims that are commonly
spoken of as self-renunciation are more properly an enlargement of the
self, and by no means destroy, though they may transform, the “I.” A
wholly selfless love is mere contemplation, an escape from conscious
speciality, and a dwelling in undifferentiated life. It sees all things
as one and makes no effort.
These two sorts of love are properly complementary, one corresponding to
production and giving each of us a specialized intensity and
effectiveness, while in the other we find enlargement and relief. They
are indeed closely bound together and each contributory to the other.
The self and the special love that goes with it seem to grow by a sort
of crystallization about them of elements from the wider life. The man
first loves the woman as something transcendent, divine, or universal,
which he dares not think of appropriating; but presently he begins to
claim her as _his_ in antithesis to the rest of the world, and to have
hopes, fears, and resentments regarding her; the painter loves beauty
contemplatively, and then tries to paint it; the poet delights in his
visions, and then tries to tell them, and so on. It is necessary to our
growth that we should be capable of delighting in that upon which we
have no designs, because we draw our fresh materials from this region.
The sort of self-love that is harmful is one that has hardened about a
particular object and ceased to expand. On the other hand, it seems that
the power to enter into universal life depends upon a healthy
development of the special self. “Willst du in’s Unendliche schreiten,”
said Goethe, “geh nur im Endlichen nach allen Seiten.” That which we
have achieved by special, selfful endeavor becomes a basis of inference
and sympathy, which gives a wider reach to our disinterested
contemplation. While the artist is trying to paint he forfeits the pure
joy of contemplation; he is strenuous, anxious, vain, or mortified; but
when he ceases trying he will be capable, just because of this
experience, of a fuller appreciation of beauty in general than he was
before. And so of personal affection; the winning of wife, home, and
children involves constant self-assertion, but it multiplies the power
of sympathy. We cannot, then, exalt one of these over the other; what
would seem desirable is that the self, without losing its special
purpose and vigor, should keep expanding, so that it should tend to
include more and more of what is largest and highest in the general
life.
It appears, then, that sympathy, in the sense of mental sharing or
communication, is by no means a simple matter, but that so much enters
into it as to suggest that by the time we thoroughly understood one
sympathetic experience we should be in a way to understand the social
order itself. An act of communication is a particular aspect of the
whole which we call society, and necessarily reflects that of which it
is a characteristic part. To come into touch with a friend, a leader, an
antagonist, or a book, is an act of sympathy; but it is precisely in the
totality of such acts that society consists. Even the most complex and
rigid institutions may be looked upon as consisting of innumerable
personal influences or acts of sympathy, organized, in the case of
institutions, into a definite and continuing whole by means of some
system of permanent symbols, such as laws, constitutions, sacred
writings, and the like, in which personal influences are preserved. And,
turning the matter around, we may look upon every act of sympathy as a
particular expression of the history, institutions, and tendencies of
the society in which it takes place. Every influence which you or I can
receive or impart will be characteristic of the race, the country, the
epoch, in which our personalities have grown up.
The main thing here is to bring out the _vital_ unity of every phase of
personal life, from the simplest interchange of a friendly word to the
polity of nations or of hierarchies. The common idea of the matter is
crudely mechanical—that there are persons as there are bricks and
societies as there are walls. A person, or some trait of personality or
of intercourse, is held to be the element of society, and the latter is
formed by the aggregation of these elements. Now there is no such thing
as an element of society in the sense that a brick is the element of a
wall; this is a mechanical conception quite inapplicable to vital
phenomena. I should say that living wholes have aspects but not
elements.
In the Capitoline Museum at Rome is a famous statue of Venus, which,
like many works of this kind, is ingeniously mounted upon a pivot, so
that one who wishes to study it can place it at any angle with reference
to the light that he may prefer. Thus he may get an indefinite number of
views, but in every view what he really observes, so far as he observes
intelligently, is the whole statue in a particular aspect. Even if he
fixes his attention upon the foot, or the great toe, he sees this part,
if he sees it rightly, in relation to the work as a whole. And it seems
to me that the study of human life is analogous in character. It is
expedient to divide it into manageable parts in some way; but this
division can only be a matter of aspects, not of elements. The various
chapters of this book, for instance, do not deal with separable
subjects, but merely with phases of a common subject, and the same is
true of any work in psychology, history or biology.
CHAPTER V
THE SOCIAL SELF—1. THE MEANING OF “I”
THE “EMPIRICAL SELF”—“I” AS A STATE OF FEELING—ITS RELATION TO THE
BODY—AS A SENSE OF POWER OR CAUSATION—AS A SENSE OF SPECIALITY OR
DIFFERENTIATION IN A SOCIAL LIFE—THE REFLECTED OR LOOKING-GLASS
“I”—“I” IS ROOTED IN THE PAST AND VARIES WITH SOCIAL CONDITIONS—ITS
RELATION TO HABIT—TO DISINTERESTED LOVE—HOW CHILDREN LEARN THE
MEANING OF “I”—THE SPECULATIVE OR METAPHYSICAL “I” IN CHILDREN—THE
LOOKING-GLASS “I” IN CHILDREN—THE SAME IN ADOLESCENCE—“I” IN
RELATION TO SEX—SIMPLICITY AND AFFECTATION—SOCIAL SELF-FEELING IS
UNIVERSAL.
It is well to say at the outset that by the word “self” in this
discussion is meant simply that which is designated in common speech by
the pronouns of the first person singular, “I,” “me,” “my,” “mine,” and
“myself.” “Self” and “ego” are used by metaphysicians and moralists in
many other senses, more or less remote from the “I” of daily speech and
thought, and with these I wish to have as little to do as possible. What
is here discussed is what psychologists call the empirical self, the
self that can be apprehended or verified by ordinary observation. I
qualify it by the word social not as implying the existence of a self
that is not social—for I think that the “I” of common language always
has more or less distinct reference to other people as well as the
speaker—but because I wish to emphasize and dwell upon the social aspect
of it.
Although the topic of the self is regarded as an abstruse one this
abstruseness belongs chiefly, perhaps, to the metaphysical discussion of
the “pure ego”—whatever that may be—while the empirical self should not
be very much more difficult to get hold of than other facts of the mind.
At any rate, it may be assumed that the pronouns of the first person
have a substantial, important, and not very recondite meaning, otherwise
they would not be in constant and intelligible use by simple people and
young children the world over. And since they have such a meaning why
should it not be observed and reflected upon like any other matter of
fact? As to the underlying mystery, it is no doubt real, important, and
a very fit subject of discussion by those who are competent, but I do
not see that it is a _peculiar_ mystery. I mean that it seems to be
simply a phase of the general mystery of life, not pertaining to “I”
more than to any other personal or social fact; so that here as
elsewhere those who are not attempting to penetrate the mystery may
simply ignore it. If this is a just view of the matter, “I” is merely a
fact like any other.
The distinctive thing in the idea for which the pronouns of the first
person are names is apparently a characteristic kind of feeling which
may be called the my-feeling or sense of appropriation. Almost any sort
of ideas may be associated with this feeling, and so come to be named
“I” or “mine,” but the feeling, and that alone it would seem, is the
determining factor in the matter. As Professor James says in his
admirable discussion of the self, the words “me” and “self” designate
“all the things which have the power to produce in a stream of
consciousness excitement of a certain peculiar sort.”[37] This view is
very fully set forth by Professor Hiram M. Stanley, whose work, “The
Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling,” has an extremely suggestive chapter
on self-feeling.
I do not mean that the feeling aspect of the self is necessarily more
important than any other, but that it is the immediate and decisive sign
and proof of what “I” is; there is no appeal from it; if we go behind it
it must be to study its history and conditions, not to question its
authority. But, of course, this study of history and conditions may be
quite as profitable as the direct contemplation of self-feeling. What I
would wish to do is to present each aspect in its proper light.
The emotion or feeling of self may be regarded as an instinct, doubtless
evolved in connection with its important function in stimulating and
unifying the special activities of individuals.[38] It is thus very
profoundly rooted in the history of the human race and apparently
indispensable to any plan of life at all similar to ours. It seems to
exist in a vague though vigorous form at the birth of each individual,
and, like other instinctive ideas or germs of ideas, to be defined and
developed by experience, becoming associated, or rather incorporated,
with muscular, visual and other sensations; with perceptions,
apperceptions and conceptions of every degree of complexity and of
infinite variety of content; and, especially, with personal ideas.
Meantime the feeling itself does not remain unaltered, but undergoes
differentiation and refinement just as does any other sort of crude
innate feeling. Thus, while retaining under every phase its
characteristic tone or flavor, it breaks up into innumerable
self-sentiments. And concrete self-feeling, as it exists in mature
persons, is a whole made up of these various sentiments, along with a
good deal of primitive emotion not thus broken up. It partakes fully of
the general development of the mind, but never loses that peculiar gusto
of appropriation that causes us to name a thought with a first-personal
pronoun. The other contents of the self-idea are of little use,
apparently, in defining it, because they are so extremely various. It
would be no more futile, it seems to me, to attempt to define fear by
enumerating the things that people are afraid of, than to attempt to
define “I” by enumerating the objects with which the word is associated.
Very much as fear means primarily a state of feeling, or its expression,
and not darkness, fire, lions, snakes, or other things that excite it,
so “I” means primarily self-feeling, or its expression, and not body,
clothes, treasures, ambition, honors, and the like, with which this
feeling may be connected. In either case it is possible and useful to go
behind the feeling and enquire what ideas arouse it and why they do so,
but this is in a sense a secondary investigation.
Since “I” is known to our experience primarily as a feeling, or as a
feeling-ingredient in our ideas, it cannot be described or defined
without suggesting that feeling. We are sometimes likely to fall into a
formal and empty way of talking regarding questions of emotion, by
attempting to define that which is in its nature primary and
indefinable. A formal definition of self-feeling, or indeed of any sort
of feeling, must be as hollow as a formal definition of the taste of
salt, or the color red; we can expect to know what it is only by
experiencing it. There can be no final test of the self except the way
we feel; it is that toward which we have the “my” attitude. But as this
feeling is quite as familiar to us and as easy to recall as the taste of
salt or the color red, there should be no difficulty in understanding
what is meant by it. One need only imagine some attack on his “me,” say
ridicule of his dress or an attempt to take away his property or his
child, or his good name by slander, and self-feeling immediately
appears. Indeed, he need only pronounce, with strong emphasis, one of
the self-words, like “I” or “my,” and self-feeling will be recalled by
association. Another good way is to enter by sympathy into some
self-assertive state of mind depicted in literature; as, for instance,
into that of Coriolanus when, having been sneered at as a “boy of
tears,” he cries out:
“Boy!...
If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there,
That, like an eagle in a dovecote, I
Fluttered your Volscians in Corioli;
Alone I did it.—Boy!”
Here is a self indeed, which no one can fail to feel, though he might be
unable to describe it. What a ferocious scream of the outraged ego is
that “I” at the end of the second line!
So much is written on this topic that ignores self-feeling and thus
deprives “self” of all vivid and palpable meaning, that I feel it
permissible to add a few more passages in which this feeling is forcibly
expressed. Thus in Lowell’s poem, “A Glance Behind the Curtain,”
Cromwell says:
“I, perchance,
Am one raised up by the Almighty arm
To witness some great truth to all the world.”
And his Columbus, on the bow of his vessel, soliloquizes:
“Here am I, with no friend but the sad sea,
The beating heart of this great enterprise,
Which, without me, would stiffen in swift death.”
And so the “I am the way” which we read in the New Testament is surely
the expression of a sentiment not very different from these. In the
following we have a more plaintive sentiment of self:
_Philoctetes._— And know’st thou not, O boy, whom thou dost see?
_Neoptolemus._— How can I know a man I ne’er beheld?
_Philoctetes._— And didst thou never hear my name, nor fame
Of these my ills, in which I pined away?
_Neoptolemus._— Know that I nothing know of what thou ask’st.
_Philoctetes._— O crushed with many woes, and of the Gods
Hated am I, of whom, in this my woe,
No rumor travelled homeward, nor went forth
Through any clime of Hellas.[39]
We all have thoughts of the same sort as these, and yet it is possible
to talk so coldly or mystically about the self that one begins to forget
that there is, really, any such thing.
But perhaps the best way to realize the naïve meaning of “I” is to
listen to the talk of children playing together, especially if they do
not agree very well. They use the first person with none of the
conventional self-repression of their elders, but with much emphasis and
variety of inflection, so that its emotional animus is unmistakable.
Self-feeling of a reflective and agreeable sort, an appropriative zest
of contemplation, is strongly suggested by the word “gloating.” To
gloat, in this sense, is as much as to think “mine, mine, mine,” with a
pleasant warmth of feeling. Thus a boy gloats over something he has made
with his scroll-saw, over the bird he has brought down with his gun, or
over his collection of stamps or eggs; a girl gloats over her new
clothes, and over the approving words or looks of others; a farmer over
his fields and his stock; a business man over his trade and his bank
account; a mother over her child; the poet over a successful quatrain;
the self-righteous man over the state of his soul; and in like manner
everyone gloats over the prosperity of any cherished idea.
I would not be understood as saying that self-feeling is clearly marked
off in experience from other kinds of feeling; but it is, perhaps, as
definite in this regard as anger, fear, grief, and the like. To quote
Professor James, “The emotions themselves of self-satisfaction and
abasement are of a unique sort, each as worthy to be classed as a
primitive emotional species as are, for example, rage or pain.”[40] It
is true here, as wherever mental facts are distinguished, that there are
no fences, but that one thing merges by degrees into another. Yet if “I”
did not denote an idea much the same in all minds and fairly
distinguishable from other ideas, it could not be used freely and
universally as a means of communication.
As many people have the impression that the verifiable self, the object
that we name with “I,” is usually the material body, it may be well to
say that this impression is an illusion, easily dispelled by anyone who
will undertake a simple examination of facts. It is true that when we
philosophize a little about “I” and look around for a tangible object to
which to attach it, we soon fix upon the material body as the most
available _locus_; but when we use the word naïvely, as in ordinary
speech, it is not very common to think of the body in connection with
it; not nearly so common as it is to think of other things. There is no
difficulty in testing this statement, since the word “I” is one of the
commonest in conversation and literature, so that nothing is more
practicable than to study its meaning at any length that may be desired.
One need only listen to ordinary speech until the word has occurred,
say, a hundred times, noting its connections, or observe its use in a
similar number of cases by the characters in a novel. Ordinarily it will
be found that in not more than ten cases in a hundred does “I” have
reference to the body of the person speaking. It refers chiefly to
opinions, purposes, desires, claims, and the like, concerning matters
that involve no thought of the body. _I_ think or feel so and so; _I_
wish or intend so and so; _I_ want this or that; are typical uses, the
self-feeling being associated with the view, purpose, or object
mentioned. It should also be remembered that “my” and “mine” are as much
the names of the self as “I” and these, of course, commonly refer to
miscellaneous possessions.
I had the curiosity to attempt a rough classification of the first
hundred “I’s” and “me’s” in Hamlet, with the following results. The
pronoun was used in connection with perception, as “I hear,” “I see,”
fourteen times; with thought, sentiment, intention, etc., thirty-two
times; with wish, as “I pray you,” six times; as speaking—“I’ll speak to
it”—sixteen times; as spoken to, twelve times; in connection with
action, involving perhaps some vague notion of the body, as “I came to
Denmark,” nine times; vague or doubtful, ten times; as equivalent to
bodily appearance—“No more like my father than I to Hercules”—once. Some
of the classifications are arbitrary, and another observer would
doubtless get a different result; but he could not fail, I think, to
conclude that Shakespeare’s characters are seldom thinking of their
bodies when they say “I” or “me.” And in this respect they appear to be
representative of mankind in general.
As already suggested, instinctive self-feeling is doubtless connected in
evolution with its important function in stimulating and unifying the
special activities of individuals. It appears to be associated chiefly
with ideas of the exercise of power, of being a cause, ideas that
emphasize the antithesis between the mind and the rest of the world. The
first definite thoughts that a child associates with self-feeling are
probably those of his earliest endeavors to control visible objects—his
limbs, his playthings, his bottle, and the like. Then he attempts to
control the actions of the persons about him, and so his circle of power
and of self-feeling widens without interruption to the most complex
objects of mature ambition. Although he does not say “I” or “my” during
the first year or two, yet he expresses so clearly by his actions the
feeling that adults associate with these words that we cannot deny him a
self even in the first weeks.
The correlation of self-feeling with purposeful activity is easily seen
by observing the course of any productive enterprise. If a boy sets
about making a boat, and has any success, his interest in the matter
waxes, he gloats over it, the keel and stern are dear to his heart, and
its ribs are more to him than those of his own frame. He is eager to
call in his friends and acquaintances, saying to them, “See what I am
doing! Is it not remarkable?”, feeling elated when it is praised, and
resentful or humiliated when fault is found with it. But so soon as he
finishes it and turns to something else, his self-feeling begins to fade
away from it, and in a few weeks at most he will have become
comparatively indifferent. We all know that much the same course of
feeling accompanies the achievements of adults. It is impossible to
produce a picture, a poem, an essay, a difficult bit of masonry, or any
other work of art or craft, without having self-feeling regarding it,
amounting usually to considerable excitement and desire for some sort of
appreciation; but this rapidly diminishes with the activity itself, and
often lapses into indifference after it ceases.
It may perhaps be objected that the sense of self, instead of being
limited to times of activity and definite purpose, is often most
conspicuous when the mind is unoccupied or undecided, and that the idle
and ineffectual are commonly the most sensitive in their self-esteem.
This, however, may be regarded as an instance of the principle that all
instincts are likely to assume troublesome forms when denied wholesome
expression. The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of
life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.
The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the
communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own. Self-feeling has
its chief scope _within_ the general life, not outside of it, the
special endeavor or tendency of which it is the emotional aspect finding
its principal field of exercise in a world of personal forces, reflected
in the mind by a world of personal impressions.
As connected with the thought of other persons it is always a
consciousness of the peculiar or differentiated aspect of one’s life,
because that is the aspect that has to be sustained by purpose and
endeavor, and its more aggressive forms tend to attach themselves to
whatever one finds to be at once congenial to one’s own tendencies and
at variance with those of others with whom one is in mental contact. It
is here that they are most needed to serve their function of stimulating
characteristic activity, of fostering those personal variations which
the general plan of life seems to require. Heaven, says Shakespeare,
doth divide
“The state of man in divers functions,
Setting endeavor in continual motion,”
and self-feeling is one of the means by which this diversity is
achieved.
Agreeably to this view we find that the aggressive self manifests itself
most conspicuously in an appropriativeness of objects of common desire,
corresponding to the individual’s need of power over such objects to
secure his own peculiar development, and to the danger of opposition
from others who also need them. And this extends from material objects
to lay hold, in the same spirit, of the attentions and affections of
other people, of all sorts of plans and ambitions, including the noblest
special purposes the mind can entertain, and indeed of any conceivable
idea which may come to seem a part of one’s life and in need of
assertion against someone else. The attempt to limit the word self and
its derivatives to the lower aims of personality is quite arbitrary; at
variance with common-sense as expressed by the emphatic use of “I” in
connection with the sense of duty and other high motives, and
unphilosophical as ignoring the function of the self as the organ of
specialized endeavor of higher as well as lower kinds.
That the “I” of common speech has a meaning which includes some sort of
reference to other persons is involved in the very fact that the word
and the ideas it stands for are phenomena of language and the
communicative life. It is doubtful whether it is possible to use
language at all without thinking more or less distinctly of someone
else, and certainly the things to which we give names and which have a
large place in reflective thought are almost always those which are
impressed upon us by our contact with other people. Where there is no
communication there can be no nomenclature and no developed thought.
What we call “me,” “mine,” or “myself” is, then, not something separate
from the general life, but the most interesting part of it, a part whose
interest arises from the very fact that it is both general and
individual. That is, we care for it just because it is that phase of the
mind that is living and striving in the common life, trying to impress
itself upon the minds of others. “I” is a militant social tendency,
working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of
tendencies. So far as it can it waxes, as all life does. To think of it
as apart from society is a palpable absurdity of which no one could be
guilty who really _saw_ it as a fact of life.
“Der Mensch erkennt sich nur im Menschen, nur
Das Leben lehret jedem was er sei.”[41]
If a thing has no relation to others of which one is conscious he is
unlikely to think of it at all, and if he does think of it he cannot, it
seems to me, regard it as emphatically _his_. The appropriative sense is
always the shadow, as it were, of the common life, and when we have it
we have a sense of the latter in connection with it. Thus, if we think
of a secluded part of the woods as “ours,” it is because we think, also,
that others do not go there. As regards the body I doubt if we have a
vivid my-feeling about any part of it which is not thought of, however
vaguely, as having some actual or possible reference to someone else.
Intense self-consciousness regarding it arises along with instincts or
experiences which connect it with the thought of others. Internal
organs, like the liver, are not thought of as peculiarly ours unless we
are trying to communicate something regarding them, as, for instance,
when they are giving us trouble and we are trying to get sympathy.
“I,” then, is not all of the mind, but a peculiarly central, vigorous,
and well-knit portion of it, not separate from the rest but gradually
merging into it, and yet having a certain practical distinctness, so
that a man generally shows clearly enough by his language and behavior
what his “I” is as distinguished from thoughts he does not appropriate.
It may be thought of, as already suggested, under the analogy of a
central colored area on a lighted wall. It might also, and perhaps more
justly, be compared to the nucleus of a living cell, not altogether
separate from the surrounding matter, out of which indeed it is formed,
but more active and definitely organized.
The reference to other persons involved in the sense of self may be
distinct and particular, as when a boy is ashamed to have his mother
catch him at something she has forbidden, or it may be vague and
general, as when one is ashamed to do something which only his
conscience, expressing his sense of social responsibility, detects and
disapproves; but it is always there. There is no sense of “I,” as in
pride or shame, without its correlative sense of you, or he, or they.
Even the miser gloating over his hidden gold can feel the “mine” only as
he is aware of the world of men over whom he has secret power; and the
case is very similar with all kinds of hid treasure. Many painters,
sculptors, and writers have loved to withhold their work from the world,
fondling it in seclusion until they were quite done with it; but the
delight in this, as in all secrets, depends upon a sense of the value of
what is concealed.
In a very large and interesting class of cases the social reference
takes the form of a somewhat definite imagination of how one’s self—that
is any idea he appropriates—appears in a particular mind, and the kind
of self-feeling one has is determined by the attitude toward this
attributed to that other mind. A social self of this sort might be
called the reflected or looking-glass self:
“Each to each a looking-glass
Reflects the other that doth pass.”
As we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass, and are interested
in them because they are ours, and pleased or otherwise with them
according as they do or do not answer to what we should like them to be;
so in imagination we perceive in another’s mind some thought of our
appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are
variously affected by it.
A self-idea of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the
imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of
his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as
pride or mortification. The comparison with a looking-glass hardly
suggests the second element, the imagined judgment, which is quite
essential. The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere
mechanical reflection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment, the
imagined effect of this reflection upon another’s mind. This is evident
from the fact that the character and weight of that other, in whose mind
we see ourselves, makes all the difference with our feeling. We are
ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man,
cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined
one, and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments
of the other mind. A man will boast to one person of an action—say some
sharp transaction in trade—which he would be ashamed to own to another.
It should be evident that the ideas that are associated with
self-feeling and form the intellectual content of the self cannot be
covered by any simple description, as by saying that the body has such a
part in it, friends such a part, plans so much, etc., but will vary
indefinitely with particular temperaments and environments. The tendency
of the self, like every aspect of personality, is expressive of
far-reaching hereditary and social factors, and is not to be understood
or predicted except in connection with the general life. Although
special, it is in no way separate—speciality and separateness are not
only different but contradictory, since the former implies connection
with a whole. The object of self-feeling is affected by the general
course of history, by the particular development of nations, classes,
and professions, and other conditions of this sort.
The truth of this is perhaps most decisively shown in the fact that even
those ideas that are most generally associated or colored with the “my”
feeling, such as one’s idea of his visible person, of his name, his
family, his intimate friends, his property, and so on, are not
universally so associated, but may be separated from the self by
peculiar social conditions. Thus the ascetics, who have played so large
a part in the history of Christianity and of other religions and
philosophies, endeavored not without success to divorce their
appropriative thought from all material surroundings, and especially
from their physical persons, which they sought to look upon as
accidental and degrading circumstances of the soul’s earthly sojourn. In
thus estranging themselves from their bodies, from property and comfort,
from domestic affections—whether of wife or child, mother, brother or
sister—and from other common objects of ambition, they certainly gave a
singular direction to self-feeling, but they did not destroy it: there
can be no doubt that the instinct, which seems imperishable so long as
mental vigor endures, found other ideas to which to attach itself; and
the strange and uncouth forms which ambition took in those centuries
when the solitary, filthy, idle, and sense-tormenting anchorite was a
widely accepted ideal of human life, are a matter of instructive study
and reflection. Even in the highest exponents of the ascetic ideal, like
St. Jerome, it is easy to see that the discipline, far from effacing the
self, only concentrated its energy in lofty and unusual channels. The
self-idea may be that of some great moral reform, of a religious creed,
of the destiny of one’s soul after death, or even a cherished conception
of the deity. Thus devout writers, like George Herbert and Thomas à
Kempis, often address _my_ God, not at all conventionally as I conceive
the matter, but with an intimate sense of appropriation. And it has been
observed that the demand for the continued and separate existence of the
individual soul after death is an expression of self-feeling, as by J.
A. Symonds, who thinks that it is connected with the intense egotism and
personality of the European races, and asserts that the millions of
Buddhism shrink from it with horror.[42]
Habit and familiarity are not of themselves sufficient to cause an idea
to be appropriated into the self. Many habits and familiar objects that
have been forced upon us by circumstances rather than chosen for their
congeniality remain external and possibly repulsive to the self; and, on
the other hand, a novel but very congenial element in experience, like
the idea of a new toy, or, if you please, Romeo’s idea of Juliet, is
often appropriated almost immediately, and becomes, for the time at
least, the very heart of the self. Habit has the same fixing and
consolidating action in the growth of the self that it has elsewhere,
but is not its distinctive characteristic.
As suggested in the previous chapter, self-feeling may be regarded as in
a sense the antithesis, or better perhaps, the complement, of that
disinterested and contemplative love that tends to obliterate the sense
of a divergent individuality. Love of this sort has no sense of bounds,
but is what we feel when we are expanding and assimilating new and
indeterminate experience, while self-feeling accompanies the
appropriating, delimiting, and defending of a certain part of
experience; the one impels us to receive life, the other to individuate
it. The self, from this point of view, might be regarded as a sort of
citadel of the mind, fortified without and containing selected treasures
within, while love is an undivided share in the rest of the universe. In
a healthy mind each contributes to the growth of the other: what we love
intensely or for a long time we are likely to bring within the citadel,
and to assert as part of ourself. On the other hand, it is only on the
basis of a substantial self that a person is capable of progressive
sympathy or love.
The sickness of either is to lack the support of the other. There is no
health in a mind except as it keeps expanding, taking in fresh life,
feeling love and enthusiasm; and so long as it does this its
self-feeling is likely to be modest and generous; since these sentiments
accompany that sense of the large and the superior which love implies.
But if love closes, the self contracts and hardens: the mind having
nothing else to occupy its attention and give it that change and renewal
it requires, busies itself more and more with self-feeling, which takes
on narrow and disgusting forms, like avarice, arrogance, and fatuity. It
is necessary that we should have self-feeling about a matter during its
conception and execution; but when it is accomplished or has failed the
self ought to break loose and escape, renewing its skin like the snake,
as Thoreau says. No matter what a man does, he is not fully sane or
human unless there is a spirit of freedom in him, a soul unconfined by
purpose and larger than the practicable world. And this is really what
those mean who inculcate the suppression of the self; they mean that its
rigidity must be broken up by growth and renewal, that it must be more
or less decisively “born again.” A healthy, self must be both vigorous
and plastic, a nucleus of solid, well-knit private purpose and feeling,
guided and nourished by sympathy.
The view that “self” and the pronouns of the first person are names
which the race has learned to apply to an instinctive attitude of mind,
and which each child in turn learns to apply in a similar way, was
impressed upon me by observing my child M. at the time when she was
learning to use these pronouns. When she was two years and two weeks old
I was surprised to discover that she had a clear notion of the first and
second persons when used possessively. When asked, “Where is your nose?”
she would put her hand upon it and say “my.” She also understood that
when someone else said “my” and touched an object, it meant something
opposite to what was meant when she touched the same object and used the
same word. Now, anyone who will exercise his imagination upon the
question how this matter must appear to a mind having no means of
knowing anything about “I” and “my” except what it learns by hearing
them used, will see that it should be very puzzling. Unlike other words,
the personal pronouns have, apparently, no uniform meaning, but convey
different and even opposite ideas when employed by different persons. It
seems remarkable that children should master the problem before they
arrive at considerable power of abstract reasoning. How should a little
girl of two, not particularly reflective, have discovered that “my” was
not the sign of a definite object like other words, but meant something
different with each person who used it? And, still more surprising, how
should she have achieved the correct use of it with reference to herself
which, it would seem, _could not be copied from anyone else_, simply
because no one else used it to describe what belonged to her? The
meaning of words is learned by associating them with other phenomena.
But how is it possible to learn the meaning of one which, as used by
others, is never associated with the same phenomenon as when properly
used by one’s self? Watching her use of the first person, I was at once
struck with the fact that she employed it almost wholly in a possessive
sense, and that, too, when in an aggressive, self-assertive mood. It was
extremely common to see R. tugging at one end of a plaything and M. at
the other, screaming, “My, my.” “Me” was sometimes nearly equivalent to
“my,” and was also employed to call attention to herself when she wanted
something done for her. Another common use of “my” was to demand
something she did not have at all. Thus if R. had something the like of
which she wanted, say a cart, she would exclaim, “Where’s _my_ cart?”
It seemed to me that she might have learned the use of these pronouns
about as follows. The self-feeling had always been there. From the first
week she had wanted things and cried and fought for them. She had also
become familiar by observation and opposition with similar appropriative
activities on the part of R. Thus she not only had the feeling herself,
but by associating it with its visible expression had probably divined
it, sympathized with it, resented it, in others. Grasping, tugging, and
screaming would be associated with the feeling in her own case and would
recall the feeling when observed in others. They would constitute a
language, precedent to the use of first-personal pronouns, to express
the self-idea. All was ready, then, for the word to name this
experience. She now observed that R., when contentiously appropriating
something, frequently exclaimed, “_my_,” “_mine_,” “give it to _me_,”
“_I_ want it,” and the like. Nothing more natural, then, than that she
should adopt these words as names for a frequent and vivid experience
with which she was already familiar in her own case and had learned to
attribute to others. Accordingly it appeared to me, as I recorded in my
notes at the time, that “‘my’ and ‘mine’ are simply names for concrete
images of appropriativeness,” embracing both the appropriative feeling
and its manifestation. If this is true the child does not at first work
out the I-and-you idea in an abstract form. The first-personal pronoun
is a sign of a concrete thing after all, but that thing is not primarily
the child’s body, or his muscular sensations as such, but the phenomenon
of aggressive appropriation, practised by himself, witnessed in others,
and incited and interpreted by a hereditary instinct. This seems to get
over the difficulty above mentioned, namely, the seeming lack of a
common content between the meaning of “my” when used by another and when
used by one’s self. This common content is found in the appropriative
feeling and the visible and audible signs of that feeling. An element of
difference and strife comes in, of course, in the opposite actions or
purposes which the “my” of another and one’s own “my” are likely to
stand for. When another person says “mine” regarding something which I
claim, I sympathize with him enough to understand what he means, but it
is a hostile sympathy, overpowered by another and more vivid “mine”
connected with the idea of drawing the object my way.
In other words, the meaning of “I” and “mine” is learned in the same way
that the meanings of hope, regret, chagrin, disgust, and thousands of
other words of emotion and sentiment are learned: that is, by having the
feeling, imputing it to others in connection with some kind of
expression, and hearing the word along with it. As to its communication
and growth the self-idea is in no way peculiar that I see, but
essentially like other ideas. In its more complex forms, such as are
expressed by “I” in conversation and literature, it is a social
sentiment, or type of sentiments, defined and developed by intercourse,
in the manner suggested in a previous chapter.
R., though a more reflective child than M., was much slower in
understanding these pronouns, and in his thirty-fifth month had not yet
straightened them out, sometimes calling his father “me.” I imagine that
this was partly because he was placid and uncontentious in his earliest
years, manifesting little social self-feeling, but chiefly occupied with
impersonal experiment and reflection; and partly because he saw little
of other children by antithesis to whom his self could be awakened. M.,
on the other hand, coming later, had R.’s opposition on which to whet
her naturally keen appropriativeness. And her society had a marked
effect in developing self-feeling in R., who found self-assertion
necessary to preserve his playthings, or anything else capable of
appropriation. He learned the use of “my,” however, when he was about
three years old, before M. was born. He doubtless acquired it in his
dealings with his parents. Thus he would perhaps notice his mother
claiming the scissors as _mine_ and seizing upon them, and would be
moved sympathetically to claim something in the same way—connecting the
word with the act and the feeling rather than the object. But as I had
not the problem clearly in mind at that time I made no satisfactory
observations.
I imagine, then, that as a rule the child associates “I” and “me” at
first only with those ideas regarding which his appropriative feeling is
aroused and defined by opposition. He appropriates his nose, eye, or
foot in very much the same way as a plaything—by antithesis to other
noses, eyes, and feet, which he cannot control. It is not uncommon to
tease little children by proposing to take away one of these organs, and
they behave precisely as if the “mine” threatened were a separable
object—which it might be for all they know. And, as I have suggested,
even in adult life, “I,” “me,” and “mine” are applied with a strong
sense of their meaning only to things distinguished as peculiar to us by
some sort of opposition or contrast. They always imply social life and
relation to other persons. That which is most distinctively mine is very
private, it is true, but it is that part of the private which I am
cherishing in antithesis to the rest of the world, not the separate but
the special. The aggressive self is essentially a militant phase of the
mind, having for its apparent function the energizing of peculiar
activities, and although the militancy may not go on in an obvious,
external manner, it always exists as a mental attitude.
In some of the best-known discussions of the development of the sense of
self in children the chief emphasis has been placed upon the speculative
or quasi-metaphysical ideas concerning “I” which children sometimes
formulate as a result either of questions from their elders, or of the
independent development of a speculative instinct. The most obvious
result of these inquiries is to show that a child, when he reflects upon
the self in this manner, usually locates “I” in the body. Interesting
and important as this juvenile metaphysics is, as one phase of mental
development, it should certainly not be taken as an adequate expression
of the childish sense of self, and probably President G. Stanley Hall,
who has collected valuable material of this kind, does not so take
it.[43] This analysis of the “I,” asking one’s self just where it is
located, whether particular limbs are embraced in it, and the like, is
somewhat remote from the ordinary, naïve use of the word, with children
as with grown people. In my own children I only once observed anything
of this sort, and that was in the case of R., when he was struggling to
achieve the correct use of his pronouns; and a futile, and as I now
think mistaken, attempt was made to help him by pointing out the
association of the word with his body. On the other hand, every child
who has learned to talk uses “I,” “me,” “mine,” and the like hundreds of
times a day, with great emphasis, in the simple, naïve way that the race
has used them for thousands of years. In this usage they refer to claims
upon playthings, to assertions of one’s peculiar will or purpose, as
“_I_ don’t want to do it that way,” “_I_ am going to draw a kitty,” and
so on, rarely to any part of the body. And when a part of the body is
meant it is usually by way of claiming approval for it, as “Don’t I look
nice?” so that the object of chief interest is after all another
person’s attitude. The speculative “I,” though a true “I,” is not the
“I” of common speech and workaday usefulness, but almost as remote from
ordinary thought as the ego of metaphysicians, of which, indeed, it is
an immature example.
That children, when in this philosophizing state of mind, usually refer
“I” to the physical body, is easily explained by the fact that their
materialism, natural to all crude speculation, needs to locate the self
somewhere, and the body, the one tangible thing over which they have
continuous power, seems the most available home for it.
The process by which self-feeling of the looking-glass sort develops in
children may be followed without much difficulty. Studying the movements
of others as closely as they do they soon see a connection between their
own acts and changes in those movements; that is, they perceive their
own influence or power over persons. The child appropriates the visible
actions of his parent or nurse, over which he finds he has some control,
in quite the same way as he appropriates one of his own members or a
plaything, and he will try to do things with this new possession, just
as he will with his hand or his rattle. A girl six months old will
attempt in the most evident and deliberate manner to attract attention
to herself, to set going by her actions some of those movements of other
persons that she has appropriated. She has tasted the joy of being a
cause, of exerting social power, and wishes more of it. She will tug at
her mother’s skirts, wriggle, gurgle, stretch out her arms, etc., all
the time watching for the hoped-for effect. These performances often
give the child, even at this age, an appearance of what is called
affectation, that is she seems to be unduly preoccupied with what other
people think of her. Affectation, at any age, exists when the passion to
influence others seems to overbalance the established character and give
it an obvious twist or pose. It is instructive to find that even Darwin
was, in his childhood, capable of departing from truth for the sake of
making an impression. “For instance,” he says in his autobiography, “I
once gathered much valuable fruit from my father’s trees and hid it in
the shrubbery, and then ran in breathless haste to spread the news that
I had discovered a hoard of stolen fruit.”[44]
The young performer soon learns to be different things to different
people, showing that he begins to apprehend personality and to foresee
its operation. If the mother or nurse is more tender than just she will
almost certainly be “worked” by systematic weeping. It is a matter of
common observation that children often behave worse with their mother
than with other and less sympathetic people. Of the new persons that a
child sees it is evident that some make a strong impression and awaken a
desire to interest and please them, while others are indifferent or
repugnant. Sometimes the reason can be perceived or guessed, sometimes
not; but the fact of selective interest, admiration, prestige, is
obvious before the end of the second year. By that time a child already
cares much for the reflection of himself upon one personality and little
for that upon another. Moreover, he soon claims intimate and tractable
persons as _mine_, classes them among his other possessions, and
maintains his ownership against all comers. M., at three years of age,
vigorously resented R.’s claim upon their mother. The latter was “_my_
mamma,” whenever the point was raised.
Strong joy and grief depend upon the treatment this rudimentary social
self receives. In the case of M. I noticed as early as the fourth month
a “hurt” way of crying which seemed to indicate a sense of personal
slight. It was quite different from the cry of pain or that of anger,
but seemed about the same as the cry of fright. The slightest tone of
reproof would produce it. On the other hand, if people took notice and
laughed and encouraged, she was hilarious. At about fifteen months old
she had become “a perfect little actress,” seeming to live largely in
imaginations of her effect upon other people. She constantly and
obviously laid traps for attention, and looked abashed or wept at any
signs of disapproval or indifference. At times it would seem as if she
could not get over these repulses, but would cry long in a grieved way,
refusing to be comforted. If she hit upon any little trick that made
people laugh she would be sure to repeat it, laughing loudly and
affectedly in imitation. She had quite a repertory of these small
performances, which she would display to a sympathetic audience, or even
try upon strangers. I have seen her at sixteen months, when R. refused
to give her the scissors, sit down and make believe cry, putting up her
under lip and snuffling, meanwhile looking up now and then to see what
effect she was producing.[45]
In such phenomena we have plainly enough, it seems to me, the germ of
personal ambition of every sort. Imagination co-operating with
instinctive self-feeling has already created a social “I,” and this has
become a principal object of interest and endeavor.
Progress from this point is chiefly in the way of a greater
definiteness, fulness, and inwardness in the imagination of the other’s
state of mind. A little child thinks of and tries to elicit certain
visible or audible phenomena, and does not go back of them; but what a
grown-up person desires to produce in others is an internal, invisible
condition which his own richer experience enables him to imagine, and of
which expression is only the sign. Even adults, however, make no
separation between what other people think and the visible expression of
that thought. They imagine the whole thing at once, and their idea
differs from that of a child chiefly in the comparative richness and
complexity of the elements that accompany and interpret the visible or
audible sign. There is also a progress from the naïve to the subtle in
socially self-assertive action. A child obviously and simply, at first,
does things for effect. Later there is an endeavor to suppress the
appearance of doing so; affection, indifference, contempt, etc., are
simulated to hide the real wish to affect the self-image. It is
perceived that an obvious seeking after good opinion is weak and
disagreeable.
I doubt whether there are any regular stages in the development of
social self-feeling and expression common to the majority of children.
The sentiments of self develop by imperceptible gradations out of the
crude appropriative instinct of new-born babes, and their manifestations
vary indefinitely in different cases. Many children show
“self-consciousness” conspicuously from the first half year; others have
little appearance of it at any age. Still others pass through periods of
affectation whose length and time of occurrence would probably be found
to be exceedingly various. In childhood, as at all times of life,
absorption in some idea other than that of the social self tends to
drive “self-consciousness” out.
Nearly everyone, however, whose turn of mind is at all imaginative goes
through a season of passionate self-feeling during adolescence, when,
according to current belief, the social impulses are stimulated in
connection with the rapid development of the functions of sex. This is a
time of hero-worship, of high resolve, of impassioned reverie, of vague
but fierce ambition, of strenuous imitation that seems affected, of
_gêne_ in the presence of the other sex or of superior persons, and so
on.
Many autobiographies describe the social self-feeling of youth which, in
the case of strenuous, susceptible natures, prevented by weak health or
uncongenial surroundings from gaining the sort of success proper to that
age, often attains extreme intensity. This is quite generally the case
with the youth of men of genius, whose exceptional endowment and
tendencies usually isolate them more or less from the ordinary life
about them. In the autobiography of John Addington Symonds we have an
account of the feelings of an ambitious boy suffering from ill-health,
plainness of feature—peculiarly mortifying to his strong æsthetic
instincts—and mental backwardness. “I almost resented the attentions
paid me as my father’s son, ... I regarded them as acts of charitable
condescension. Thus I passed into an attitude of haughty shyness which
had nothing respectable in it except a sort of self-reliant,
world-defiant pride, a resolution to effectuate myself, and to win what
I wanted by my exertions.... I vowed to raise myself somehow or other to
eminence of some sort.... I felt no desire for wealth, no mere wish to
cut a figure in society. But I thirsted with intolerable thirst for
eminence, for recognition as a personality.[46]... The main thing which
sustained me was a sense of self—imperious, antagonistic,
unmalleable.[47]... My external self in these many ways was being
perpetually snubbed, and crushed, and mortified. Yet the inner self
hardened after a dumb, blind fashion. I kept repeating, ‘Wait, wait. I
will, I shall, I must.’”[48] At Oxford he overhears a conversation in
which his abilities are depreciated and it is predicted that he will not
get his “first.” “The sting of it remained in me; and though I cared
little enough for first classes, I then and there resolved that I would
win the best first of my year. This kind of grit in me has to be
notified. Nothing aroused it so much as a seeming slight, exciting my
rebellious manhood.”[49] Again he exclaims, “I look round me and find
nothing in which I excel.”[50]... “I fret because I do not realize
ambition, because I have no active work, and cannot win a position of
importance like other men.”[51]
This sort of thing is familiar in literature, and very likely in our own
experience. It seems worth while to recall it and to point out that this
primal need of self-effectuation, to adopt Mr. Symonds’s phrase, is the
essence of ambition, and always has for its object the production of
some effect upon the minds of other people. We feel in the quotations
above the indomitable surging up of the individualizing, militant force
of which self-feeling seems to be the organ.
Sex-difference in the development of the social self is apparent from
the first. Girls have, as a rule, a more impressible social sensibility;
they care more obviously for the social image, study it, reflect upon it
more, and so have even during the first year an appearance of subtlety,
_finesse_, often of affectation, in which boys are comparatively
lacking. Boys are more taken up with muscular activity for its own sake
and with construction, their imaginations are occupied somewhat less
with persons and more with things. In a girl _das ewig Weibliche_, not
easy to describe but quite unmistakable, appears as soon as she begins
to take notice of people, and one phase of it is certainly an ego less
simple and stable, a stronger impulse to go over to the other person’s
point of view and to stake joy and grief on the image in his mind. There
can be no doubt that women are as a rule more dependent upon immediate
personal support and corroboration than are men. The thought of the
woman needs to fix itself upon some person in whose mind she can find a
stable and compelling image of herself by which to live. If such an
image is found, either in a visible or an ideal person, the power of
devotion to it becomes a source of strength. But it is a sort of
strength dependent upon this personal complement, without which the
womanly character is somewhat apt to become a derelict and drifting
vessel. Men being built more for aggression, have, relatively, a greater
power of standing alone. But no one can really stand alone, and the
appearance of it is due simply to a greater momentum and continuity of
character which stores up the past and resists immediate influences.
Directly or indirectly the imagination of how we appear to others is a
controlling force in all normal minds.
The vague but potent phases of the self associated with the instinct of
sex may be regarded, like other phases, as expressive of a need to exert
power and as having reference to personal function. The youth, I take
it, is bashful precisely because he is conscious of the vague stirring
of an aggressive instinct which he does not know how either to
effectuate or to ignore. And it is perhaps much the same with the other
sex: the bashful are always aggressive at heart; they are conscious of
an interest in the other person, of a need to be something to him. And
the more developed sexual passion, in both sexes, is very largely an
emotion of power, domination, or appropriation. There is no state of
feeling that says “mine, mine,” more fiercely. The need to be
appropriated or dominated which, in women at least, is equally powerful,
is of the same nature at bottom, having for its object the attracting to
itself of a masterful passion. “The desire of the man is for the woman,
but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.”[52]
Although boys have generally a less impressionable social self than
girls, there is great difference among them in this regard. Some of them
have a marked tendency to _finesse_ and posing, while others have almost
none. The latter have a less vivid personal imagination; they are
unaffected chiefly, perhaps, because they have no vivid idea of how they
seem to others, and so are not moved to seem rather than to be; they are
unresentful of slights because they do not feel them, not ashamed or
jealous or vain or proud or remorseful, because all these imply
imagination of another’s mind. I have known children who showed no
tendency whatever to lie; in fact, could not understand the nature or
object of lying or of any sort of concealment, as in such games as
hide-and-coop. This excessively simple way of looking at things may come
from unusual absorption in the observation and analysis of the
impersonal, as appeared to be the case with R., whose interest in other
facts and their relations so much preponderated over his interest in
personal attitudes that there was no temptation to sacrifice the former
to the latter. A child of this sort gives the impression of being
non-moral; he neither sins nor repents, and has not the knowledge of
good and evil. We eat of the tree of this knowledge when we begin to
imagine the minds of others, and so become aware of that conflict of
personal impulses which conscience aims to allay.
Simplicity is a pleasant thing in children, or at any age, but it is not
necessarily admirable, nor is affectation altogether a thing of evil. To
be normal, to be at home in the world, with a prospect of power,
usefulness, or success, the person must have that imaginative insight
into other minds that underlies tact and _savoir faire_, morality, and
beneficence. This insight involves sophistication, some understanding
and sharing of the clandestine impulses of human nature. A simplicity
that is merely the lack of this insight indicates a sort of defect.
There is, however, another kind of simplicity, belonging to a character
that is subtle and sensitive, but has sufficient force and mental
clearness to keep in strict order the many impulses to which it is open,
and so preserve its directness and unity. One may be simple like Simple
Simon, or in the sense that Emerson meant when he said, “To be simple is
to be great.” Affectation, vanity and the like, indicate the lack of
proper assimilation of the influences arising from our sense of what
others think of us. Instead of these influences working upon the
individual gradually and without disturbing his equilibrium, they
overbear him so that he appears to be not himself, posing, out of
function, and hence silly, weak, contemptible. The affected smile, the
“foolish face of praise” is a type of all affectation, an external,
put-on thing, a weak and fatuous petition for approval. Whenever one is
growing rapidly, learning eagerly, preoccupied with strange ideals, he
is in danger of this loss of equilibrium; and so we notice it in
sensitive children, especially girls, in young people between fourteen
and twenty, and at all ages in persons of unstable individuality.
This disturbance of our equilibrium by the outgoing of the imagination
toward another person’s point of view means that we are undergoing his
influence. In the presence of one whom we feel to be of importance there
is a tendency to enter into and adopt, by sympathy, his judgment of
ourself, to put a new value on ideas and purposes, to recast life in his
image. With a very sensitive person this tendency is often evident to
others in ordinary conversation and in trivial matters. By force of an
impulse springing directly from the delicacy of his perceptions he is
continually imagining how he appears to his interlocutor, and accepting
the image, for the moment, as himself. If the other appears to think him
well-informed on some recondite matter, he is likely to assume a learned
expression; if thought judicious he looks as if he were, if accused of
dishonesty he appears guilty, and so on. In short, a sensitive man, in
the presence of an impressive personality, tends to become, for the
time, his interpretation of what the other thinks he is. It is only the
heavy-minded who will not feel this to be true, in some degree, of
themselves. Of course it is usually a temporary and somewhat superficial
phenomenon; but it is typical of all ascendency, and helps us to
understand how persons have power over us through some hold upon our
imaginations, and how our personality grows and takes form by divining
the appearance of our present self to other minds.
So long as a character is open and capable of growth it retains a
corresponding impressibility, which is not weakness unless it swamps the
assimilating and organizing faculty. I know men whose careers are a
proof of stable and aggressive character who have an almost feminine
sensitiveness regarding their seeming to others. Indeed, if one sees a
man whose attitude toward others is always assertive, never receptive,
he may be confident that man will never go far, because he will never
learn much. In character, as in every phase of life, health requires a
just union of stability with plasticity.
There is a vague excitement of the social self more general than any
particular emotion or sentiment. Thus the mere presence of people, a
“sense of other persons,” as Professor Baldwin says, and an awareness of
their observation, often causes a vague discomfort, doubt, and tension.
One feels that there is a social image of himself lurking about, and not
knowing what it is he is obscurely alarmed. Many people, perhaps most,
feel more or less agitation and embarrassment under the observation of
strangers, and for some even sitting in the same room with unfamiliar or
uncongenial people is harassing and exhausting. It is well known, for
instance, that a visit from a stranger would often cost Darwin his
night’s sleep, and many similar examples could be collected from the
records of men of letters. At this point, however, it is evident that we
approach the borders of mental pathology.
Possibly some will think that I exaggerate the importance of social
self-feeling by taking persons and periods of life that are abnormally
sensitive. But I believe that with all normal and human people it
remains, in one form or another, the mainspring of endeavor and a chief
interest of the imagination throughout life. As is the case with other
feelings, we do not think much of it so long as it is moderately and
regularly gratified. Many people of balanced mind and congenial activity
scarcely know that they care what others think of them, and will deny,
perhaps with indignation, that such care is an important factor in what
they are and do. But this is illusion. If failure or disgrace arrives,
if one suddenly finds that the faces of men show coldness or contempt
instead of the kindliness and deference that he is used to, he will
perceive from the shock, the fear, the sense of being outcast and
helpless, that he was living in the minds of others without knowing it,
just as we daily walk the solid ground without thinking how it bears us
up. This fact is so familiar in literature, especially in modern novels,
that it ought to be obvious enough. The works of George Eliot are
particularly strong in the exposition of it. In most of her novels there
is some character like Mr. Bulstrode in “Middlemarch” or Mr. Jermyn in
“Felix Holt,” whose respectable and long-established social image of
himself is shattered by the coming to light of hidden truth.
It is true, however, that the attempt to describe the social self and to
analyze the mental processes that enter into it almost unavoidably makes
it appear more reflective and “self-conscious” than it usually is. Thus
while some readers will be able to discover in themselves a quite
definite and deliberate contemplation of the reflected self, others will
perhaps find nothing but a sympathetic impulse, so simple that it can
hardly be made the object of distinct thought. Many people whose
behavior shows that their idea of themselves is largely caught from the
persons they are with, are yet quite innocent of any intentional posing;
it is a matter of subconscious impulse or mere suggestion. The self of
very sensitive but non-reflective minds is of this character.
CHAPTER VI
THE SOCIAL SELF—2. VARIOUS PHASES OF “I”
EGOTISM AND SELFISHNESS—THE USE OF “I” IN LITERATURE AND
CONVERSATION—INTENSE SELF-FEELING NECESSARY TO PRODUCTIVITY—OTHER
PHASES OF THE SOCIAL SELF—PRIDE _versus_ VANITY—SELF-RESPECT,
HONOR, SELF-REVERENCE—HUMILITY—MALADIES OF THE SOCIAL
SELF—WITHDRAWAL—SELF-TRANSFORMATION—PHASES OF THE SELF CAUSED BY
INCONGRUITY BETWEEN THE PERSON AND HIS SURROUNDINGS.
If self and the self-seeking that springs from it are healthy and
respectable traits of human nature, then what are those things which we
call egotism and selfishness,[53] and which are so commonly regarded as
objectionable? The answer to this appears to be that it is not
self-assertion as such that we stigmatize by these names, but the
assertion of a kind or phase of self that is obnoxious to us. So long as
we agree with a man’s thoughts and aims we do not think of him as
selfish or egotistical, however urgently he may assert them; but so soon
as we cease to agree, while he continues persistent and perhaps
intrusive, we are likely to say hard things about him. It is at bottom a
matter of moral judgment, not to be comprised in any simple definition,
but to be determined by conscience after the whole situation is taken
into account. In this regard it is essentially one with the more general
question of misconduct or personal badness. There is no distinct line
between the behavior which we mildly censure as selfish and that which
we call wicked or criminal; it is only a matter of degree.
It is quite apparent that mere self-assertion is not looked upon as
selfishness. There is nothing more respected—and even liked—than a
persistent and successful pursuit of one’s peculiar aims, so long as
this is done within the accepted limits of fairness and consideration
for others. Thus one who has acquired ten millions must have expressed
his appropriative instinct with much energy and constancy, but
reasonable people do not conclude that he is selfish unless it appears
that he has ignored social sentiments by which he should have been
guided. If he has been dishonest, mean, hard, or the like, they will
condemn him.
The men we admire most, including those we look upon as peculiarly good,
are invariably men of notable self-assertion. Thus Martin Luther, to
take a conspicuous instance, was a man of the most intense self-feeling,
resentful of opposition, dogmatic, with “an absolute confidence in the
infallibility, practically speaking, of his own judgment.” This is a
trait belonging to nearly all great leaders, and a main cause of their
success. That which distinguishes Luther from the vulgarly ambitious and
aggressive people we know is not the quality of his self-feeling, but
the fact that it was identified in his imagination and endeavors with
sentiments and purposes that we look upon as noble, progressive, or
right. No one could be more ambitious than he was, or more determined to
secure the social aggrandizement of his self; but in his case the self
for which he was ambitious and resentful consisted largely of certain
convictions regarding justification by faith, the sacrilege of the sale
of indulgences, and, more generally, of an enfranchising spirit and mode
of thought fit to awaken and lead the aspiration of the time.
It is evident enough that in this respect Luther is typical of
aggressive reformers in our own and every other time. Does not every
efficient clergyman, philanthropist, or teacher become such by
identifying some worthy object with a vigorous self-feeling? Is it ever
really possible to separate the feeling for the cause from the feeling
that it is _my_ cause? I doubt whether it is. Some of the greatest and
purest founders and propagators of religion have been among the greatest
egotists in the sense that they openly identified the idea of good with
the idea of self, and spoke of the two interchangeably. And I cannot
think of any strong man I have known, however good, who does not seem to
me to have had intense self-feeling about his cherished affair; though
if his affair was a large and helpful one no one would call him selfish.
Since the judgment that a man is or is not selfish is a question of
sympathies, it naturally follows that people easily disagree regarding
it, their views depending much upon their temperaments and habits of
thought. There are probably few energetic persons who do not make an
impression of egotism upon some of their acquaintances; and, on the
other hand, how many there are whose selfishness seems obvious to most
people, but is not apparent to their wives, sisters and mothers. In so
far as our self is identified with that of another it is, of course,
unlikely that the aims of the latter should be obnoxious to us.
If we should question many persons as to why they thought this or that
man selfish, a common answer would probably be, “He does not consider
other people.” What this means is that he is inappreciative of the
social situation as we see it; that the situation does not awaken in him
the same personal sentiments that it does in us, and so his action
wounds those sentiments. Thus the commonest and most obvious form of
selfishness is perhaps the failure to subordinate sensual impulses to
social feeling, and this, of course, results from the apathy of the
imaginative impulses that ought to effect this subordination. It would
usually be impossible for a man to help himself to the best pieces on
the platter if he conceived the disgust and resentment which he excites.
And though this is a very gross and palpable sort of selfishness, it is
analogous in nature to the finer kinds. A fine-grained, subtle Egoist,
such as is portrayed in George Meredith’s novel of that name, or such as
Isabel’s husband in Henry James’s “Portrait of a Lady,” has delicate
perceptions in certain directions, but along with these there is some
essential narrowness or vulgarity of imagination which prevents him from
grasping what we feel to be the true social situation, and having the
sentiments that should respond to it. The æsthetic refinement of Osmond
which so impresses Isabel before her marriage turns out to be compatible
with a general smallness of mind. He is “not a good fellow,” as Ralph
remarks, and incapable of comprehending her or her friends.
A lack of tact in face-to-face intercourse very commonly gives an
impression of egotism, even when it is a superficial trait not really
expressive of an unsympathetic character. Thus there are persons who in
the simplest conversation do not seem to forget themselves, and enter
frankly and disinterestedly into the subject, but are felt to be always
preoccupied with the thought of the impression they are making,
imagining praise or depreciation, and usually posing a little to avoid
the one or gain the other. Such people are uneasy, and make others so;
no relaxation is possible in their company, because they never come
altogether out into open and common ground, but are always keeping back
something. It is not so much that they have self-feeling as that it is
clandestine and furtive, giving one a sense of insecurity. Sometimes
they are aware of this lack of frankness, and try to offset it by
reckless confessions, but this only shows their self-consciousness in
another and hardly more agreeable aspect. Perhaps the only cure for this
sort of egotism is to cherish very high and difficult ambitions, and so
drain off the superabundance of self-feeling from these petty channels.
People who are doing really important things usually appear simple and
unaffected in conversation, largely because their selves are healthfully
employed elsewhere.
One who has tact always sees far enough into the state of mind of the
person with whom he is conversing to adapt himself to it and to seem, at
least, sympathetic; he is sure to feel the situation. But if you tread
upon the other person’s toes, talk about yourself when he is not
interested in that subject, and, in general, show yourself out of touch
with his mind, he very naturally finds you disagreeable. And behavior
analogous to this in the more enduring relations of life gives rise to a
similar judgment.
So far as there is any agreement in judgments regarding selfishness it
arises from common standards of right, fairness, and courtesy which all
thoughtful minds work out from their experience, and which represent
what the general good requires. The selfish man is one in whose self, or
in whose style of asserting it, is something that falls below these
standards. He is a transgressor of fair play and the rules of the game,
an outlaw with whom no one ought to sympathize, but against whom all
should unite for the general good.
It is the unhealthy or egotistical self that is usually meant by the
word self when used in moral discussions; it is this that people need to
get away from, both for their own good and that of the community. When
we speak of getting out of one’s “self” we commonly mean _any line of
thought with which one tends to be unduly preoccupied_; so that to
escape from it is indeed a kind of salvation.
There is perhaps no sort of self more subject to dangerous egotism than
that which deludes itself with the notion that it is not a self at all,
but something else. It is well to beware of persons who believe that the
cause, the mission, the philanthropy, the hero, or whatever it may be
that they strive for, is outside of themselves, so that they feel a
certain irresponsibility, and are likely to do things which they would
recognize as wrong if done in behalf of an acknowledged self. Just as
the Spanish armies in the Netherlands held that their indulgence in
murder, torture, and brutal lust was sanctified by the supposed holy
character of their mission, so in our own time the name of religion,
science, patriotism, or charity sometimes enables people to indulge
comfortably in browbeating, intrusion, slander, dishonesty, and the
like. _Every cherished idea is a self_: and though it appear to the
individual, or to a class, or to a whole nation, worthy to swallow up
all other selves, it is subject to the same need of discipline under
rules of justice and decency as any other. It is healthy for everyone to
understand that he is, and will remain, a self-seeker, and that if he
gets out of one self he is sure to form another which may stand in equal
need of control.
Selfishness as a mental trait is always some sort of narrowness,
littleness or defect; an inadequacy of imagination. The perfectly
balanced and vigorous mind can hardly be selfish, because it cannot be
oblivious to any important social situation, either in immediate
intercourse or in more permanent relations; it must always tend to be
sympathetic, fair, and just, because it possesses that breadth and unity
of view of which these qualities are the natural expression. To lack
them is to be not altogether social and human, and may be regarded as
the beginning of degeneracy. Egotism is then not something additional to
ordinary human nature, as the common way of speaking suggests, but
rather a lack. The egotist is not more than a man, but less than a man;
and as regards personal power he is as a rule the weaker for his
egotism. The very fact that he has a bad name shows that the world is
against him, and that he is contending against odds. The success of
selfishness attracts attention and exaggeration because it is hateful to
us; but the really strong generally work within the prevalent standards
of justice and courtesy, and so escape condemnation.
There is infinite variety in egotism; but an important division may be
based on the greater or less stability of the egotists’ characters.
According to this we may divide them into those of the unstable type and
those of the rigid type. Extreme instability is always selfish; the very
weak cannot be otherwise, because they lack both the deep sympathy that
enables people to penetrate the lives of others, and the consistency and
self-control necessary to make sympathy effective if they had it. Their
superficial and fleeting impulses are as likely to work harm as good and
cannot be trusted to bring forth any sound fruit. If they are amiable at
times they are sure to be harsh, cold, or violent at other times; there
is no justice, no solid good or worth in them. The sort of people I have
in mind are, for instance, such as in times of affliction go about
weeping and wringing their hands to the neglect of their duty to aid and
comfort the survivors, possibly taking credit for the tenderness of
their hearts.
The other sort of egotism, not sharply distinguished from this in all
cases, belongs to people who have stability of mind and conduct, but
still without breadth and richness of sympathy, so that their aims and
sentiments are inadequate to the life around them—narrow, hard, mean,
self-satisfied, or sensual. This I would call the rigid type of egotism
because the essence of it is an arrest of sympathetic development and an
ossification as it were of what should be a plastic and growing part of
thought. Something of this sort is perhaps what is most commonly meant
by the word, and everyone can think of harsh, gross, grasping, cunning,
or self-complacent traits to which he would apply it. The self, to be
healthy or to be tolerable to other selves, must be ever moving on,
breaking loose from lower habits, walking hand-in-hand with sympathy and
aspiration. If it stops too long anywhere it becomes stagnant and
diseased, odious to other minds and harmful to the mind it inhabits. The
men that satisfy the imagination are chastened men; large, human,
inclusive, feeling the breadth of the world. It is impossible to think
of Shakespeare as arrogant, vain, or sensual; and if some, like Dante,
had an exigent ego, they succeeded in transforming it into higher and
higher forms.
Selfishness of the stable or rigid sort is as a rule more bitterly
resented than the more fickle variety, chiefly, no doubt, because,
having more continuity and purpose, it is more formidable.
One who accepts the idea of self, and of personality in general, already
set forth, will agree that what is ordinarily called egotism cannot
properly be regarded as the opposite of “altruism,” or of any word
implying the self-and-other classification of impulses. No clear or
useful idea of selfishness can be reached on the basis of this
classification, which, as previously stated, seems to me fictitious. It
misrepresents the mental situation, and so tends to confuse thought. The
mind has not, in fact, two sets of motives to choose from, the
self-motives and the other-motives, the latter of which stand for the
higher course, but has the far more difficult task of achieving a higher
life by gradually discriminating and organizing a great variety of
motives not easily divisible into moral groups. The proper antithesis of
selfishness is right, justice, breadth, magnanimity, or something of
that sort; something opposite to the narrowness of feeling and action in
which selfishness essentially consists. It is a matter of more or less
symmetry and stature, like the contrast between a gnarled and stunted
tree and one of ample growth.
The ideas denoted by such phrases as _my_ friend, _my_ country, _my_
duty, and so on, are just the ones that stand for broad or “unselfish”
impulses, and yet they are self-ideas as shown by the first-personal
pronoun. In the expression “_my duty_” we have in six letters a
refutation of that way of thinking which makes right the opposite of
self. That it stands for the right all will admit; and yet no one can
pronounce it meaningly without perceiving that it is charged with
intense self-feeling.
It is always vain to try to separate the outer aspect of a motive, the
other people, the cause or the like, which we think of as external, from
the private or self aspect, which we think of as internal. The apparent
separation is purely illusive. It is surely a very simple truth that
what makes us act in an unselfish or devoted manner is always some sort
of sentiment in our own minds, and if we cherish this sentiment
intimately it is a part of ourselves. We develop the inner life by
outwardly directed thought and action, relating mostly to other persons,
to causes, and the like. Is there no difference, then, it may be asked,
between doing a kind act to please someone else and doing it to please
one’s self? I should say regarding this that while it is obvious, if one
thinks of it, that pleasing another can exist for me only as a pleasant
feeling in my own mind, which is the motive of my action, there is a
difference in the meaning of these expressions as commonly used.
Pleasing one’s self ordinarily means that we act from some comparatively
narrow sentiment not involving penetrating sympathy. Thus, if one gives
Christmas presents to make a good impression or from a sense of
propriety, he might be said to do it to please himself, while if he
really imagined the pleasure the gift would bring to the recipient he
would do it to please the latter. But it is clear enough that his own
pleasure might be quite as great in the second case. Again, sometimes we
do things “to please others” which we declare are painful to ourselves.
But this, of course, means merely that there are conflicting impulses in
our own minds, some of which are sacrificed to others. The satisfaction,
or whatever you choose to call it, that one gets when he prefers his
duty to some other course is just as much his own as any pleasure he
renounces. No self-sacrifice is admirable that is not the choice of a
higher or larger aspect of the self over a lower or partial aspect. If a
man’s act is really self-sacrifice, that is, not properly _his own_, he
would better not do it.
Some opponent of Darwin attempted to convict him of egotism by counting
the number of times that the pronoun “I” appears upon the first few
pages of the “Origin of Species.” He was able to find a great many, and
to cause Darwin, who was as modest a man as ever lived, to feel abashed
at the showing; but it is doubtful if he convinced any reader of the
book of the truth of the assertion. In fact, although the dictionary
defines egotism as “the habit or practice of thinking and talking much
of one’s self,” the use of the first-personal pronoun is hardly the
essence of the matter. This use is always in some degree a
self-assertion, but it has a disagreeable or egotistical effect only in
so far as the self asserted is repellent to us. Even Montaigne, who says
“I” on every other line, and whose avowed purpose is to display himself
at large and in all possible detail, does not, it seems to me, really
make an impression of egotism upon the congenial reader, because he
contrives to make his self so interesting in every aspect that the more
we are reminded of it the better we are pleased; and there is good sense
in his doctrine that “not to speak roundly of a man’s self implies some
lack of courage; a firm and lofty judgment, and that judges soundly and
surely, makes use of his own example upon all occasions, as well as
those of others.” A person will not displease sensible people by saying
“I” so long as the self thus asserted stands for something, is a
pertinent, significant “I,” and not merely a random self-intrusion. We
are not displeased to see an athlete roll up his sleeves and show his
muscles, although if a man of only ordinary development did so it would
seem an impertinence; nor do we think less of Rembrandt for painting his
own portrait every few months. The “I” should be functional, and so long
as a man is functioning acceptably there can be no objection to his
using it.
Indeed, it is a common remark that the most delightful companions, or
authors of books, are often the most egotistical in the sense that they
are always talking about themselves. The reason for this is that if the
“I” is interesting and agreeable we adopt it for the time being and make
it our own. Then, being on the inside as it were, it is our own self
that is so expansive and happy. We adopt Montaigne, or Lamb, or
Thackeray, or Stevenson, or Whitman, or Thoreau, and think of their
words as our words. Thus even extravagant self-assertion, if the reader
can only be led to enter into it, may be congenial. There may be quite
as much egotism in the suppression of “I” as in the use of it, and a
forced and obvious avoidance of this pronoun often gives a disagreeable
feeling of the writer’s self-consciousness. In short, egotism is a
matter of character, not of forms of language, and if we are egotists
the fact will out in spite of any conventional rules of decorum that we
may follow.
It is possible to maintain that “I” is a more modest pronoun than “one,”
by which some writers seem to wish to displace it. If a man says “I
think,” he speaks only for himself, while if he says “one thinks,” he
insinuates that the opinion advanced is a general or normal view. To say
“one does not like this picture,” is a more deadly attack upon it than
to say “I do not like it.”
It would seem also that more freedom of self-expression is appropriate
to a book than to ordinary intercourse, because people are not obliged
to read books, and the author has a right to assume that his readers
are, in a general way, sympathetic with that phase of his personality
that he is trying to express. If we do not sympathize why do we continue
to read? We may, however, find fault with him if he departs from that
which it is the proper function of the book to assert, and intrudes a
weak and irrelevant “I” in which he has no reason to suppose us
interested. I presume we can all think of books that might apparently be
improved by going through them and striking out passages in which the
author has incontinently expressed an aspect of himself that has no
proper place in the work.
In every higher kind of production a person needs to understand and
believe in himself—the more thoroughly the better. It is precisely that
in him which he feels to be worthy and at the same time peculiar—the
characteristic—that it is his duty to produce, communicate, and realize;
and he cannot possess this, cannot differentiate it, cleanse it from
impurities, consolidate and organize it, except through prolonged and
interested self-contemplation. Only this can enable him to free himself
from the imitative on the one hand and the whimsical on the other, and
to stand forth without shame or arrogance for what he truly is.
Consequently every productive mind must have intense self-feeling; it
must delight to contemplate the characteristic, to gloat over it if you
please, and in this way learn to define, arrange, and express it. If one
will take up a work of literary art like, say, the “Sentimental
Journey,” he will see that a main source of the charm of it is in the
writer’s assured and contented familiarity with himself. A man who
writes like that has delighted to brood over his thoughts, jealously
excluding everything not wholly congenial to him, and gradually working
out an adequate expression. And the superiority, or at least the
difference, in tone and manner of the earlier English literature as
compared with that of the nineteenth century is apparently connected
with a more assured and reposeful self-possession on the part of the
older writers, made possible, no doubt, by a less urgent general life.
The same fact of self-intensity goes with notable production in all
sorts of literature, in every art, in statesmanship, philanthropy,
religion; in all kinds of career.
Who does not feel at times what Goethe calls the joy of dwelling in
one’s self, of surrounding himself with the fruits of his own mind, with
things he has made, perhaps, books he has chosen, his familiar clothes
and possessions of all sorts, with his wife, children, and old friends,
and with his own thoughts, which some, like Robert Louis Stevenson,
confess to a love of re-reading in books, letters, or diaries? At times
even conscientious people, perhaps, look kindly at their own faults,
deficiencies, and mannerisms, precisely as they would on those of a
familiar friend. Without self-love in some such sense as this any solid
and genial growth of character and accomplishment is hardly possible.
“Whatever any man has to effect must emanate from him like a second
self; and how could this be possible were not his first self entirely
pervaded by it?” Nor is it opposed to the love of others. “Indeed,” says
Mr. Stevenson, “he who loves himself, not in idle vanity, but with a
plenitude of knowledge, is the best equipped of all to love his
neighbors.”
Self-love, Shakespeare says, is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting;
and many serious varieties of the latter might be specified. There is,
for instance, a culpable sort of self-dreading cowardice, not at all
uncommon with sensitive people, which shrinks from developing and
asserting a just “I” because of the stress of self-feeling—of vanity,
uncertainty, and mortification—which is foreseen and shunned. If one is
liable to these sentiments the proper course is to bear with them as
with other disturbing conditions, rather than to allow them to stand in
the way of what, after all, one is born to do. “Know your own bone,”
says Thoreau, “gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.”[54]
“If I am not I, who will be?”
A tendency to secretiveness very often goes with this self-cherishing.
Goethe was as amorous and jealous about his unpublished works, in some
cases, as the master of a seraglio; fostering them for years, and
sometimes not telling his closest friends of their existence. His
Eugenie, “meine Liebling Eugenie,” as he calls it, was vulgarized and
ruined for him by his fatal mistake in publishing the first part before
the whole was complete. It would not be difficult to show that the same
cherishing of favorite and peculiar ideas is found also in painters,
sculptors, and effective persons of every sort. As was suggested in an
earlier chapter, this secretiveness has a social reference, and few
works of art could be carried through if the artist was convinced they
would have no value in the eyes of anyone else. He hides his work that
he may purify and perfect it, thus making it at once more wholly and
delightfully his own and also more valuable to the world in the end. As
soon as the painter exhibits his picture he loses it, in a sense; his
system of ideas about it becomes more or less confused and disorganized
by the inrush of impressions arising from a sense of what other people
think of it; it is no longer the perfect and intimate thing which his
thought cherished, but has become somewhat crude, vulgar, and
disgusting, so that if he is sensitive he may wish never to look upon it
again. This, I take it, is why Goethe could not finish Eugenie, and why
Guignet, a French painter, of whom Hamerton speaks, used to alter or
throw away a painting that anyone by chance saw upon the easel. Likewise
it was in order more perfectly to know and express himself—in his book
called “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”—that Thoreau retired
to Walden Pond, and it was doubtless with the same view that Descartes
quitted Paris and dwelt for eight years in Holland, concealing even his
place of residence. The Self, like a child, is not likely to hold its
own in the world unless it has had a mature prenatal development.
It may be said, perhaps, that these views contradict a well-known fact,
namely, that we do our best work when we are not self-conscious, not
thinking about effect, but filled with disinterested and impersonal
passion. Such truth as there is in this idea is, however, in no way
inconsistent with what has just been said. It is true that a certain
abandonment and self-forgetting is often characteristic of high thought
and noble action. But there would be no production, no high thought or
noble action, if we relied entirely upon these impassioned moments
without preparing ourselves to have them. It is only as we have
self-consciousness that we can be aware of those special tendencies
which we assert in production, or can learn how to express them, or even
have the desire to do so. The moment of insight would be impossible
without the persistent self-conscious endeavor that preceded it, nor has
enthusiastic action any value without a similar discipline.
It is true, also, that in sensitive persons self-feeling often reaches a
pitch of irritability that impedes production, or vulgarizes it through
too great deference to opinion. But this is a matter of the control and
discipline of particular aspects of the self rather than of its general
tendency. When undisciplined this sort of feeling may be futile or
harmful, just as fear, whose function is to cause us to avoid danger,
may defeat its own aim through excessive and untimely operation, and
anger may so excite us that we lose the power of inflicting injury.
If the people of our time and country are peculiarly selfish, as is
sometimes alleged, it is certainly not because a too rigid or clearly
differentiated type of self-consciousness is general among us. On the
contrary, our most characteristic fault is perhaps a certain
superficiality and vagueness of character and aims; and this seems to
spring from a lack of collectedness and self-definition, which in turn
is connected with the too eager mode of life common among us. I doubt,
however, whether egotism, which is essentially a falling short of moral
standards, can be said to be more prevalent in one age than another.
In Mr. Roget’s “Thesaurus” may be found about six pages devoted to words
denoting “Extrinsic personal affections, or personal affections derived
from the opinions or feelings of others,” an expression which seems to
mean nearly the same as is here meant by social self-feeling of the
reflected or looking-glass sort. Although the compiler fishes with a
wide net and brings in much that seems hardly to belong here, the number
of words in common use indicating different varieties of this sort of
feeling is surprising and suggestive. One cannot but think, What insight
and what happy boldness of invention went to the devising of all these
terms! What a psychologist is language, that thus labels and treasures
up so many subtle aspects of the human mind!
We may profitably distinguish, as others have done, two general
attitudes—the aggressive or self-assertive and the shrinking or humble.
The first indicates that one thinks favorably of himself and tries to
impose that favorable thought on others; the second, that he accepts and
yields to a depreciating reflection of himself, and feels accordingly
diminished and abased. Pride would, of course, be an example of the
first way of feeling and acting, humility of the second.
But there are many phases of the aggressive self, and these, again,
might be classified something as follows: first, in response to imagined
approval we have pride, vanity, or self-respect; second, in response to
imagined censure we have various sorts of resentment; and the humble
self might be treated in a similar manner.
Pride and vanity are names which are commonly applied only to forms of
self-approval that strike us as disagreeable or egotistical; but they
may be used in a somewhat larger sense to indicate simply a more or less
stable attitude of the social self toward the world in which it is
reflected; the distinction being of the same sort as that between
unstable and rigid egotism already suggested.
These differences in stability, which are of great importance in the
study of social personality, are perhaps connected with the contrast
between the more receptive and the more constructive types of mind.
Although in the best minds reception and construction are harmoniously
united, and although it may be shown that they are in a measure mutually
dependent, so that neither can be perfect without the other, yet as a
rule they are not symmetrically developed, and this lack of symmetry
corresponds to divergences of personal character. Minds of one sort are,
so to speak, endogenous or ingrowing in their natural bent, while those
of another are exogenous or outgrowing; that is to say, those of the
former kind have a relatively strong turn for working up old material,
as compared with that for taking in new; cogitation is more pleasant to
them than observation; they prefer the sweeping and garnishing of their
house to the confusion of entertaining visitors; while of the other sort
the opposite of this may be said. Now, the tendency of the endogenous or
inward activities is to secure unity and stability of thought and
character at the possible expense of openness and adaptability; because
the energy goes chiefly into systematization, and in attaining this the
mind is pretty sure to limit its new impressions to those that do not
disturb too much that unity and system it loves so well. These traits
are, of course, manifested in the person’s relation to others. The
friends he has “and their acceptance tried” he grapples to his soul with
hooks of steel, but is likely to be unsympathetic and hard toward
influences of a novel character. On the other hand, the exogenous or
outgrowing mind, more active near the periphery than toward the centre,
is open to all sorts of impressions, eagerly taking in new material,
which is likely never to get much arrangement; caring less for the order
of the house than that it should be full of guests, quickly responsive
to personal influences, but lacking that depth and tenacity of sympathy
that the other sort of mind shows with people congenial with itself.
Pride,[55] then, is the form social self-approval takes in the more
rigid or self-sufficient sort of minds; the person who feels it is
assured that he stands well with others whose opinion he cares for, and
does not imagine any humiliating image of himself, but carries his
mental and social stability to such a degree that it is likely to narrow
his soul by warding off the enlivening pricks of doubt and shame. By no
means independent of the world, it is, after all, distinctly a social
sentiment, and gets its standards ultimately from social custom and
opinion. But the proud man is not _immediately_ dependent upon what
others think; he has worked over his reflected self in his mind until it
is a steadfast portion of his thought, an idea and conviction apart, in
some measure, from its external origin. Hence this sentiment requires
time for its development and flourishes in mature age rather than in the
open and growing period of youth. A man who is proud of his rank, his
social position, his professional eminence, his benevolence, or his
integrity, is in the habit of contemplating daily an agreeable and
little changing image of himself as he believes he appears in the eyes
of the world. This image is probably distorted, since pride deceives by
a narrowing of the imagination, but it is stable, and because it is so,
because he feels sure of it, he is not disturbed by any passing breath
of blame. If he is aware of such a thing at all he dismisses it as a
vagary of no importance, feeling the best judgment of the world to be
securely in his favor. If he should ever lose this conviction, if some
catastrophe should shatter the image, he would be a broken man, and, if
far gone in years, would perhaps not raise his head again.
In a sense pride is strength; that is, it implies a stable and
consistent character which can be counted on; it will do its work
without watching, and be honorable in its dealings, according to its
cherished standards; it has always a vigorous, though narrow,
conscience. On the other hand, it stunts a man’s growth by closing his
mind to progressive influences, and so in the long run may be a source
of weakness. Burke said, I believe, that no man ever had a point of
pride that was not injurious to him; and perhaps this was what he meant.
Pride also causes, as a rule, a deeper animosity on the part of others
than vanity; it may be hated but hardly despised; yet many would rather
live with it than with vanity, because, after all, one knows where to
find it, and so can adapt himself to it. The other is so whimsical that
it is impossible to foresee what turn it will take next.
Language seldom distinguishes clearly between a way of feeling and its
visible expression; and so the word vanity, which means primarily
emptiness, indicates either a weak or hollow appearance of worth put on
in the endeavor to impress others, or the state of feeling that goes
with it. It is the form social self-approval naturally takes in a
somewhat unstable mind, not sure of its image. The vain man, in his more
confident moments, sees a delightful reflection of himself, but knowing
that it is transient, he is afraid it will change. He has not fixed it,
as the proud man has, by incorporation with a stable habit of thought,
but, being immediately dependent for it upon others, is at their mercy
and very vulnerable, living in the frailest of glass houses which may be
shattered at any moment; and, in fact, this catastrophe happens so often
that he gets somewhat used to it and soon recovers from it. While the
image which the proud person contemplates is fairly consistent, and,
though distorted, has a solid basis in his character, so that he will
not accept praise for qualities he does not believe himself to possess;
vanity has no stable idea of itself and will swallow any shining bait.
The person will gloat now on one pleasing reflection of himself, now on
another, trying to mimic each in its turn, and becoming, so far as he
can, what any flatterer says he is, or what any approving person seems
to think he is. It is characteristic of him to be so taken up with his
own image in the other’s mind that he is hypnotized by it, as it were,
and sees it magnified, distorted, and out of its true relation to the
other contents of that mind. He does not see, as so often happens, that
he is being managed and made a fool of; he “gives himself away”—fatuity
being of the essence of vanity. On the other hand, and for the same
reason, a vain person is frequently tortured by groundless imaginings
that someone has misunderstood him, slighted him, insulted him, or
otherwise mistreated his social effigy.
Of course the immediate result of vanity is weakness, as that of pride
is strength; but on a wider view there is something to be said for it.
Goethe exclaims in Wilhelm Meister, “Would to heaven all men were vain!
that is were vain with clear perception, with moderation, and in a
proper sense: we should then, in the cultivated world, have happy times
of it. Women, it is told us, are vain from the very cradle; yet does it
not become them? do they not please us the more? How can a youth form
himself if he is not vain? An empty, hollow nature will, by this means,
at least contrive to give itself an outward show, and a proper man will
soon train himself from the outside inwards.”[56] That is to say,
vanity, in moderation, may indicate an openness, a sensibility, a
teachability, that is a good augury of growth. In youth, at least, it is
much preferable to pride.
It is the obnoxious, or in some way conspicuous, manifestations of
self-feeling that are likely to receive special names. Accordingly,
there are many words and phrases for different aspects of pride and
vanity, while a moderate and balanced self-respect does not attract
nomenclature. One who has this is more open and flexible in feeling and
behavior than one who is proud; the image is not stereotyped, he is
subject to humility; while at the same time he does not show the
fluttering anxiety about his appearance that goes with vanity, but has
stable ways of thinking about the image, as about other matters, and
cannot be upset by passing phases of praise or blame. In fact, the
healthy life of the self requires the same co-operation of continuity
with change that marks normal development everywhere; there must be
variability, openness, freedom, on a basis of organization: too rigid
organization meaning fixity and death, and the lack of it weakness or
anarchy. The self-respecting man values others’ judgments and occupies
his mind with them a great deal, but he keeps his head, he discriminates
and selects, considers all suggestions with a view to his character, and
will not submit to influences not in the line of his development.
Because he conceives his self as a stable and continuing whole he always
feels the need to _be_, and cannot be guilty of that separation between
being and seeming that constitutes affectation. For instance, a
self-respecting scholar, deferent to the standards set by the opinions
of others, might wish to have read all the books on a certain subject,
and feel somewhat ashamed not to have done so, but he could not affect
to have read them when he had not. The pain of breaking the unity of his
thought, of disfiguring his picture of himself as a sincere and
consistent man, would overbalance any gratification he might have in the
imagined approval of his thoroughness. If he were vain he would possibly
affect to have read the books; while if arrogant he might feel no
compunctions for avowed ignorance of them.
Common-sense approves a just mingling of deference and self-poise in the
attitude of one man toward others: while the unyielding are certainly
repellent, the too deferent are nearly as much so; they are tiresome and
even disgusting, because they seem flimsy and unreal, and do not give
that sense of contact with something substantial and interesting that we
look for.
“——you have missed
The manhood that should yours resist,
Its complement.”
We like the manner of a person who appears interested in what we say and
do, and not indifferent to our opinion, but has at the same time an
evident reserve of stability and independence. It is much the same with
a writer; we require of him a bold and determined statement of his own
special view—that is what he is here for—and yet, with this, an air of
hospitality, and an appreciation that he is after all only a small part
of a large world.
With some, then, the self-image is an imitative sketch in the supposed
style of the last person they have talked to; with others, it is a
rigid, traditional thing, a lifeless repetition that has lost all
relation to the forces that originally moulded it, like the Byzantine
madonnas before the time of Cimabue; with others again it is a true work
of art in which individual tendencies and the influence of masters
mingle in a harmonious whole; but all of us have it, unless we are so
deficient in imagination as to be less than human. When we speak of a
person as independent of opinion, or self-sufficient, we can only mean
that, being of a constructive and stable character, he does not have to
recur every day to the visible presence of his approvers, but can supply
their places by imagination, can hold on to some influences and reject
others, choose his leaders, individualize his conformity; and so work
out a characteristic and fairly consistent career. The self must be
built up by the aid of social suggestions, just as all higher thought
is.
Honor is a finer kind of self-respect. It is used to mean either
something one feels regarding himself, or something that other people
think and feel regarding him, and so illustrates by the accepted use of
language the fact that the private and social aspects of self are
inseparable. One’s honor, as he feels it, and his honor in the sense of
honorable repute, as he conceives it to exist in the minds of others
whose opinion he cares for, are two aspects of the same thing. No one
can permanently maintain a standard of honor in his own mind if he does
not conceive of some other mind or minds as sharing and corroborating
this standard. If his immediate environment is degrading he may have
resort to books or memory in order that his imagination may construct a
better environment of nobler people to sustain his standard; but if he
cannot do this it is sure to fall. Sentiments of higher good or right,
like other sentiments, find source and renewal in intercourse. On the
other hand, we cannot separate the idea of honor from that of a sincere
and stable private character. We cannot form a habit of thought about
what is admirable, though it be derived from others, without creating a
mental standard. A healthy mind cannot strive for outward honor without,
in some measure, developing an inward conscience—training himself from
the outside in, as Goethe says.
It is the result of physiological theories of ethics—certainly not
intended by the authors of those theories—to make the impulses of an
ideal self, like the sentiment of honor, seem far-fetched, extravagant
and irrational. They have to be justified by an elaborate course of
reasoning which does not seem very convincing after all. No such
impression, however, could result from the direct observation of social
life. In point of fact, a man’s honor, as he conceives it, is his self
in its most immediate and potent reality, swaying his conduct without
waiting upon any inquiry into its physiological antecedents. The
preference of honor to life is not at all a romantic exception in human
behavior, but something quite characteristic of man on a really human
level. A despicable or degenerate person may save his body alive at the
expense of honor, and so may almost anyone in moments of panic or other
kind of demoralization, but the typical man, in his place among his
fellows and with his social sentiments about him, will not do so. We
read in history of many peoples conquered because they lacked discipline
and strategy, or because their weapons were inferior, but we seldom read
of any who were really cowardly in the sense that they would not face
death in battle. And the readiness to face death commonly means that the
sentiment of honor dominates the impulses of terror and pain. All over
the ancient world the Roman legions encountered men who shunned death no
more than themselves, but were not so skilful in inflicting it; and in
Mexico and Peru the natives died by thousands in a desperate struggle
against the Spanish arms. The earliest accounts we have of our own
Germanic ancestors show a state of feeling and practice that made
self-preservation, in a material sense, strictly subordinate to honor.
“Death is better for every clansman than coward life,” says Beowulf,[57]
and there seems no doubt whatever that this was a general principle of
action, so that cowardice was a rare phenomenon. In modern life we see
the same subordination of sensation to sentiment among soldiers and in a
hundred other careers involving bodily peril—not as a heroic exception
but as the ordinary practice of plain men. We see it also in the general
readiness to undergo all sorts of sensual pains and privations rather
than cease to be respectable in the eyes of other people. It is well
known, for instance, that among the poor thousands endure cold and
partial starvation rather than lose their self-respect by begging. In
short, it does not seem too favorable a view of mankind to say that
under normal conditions their minds are ruled by the sentiment of
Norfolk:
“Mine honor is my life: both grow in one;
Take honor from me and my life is done.”
If we once grasp the fact that the self is primarily a social, ideal, or
imaginative fact, and not a sensual fact, all this appears quite natural
and not in need of special explanation.
In relation to the highest phases of individuality self-respect becomes
self-reverence, in the sense of Tennyson, when he says:
“Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
These three alone lead life to sovereign power.”[58]
or of Goethe when, in the first chapter of the second book of “Wilhelm
Meister’s Wanderjahre,” he names self-reverence—_Ehrfurcht vor sick
selbst_—as the highest of the four reverences taught to youth in his
ideal system of education.[59] Emerson uses self-reliance in a similar
sense, in that memorable essay the note of which is “Trust thyself,
every heart vibrates to that iron string,” and throughout his works.
Self-reverence, as I understand the matter, means reverence for a higher
or ideal self; a real “I,” because it is based on what the individual
actually is, as only he himself can know and appropriate it, but a
better “I” of aspiration rather than attainment; it is simply the best
he can make out of life. Reverence for it implies, as Emerson urges,
resistance to friends and counsellors and to any influence that the mind
honestly rejects as inconsistent with itself; a man must feel that the
final arbiter is within him and not outside of him in some master,
living or dead, as conventional religion, for instance, necessarily
teaches. Nevertheless this highest self is a social self, in that it is
a product of constructive imagination working with the materials which
social experience supplies. Our ideals of personal character are built
up out of thoughts and sentiments developed by intercourse, and very
largely by imagining how our selves would appear in the minds of persons
we look up to. These are not necessarily living persons; anyone that is
at all real, that is imaginable, to us, becomes a possible occasion of
social self-feeling; and idealizing and aspiring persons live largely in
the imagined presence of masters and heroes to whom they refer their own
life for comment and improvement. This is particularly true of youth,
when ideals are forming; later the personal element in these ideals,
having performed its function of suggesting and vivifying them, is
likely to fade out of consciousness and leave only habits and principles
whose social origin is forgotten.
Resentment, the attitude which an aggressive self takes in response to
imagined depreciation, may be regarded as self-feeling with a coloring
of anger; indeed, the relation between self-feeling and particular
emotions like anger and fear is so close that the latter might be looked
upon as simply specialized kinds of the former; it makes little
difference whether we take this view or think of them as distinct, since
such divisions must always be arbitrary. I shall say more of this
sentiment in the next chapter.
If a person conceives his image as depreciated in the mind of another;
and if, instead of maintaining an aggressive attitude and resenting that
depreciation, he yields to it and accepts the image and the judgment
upon it; then he feels and shows something in the way of humility. Here
again we have a great variety of nomenclature, indicating different
shades of humble feeling and behavior, such as shame, confusion,
abasement, humiliation, mortification, meekness, bashfulness,
diffidence, shyness, being out of countenance, abashed or crestfallen,
contrition, compunction, remorse, and so on.
Humility, like self-approval, has forms that consist with a high type of
character and are felt to be praiseworthy, and others that are felt to
be base. There is a sort that goes with vanity and indicates
instability, an excessive and indiscriminate yielding to another’s view
of one’s self. We wish a man to be humble only before what, from his own
characteristic point of view, is truly superior. His humility should
imply self-respect; it should be that attitude of deference which a
stable but growing character takes in the presence of whatever embodies
its ideals. Every outreaching person has masters in whose imagined
presence he drops resistance and becomes like clay in the hands of the
potter, that they may make something better of him. He does this from a
feeling that the master is more himself than he is; there is a receptive
enthusiasm, a sense of new life that swallows up the old self and makes
his ordinary personality appear tedious, base and despicable. Humility
of this sort goes with self-reverence, because a sense of the higher or
ideal self plunges the present and commonplace self into humility. The
man aims at “so high an ideal that he always feels his unworthiness in
his own sight and that of others, though aware of his own desert by the
ordinary standards of his community, country, or generation.”[60] But a
humility that is self-abandonment, a cringing before opinion alien to
one’s self, is felt to be mere cowardice and servility.
Books of the inner life praise and enjoin lowliness, contrition,
repentance, self-abnegation; but it is apparent to all thoughtful
readers that the sort of humility inculcated is quite consistent with
the self-reverence of Goethe or the self-reliance of Emerson—comes,
indeed, to much the same thing. The “Imitatio Christi” is the type of
such teaching, yet it is a manly book, and the earlier part especially
contains exhortations to self-trust worthy of Emerson. “Certa
viriliter,” the writer says, “consuetudo consuetudine vincitur. Si tu
scis homines dimittere, ipsi bene te dimittent tua facta facere.”[61]
The yielding constantly enjoined is either to God—that is, to an ideal
personality developed in one’s own mind—or, if to men, it is a
submission to external rule which is designed to leave the will free for
what are regarded as its higher functions. The whole teaching tends to
the aggrandizement of an ideal but intensely private self, worked out in
solitary meditation—to insure which worldly ambition is to be
renounced—and symbolized as God, conscience, or grace. The just
criticism of the doctrine that Thomas stands for is not that it
depreciates manhood and self-reliance, but that it calls these away from
the worldly activities where they are so much needed, and exercises them
in a region of abstract imagination. No healthy mind can cast out
self-assertion and the idea of personal freedom, however the form of
expression may seem to deny these things, and accordingly the Imitation,
and still more the New Testament, are full of them. Where there is no
self-feeling, no ambition of any sort, there is no efficacy or
significance. To lose the sense of a separate, productive, resisting
self, would be to melt and merge and cease to be.
Healthy, balanced minds, of only medium sensibility, in a congenial
environment and occupied with wholesome activity, keep the middle road
of self-respect and reasonable ambition. They may require no special
effort, no conscious struggle with recalcitrant egotism, to avoid
heart-burning, jealousy, arrogance, anxious running after approval, and
other maladies of the social self. With enough self-feeling to stimulate
and not enough to torment him, with a social circle appreciative but not
flattering, with good health and moderate success, a man may go through
life with very little use for the moral and religious weapons that have
been wrought for the repression of a contumacious self. There are many,
particularly in an active, hopeful, and materially prosperous time like
this, who have little experience of inner conflict and no interest in
the literature and doctrine that relate to it.
But nearly all persons of the finer, more sensitive sort find the social
self at times a source of passion and pain. In so far as a man amounts
to anything, stands for anything, is truly an individual, he has an ego
about which his passions cluster, and to aggrandize which must be a
principal aim with him. But the very fact that the self is the object of
our schemes and endeavors makes it a centre of mental disturbance: its
suggestions are of effort, responsibility, doubt, hope, and fear. Just
as a man cannot enjoy the grass and trees in his own grounds with quite
the peace and freedom that he can those abroad, because they remind him
of improvements that he ought to make and the like; so any part of the
self is, in its nature, likely to be suggestive of exertion rather than
rest. Moreover, it would seem that self-feeling, though pleasant in
normal duration and intensity, is disagreeable in excess, like any other
sort of feeling. One reason why we get tired of ourselves is simply that
we have exhausted our capacity for experiencing with pleasure a certain
kind of emotion.
As we have seen, the self that is most importunate is a reflection,
largely, from the minds of others. This phase of self is related to
character very much as credit is related to the gold and other
securities upon which it rests. It easily and willingly expands, in most
of us, and is liable to sudden, irrational, and grievous collapses. We
live on, cheerful, self-confident, conscious of helping make the world
go round, until in some rude hour we learn that we do not stand so well
as we thought we did, that the image of us is tarnished. Perhaps we do
something, quite naturally, that we find the social order is set
against, or perhaps it is the ordinary course of our life that is not so
well regarded as we supposed. At any rate, we find with a chill of
terror that the world is cold and strange, and that our self-esteem,
self-confidence, and hope, being chiefly founded upon opinions,
attributed to others, go down in the crash. Our reason may tell us that
we are no less worthy than we were before, but dread and doubt do not
permit us to believe it. The sensitive mind will certainly suffer,
because of the instability of opinion. _Cadit cum labili._ As social
beings we live with our eyes upon our reflection, but have no assurance
of the tranquillity of the waters in which we see it. In the days of
witchcraft it used to be believed that if one person secretly made a
waxen image of another and stuck pins into the image, its counterpart
would suffer tortures, and that if the image was melted the person would
die. This superstition is almost realized in the relation between the
private self and its social reflection. They seem separate but are
darkly united, and what is done to the one is done to the other.
If a person of energetic and fine-strung temperament is neither vain nor
proud, and lives equably without suffering seriously from mortification,
jealousy, and the like; it is because he has in some way learned to
discipline and control his self-feeling, and thus to escape the pains to
which it makes him liable. To effect some such escape has always been a
present and urgent problem with sensitive minds, and the literature of
the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate
passions of the social self. To the commoner and somewhat sluggish sorts
of people these passions are, on the whole, agreeable and beneficent.
Emulation, ambition, honor, even pride and vanity in moderation, belong
to the higher and more imaginative parts of our thought; they awaken us
from sensuality and inspire us with ideal and socially determined
purposes. The doctrine that they are evil could have originated only
with those who felt them so; that is, I take it, with unusually
sensitive spirits, or those whom circumstances denied a normal and
wholesome self-expression. To such the thought of self becomes painful,
not because of any lack of self-feeling; but, quite the reverse,
because, being too sensitive and tender, it becomes overwrought, so that
this thought sets in vibration an emotional chord already strained and
in need of rest. To such minds self-abnegation becomes an ideal, an
ideal of rest, peace and freedom, like green pastures and still waters.
The prophets of the inner life, like Marcus Aurelius, St. Paul, St.
Augustine, Thomas à Kempis, and Pascal, were men distinguished not by
the lack of an aggressive self, but by a success in controlling and
elevating it which makes them the examples of all who undergo a like
struggle with it. If their ego had not been naturally importunate they
would not have been forced to contend with it, and to develop the
tactics of that contention for the edification of times to come.
The social self may be protected either in the negative way, by some
sort of withdrawal from the suggestions that agitate and harass it, or
in the positive way, by contending with them and learning to control and
transform them, so that they are no longer painful; most teachers
inculcating some sort of a combination of these two kinds of tactics.
Physical withdrawal from the presence of men has always been much in
favor with those in search of a calmer, surer life. The passions to be
regulated are sympathetic in origin, awakened by imagination of the
minds of other persons with whom we come in contact. As Contarini
Fleming remarks in Disraeli’s novel, “So soon as I was among men I
desired to influence them.” To retire to the monastery, or the woods, or
the sea, is to escape from the sharp suggestions that spur on ambition;
and even to change from the associates and competitors of our active
life into the company of strangers, or at least of those whose aims and
ambitions are different from ours, has much the same effect. To get away
from one’s working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one’s
self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change. I can
hardly agree with those who imagine that a special instinct of
withdrawal is necessary to explain the prominence of retirement in the
ordinances of religion. People wish to retire from the world because
they are weary, harassed, driven by it, so that they feel that they
cannot recover their equanimity without getting away from it. To the
impressible mind life is a theatre of alarms and contentions, even when
a phlegmatic person can see no cause for agitation—and to such a mind
peace often seems the one thing fair and desirable, so that the cloister
or the forest, or the vessel on the lonesome sea, is the most grateful
object of imagination. The imaginative self, which is, for most
purposes, the real self, may be more battered, wounded and strained by a
striving, ambitious life than the material body could be in a more
visible battle, and its wounds are usually more lasting and draw more
deeply upon the vitality. Mortification, resentment, jealousy, the fear
of disgrace and failure, sometimes even hope and elation, are exhausting
passions; and it is after a severe experience of them that retirement
seems most healing and desirable.
A subtler kind of withdrawal takes place in the imagination alone by
curtailing ambition, by trimming down one’s idea of himself to a measure
that need not fear further diminution. How secure and restful it would
be if one could be consistently and sincerely humble! There is no
sweeter feeling than contrition, self-abnegation, after a course of
alternate conceit and mortification. This also is an established part of
the religious discipline of the mind. Thus we find the following in
Thomas: “Son, now I will teach thee the way of peace and of true
liberty.... Study to do another’s will rather than thine own. Choose
ever to have less rather than more. Seek ever the lower place and to be
subject to all; ever wish and pray that the will of God may be perfectly
done in thee and in all. Behold such a man enters the bounds of peace
and calm.”[62] In other words, lop off the aggressive social self
altogether, renounce the ordinary objects of ambition, accustom yourself
to an humble place in others’ thoughts, and you will be at peace;
because you will have nothing to lose, nothing to fear. No one at all
acquainted with the moralists, pagan or Christian, will need to be more
than reminded that this imaginative withdrawal of the self from strife
and uncertainty has ever been inculcated as a means to happiness and
edification. Many persons who are sensitive to the good opinion of
others, and, by impulse, take great pleasure in it, shrink from
indulging this pleasure because they know by experience that it puts
them into others’ power and introduces an element of weakness, unrest,
and probable mortification. By recognizing a favorable opinion of
yourself, and taking pleasure in it, you in a measure give yourself and
your peace of mind into the keeping of another, of whose attitude you
can never be certain. You have a new source of doubt and apprehension.
One learns in time the wisdom of entering into such relations only with
persons of whose sincerity, stability, and justice one is as sure as
possible; and also of having nothing to do with approval of himself
which he does not feel to have a secure basis in his character. And so
regarding self-aggrandizement in the various forms implicitly condemned
by Thomas’s four rules of peace; if a man is of so eager a temperament
that he does not need these motives to awaken him and call his faculties
into normal action, he will be happier and possibly more useful to the
world if he is able to subdue them by some sort of discipline. In this
way, it seems to me, we may chiefly account for and justify the
stringent self-suppression of Pascal and of many other fine spirits. “So
jealous was he of any surprise of pleasure, of any thought of vanity or
complacency in himself and his work, that he wore a girdle of iron next
his skin, the sharp points of which he pressed closely when he thought
himself in any danger....”[63]
Of course the objection to withdrawal, physical or imaginative, is that
it seems to be a refusal of social functions, a rejection of life,
leading logically to other-worldism, to the idea that it is better to
die than to live. According to this teaching, in its extreme form, the
best thing that can happen to a man is to die and go to heaven; but if
that is not permitted, then let the private, ambitious self, set to play
the tunes of this world, die in him, and be replaced by humble and
secluded meditation in preparation for the life to come. When this
doctrine was taught and believed to such an extent that a great part of
the finer spirits were led, during centuries, to isolate themselves in
deserts and cloisters, or at least to renounce and depreciate the
affections and duties of the family, the effect was no doubt bad; but in
our time there is little tendency to this extreme, and there is perhaps
danger that the usefulness of partial or occasional withdrawal may be
overlooked. Mr. Lecky thinks, for instance, that the complete
suppression of the conventual system by Protestantism has been far from
a benefit to women or the world, and that it is impossible to conceive
of any institution more needed than one which should furnish a shelter
for unprotected women and convert them into agents of charity.[64] The
amount and kind of social stimulation that a man can bear without harm
to his character and working power depends, roughly speaking, upon his
sensitiveness, which determines the emotional disturbance, and upon the
vigor of the controlling or co-ordinating functions, which measures his
power to guide or quell emotion and make it subsidiary to healthy life.
There has always been a class of persons, including a large proportion
of those capable of the higher sorts of intellectual production, for
whom the competitive struggles of ordinary life are overstimulating and
destructive, and who therefore cannot serve the world well without
apparently secluding themselves from it. It would seem, then, that
withdrawal and asceticism are often too sweepingly condemned. A sound
practical morality will consider these things in relation to various
types of character and circumstance, and find, I believe, important
functions for both.
But the most radical remedy for the mortifications and uncertainties of
the social self is not the negative one of merely secluding or
diminishing the I, but the positive one of transforming it. The two are
not easily distinguishable, and are usually phases of the same process.
The self-instinct, though it cannot be suppressed while mental vigor
remains, can be taught to associate itself more and more with ideas and
aims of general and permanent worth, which can be thought of as higher
than the more sensual, narrow, or temporary interests, and independent
of them. It must always be borne in mind that the self is any idea or
system of ideas with which is associated the peculiar appropriative
attitude we call self-feeling. Anything whose depreciation makes me feel
resentful is myself, whether it is my coat, my face, my brother, the
book I have published, the scientific theory I accept, the philanthropic
work to which I am devoted, my religious creed, or my country. The only
question is, Am I identified with it in my thought, so that to touch it
is to touch me? Thus in “Middlemarch” the true self of Mr. Casaubon, his
most aggressive, persistent, and sensitive part, is his system of ideas
relating to the unpublished “Key to All Mythologies.” It is about this
that he is proud, jealous, sore, and apprehensive. What he imagines that
the Brasenose men will think of it is a large part of his social self,
and he suffers hidden joy and torture according as he is hopeful or
despondent of its triumphant publication. When he finds that his body
must die his chief thought is how to keep this alive, and he attempts to
impose its completion upon poor Dorothea, who is a pale shadow in his
life compared with the Key, a mere instrument to minister to this
fantastic ego. So if one, turning the leaves of history, could evoke the
real selves of all the men of thought, what a strange procession they
would be!—outlandish theories, unintelligible and forgotten creeds,
hypotheses once despised but now long established, or _vice versa_—all
conceived eagerly, jealously, devotedly, as the very heart of the self.
There is no class more sensitive and none, not even the insane, in whom
self-feeling attaches to such singular and remote conceptions. An
astronomer may be indifferent when you depreciate his personal
appearance, abuse his relatives, or question his pecuniary honesty; but
if you doubt that there are artificial canals on Mars you cut him to the
quick. And poets and artists of every sort have always and with good
reason been regarded as a _genus irritabile_.
The ideas of self most commonly cherished, and the ambitions
corresponding to these ideas, fail to appease the imagination of the
idealist, for various reasons; chiefly, perhaps, for the following:
first because they seem more or less at variance with the good of other
persons, and so, to the imaginative and sympathetic mind, bring elements
of inconsistency and wrong, which it cannot accept as consonant with its
own needs; and second because their objects are at best temporary, so
that even if thought of as achieved they fail to meet the need of the
mind for a resting-place in some conception of permanent good or right.
The transformation of narrow and temporary ambitions or ideals into
something more fitted to satisfy the imagination in these respects, is
an urgent need, a condition precedent to peace of mind, in many persons.
The unquiet and discordant state of the unregenerate is a commonplace, a
thousand times repeated, of writings on the inner life. “_Superbus et
avarus numquam quiescunt_,” they tell us, and to enable us to escape
from such unrest is a chief aim of the discipline of self-feeling
enjoined by ethical and religious teachers. “Self,” “the natural man,”
and similar expressions indicate an aspect of the self thought of as
lower—in part at least because of the insecure, inconsistent, and
temporary character just indicated—which is to be so far as possible
subjected and forgotten, while the feelings once attached to it find a
less precarious object in ideas of justice and right, or in the
conception of a personal deity, in whom all that is best of personality
is to have secure existence and eternal success.
In this sense also we may understand the idea of freedom as it presented
itself to Thomas à Kempis and similar minds. To forget “self” and live
the larger life is to be free; free, that is, from the racking passions
of the lower self, free to go onward into a self that is joyful,
boundless, and without remorse. To gain this freedom the principal means
is the control or mortification of sensual needs and worldly ambitions.
Thus the passion of self-aggrandizement is persistent but plastic; it
will never disappear from a vigorous mind, but may become morally higher
by attaching itself to a larger conception of what constitutes the self.
Wherever men find themselves out of joint with their social environment
the fact will be reflected in some peculiarity of self-feeling. Thus it
was in times when the general state of Europe was decadent and hopeless,
or later when ceaseless wars and the common rule of violence prevailed,
that finer spirits, for whose ambition the times offered no congenial
career, so largely sought refuge in religious seclusion, and there built
up among themselves a philosophy which compensated them by the vision of
glory in another world for their insignificance in this. An institution
so popular and enduring as monasticism and the system of belief that
throve in connection with it must have answered to some deep need of
human nature, and it would seem that, as regarded the more intellectual
class, this need was largely that of creating a social self and system
of selves which could thrive in the actual state of things. Their
natures craved success, and, following a tendency always at work, though
never more fantastic in its operation, they created an ideal or standard
of success which they could achieve—very much as a farmer’s boy with a
weak body but an active brain sometimes goes into law, seeking and
upholding an intellectual type of success. From this point of view—which
is, of course, only one of many whence monasticism may be regarded—it
appears as a wonderful exhibition of the power of human nature to
effectuate itself in a co-operative manner in spite of the most untoward
external circumstances.
If we have less flight from the world, corporeal or metaphysical, at the
present day, it is doubtless in part because the times are more
hospitable to the finer abilities, so that all sorts of men, within wide
limits, find careers in which they may hope to gratify a reasonable
ambition. But even now, where conditions are deranged and somewhat
anarchical, so that many find themselves cut off from the outlook toward
a congenial self-development, the wine of life turns bitter, and
harrying resentments are generated which more or less disturb the
stability of the social order. Each man must have his “I”; it is more
necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within
the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble.
Persons of great ambitions, or of peculiar aims of any sort, lie open to
disorders of self-feeling, because they necessarily build up in their
minds a self-image which no ordinary social environment can understand
or corroborate, and which must be maintained by hardening themselves
against immediate influences, enduring or repressing the pains of
present depreciation, and cultivating in imagination the approval of
some higher tribunal. If the man succeeds in becoming indifferent to the
opinions of his neighbors he runs into another danger, that of a
distorted and extravagant self of the pride sort, since by the very
process of gaining independence and immunity from the stings of
depreciation and misunderstanding, he has perhaps lost that wholesome
deference to some social tribunal that a man cannot dispense with and
remain quite sane. The image lacks verification and correction and
becomes too much the reflection of an undisciplined self-feeling. It
would seem that the megalomania or delusion of greatness which Lombroso,
with more or less plausibility, ascribes to Victor Hugo and many other
men of genius, is to be explained largely in this way.
Much the same may be said regarding the relation of self-feeling to
mental disorder, and to abnormal personality of all sorts. It seems
obvious, for instance, that the delusions of greatness and delusions of
persecution so common in insanity are expressions of self-feeling
escaped from normal limitation and control. The instinct which under
proper regulation by reason and sympathy gives rise to just and sane
ambition, in the absence of it swells to grotesque proportions; while
the delusion of persecution appears to be a like extravagant development
of that jealousy regarding what others are thinking of us which often
reaches an almost insane point in irritable people whose sanity is not
questioned.
The peculiar relations to other persons attending any marked personal
deficiency or peculiarity are likely to aggravate, if not to produce,
abnormal manifestations of self-feeling. Any such trait sufficiently
noticeable to interrupt easy and familiar intercourse with others, and
make people talk and think _about_ a person or _to_ him rather than
_with_ him, can hardly fail to have this effect. If he is naturally
inclined to pride or irritability, these tendencies, which depend for
correction upon the flow of sympathy, are likely to be increased. One
who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably perhaps, but
cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly
excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every
countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion or pity, and in so far
as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the
lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others
can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore. He finds himself
apart, “not in it,” and feels chilled, fearful, and suspicious. Thus
“queerness” is no sooner perceived than it is multiplied by reflection
from other minds. The same is true in some degree of dwarfs, deformed or
disfigured persons, even the deaf and those suffering from the
infirmities of old age. The chief misery of the decline of the
faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it,
is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and
influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of
others can alleviate.
CHAPTER VII
HOSTILITY
SIMPLE OR ANIMAL ANGER—SOCIAL ANGER—THE FUNCTION OF HOSTILITY—THE
DOCTRINE OF NON-RESISTANCE—CONTROL AND TRANSFORMATION OF HOSTILITY
BY REASON—HOSTILITY AS PLEASURE OR PAIN—THE IMPORTANCE OF ACCEPTED
SOCIAL STANDARDS—FEAR.
Anger, like other emotions, seems to exist at birth as a simple,
instinctive animal tendency, and to undergo differentiation and
development parallel with the growth of imagination. Perez, speaking of
children at about the age of two months, says, “they begin to push away
objects that they do not like, and have real fits of passion, frowning,
growing red in the face, trembling all over, and sometimes shedding
tears.” They also show anger at not getting the breast or bottle, or
when washed or undressed, or when their toys are taken away. At about
one year old “they will beat people, animals, and inanimate objects if
they are angry with them,”[65] throw things at offending persons, and
the like.
I have observed phenomena similar to these, and no doubt all have who
have seen anything of little children. If there are any writers who tend
to regard the mind at birth as almost _tabula rasa_ so far as special
instincts are concerned, consisting of little more than a faculty of
receiving and organizing impressions, it must be wholesome for them to
associate with infants and notice how unmistakable are the signs of a
distinct and often violent emotion, apparently identical with the anger
or rage of adults. What grown-up persons feel seems to be different, not
in its emotional essence, but in being modified by association with a
much more complicated system of ideas.
This simple, animal sort of anger, excited immediately by something
obnoxious to the senses, does not entirely disappear in adult life.
Probably most persons who step upon a barrel-hoop or run their heads
against a low doorway can discern a moment of instinctive anger toward
the harming object. Even our more enduring forms of hostility seem often
to partake of this direct, unintellectual character. Most people, but
especially those of a sensitive, impressible nature, have antipathies to
places, animals, persons, words—to all sorts of things in fact—which
appear to spring directly out of the subconscious life, without any
mediation of thought. Some think that an animal or instinctive antipathy
to human beings of a different race is natural to all mankind. And among
people of the same race there are undoubtedly persons whom other persons
loathe without attributing to them any hostile state of mind, but with a
merely animal repugnance. Even when the object of hostility is quite
distinctly a mental or moral trait, we often seem to feel it in an
external way, that is, we _see_ it as behavior but do not really
understand it as thought or sentiment. Thus duplicity is hateful whether
we can see any motive for it or not, and gives a sense of slipperiness
and insecurity so tangible that one naturally thinks of some wriggling
animal. In like manner vacillation, fawning, excessive protestation or
self-depreciation, and many other traits, may be obnoxious to us in a
somewhat physical way without our imagining them as states of mind.
But for a social, imaginative being, whose main interests are in the
region of communicative thought and sentiment, the chief field of anger,
as of other emotions, is transferred to this region. Hostility ceases to
be a simple emotion due to a simple stimulus, and breaks up into
innumerable hostile sentiments associated with highly imaginative
personal ideas. In this mentally higher form it may be regarded as
hostile sympathy, or a hostile comment on sympathy. That is to say, we
enter by sympathy or personal imagination into the state of mind of
others, or think we do, and if the thoughts we find there are injurious
to or uncongenial with the ideas we are already cherishing, we feel a
movement of anger.
This is forcibly expressed in a brief but admirable study of antipathy
by Sophie Bryant. Though the antipathy she describes is of a peculiarly
subtle kind, it is plain that the same sort of analysis may be applied
to any form of imaginative hostility.
“A is drawn out toward B to feel what he feels. If the new feeling
harmonizes, distinctly or obscurely, with the whole system of A’s
consciousness—or the part then identified with his will—there follows
that joyful expansion of self beyond self which is sympathy. But if
not—if the new feeling is out of keeping with the system of A’s
will—tends to upset the system, and brings discord into it—there follows
the reaction of the whole against the hostile part which, transferred to
its cause in B, pushes out B’s state, as the antithesis of self, yet
threatening self, and offensive.” Antipathy, she says, “is full of
horrid thrill.” “The peculiar horror of the antipathy springs from the
unwilling response to the state abhorred. We feel ourselves actually
like the other person, selfishly vain, cruelly masterful, artfully
affected, insincere, ungenial, and so on.”... “There is some affinity
between those who antipathize.”[66] And with similar meaning Thoreau
remarks that “you cannot receive a shock unless you have an electric
affinity for that which shocks you,” and that “He who receives an injury
is to some extent an accomplice of the wrong-doer.”[67]
Thus the cause of hostility is imaginative or sympathetic, an inimical
idea attributed to another mind. We cannot feel this way toward that
which is totally unlike us, because the totally unlike is unimaginable,
has no interest for us. This, like all social feeling, requires a union
of likeness with difference.
It is clear that closer association, and more knowledge of one another,
offer no security against hostile feeling. Whether intimacy will improve
our sentiment toward another man or not depends upon the true relation
of his way of thinking and feeling to ours, which intimacy is likely to
reveal. There are many persons with whom we get on very well at a
certain distance, who would turn out intensely antipathetic if we had to
live in the same house with them. Probably all of us have experienced in
one form or another the disgust and irritation that may come from
enforced intimacy with people we liked well enough as mere
acquaintances, and with whom we can find no particular fault, except
that they rub us the wrong way. Henry James, speaking of the aversion of
the brothers Goncourt for Saint Beuve, remarks that it was “a plant
watered by frequent intercourse and protected by punctual notes.”[68] It
is true that an active sense of justice may do much to overcome
unreasonable antipathies; but there are so many urgent uses for our
sense of justice that it is well not to fatigue it by excessive and
unnecessary activity. Justice involves a strenuous and symmetrical
exercise of the imagination and reason, which no one can keep up all the
time; and those who display it most on important occasions ought to be
free to indulge somewhat their whims and prejudices in familiar
intercourse.
Neither do refinement, culture, and taste have any necessary tendency to
diminish hostility. They make a richer and finer sympathy possible, but
at the same time multiply the possible occasions of antipathy. They are
like a delicate sense of smell, which opens the way to as much disgust
as appreciation. Instead of the most sensitive sympathy, the finest
mental texture, being a safeguard against hostile passions, it is only
too evident from a study of the lives of men of genius that these very
traits make a sane and equable existence peculiarly difficult. Read, for
instance, the confessions of Rousseau, and observe how a fine nature,
full of genuine and eager social idealism, is subject to peculiar
sufferings and errors through the sensibility and imagination such a
nature must possess. The quicker the sympathy and ideality, the greater
the suffering from neglect and failure, the greater also the difficulty
of disciplining the multitude of intense impressions and maintaining a
sane view of the whole. Hence the pessimism, the extravagant indignation
against real or supposed wrong-doers, and not infrequently, as in
Rousseau’s case, the almost insane bitterness of jealousy and mistrust.
The commonest forms of imaginative hostility are grounded on social
self-feeling, and come under the head of resentment. We impute to the
other person an injurious thought regarding something which we cherish
as a part of our self, and this awakens anger, which we name pique,
animosity, umbrage, estrangement, soreness, bitterness, heart-burning,
jealousy, indignation, and so on; in accordance with variations which
these words suggest. They all rest upon a feeling that the other person
harbors ideas injurious to us, so that the thought of him is an attack
upon our self. Suppose, for instance, there is a person who has reason
to believe that he has caught me in a lie. It makes little difference,
perhaps, whether he really has or not; so long as I have any
self-respect left, and believe that he entertains this depreciatory idea
of me, I must resent this idea whenever, through my thinking of him, it
enters my mind. Or suppose there is a man who has met me running in
panic from the field of battle; would it not be hard not to hate him?
These situations are perhaps unusual, but we all know persons to whom we
attribute depreciation of our characters, our friends, our children, our
workmanship, our cherished creed or philanthropy; and we do not like
them.
The resentment of charity or pity is a good instance of hostile
sympathy. If a man has self-respect, he feels insulted by the
depreciating view of his manhood implied in commiserating him or
offering him alms. Self-respect means that one’s reflected self is up to
the social standard: and the social standard requires that a man should
not need pity or alms except under very unusual conditions. So the
assumption that he does need them is an injury—whether he does or
not—precisely as it is an insult to a woman to commiserate her ugliness
and bad taste, and suggest that she wear a veil or employ someone to
select her gowns. The curious may find interest in questions like this:
whether a tramp can have self-respect unless he deceives the one who
gives him aid, and so feels superior to him, and not a mere dependent.
In the same way we can easily see why criminals look down upon paupers.
The word indignation suggests a higher sort of imaginative hostility. It
implies that the feeling is directed toward some attack upon a standard
of right, and is not merely an impulse like jealousy or pique. A higher
degree of rationalization is involved; there is some notion of a
reasonable adjustment of personal claims, which the act or thought in
question violates. We frequently perceive that the simpler forms of
resentment have no rational basis, could not be justified in open court,
but indignation always claims a general or social foundation. We feel
indignant when we think that favoritism and not merit secures promotion,
when the rich man gets a pass on the railroad, and so on.
It is thus possible rudely to classify hostilities under three heads,
according to the degree of mental organization they involve; namely, as
1. Primary, immediate, or animal.
2. Social, sympathetic, imaginative, or personal, of a comparatively
direct sort, that is, without reference to any standard of justice.
3. Rational or ethical; similar to the last but involving reference to a
standard of justice and the sanction of conscience.
The function of hostility is, no doubt, to awaken a fighting energy, to
contribute an emotional motive force to activities of self-preservation
or aggrandizement.
In its immediate or animal form this is obvious enough. The wave of
passion that possesses a fighting dog stimulates and concentrates his
energy upon a few moments of struggle in which success or failure may be
life or death; and the simple, violent anger of children and impulsive
adults is evidently much the same thing. Vital force explodes in a flash
of aggression; the mind has no room for anything but the fierce
instinct. It is clear that hostility of this uncontrolled sort is proper
to a very simple state of society and of warfare, and is likely to be a
source of disturbance and weakness in that organized state which calls
for corresponding organization in the individual mind.
There is a transition by imperceptible degrees from the blind anger that
thinks of nothing to the imaginative anger that thinks of persons, and
pursues the personal idea into all possible degrees of subtlety and
variety. The passion itself, the way we feel when we are angry, does not
seem to change much, except, perhaps, in intensity, the change being
mostly in the idea that awakens it. It is as if anger were a strong and
peculiar flavor which might be taken with the simplest food or the most
elaborate, might be used alone, strong and plain, or in the most curious
and recondite combinations with other flavors.
While it is evident enough that animal anger is one of those instincts
that are readily explained as conducive to self-preservation, it is not,
perhaps, so obvious that socialized anger has any such justification. I
think, however, that, though very liable to be excessive and
unmanageable, and tending continually to be economized as the race
progresses, so that most forms of it are properly regarded as wrong, it
nevertheless plays an indispensable part in life.
The mass of mankind are sluggish and need some resentment as a
stimulant; this is its function on the higher plane of life as it is on
the lower. Surround a man with soothing, flattering circumstances, and
in nine cases out of ten he will fail to do anything worthy, but will
lapse into some form of sensualism or dilettanteism. There is no tonic,
to a nature substantial enough to bear it, like chagrin—“erquickender
Verdruss,” as Goethe says. Life without opposition is Capua. No matter
what the part one is fitted to play in it, he can make progress in his
path only by a vigorous assault upon the obstacles, and to be vigorous
the assault must be supported by passion of some sort. With most of us
the requisite intensity of passion is not forthcoming without an element
of resentment; and common-sense and careful observation will, I believe,
confirm the opinion that few people who amount to much are without a
good capacity for hostile feeling, upon which they draw freely when they
need it. This would be more readily admitted if many people were not
without the habit of penetrating observation, either of themselves or
others, in such matters, and so are enabled to believe that anger, which
is conventionally held to be wrong, has no place in the motives of moral
persons.
I have in mind a man who is remarkable for a certain kind of aggressive,
tenacious and successful pursuit of the right. He does the things that
everyone else agrees ought to be done but does not do—especially things
involving personal antagonism. While the other people deplore the
corruption of politics, but have no stomach to amend it, he is the man
to beard the corrupt official in his ward, or expose him in the courts
or the public press—all at much pains and cost to himself and without
prospect of honor or any other recompense. If one considers how he
differs from other conscientious people of equal ability and
opportunity, it appears to be largely in having more bile in him. He has
a natural fund of animosity, and instead of spending it blindly and
harmfully, he directs it upon that which is hateful to the general good,
thus gratifying his native turn for resentment in a moral and fruitful
way. Evidently if there were more men of this stamp it would be of
benefit to the moral condition of the country. Contemporary conditions
seem to tend somewhat to dissipate that righteous wrath against evil
which, intelligently directed, is a main instrument of progress.
Thomas Huxley, to take a name known to all, was a man in whom there was
much fruitful hostility. He did not seek controversy, but when the
enemies of truth offered battle he felt no inclination to refuse; and he
avowed—perhaps with a certain zest in contravening conventional
teaching—that he loved his friends and hated his enemies.[69] His hatred
was of a noble sort, and the reader of his Life and Letters can hardly
doubt that he was a good as well as a great man, or that his pugnacity
helped him to be such. Indeed I do not think that science or letters
could do without the spirit of opposition, although much energy is
dissipated and much thought clouded by it. Even men like Darwin or
Emerson, who seem to wish nothing more than to live at peace with
everyone, may be observed to develop their views with unusual fulness
and vigor where they are most in opposition to authority. There is
something analogous to political parties in all intellectual activity;
opinion divides, more or less definitely, into opposing groups, and each
side is stimulated by the opposition of the other to define,
corroborate, and amend its views, with the purpose of justifying itself
before the constituency to which it appeals. What we need is not that
controversy should disappear, but that it should be carried on with
sincere and absolute deference to the standard of truth.
A just resentment is not only a needful stimulus to aggressive
righteousness, but has also a wholesome effect upon the mind of the
person against whom it is directed, by awakening a feeling of the
importance of the sentiments he has transgressed. On the higher planes
of life an imaginative sense that there is resentment in the minds of
other persons performs the same function that physical resistance does
upon the lower.[70] It is an attack upon my mental self, and as a
sympathetic and imaginative being I feel it more than I would a mere
blow; it forces me to consider the other’s view, and either to accept it
or to bear it down by the stronger claims of a different one. Thus it
enters potently into our moral judgments.
“Let such pure hate still underprop
Our love that we may be
Each other’s conscience.”[71]
I think that no one’s character and aims can be respected unless he is
perceived to be capable of some sort of resentment. We feel that if he
is really in earnest about anything he should feel hostile emotion if it
is attacked, and if he gives no sign of this, either at the moment of
attack or later, he and what he represents become despised. No teacher,
for instance, can maintain discipline unless his scholars feel that he
will in some manner resent a breach of it.
Thus we seldom feel keenly that our acts are wrong until we perceive
that they arouse some sort of resentment in others, and whatever selfish
aggression we can practise without arousing resistance, we presently
come to look upon as a matter of course. Judging the matter from my own
consciousness and experience, I have no belief in the theory that
non-resistance has, as a rule, a mollifying influence upon the
aggressor. I do not wish people to turn me the other cheek when I smite
them, because, in most cases, that has a bad effect upon me. I am soon
used to submission and may come to think no more of the unresisting
sufferer than I do of the sheep whose flesh I eat at dinner. Neither, on
the other hand, am I helped by extravagant and accusatory opposition;
that is likely to put me into a state of unreasoning anger. But it is
good for us that everyone should maintain his rights, and the rights of
others with whom he sympathizes, exhibiting a just and firm resentment
against any attempt to tread upon them. A consciousness, based on
experience, that the transgression of moral standards will arouse
resentment in the minds of those whose opinion we respect, is a main
force in the upholding of such standards.
But the doctrine of non-resistance, like all ideas that have appealed to
good minds, has a truth wrapped up in it, notwithstanding what appears
to be its flagrant absurdity. What the doctrine really means, as taught
in the New Testament and by many individuals and societies in our own
day, is perhaps no more than this, that we should discard the coarser
weapons of resistance for the finer, and threaten a moral resentment
instead of blows or lawsuits. It is quite true that we can best combat
what we regard as evil in another person of ordinary sensibility by
attacking the higher phases of his self rather than the lower. If a man
appears to be about to do something brutal or dishonest, we may either
encounter him on his present low plane of life by knocking him down or
calling a policeman, or we may try to work upon his higher consciousness
by giving him to understand that we feel sure a person of his
self-respect and good repute will not degrade himself, but that if
anything so improbable and untoward should occur, he must, of course,
expect the disappointment and contempt of those who before thought well
of him. In other words, we threaten, as courteously as possible, his
social self. This method is often much more efficient than the other, is
morally edifying instead of degrading, and is practised by men of
address who make no claim to unusual virtue.
This seems to be what is meant by non-resistance; but the name is
misleading. It _is_ resistance, and directed at what is believed to be
the enemy’s weakest point. As a matter of strategy it is an attack upon
his flank, aggression upon an unprotected part of his position. Its
justification, in the long run, is in its success. If we do not succeed
in making our way into the other man’s mind and changing his point of
view by substituting our own, the whole manœuvre falls flat, the injury
is done, the ill-doer is confirmed in his courses, and you would better
have knocked him down. It is good to appeal to the highest motives we
can arouse, and to exercise a good deal of faith as to what can be
aroused, but real non-resistance to what we believe to be wrong is mere
pusillanimity. There is perhaps no important sect or teacher that really
inculcates such a doctrine, the name non-resistance being given to
attacks upon the higher self under the somewhat crude impression that
resistance is not such unless it takes some obvious material form, and
probably all teachers would be found to vary their tactics somewhat
according to the sort of people with whom they are dealing. Although
Christ taught the turning of the other cheek to the smiter, and that the
coat should follow the cloak, it does not appear that he suggested to
those who were desecrating the Temple that they should double their
transactions, but, apparently regarding them as beyond the reach of
moral suasion, he “went into the Temple, and began to cast out them that
sold and bought in the Temple, and overthrew the tables of the
money-changers and the seats of them that sold doves.” It seems that he
even used a scourge on this occasion. I cannot see much in the question
regarding non-resistance beyond a vague use of terms and a difference of
opinion as to what kind of resistance is most effective in certain
cases.
It is easy and not uncommon to state too exclusively the pre-eminence of
affection in human ideals. No one, I suppose, believes that the life of
Fra Angelico’s angels, such as we see them in his “Last Judgment,”
circling on the flowery sward of Paradise, would long content any normal
human creature. If it appears beautiful and desirable at times, this is
perhaps because our world is one in which the supply of amity and peace
mostly falls short of the demand for them. Many of us have seen times of
heat and thirst when it seemed as if a bit of shade and a draught of
cold water would appease all earthly wants. But when we had the shade
and the water we presently began to think about something else. So with
these ideals of unbroken peace and affection. Even for those sensitive
spirits that most cherish them, they would hardly suffice as a
continuity. An indiscriminate and unvarying amity is, after all,
disgusting.
Human ideals and human nature must develop together, and we cannot
foresee what either may become; but for the present it would seem that
an honest and reasonable idealism must look rather to the organization
and control of all passions with reference to some conception of right,
than to the expulsion of some passions by others. I doubt whether any
healthy and productive love can exist which is not resentment on its
obverse side. How can we rightly care for anything without in some way
resenting attacks upon it?
Apparently, the higher function of hostility is to put down wrong; and
to fulfil this function it must be rationally controlled with a view to
ideals of justice. In so far as a man has a sound and active social
imagination, he will feel the need of this control, and will tend with
more or less energy, according to the vigor of his mind, to limit his
resentment to that which his judgment tells him is really unjust or
wrong. Imagination presents us with all sorts of conflicting views,
which reason, whose essence is organization, tries to arrange and
control in accordance with some unifying principle, some standard of
equity: moral principles result from the mind’s instinctive need to
achieve unity of view. All special impulses, and hostile feeling among
them, are brought to the bar of conscience and judged by such standards
as the mind has worked out. If declared right or justifiable, resentment
is endorsed and enforced by the will; we think of it as righteous and
perhaps take credit with ourselves for it. But if it appears grounded on
no broad and unifying principle, our larger thought disowns it, and
tends with such energy as it may have to ignore and suppress it. Thus we
overlook accidental injury, we control or avoid mere antipathy, but we
act upon indignation. The latter is enduring and powerful because
consistent with cool thought; while impulsive, unreasoning anger,
getting no re-enforcement from such thought, has little lasting force.
Suppose, for illustration, one goes with a request to some person in
authority, and meets a curt refusal. The first feeling is doubtless one
of blind, unthinking anger at the rebuff. Immediately after that the
mind busies itself more deeply with the matter, imagining motives,
ascribing feelings and the like; and anger takes a more bitter and
personal form, it rankles where at first it only stung. But if one is a
fairly reasonable man, accustomed to refer things to standards of right,
one presently grows calmer and, continuing the imaginative process in a
broader way, endeavors to put himself at the other person’s point of
view and see what justification, if any, there is for the latter’s
conduct. Possibly he is one subject to constant solicitation, with whom
coldness and abruptness are necessary to the despatch of business—and so
on. If the explanation seems insufficient, so that his rudeness still
appears to be mere insolence, our resentment against him lasts,
reappearing whenever we think of him, so that we are likely to thwart
him somehow if we get a chance, and justify our action to ourselves and
others on grounds of moral disapproval.
Or suppose one has to stand in line at the postoffice, with a crowd of
other people, waiting to get his mail. There are delay and discomfort to
be borne; but these he will take with composure because he sees that
they are a part of the necessary conditions of the situation, which all
must submit to alike. Suppose, however, that while patiently waiting his
turn he notices someone else, who has come in later, edging into the
line ahead of him. Then he will certainly be angry. The delay threatened
is only a matter of a few seconds; but here is a question of justice, a
case for indignation, a chance for anger to come forth with the sanction
of thought.
Another phase of the transformation of hostility by reason and
imagination, is that it tends to become more discriminating or selective
as regards its relation to the idea of the person against whom it is
directed. In a sense the higher hostility is less personal than the
lower; that is, in the sense that it is no longer aimed blindly at
persons as wholes, but distinguishes in some measure between phases or
tendencies of them that are obnoxious and others that are not. It is not
the mere thought of X’s countenance, or other symbol, that arouses
resentment, but the thought of him as exhibiting insincerity, or
arrogance, or whatever else it may be that we do not like; while we may
preserve a liking for him as exhibiting other traits. Generally
speaking, all persons have much in them which, if imagined, must appear
amiable; so that if we feel only animosity toward a man it must be
because we have apprehended him only in a partial aspect. An
undisciplined anger, like any other undisciplined emotion, always tends
to produce these partial and indiscriminate notions, because it
overwhelms symmetrical thought and permits us to see only that which
agrees with itself. But a more chastened sentiment allows a juster view,
so that it becomes conceivable that we should love our enemies as well
as antagonize the faults of our friends. A just parent or teacher will
resent the insubordinate behavior of a child or pupil without letting go
of affection, and the same principle holds good as regards criminals,
and all proper objects of hostility. The attitude of society toward its
delinquent members should be stern, yet sympathetic, like that of a
father toward a disobedient child.
It is the tendency of modern life, by educating the imagination and
rendering all sorts of people conceivable, to discredit the sweeping
conclusions of impulsive thought—as, for instance, that all who commit
violence or theft are hateful ill-doers, and nothing more—and to make us
feel the fundamental likeness of human nature wherever found. Resentment
against ill-doing should by no means disappear; but while continuing to
suppress wrong by whatever means proves most efficacious, we shall
perhaps see more and more clearly that the people who are guilty of it
are very much like ourselves, and are acting from motives to which we
also are subject.
It is often asserted or assumed that hostile feeling is in its very
nature obnoxious and painful to the human mind, and persists in spite of
us, as it were, because it is forced upon us by the competitive
conditions of existence. This view seems to me hardly sound. I should
rather say that the mental and social harmfulness of anger, in common
experience, is due not so much to its peculiar character as hostile
feeling, as to the fact that, like lust, it is so surcharged with
instinctive energy as to be difficult to control and limit to its proper
function; while, if not properly disciplined, it of course introduces
disorder and pain into the mental life.
To a person in robust condition, with plenty of energy to spare, a
thorough-going anger, far from being painful, is an expansive, I might
say glorious, experience, _while the fit is on and has full control_. A
man in a rage does not want to get out of it, but has a full sense of
life which he impulsively seeks to continue by repelling suggestions
tending to calm him. It is only when it has begun to pall upon him that
he is really willing to be appeased. This may be seen by observing the
behavior of impulsive children, and also of adults whose passions are
undisciplined.
An enduring hatred may also be a source of satisfaction to some minds,
though this I believe to be unusual in these days, and becoming more so.
One who reads Hazlitt’s powerful and sincere, though perhaps unhealthy,
essay on the Pleasure of Hating, will see that the thing is possible. In
most cases remorse and distress set in so soon as the fit of anger
begins to abate, and its destructive incompatibility with the
established order and harmony of the mind begins to be felt. There is a
conviction of sin, the pain of a shattered ideal, just as there is after
yielding to any other unchastened passion. The cause of the pain seems
to be not so much the peculiar character of the feeling as its
exorbitant intensity.
Any simple and violent passion is likely to be felt as painful and wrong
in its after-effects because it destroys that harmony or synthesis that
reason and conscience strive to produce; and this effect is probably
more and more felt as the race advances and mental life becomes more
complex. The conditions of civilization require of us so extensive and
continuous an expenditure of psychical force, that we no longer have the
superabundance of emotional energy that makes a violent outlet
agreeable. Habits and principles of self-control naturally arise along
with the increasing need for economy and rational guidance of emotion;
and whatever breaks through them causes exhaustion and remorse. Any
gross passion comes to be felt as “the expense of spirit in a waste of
shame.” Spasms of violent feeling properly belong with a somewhat
apathetic habit of life, whose accumulating energies they help to
dissipate, and are as much out of place to-day as the hard-drinking
habits of our Saxon ancestors.
The sort of men that most feel the need of hostility as a spur to
exertion are, I imagine, those of superabundant vitality and somewhat
sluggish temperament, like Goethe and Bismarck, both of whom declared
that it was essential to them. There is also a great deal of
old-fashioned personal hatred in remote and quiet places, like the
mountains of North Carolina, and probably among all classes who do not
much feel the stress of civilization. But to most of those who share
fully in the life of the time, intense personal animosities are painful
and destructive, and many fine spirits are ruined by failure to inhibit
them.
The kind of man most characteristic of these times, I take it, does not
allow himself to be drawn into the tangle of merely personal hatred,
but, cultivating a tolerance for all sorts of men, he yet maintains a
sober and determined antagonism toward all tendencies or purposes that
conflict with his true self, with whatever he has most intimately
appropriated and identified with his character. He is always courteous,
cherishes as much as possible those kindly sentiments which are not only
pleasant and soothing but do much to oil the machinery of his
enterprises, and by wasting no energy on futile passion is enabled to
think all the more clearly and act the more inflexibly when he finds
antagonism necessary. A man of the world of the modern type is hardly
ever dramatic in the style of Shakespeare’s heroes. He usually expresses
himself in the most economical manner possible, and if he has to
threaten, for instance, knows how to do it by a movement of the lips, or
the turn of a phrase in a polite note. If cruder and more violent
tactics are necessary, to impress vulgar minds, he is very likely to
depute this rough work to a subordinate. A foreman of track hands may
have to be a loud-voiced, strong-armed, palpably aggressive person; but
the president of the road is commonly quiet and mild-mannered.
The mind is greatly aided in the control of animosity by the existence
of ready-made and socially accepted standards of right. Suffering from
his own angry passions and from those of others, one looks out for some
criterion, some rule of what is just and fair among persons, which he
may hold himself and others to, and moderate antagonism by removing the
sense of peculiar injury. Opposition itself, within certain limits,
comes to be regarded as part of the reasonable order of things. In this
view the function of moral standards is the same as that of courts of
justice in grosser conflicts. All good citizens want the laws to be
definite and vigorously enforced, in order to avoid the uncertainty,
waste, and destruction of a lawless condition. In the same way
right-minded people want definite moral standards, enforced by general
opinion, in order to save the mental wear and tear of unguided feeling.
It is a great relief to a person harassed by hostile emotion to find a
point of view from which this emotion appears wrong or irrational, so
that he can proceed definitely and with the sanction of his reason to
put it down. The next best thing, perhaps, is to have the hostility
definitely approved by reason, so that he may indulge it without further
doubt. The unsettled condition is worst of all.
This control of hostility by a sense of common allegiance to rule is
well illustrated by athletic games. When properly conducted they proceed
upon a definite understanding of what is fair, and no lasting anger is
felt for any hurts inflicted, so long as this standard of fairness is
maintained. It is the same in war: soldiers do not necessarily feel any
anger at other soldiers who are trying to shoot them to death. That is
thought of as within the rules of the game. As Admiral Cervera’s chief
of staff is reported to have said to Admiral Sampson, “You know there is
nothing personal in this.” But if the white flag is used treacherously,
explosive bullets employed, or the moral standard otherwise
transgressed, there is hard feeling. It is very much the same with the
multiform conflicts of purpose in modern industrial life. It is not
clear that competition as such, apart from the question of fairness or
unfairness, has any tendency to increase hostility. Competition and the
clash of purposes are inseparable from activity, and are felt to be so.
Ill-feeling flourishes no more in an active, stirring state of society
than in a stagnant state. The trouble with our industrial relations is
not the mere extent of competition, but the partial lack of established
laws, rules, and customs, to determine what is right and fair in it.
This partial lack of standards is connected with the rapid changes in
industry and industrial relations among men, with which the development
of law and of moral criteria has by no means kept pace. Hence there
arises great uncertainty as to what some persons and classes may rightly
and fairly require of other persons and classes; and this uncertainty
lets loose angry imaginations.
It will be evident that I do not look upon affection, or anger, or any
other particular mode of feeling, as in itself good or bad, social or
anti-social, progressive or retrogressive. It seems to me that the
essentially good, social, or progressive thing, in this regard, is the
organization and discipline of all emotions by the aid of reason, in
harmony with a developing general life, which is summed up for us in
conscience. That this development of the general life is such as to tend
ultimately to do away with hostile feeling altogether, is not clear. The
actively good people, the just men, reformers, and prophets, not
excepting him who drove the money-changers from the Temple, have been
and are, for the most part, people who feel the spur of resentment; and
it is not evident that this can cease to be the case. The diversity of
human minds and endeavors seems to be an essential part of the general
plan of things, and shows no tendency to diminish. This diversity
involves a conflict of ideas and purposes, which, in those who take it
earnestly, is likely to occasion hostile feeling. This feeling should
become less wayward, violent, bitter, or personal, in a narrow sense,
and more disciplined, rational, discriminating, and quietly persistent.
That it ought to disappear is certainly not apparent.
Something similar to what has been said of anger will hold true of any
well-marked type of instinctive emotion. If we take fear, for instance,
and try to recall our experience of it from early childhood on, it seems
clear that, while the emotion itself may change but little, the ideas,
occasions, suggestions that excite it depend upon the state of our
intellectual and social development, and so undergo great alteration.
The feeling does not tend to disappear, but to become less violent and
spasmodic, more and more social as regards the objects that excite it,
and more and more subject, in the best minds, to the discipline of
reason.
The fears of little children[72] are largely excited by immediate
sensible experiences—darkness, solitude, sharp noises, and so on.
Sensitive persons often remain throughout life subject to irrational
fears of this sort, and it is well known that they play a conspicuous
part in hysteria, insanity, and other weak or morbid conditions. But for
the most part the healthy adult mind becomes accustomed and indifferent
to these simple phenomena, and transfers its emotional sensibility to
more complex interests. These interests are for the most part
sympathetic, involving our social rather than our material self—our
standing in the minds of other people, the well-being of those we care
for, and so on. Yet these fears—fear of standing alone, of losing one’s
place in the flow of human action and sympathy, fear for the character
and success of those near to us—have often the very quality of childish
fear. A man cast out of his regular occupation and secure place in the
system of the world feels a terror like that of the child in the dark;
just as impulsive, perhaps just as purposeless and paralyzing. The main
difference seems to be that the latter fear is stimulated by a complex
idea, implying a socially imaginative habit of mind.
Social fear, of a sort perhaps somewhat morbid, is vividly depicted by
Rousseau in the passage of his Confessions where he describes the
feeling that led him falsely to accuse a maid-servant of a theft which
he had himself committed. “When she appeared my heart was agonized, but
the presence of so many people was more powerful than my compunction. I
did not fear punishment, but I dreaded shame: I dreaded it more than
death, more than the crime, more than all the world. I would have
buried, hid myself in the centre of the earth: invincible shame bore
down every other sentiment; shame alone caused all my impudence, and in
proportion as I became criminal the fear of discovery rendered me
intrepid. I felt no dread but that of being detected, of being publicly
and to my face declared a thief, liar, and calumniator....”[73]
So also we might distinguish, as in the case of anger, a higher form of
social fear, one that is not narrowly personal, but relates to some
socially derived ideal of good or right. For instance, in a soldier the
terror of roaring guns and singing bullets would be a fear of the lowest
or animal type. Dread of the disgrace to follow running away would be a
social fear, yet not of the highest sort, because the thing dreaded is
not wrong but shame—a comparatively simple and non-rational idea. People
often do what they know is wrong under the influence of such fear, as
did Rousseau in the incident quoted above. But, supposing the soldier’s
highest ideal to be the success of his army and his country, a fear for
that, overcoming all lower and cruder fears—selfish fears as they would
ordinarily be called—would be moral or ethical.
CHAPTER VIII
EMULATION
CONFORMITY—NON-CONFORMITY—THE TWO VIEWED AS COMPLEMENTARY PHASES OF
LIFE—RIVALRY—HERO-WORSHIP.
It will be convenient to distinguish three sorts of
emulation—conformity, rivalry, and hero-worship.
Conformity may be defined as the endeavor to maintain a standard set by
a group. It is a voluntary imitation of prevalent modes of action,
distinguished from rivalry and other aggressive phases of emulation by
being comparatively passive, aiming to keep up rather than to excel, and
concerning itself for the most part with what is outward and formal. On
the other hand, it is distinguished from involuntary imitation by being
intentional instead of mechanical. Thus it is not conformity, for most
of us, to speak the English language, because we have practically no
choice in the matter, but we might choose to conform to particular
pronunciations or turns of speech used by those with whom we wish to
associate.
The ordinary motive to conformity is a sense, more or less vivid, of the
pains and inconveniences of non-conformity. Most people find it painful
to go to an evening company in any other than the customary dress; the
source of the pain appearing to be a vague sense of the depreciatory
curiosity which one imagines that he will excite. His social
self-feeling is hurt by an unfavorable view of himself that he
attributes to others. This example is typical of the way the group
coerces each of its members in all matters concerning which he has no
strong and definite private purpose. The world constrains us without any
definite intention to do so, merely through the impulse, common to all,
to despise peculiarity for which no reason is perceived. “Nothing in the
world more subtle,” says George Eliot, speaking of the decay of higher
aims in certain people, “than the process of their gradual change! In
the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly; you and I may have sent some
of our breath toward infecting them, when we uttered our conforming
falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the
vibrations from a woman’s glance.” “Solitude is fearsome and
heavy-hearted,” and non-conformity condemns us to it by causing _gêne_,
if not dislike, in others, and so interrupting that relaxation and
spontaneity of attitude that is required for the easy flow of sympathy
and communication. Thus it is hard to be at ease with one who is
conspicuously worse or better dressed than we are, or whose manners are
notably different; no matter how little store our philosophy may set by
such things. On the other hand, a likeness in small things that enables
them to be forgotten gives people a _prima facie_ at-homeness with each
other highly favorable to sympathy; and so we all wish to have it with
people we care for.
It would seem that the repression of non-conformity is a native impulse,
and that tolerance always requires some moral exertion. We all cherish
our habitual system of thought, and anything that breaks in upon it in a
seemingly wanton manner, is annoying to us and likely to cause
resentment. So our first tendency is to suppress the peculiar, and we
learn to endure it only when we must, either because it is shown to be
reasonable or because it proves refractory to our opposition. The
innovator is nearly as apt as anyone else to put down innovation in
others. Words denoting singularity usually carry some reproach with
them; and it would perhaps be found that the more settled the social
system is, the severer is the implied condemnation. In periods of
disorganization and change, such as ours is in many respects, people are
educated to comparative tolerance by unavoidable familiarity with
conflicting views—as religious toleration, for instance, is the outcome
of the continued spectacle of competing creeds.
Sir Henry Maine, in discussing the forces that controlled the legal
decisions of a Roman prætor, remarks that he “was kept within the
narrowest bounds by the prepossessions imbibed from early training and
by the strong restraints of professional opinion, restraints of which
the stringency can only be appreciated by those who have personally
experienced them.”[74] In the same way every profession, trade or
handicraft, every church, circle, fraternity or clique, has its more or
less definite standards, conformity to which it tends to impose on all
its members. It is not at all essential that there should be any
deliberate purpose to set up these standards, or any special machinery
for enforcing them. They spring up spontaneously, as it were, by an
unconscious process of assimilation, and are enforced by the mere
inertia of the minds constituting the group.
Thus every variant idea of conduct has to fight its way: as soon as
anyone attempts to do anything unexpected the world begins to cry, “Get
in the rut! Get in the rut! Get in the rut!” and shoves, stares, coaxes,
and sneers until he does so—or until he makes good his position, and so,
by altering the standard in a measure, establishes a new basis of
conformity. There are no people who are altogether non-conformers, or
who are completely tolerant of non-conformity in others. Mr. Lowell, who
wrote some of the most stirring lines in literature in defence of
non-conformity, was himself conventional and an upholder of conventions
in letters and social intercourse. Either to be exceptional or to
appreciate the exceptional requires a considerable expenditure of
energy, and no one can afford this in many directions. There are many
persons who take pains to keep their minds open; and there are groups,
countries, and periods which are comparatively favorable to
open-mindedness and variation; but conformity is always the rule and
non-conformity the exception.
Conformity is a sort of co-operation: one of its functions is to
economize energy. The standards which it presses upon the individual are
often elaborate and valuable products of cumulative thought and
experience, and whatever imperfections they may have they are, as a
whole, an indispensable foundation for life: it is inconceivable that
anyone should dispense with them. If I imitate the dress, the manners,
the household arrangements of other people, I save so much mental energy
for other purposes. It is best that each should originate where he is
specially fitted to do so, and follow others where they are better
qualified to lead. It is said with truth that conformity is a drag upon
genius; but it is equally true and important that its general action
upon human nature is elevating. We get by it the selected and
systematized outcome of the past, and to be brought up to its standards
is a brief recapitulation of social development: it sometimes levels
down but more generally levels up. It may be well for purposes of
incitement to goad our individuality by the abuse of conformity; but
statements made with this in view lack accuracy. It is good for the
young and aspiring to read Emerson’s praise of self-reliance, in order
that they may have courage to fight for their ideas; but we may also
sympathize with Goethe when he says that “nothing more exposes us to
madness than distinguishing us from others, and nothing more contributes
to maintaining our common-sense than living in the universal way with
multitudes of men.”[75]
There are two aspects of non-conformity: first, a rebellious impulse or
“contrary suggestion” leading to an avoidance of accepted standards in a
spirit of opposition, without necessary reference to any other
standards; and, second, an appeal from present and commonplace standards
to those that are comparatively remote and unusual. These two usually
work together. One is led to a mode of life different from that of the
people about him, partly by intrinsic contrariness, and partly by fixing
his imagination on the ideas and practices of other people whose mode of
life he finds more congenial.
But the essence of non-conformity as a personal attitude consists in
contrary suggestion or the spirit of opposition. People of natural
energy take pleasure in that enhanced feeling of self that comes from
consciously _not_ doing that which is suggested or enjoined upon them by
circumstances and by other persons. There is joy in the sense of
self-assertion: it is sweet to do one’s own things; and if others are
against him one feels sure they _are_ his own. To brave the disapproval
of men is tonic; it is like climbing along a mountain path in the teeth
of the wind; one feels himself as a cause, and knows the distinctive
efficacy of his being. Thus self-feeling which, if somewhat languid and
on the defensive, causes us to avoid peculiarity, may, when in a more
energetic condition, cause us to seek it; just as we rejoice at one time
to brave the cold, and at another to cower over the fire, according to
the vigor of our circulation.
This may easily be observed in vigorous children: each in his way will
be found to attach himself to methods of doing things which he regards
as peculiarly his own, and to delight in asserting these methods against
opposition. It is also the basis of some of the deepest and most
significant differences between races and individuals. Controlled by
intellect and purpose this passion for differentiation becomes
self-reliance, self-discipline, and immutable persistence in a private
aim: qualities which more than any others make the greater power of
superior persons and races. It is a source of enterprise, exploration,
and endurance in all kinds of undertakings, and of fierce defence of
private rights. How much of Anglo-Saxon history is rooted in the
intrinsic cantankerousness of the race! It is largely this that makes
the world-winning pioneer, who keeps pushing on because he wants a place
all to himself, and hates to be bothered by other people over whom he
has no control. On the frontier a common man defines himself better as a
cause. He looks round at his clearing, his cabin, his growing crops, his
wife, his children, his dogs, horses, and cattle, and says, _I did it:
they are mine_. All that he sees recalls the glorious sense of things
won by his own hand.
Who does not feel that it is a noble thing to stand alone, to steer due
west into an unknown universe, like Columbus, or, like Nansen, ground
the ship upon the ice-pack and drift for the North Pole? “Adhere to your
own act,” says Emerson, “and congratulate yourself if you have done
something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous
age.” We like that epigram, _Victrix causa diis placuit, sed victa
Catoni_, because we like the thought that a man stood out alone against
the gods themselves, and set his back against the course of nature. The
“souls that stood alone,
While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone,”
are not to be thought of as victims of self-sacrifice. Many of them
rejoiced in just that isolation, and daring, and persistence; so that it
was not self-sacrifice but self-realization. Conflict is a necessity of
the active soul, and if a social order could be created from which it
were absent, that order would perish as uncongenial to human nature. “To
be a man is to be a non-conformer.”
I think that people go into all sorts of enterprises, for instance into
novel and unaccredited sorts of philanthropy, with a spirit of adventure
not far removed from the spirit that seeks the North Pole. It is neither
true nor wholesome to think of the “good” as actuated by motives
radically different in kind from those of ordinary human nature; and I
imagine the best of them are far from wishing to be thus thought of.
Undertakings of reform and philanthropy appeal to the mind in a double
aspect. There is, of course, the desire to accomplish some worthy end,
to effectuate some cherished sentiment which the world appears to
ignore, to benefit the oppressed, to advance human knowledge, or the
like. But behind that is the vague need of self-expression, of creation,
of a momentous experience, so that one may know that one has really
lived. And the finer imaginations are likely to find this career of
novelty and daring, not in the somewhat outworn paths of war and
exploration, but in new and precarious kinds of social activity. So one
may sometimes meet in social settlements and charity organization
bureaus the very sort of people that led the Crusades into Palestine. I
do not speak at random, but have several persons in mind who seem to me
to be of this sort.
In its second aspect non-conformity may be regarded as a remoter
conformity. The rebellion against social influence is only partial and
apparent; and the one who seems to be out of step with the procession is
really keeping time to another music. As Thoreau said, he hears a
different drummer. If a boy refuses the occupation his parents and
friends think best for him, and persists in working at something strange
and fantastic, like art or science, it is sure to be the case that his
most vivid life is not with those about him at all, but with the masters
he has known through books, or perhaps seen and heard for a few moments.
Environment, in the sense of social influence actually at work, is far
from the definite and obvious thing it is often assumed to be. Our real
environment consists of those images which are most present to our
thoughts, and in the case of a vigorous, growing mind, these are likely
to be something quite different from what is most present to the senses.
The group to which we give allegiance, and to whose standards we try to
conform, is determined by our own selective affinity, choosing among all
the personal influences accessible to us; and so far as we select with
any independence of our palpable companions, we have the appearance of
non-conformity.
All non-conformity that is affirmative or constructive must act by this
selection of remoter relations; opposition, by itself, being sterile,
and meaning nothing beyond personal peculiarity. There is, therefore, no
definite line between conformity and non-conformity; there is simply a
more or less characteristic and unusual way of selecting and combining
accessible influences. It is much the same question as that of invention
_versus_ imitation. As Professor Baldwin points out, there is no radical
separation between these two aspects of human thought and action. There
is no imitation that is absolutely mechanical and uninventive—a man
cannot repeat an act without putting something of his idiosyncrasy into
it—neither is there any invention that is not imitative in the sense
that it is made up of elements suggested by observation and experience.
What the mind does, in any case, is to reorganize and reproduce the
suggested materials in accordance with its own structure and tendency;
and we judge the result as imitative or inventive, original or
commonplace, according as it does or does not strike us as a new and
fruitful employment of the common material.[76]
A just view of the matter should embrace the whole of it at once, and
see conformity and non-conformity as normal and complementary phases of
human activity. In their quieter moods men have a pleasure in social
agreement and the easy flow of sympathy, which makes non-conformity
uncomfortable. But when their energy is full and demanding an outlet
through the instincts, it can only be appeased by something which gives
the feeling of self-assertion. They are agitated by a “creative
impatience,” an outburst of the primal need to act; like the Norsemen,
of whom Gibbon says: “Impatient of a bleak climate and narrow limits,
they started from the banquet, sounded their horn, ascended their
vessels, and explored every coast that promised either spoil or
settlement.”[77] In social intercourse this active spirit finds its
expression largely in resisting the will of others; and the spirit of
opposition and self-differentiation thus arising is the principal direct
stimulus to non-conformity. This spirit, however, has no power of
absolute creation, and is forced to seek for suggestions and materials
in the minds of others; so that the independence is only relative to the
more immediate and obvious environment, and never constitutes a real
revolt from the social order.
Naturally non-conformity is characteristic of the more energetic states
of the human mind. Men of great vigor are sure to be non-conformers in
some important respect; youth glories in non-conformity, while age
usually comes back to the general point of view. “Men are conservatives
when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are
conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are
sick or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their
conscience has been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read
poetry, they are radicals.”[78]
The rational attitude of the individual toward the question of
conformity or non-conformity in his own life, would seem to be: assert
your individuality in matters which you deem important; conform in those
you deem unimportant. To have a conspicuously individual way of doing
everything is impossible to a sane person, and to attempt it would be to
do one’s self a gratuitous injury, by closing the channels of sympathy
through which we partake of the life around us. We should save our
strength for matters in regard to which persistent conviction impels us
to insist upon our own way.
Society, like every living, advancing whole, requires a just union of
stability and change, uniformity and differentiation. Conformity is the
phase of stability and uniformity, while non-conformity is the phase of
differentiation and change. The latter cannot introduce anything wholly
new, but it can and does effect such a reorganization of existing
material as constantly to transform and renew human life.
I mean by rivalry a competitive striving urged on by the desire to win.
It resembles conformity in that the impelling idea is usually a sense of
what other people are doing and thinking, and especially of what they
are thinking of us: it differs from it chiefly in being more aggressive.
Conformity aims to keep up with the procession, rivalry to get ahead of
it. The former is moved by a sense of the pains and inconveniences of
differing from other people, the latter by an eagerness to compel their
admiration. Winning, to the social self, usually means conspicuous
success in making some desired impression upon other minds, as in
becoming distinguished for power, wealth, skill, culture, beneficence,
or the like.
On the other hand, rivalry may be distinguished from finer sorts of
emulation by being more simple, crude, and direct. It implies no very
subtle mental activity, no elaborate or refined ideal. If a spirited
horse hears another overtaking him from behind, he pricks up his ears,
quickens his steps, and does his best to keep ahead. And human rivalry
appears to have much of this instinctive element in it; to become aware
of life and striving going on about us seems to act immediately upon the
nerves, quickening an impulse to live and strive in like manner. An
eager person will not hear or read of vivid action of any sort without
feeling some impulse to get into it; just as he cannot mingle in a
hurrying, excited crowd without sharing in the excitement and hurry,
whether he knows what it is all about or not. The genesis of ambition is
often something as follows: one mingles with men, his self-feeling is
vaguely aroused, and he wishes to be something to them. He sees,
perhaps, that he cannot excel in just what they are doing, and so he
takes refuge in his imagination, thinking what he _can_ do which is
admirable, and determining to do it. Thus he goes home nursing secret
ambitions.
The motive of rivalry, then, is a strong sense that there is a race
going on, and an impulsive eagerness to be in it. It is rather imitative
than inventive; the idea being not so much to achieve an object for its
own sake, because it is reflectively judged to be worthy, as to get what
the rest are after. There is conformity in ideals combined with a thirst
for personal distinction. It has little tendency toward innovation,
notwithstanding the element of antagonism in it; but takes its color and
character from the prevalent social life, accepting and pursuing the
existing ideal of success, and whatever special quality it has depends
upon the quality of that ideal. There is, for instance, nothing so gross
or painful that it may not become an object of pursuit through
emulation. Charles Booth, who has studied so minutely the slums of
London, says that “among the poor, men drink on and on from a perverted
pride,” and among another class a similar sentiment leads women to
inflict surprising deformities of the trunk upon themselves.
Professor William James suggests that rivalry does nine-tenths of the
world’s work.[79] Certainly no motive is so generally powerful among
active, efficient men of the ordinary type, the type that keeps the ball
moving all over the world. Intellectual initiative, high and persistent
idealism, are rare. The great majority of able men are ambitious,
without having intrinsic traits that definitely direct their ambition to
any particular object. They feel their way about among the careers which
their time, their country, their early surroundings and training, make
accessible to them, and, selecting the one which seems to promise the
best chance of success, they throw themselves into the pursuit of the
things that conduce to that success. If the career is law, they strive
to win cases and gain wealth and prestige, accepting the moral code and
other standards that they find in actual use; and it is the same,
_mutatis mutandis_, in commerce, politics, the ministry, the various
handicrafts, and so on.
There is thus nothing morally distinctive about rivalry; it is harmful
or beneficent according to the objects and standards with reference to
which it acts. All depends upon the particular game in which one takes a
hand. It may be said in a broad way, however, that rivalry supplies a
stimulus wholesome and needful to the great majority of men, and that it
is, on the whole, a chief progressive force, utilizing the tremendous
power of ambition, and controlling it to the furtherance of ends that
are socially approved. The great mass of what we judge to be evil is of
a negative rather than a positive character, arising not from
misdirected ambition but from apathy or sensuality, from a falling short
of that active, social humanity which ambition implies.
By hero-worship is here meant an emulation that strives to imitate some
admired character, in a spirit not of rivalry or opposition, but of
loyal enthusiasm. It is higher than rivalry, in the sense that it
involves a superior grade of mental activity—though, of course, there is
no sharp line of separation between them. While the other is a rather
gross and simple impulse, common to all men and to the higher animals,
the hero-worshipper is an idealist, imaginative; the object that arouses
his enthusiasm and his endeavor does so because it bears a certain
relation to his aspirations, to his constructive thought. Hero-worship
is thus more selective, more significant of the special character and
tendencies of the individual, in every way more highly organized than
rivalry.
It has a great place in all active, aspiring lives, especially in the
plastic period of youth. We feed our characters, while they are forming,
upon the vision of admired models; an ardent sympathy dwells upon the
traits through which their personality is communicated to us—facial
expression, voice, significant movements, and so on. In this way those
tendencies in us that are toward them are literally fed; are stimulated,
organized, made habitual and familiar. As already pointed out, sympathy
appears to be an act of growth; and this is especially true of the sort
of sympathy we call hero-worship. All autobiographies which deal with
youth show that the early development of character is through a series
of admirations and enthusiasms, which pass away, to be sure, but leave
character the richer for their existence. They begin in the nursery,
flourish with great vigor in the school-yard, attain a passionate
intensity during adolescence, and though they abate rapidly in adult
life, do not altogether cease until the power of growth is lost. All
will find, I imagine, if they recall their own experience, that times of
mental progress were times when the mind found or created heroes to
worship, often owning allegiance to several at the same time, each
representing a particular need of development. The active tendencies of
the schoolboy lead to admiration of the strongest and boldest of his
companions; or perhaps, more imaginative, he fixes his thoughts on some
famous fighter or explorer; later it is possibly a hero of statesmanship
or literature who attracts him. Whatever the tendency, it is sure to
have its complementary hero. Even science often begins in hero-worship.
“This work,” says Darwin of Humboldt’s “Personal Narrative,” “stirred up
in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the
noble structure of Natural Science.”[80] We easily forget this varied
and impassioned idealism of early life; but “the thoughts of youth are
long, long thoughts,” and it is precisely then and in this way that the
most rapid development of character takes place. J. A. Symonds, speaking
of Professor Jowett’s early influence upon him says, “Obscurely but
vividly I felt my soul grow by his contact, as it had never grown
before;” and Goethe remarks that “vicinity to the master, like an
element, lifts one and bears him on.”
If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that
hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sense of
youth. To admire, to expand one’s self, to forget the rut, to have a
sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of
life. “Whilst we converse with what is above us we do not grow old but
grow young”; and that is what hero-worship means. To have no heroes is
to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown
back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self.
As hero-worship becomes more imaginative, it merges insensibly into that
devotion to ideal persons that is called religious. It has often been
pointed out that the feeling men have toward a visible leader and master
like Lincoln, Lee, Napoleon, or Garibaldi, is psychologically much the
same thing as the worship of the ideal persons of religion. Hero-worship
is a kind of religion, and religion, in so far as it conceives persons,
is a kind of hero-worship. Both are expressions of that intrinsically
social or communicative nature of human thought and sentiment which was
insisted upon in a previous chapter. That the personality toward which
the feeling is directed is ideal evidently affords no fundamental
distinction. All persons are ideal, in a true sense, and those whom we
admire and reverence are peculiarly so. That is to say, the idea of a
person, whether his body be present to our senses or not, is
imaginative, a synthesis, an interpretation of many elements, resting
upon our whole experience of human life, not merely upon our
acquaintance with this particular person; and the more our admiration
and reverence are awakened the more actively ideal and imaginative does
our conception of the person become. Of course we never _see_ a person;
we see a few visible traits which stimulate our imaginations to the
construction of a personal idea in the mind. The ideal persons of
religion are not fundamentally different, psychologically or
sociologically, from other persons; they are personal ideas built up in
the mind out of the material at its disposal, and serving to appease its
need for a sort of intercourse that will give scope to reverence,
submission, trust, and self-expanding enthusiasm. So far as they are
present to thought and emotion, and so work upon life, they are real,
with that immediate social reality discussed in the third chapter. The
fact that they have attached to them no visible or tangible material
body, similar to that of other persons, is indeed an important fact, but
rather of physiological than of psychological or social interest.
Perhaps it is not going too far to say that the idea of God is
_specially_ mysterious only from a physiological point of view; mentally
and socially regarded it is of one sort with other personal ideas, no
less a verifiable fact, and no more or less inscrutable. It must be
obvious to anyone who reflects upon the matter, I should think, that our
conceptions of personality, from the simple and sensuous notions a
little child has of those about him, up to the noblest and fullest idea
of deity that man can achieve, are one in kind, as being imaginative
interpretations of experience, and form a series in which there are no
breaks, no gap between human and divine. All is human, and all, if you
please, divine.
If there are any who hold that nothing is real except what can be seen
and touched, they will necessarily forego the study of persons and of
society; because these things are essentially intangible and invisible.
The bodily presence furnishes important assistance in the forming of
personal ideas, but is not essential. I never saw Shakespeare, and have
no lively notion of how he looked. His reality, his presence to my mind,
consists in a characteristic impression made upon me by his recorded
words, an imaginative interpretation or inference from a book. In a
manner equally natural and simple the religious mind comes to the idea
of personal deity by a spontaneous interpretation of life as a whole.
The two ideas are equally real, equally incapable of verification _to
the senses_.
CHAPTER IX
LEADERSHIP OR PERSONAL ASCENDENCY
LEADERSHIP DEFINES AND ORGANIZES VAGUE TENDENCY—POWER AS BASED UPON
THE MENTAL STATE OF THE ONE SUBJECT TO IT—THE MENTAL TRAITS OF A
LEADER: SIGNIFICANCE AND BREADTH—WHY THE FAME AND POWER OF A MAN
OFTEN TRANSCEND HIS REAL CHARACTER—ASCENDENCY OF BELIEF AND
HOPE—MYSTERY—GOOD FAITH AND IMPOSTURE—DOES THE LEADER REALLY LEAD?
But how do we choose our heroes? What is it that gives leadership to
some and denies it to others? Can we make out anything like a
_rationale_ of personal ascendency? We can hardly hope for a complete
answer to these questions, which probe the very heart of life and
tendency, but at least the attempt to answer them, so far as possible,
will bring us into an interesting line of thought.
It is plain that the theory of ascendency involves the question of the
mind’s relative valuation of the suggestions coming to it from other
minds; leadership depending upon the efficacy of a personal impression
to awaken feeling, thought, action, and so to become a cause of life.
While there are some men who seem but to add one to the population,
there are others whom we cannot help thinking about; they lend arguments
to their neighbors’ creeds, so that the life of their contemporaries,
and perhaps of following generations, is notably different because they
have lived. The immediate reason for this difference is evidently that
in the one case there is something seminal or generative in the relation
between the personal impression a man makes and the mind that receives
it, which is lacking in the other case. If we could go farther than this
and discover what it is that makes certain suggestions seminal or
generative, we should throw much light on leadership, and through that
on all questions of social tendency.
We are born with what may be roughly described as a vaguely
differentiated mass of mental tendency, vast and potent, but unformed
and needing direction—_informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum_. This
instinctive material is believed to be the outcome of age-long social
development in the race, and hence to be, in a general way, expressive
of that development and functional in its continuance. The process of
evolution has established a probability that a man will find himself at
home in the world into which he comes, and prepared to share in its
activities. Besides the tendency to various sorts of emotion, we have
the thinking instinct, the intelligence, which seems to be fairly
distinct from emotion and whose function includes the co-ordination and
organization of other instinctive material with reference to the
situations which life offers.
At any particular stage of individual existence, these elements,
together with the suggestions from the world without, are found more or
less perfectly organized into a living, growing whole, a person, a man.
Obscurely locked within him, inscrutable to himself as to others, is the
soul of the whole past, his portion of the energy, the passion, the
tendency, of human life. Its existence creates a vague need to live, to
feel, to act; but he cannot fulfil this need, at least not in a normal
way, without incitement from outside to loosen and direct his
instinctive aptitude. There is explosive material stored up in him, but
it cannot go off unless the right spark reaches it, and that spark is
usually some sort of a personal suggestion, some living trait that sets
life free and turns restlessness into power.
It must be evident that we can look for no cut-and-dried theory of this
life-imparting force, no algebraic formula for leadership. We know but
little of the depths of human tendency; and those who know most are
possibly the poets, whose knowledge is little available for precise
uses. Moreover, the problem varies incalculably with sex, age, race,
inherited idiosyncrasy, and previous personal development. The general
notions of evolution, however, lead us to expect that what awakens life
and so gives ascendency will be something important or functional in the
past life of the race, something appealing to instincts which have
survived because they had a part to perform; and this, generally
speaking, appears to be the case.
The prime condition of ascendency is the presence of undirected energy
in the person over whom it is to be exercised; it is not so much forced
upon us from without as demanded from within. The mind, having energy,
must work, and requires a guide, a form of thought, to facilitate its
working. All views of life are fallacious which do not recognize the
fact that the primary need is the need to do. Every healthy organism
evolves energy, and this must have an outlet. In the human mind, during
its expanding period, the excess of life takes the form of a reaching
out beyond all present and familiar things after an unknown good; no
matter what the present and familiar may be, the fact that it is such is
enough to make it inadequate. So we have a vague onward impulse, which
is the unorganized material, the undifferentiated protoplasm, so to
speak, of all progress; and this, as we have seen, makes the eagerness
of hero-worship in the young, imaginative and aspiring. So long as our
minds and hearts are open and capable of progress, there are persons
that have a glamour for us, of whom we think with reverence and
aspiration; and although the glamour may pass from them and leave them
commonplace, it will have fixed itself somewhere else. In youth the
mind, eager, searching, forward looking, stands at what Professor
Baldwin calls the alter pole of the socius, peering forth in search of
new life. And the idealist at any age needs superiority in others and is
always in quest of it. “Dear to us are those who love us, ... but dearer
are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they
build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply
to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new
and unattempted performances.”[81] To cease to admire is a proof of
deterioration.
Most people will be able to recall vague yet intensely vivid personal
impressions that they have received from faces—perhaps from a single
glance of a countenance that they have never seen before or since—or
perhaps from a voice; and these impressions often remain and grow and
become an important factor in life. The explanation is perhaps something
like this: When we receive these mysterious influences we are usually in
a peculiarly impressionable state, with nervous energy itching to be
worked off. There is pressure in the obscure reservoirs of hereditary
passion. In some way, which we can hardly expect to define, this energy
is tapped, an instinct is disengaged, the personal suggestion conveyed
in the glance is felt as the symbol, the master-key that can unlock
hidden tendency. It is much the same as when electricity stored and
inert in a jar is loosed by a chance contact of wires that completes the
circuit; the mind holds fast the life-imparting suggestion; cannot, in
fact, let go of it.
“——all night long his face before her lived,
Dark-splendid, speaking in the silence, full
Of noble things, and held her from her sleep.”
It is true of races, as of individuals, that the more vitality and
onwardness they have, the more they need ideals and a leadership that
gives form to them. A strenuous people like the Anglo-Saxon must have
something to look forward and up to, since without faith of some sort
they must fall into dissipation or despair; they can never be content
with that calm and symmetrical enjoyment of the present which is thought
to have been characteristic of the ancient Greeks. To be sure it is
said, and no doubt with truth, that the people of Northern Europe are
less hero-worshippers than those of the South, in the sense that they
are less given to blind enthusiasm for popular idols; but this, I take
it, only means that the former, having more constructive power in
building up ideals from various personal sources, and more persistence
in adhering to them when thus built up, are more sober and independent
in their judgment of particular persons, and less liable to extravagant
admiration of the hero of the moment. But their idealism is all the more
potent for this, and at bottom is just as dependent upon personal
suggestion for its definition. Thus it is likely that all leadership
will be found to be such by virtue of defining the possibilities of the
mind. “If we survey the field of history,” says Professor William James,
“and ask what feature all great periods of revival, of expansion of the
human mind, display in common, we shall find, I think, simply this; that
each and all of them have said to the human being, ‘the inmost nature of
the reality is congenial to _powers_ which you possess’”;[82] and the
same principle evidently applies to personal leadership.
We are born to action; and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding
action has power over us from the first. The attention of the new-born
child is fixed by whatever exercises the senses, through motion, noise,
touch, or color. Persons and animals interest him primarily because they
offer a greater amount and variety of sensible stimulus than other
objects. They move, talk, laugh, coax, fondle, bring food and so on. The
prestige they thus acquire over the child’s mind is shared with such
other stimulating phenomena as cars, engines, windmills, patches of
sunlight and bright-colored garments. A little later, when he begins to
acquire some control over his activities, he welcomes eagerly whatever
can participate in and so stimulate and guide them. The playthings he
cares for are those that go, or that he can do something with—carts,
fire-engines, blocks, and the like. Persons, especially those that share
his interests, maintain and increase their ascendency, and other
children, preferably a little older and of more varied resources than
himself, are particularly welcome. Among grown-ups he admires most those
who do something that he can understand, whom he can appreciate as
actors and producers—such as the carpenter, the gardener, the maid in
the kitchen. R. invented the happy word “thinger” to describe this sort
of people, and while performing similar feats would proudly proclaim
himself a thinger.
It will be observed that at this stage a child has learned to reflect
upon action and to discriminate that which is purposeful and effective
from mere motion; he has gained the notion of power. Himself constantly
trying to do things, he learns to admire those who can do things better
than himself, or who can suggest new things to do. His father sitting at
his desk probably seems an inert and unattractive phenomenon, but the
man who can make shavings or dig a deep hole is a hero; and the
seemingly perverse admiration which children at a later age show for
circus men and for the pirates and desperadoes they read about, is to be
explained in a similar manner. What they want is _evident_ power. The
scholar may possibly be as worthy of admiration as the acrobat or the
policeman; but the boy of ten will seldom see the matter in that light.
Thus the idea of power and the types of personality which, as standing
for that idea, have ascendency over us, are a function of our own
changing character. At one stage of their growth nearly all imaginative
boys look upon some famous soldier as the ideal man. He holds this place
as symbol and focus for the aggressive, contending, dominating impulses
of vigorous boyhood; to admire and sympathize with him is to gratify,
imaginatively, these impulses. In this country some notable speaker and
party leader often succeeds the soldier as a boyish ideal; his career is
almost equally dominating and splendid, and, in time of peace, not quite
so remote from reasonable aspiration. In later life these simple ideals
are likely to yield somewhat to others of a more special character,
depending upon the particular pursuit into which one’s energies are
directed. Every occupation which is followed with enthusiasm has its
heroes, men who stand for the idea of power or efficient action as
understood by persons of a particular training and habit. The world of
commerce and industry is full of hero-worship, and men who have made
great fortunes are admired, not unjustly, for the personal prowess such
success implies; while people of a finer intellectual development have
their notion of power correspondingly refined, and to them the artist,
the poet, the man of science, the philanthropist, may stand for the
highest sort of successful action.
It should be observed, however, that the simpler and more dramatic or
visually imaginable kinds of power have a permanent advantage as regards
general ascendency. Only a few can appreciate the power of Darwin, and
those few only when the higher faculties of their minds are fully awake;
there is nothing dramatic, nothing appealing to the visual imagination,
in his secluded career. But we can all _see_ Grant or Nelson or Moltke
at the head-quarters of their armies, or on the decks of their ships,
and hear the roar of their cannons. They hold one by the eye and by the
swelling of an emotion felt to be common to a vast multitude of people.
There is always something of the intoxication of the crowd in the
submission to this sort of ascendency. However alone our bodies may be,
our imaginations are in the throng; and for my part whenever I think of
any occasion when a man played a great part before the eyes of mankind,
I feel a thrill of irrational enthusiasm. I should imagine, for
instance, that scarcely anyone could read such a thing as “Sheridan’s
Ride” without strong feeling. He witnesses the disorder, uncertainty,
and dismay of the losing battle, the anxious officers trying to stay the
retreat, and longing for the commander who has always led to victory.
Then he follows the ride from “Winchester twenty miles away,” and shares
the enthusiasm of the army when the valiant and beloved leader rides
forth upon the field at last, renewing every heart by his presence and
making victory out of defeat. In comparison with this other kinds of
power seem obscure and separate. It is the drama of visible courage,
danger, and success, and the sense of being one of a throng to behold
it, that makes the difference.
This need of a dramatic or visually imaginable presentation of power is
no doubt more imperative in the childlike peoples of Southern Europe
than it is in the sedater and more abstractly imaginative Teutons; but
it is strong in every people, and is shared by the most intellectual
classes in their emotional moods. Consequently these heroes of the
popular imagination, especially those of war, are enabled to serve as
the instigators of a common emotion in great masses of people, and thus
to produce in large groups a sense of comradeship and solidarity. The
admiration and worship of such heroes is probably the chief feeling that
people have in common in all early stages of civilization, and the main
bond of social groups. Even in our own time this is more the case than
is understood. It was easy to see, during the Spanish-American War, that
the eager interest of the whole American people in the military
operations, and the general and enthusiastic admiration of every trait
of heroism, was bringing about a fresh sense of community throughout the
country and so renewing and consolidating the collective life of the
nation.
If we ask what are the mental traits that distinguish a leader, the only
answer seems to be that he must, in one way or another, be a great deal
of a man, or at least appear to be. He must stand for something to which
men incline, and so take his place by right as a focus of their thought.
Evidently he must be the best of his kind available. It is impossible
that he should stand forth as an archetype, unless he is conceived as
superior, in some respect, to all others within range of the
imagination. Nothing that is seen to be second-rate can be an ideal; if
a character does not bound the horizon at some point we will look over
it to what we can see beyond. The object of admiration may be Cæsar
Borgia, or Napoleon, or Jesse James the train-robber, but he must be
typical, must stand for something. No matter how bad the leader may be,
he will always be found to owe his leadership to something strong,
affirmative, and superior, something that appeals to onward instinct.
To be a great deal of a man, and hence a leader, involves, on the one
hand, a significant individuality, and, on the other, breadth of
sympathy, the two being different phases of personal calibre, rather
than separate traits.
It is because a man cannot stand for anything except as he has a
significant individuality, that self-reliance is so essential a trait in
leadership: except as a person trusts and cherishes his own special
tendency, different from that of other people and usually opposed by
them in its inception, he can never develop anything of peculiar value.
He has to free himself from the domination of purposes already defined
and urged upon him by others, and bring up something fresh out of the
vague under-world of subconsciousness; and this means an intense self, a
militant, gloating “I.” Emerson’s essay on self-reliance only formulates
what has always been the creed of significant persons.
On the other hand, success in unfolding a special tendency and giving
vogue to it, depends upon being in touch, through sympathy, with the
current of human life. All leadership takes place through the
communication of ideas to the minds of others, and unless the ideas are
so presented as to be congenial to those other minds, they will
evidently be rejected. It is because the novelty is not alien to us, but
is seen to be ourself in a fresh guise, that we welcome it.
It has frequently been noticed that personal ascendency is not
necessarily dependent upon any palpable deed in which power is
manifested, but that there is often a conviction of power and an
expectation of success that go before the deed and control the minds of
men without apparent reason. There is something fascinating about this
immediate and seemingly causeless personal efficacy, and many writers of
insight lay great stress upon it. Emerson, for example, is fond of
pointing out that the highest sort of greatness is self-evident, without
particular works. Most men of executive force possess something of this
direct ascendency, and some, like Napoleon, Cromwell, Bismarck, and
Andrew Jackson, have had it in pre-eminent measure. It is not confined
to any class, however, but exists in an infinite variety of kinds and
degrees; and men of thought may have it as well as men of action. Dante,
Milton, Goethe, and their like, bear the authority to dominate the minds
of others like a visible mantle upon their shoulders, inspiring a sense
of reverence and a tendency to believe and follow in all the
impressionable people they meet. Such men are only striking examples of
what we are all familiar with in daily life, most persons of decided
character having something imposing about them at times. Indeed, there
is hardly anyone so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to
someone at some time.
Notwithstanding the mystery that is often made of this, it appears to be
simply a matter of impulsive personal judgment, an impression of power
and a sense of yielding due to interpretation of the visible or audible
symbols of personality, discussed in a previous chapter. Another may
impress us with his power, and so exercise ascendency over us, either by
grossly performing the act, or by exhibiting traits of personality which
convince our imaginations that he can and will do the act if he wishes
to. It is in this latter way, through imaginative inference, that people
mostly work upon us in ordinary social intercourse. It would puzzle us,
in many cases, to tell just how we know that a man is determined,
dauntless, magnanimous, intrinsically powerful, or the reverse. Of
course reputation and past record count for much; but we judge readily
enough without them, and if, like Orlando in “As You Like It,” he “looks
successfully,” we believe in him. The imagination is a sort of
clearing-house through which great forces operate by convenient symbols
and with a minimum of trouble.
The man of action who, like Napoleon, can dominate the minds of others
in a crisis, must have the general traits of leadership developed with
special reference to the promptness of their action. His individual
significance must take the form of a palpable decision and
self-confidence; and breadth of sympathy becomes a quick tact to grasp
the mental state of those with whom he deals, so that he may know how to
plant the dominating suggestion. Into the vagueness and confusion that
most of us feel in the face of a strange situation, such a man injects a
clearcut idea. There is a definiteness about him which makes us feel
that he will not leave us drifting, but will set a course, will
substitute action for doubt, and give our energies an outlet. Again, his
aggressive confidence is transmitted by suggestion, and acts directly
upon our minds as a sanction of his leadership. And if he adds to this
the tact to awaken no opposition, to make us feel that he is of our
sort, that his suggestions are quite in our line, in a word that we are
safe in his hands; he can hardly be resisted.
In face-to-face relations, then, the natural leader is one who always
has the appearance of being master of the situation. He includes other
people and extends beyond them, and so is in a position to point out
what they must do next. Intellectually his suggestion seems to embrace
what is best in the views of others, and to embody the inevitable
conclusion; it is the timely, the fit, and so the prevalent. Emotionally
his belief is the strongest force present, and so draws other beliefs
into it. Yet, while he imposes himself upon others, he feels the other
selves as part of the situation, and so adapts himself to them that no
opposition is awakened; or possibly he may take the violent method, and
browbeat and humiliate a weak mind: there are various ways of
establishing superiority, but in one way or another the consummate
leader always accomplishes it.
Take Bismarck as an example of almost irresistible personal ascendency
in face-to-face relations. He had the advantage, which, however, many
men of equal power have done without, of an imposing bulk and stature;
but much more than this were the mental and moral traits which made him
appear the natural master in an assembly of the chief diplomats of
Europe. “No idea can be formed,” says M. de Blowitz,[83] “of the
ascendency exercised by the German Chancellor over the eminent
diplomatists attending the Congress. Prince Gortchakoff alone, eclipsed
by his rival’s greatness, tried to struggle against him.” His “great and
scornful pride,” the absolute, contemptuous assurance of superiority
which was evident in every pose, tone, and gesture, accompanied, as is
possible only to one perfectly sure of himself, by a frankness,
good-humor, and cordial insight into others which seemed to make them
one with himself, participators in his domination; together with a
penetrating intelligence, a unique and striking way of expressing
himself, and a perfect clearness of purpose at all times, were among the
elements of the effect he produced. He conciliated those whom he thought
it worth while to conciliate, and browbeat, ignored, or ridiculed the
rest. There was nothing a rival could say or do but Bismarck, if he
chose, would say or do something which made it appear a failure.
General Grant was a man whose personal presence had none of the splendor
of Prince Bismarck, and who even appeared insignificant to the
undiscerning. It is related that when he went to take command of his
first regiment soon after the outbreak of the Civil War, the officer
whom he was to succeed paid no attention to him at first, and would not
believe that he was Grant until he showed his papers. An early
acquaintance said of him, “He hadn’t the push of a business man.” “He
was always a gentleman, and everybody loved him, for he was so gentle
and considerate; but we didn’t see what he could do in the world.”[84]
Yet over the finer sort of men he exercised a great ascendency, and no
commander was more willingly obeyed by his subordinates, or inspired
more general confidence. In his way he manifested the essential traits
of decision, self-confidence, and tact in great measure. He never
appeared dubious, nervous, or unsettled; and though he often talked over
his plans with trusted officers, he only once, I believe, summoned a
council of war, and then rejected its decision. He was nearly or quite
alone in his faith in the plan by which Vicksburg was taken, and it is
well known that General Sherman, convinced that it would fail, addressed
him a formal remonstrance, which Grant quietly put in his pocket and
later returned to its author. “His pride in his own mature opinion,”
says General Schofield, “was very great; in that he was as far as
possible from being a modest man. This absolute confidence in his own
judgment upon any subject he had mastered, and the moral courage to take
upon himself alone the highest responsibility, and to demand full
authority and freedom to act according to his own judgment, without
interference from anybody, added to his accurate estimate of his own
ability, and his clear perception of the necessity for undivided
authority and responsibility in the conduct of military operations, and
in all that concerns the efficiency of armies in time of war,
constituted the foundation of that very great character.”[85] He was
also a man of great tact and insight. He always felt the personal
situation; divining the character and aims of his antagonists, and
making his own officers feel that he understood them and appreciated
whatever in them was worthy.
In spite of the fact that a boastful spirit is attributed to Americans,
the complete renunciation of external display so noticeable in General
Grant is congenial to the American mind, and characteristic of a large
proportion of our most successful and admired men. Undoubtedly our
typical hero is the man who is capable of anything, but thinks it
unbecoming to obtrude the fact. Possibly it is our self-reliant,
democratic mode of life, which, since it offers a constant and varied
test of the realities, as distinct from the appearances, gives rise to a
contempt of the latter, and of those arts of pretence which impose upon
a less sophisticated people. The truth about us is so accessible that
cant becomes comparatively transparent and ridiculous.[86]
There is no better phenomenon in which to observe personal ascendency
than public speaking. When a man takes the floor in an assembly, all
eyes are fixed upon him, all imaginations set to work to divine his
personality and significance. If he looks like a true and steadfast man,
of a spirit kindred with our own, we incline to him before he speaks,
and believe that what he says will be congenial and right. We have all,
probably, seen one arise in the midst of an audience strange to him, and
by his mere attitude and expression of countenance create a subtle sense
of community and expectation of consent. Another, on the contrary, will
at once impress us as self-conceited, insincere, over-excited, cold,
narrow, or in some other way out of touch with us, and not likely to say
anything that will suit us. As our first speaker proceeds, he continues
to create a sense that he feels the situation; we are at home and
comfortable with him, because he seems to be of our sort, having similar
views and not likely to lead us wrong; it is like the ease and
relaxation that one feels among old friends. There can be no perfect
eloquence that does not create this sense of personal congeniality. But
this deference to our character and mood is only the basis for exerting
power over us; he is what we are, but is much more; is decided where we
were vacillating, clear where we were vague, warm where we were cold. He
offers something affirmative and onward, and gives it the momentum of
his own belief. A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and
still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail.
“Speak only what you do know and believe, and are personally in it, and
are answerable for every word.” In comparison with these traits of mind
and character, fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely
the decorative surface of oratory, which is well enough in its
subordinate place, but can easily be dispensed with. Bismarck was not
the less a great orator because he spoke “with difficulty and an
appearance of struggle,” and Cromwell’s rude eloquence would hardly have
been improved by lessons in elocution.
Burke is an example of a man who appears to have had all the attributes
of a great speaker except tact, and was conspicuously contrasted in this
respect with Fox, whose genial nature never failed to keep touch with
the situation. A man whose rising makes people think of going to dinner
is not distinctively a great orator, even though his speeches are an
immortal contribution to literature. The well-known anecdote of the
dagger illustrates the unhappy results of losing touch with the
situation. In the midst of one of his great discourses on the French
Revolution, intending to impress upon his hearers the bloody character
of that movement, Burke drew from his bosom a dagger and cast it on the
floor. It so happened, however, that the Members of Parliament present
were not just then in the mood to be duly impressed by this exhibition,
which produced only astonishment and ridicule. Fox could never have done
a thing of this sort. With all Burke’s greatness, it would seem that
there must have been something narrow, strenuous, and at times even
repellent, in his personality and manner, some lack of ready
fellow-feeling, allowing him to lose that sense of the situation without
which there can hardly be any face-to-face ascendency.
The ascendency which an author exercises over us by means of the written
page is the same in essence as that of the man of action or the orator.
The medium of communication is different; visible or audible traits give
place to subtler indications. There is also more time for reflection,
and reader or writer can choose the mood most fit to exert power or to
feel it; so that there is no need for that constant preparedness and
aggressiveness of voice and manner which the man of action requires. But
these are, after all, incidental differences; and the underlying traits
of personality, the essential relationship between leader and follower,
are much the same as in the other cases. The reader should feel that the
author’s mind and purpose are congenial with his own, though in the
present direction they go farther, that the thought communicated is not
at all alien, but so truly his that it offers an opportunity to expand
to a wider circle, and become a completer edition of himself. In short,
if an author is to establish and maintain the power to interest us and,
in his province, to lead our thought, he must exhibit personal
significance and tact, in a form appropriate to this mode of expression.
He must have a humanity so broad that, in certain of our moods at least,
it gives a sense of congeniality and at-homeness. He must also make a
novel and characteristic impression of some sort, a fresh and authentic
contribution to our life; and must, moreover, be wholly himself, “stand
united with his thought,” have that “truth to its type of the given
force” of which Walter Pater speaks. He must possess belief in
something, and simplicity and boldness in expressing it.
Take Darwin again for example, all the better because it is sometimes
imagined that personality is unimportant in scientific writing. Probably
few thoughtful and open-minded persons can read the “Origin of Species”
without becoming Darwinists, yielding willingly, for the time at least,
to his ascendency, and feeling him as a master. If we consider the
traits that give him this authority, it will be found that they are of
the same general nature as those already pointed out. As we read his
chapters, and begin to build him up in our imaginations out of the
subtle suggestions of style, we find ourselves thinking of him as, first
of all, a true and simple man, a patient, sagacious seeker after the
real. This makes us, so far as we are also simple seekers after the
real, feel at home with him, forget suspicion, and incline to believe as
he believes, even if we fail to understand his reasons—though no man
leaves us less excuse for such failure. His aim is our aim—the truth,
and as he is far more competent to achieve it in this field than we are,
both because of natural aptitude and a lifetime of special research, we
readily yield him the reins, the more so because he never for an instant
demands it, but seems to appeal solely to facts.
How many writers are there, even of much ability, who fail, primarily
and irretrievably, because they do not make this favorable personal
impression; because we divine something insincere, something impatient,
some private aim that is not truth, which keeps us uncomfortably on our
guard and makes us reluctant to follow them even when they appear most
incontrovertible. Mr. Huxley suggested that Darwin harmed his case by
excessive and unnecessary deference to the suggestions of his opponents;
but it may well be that in the long run, and with the highest tribunal,
this trait has added to his power. Many men have been convinced by the
character of Darwin, by his obvious disinterestedness and lack of all
controversial bias, who would never have followed Huxley. I have had
occasion to notice that there is no way of making converts to the idea
of evolution so effectual as to set people reading the “Origin of
Species.” Spencerism comes and goes, but Darwinism is an abiding
condition.
Darwin’s intellectual significance no one will question; and his
self-confidence or faith was equally remarkable, and not at all
inconsistent with his modesty. In his case it seems a faith in truth
itself, so wholly is the self we find in his books identified with the
striving after truth. As an act of faith his twenty years of collecting
and brooding over the facts bearing upon the principle he had divined,
was an exploit of the same nature as that of Columbus, sailing westward
for months into an unknown ocean, to a goal which no one else could see.
And with what simple confidence does he take his stand upon the truth
thus won, and apply it to the geological history of the globe, or the
rise of the human body and mind. A good illustration of his faith is his
assertion, in the face of ridicule, that the existence of an orchid with
a narrow neck eleven inches long proved the existence of a moth with a
tongue of equal length. The moth, at that time unknown, was subsequently
discovered.[87]
To illustrate the same principles in a wholly different phase of
thought, we might take Charles Lamb. Lamb, too, attracts us first of all
by a human and congenial personality. We feel that in the kinds of
sentiment with which he deals he is at home and adequate, is ourselves
and more than we, with a deeper pathos, a richer, more audacious humor,
a truer sensibility. He, too, enlarges life by access to novel and
acceptable modes of being; and he is always boldly and simply himself.
It is a poor notion of Lamb that does not recognize that he was, in his
way, a man of character, conviction, and faith.
A similar analysis might be applied to great writers of other
sorts—poets, historians, and moralists; also to painters, sculptors,
actors, singers, to every potent personality after its kind. While there
is infinite variety in leadership—according to the characters of the
persons concerned, the points at which they come in contact, the means
of communication between them, and so on—there is, nevertheless, a
likeness of principle everywhere present. There is no such radical and
complete divergence of the conditions of power in the various fields of
activity as is sometimes imagined. While there are great differences,
they may be looked upon as specific rather than generic. We may always
expect to find a human nature sufficiently broad and sound—at least in
those phases most apparent in the special means of expression chosen—to
be felt as representative; also some timely contribution added to the
range of thought or feeling, and faith in or loyalty to this peculiar
contribution.
It is a very natural result of the principles already noted that the
fame and power of a man often transcend the man himself; that is to say,
the personal idea associated by the world with a particular name and
presence has often little basis in the mind behind that name and
presence, as it appears to cool and impartial study. The reason is that
the function of the great and famous man is to be a symbol, and the real
question in other minds is not so much, What are you? as, What can I
believe that you are? What can you help me to feel and be? How far can I
use you as a symbol in the development of my instinctive tendency? The
scientific historian may insist on asking, What are you? because the
instinct he is trying to gratify is the need to make things consistent
to the intelligence. But few persons have this need strongly developed,
in comparison with those of a more emotional character; and so most will
care more for the other questions. The scientific point of view can
never be that of the most of mankind, and science, it seems to me, can
hardly be more than the critic and chastener of popular faith, not its
leader.
Thus we may say of all famous and admired characters that, as personal
ideas, they partake of the nature of gods, in that the thought
entertained of them is a constructive effort of the idealizing
imagination seeking to create a personal symbol of its own tendency.
Perhaps there is no more striking illustration of this than that offered
by the mediæval history of the papacy. It is notorious that the idea of
the pope, as it was entertained by the religious world, and the pope
himself, as he appeared to his intimates, were things having for the
most part no close relation to each other. The visible pope was often
and for long periods at a time a depraved or insignificant man; but
during these very periods the ideal pope, the pope of Europe’s thought,
might and often did flourish and grow in temporal and spiritual power.
The former was only a symbol for the better definition of what the world
needed to believe, a lay figure for garments woven by the co-operative
imagination of religious men. The world needed to believe in a spiritual
authority as a young girl needs to be in love, and it took up with the
papacy as the most available framework for that belief, just as the
young girl is likely to give her love to the least repugnant of those
who solicit it. The same is true in a large measure of the other great
mediæval authority, the emperor, as Mr. Bryce so clearly shows in his
history of the Holy Roman Empire; and it holds true in some degree of
all those clothed with royalty or other great offices. Fame may or may
not represent what men were; but it always represents what humanity
needs them to have been.
It is also true that when there is a real personal superiority,
ascendency is seldom confined to the traits in which this is manifested,
but, once established in regard to these traits, it tends to envelop the
leader as a whole, and to produce allegiance to him as a concrete
person. This comes, of course, from the difficulty of breaking up and
sifting that which presents itself to the senses, and through them to
the mind, as a single living whole. And as the faults and weaknesses of
a great man are commonly much easier to imitate than his excellences, it
often happens, as in the case of Michelangelo, that the former are much
more conspicuous in his followers than the latter.
Another phase of the same truth is the ascendency that persons of belief
and hope always exercise as against those who may be superior in every
other respect, but who lack these traits. The onward and aggressive
portion of the world, the people who do things, the young and all having
surplus energy, need to hope and strive for an imaginative object, and
they will follow no one who does not encourage this tendency. The first
requisite of a leader is, not to be right, but to lead, to show a way.
The idealist’s programme of political or economic reform may be
impracticable, absurd, demonstrably ridiculous; but it can never be
successfully opposed merely by pointing out that this is the case. A
negative opposition cannot be wholly effectual: there must be a
competing idealism; something must be offered that is not only less
objectionable but more desirable, that affords occupation to progressive
instinct. This holds true, for instance, in the case of teachers. One
may sometimes observe two men of whom one has a sounder judgment, a
clearer head, a more steadfast character, and is more a master of his
subject, than the other; yet is hopelessly inferior in influence,
because the other has a streak of contagious idealism which he lacks.
One has all the virtues except hope; the other has that and all the
power. It has been well said that when a man ceases to learn—to be open
and forward looking—he should also cease to teach.
It would be easy to multiply illustrations of this simple but important
truth. All vigorous minds, I think, love books and persons that are
mentally enfranchising and onward-looking, that seem to overthrow the
high board fences of conventional thought and show a distance with
purple hills; while it would be possible to mention powerful minds that
have quickly lost influence by giving too much the impression of
finality, as if they thought their system was the last. They only build
another board fence a little beyond the old one. Perhaps the most
admirable and original thing about Emerson is the invincible openness
and renewal that seem to be in him, and some of us find his best
expression in that address on the “Method of Nature” in which, even more
than elsewhere, he makes us feel that what is achieved is ever
transitory, and that there is everything to expect from the future. In
like manner, to take perhaps the most remarkable example of all, the
early Christians found in their belief organized hope, in contrast to
the organized _ennui_ of the Roman system of thought, and this, it would
seem, must have been its most direct and potent appeal to most
minds.[88]
It is also because of this ideal and imaginative character in personal
ascendency that mystery enters so largely into it. Our allegiance is
accompanied by a mental enlargement and renewal through generative
suggestions; we are passing from the familiar to the strange, are being
drawn we know not whither by forces never before experienced; the very
essence of the matter is novelty, insecurity, and that excitement in the
presence of dim possibilities that constitutes mystery.
It has often been remarked that to one in love the beloved person
appears as a mystery, enveloped, as it were, in a sort of purple cloud.
This is doubtless because the lover is undergoing strange alteration in
his own mind; fresh vague passions are rising into consciousness out of
the dark storehouse of hereditary instinct; he is cast loose from his
old anchorage and does not know whither he is driven. The consequent
feeling of a power and a strangeness upon him he associates, of course,
with the person—commonplace enough, perhaps, to others—who is the symbol
and occasion of the experience. Goethe seems to mean something of this
sort when he uses the expression _das ewig Weibliche_ to suggest the
general mystery and allurement of new life.
And it is much the same no matter what sort of ascendency is exercised
over us; there is always excitement and a feeling of newness and
uncertainty, imagination is awakened and busies itself with the
fascinating personality; his slightest word or action is eagerly
interpreted and works upon us. In short, mystery and idealism are so
inseparable that a sense of power in others seems to involve a sense of
their inscrutability; and, on the other hand, so soon as a person
becomes plain, he ceases to stimulate the imagination; we have seen all
around him, so that he no longer appears an open door to new life, but
has begun to be commonplace and stale.
It is even true that inscrutability in itself, having perhaps nothing
important back of it, plays a considerable part in personal ascendency.
The hero is always a product of constructive imagination; and just as
some imaginative painters find that the too detailed observation of
sensible objects cumbers the inner vision and impedes production, so the
hero-worshipper is likely at times to reject altogether the persons he
knows in favor of some sort of mask or lay figure, whose very blankness
or inertness insures to it the great advantage that it cannot actively
repudiate the qualities attributed to it: it offers _carte blanche_ to
the imagination. As already suggested, the vital question in ascendency
is not, primarily, What are you? but, What do you enable me to be? What
self-developing ideas do you enable me to form? and the power of mere
inscrutability arises from the fact that it gives a vague stimulus to
thought and then leaves it to work out the details to suit itself. To
recur to the matter of falling in love: the young girl who, like
Gwendolen in “Daniel Deronda,” or Isabel in the “Portrait of a Lady,”
fixes her passion upon some self-contained and to her inscrutable
person, in preference to others who are worthier but less mysterious, is
a common character in life as well as in fiction.
Many other illustrations of the same principle might be given. Thus the
fact, instances of which are collected by Mr. Tylor in his work on
“Primitive Culture,” that the insane, the idiotic, and the epileptic are
reverenced by primitive peoples, may be interpreted in a similar
manner.[89] Those who are mentally abnormal present in a striking form
the inscrutable in personality; they seem to be men, but are not such
men as we; our imaginations are alarmed and baffled, so that it is not
unnatural that before science has shown us definite relations between
these persons and ourselves, they should serve as one of the points
about which crystallize our imaginations of unknown power. In the same
way a strange and somewhat impassive physiognomy is often, perhaps, an
advantage to an orator, or leader of any sort, because it helps to fix
the eye and fascinate the mind. Such a countenance as that of Savonarola
may have counted for much toward the effect he produced. Another
instance of the prestige of the inscrutable is the fascination of
silence, when power is imagined to lie behind it. The very name of
William the Silent gives one a sort of thrill, whether he knows anything
of that distinguished character or not. One seems to see a man darkly
potent, mysteriously dispensing with the ordinary channel of
self-assertion, and attaining his ends without evident means. It is the
same with Von Moltke, “silent in seven languages,” whose genius humbled
France and Austria in two brief campaigns. And General Grant’s
taciturnity undoubtedly fascinated the imagination of the people—after
his earlier successes had shown that there was really something in
him—and helped to secure to him a trust and authority much beyond that
of any other of the Federal generals. It is the same with personal
reserve in every form: one who always appears to be his own master and
does not too readily reveal his deeper feelings, is so much the more
likely to create an impression of power. He is formidable because
incalculable. And accordingly we see that many people deliberately
assume, or try to assume, an appearance of inscrutability,
“And do a wilful stillness entertain,
With purpose to be dressed in an opinion
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit;”
Disraeli, it is said, “was a mystery man by instinct and policy,” and we
all know others in our own circle of acquaintances.
So with the expression of personality in literature. A book which is
perfectly clear at the first cursory reading is by that fact condemned
as commonplace. If there were anything vital in it, it would appear at
least a little strange, and would not be fully understood until it had
been for some time inwardly digested. At the end of that time it would
have done its best service for us and its ascendency would have waned.
It is always thus, I imagine, with writers who strongly move us; there
is first mystery and a sense of unexplored life, then a period of
assimilative excitement, and after that chastened affection, or perhaps
revulsion or distrust. A person of mature years and ripe development,
who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and
renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete
as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious
students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they
are capable of the growth that it accompanies. It was a maxim of Goethe
that where there is no mystery there is no power; and something of the
perennial vitality of his writings may be attributed to the fact that he
did not trouble himself too much with the question whether people would
understand him, but set down his inmost experiences as adequately as he
could, and left the rest to time. The same may be said of Browning, and
of many other great writers.
Something similar holds true of power in plastic art. The sort of
mystery most proper and legitimate in art, however, is not an
intellectual mystery—though some artists have had a great deal of that,
like Leonardo, who “conquered by the magnetism of an incalculable
personality”[90]—but rather a sensuous mystery, that is to say a vague
and subtle appeal to recondite sources of sensuous impression, an
awakening of hitherto unconscious capacity for harmonious sensuous life,
like the feeling we get from the first mild weather in the spring. In
this way, it seems to me, there is an effect of mystery, of congenial
strangeness, in all powerful art. Probably everyone would recognize this
as true of music, even if all do not feel its applicability to painting,
sculpture and architecture.
The well-known fact that mystery is inseparable from higher religious
idealism may be regarded as a larger expression of this same necessity
of associating inscrutability with personal power. If the imagination
cannot be content with the definite in lesser instances, it evidently
cannot when it comes to form the completest image of personality that it
can embrace.
Although ascendency depends upon what we think about a man rather than
what he is, it is nevertheless true that an impression of his reality
and good faith is of the first importance, and this impression can
hardly outlast close scrutiny unless it corresponds to the fact. Hence,
as a rule, the man who is to exercise enduring power over others must
believe in that for which he stands. Such belief operates as a potent
suggestion upon the minds of others.
“While thus he spake, his eye, dwelling on mine,
Drew me, with power upon me, till I grew
One with him, to believe as he believed.”[91]
If we divine a discrepancy between a man’s words and his character, the
whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the
imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly
accepted. Nothing, therefore, is more fatal to ascendency than perceived
insincerity or doubt, and in immediate intercourse it is hard to conceal
them. When Luther came to Rome and saw what kind of a man the Pope was,
the papacy was shaken.
How far it is possible for a man to work upon others through a false
idea of himself depends upon a variety of circumstances. As already
pointed out, the man himself may be a mere incident with no definite
relation to the idea of him, the latter being a separate product of the
imagination. This can hardly be except where there is no immediate
contact between leader and follower, and partly explains why authority,
especially if it covers intrinsic personal weakness, has always a
tendency to surround itself with forms and artificial mystery, whose
object is to prevent familiar contact and so give the imagination a
chance to idealize. Among a self-reliant, practical people like ours,
with much shrewdness and little traditional reverence, the power of
forms is diminished; but it is always great. The discipline of armies
and navies, for instance, very distinctly recognizes the necessity of
those forms which separate superior from inferior, and so help to
establish an unscrutinized ascendency in the former. In the same way
manners, as Professor Ross remarks in his work on “Social Control,”[92]
are largely used by men of the world as a means of self-concealment, and
this self-concealment serves, among other purposes, that of preserving a
sort of ascendency over the unsophisticated.
As regards intentional imposture, it may be said in general that all men
are subject to be duped in matters of which they have no working
knowledge and which appeal strongly to the emotions. The application of
this principle to quack medicine, to commercial swindles, and to the
ever-reappearing impostures relating to supposed communication with
spirits, is too plain to be enlarged upon. While it is an advantage,
even to a charlatan, to believe in himself, the susceptibility of a
large part of us to be duped by quacks of one sort or another is obvious
enough, and shows that the work of free institutions in developing
shrewdness is by no means complete.
Probably a close and candid consideration of the matter would lead to
the conclusion that everyone is something of an impostor, that we all
pose more or less, under the impulse to produce a desired impression
upon others. As social and imaginative beings we must set store by our
appearance; and it is hardly possible to do so without in some degree
adapting that appearance to the impression we wish to make. It is only
when this adaptation takes the form of deliberate and injurious deceit
that much fault can be found with it. “We all,” says Stevenson in his
essay on Pepys, “whether we write or speak, must somewhat drape
ourselves when we address our fellows; at a given moment we apprehend
our character and acts by some particular side; we are merry with one,
grave with another, as befits the nature and demands of the relation.”
If we never tried to seem a little better than we are, how could we
improve or “train ourselves from the outside inward”? And the same
impulse to show the world a better or idealized aspect of ourselves
finds an organized expression in the various professions and classes,
each of which has to some extent a cant or pose, which its members
assume unconsciously, for the most part, but which has the effect of a
conspiracy to work upon the credulity of the rest of the world. There is
a cant not only of theology and of philanthropy, but also of law,
medicine, teaching, even of science—perhaps especially of science, just
now, since the more a particular kind of merit is recognized and
admired, the more it is likely to be assumed by the unworthy. As
theology goes down and science comes up, the affectation of
disinterestedness and of exactness in method tends to supplant the
affectation of piety.
In general it may be said that imposture is of considerable but always
secondary importance; it is a sort of parasite upon human idealism and
thrives only by the impulse to believe. A correct intuition on the part
of mankind in the choice of their leaders is the only guaranty of the
effectual organization of life in any or every sphere; and in the long
run and on a large scale this correctness seems to exist. On the whole,
the great men of history were real men, not shams, their characters were
genuinely representative of the deeper needs and tendencies of human
nature, so that in following them men were truly expressing themselves.
We have seen that all leadership has an aspect of sympathy and
conformity, as well as one of individuality and self-will, so that every
leader must also be a follower, in the sense that he shares the general
current of life. He leads by appealing to our own tendency, not by
imposing something external upon us. Great men are therefore the symbols
or expressions, in a sense, of the social conditions, under which they
work, and if these conditions were not favorable the career of the great
man would be impossible.
Does the leader, then, really lead, in the sense that the course of
history would have been essentially different if he had not lived? Is
the individual a true cause, or would things have gone on about the same
if the famous men had been cut off in infancy? Is not general tendency
the great thing, and is it not bound to find expression independently of
particular persons? Certainly many people have the impression that in an
evolutionary view of life single individuals become insignificant, and
that all great movements must be regarded as the outcome of vast,
impersonal tendencies.
If one accepts the view of the relation between particular individuals
and society as a whole already stated in various connections, the answer
to these questions must be that the individual _is_ a cause, as
independent as a cause can be which is part of a living whole, that the
leader does lead, and that the course of history must have been notably
different if a few great men had been withdrawn from it.
As to general tendency, it is false to set it over against individuals,
as if it were a separate thing; it is only through individuals that
general tendency begins or persists. “Impersonal tendency” in society is
a mere abstraction; there is no such thing. Whether idiosyncrasy is such
as we all have in some measure, or whether it takes the form of
conspicuous originality or genius, it is a variant element in life
having always some tendency to innovation. Of course, if we believe in
the prevalence of continuity and law, we cannot regard it as a new
creation out of nothing; it must be a reorganization of hereditary and
social forces. But however this may be, the person as a whole is always
more or less novel or innovating. Not one of us floats quite inert upon
the general stream of tendency; we leave the world somewhat different
from what it would have been if we had been carried off by the croup.
Now in the case of a man of genius, this variant tendency may be so
potent as to reorganize a large part of the general life in its image,
and give it a form and direction which it could not have had otherwise.
How anyone can look at the facts and doubt the truth of this it is hard
to see. Would the life we receive from the last century have been the
same if, say, Darwin, Lincoln, and Bismarck had not lived? Take the case
of Darwin. No doubt his greatness depended upon his representing and
fulfilling an existing tendency, and this tendency entered into him from
his environment, that is from other individuals. But it came out of him
no longer the vague drift toward evolutionary theory and experiment that
it was before, but concrete, common-sense, matter-of-fact knowledge,
thoroughly Darwinized, and so accredited by his character and labors
that the world accepts it as it could not have done if he had not lived.
We may apply the same idea to the author of Christianity. Whatever we
may or may not believe regarding the nature of Christ’s spiritual
leadership, there is, I take it, nothing necessarily at variance with a
sound social science in the Christian theory that the course of history
has been transformed by his life.
The vague instincts which it is the function of the leader to define,
stimulate and organize, might have remained latent and ineffectual, or
might have developed in a totally different manner, if he had not lived.
No one can guess what the period following the French Revolution, or any
period of French history since then, might have been without Napoleon;
but it is apparent that all would have been very different. It is true
that the leader is always a symbol, and can work only by using existing
elements of life; but in the peculiar way in which he uses those
elements is causation, is creation, in the only sense, perhaps, in which
creation is definitely conceivable. To deny its importance is as absurd
as to say that the marble as it comes from the quarry and the marble
after Michelangelo is through with it, are one and the same thing.
Most, if not all, of our confusion regarding such points as these arises
from the almost invincible habit of thinking of “society,” or
“historical tendency,” as a distinct entity from “individuals,” instead
of remembering that these general and particular terms merely express
different aspects of the same concrete fact—human life. In studying
leadership we may examine the human army one by one, and inquire why
certain persons stand out from the rest as captains, colonels, or
generals, and what, in particular, it is that they have to do; or, in
studying social tendency, we may disregard individuality and look at the
movements of the army, or of its divisions and regiments, as if they
were impersonal wholes. But there is no separation in fact: the leader
is always the nucleus of a tendency, and, on the other hand, all social
movement, closely examined, will be found to consist of tendencies
having such nuclei. It is never the case that mankind move in any
direction with an even front, but there are always those who go before
and show the way.
I need hardly add that leadership is not a _final_ explanation of
anything; but is simply one of many aspects in which human life, always
inscrutable, may be studied. In these days we no longer look for final
explanations, but are well content if we can get a glimpse of things in
process, not expecting to know how they began or where they are to end.
The leader is a cause, but, like all causes we know of, he is also an
effect. His being, however original, is rooted in the past of the race,
and doubtless as susceptible of explanation as anything else, if we
could only get at the facts.
CHAPTER X
THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF CONSCIENCE
THE RIGHT AS THE RATIONAL—SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS VIEW—THE RIGHT AS THE
ONWARD—THE RIGHT AS HABIT—RIGHT IS NOT THE SOCIAL AS AGAINST THE
INDIVIDUAL—IT IS, IN A SENSE, THE SOCIAL AS AGAINST THE SENSUAL—THE
RIGHT AS A SYNTHESIS OF PERSONAL INFLUENCES—PERSONAL
AUTHORITY—CONFESSION, PRAYER, PUBLICITY—TRUTH—DEPENDENCE OF RIGHT
UPON IMAGINATION—CONSCIENCE REFLECTS A SOCIAL GROUP—IDEAL PERSONS AS
FACTORS IN CONSCIENCE.
I agree with those moralists who hold that what we judge to be the right
is simply the rational, in a large sense of that word. The mind is the
theatre of conflict for an infinite number of impulses, variously
originating, among which it is ever striving to produce some sort of
unification or harmony. This endeavor to harmonize or assimilate
includes deliberate reasoning, but is something much more general and
continuous than that. It is mostly an unconscious or subconscious
manipulation of the materials presented, an unremitting comparison and
rearrangement of them, which ever tends to organize them into some sort
of a whole. The right, then, is that which stands this test; the
sanction of conscience attaches to those thoughts which, in the long
run, maintain their places as part of that orderly whole which the
mental instinct calls for, and which it is ever working with more or
less success to build up. That is right which presents itself, after the
mind has done its full work upon the matter, as the mentally necessary,
which we cannot gainsay without breaking up our mental integrity.
According to this view of the matter, judgments of right and wrong are
in no way isolated or radically different in kind from other judgments.
Such peculiarity as they have seems to come chiefly from the unusual
intensity of the mental conflict that precedes them. The slightest
scrutiny of experience shows, it seems to me, that the sharp and
absolute distinction often assumed to exist between conscience and other
mental activities does not hold good in life. There are gradual
transitions from judgments which no one thinks of as peculiarly moral,
through others which some would regard as moral and others would not, to
those which are universally so regarded; and likewise moral feeling or
sentiment varies a good deal in different individuals, and in the same
individual under different conditions.
The class of judgments which everyone considers as moral is perhaps
limited to such as follow an exciting and somewhat protracted mental
struggle, involving an imaginative weighing of conflicting personal
ideas. A line of conduct has to be chosen; alternatives present
themselves, each of which is backed by strong impulses, among which are
some, at least, of sympathetic origin; the mind is intensely, even
painfully, aroused, and when a decision is reached, it is accompanied by
a somewhat peculiar sort of feeling called the sense of obligation,
duty, or right. There would be little agreement, however, as to what
sort of situations evoke this feeling. We are apt to feel that any
question in regard to which we are much in earnest is a question of
right and wrong. To the artist a consciously false stroke of brush or
chisel is a moral wrong, a sin; and a good carpenter will suffer remorse
if he lets a bad joint go uncorrected.
The fact that the judgment of right is likely to present itself to
people of emotional temperament as an imagined voice, admonishing them
what they ought to do, is an illustration of that essentially social or
interlocutory character of thought, spoken of in an earlier chapter. Our
thoughts are always, in some sort, imaginary conversations; and when
vividly felt they are likely to become quite distinctly so. On the other
hand, people whose moral life is calm perceive little or no distinction,
in this regard, between the conclusions of conscience and other
judgments.
Of course, the view that the right is the rational would be untrue, if
by rational were meant merely the result of formal reasoning. The
judgment of right and the conclusion of formal thought are frequently
opposed to each other, because, I take it, the latter is a comparatively
narrow, partial, and conventional product of the mind. The former is
rational and mentally authoritative in a larger sense; its premises are
immeasurably richer; it deals with the whole content of life, with
instincts freighted with the inarticulate conclusions of a remote past,
and with the unformulated inductions of individual experience. To set
the product of a superficial ratiocination over the final output, in
conscience, of our whole mental being, is a kind of pedantry. I do not
mean to imply that there is usually an opposition between the two—they
should work harmoniously together—but only to assert that when there is,
conscience must be regarded as of a profounder rationality.
On the other hand, the wrong, the immoral, is, in a similar sense, the
irrational. It is that which, after the mind has done its full work upon
the matter, presents itself as the mentally isolated, the inharmonious,
that which we cannot follow without having, in our more collected moods,
a sense of having been untrue to ourselves, of having done ourselves a
harm. The mind in its fullest activity is denied and desecrated; we are
split in two. To violate conscience is to act under the control of an
incomplete and fragmentary state of mind; and so to become less a
person, to begin to disintegrate and go to pieces. An unjust or
incontinent deed produces remorse, apparently because the thought of it
will not lie still in the mind, but is of such a nature that there is no
comfortable place for it in the system of thought already established
there.
The question of right and wrong, as it presents itself to any particular
mind, is, then, a question of the completest practicable organization of
the impulses with which that mind finds itself compelled to deal. The
working out of the right conclusion may be compared to the process by
which a deliberative body comes to a conclusion upon some momentous
public measure. Time must be given for all the more important passions,
prejudices, traditions, interests, and the like, to be urged upon the
members with such cogency as their advocates can give them, and for
attempts to harmonize these conflicting forces so that a measure can be
framed which the body can be induced to pass. And when a decision is
finally reached there is a sense of relief, the greater in proportion as
the struggle has been severe, and a tendency, even on the part of the
opposition, to regard the matter as settled. Those people who cannot
achieve moral unity, but have always a sense of two personalities
warring within them, may be compared to certain countries in whose
assemblies political parties are so embittered that they never come to
an understanding with one another.
The mental process is, of course, only the proximate source of the idea
of right, the conflict by which the competitive strength of the various
impulses is measured, and some combination of them achieved; behind it
is the whole history of the race and of the individual, in which
impulses are rooted. Instinctive passions, like love, ambition, and
revenge; the momentum of habit, the need of change, personal
ascendencies, and the like, all have their bearing upon the final
synthesis, and must either be conciliated or suppressed. Thus in case of
a strong passion, like revenge let us say, one of two things is pretty
sure to happen; either it will succeed in getting its revengeful
impulse, more or less disguised perhaps, judged as right; or, if
opposing ideas prove stronger, revenge will be kept under by the rise of
an intense feeling of wrong that associates itself with it. If one
observes that a person has a very vivid sense of the wrong of some
particular impulse, one may usually infer that he has had in some way to
contend with it; either as a temptation in his own mind, or as
injuriously manifested in the conduct of others.
The natural way to solve a moral question, when immediate action is not
required, is to let it lie in the mind, turning it over from time to
time as attention is directed to it. In this manner the new situation
gradually relates itself to all the mental forces having pertinency to
it. The less violent but more persistent tendencies connect themselves
quietly but firmly to recalcitrant impulse, enwrapping it like the
filaments of a spider’s web, and bringing it under discipline. Something
of this sort is implied in the rule of conduct suggested by Mr. H. R.
Marshall, in his excellent work, “Instinct and Reason”: “Act to restrain
the impulses which demand immediate reaction, in order that the impulse
order determined by the existence of impulses of less strength, but of
wider significance, may have full weight in the guidance of your
life.”[93]
It occurs to me, however, that there is no absolute rule that the right
is the deliberate. It is usually so, because the danger of irrationality
and disintegration comes, in most cases, from the temporary sway of some
active impulse, like that to strike or use injurious words in anger. But
rationality involves decision as well as deliberation; and there are
persons in whom the impulse to meditate and ponder so much outweighs the
impulse to decide and act, as itself to endanger the unity of life. Such
a person may well come to feel that the right is the decisive. It seems
likely that in most minds the larger rationality, which gives the sense
of right, is the sequel of much pondering, but is definitely achieved in
moments of vivid insight.
The main significance of the view that the right is the rational is to
deny that there is any sharp distinction in kind between the question of
right and wrong and other mental questions; the conclusion of conscience
being held to be simply a more comprehensive judgment, reached by the
same process as other judgments. It still leaves untouched the remoter
problems, mental and social, underlying all judgments; as, for instance,
of the nature of impulses, of what determines their relative intensity
and persistence, of the character of that process of competition and
assimilation among them of which judgments are the outcome; and of the
social order as determining impulses both indirectly, through its action
upon heredity, and directly through suggestion.
And behind these is that problem of problems, to which all the roads of
thought lead, that question of organization or vital process, of which
all special questions of society or of the mind are phases. From
whatever point of view we look at life, we can see something going on
which it is convenient to call organization, development, or the like;
but I suppose that all who have thought much about the matter feel that
we have only a vague notion of what the fact is that lies behind these
words.
I mention these things merely to disclaim any present attempt to fathom
them, and to point out that the aim of this chapter is limited to some
observations on the working of social or personal factors in the
particular sort of organization which we call conscience or moral
judgment.
It is useless to look for any other or higher criterion of right than
conscience. What is felt to be right is right; that is what the word
means. Any theory of right that should turn out to be irreconcilable
with the sense of right must evidently be judged as false. And when it
is urged that conscience is variable, we can only answer that, for this
very reason, the right cannot be reduced to a universal and conclusive
formula. Like life in all its phases, it is a progressive revelation out
of depths we do not penetrate.
For the individual considering his own conduct, his conscience is the
only possible moral guide, and though it differ from that of everyone
else, it is the only right there is for him; to violate it is to commit
moral suicide. Speculating more largely on conduct in general he may
find the right in some collective aspect of conscience, in which his own
conscience appears as member of a larger whole; and with reference to
which certain particular consciences, at variance with his own, like
those of certain sorts of criminals, may appear as degenerate or
wrong—and this will not surprise him, because science teaches us to
expect degenerate variations in all forms of life. But, however broad a
view he takes, he cannot do otherwise than refer the matter to his
conscience; so that what I think, or—to generalize it—what _we_ think,
must, in one form or another, be the arbiter of right and wrong, so far
as there can be any. Other tests become valid only in so far as
conscience adopts them.
It would seem that any scientific study of the matter must consist
essentially in investigating the conditions and relations of concrete
right—the when, where, and why of what people _do_ think is right.
Social or moral science can never be a final source or test of morality;
though it can reveal facts and relations which may help conscience in
making its authoritative judgment.
The view that the right is the rational is quite consistent with the
fact that, for those who have surplus energy, the right is the _onward_.
The impulse to act, to become, to let out the life that rises within
from obscure springs of power, is the need of needs, underlying all more
special impulses; and this onward _Trieb_ must always count in our
judgments of right: it is one of the things conscience has to make room
for. There can be no harmony in a mental life which denies expression to
this most persistent and fundamental of all instinctive tendencies: and
consequently the equilibrium which the active mind seeks, and a sense of
which is one with the sense of right, is never a state of rest, but an
_equilibrium mobile_. Our situation may be said to resemble that of an
acrobat balancing himself upon a rolling sphere, and enabled to stand
upright only on condition of moving continually forward. The right never
remains precisely the same two days in succession; but as soon as any
particular state of right is achieved, the mental centre of gravity
begins to move onward and away from it, so that we can hold our ground
only by effecting a new adjustment. Hence the merely negative can never
be the right to a vigorous person, or to a vigorous society, because the
mind will not be content with anything so inadequate to its own nature.
The good self must be what Emerson calls a “crescive self,” and the
right must mark a track across the “waste abyss of possibility” and lead
out the energies to congenial exertion.
This idea is nowhere, perhaps, more cogently stated and illustrated than
in M. Guyau’s penetrating work, “A Sketch of Morality.” He holds that
the sense of duty is, in one aspect, a sense of a power to do things,
and that this power tends in itself to create a sense of obligation. We
can, therefore we must. “Obligation is an internal expansion—a need to
complete our ideas by converting them into action.”[94] Even pain may be
sought as part of that larger life which the growing mind requires.
“Leopardi, Heine, or Lenau would probably not have exchanged those hours
of anguish in which they composed their finest songs for the greatest
possible enjoyment. Dante suffered.... Which of us would not undergo a
similar suffering? Some heart-aches are infinitely sweet.”[95] And so
with benevolence and what is called self-sacrifice. “... charity is but
one with overflowing fecundity; it is like a maternity too large to be
confined within the family. The mother’s breast needs life eager to
empty it; the heart of the truly humane creature needs to be gentle and
helpful to all.”[96] “The young man is full of enthusiasm; he is ready
for every sacrifice because, in point of fact, it is necessary that he
should sacrifice something of himself—that he should diminish himself to
a certain extent; he is too full of life to live only for himself.”[97]
The right, then, is not merely the repressive discipline with which we
sometimes identify it, but is also something warm, fresh and
outward-looking. That which we somewhat vaguely and coldly call mental
development is, when at its best, the revelation of an expanding,
variegating, and beautiful whole, of which the right act is a harmonious
member.
When, on the other hand, we say that right is largely determined by
habit, we only emphasize the other aspect of that progressive mingling
of continuity with change, which we see in mental life in all its
phases. Habit, we know, makes lines of less resistance in thought,
feeling, and action; and the existence of these tracks must always count
in the formation of a judgment of right, as of any other judgment. It
ought not, apparently, to be set over against novel impulses as a
contrary principle, but rather thought of as a phase of all impulses,
since novelty always consists, from one point of view, in a fresh
combination of habits. It is much the same question as that of
suggestion and choice, or of invention and imitation. The concrete fact,
the real thing, in each case, is not one of these as against the other,
or one modified by the other, but a single, vital act of which these are
aspects, having no separate existence.
Whether a person’s life, in its moral or any other aspect, is obviously
changeful, or, on the contrary, appears to be merely repetitive or
habitual, depends upon whether the state of his mind, and of the
conditions about it, are favorable to rapid changes in the system of his
thought. Thus if he is young and vigorous, and if he has a natural
open-mindedness and keenness of sensibility, he will be so much the more
likely, other things equal, to incorporate fresh elements of thought and
make a new synthesis, instead of running on habit. Variety of life in
the past, preventing excessive deepening of the mental ruts, and contact
with strong and novel influences in the present, have the same tendency.
The rigidly habitual or traditionary morality of savages is apparently a
reflection of the restriction and sameness of their social life; and a
similar type of morals is found even in a complex society, as in China,
when the social system has become rigid by the equilibration of
competing ideas. On the other hand, the stir and change of the more
active parts of our society make control by mere habit impossible. There
are no simple dominant habits; tendencies are mixed and conflicting, so
that the person must either be intelligently moral or else degenerate.
He must either make a fresh synthesis or have no synthesis at all.
What is called principle appears to be simply a habit of conscience, a
rule formed originally by a synthesis of various impulses, but become
somewhat mechanical and independent of its origin—as it is the nature of
habit to do. As the mind hardens and matures there is a growing
inaptitude to take in novel and powerful personal impressions, and a
corresponding ascendency of habit and system; social sentiment, the
flesh and blood of conduct, partly falls away, exposing a skeleton of
moral principles. The sense of duty presents itself less and less as a
vivid sympathetic impulse, and more and more as a sense of the economy
and restfulness of a definite standard of conduct. When one has come to
accept a certain course as duty he has a pleasant sense of relief and of
lifted responsibility, even if the course involves pain and
renunciation. It is like obedience to some external authority; any clear
way, though it lead to death, is mentally preferable to the tangle of
uncertainty.
Actions that appear memorable or heroic are seldom achieved at the
moment of decisive choice, but are more likely to come after the habit
of thought which produces the action has become somewhat mechanical and
involuntary. It is probably a mistake to imagine that the soldier who
braves death in battle, the fireman who enters the burning building, the
brakeman who pursues his duty along the icy top of a moving train, or
the fisherman who rows away from his vessel into the storm and mist, is
usually in an acute state of heroism. It is all in the day’s work; the
act is part of a system of thought and conduct which has become habitual
and would be painful to break. Death is not imagined in all its terrors
and compared with social obligation; the case is far simpler. As a rule
there is no time in a crisis for complicated mental operations, and
whether the choice is heroic or cowardly it is sure to be simple. If
there is any conflict of suggestions it is brief, and the one that gains
ascendency is likely to be followed mechanically, without calculation of
the future.
One who studies the “sense of oughtness” in children will have no
difficulty in seeing that it springs largely from a reluctance to break
habits, an indisposition, that is, to get out of mental ruts. It is in
the nature of the mind to seek a principle or unifying thought—the mind
is a rule-demanding instinct—and in great part this need is met by a
habit of thought, inculcated perhaps by some older person who proclaims
and enforces the rule, or perhaps by the unintended pressure of
conditions which emphasize one suggestion and shut out others. However
the rule originates, it meets a mental want, and, if not too strongly
opposed by other impulses, is likely to be adopted and felt as
obligatory just because it is a consistent way of thinking. As Mr. Sully
says, “The truth is that children have a tremendous belief in law.”[98]
The books on child-study give many instances of the surprising
allegiance which children often give to rule, merely as rule, and even
an intermittent observer will be sure to corroborate them. Thus a child
five years old, when on a visit, was invited to “open his mouth and shut
his eyes,” and upon his doing so a piece of candy was put into the
former. When he tasted it he pulled it out and exclaimed, “Mamma don’t
want me to have candy.” Now this did not seem to be affectation, nor was
the child other than fond of sweets, nor afraid of punishment or blame;
he was simply under the control of a need for mental consistency. The
no-candy rule had been promulgated and enforced at home; he had adopted
it as part of his system of thought, and, when it was broken, his moral
sense, otherwise the harmony of his mind, was shocked to a degree that
the sweet taste of the candy could not overcome. Again, R. was subjected
nearly every evening for several years to a somewhat painful operation
called “bending his foot,” intended to correct a slight deformity. After
becoming accustomed to this he would sometimes protest and even cry if
it were proposed to omit it. I thought I could see that moral allegiance
to a rule, merely as such, weakened as he grew older; and the
explanation of this I took to be that the increasing competition of
suggestions and conflict of precepts made this simple, mechanical unity
impossible, and so forced the mind, still striving for harmony, to exert
its higher organizing activity and attempt a larger sort of unification.
It is the same principle as that which prevents the civilized man from
retaining the simple allegiance to rule and habit that the savage has;
his complex life cannot be unified in this way, any more than his
accounts can be notched on a stick; and he is forced, if he is to
achieve any unity of life, to seek it in some more elaborate standard of
behavior. Under uniform conditions the habitual is the rational, and
therefore the moral; but under complex conditions this ceases to be the
case.
Of course this way of looking at the matter does not do away with all
the difficulties involved in it, but does, it seems to me, put habitual
and other morality on the common ground of rationality, and show the
apparently sharp division between them to be an illusion.
Those who think as I do will reject the opinion that the right is, in
any general sense, the social as opposed to the individual. As already
stated, I look upon this antithesis as false when used to imply a
radical opposition. All our human thought and activity is either
individual or social, according to how you look at it, the two being no
more than phases of the same thing, which common thought, always
inclined to confuse words with things, attempts to separate. This is as
true in the ethical field as in any other. The consideration of other
persons usually enters largely into questions of right and wrong; but
the ethical decision is distinctly an assertion of a private,
individualized view of the matter. Surely there is no sound general
principle in accordance with which the right is represented by the
suggestions of the social environment, and the wrong by our more private
impulses.
The right is always a private impulse, always a self-assertion, with no
prejudice, however, to its social character. The “ethical self” is not
less a self for being ethical, but if anything more of a self, because
it is a fuller, more highly organized expression of personality. All
will recognize, I imagine, that a strong sense of duty involves
self-feeling, so that we say to ourselves emphatically I ought. It would
be no sense of duty at all if we did not feel that there was something
about it peculiar to us and antithetical to some of the influences
acting upon us. It is important for many purposes to emphasize the fact
that the ethical self is always a public self; but it is equally true
and important that it is always a private self.
In short, ethical thinking and feeling, like all our higher life, has
its individual and social aspects, with no peculiar emphasis on either.
If the social aspect is here at its highest, so also is the individual
aspect.
The same objection applies to any form of the antithesis self _versus_
other, considered as a general statement of moral situations. It is a
fallacious one, involving vague and material notions of what personality
is—vague because material, for we cannot, I think, reflect closely upon
the facts of personality without seeing that they are primarily mental
or spiritual, and by no means even analogous to the more obvious aspects
of the physical. As a matter of fact, ego and alter, self and sympathy,
are correlative, and always mingled in ethical judgments, which are not
distinguished by having less self and more other in them, but by being a
completer synthesis of all pertinent impulses. The characteristic of a
sense of right is not ego or alter, individual or social, but mental
unification, and the peculiar feeling that accompanies it.
Egoism can be identified with wrong only when we mean by it some narrow
or unstable phase of the self; and altruism, if we take it to mean
susceptibility to be impressed by other people, is equally wrong when
it, in turn, becomes narrow or unstable, as we see it in hysterical
persons. As I have already said, I hold altruism, when used, as it seems
to be ordinarily, to denote a supposed peculiar class of impulses,
separate from another supposed class called egoistic, to be a mere
fiction, engendered by the vaguely material idea of personality just
mentioned. Most higher kinds of thought are altruistic, in the sense
that they involve a more or less distinct reference to other persons;
but when intensely conceived, these same kinds of thought are usually,
if not always, self-thoughts, or egoistic, as well.
The question whether a man shall keep his dollar or give it to a beggar,
for example, looks at first sight like a question of ego _versus_ alter,
because there are two physical bodies present and visibly associated
with the conflicting impulses. In this merely physical sense, of
referring to one material body rather than another, it is in fact such a
question, but not necessarily in any properly mental, social, or moral
sense.
Let us look at the matter a moment with reference to various possible
meanings of the words altruism and altruistic. Taking the latter word as
the most convenient for our purpose, I can think of three meanings, any
one of which would answer well enough to the vague current usage of it:
first, that which is suggested by another person, that is by his
appearance, words, or other symbols; second, that which is for the
benefit of another; third, good or moral.
In the first sense, which carries no moral implication at all, it is
altruistic to give to the beggar, but the word is also applicable to the
greater part of our actions, since most of them are suggested by others
in some way. And, of course, many of the actions included are what are
generally called selfish ones. To strike a man with whom we are angry,
to steal from one of whom we are envious, to take liberties with an
attractive woman, and all sorts of reprehensible proceedings suggested
by the sight of another person, would be altruistic in this sense, which
I suppose, therefore, cannot be the one intended by those who use the
word as the antithesis to egoistic.
If we use the word in the second sense, that of being for the benefit of
another, to give to the beggar may or may not be altruistic; thoughtful
philanthropy is inclined to say that it is usually for his harm. It may,
perhaps, be said that we at least intend to benefit or please him, that
this is the main thing, and that it is a question whether the action has
an I-reference or a you-reference in the mind of the actor. As to this I
would again call attention to what was said of the nature of I and you
as personal ideas in Chapter III., and of the nature of egotism in
Chapter VI. Our impulses regarding persons cannot, in my opinion, be
classified in this way. What could be more selfish than the action of a
mother who cannot refuse her child indigestible sweetmeats? She gives
them both to please the child and to gratify a shallow self which is
identified with him. To refuse the money to the beggar may be as
altruistic, in the sense of springing from the desire to benefit others,
as to give it. The self for which one wishes to keep the dollar is
doubtless a social self of some sort, and very possibly has better
social claims upon him than the beggar: he may wish to buy flowers for a
sick child.
I need hardly add that to give the money is not necessarily the moral
course. The attempt to identify the good with what refers to others as
against what refers to one’s self is hopelessly confusing and false,
both theoretically and in practical application.
In short it is hard to discover, in the word altruism, any definite
moral significance.
The individual and the group are related in respect to moral thought
quite as they are everywhere else; individual consciences and the social
conscience are not separate things, but aspects of one thing, namely,
the moral Life, which may be regarded as individual by fixing our
attention upon a particular conscience in artificial isolation, or as
general, by attending to some collective phase, like public opinion upon
a moral question. Suppose, for instance, one were a member of the
Congress that voted the measure which brought on the war with Spain. The
question how he should vote on this measure would be, in its individual
aspect, a matter of private conscience; and so with all other members.
But taking the vote as a whole, as a synthesis, showing the moral drift
of the group, it appears as an expression of a social conscience. The
separation is purely artificial, every judgment of an individual
conscience being social in that it involves a synthesis of social
influences, and every social conscience being a collective view of
individual consciences. The concrete thing, the moral Life, is a whole
made up of differentiated members. If this is at all hard to grasp, it
is only because the fact is a large one. We certainly cannot get far
unless we can learn to _see_ organization, since all our facts present
it.
The idea that the right is the social as opposed to the sensual is, it
seems to me, a sound one, if we mean by it that the mentally higher,
more personal or imaginative impulses have on the whole far more weight
in conscience than the more sensual. The immediate reason for this seems
to be that the mind of one who shares the higher life is so thronged
with vivid personal or social sentiments, that the merely sensual cannot
be the rational except where it is allied with these, or at any rate not
opposed to them. It is for the psychologist to explain the mental
processes involved, but apparently the social interests prevail in
conscience over the sensual because they are the major force; that is,
they are, on the whole, so much more numerous, vivid, and persistent,
that they determine the general system of thought, of which conscience
is the fullest expression.
We may, perhaps, represent the matter nearly enough for our purpose by
comparing the higher and lower kinds of thought to the human race and
the inferior animals. The former is so much more powerful, on the whole,
though not always so individually, that it determines, in all settled
countries, the general organization of life, erecting cities and
railroads, clearing forests, and the like, to suit itself, and with only
incidental regard to other animals. The latter are preserved within the
system only in so far as they are useful, or at any rate not very
troublesome, to mankind. So all sensual impulses are judged by their
relation to a system of thought dominated by social sentiment. The
pleasures of eating, harmless in themselves, begin to be judged wrong so
soon as they are indulged in such a way as to blunt the higher
faculties, or to violate justice, decency, or the like. A shipwrecked
man, it is felt, should rather perish of hunger than kill and eat
another man, because the latter action violates the whole system of
social thought. And in like manner it is held that a soldier, or indeed
any man, should prefer honor and duty to life itself.
The working of personal influence upon our judgments of right is not
different in kind from its working upon other judgments: it simply
introduces vivid impulses, which affect the moral synthesis something in
the way that picking up a weight will change one’s centre of gravity and
force him to alter his footing.
As was suggested above, the morality of mere rule and habit becomes the
less conspicuous in the life of children the more they are subjected to
fresh personal influences. If their sympathies are somewhat dull, or if
they are secluded, their minds naturally become grooved; and all
children, perhaps, become much bound to habit in matters where personal
influence is not likely to interfere. But in most children, and in most
matters, it will be found that the moral judgment and feeling are, from
the very earliest, intensely sympathetic and personal, charged with
shame, affection, anger, jealousy, and desire to please. The mind has
already to struggle for harmony among vivid emotions, aroused by the
appeals of life to hereditary instinct, each giving intensity to certain
ideas of conduct, and tending to sway the judgment of right in their
sense.
If the boy who refused the candy, as mentioned above, had possessed a
vivid imagination of personal attitudes, which he did not, his situation
might have been much more intricate. He might have been drawn to accept
it not only by the sweet taste but by a desire to please the friends who
offered it; and on the other hand he might have been deterred by a
vision of the reproving face and voice of his mother. Thus M., nearly
sixteen months old, had been frowned at and called naughty in a severe
tone of voice when she tried to claw her brother’s face. Shortly after,
while sitting with him on the bed, her mother being at a distance, she
was observed to repeat the offence and then, without further cause or
suggestion, to bow her head and look abashed and guilty. Apparently she
had a sense of wrong, a conviction of sin, perhaps consisting only in a
reminiscence of the shame she had previously felt when similar behavior
was followed by rebuke.
Here, then, we have a simple manifestation of a moral force that acts
upon every one of us in countless ways, and every day of his life—the
imagined approval or disapproval of others, appealing to instinctive
emotion, and giving the force of that emotion to certain views of
conduct. The behavior that connects itself with such social sentiment as
we like and feel the impulse to continue, is so much the more likely to
be judged as right; but if the sentiment is one from which we are
averse, the behavior is the more likely to be judged as wrong. The
child’s moral sense, says Perez, “begins as soon as he understands the
signification of certain intonations of the voice, of certain attitudes,
of a certain expression of countenance, intended to reprimand him for
what he has done or to warn him against something he was on the point of
doing. This penal and remunerative sanction gives rise by degrees to a
clear distinction of concrete good and evil.”[99]
A child who is not sensitive to praise or blame, but whose interests are
chiefly impersonal, or at any rate only indirectly personal, sometimes
appears to have no moral sense at all, to be without the conviction of
sin or any notion of _personal_ wrong. He has little experience of those
peculiarly acute and trying mental crises which result from the conflict
of impulses of sympathetic origin with one another or with animal
appetites. This was much the case with R. in his earliest years. Living
in quiet surroundings, somewhat isolated from other children, with no
violent or particularly mischievous impulses, occupied all day long with
blocks, sand-pile, and other impersonal interests, not sensitive to
blame nor inclined to take it seriously, he gave the impression of being
non-moral, an unfallen spirit. M. was the very opposite of all this.
From the first week she was visibly impulsive, contentious, sensitive,
sympathetic; laying traps for approval, rebelling against criticism,
sudden and quick to anger, sinning, repenting, rejoicing; living almost
altogether in a vivid personal world.
A character of the latter sort has an intenser moral life, because the
variety of strong impulses introduced by a sensitive and personally
imaginative temperament are sure to make crises for the mind to wrestle
with. The ethics of personal feeling which it has to work out seems
widely apart from the ethics of rule and habit, as in fact it is, so far
as regards the materials that enter into the moral synthesis. The color
and content, all the concrete elements of the moral life, are as
different as are the different characters of people: the idea of right
is not a fraction of thought alike in all minds, but a comprehensive,
integrating state of mind, characteristic of the personality of which it
is an expression.
The idea of justice is, of course, a phase of the idea of right, and
arises out of the mental attempt to reconcile conflicting impulses. As
Professor Baldwin points out, the child is puzzled by contradictions
between his simpler impulses, such as those to appropriate food and
playthings, and other impulses of more imaginative or sympathetic
origin. Needing to allay this conflict he readily grasps the notion of a
_tertium quid_, a reconciling rule or law which helps him to do so.
Our mature life is not radically distinguished from childhood as regards
the working of personal influence upon our moral thought. If there is
progress it is in the way of fulness of experience and better
organization: the mental life may become richer in those sympathetic or
imaginative impulses which we derive from healthy intercourse with the
world, and without a good store of which our judgments of right must be
narrow and distorted; there may at the same time be a completer ordering
and discipline of these materials, a greater power to construct the
right, the unifying thought, out of diverse elements, a quicker
recognition of it when achieved, and a steadier disposition to act upon
it. In most cases, perhaps, a person after thirty years of age gains
something in the promptness and steadfastness of his moral judgment, and
loses something in the imaginative breadth of his premises. But the
process remains the same, and our view of right is still a sort of
microcosm of our whole character. Whatever characteristic passions we
have will in some way be represented in it, and until we stiffen into
mental rigidity and decline, it will change more or less with every
important change in our social surroundings.
To a very large class of minds, perhaps to the largest class, the notion
of right presents itself chiefly as a matter of personal authority. That
is, what we feel we ought to do is simply what we imagine our guide or
master would do, or would wish us to do. This, for instance, is the idea
very largely inculcated and practised by the Christian Church. It is not
anything opposed to or different from the right as a mental synthesis,
but simply means that admiration, reverence, or some other strong
sentiment, gives such overwhelming force to the suggestions of a certain
example, that they more or less completely dominate the mind. The
authority works through conscience and not outside of it. Moreover the
relation is not so one-sided as it would seem, since our guide is
always, in one point of view, the creation of our own imaginations,
which are sure to interpret him in a manner congenial to our native
tendency. Thus the Christ of Fra Angelico is one thing, and the Christ
of Michelangelo, directing the ruin of the damned, is quite another.
The ascendency of personal authority is usually greater in proportion as
the mind is of a simple, visually imaginative, rather than reflective
turn. People of the sort commonly called “emotional,” with ready and
vivid personal feeling but little constructive power, are likely to
yield to an ascendent influence as a whole, with little selection or
reconstruction. Their individuality is expressed chiefly in the choice
of a master; having chosen, they are all his. If they change masters
they change morals at the same time. The mental unity of which they,
like all the rest of us, are in search, is found in allegiance to a
concrete personality, which saves them the impossible task of abstract
thought. Such people, however, usually feel an attraction toward
stability in others, and secure it for themselves by selecting a
steadfast personality to anchor their imaginations to.
This, of course, is possible or congenial only to those who lack the
mental vigor to make in a more intellectual manner that synthesis of
which moral judgment is the expression. Those who have this vigor make
use of many examples, and if they acknowledge the pre-eminence of
anyone, he is likely to be vaguely conceived and to be in reality no
more than the symbol of their own moral conclusions.
The immediate power of personal images or influences over our sense of
right is probably greater in all of us than we realize. “It is
wonderful,” says George Eliot in “Middlemarch,” “how much uglier things
will look when we only think we are blamed for them ... and, on the
other hand, it is astonishing how pleasantly conscience takes our
encroachments on those who never complain, or have nobody to complain
for them.” That is to say, other persons, by awaking social self-feeling
in us, give life and power to certain sentiments of approval or
disapproval regarding our own actions. The rule, already suggested, that
the self of a sensitive person, in the presence of an ascendent
personality, tends to become his interpretation of what the other thinks
of him, is a prime factor in determining the moral judgments of all of
us. Everyone must have felt the moral renewal that comes with the mere
presence of one who is vigorously good, whose being enlivens our
aspiration and shames our backsliding, who makes us really feel the
desirability of the higher life and the baseness and dulness of the
lower.
In one of Mr. Theodore Child’s papers on French art he relates that
Dagnan said after the death of Bastien-Lepage, “With every new picture I
paint in future I shall try to think if he would have been satisfied
with it.” Almost the same has been said by an American author with
reference to Robert Louis Stevenson. And these instances are typical of
the general fact that our higher selves, our distinctively right views
and choices, are dependent upon imaginative realization of the points of
view of other persons. There is, I think, no possibility of being good
without living, imaginatively of course, in good company; and those who
uphold the moral power of personal example, as against that of abstract
thought are certainly in the right. A mental crisis, by its very
difficulty, is likely to call up the thought of some person we have been
used to look to as a guide, and the confronting of the two ideas, that
of the person and that of the problem, compels us to answer the question
What would he have thought of it? The guide we appeal to may be a person
in the room, or a distant friend, or an author whom we have never seen,
or an ideal person of religion. The strong, good men we have once
imagined live in our minds and fortify there the idea of worthiness.
They were free and noble and make us unhappy to be less.
Of course the influence of other persons often goes by contraries. The
thought of one who is repugnant to us often brings a strong sense of the
wrong of that for which he stands, and our conviction of the hatefulness
of any ill trait is much enlivened by intimate contact with one who
exhibits it.
The moral potency of confession, and of all sorts of publicity, rests
upon the same basis. In opening ourselves to another we are impelled to
imagine how our conduct appears to him; we take an outside view of
ourselves. It makes a great difference to whom we confess: the higher
the character of the person whose mind we imagine, the more enlightening
and elevating is the view of ourselves that we get. Even to write our
thoughts in a diary, and so to confess, not to a particular person, but
to that vague image of an interlocutor that connects itself with all
articulate expression, makes things look different.
It is, perhaps, much the same with prayer. To pray, in a higher sense,
is to confront our moral perplexities with the highest personal ideal we
can form, and so to be unconsciously integrating the two, straightening
out the one in accordance with the other. It would seem that social
psychology strongly corroborates the idea that prayer is an essential
aspect of the higher life; by showing, I mean, that thought, and
especially vivid thought, is interlocutory in its very nature, and that
aspiration almost necessarily takes, more or less distinctly, the form
of intercourse with an ideal being.
Whatever publishes our conduct introduces new and strong factors into
conscience; but whether this publicity is wholesome or otherwise depends
upon the character of the public; or, more definitely, upon whether the
idea of ourselves that we impute to this public is edifying or
degrading. In many cases, for instance, it is ruinous to a person’s
character to be publicly disgraced, because he, or she, presently
accepts the degrading self that seems to exist in the minds of others.
There are some people to whom we should be ashamed to confess our sins,
and others, perhaps, to whom we should not like to own our virtues.
Certainly it should not be assumed that it is good for us to have our
acts displayed before the generality of persons: while this may be a
good thing as regards matters, like the tax-roll, that relate to our
obvious duty to the immediate community, it has in most things a
somewhat vulgarizing effect, tending to promote conformity rather than a
distinctive life. If the scholar’s study were on the market-place, so
that the industrious townspeople could see how many hours of the day he
spends in apparent idleness, he might lack courage to pursue his
vocation. In short, we need privacy as against influences that are not
edifying, and communion with those that are.
Even telling the truth does not result so much from a need of mental
accuracy, though this is strong in some minds, as from a sense of the
unfairness of deceiving people of our own sort, and of the shame of
being detected in so doing. Consequently the maxim, “Truth for friends
and lies for enemies,” is very generally followed, not only by savages
and children, but, more or less openly, by civilized people. Most
persons feel reluctant to tell a lie in so many words, but few have any
compunctions in deceiving by manner, and the like, persons toward whom
they feel no obligation. We all know business men who will boast of
their success in deceiving rivals; and probably few of us hold ourselves
to quite the same standard of honor in dealing with one we believe to be
tricky and ill-disposed toward us, that we would if we thought him
honest and well meaning. “Conscience is born of love” in this as in many
matters. A thoughtful observer will easily see that injustice and not
untruth is the essence of lying, as popularly conceived.
It is because of our need to recall vanished persons, that all goodness
and justice, all right of any large sort, depend upon an active
imagination. Without it we are the prisoners of the immediate
environment and of the suggestions of the lower organism. It is only
this that enables us to live with the best our lives have afforded, and
maintain higher suggestions to compete with the baser ones that assail
us. Let us hear Professor James again: “When for motives of honor and
conscience I brave the condemnation of my own family, club and ‘set’;
when as a Protestant I turn Catholic; as a Catholic, free-thinker; as a
‘regular practitioner,’ homeopath, or what not, I am always inwardly
strengthened in my course, and steeled against the loss of my actual
social self by the thought of other and better _possible_ social judges
than those whose verdict goes against me now. The ideal social self
which I thus seek in appealing to their decision may be very remote; it
may be represented as barely possible. I may not hope for its
realization during my lifetime; I may even expect the future
generations, which would approve me if they knew me, to know nothing
about me when I am dead and gone.”[100] As regards the nearness or
remoteness of the companion it would perhaps be sufficient to say that
if imagined he is actually present, so far as our mental and moral life
are concerned, and except as affecting the vividness of our idea of him,
it makes no immediate difference whether we ever saw him or whether he
ever had any corporeal existence at all.
The alteration of conscience due to the advent in thought of a new
person is often so marked that one view of duty is quite evidently
supplanted by a fresh one, due to the fresh suggestion. Thus, to take an
example probably familiar to all who are used to mental application, it
sometimes happens that a student is fagged and yet feels that he must
think out his problem; there is a strong sense of oughtness backing this
view, which, so long as it is unopposed, holds its ground as the call of
duty. But now a friend may come in and suggest to him that he ought to
stop, that if he goes on he will harm himself and do poor work. Here is
another view of right, and the mind must now make a fresh synthesis and
come, perhaps, to feel that its duty is to leave off.
Because of its dependence upon personal suggestion, the right always
reflects a social group; there is always a circle of persons, more or
less extended, whom we really imagine, and who thus work upon our
impulses and our conscience; while people outside of this have not a
truly personal existence for us. The extent of this circle depends upon
many circumstances, as for instance upon the vigor of our imaginations,
and the reach of the means of communication through which personal
symbols are impressed upon them.
In these days of general literacy, many get their most potent
impressions from books, and some, finding this sort of society more
select and stimulating than any other, cultivate it to the neglect of
palpable persons. This kind of people often have a very tender
conscience regarding the moral problems presented in novels, but a
rather dull one for those of the flesh-and-blood life about them. In
fact, a large part of the sentiments of imaginative persons are purely
literary, created and nourished by intercourse with books, and only
indirectly connected with what is commonly called experience. Nor should
it be assumed that these literary sentiments are necessarily a mere
dissipation. Our highest ideals of life come to us largely in this way,
since they depend upon imaginative converse with people we do not have a
chance to know in the flesh. Indeed, the expansion of conscience that is
so conspicuous a fact of recent years, the rise of moral sentiment
regarding international relations, alien races and social and industrial
classes other than our own, could not have taken place without the aid
of cheap printing and rapid communication. Such understanding and sense
of obligation as we have regarding the populace of great cities, for
instance, is due chiefly to writers who, like the author of “How the
Other Half Lives,” describe the life of such people in a vivid, personal
way, and so cause us to imagine it.
Not to pursue this line of thought too far, it is enough for our purpose
to note that conscience is always a group conscience, however the group
may be formed, so that our moral sentiment always reflects our time, our
country, and our special field of personal imagination. On the other
hand, our sense of right ignores those whom we do not, through sympathy,
feel as part of ourselves, no matter how close their physical
contiguity. To the Norman conqueror the Saxon was an inferior animal,
whose sentiments he no more admitted to his imagination, I suppose, than
a farmer does those of his cattle, and toward whom, accordingly, he did
not feel human obligation. It was the same with the slaveholder and the
slave, and so it sometimes is with employer and wage-earner. The
behavior of the Europeans toward the Chinese during the recent invasion
of China showed in a striking manner how completely moral obligation
breaks down in dealing with people who are not felt to be of kindred
humanity with ourselves.
In minds capable of constructive imagination the social factor in
conscience may take the form of ideal persons, whose traits are used as
a standard of behavior.
Idealization, of this or any other sort, is not to be thought of as
sharply marked off from experience and memory. It seems probable that
the mind is never indifferent to the elements presented to it, but that
its very nature is to select, arrange, harmonize, idealize. That is, the
whole is always acting upon the parts, tending to make them one with
itself. What we call distinctively an ideal is only a relatively complex
and finished product of this activity. The past, as it lives in our
minds, is never a mere repetition of old experience, but is always
colored by our present feeling, is always idealized in some sense; and
it is the same with our anticipation of the future, so that to wholesome
thought expectation is hope. Thus the mind is ever an artist,
re-creating things in a manner congenial to itself, and special arts are
only a more deliberate expression of a general tendency.
An ideal, then, is a somewhat definite and felicitous product of
imagination, a harmonious and congenial reconstruction of the elements
of experience. And a personal ideal is such a harmonious and congenial
reconstruction of our experience of persons. Its active function is to
symbolize and define the desirable, and by so doing to make it the
object of definite endeavor. The ideal of goodness is only the next step
beyond the good man of experience, and performs the same energizing
office. Indeed, as I have already pointed out, there is no separation
between actual and ideal persons, only a more or less definite
connection of personal ideas with material bodies.
There are all degrees of vagueness or definition in our personal ideals.
They may be no more than scattered imaginings of traits which we have
met in experience and felt to be worthy; or they may assume such fulness
and cohesion as to be distinct ideal persons. There may even be several
personal ideals; one may cherish one ideal of himself and a different
one for each of his intimate friends; or his imagination may project
several ideals of himself, to correspond to various phases of his
development.
Probably the phrase “ideal person” suggests something more unified and
consistent than is actually present in the minds of most people when
they conceive the desirable or good in personal character. Is it not
rather ideal traits or sentiments, fragments of personal experience,
phases of past intercourse returning in the imagination with a new
emphasis in the presence of new situations? We have at times divined in
other people courage, generosity, patience and justice, and judged them
to be good. Now, when we find ourselves in a situation where these
traits are called for, we are likely to be reminded by that very fact of
our previous experience of them; and the memory of it brings these
sentiments more vividly to life and gives them more authority in
conscience. Thus a person hesitating whether to smuggle in dutiable
goods is likely to think in his perplexity of some one whom he has come
to regard as honorable in such matters, and of how that one would feel
and act under like conditions.
This building up of higher personal conceptions does not lend itself to
precise description. It is mostly subconscious; the mind is continually
at work ordering and bettering its past and present experiences, working
them up in accordance with its own instinctive need for consistency and
pleasantness; ever idealizing, but rarely producing clean-cut ideals. It
finds its materials both in immediate personal intercourse and through
books and other durable media of expression. “Books, monuments,
pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he finds the lineaments
he is forming.” “All that is said of the wise man ... describes to each
reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self.”[101]
“A few anecdotes, a few traits of character, manners, face, a few
incidents, have an emphasis in your memory out of all proportion to
their apparent significance, if you measure them by the ordinary
standards. They relate to your gift. Let them have their weight, and do
not reject them and cast about for illustrations more usual in
literature. What your heart thinks great is great. The soul’s emphasis
is always right.”[102]
Idealism in this vague form has neither first, second, nor third person.
It is simply an impression of the desirable in personality, and is
impulsively applied to your conduct, my conduct, or his conduct, as the
case may be. The sentiment occurs to us, and the connection in which it
occurs determines its moral application. We sometimes speak as if it
required an unusual effort of virtue to apply the same standards to
ourselves as to others; and so it does, in one sense; but in another it
is easier and more common to do this than not to do it. The simplest
thing, as regards the mental process concerned, is to take ideas of
conduct as they come, without thinking specially where they come from,
and judge them by the standard that conscience presents to us. Injustice
and personal wrong of all sorts, as between one’s self and others,
commonly consist, not in imagining the other man’s point of view and
refusing to give it weight; but in not imagining it, not admitting him
to the tribunal at all. It is in exerting the imagination that the
effort of virtue comes in. One who entertains the thought and feeling of
others can hardly refuse them justice; he has made them a part of
himself. There is, as we have seen, no first or second person about a
sentiment; if it is alive in the mind that is all there is to the
matter.
It is perhaps the case, however, that almost every person of imagination
has at times a special and somewhat definite ideal self, concerning
which he has the “my” feeling, and which he would not use in judging
others. It is, like all ideals, a product of constructive imagination
working upon experience. It represents what we should like to see
ourselves, and has an especially vigorous and varied life in early
youth, when the imagination projects models to match each new aspiration
that gains power over it. In a study of the “Continued Stories” of
children, by Mabel W. Learoyd, many interesting facts are given
illustrating sustained self-idealization. These continued stories are
somewhat consecutive series of imaginations on the part of the young,
recalled and described at a later period. Two-thirds are said to embody
an ideal, and the author, in an idealized form, is the hero of many of
them.[103] An instance of this same process continued into old age is
the fact mentioned by Mr. E. W. Emerson in his “Emerson in
Concord,”[104] that the poet’s diary contains frequent allusion to one
Osman, who stands for an ideal self, a more perfect Emerson of his
aspiration.
It would always be found, I think, that our ideal self is constructed
chiefly out of ideas about us attributed to other people. We can hardly
get any distinct view of ourselves except in this way, that is by
placing ourselves at the standpoint of someone else. The impressions
thus gained are worked over and over, like other mental material, and,
according to the imaginative vigor of the mind, more or less
reorganized, and projected as an ideal.
With some this ideal is quite definite and visible before the eye of the
mind. I have heard the expression “seeing yourself” applied to it. Thus
one woman says of another “She always sees herself in evening dress,”
meaning that her ideal of herself is one of social propriety or
distinction, and that it takes the form of an image of her visible
person as it appears to others in a shape expressing these traits. This
is, of course, a phase of the reflected self, discussed in the fifth
chapter. Some people “see themselves” so constantly, and strive so
obviously to live up to the image, that they give a curious impression
of always acting a part, as if one should compose a drama with himself
as chief personage, and then spend his life playing it. Perhaps
something of this sort is inevitable with persons of vivid imagination.
Once formed and familiarized the ideal self serves, like any ideal only
more directly, as an incitement to growth in its direction, and a
punishment to retrogression. A man who has become used to imagining
himself as noble, beneficent and respected has a real picture in his
mind, a fair product of aspiring thought, a work of art. If his conduct
violates this imagination he has a sense of ugliness and shame; there is
a rent in the picture, a rude, shapeless hole, shattering its beauty,
and calling for painful and tedious repairs before it can be even
tolerable to look upon. Repentance is the pain of this spectacle; and
the clearer and more firmly conceived the ideal, the greater the pain.
The ideal person or persons of an ethical religion are the highest
expression of this creative outreaching of the mind after the admirable
in personality. It can hardly be supposed, by anyone who is willing to
go into the psychology of the matter at all, that they are radically
different from other ideal persons, or in any way sharply divided from
the mass of personal thought. Any comparative study of idealism, among
nations in various stages of civilization, among persons of different
intellectual power, among the various periods of development in one
individual, can hardly fail, I should say, to leave a conviction that
all hangs together, that there is no chasm anywhere, that the most
rudimentary idealizing impulse of the savage or the child is of a piece
with the highest religious conceptions. The tendency of such a view, of
course, is not to drag down the exalted, but to show all as part of a
common life.
All ideals of personality are derived from intercourse, and all that
attain any general acceptance have a social organization and history.
Each historical epoch or nation has its somewhat distinctive personal
ideals, which are instilled into the individual from the general store
of thought. It is especially true that the persons of religion have this
character. They are communal and cumulative, are gradually built up and
become in some degree an institution. In this way they may acquire
richness, clearness, sanctity, and authority, and may finally be
inculcated as something above and outside of the human mind. The latter
is certain to happen if they are made the basis of a discipline to be
applied to all sorts of people. The dogma that they are extra-human
serves, like the forms and ceremonies of a court, to secure to them the
prestige of distance and inaccessibility.
It is a chief function of religious organization to make the moral
synthesis more readily attainable, by establishing a spiritual
discipline, or system of influences and principles, which shall
constantly stimulate one’s higher sentiments, and furnish a sort of
outline or scaffolding of suggestions to aid him in organizing his
thought. In doing this its main agent is the inculcation of personal
ideals, although the teaching of creeds is also, perhaps, important to
the same purpose. It is apparently part of the legitimate function of
organized moral thought to enter the vaguer fields of speculation about
conduct and inculcate provisional ideas, relating for instance to the
origin and meaning of life—matters which the mind must and will explore,
with or without a guide. To have suggested to them definite ways of
thinking regarding such matters helps to make mental unity possible, and
to save men from the aimless and distracting wanderings that often end
in despair. Of course these ideas must be in harmony with the general
state of thought, consistent, for example, with the established results
of science. Otherwise they only increase the distraction. But a
_credible creed_ is an excellent thing, and the lack of it is a real
moral deficiency.
Now in times of intellectual unsettlement, like the present, the ideal
may become disorganized and scattered, the face of God blurred to the
view, like the reflection of the sun in troubled waters. And at the same
time the creeds become incredible, so that, until new ones can be worked
out and diffused, each man must either make one for himself—a task to
which few are equal—or undergo distraction, or cease to think about such
matters, if he can. This state of things involves some measure of
demoralization, although it may be part of a movement generally
beneficent. Mankind needs the highest vision of personality, and needs
it clear and vivid, and in the lack of it will suffer a lack in the
clearness and cogency of moral thought. It is the natural apex to the
pyramid of personal imagination, and when it is wanting there will be an
unremitting and eventually more or less successful striving to replace
it. When it reappears it will, of course, express in all its lineaments
a new era of thought; but the opinion that it is gone to stay, which is
entertained by some, seems very ill grounded.
CHAPTER XI
PERSONAL DEGENERACY
IS A PHASE OF THE QUESTION OF RIGHT AND WRONG—RELATION TO THE IDEA OF
DEVELOPMENT—JUSTIFICATION AND MEANING OF THE PHRASE “PERSONAL
DEGENERACY”—HEREDITARY AND SOCIAL FACTORS IN PERSONAL
DEGENERACY—DEGENERACY AS A MENTAL TRAIT—CONSCIENCE IN
DEGENERACY—CRIME, INSANITY, AND RESPONSIBILITY—GENERAL AIMS IN THE
TREATMENT OF DEGENERACY.
I wish to touch upon this subject only in so far as to suggest a general
way of conceiving it in accord with the views set forth in the preceding
chapters.
The question of personal degeneracy is a phase of the question of right
or wrong and is ultimately determined by conscience. A degenerate might
be defined as one whose personality falls distinctly short of a standard
set by the dominant moral thought of a group. It is the nature of the
mind to form standards of better or worse in all matters toward which
its selective activity is directed; and this has its collective as well
as its individual aspect, so that not only every man but every group has
its preferences and aversions, its good and bad. The selective,
organizing processes which all life, and notably the life of the mind,
presents, involve this distinction; it is simply a formulation of the
universal fact of preference. We cannot view things in which we are
interested without liking some and disliking others; and somewhat in
proportion to our interest is our tendency to express these likes and
dislikes by good and bad or similar words. And since there is nothing
that interests us so much as persons, judgments of right and wrong
regarding them have always been felt and expressed with peculiar zest
and emphasis. The righteous and the wicked, the virtuous and the
vicious, the good and bad under a hundred names, have been sharply and
earnestly discriminated in every age and country.
Although this distinction between personal good and bad has always been
a fact of human thought, a broader view of it is reached, in these days,
through the idea of evolution. The method of nature being everywhere
selective, growth is seen to take place not by making a like use of the
elements already existing, but by the fostering of some to the
comparative neglect or suppression of others. Or, if this statement
gives too much the idea of a presiding intelligence outside the process
itself, we may simply say that the functions of existing elements in
contributing to further growth are extremely different, so much so that
some of them usually appear to have no important function at all, or
even to impede the growth, while others appear to be the very heart of
the onward or crescent life. This idea is applicable to physiological
processes, such as go on within our bodies, to the development of
species, as illustrated with such convincing detail by Darwin, and to
all the processes of thought and of society; so that the forces that are
observed in the present, if viewed with reference to function or
tendency, never appear to be on the same level of value, but are strung
along at different levels, some below a mean, some above it. Thus we not
only have the actual discrimination of good and bad in persons, but a
philosophy which shows it as an incident of evolution, a reflection in
thought of the general movement of nature.
Or, to regard the process of evolution in more detail, we find
degeneracy or inferiority implied in that idea of variation which is the
starting-point of Darwinism. All forms of life, it seems, exhibit
variation; that is, the individuals are not quite alike but differ from
one another and from the parents in a somewhat random manner, so that
some are better adapted to the actual conditions of life, and some
worse. The change or development of a species takes place by the
cumulative survival and multiplication, generation after generation, of
fit or fortunate variations. The very process that produces the fittest
evidently implies the existence of the unfit; and the distinctly unfit
individuals of any species may be regarded as the degenerate.
It will not do to transfer these ideas too crudely to the mental and
social life of mankind; but it will hardly be disputed that the
character of persons exhibits variations which are partly at least
incalculable, and which produce on the one hand leadership and genius
and on the other weakness and degeneracy. We probably cannot have the
one without having something, at least, of the other, though I believe
that the variations of personality are capable, to a great degree, of
being brought under rational control.
This truth that all forms of deficient humanity have a common
philosophical aspect is one reason for giving them some common name,
like degeneracy. Another is that the detailed study of fact more and
more forces the conclusion that such things as crime, pauperism, idiocy,
insanity, and drunkenness have, in great measure, a common causation,
and so form, practically, parts of a whole. We see this in the study of
heredity, which shows that the transmitted taint commonly manifests
itself in several or all of these forms in different generations or
individuals of the same family; and we see it in the study of social
conditions, in the fact that where these conditions are bad, as in the
slums of great cities, all the forms become more prevalent. A third
reason for the use of a special term is that it is desirable that the
matter receive more dispassionate study than formerly, and this may
possibly be promoted by the use of words free, so far as possible, from
irrelevant implications. Many of the words in common use, such as
badness, wickedness, crime and the like, reflect particular views of the
facts, such as the religious view of them as righteousness or sin, and
the legal view as criminal or innocent, while degeneracy suggests the
disinterestedness of science.
I do not much care to justify the particular word degeneracy in this
connection, further than to say that I know of none more convenient or
less objectionable. It comes, of course, from _de_ and _genus_ through
_degenerare_, and seems to mean primarily the state of having fallen
from a type. It is not uncommon in English literature, usually meaning
inferiority to the standard set by ancestors, as when we say a
degenerate age, a degenerate son, etc.; and recently it has come into
use to describe any kind of marked and enduring mental defect or
inferiority. I see no objection to this usage unless it be that it is
doubtful whether the mentally or morally inferior person can in all
cases be said _to have fallen_ from a higher state. This might be
plausibly argued on both sides, but it does not seem worth while.
I use the phrase personal degeneracy, then, to describe the state of
persons whose character and conduct fall distinctly below the type or
standard regarded as normal by the dominant sentiment of the group.
Although it must be admitted that this definition is a vague one, it is
not more so, perhaps, than most definitions of mental or social
phenomena. There is no sharp criterion of what is mentally and socially
up to par and what is not, but there are large and important classes
whose inferiority is evident, such as idiots, imbeciles, the insane,
drunkards and criminals; and no one will question the importance of
studying the whole of which these are parts.
It is altogether a social matter at bottom; that is to say, degeneracy
exists only in a certain relation between a person and the rest of a
group. In so far as any mental or physical traits constitute it they do
so because they involve unfitness for a normal social career, in which
alone the essence of the matter is found. The only palpable test of
it—and this an uncertain one—is found in the actual career of the
person, and especially in the attitude toward him of the organized
thought of the group. We agree fairly well upon the degeneracy of the
criminal, largely because his abnormality is of so obvious and
troublesome a kind that something in particular has to be done about it,
and so he becomes definitely and formally stigmatized by the organs of
social judgment. Yet even from this decisive verdict an appeal is
successfully made in some cases to the wider and maturer thought of
mankind, so that many have been executed as felons who, like John Brown,
are now revered as heroes.
In short, the idea of wrong, of which the idea of degeneracy is a phase,
partakes of the same uncertainty that belongs to its antithesis, the
idea of right. Both are expressions of an ever-developing, always
selective life, and share in the indeterminateness that necessarily goes
with growth. They assume forms definite enough for the performance of
their momentous practical functions, but always remain essentially
plastic and variable.
Concerning the causation of degeneracy, we may say, as of every aspect
of personality, that its roots are to be looked for somewhere in the
mingling of hereditary and social factors from which the individual life
springs. Both of these factors exhibit marked variation; men differ in
their natural traits very much as other animals do, and they also find
themselves subject to the varying influences of a diversified social
order. The actual divergences of character and conduct which they
exhibit are due to the composition of these two variables into a third
variable, the man himself.
In some cases the hereditary factor is so clearly deficient as to make
it natural and justifiable to regard heredity as the cause; in a much
larger number of cases there is good reason to think that social
conditions are more particularly to blame, and that the original
hereditary outfit was fairly good. In a third class, the largest,
perhaps, of all, it is practically impossible to discriminate between
them. Indeed, it is always a loose way of speaking to set heredity and
environment over against each other as separable forces, or to say that
either one is the cause of character or of any personal trait. They have
no separate existence after personal development is under way; each
reacts upon the other, and every trait is due to their intimate union
and co-operation. All we are justified in saying is that one or the
other may be so aberrant as to demand our special attention.
Congenital idiocy is regarded as hereditary degeneracy, because it is
obvious that no social environment can make the individual other than
deficient, and we must work upon heredity if we wish to prevent it. On
the other hand, when we find that certain conditions, like residence in
crowded parts of a city, are accompanied by the appearance of a large
per cent. of criminality, among a population whom there is no reason to
suppose naturally deficient, we are justified in saying that the causes
of this degeneracy are social rather than hereditary. The fact probably
is, in the latter case, that the criminality is due to the conjunction
of degrading surroundings with a degree of hereditary deficiency that a
better training would have rendered harmless, or at least inconspicuous;
but, practically, if we wish to diminish this sort of degeneracy, we
must work upon social conditions.
A sound mental heredity consists essentially in teachability, a capacity
to learn the things required by the social order; and the congenital
idiot is degenerate by the hereditary factor alone, because he is
incapable of learning these things. But a sound heredity is no safeguard
against personal degeneracy; if we have teachability all turns upon what
is taught, and this depends upon the social environment. The very
faculties that lead a child to become good or moral in a good
environment may cause him to become criminal in a criminal environment;
it is all a question of what he finds to learn. It may be said, then,
that of the four possible combinations between good and bad heredity and
good and bad environment, three—bad heredity with bad or good
environment, and good heredity with bad environment—lead to degeneracy.
Only when both elements are favorable can we have a good result. Of
course, by bad environment in this connection must be understood bad in
its action upon this particular individual, not as judged by some other
standard.
As the social surroundings of a person can be changed, and his
hereditary bias cannot, it is expedient, in that vast majority of cases
in which causation is obscure, to assume as a working hypothesis that
the social factor is at fault, and to try by altering it to alter the
person. This is more and more coming to be done in all intelligent
treatment of degeneracy.
As a mental trait, marking a person off as, in some sense, worse than
others in the same social group, degeneracy appears to consist in some
lack in the higher organization of thought. It is not that one has the
normal mental outfit plus something additional, called wrong, crime,
sin, madness, or the like, but that he is in some way deficient in the
mental activity by which sympathy is created and by which all impulses
are unified with reference to a general life. The criminal impulses,
rage, fear, lust, pride, vanity, covetousness, and so on, are the same
in general type as those of the normal person; the main difference is
that the criminal lacks, in one way or another, the higher mental
organization—a phase of the social organization—to which these impulses
should be subordinate. It would not be very difficult to take the seven
deadly sins—Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Covetousness, Gluttony, and
Lust—and show that each may be regarded as the undisciplined
manifestation of a normal or functional tendency. Indeed, as regards
anger this was attempted in a previous chapter.
“To describe in detail the different varieties of degeneracy that are
met with,” says Dr. Maudsley, “would be an endless and barren labor. It
would be as tedious as to attempt to describe particularly the exact
character of the ruins of each house in a city that had been destroyed
by an earthquake: in one place a great part of the house may be left
standing, in another place a wall or two, and in another the ruin is so
great that scarcely one stone is left upon another.”[105]
In the lowest phases mental organization can hardly be said to exist at
all: an idiot has no character, no consistent or effective
individuality. There is no unification, and so no self-control or stable
will; action simply reflects the particular animal impulse that is
ascendent. Hunger, sexual lust, rage, dread, and, in somewhat higher
grades, a crude, naïve kindliness, are each felt and expressed in the
simplest manner possible. There can, of course, be little or no true
sympathy, and the unconsciousness of what is going on in the minds of
other persons prevents any sense of decency or attempt to conform to
social standards.
In the higher grades we may make the distinction, already suggested in
speaking of egotism, between the unstable and the rigid varieties.
Indeed, as was intimated, selfishness and degeneracy are of the same
general character; both being defined socially by a falling short of
accepted standards of conduct, and mentally by some lack in the scope
and organization of the mind.
There is, then, one sort of persons in whom the most conspicuous and
troublesome trait is mere mental inconsistency and lack of character,
and another who possess a fair degree, at least, of consistency and
unity of purpose, but whose mental scope or reach of sympathy is so
small that they have no adequate relation to the life about them.
An outgrowing, impressionable sort of mind, if deficient in the power to
work up its material, is necessarily unstable and lacking in momentum
and definite direction: and in the more marked cases we have people of
the hysterical type, unstable forms of dementia and insanity, and
impulsive crime. “The fundamental defect in the hysterical brain,” says
Dr. Dana, “is that it is circumscribed in its associative functions; the
field of consciousness is limited just as is the field of vision. The
mental activity is confined to personal feelings, which are not
regulated by connotation of past experiences, hence they flow over too
easily into emotional outbursts or motor paroxysms. The hysterical
person cannot think.”[106] It is evident that something similar might be
said of all manifestations of instability.
On the other hand, an ingrowing sort of mind, whose tendency is rather
to work over and over its cherished thoughts than to open out to new
ones, may have a marked deficiency of sensibility and breadth of
perception. If so, the person is likely to exhibit some form of gross
and persistent egotism, such as sensuality, avarice, narrow and ruthless
ambition, fanaticism, of a hard, cold sort, delusion of greatness, or
those kinds of crime that result from habitual insensibility to social
standards rather than from transient impulse.
As conscience is simply the completest product of mental organization,
it will of course share in whatever defect there may be in the mental
life as a whole. In the lower grades of idiocy we may assume that there
is no system in the mind from which a conscience could spring. In a
higher degenerate of the unstable type, there is a conscience, but it is
vacillating in its judgments, transient in duration and ineffectual in
control, proportionally to the mental disintegration which it reflects.
We all, probably, can think of people conspicuously lacking in
self-control, and it will perhaps be evident, when we reflect upon them,
that their consciences are of this sort. The voice of conscience, with
them, is certain to be chiefly an echo of temporary emotions, because a
synthesis embracing long periods of time is beyond their range; it is
frequently inaudible, on account of their being engrossed by passing
impulses, and their conduct is largely without any rational control at
all. They are likely to suffer sharp and frequent attacks of remorse, on
account of failure to live up to their standards, but it would seem that
the wounds do not go very deep as a rule, but share in the general
superficiality of their lives. People of this sort, if not too far gone
in weakness, are probably the ones who profit most by punishment,
because they are helped by the sharp and definite pain which it
associates with acts that they recognize as wrong, but cannot keep from
doing without a vivid emotional deterrent. They are also the ones who,
in their eagerness to escape from the pains of fluctuation and
inconsistency, are most prone to submit blindly to some external and
dogmatic authority. Unable to rule themselves, they crave a master, and
if he only is a master, that is, one capable of grasping and dominating
the emotions by which they are swayed, they will often cleave to him and
kiss the rod.
With those whose defect is rigidity rather than instability, conscience
may exist and may control the life; the trouble with it is, that it is
not in key with the consciences of other people. There is an original
poverty of the impulses that extends to any result that can be worked
out of them. It may appear startling to some to assert that conscience
may dictate the wrong, but such is quite clearly the fact, if we
identify the right with some standard of conduct accepted among people
of broad sympathies. Conscience is the only possible moral guide—any
external authority can work morally upon us only through conscience—but
it always partakes of the limitations of one’s character, and so far as
that is degenerate the idea of right is degenerate also. As a matter of
fact, the very worst men of the hard, narrow, fanatical, or brutal
sorts, often live at peace with their consciences. I feel sure that
anyone who reflects imaginatively upon the characters of people he has
known of this sort will agree that such is the case. A bad conscience
implies mental division, inconsistency between thought and deed, and men
of this sort are often quite at one with themselves. The usurer who
grinds the faces of the poor, the unscrupulous speculator who causes the
ruin of innocent investors to aggrandize himself, the fanatical
anarchist who stabs a king or shoots a president, the Kentucky
mountaineer who regards murderous revenge as a duty, the assaulter who
causes pictures commemorative of his crimes to be tattooed on his skin,
are diverse examples of wrong-doers whose consciences not only do not
punish, but often instigate their ill deeds.
The idea, cherished by some, that crime or wrong of any sort is
invariably pursued by remorse, arises from the natural but mistaken
assumption that all other people have consciences similar to our own.
The man of sensitive temperament and refined habit of thought feels that
he would suffer remorse if he had done the deed, and supposes that the
same must be the case with the perpetrator. On the contrary, it seems
likely that only a very small proportion of those whom the higher moral
sentiment regards as wrong-doers suffer much from the pricks of
conscience. If the general tenor of a man’s life is high, and the act is
the fearful outcome of a moment of passion, as is often the case with
unpremeditated murder, he will suffer, but if his life is all of a
piece, he will not. All authorities agree that the mass of criminals,
and the same is clearly true of ill-doers within the law, have a habit
of mind of which the ill deed is the logical outcome, so that there is
nothing sudden or catastrophic about it. Of course, if we apply the word
conscience only to the mental synthesis of a mind rich in higher
sentiments, then such people have no consciences, but it seems a broader
view of the matter to say that they have a conscience, in so far as they
have mental unity, but that it reflects the general narrowness and
perversion of their lives. In fact, people of this description usually,
if not always, have standards of their own, some sort of honor among
thieves, which they will not transgress, or which, if transgressed,
cause remorse. It is impossible that mental organization should not
produce a moral synthesis of some sort.
There is nothing in this way of conceiving degeneracy which tends to
break down the practical distinctions among the various forms of it, as,
for instance, that between crime and insanity. Though the line between
these two is arbitrary and uncertain, as must always be the case in the
classification of mental facts, and as is confessed by the existence of
a class called the criminal insane, yet the distinction itself and the
difference in treatment associated with it are sound enough in a general
way.
The contrast between our attitudes toward crime and toward insanity is
primarily a matter of personal idea and impulse. We understand the
criminal act, or think we do, and we feel toward it resentment, or
hostile sympathy; while we do not understand the insane act, and so do
not resent it, but regard it with pity, curiosity, or disgust. If one
man strikes down another to rob him, or in revenge, we can imagine the
offender’s state of mind, his motive lives in our thought and is
condemned by conscience precisely as if we thought of doing the act
ourselves. Indeed, to understand an act _is_ to think of doing it
ourselves. But, if it is done for no reason that we can comprehend, we
do not imagine, do not get a personal impression of the case at all, but
have to think of it as merely mechanical. It is the same sort of
difference as that between a person who injures us accidentally and one
who does it “on purpose.”
Secondarily, it is a matter of expediency. We feel that the act which we
can imagine ourselves doing ought to be punished, because we perceive by
our own sympathy with it that more of this sort of thing is likely to
take place if it is not put down. We want the house-breaker to be
stigmatized, disgraced, and imprisoned, because we feel that, if this is
not done, he and others will be encouraged to more housebreaking; but we
feel only pity for the man who thinks he is Julius Cæsar, because we
suppose there is nothing to be feared either from him or his example.
This practical basis of the distinction expresses itself in the general,
and I think justifiable, reluctance to apply the name and treatment of
insanity to behavior which seems likely to be imitated. It is felt that
whatever may be the mental state of the man who commits an act of
violence or fraud, it is wholesome that people in general, who draw no
fine distinctions, but judge others by themselves, should be taught by
example that such conduct is followed by moral and legal penalties. On
the other hand, when the behavior is so evidently remote from ordinary
habits of thought that it can be a matter only of pity or curiosity,
there is no occasion to do anything more than the good of the person
affected seems to require.
The same analysis applies to the whole question of responsibility or
irresponsibility. It is a matter of imaginative contact and personal
idea. To hold a man responsible, is to imagine him as a man like
ourselves, having similar impulses but failing to control them as we do,
or at least as we feel we ought to do. We think of doing as he does,
find it wrong, and impute the wrong to him. The irresponsible person is
one who is looked upon as a different sort of being, not human with
reference to the conduct in question, not imaginable, not near enough to
us to be the object of hostile sentiment. We _blame_ the former; that
is, we visit him with a sympathetic resentment; we condemn that part of
ourselves that we find in him. But in the latter we do not find
ourselves at all.
It is worth noting in this connection, that we could not altogether
cease to blame others without ceasing to blame ourselves, which would
mean moral apathy. It is sometimes thought that the cool analysis of
such questions as this tends toward indifferentism; but I do not see
that this is the case. The social psychologist finds in moral sentiment
a central and momentous fact of human life, and if perchance he does not
himself feel it very vividly, he should have the candor to confess
himself so much the less a man. Indeed, if there is such a thing as an
indifferentist, in the sense of one who does not feel any cogency in
moral sentiment, he must be quite unsuited to the pursuit of social or
moral science, because he lacks power to sympathize with, and so
observe, the facts upon which this sort of science must be based.
I do not purpose to give this discussion a practical turn by entering
into the details of the treatment of various forms of degeneracy; but it
may help to show the bearing of our general view, if I point out in
brief the line of procedure which common-sense would seem to call for.
This procedure naturally divides itself into prevention, reform or cure,
and isolation, according to the stage of development which the evil has
reached.
Everything which acts in a favorable manner upon either the hereditary
or the social factor in life is more or less preventive of degeneracy,
and of course influences of this general sort are of far more importance
as a whole than any more particular measures. Under the head of
prevention would also come punishment, disgrace, and the like—everything
in the treatment of criminals, paupers, and other special classes which
is designed to impress the minds of the rest of the people, and to check
the degenerate tendencies possibly existing among them. Although it is
now thought that the efficacy of these deterrent influences, in the case
of crime at least, is less than was formerly supposed, still it is by no
means desirable that the attempt to exert them should be abandoned.
If degenerate tendencies actually manifest themselves, the main thing to
be done is to take note of them as early in the individual’s life as
possible, and to attempt to counteract them by a suitable change in the
social environment. I need hardly point out that it is now believed that
such counteraction is much more practicable than was formerly supposed,
or mention that many beneficent institutions and other enterprises exist
which aim to secure it.
And if, as must always be the fact in a considerable proportion of
cases, the person remains so distinctly and persistently below the
standard of character and conduct that it is clearly inexpedient to
leave him at large, the rational treatment of him is evidently a decent
isolation, which shall prevent him from propagating his degenerate
traits through either heredity or social influence.
CHAPTER XII
FREEDOM
THE MEANING OF FREEDOM—FREEDOM AND DISCIPLINE—FREEDOM AS A PHASE OF
THE SOCIAL ORDER—FREEDOM INVOLVES INCIDENTAL STRAIN AND DEGENERACY.
Goethe remarks in his Autobiography[107] that the word freedom has so
fair a sound that we cannot do without it even though it designate an
error. Certainly it is a word inseparable from our higher sentiments,
and if, in its popular use at the present day, it has no precise
meaning, there is so much the more reason why we should try to give it
one, and to continue its use as a symbol of something that mankind
cherishes and strives for.
The common notion of freedom is negative, that is, it is a notion of the
absence of constraint. Starting with the popular individualistic view of
things, the social order is thought of as something apart from, and more
or less a hinderance to, a man’s natural development. There is an
assumption that an ordinary person is self-sufficient in most respects,
and will do very well if he is only left alone. But there is, of course,
no such thing as the absence of restraint, in the sense of social
limitations; man has no existence apart from a social order, and can
develop his personality only through the social order, and in the same
degree that it is developed. A freedom consisting in the removal of
limiting conditions is inconceivable. If the word is to have any
definite meaning in sociology, it must therefore be separated from the
idea of a fundamental opposition between society and the individual, and
made to signify something that is both individual and social. To do this
it is not necessary to do any great violence to accepted ideas of a
practical sort; since it is rather in theory than in application that
the popular view is objectionable. A sociological interpretation of
freedom should take away nothing worth keeping from our traditional
conception of it, and may add something in the way of breadth,
clearness, and productiveness.
The definition of freedom naturally arising from the chapters that have
gone before is perhaps this: that it is _opportunity for right
development_, for development in accordance with the progressive ideal
of life that we have in conscience. A child comes into the world with an
outfit of vague tendencies, for all definite unfolding of which he is
dependent upon social conditions. If cast away alone on a desert island
he would, supposing that he succeeded in living at all, never attain a
real humanity, would never know speech, or social sentiment, or any
complex thought. On the other hand, if all his surroundings are from the
first such as to favor the enlargement and enrichment of his life, he
may attain the fullest development possible to him in the actual state
of the world. In so far as the social conditions have this favoring
action upon him he may be said to be free. And so every person, at every
stage of his growth, is free or unfree in proportion as he does or does
not find himself in the midst of conditions conducive to full and
harmonious personal development. Thinking in this way we do not regard
the individual as separable from the social order as a whole, but we do
regard him as capable of occupying any one of an indefinite number of
positions within that order, some of them more suitable to him than
others.
No doubt there are elements of vagueness in this conception. What is
full and harmonious personal development? What is the right, the
opportunity to achieve which is freedom? The possibilities of
development are infinitely various, and unimaginable until they begin to
be realized, so that it would appear that our notion gives us nothing
definite to go by after all. This is largely true: development cannot be
defined, either for the race or for individuals, but is and must remain
an ideal, of which we can get only partial and shifting glimpses. In
fact, we should cease to think of freedom as something definite and
final, that can be grasped and held fast once for all, and learn to
regard it as a line of advance, something progressively appearing out of
the invisible and defining itself, like the forms of a mountain up which
one is climbing in a mist. This vagueness and incompleteness are only
what we meet in every direction when we attempt to define our ideals.
What is progress? What is right? What is beauty? What is truth? The
endeavor to produce unmistakable and final definitions of these things
is now, I suppose, given up, and we have come to recognize that the
good, in all its forms, is evolved rather than achieved, is a process
rather than a state.
The best definition of freedom is perhaps nothing other than the most
helpful way of thinking about it; and it seems to me that the most
helpful way of thinking about it is to regard it in the light of the
contrast between what a man is and what he might be, as our experience
of life enables us to imagine the two states. Ideas of this sort are
suggested by defining freedom as opportunity, and their tendency is to
stimulate and direct practical endeavor. If the word helps us to
realize, for instance, that it is possible to make healthy, intelligent,
and hopeful children out of those that are now sickly, dull, and
unhappy, so much the better. On the other hand, the definition of it as
letting people alone, well enough suited, perhaps, to an over-governed
state of society, does not seem especially pertinent to our time and
country.
We have always been taught by philosophy that the various forms of the
good were merely different views of the same thing, and this idea is
certainly applicable to such notions as those of freedom, progress, and
right. Thus freedom may be regarded as merely the individual aspect of
progress, the two being related as the individual and the social order
were asserted to be in the first chapter, and no more distinct or
separable. If instead of contrasting what a particular man is with what
he might be, we do the same for mankind as a whole, we have the notion
of progress. Progress which does not involve liberation is evidently no
progress at all; and, on the other hand, a freedom that is not part of
the general onward movement of society is not free in the largest sense.
Again, any practicable idea of freedom must connect it with some
standard of right, in which, like opposing claims in a clearing-house,
the divergent tendencies of each person, and of different persons, are
disciplined and reconciled. The wrong is the unfree; it is that which
tends, on the whole, to restrict personal development. It is no
contribution to freedom to turn loose the insane or the criminal, or to
allow children to run on the streets instead of going to school. The
only test of all these things—of right, freedom, progress, and the
like—is the instructed conscience; just as the only test of beauty is a
trained æsthetic sense, which is a mental conclusion of much the same
sort as conscience.
So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the
use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are
lower or less rational. A free discipline controls the individual by
appealing to his reason and conscience, and therefore to his
self-respect; while an unfree control works upon some lower phase of the
mind, and so tends to degrade him. It is freedom to be disciplined in as
rational a manner as you are fit for.
Thus freedom is relative to the particular persons and states who are to
enjoy it, some individuals within any society, and some societies as
wholes, being capable of a higher sort of response than others. In the
family, it implies the substitution, so far as practicable, of
familiarity and moral suasion for distance and the rod; in government
the growth of public opinion and education as compared with autocracy
and the military and police functions; in the church, the decline of
dogma, form, the fear of hell and hypnotic conversion, relatively to
intelligence, sympathy, and good works. But any relaxation of lower
forms of discipline which is not supplied by higher, which tends, on the
whole, to confusion rather than reorganization, is not in the way of
real freedom. The question what this is is always one that is relative
to the actual situation, never one that can be absolutely or abstractly
answered. Freedom can be increased only in connection with the increase
of sympathy, intelligence, and self-control in individuals.
The social order is antithetical to freedom only in so far as it is a
bad one. Freedom can exist only in and through a social order, and must
be increased by all the healthy growth of the latter. It is only in a
large and complex social system that any advanced degree of it is
possible, because nothing else can supply the multifarious opportunities
by means of which all sorts of persons can work out a congenial
development through the choice of influences.
In so far as we have freedom in the United States at the present time,
in what does it consist? Evidently, it seems to me, in the access to a
great number and variety of influences by whose progressive selection
and assimilation a child may become, within vague limits set by the
general state of our society, the best that he is naturally fitted to
become. It consists, to begin with infancy, in a good family life, in
intelligent nurture and training, adapted to the special traits of
character which every child manifests from the first week of life. Then
it involves good schooling, admitting the child through books and
teachers to a rich selection from the accumulated influences of the best
minds of the past. Free technical and professional education, so far as
it exists, contributes to it, also the facility of travel, bringing him
in contact with significant persons from all over the world; public
libraries, magazines, good newspapers, and so on. Whatever enlarges his
field of selection without permanently confusing him adds to his
liberty. In fact, institutions—government, churches, industries, and the
like—have properly no other function than to contribute to human
freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this
function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.
Although a high degree of freedom can exist only through a complex
social order, it by no means follows that every complex social order is
free. On the contrary, it has more often been true in the past that very
large and intricately organized states, like the Roman Empire, were
constructed on a comparatively mechanical or unfree principle. And in
our own time a vast and complex empire, like Russia or China, may be
less free than the simplest English-speaking colony. There are serious
objections to identifying progress, as Herbert Spencer sometimes appears
to do, with the mere differentiation and co-ordination of social
functions. But the example of the United States, which is perhaps on the
whole the most intricately differentiated and co-ordinated state that
ever existed, shows that complexity is not inconsistent with freedom. To
enter fully into this matter would require a more careful examination of
the institutional aspect of life than I wish to undertake at present;
but I hold that the possibility of organizing large and complex
societies on a free principle depends upon the quickness and facility of
communication, and so has come to exist only in recent times. The great
states of earlier history were necessarily somewhat mechanical in
structure.
It happens from time to time in every complex and active society, that
certain persons feel the complexity and insistence as a tangle, and seek
freedom in retirement, as Thoreau sought it at Walden Pond. They do not,
however, in this manner escape from the social institutions of their
time, nor do they really mean to do so; what they gain, if they are
successful, is a saner relation to them. Thoreau in his hut remained as
truly a member of society, as dependent for suggestion upon his books,
his friends, and his personal memories, and upon verbal expression for
his sense of self, as did Emerson in Concord or Lowell in Cambridge; and
I imagine that if he had cared to discuss the matter he would have
admitted that this was the case. Indeed, the idea of Thoreau as a
recluse was not, I think, his own idea, but has been attached to him by
superficial observers of his life. Although he was a dissenter from the
state and the church of his time, his career would have been impossible
without those institutions, without Harvard College, for instance, which
was a joint product of the two. He worked out his personal development
through congenial influences selected from the life of his time, very
much as others do. He simply had peculiar tendencies which he developed
in a peculiar way, especially by avoiding a gregarious mode of life
unsuited to his temperament. He was free through the social order, not
outside of it, and the same may be said of Edward Fitzgerald and other
seclusive spirits. No doubt the commonplace life of the day is a sort of
slavery for many sensitive minds that have not, like these, the
resolution to escape from it into a calmer and broader atmosphere.
Since freedom is not a fixed thing that can be grasped and held once for
all, but a growth, any particular society, such as our own, always
appears partly free and partly unfree. In so far as it favors, in every
child, the development of his highest possibilities, it is free, but
where it falls short of this it is not. So far as children are
ill-nurtured or ill-taught, as family training is bad, the schools
inefficient, the local government ill-administered, public libraries
lacking, or private associations for various sorts of culture deficient,
in so far the people are unfree. A child born in a slum, brought up in a
demoralized family, and put at some confining and mentally deadening
work when ten or twelve years old, is no more free to be healthy, wise,
and moral than a Chinese child is free to read Shakespeare. Every social
ill involves the enslavement of individuals.
This idea of freedom is quite in accord with a general, though vague,
sentiment among us; it is an idea of fair play, of giving everyone a
chance; and nothing arouses more general and active indignation among
our people than the belief that someone or some class is not getting a
fair chance. There seems, however, to be too great complacency in the
way in which the present state of things is interpreted, a tendency to
assume that freedom has been achieved once for all by the Declaration of
Independence and popular suffrage, and that little remains but to let
each person realize the general blessing to the best of his ability. It
is well to recognize that the freedom which we nominally worship is
never more than partly achieved, and is every day threatened by new
encroachments, that the right to vote is only one phase of it, and
possibly, under present conditions, not the most important phase, and
that we can maintain and increase it only by a sober and determined
application of our best thought and endeavor. Those lines of Lowell’s
“Commemoration Ode” are always applicable:
“—the soft Ideal that we wooed
Confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued,
And cries reproachful: Was it then my praise,
And not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth.
I claim of thee the promise of thy youth.”
In our view of freedom we have a right to survey all times and countries
and from them form for our own social order an ideal condition, which
shall offer to each individual all the encouragements to growth and
culture that the world has ever or anywhere enjoyed. Any narrowness or
lack of symmetry in life in general is reflected in the contraction or
warping of personal development, and so constitutes a lack of freedom.
The social order should not exaggerate one or a few aspects of human
nature at the expense of others, but extend its invitations to all our
higher tendencies. Thus the excessive preoccupation of the nineteenth
century with material production and physical science may be regarded as
a partial enslavement of the spiritual and æsthetic sides of humanity,
from which we are now struggling to escape. The freedom of the future
must, it would seem, call more and more for a various, rich, and
tolerant environment, in which all sorts of persons may build themselves
up by selective development. The day for any sort of dogmatism and
coercive uniformity appears to be past, and it will be practicable to
leave people more and more to control by a conscience reflecting the
moral opinion of the group to which their inclination and capacity
attach them.
The substitution of higher forms of control for lower, the offering more
alternatives and trusting the mind to make a right selection, involves,
of course, an increased moral strain upon individuals. Now this increase
of moral strain is not in all cases exactly proportioned to the ability
to bear it well; and when it is not well borne the effect upon character
is more or less destructive, so that something in the way of degeneracy
results.
Consequently every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some
degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom. This is very
plainly to be seen at the present time, which is one, on the whole, of
rapid increase of freedom. Family life and the condition of women and
children have been growing freer and better, but along with this we have
the increase of divorce and of spoiled children. Democracy in the state
has its own peculiar evils, as we all know; and in the church the decay
of dogmatism and unreasoning faith, a moral advance on the whole, has
nevertheless caused a good many moral failures. In much the same way the
enfranchisement of the negroes is believed to have caused an increase of
insanity among them, and the growth of suicide in all countries seems to
be due in part to the strain of a more complex society. It is not true,
exactly, that freedom itself causes degeneracy, because if one is
subjected to more strain than is good for him his real freedom is rather
contracted than enlarged, but it should rather be said that any movement
which has increase of freedom for its general effect can never be so
regulated as to have only this effect, but is sure to act upon some in
an opposite manner.
Nor is it reasonable to sit back and say that this incidental
demoralization is inevitable, a fixed price of progress. On the
contrary, although it can never be altogether dispensed with, it can be
indefinitely reduced, and every social institution or influence that
tends to adapt the stress of civilization to the strength of the
individual does reduce it in some measure.
INDEX
Adolescence, the self in, 169
Affectation, 173 ff, 320
Altruism, 4, 90;
in relation to egoism, 92 ff, 115, 188 ff, 344 ff
Ambition, 275 f
Americanism, unconscious, 36
Anger, development of, 232 ff;
animal, 240
Anglo-Saxons, cantankerousness of, 268;
idealism of, 288
Antipathy, 233 ff
Appreciation, necessary to production, 59
Art, creative impulse in, 57;
personal symbols in, 71 ff;
mental life a work of, 123 f;
plastic, mystery in, 316 f;
as idealization, 363
Ascendency, personal, 283–325
Asceticism, 154, 223
Augustine, St., 218
Aurelius, Marcus, on freedom of thought, 35;
self-feeling of, 218
Author, an, as leader, 303 ff
Authority, personal, in morals, 353 ff, 384. See also Leadership
Baldwin, Prof. J. M., 15;
on social persons, 90; 176, 271, 286
Bastien-Lepage, 355
Belief, ascendency of, 310 f, 317 f
Beowulf, on honor, 209 f
Bismarck, 254;
ascendency of, 298, 302
Blame, nature of, 289
Blowitz, M. de, 298
Body, relation of, to the self, 144 f, 163
Booth, Charles, 276
Brotherhood, extension of the sense of, 114 f
Brown, John, 377
Browning, 316
Bryant, Sophie, on antipathy, 235
Bryce, Prof. James, 38, 309
Burke, Edmund, 202, 302 f
Burroughs, John, on the physiognomy of works of genius, 74
Cæsar, as a personal idea, 99
Cant, 320
Casaubon, Mr., 224 f
Chagrin, 241
Charity, 238, 336. See also Altruism, Right
Chicago, aspect of the crowd in, 37
Child, Theodore, 355
Child, a, unlovable at birth, 45
Children, imitation in, 19 ff;
sociability of, 45 ff;
imaginary conversation of, 52 ff;
study of expression by, 62 ff;
growth of sentiment in, 79 ff;
development of self in, 142, 146;
use of “I” by, 157 ff;
reflected self in, 164 ff;
anger of, 232 f;
hero-worship of, 279;
ascendency over, 289 f;
habitual morality in, 340 f;
moral growth of, 349 ff;
causes of degeneracy in, 378 ff;
what constitutes freedom for, 393 f, 398, 401;
spoiled, 403
China, organization of, 399
Chinese, European lack of moral sense regarding, 362
Choice, in relation to suggestion, 14–44;
as an organization of social relations, 16 f;
practical limitations of, 31 ff;
is exhausting, 33 f
Christ, self-feeling of, 142;
indignation felt by, 247;
as leader, 323;
as moral authority, 353
“Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life,” 34
Church, inculcation of personal authority in the, 353;
freedom in the, 398, 403
City life, effect upon sympathy, 112 f
Classification of minds as stable or unstable, 186 f, 200 ff, 382 f
Collectivism, 4
Columbus, 269, 306
Communicate, the impulse to, 56 ff
Communication, of sentiment, 104 f;
effect of modern, 114;
influence of means of, 361, 365, 399
Communion, as an aspect of society, 102–135
Competition, 252, 256 f
Confession, 54, 356 f
Conformity, 262 ff
Conscience, 12, 180, 202, 239, 249, 258;
social aspect of, 326–371;
voice of, 328;
individual and social aspects of, 346 f;
in degeneracy, 383 ff;
is the test of freedom, etc., 396.
See also Right
Conservatism, 273
“Continued Stories,” 366 f
Controversy, 243
Conversation, imaginary, 52 ff, 359, 361
Country life, effect upon sympathy; 112
Creeds, the nature and use of, 370
Crime, 252;
as degeneracy, 379, 385 ff;
and insanity, 387 ff
Criminal impulses, nature of, 380 f
Cromwell, 302
Crowds, suggestibility of, 40
Crowd-feeling, 291 f
Culture, relation of, to social organization, 117 f
Dagnan, 355
Dante, 31 f, 188
Darwin, Charles, 66, 68, 165, 177, 190, 243, 279;
power as a writer, 304; 323, 374
“_Das ewig Weibliche_,” 171, 312
Degeneracy, from too much choice, 39, 125;
self-feeling in, 229 ff;
personal, 372–391;
incidental to freedom, 403 f
Delusions of greatness and of persecution, 229 f
Democracy of sentiment, 114
Descartes, seclusion of, 197
Determinism, 4
Dialogue, composing in, 55 f
Diaries, as intercourse, 57;
moral effect of, 356 f
Dill’s “Roman Society,” 312
Discipline, in relation to freedom, 396 f
Disraeli, B., 219, 315
Divorce, increase of, incidental to freedom, 403
Double causation theory of society, 9 f
Dreams, as imaginary conversation, 54
Duplicity, 234
Duty, sense of, 338 f, 343, 360
Education, culture in, 117 f;
as freedom, 398, 401.
See also Children
Ego, the empirical, 136;
the metaphysical, 136, 163;
and alter in morals, 343 ff
Egoism, 4;
and altruism, 92 ff, 188 ff, 344 ff
Egotism, 92, 179 ff;
as a mental trait, 186 ff;
varieties of, 186 ff;
as degeneracy, 382 f
Element of society, 134
Eliot, George, 178, 224, 263, 314, 354
Eloquence, 301 ff
Emerson, E. W., 367
Emerson, R. W., 6, 57, 120, 128, 174, 211, 243, 266, 269, 287, 294,
295, 335, 365, 367
Emulation, 262–282
Endogenous minds, 200 f, 383
Environment, 271;
and heredity, 378 f.
See also Suggestion
_Equilibrium mobile_ of conscience, 335
Ethics, physiological theories of, 208 f. See also Conscience, Right
Evolution, 9, 13, 18, 145;
in relation to leadership, 322;
to degeneracy, 373 ff
Exhaustion, causes suggestibility, 41
Exogenous minds, 200 f, 382
Experience, social, is imaginative, 105 f
Expression, facial, 62 ff;
vocal, 66 f;
interpretation of, 68 f;
suggestion of, in literature and art, 71 ff
Eye, expressiveness of, 62 f;
in literature, 73
Face. See Expression
Fame, often transcends the man, 307 f
Family, freedom in the, 403
Fear, of animals, 66;
social, 258 ff
Feeling. See Sentiment
Fitzgerald, Edward, seclusiveness of, 400
Forms, used to maintain ascendency, 319
Fox, Charles, 302 f
Fra Angelico, 248, 353
Francis, St., 47
Free will, 4, 18 ff, 32
Freedom, 392–404;
definition of, 393, 395
Friendship, 120 f
Frith’s “Autobiography,” 76
Games, athletic, 256
Genius, 11, 106, 169, 188;
disorders of self incident to, 228 f, 237, 266, 321 ff.
See also Leadership
Gibbon, Edward, 273
Gibson, W. H., 306
Giddings, Prof. F. H., on imitation, 27
Gloating, 143
God, as love, 126 f;
appropriated, 155;
as ideal self, 214;
idea of, 281 f, 370 f.
See also Religion
Gods, famous persons partake of the nature of, 308
Goethe, on individuality in art, 33;
on the composition of “Werther,” 55;
personality in his style 75; 121, 122, 132, 150, 194, 196, 204, 211,
241, 254, 266, 279, 312, 316, 392
Gothic architecture, rise of, 37
Grant, General, 41, 76;
ascendency of, 299 f, 315
Gummere, F. B., 210
Guyau, on the onward self, 335 f
Habit, limits suggestibility, 42;
in relation to the self, 155;
to the sense of right, 337 ff, 348
Hall, President G. Stanley, 73;
on the self, 163; 259
Hamerton, P. G., 196, 317
Hamlet, use of “I” in, 145
Hatred, 253
Hazlitt, W., 253
Hedonizing, instinctive, 61
Herbert, George, 155
Hereditary element in sociability, 50
Hereditary tendency, 284 ff
Heredity, as a cause of degeneracy, 375, 378 ff
Hero-worship, 213, 278 ff, 286 f
Heroism, 339
Honor, 207 ff
Hope, ascendency of, 310 f
Hostility, 232–261
Howells, W. D., 301
Hugo, Victor, 229
Humility, 212 ff
Huxley, Thomas, 242 f, 305
Hysterical temperament, 344, 382 f
“I,” in relation to love, 129 ff;
the reflected or looking-glass, 152 f, 164 ff, 175, 178, 211, 216 f,
349 ff;
meaning of, 136–178;
exists within the general life, 147 ff;
as related to the rest of thought, 150 f, 156;
is rooted in the social order, 153 ff;
how children learn the meaning of, 157 ff;
various phases of, 179–231;
use of in literature and conversation, 190 ff;
in self-reverence, 211;
in leadership, 294
Ideal persons, as factors in conscience, 362 ff;
of religion, 280 ff, 368 ff
Idealism, ascendency of, 310
Idealization, 272, 362 ff
Ideas, personal. See Personal ideas
Idiocy, congenital, 379;
as mental degeneracy, 381 f
Idiots, kindliness of, 51 f, 125
Imaginary conversation, of children, 52 f;
all thought is, 53 ff
Imaginary playmate, 52 f
Imagination, in relation to personal ideas, 81 ff, 98 ff;
the locus of society, 100;
social, a requisite to power, 107;
narrowness of, in egotism, 183;
essential to goodness, 359
Imitation, 14 ff;
in children, 19 ff;
not mechanical, 23 ff;
by parents, 25;
in relation to smiling, 47 f, 64, 71, 262, 266, 271;
the doctrine of objectionable, 272; 310, 337
Imitative instinct, the supposed, 25 ff
Immortality, self-feeling in the idea of, 155
Imposture, 318 ff
Indifferentism, 389
Indignation, 239, 249 ff
Individual, the, in relation to society, 1–13, 324 f, 393;
as a cause, 321 ff;
and social, in morals, 342 ff
Individualism, 4 ff, 8, 10
Individuality, Goethe’s view of, in art, 33
Industrial system, effect of upon the individual, 118 f
Insane, reverence for the, 314
Insanity, in relation to sympathy, 110;
the self in, 229 f;
and crime, 387 ff
Instincts, whether divisible into social and unsocial, 12 f
Institution, ideal persons may become an, 369
Institutions, in relation to sympathy, 133
Intercourse, relation to thought, 61
Interlocutor, imaginary, drawn from the environment, 59 f
Invention, 271 f, 337. See also Imitation
Involuntary, the, why ignored, 30 f. See also Will
Isolation of degenerates, 391
James, Henry, 183, 236, 314
James, Prof. William, on social persons, 90;
on the self, 138; 143, 276, 288, 359
Jerome, St., 154
Jowett, Prof., 279
Justice, the sentiment of, 91;
based on sympathy, 108;
relation to love, 127; 236, 352, 366
Kempis, Thomas à, 34, 128, 155, 214, 218, 220, 226
Lamb, Charles, 76, 192;
literary power of, 306
Language involves an interlocutor, 56.
See also Expression
Leader, mental traits of a, 293 ff;
does he really lead? 321
Leadership, 108, 175, 283–325
Learoyd, Mabel W., 366
Lecky, W. H., 223
Leonardo, mystery of, 316
Likeness and difference in sympathy, 120 f
Lincoln, 83
Literature, creative impulse in, 57;
personal symbols in, 73 ff;
self-feeling in, 194;
ascendency in, 303 ff;
mystery in, 315
Lombroso, Prof. Cesare, 229
Love, of the sexes, 121 f;
and sympathy, 124 ff;
scope of, 126 f;
nature of, 127 ff;
Thomas à Kempis and Emerson on, 128;
two kinds of, 129 ff;
and self, 129 ff;
155 ff, 195;
as a social ideal, 247 f;
of enemies, 251; 309, 312
Lowell, J. R., 141 f, 265, 269, 402
Luther, Martin, 180 f, 318
Lying, in relation to sympathy, 110, 358 f
M., a child of the author, 24, 27, 49, 62 ff, 157 ff, 166 f, 349 ff
Macaulay, physiognomy in his style, 77
Machinery, effect of, upon the workman, 118 f
Maine, Sir Henry, 264
Man of the world, traits of the contemporary, 255
Manners, conformity in, 263;
as an aid to ascendency, 319
Marshall, H. R., 331
Material bent of our civilization, 37, 402
Maudsley, Dr., on degeneracy, 381
Meredith, George, 182
Michelangelo, 76, 310, 353
Middle Ages, suggestibility in the, 36
_Milieu_, power of the, 34 ff
Milton, 73
Moltke, silence of, 315
Monasticism, in relation to the self, 222 f, 227 f
Montaigne, on the need to communicate, 56; 76, 191, 192
Moore, K. C., on the smiling of infants, 46
Morality, traditionary, 338 ff.
See also Conscience, Right
Motley, J. L., 73 f
Murder, 386
Music, sensuous mystery of, 317
Mystery, a factor in ascendency, 312 ff
Nansen, 269
Napoleon, how we know him, 86;
ascendency of, 296;
place in history, 324
New Testament, 142, 215, 245
Nirvana, the ideal of disinterested love, 130
Non-conformity, 262 ff
Non-resistance, doctrine of, 245 ff
Norsemen, motive of, 273
Norton, Prof. C. E., 37
“One,” use of, compared with “I,” 192 f
Onward, right as the, 334 ff
Opposition, personal, its nature, 95 f;
spirit of, 267 ff
Oratory, ascendency in, 301 ff
Organization, of personal thought, 51;
effect of upon the individual, 115 ff;
or vital process, problem of, 333
Originality, 322 ff.
See also Genius, Leadership, Invention
Other-worldism, 222
Painting, personal symbols in, 72.
See also Art, Expression
Papacy, symbolic character of, 308 f
Particularism, 4
Pascal, 218, 222
Passion, why a cause of pain, 253 f;
influence upon idea of right, 330 f
Pater, Walter, 304
Patten, Prof Simon N., 244
Paul, St., 218
Perez, Dr. B., 46;
on the eye, 62 f;
232, 350
Personal authority, influence upon sense of right, 353 ff
Personal character, interpretation of, 67, 70
Personal ideas, 62 ff;
sensuous nucleus of, 69 ff;
sentiment their chief content, 81 ff, 104;
compared to a system of lights, 97 f;
affect the physical organism, 99 f;
affect the sense of right, 348 ff
Personal symbols in art and literature, 71 ff
Persona, real and imaginary, inseparable, 60 f;
incorporeal, their social reality, 88;
social, interpenetrate one another, 90 ff;
ideal, as factors in conscience, 362 ff;
ideal, of religion, 280 ff, 368 ff
Philanthropy, motive of, 269 f
Pioneer, self-feeling of the, 268
Pity, is it altruism? 94 f;
relation to sympathy, 102 f; 238
Power, based on sympathy, 107 f;
idea of, 290;
advantage of visible forms of, 291 f.
See also Ascendency
Prayer, as personal intercourse, 357
Pretence, contempt of, in America, 300
Prevention of degeneracy, 390 f
Preyer, W., 27, 46
Pride, 199 ff
Primitive individualism, 10
Principle, moral, 338 f
Process, social, imitation, etc., as, 272;
vital, problem of, 333
Processes, social, reflected in sympathy, 119 ff
Progress, relation of, to freedom, 396
Publicity, moral effect of, 356 ff
Punishment, 252, 384, 390
R., a child of the author, 21 ff, 28, 49 f, 51, 53, 158 ff, 341, 351
Rational, right as the, 326 ff
Recapitulation theory of mental development, 21
Refinement, as affecting hostility, 237
Religion, suggestibility in, 42, 43;
self-feeling of founders of, 181;
self-discipline in, 214 f, 219 ff;
as hero-worship, 280 ff;
mediæval, 309;
mystery in, 317;
ideal persons of, 368 ff
Remorse, 253, 329, 368, 385 f
Repentance, 368
Resentment, 199, 212, 237 ff
Resistance, imaginative, 245 ff
Responsibility, in crime, etc., 388 f
Right, based on sympathy, 108 ff;
relation to egotism, 184;
to the
self in general, 189;
social standards of, as affecting hostility, 256 ff;
as the rational, 326 ff;
conscience the final test of, 333 f;
as the onward, 334 ff;
as habit, 337 ff, 348;
as a phase of the self, 342 f;
the social as opposed to the sensual, 347 f;
action of personal ideas in forming the sense of, 348 ff;
as a microcosm of character, 353;
reflects a social group, 360 ff;
and wrong, 372 ff;
idea of, 377;
freedom as, 393 ff
Riis, Jacob A., 361
Rivalry, 274 ff
Roget’s “Thesaurus,” 198
Roman Empire, 312, 399
Rousseau, 237, 260
Rule of conduct, Marshall’s, 331
Ruskin, 317
Russia, 399
Sanity, based on sympathy, 110
Savonarola, physiognomy of, 314
Schiller, 113, 121
Science, and faith, 308;
cant of, 320;
moral, limits of, 334;
physical, 402
Sculpture, personal symbols in, 72 f
Seclusion, moral effect of, 358
Secretiveness, 59, 196
“Seeing yourself,” 367 f
Selection, in sympathy, 122 ff
Selective method of nature, 373 f
Self, in relation to other personal ideas, 91 ff, 98;
antithesis with “other,” 115, 188 ff;
in morals, 365 f;
in relation to love, 129 ff, 155 ff, 195;
social, 136–231;
observation of in children, 157 ff;
the narrow or egotistical, 185;
every cherished idea is a, 185;
reflected or looking-glass, 152 f, 164 ff, 175, 178, 211, 216 f;
influence of upon conscience, 349 ff;
maladies of the social, 215 ff;
transformation of, 224 ff;
effect of uncongenial environment upon, 227 ff, 245, 320;
crescive, 335;
ethical, 342 f;
ideal social, 359, 366 ff
Self-control, 254
Self-feeling, 137 ff;
quotations illustrating, 141 f;
of reformers, etc., 181;
intense, essential to production, 193 ff;
control of, 217 ff;
in mental disorder, etc., 229 f;
in non-conformity, 267
Self-image as a work of art, 207
Self-neglecting, 195
Self-reliance, 294 ff
Self-respect, 205 ff, 238
Self-reverence, 211 ff
Self-sacrifice, 190, 336.
See also Humility, Altruism
Selfishness, nature of, 179 ff;
as a mental trait, 186 ff
“Sense of other persons,” 176
Sensual, as opposed to the social, 347 f
Sensuality, 182
Sentiment, personal, genesis of, 79 ff;
is differentiated emotion, 80;
in personal ideas, 81 ff;
relation to persons, 83;
more communicable than sensation, 104 f;
moral, 327 ff; 389
Sentiments, as related to selfishness, 182;
literary, 361
Seven deadly sins, 381
Sex, in sympathy, 121 f;
in the self, 171 ff
Shakespeare, 11, 73, 76;
on the genesis of sentiment, 80 f, 103, 106, 141, 145, 148, 188, 195,
210, 255, 282
Shame, fear of, 260 f;
sense of, 350
“Sheridan’s Ride,” 292
Sherman, General, 299
Shinn, Miss, 167
Sidis, Dr. B., 36
Sidney, Sir Philip, 83
Silence, fascination of, 314 f
Simplicity, 174
Sin, 376, 381
Sincerity in leadership, 317 ff
Slums, 379
Smiles, earliest, 45 ff;
interpretation of, 64 f
Sociability and personal ideas, 45–101
“Social,” meanings of the word, 3 f
Social faculty view, 11 f
Social groups, sensible basis of the idea of, 77;
relation of to the individual, 114
Social order, reflected in sympathy, 111 ff;
freedom in relation to, 397 ff
Social reality, the immediate is the personal idea, 84
Socialism, 4 ff, 90
Society, and the individual, 1–13, 134 f, 324 f;
in morals, 342 ff, 393;
is primarily a mental fact, 84;
is a relation among personal ideas, 84;
each mind an aspect of, 84 f;
the idea of, 85;
must be studied in the imagination, 86 ff;
is the collective aspect of personal thought, 100;
a phase, not a separable thing, 101
Sociology, too much based on material notions, 85, 89 f, 98 ff;
must observe personal ideas, 87 ff;
deals with personal intercourse in primary and secondary aspects, 101
Solitude, apparent, 57 f
Sophocles, 142
Spanish-American war, consolidating effect of, 293
Specialization, effect of, 115 ff
Spencer, Herbert, on egoism and altruism, 92;
nature of his system, 92;
on progress, 399
Spencerism, 306
Stability and instability in the self, 200 ff
Stable and unstable types of mind, 186 ff, 200 ff, 382 f
Stanley, Prof. H. M., 27, 138, 201, 214
Sterne, L., 194
Stevenson, R. L., physiognomy in his style, 77, 88, 95, 192, 195, 260,
320, 355
Strain of the present age, 112
Struggle for existence, as a view of life, 272
Style, the personal idea in, 73 ff;
what it is, 74;
personal ascendency in, 303 ff
Suger, the Abbot, 37
Suggestibility, 39 ff
Suggestion, and choice, 14–44;
definition of, 14;
in children, 19 ff;
contrary, 23, 267;
scope of in life, 29 ff
Superficiality of the time, 112, 198
Symbols, personal, 69 ff;
in art and literature, 71 ff
Symonds, J. A., 155, 169 f, 279, 317
Sympathy, or communion as an aspect of society, 102–135;
meaning of, 102 ff;
as compassion, 103;
a measure of personality, 106 ff;
universal, 113 f;
reflects social processes, 119 ff;
selective, 122 ff;
and love, 124 ff;
a particular expression of society, 133 ff;
hostile, 160, 234 ff;
in leadership, 294 ff;
lack of, in degeneracy, 382;
with criminal acts a test of responsibility, 387 ff
Sympathies, reflect the social order, 111 ff
Tact, 183 f;
in ascendency, 297 f
Tarde, G., 15, 272
“Tasso,” quoted, 122, 150
Tennyson, 129, 210, 287, 318
Thackeray, 76, 192
Thoreau, H. D., his relation to society, 57 f, 399 f; 157, 192, 195,
197, 235, 244, 270
Toleration, 264
Truth, motive for telling, 358 f
Tylor, E. B., 42, 314
Vanity, 199, 203 ff
Variation, degeneracy as, 374 f
Wagner, Richard, 76
War, hostile feeling in, 257;
dramatic power of leadership in, 291 f
Washington, 83
Whitman, Walt, 192
Will, free, 4;
individual and social, 17;
popular view of, 18;
is it externally determined?, 18 f, 32 f;
activity of, reflects society, 38 f
William the Silent, 314
Withdrawal, physical, 219;
imaginative, 220 ff
Wrong, as the irrational, 329;
emphasized by example, 356;
degeneracy as, 372 ff;
idea of, 377;
not always opposed by conscience, 385 f;
the unfree, 396
Wundt, on “Ich,” 138
Youth, sense of, 128, 280
-----
Footnote 1:
Also free will, determinism, egoism, and altruism, which involve, in
my opinion, a kindred misconception.
Footnote 2:
It should easily be understood that one who agrees with what was said
in the preceding chapter about the relation between society and the
individual, can hardly entertain the question whether the individual
will is free or externally determined. This question assumes as true
what he holds to be false, namely that the particular aspect of
mankind is separable from the collective aspect. The idea underlying
it is that of an isolated fragment of life, the will, on the one hand,
and some great mass of life, the environment, on the other; the
question being which of these two antithetical forces shall be master.
If one, then the will is free; if the other, then it is determined. It
is as if each man’s mind were a castle besieged by an army, and the
question were whether the army should make a breach and capture the
occupants. It is hard to see how this way of conceiving the matter
could arise from a direct observation of actual social relations.
Take, for instance, the case of a member of Congress, or of any other
group of reasoning, feeling, and mutually influencing creatures. Is he
free in relation to the rest of the body or do they control him? The
question appears senseless. He is influenced by them and also exerts
an influence upon them. While he is certainly not apart from their
power, he is controlled, if we use that word, _through_ his own will
and not in spite of it. And it seems plain enough that a relation
similar in kind holds between the individual and the nation, or
between the individual and humanity in general. If you think of human
life as a whole and of each individual as a member and not a fragment,
as, in my opinion, you must if you base your thoughts on a direct
study of society and not upon metaphysical or theological
preconceptions, the question whether the will is free or not is seen
to be meaningless. The individual will appears to be a specialized
part of the general life, more or less divergent from other parts and
possibly contending with them; but this very divergence is a part of
its function—just as a member of Congress serves that body by urging
his particular opinions—and in a large view does not separate but
unites it to life as a whole. It is often necessary to consider the
individual with reference to his opposition to other persons, or to
prevailing tendencies, and in so doing it may be convenient to speak
of him as separate from and antithetical to the life about him: but
this separateness and opposition are incidental, like the right hand
pulling against the left to break a string, and there seems to be no
sufficient warrant for extending it into a general or philosophical
proposition.
There may be some sense in which the question of the freedom of the
will is still of interest; but it seems to me that the student of
social relations may well pass it by as one of those scholastic
controversies which are settled, if at all, not by being decided one
way or the other, but by becoming obsolete.
Footnote 3:
The imitativeness of children is stimulated by the imitativeness of
parents. A baby cannot hit upon any sort of a noise, but the admiring
family, eager for communication, will imitate it again and again,
hoping to get a repetition. They are usually disappointed, but the
exercise probably causes the child to notice the likeness of the
sounds and so prepares the way for imitation. It is perhaps safe to
say that up to the end of the first year the parents are more
imitative than the child.
Footnote 4:
“In like manner any act or expression is a stimulus to the
nerve-centres that perceive or understand it. Unless their action is
inhibited by the will, or by counter-stimulation, they must discharge
themselves in movements that more or less closely copy the
originals.”—Giddings, Principles of Sociology, 110.
Footnote 5:
H. M. Stanley, The Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling, p. 53.
Footnote 6:
Goethe, in various places, contrasts modern art and literature with
those of the Greeks in respect to the fact that the former express
individual characteristics, the latter those of a race and an epoch.
Thus in a letter to Schiller—No. 631 of the Goethe-Schiller
correspondence—he says of Paradise Lost, “In the case of this poem, as
with all modern works of art, it is in reality the individual that
manifests itself that awakens the interest.”
Can there be some illusion mixed with the truth of this idea? Is it
not the case that the nearer a thing is to our habit of thought the
more clearly we see the individual, and the more vaguely, if at all,
the universal? And would not an ancient Greek, perhaps, have seen as
much of what was peculiar to each artist, and as little of what was
common to all, as we do in a writer of our own time? The principle is
much the same as that which makes all Chinamen look pretty much alike
to us: we see the type because it is so different from what we are
used to, but only one who lives within it can fully perceive the
differences among individuals.
Footnote 7:
See the latter chapters of his Psychology of Suggestion.
Footnote 8:
See Harper’s Magazine, vol. 79, p. 770.
Footnote 9:
See The American Commonwealth, vol. ii., p. 705.
Footnote 10:
Memoirs of U. S. Grant, vol. i., p. 344.
Footnote 11:
See his Primitive Culture, vol. ii., p. 372.
Footnote 12:
K. C. Moore, The Mental Development of a Child, p. 37.
Footnote 13:
The Senses and the Will, p. 295.
Footnote 14:
See his First Three Years of Childhood, p. 13.
Footnote 15:
Oxenford’s Translation, vol. i., p. 501.
Footnote 16:
See his Essay on Vanity.
Footnote 17:
Early Spring in Massachusetts, p. 232.
Footnote 18:
The First Three Years of Childhood, p. 77.
Footnote 19:
See his Biographical Sketch of an Infant, Mind, vol. ii., p. 289.
Footnote 20:
A good way to interpret a man’s face is to ask oneself how he would
look saying “I” in an emphatic manner. This seems to help the
imagination in grasping what is most essential and characteristic in
him.
Footnote 21:
Only four words—“heart,” “love,” “man,” “world”—take up more space in
the index of “Familiar Quotations” than “eye.”
Footnote 22:
On the fear of (imaginary) eyes see G. Stanley Hall’s study of Fear in
The American Journal of Psychology, vol. 8, p. 147.
Footnote 23:
Two apparently opposite views are current as to what style is. One
regards it as the distinctive or characteristic in expression, that
which marks off a writer or other artist from all the rest; according
to the other, style is mastery over the common medium of expression,
as language or the technique of painting or sculpture. These are not
so inconsistent as they seem. Good style is both; that is, a
significant personality expressed in a workmanlike manner.
Footnote 24:
P. 493.
Footnote 25:
With me, at least, this is the case. Some whom I have consulted find
that certain sentiments—for instance, pity—may be directly suggested
by the word, without the mediation of a personal symbol. This hardly
affects the argument, as it will not be doubted that the sentiment was
in its inception associated with a personal symbol.
Footnote 26:
This idea that social persons are not mutually exclusive but composed
largely of common elements is implied in Professor William James’s
doctrine of the Social Self and set forth at more length in Professor
James Mark Baldwin’s Social and Ethical Interpretations of Mental
Development. Like other students of social psychology I have received
much instruction and even more helpful provocation from the latter
brilliant and original work. To Professor James my obligation is
perhaps greater still.
Footnote 27:
I distinguish, of course, between egotism, which is an English word of
long standing, and egoism, which was, I believe, somewhat recently
introduced by moralists to designate, in antithesis to altruism,
certain theories or facts of ethics. I do not object to these words as
names of theories, but as purporting to be names of facts of conduct I
do, and have in mind more particularly their use by Herbert Spencer in
his Principles of Psychology and other works. As used by Spencer they
seem to me valid from a physiological standpoint only, and fallacious
when employed to describe mental, social, or moral facts. The trouble
is, as with his whole system, that the physiological aspect of life is
expounded and assumed, apparently, to be the only aspect that science
can consider. Having ventured to find fault with Spencer, I may be
allowed to add that I have perhaps learned as much from him as from
any other writer. If only his system did not appear at first quite so
complete and final one might more easily remain loyal to it in spite
of its deficiencies. But when these latter begin to appear its very
completeness makes it seem a sort of a prison-wall which one must
break down to get out.
I shall try to show the nature of egotism and selfishness in Chapter
VI.
Footnote 28:
Some may question whether we can pity ourselves in this way. But it
seems to me that we avoid self-pity only by not vividly imagining
ourselves in a piteous plight; and that if we do so imagine ourselves
the sentiment follows quite naturally.
Footnote 29:
Sympathy in the sense of compassion is a specific emotion or
sentiment, and has nothing necessarily in common with sympathy in the
sense of communion. It might be thought, perhaps, that compassion was
one form of the sharing of feeling; but this appears not to be the
case. The sharing of painful feeling may precede and cause compassion,
but is not the same with it. When I feel sorry for a man in disgrace,
it is, no doubt, in most cases, because I have imaginatively partaken
of his humiliation; but my compassion for him is not the thing that is
shared, but is something additional, a comment on the shared feeling.
I may imagine how a suffering man feels—sympathize with him in that
sense—and be moved not to pity but to disgust, contempt, or perhaps
admiration. Our feeling makes all sorts of comments on the imagined
feeling of others. Moreover it is not essential that there should be
any real understanding in order that compassion may be felt. One may
compassionate a worm squirming on a hook, or a fish, or even a tree.
As between persons pity, while often a helpful and healing emotion,
leading to kindly acts, is sometimes indicative of the absence of true
sympathy. We all wish to be understood, at least in what we regard as
our better aspects, but few of us wish to be pitied except in moments
of weakness and discouragement. To accept pity is to confess that one
falls below the healthy standard of vigor and self-help. While a real
understanding of our deeper thought is rare and precious, pity is
usually cheap, many people finding an easy pleasure in indulging it,
as one may in the indulgence of grief, resentment, or almost any
emotion. It is often felt by the person who is its object as a sort of
an insult, a back-handed thrust at self-respect, the unkindest cut of
all. For instance, as between richer and poorer classes in a free
country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity
on the one hand and dependence on the other, and is, perhaps, the next
best thing to fraternal feeling.
Footnote 30:
Much of what is ordinarily said in this connection indicates a
confusion of the two ideas of specialization and isolation. These are
not only different but, in what they imply, quite opposite and
inconsistent. Speciality implies a whole to which the special part has
a peculiar relation, while isolation implies that there is no whole.
Footnote 31:
See his Essay on Friendship.
Footnote 32:
Lewes’s Life of Goethe, vol. i, p. 282.
Footnote 33:
Goethe, Biographische Einzelheiten, Jacobi.
Footnote 34:
“I had to love him, for with him my life grew to such life as I had
never known.”—Act 3, sc. 2.
Footnote 35:
Emerson, Address on The Method of Nature.
Footnote 36:
De Imitatione Christi, part iii., chap. 5, pars. 3 and 4.
Footnote 37:
“_The words_ ME, _then, and_ SELF, _so far as they arouse feeling and
connote emotional worth, are_ OBJECTIVE _designations meaning_ ALL THE
THINGS _which have the power to produce in a stream of consciousness
excitement of a certain peculiar sort_.” Psychology, i., p. 319. A
little earlier he says: “_In its widest possible sense_, however, _a
man’s self is the sum total of all he_ CAN _call his_, not only his
body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife
and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his
lands and horses and yacht and bank account. All these things give him
the same emotions.” Idem, p. 291.
So Wundt says of “Ich”: “Es ist ein _Gefühl_, nicht eine Vorstellung,
wie es häufig genannt wird.” Grundriss der Psychologie 4. Auflage, S.
265.
Footnote 38:
It is, perhaps, to be thought of as a more general instinct, of which
anger, etc., are differentiated forms, rather than as standing by
itself.
Footnote 39:
Plumptre’s Sophocles, p. 352.
Footnote 40:
Psychology, i., p. 307.
Footnote 41:
“Only in man does man know himself; life alone teaches each one what
he is.”—Goethe, Tasso, act 2, sc. 3.
Footnote 42:
John Addington Symonds, by H. F. Brown, vol. ii. p. 120.
Footnote 43:
Compare Some Aspects of the Early Sense of Self, American Journal of
Psychology, ix., p 351.
Footnote 44:
Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, by F. Darwin, p. 27.
Footnote 45:
This sort of thing is very familiar to observers of children. See, for
instance, Miss Shinn’s Notes on the Development of a Child, p. 153.
Footnote 46:
John Addington Symonds, by H. F. Brown, vol. 1, p. 63.
Footnote 47:
P. 70.
Footnote 48:
P. 74.
Footnote 49:
P. 120.
Footnote 50:
P. 125.
Footnote 51:
P. 348.
Footnote 52:
Attributed to Mme. de Staël.
Footnote 53:
I do not attempt to distinguish between these words, though there is a
difference, ill defined however, in their meanings. As ordinarily used
both designate a phase of self-assertion regarded as censurable, and
this is all I mean by either.
Footnote 54:
Letters, p. 46.
Footnote 55:
Compare Stanley, The Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling, p. 271 _et
seq._
Footnote 56:
Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, Chap. XII., Carlyle’s Translation.
Footnote 57:
Quoted by Gummere, Germanic Origins, p. 266.
Footnote 58:
Œnone.
Footnote 59:
Travels, chap. 10, in Carlyle’s translation.
Footnote 60:
Stanley, The Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling, p. 280.
Footnote 61:
“Strive manfully; habit is subdued by habit. If you know how to
dismiss men, they also will dismiss you, to do your own things.”—De
Imitatione Christi, book i., chap. 21, par. 2.
Footnote 62:
De Imitatione Christi, book iii., chap. 23, par. 1.
Footnote 63:
Tulloch’s Pascal, p. 100.
Footnote 64:
See his History of European Morals, vol. ii., p. 369.
Footnote 65:
Perez, The First Three Years of Childhood, p. 66.
Footnote 66:
Mind, new series, vol. iv., p. 365.
Footnote 67:
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, pp. 303, 328.
Footnote 68:
See his essay on the Journal of the Brothers Goncourt.
Footnote 69:
See his Life and Letters, vol. ii., p. 192.
Footnote 70:
Compare Professor Simon N. Patten’s Theory of Social Forces, p. 135.
Footnote 71:
Thoreau, A Week, etc., p. 304.
Footnote 72:
Compare G. Stanley Hall’s study of Fear in the American Journal of
Psychology, viii., p. 147.
Footnote 73:
The terrors of our dreams are caused largely by social imaginations.
Thus Stevenson, in one of his letters, speaks of “my usual dreams of
social miseries and misunderstandings and all sorts of crucifixions of
the spirit.”—Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, i., p. 79.
Footnote 74:
Maine, Ancient Law, p. 62.
Footnote 75:
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, v., 16, Carlyle’s Translation.
Footnote 76:
In reading studies of a particular aspect of life, like M. Tarde’s
brilliant work, Les Lois de l’Imitation, it is well to remember that
there are many such aspects, any of which, if expounded at length and
in an interesting manner, might appear for the time to be of more
importance than any other. I think that other phases of social
activity, such, for instance, as communication, competition,
differentiation, adaptation, idealization, have as good claims as
imitation to be regarded as the social process, and that a book
similar in character to M. Tarde’s might, perhaps, be written upon any
one of them. The truth is that the real process is a multiform thing
of which these are glimpses. They are good so long as we recognize
that they _are_ glimpses and use them to help out our perception of
that many-sided whole which life is; but if they become _doctrines_
they are objectionable.
The Struggle for Existence is another of these glimpses of life which
just now seems to many the dominating fact of the universe, chiefly
because attention has been fixed upon it by copious and interesting
exposition. As it has had many predecessors in this place of
importance, so doubtless it will have many successors.
Footnote 77:
Decline and Fall, vol. vii., p. 82; Milman-Smith edition.
Footnote 78:
Emerson, address on New England Reformers.
Footnote 79:
Psychology, vol. ii., p. 409.
Footnote 80:
See Darwin’s Life and Letters, by his son, vol. i., p. 47.
Footnote 81:
Emerson, New England Reformers.
Footnote 82:
Psychology, vol. ii., p. 314.
Footnote 83:
In Harper’s Magazine, vol. 78, p. 870.
Footnote 84:
Reminiscences quoted by Garland in McClure’s Magazine, April, 1897.
Footnote 85:
From a letter published in the newspapers at the time of the
dedication of the Grant Monument, in April, 1897.
Footnote 86:
Mr. Howells remarks that “in Europe life is histrionic and dramatized,
and that in America, except when it is trying to be European, it is
direct and sincere.”—“Their Silver Wedding Journey,” Harper’s
Magazine, September, 1899.
Footnote 87:
Related by W. H. Gibson, in Harper’s Magazine for May, 1897.
Footnote 88:
The fact that the Roman system meant organized _ennui_ in thought, the
impossibility of entertaining large and hopeful views of life, is
strikingly brought out by the aid of contemporary documents in Dill’s
Roman Society. Prisoners of a shrinking system, the later Romans had
no outlook except toward the past. Anything onward and open in thought
was inconceivable by them.
Footnote 89:
See Primitive Culture, by E. B. Tylor, chap. xiv.
Footnote 90:
J. A. Symonds, History of the Renaissance in Italy, The Fine Arts, p.
329. Hamerton has some interesting observations on mystery in art in
his life of Turner, p. 352; also Ruskin in Modern Painters, part v.,
chaps. 4 and 5.
Footnote 91:
Tennyson, The Holy Grail.
Footnote 92:
See p. 248.
Footnote 93:
See his Instinct and Reason, p. 569.
Footnote 94:
M. J. Guyau, Esquisse d’une Morale sans Obligation ni Sanction,
English translation, p. 93.
Footnote 95:
Idem, p. 149.
Footnote 96:
Idem, p. 87.
Footnote 97:
Idem, p. 82.
Footnote 98:
Studies of Childhood, p. 284.
Footnote 99:
See his First Three Years of Childhood, p. 287.
Footnote 100:
Psychology, vol. i., p. 315.
Footnote 101:
Emerson, History.
Footnote 102:
Idem, Spiritual Laws.
Footnote 103:
Amer. Jour. of Psychology, vol. 7, p. 86.
Footnote 104:
See pp. 101, 210, 226.
Footnote 105:
The Pathology of Mind, p. 425.
Footnote 106:
C. L. Dana, Nervous Diseases, p. 425.
Footnote 107:
Aus Meinem Leben, Book XI.
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