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.”