sentiment, quite accordant with the genetic point of view of modern
psychology, and very important in the understanding of social relations.
Facial expression, tone of voice, and the like, the sensible nucleus of
personal and social ideas, serve as the handle, so to speak, of such
ideas, the principal substance of which is drawn from the region of
inner imagination and sentiment. The personality of a friend, as it
lives in my mind and forms there a part of the society in which I live,
is simply a group or system of thoughts associated with the symbols that
stand for him. To think of him is to revive some part of the system—to
have the old feeling along with the familiar symbol, though perhaps in a
new connection with other ideas. The real and intimate thing in him is
the thought to which he gives life, the feeling his presence or memory
has the power to suggest. This clings about the sensible imagery, the
personal symbols already discussed, because the latter have served as
bridges by which we have entered other minds and therein enriched our
own. We have laid up stores, but we always need some help to get at them
in order that we may use and increase them; and this help commonly
consists in something visible or audible, which has been connected with
them in the past and now acts as a key by which they are unlocked. Thus
the face of a friend has power over us in much the same way as the sight
of a favorite book, of the flag of one’s country, or the refrain of an
old song; it starts a train of thought, lifts the curtain from an
intimate experience. And his presence does not consist in the pressure
of his flesh upon a neighboring chair, but in the thoughts clustering
about some symbol of him, whether the latter be his tangible person or
something else. If a person is more his best self in a letter than in
speech, as sometimes happens, he is more truly present to me in his
correspondence than when I see and hear him. And in most cases a
favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been
in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and
perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to
the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to
see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should
hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.
The world of sentiment and imagination, of all finer and warmer thought,
is chiefly a personal world—that is, it is inextricably interwoven with
personal symbols. If you try to think of a person you will find that
what you really think is chiefly sentiments which you connect with his
image; and, on the other hand, if you try to recall a sentiment you will
find, as a rule, that it will not come up except along with symbols of
the persons who have suggested it. To think of love, gratitude, pity,
grief, honor, courage, justice, and the like, it is necessary to think
of people by whom or toward whom these sentiments may be
entertained.[25] Thus justice may be recalled by thinking of Washington,
kindness by Lincoln, honor by Sir Philip Sidney, and so on. The reason
for this, as already intimated, is that sentiment and imagination are
generated, for the most part, in the life of communication, and so
belong with personal images by original and necessary association,
having no separate existence except in our forms of speech. The ideas
that such words as modesty and magnanimity stand for could never have
been formed apart from social intercourse, and indeed are nothing other
than remembered aspects of such intercourse. To live this higher life,
then, we must live with others, by the aid of their visible presence, by
reading their words, or by recalling in imagination these or other
symbols of them. To lose our hold upon them—as, for example, by long
isolation or by the decay of the imagination in disease or old age—is to
lapse into a life of sensation and crude instinct.
So far as the study of immediate social relations is concerned the
personal idea is the real person. That is to say, it is in this alone
that one man exists for another, and acts directly upon his mind. My
association with you evidently consists in the relation between my idea
of you and the rest of my mind. If there is something in you that is
wholly beyond this and makes no impression upon me it has no social
reality in this relation. _The immediate social reality is the personal
idea_; nothing, it would seem, could be much more obvious than this.
Society, then, in its immediate aspect, _is a relation among personal
ideas_. In order to have society it is evidently necessary that persons
should get together somewhere; and they get together only as personal
ideas in the mind. Where else? What other possible _locus_ can be
assigned for the real contact of persons, or in what other form can they
come in contact except as impressions or ideas formed in this common
_locus_? Society exists in my mind as the contact and reciprocal
influence of certain ideas named “I,” Thomas, Henry, Susan, Bridget, and
so on. It exists in your mind as a similar group, and so in every mind.
Each person is immediately aware of a particular aspect of society: and
so far as he is aware of great social wholes, like a nation or an epoch,
it is by embracing in this particular aspect ideas or sentiments which
he attributes to his countrymen or contemporaries in their collective
aspect. In order to see this it seems to me only necessary to discard
vague modes of speech which have no conceptions back of them that will
bear scrutiny, and look at the facts as we know them in experience.
Yet most of us, perhaps, will find it hard to assent to the view that
the social person is a group of sentiments attached to some symbol or
other characteristic element, which keeps them together and from which
the whole idea is named. The reason for this reluctance I take to be
that we are accustomed to talk and think, so far as we do think in this
connection, as if a person were a material rather than a psychical fact.
Instead of basing our sociology and ethics upon what a man really is as
part of our mental and moral life, he is vaguely and yet grossly
regarded as a shadowy material body, a lump of flesh, and not as an
ideal thing at all. But surely it is only common-sense to hold that the
social and moral reality is that which lives in our imaginations and
affects our motives. As regards the physical it is only the finer, more
plastic and mentally significant aspects of it that imagination is
concerned with, and with that chiefly as a nucleus or centre of
crystallization for sentiment. Instead of perceiving this we commonly
make the physical the dominant factor, and think of the mental and moral
only by a vague analogy to it.
Persons and society must, then, be studied primarily in the imagination.
It is surely true, _prima facie_, that the best way of observing things
is that which is most direct; and I do not see how anyone can hold that
we know persons directly except as imaginative ideas in the mind. These
are perhaps the most vivid things in our experience, and as observable
as anything else, though it is a kind of observation in which accuracy
has not been systematically cultivated. The observation of the physical
aspects, however important, is for social purposes quite subsidiary:
there is no way of weighing or measuring men which throws more than a
very dim side-light on their personality. The physical factors most
significant are those elusive traits of expression already discussed,
and in the observation and interpretation of these physical science is
only indirectly helpful. What, for instance, could the most elaborate
knowledge of his weights and measures, including the anatomy of his
brain, tell us of the character of Napoleon? Not enough, I take it, to
distinguish him with certainty from an imbecile. Our real knowledge of
him is derived from reports of his conversation and manner, from his
legislation and military dispositions, from the impression made upon
those about him and by them communicated to us, from his portraits and
the like; all serving as aids to the imagination in forming a system
that we call by his name. I by no means aim to discredit the study of
man or of society with the aid of physical measurements, such as those
of psychological laboratories; but I think that these methods are
indirect and ancillary in their nature and are most useful when employed
in connection with a trained imagination.
I conclude, therefore, that the imaginations which people have of one
another are the _solid facts_ of society, and that to observe and
interpret these must be a chief aim of sociology. I do not mean merely
that society must be studied _by_ the imagination—that is true of all
investigations in their higher reaches—but that the _object_ of study is
primarily an imaginative idea or group of ideas in the mind, that we
have to imagine imaginations. The intimate grasp of any social fact will
be found to require that we divine what men think of one another.
Charity, for instance, is not understood without imagining what ideas
the giver and recipient have of each other; to grasp homicide we must,
for one thing, conceive how the offender thinks of his victim and of the
administrators of the law; the relation between the employing and
hand-laboring classes is first of all a matter of personal attitudes
which we must apprehend by sympathy with both, and so on. In other
words, we want to get at motives, and motives spring from personal
ideas. There is nothing particularly novel in this view; historians, for
instance, have always assumed that to understand and interpret personal
relations was their main business; but apparently the time is coming
when this will have to be done in a more systematic and penetrating
manner than in the past. Whatever may justly be urged against the
introduction of frivolous and disconnected “personalities” into history,
the understanding of persons is the aim of this and all other branches
of social study.
It is important to face the question of persons who have no corporeal
reality, as for instance the dead, characters of fiction or the drama,
ideas of the gods and the like. Are these real people, members of
society? I should say that in so far as we imagine them they are. Would
it not be absurd to deny social reality to Robert Louis Stevenson, who
is so much alive in many minds and so potently affects important phases
of thought and conduct? He is certainly more real in this practical
sense than most of us who have not yet lost our corporeity, more alive,
perhaps, than he was before he lost his own, because of his wider
influence. And so Colonel Newcome, or Romola, or Hamlet is real to the
imaginative reader with the realest kind of reality, the kind that works
directly upon his personal character. And the like is true of the
conceptions of supernatural beings handed down by the aid of tradition
among all peoples. What, indeed, would society be, or what would any one
of us be, if we associated only with corporeal persons and insisted that
no one should enter our company who could not show his power to tip the
scales and cast a shadow?
On the other hand, a corporeally existent person is not socially real
unless he is imagined. If the nobleman thinks of the serf as a mere
animal and does not attribute to him a human way of thinking and feeling
the latter is not real to him in the sense of acting personally upon his
mind and conscience. And if a man should go into a strange country and
hide himself so completely that no one knew he was there, he would
evidently have no social existence for the inhabitants.
In saying this I hope I do not seem to question the independent reality
of persons or to confuse it with personal ideas. The man is one thing
and the various ideas entertained about him are another; but the latter,
the personal idea, is the immediate social reality, the thing in which
men exist for one another, and work directly upon one another’s lives.
Thus any study of society that is not supported by a firm grasp of
personal ideas is empty and dead—mere doctrine and not knowledge at all.
I believe that the vaguely material notion of personality, which does
not confront the social fact at all but assumes it to be the analogue of
the physical fact, is a main source of fallacious thinking about ethics,
politics, and indeed every aspect of social and personal life. It seems
to underlie all four of the ways of conceiving society and the
individual alleged in the first chapter to be false. If the person is
thought of primarily as a separate material form, inhabited by thoughts
and feelings conceived by analogy to be equally separate, then the only
way of getting a society is by adding on a new principle of socialism,
social faculty, altruism, or the like. But if you start with the idea
that the social person is primarily a fact in the mind, and observe him
there, you find at once that he has no existence apart from a mental
whole of which all personal ideas are members, and which is a particular
aspect of society. Every one of these ideas, as we have seen, is the
outcome of our experience of all the persons we have known, and is only
a special aspect of our general idea of mankind.
To many people it would seem mystical to say that persons, as we know
them, are not separable and mutually exclusive, like physical bodies, so
that what is part of one cannot be part of another, but that they
interpenetrate one another, the same element pertaining to different
persons at different times, or even at the same time: yet this is a
verifiable and not very abstruse fact.[26] The sentiments which make up
the largest and most vivid part of our idea of any person are not, as a
rule, peculiarly and exclusively his, but each one may be entertained in
conjunction with other persons also. It is, so to speak, at the point of
intersection of many personal ideas, and may be reached through any one
of them. Not only Philip Sidney but many other people call up the
sentiment of honor, and likewise with kindness, magnanimity, and so on.
Perhaps these sentiments are never precisely the same in any two cases,
but they are nearly enough alike to act in about the same manner upon
our motives, which is the main thing from a practical point of view. Any
kindly face will arouse friendly feeling, any suffering child awaken
pity, any brave man inspire respect. A sense of justice, of something
being due to a man as such, is potentially a part of the idea of every
man I know. All such feelings are a cumulative product of social
experience and do not belong exclusively to any one personal symbol. A
sentiment, if we consider it as something in itself, is vaguely,
indeterminately personal; it may come to life, with only slight
variations, in connection with any one of many symbols; whether it is
referred to one or to another, or to two or more at once, is determined
by the way one’s thoughts arrange themselves, by the connection in which
the sentiment is suggested.
As regards one’s self in relation to other people, I shall have more to
say in a later chapter; but I may say here that there is no view of the
self, that will bear examination, which makes it altogether distinct, in
our minds, from other persons. If it includes the whole mind, then, of
course, it includes all the persons we think of, all the society which
lives in our thoughts. If we confine it to a certain part of our thought
with which we connect a distinctive emotion or sentiment called
self-feeling, as I prefer to do, it still includes the persons with whom
we feel most identified. _Self and other do not exist as mutually
exclusive social facts_, and phraseology which implies that they do,
like the antithesis egoism _versus_ altruism, is open to the objection
of vagueness, if not of falsity.[27] It seems to me that the
classification of impulses as altruistic and egoistic, with or without a
third class called, perhaps, ego-altruistic, is empty; and I do not see
how any other conclusion can result from a concrete study of the matter.
There is no class of altruistic impulses specifically different from
other impulses: all our higher, socially developed sentiments are
indeterminately personal, and may be associated with self-feeling, or
with whatever personal symbol may happen to arouse them. Those feelings
which are merely sensual and have not been refined into sentiments by
communication and imagination are not so much egoistic as merely animal:
they do not pertain to social persons, either first or second, but
belong in a lower stratum of thought. Sensuality is not to be confused
with the social self. As I shall try to show later we do not think “I”
except with reference to a complementary thought of other persons; it is
an idea developed by association and communication.
The egoism-altruism way of speaking falsifies the facts at the most
vital point possible by assuming that our impulses relating to persons
are separable into two classes, the I impulses and the You impulses, in
much the same way that physical persons are separable; whereas a primary
fact throughout the range of sentiment is a fusion of persons, so that
the impulse belongs not to one or the other, but precisely to the common
ground that both occupy, to their intercourse or mingling. Thus the
sentiment of gratitude does not pertain to me as against you, nor to you
as against me, but springs right from our union, and so with all
personal sentiment. Special terms like egoism and altruism are
presumably introduced into moral discussions for the more accurate
naming of facts. But I cannot discover the facts for which these are
supposed to be names. The more I consider the matter the more they
appear to be mere fictions of analogical thought. If you have no
definite idea of personality or self beyond the physical idea you are
naturally led to regard the higher phases of thought, which have no
evident relation to the body, as in some way external to the first
person or self. Thus instead of psychology, sociology, or ethics we have
a mere shadow of physiology.
Pity is typical of the impulses ordinarily called altruistic; but if one
thinks of the question closely it is hard to see how this adjective is
especially applicable to it. Pity is not aroused exclusively by images
or symbols of other persons, as against those of one’s self. If I think
of my own body in a pitiable condition I am perhaps as likely to feel
pity as if I think of someone else in such a condition.[28] At any rate,
self-pity is much too common to be ignored. Even if the sentiment were
aroused only by symbols of other persons it would not necessarily be
non-egoistic. “A father pitieth his children,” but any searching
analysis will show that he incorporates the children into his own
imaginative self. And, finally, pity is not necessarily moral or good,
but is often mere “self-indulgence,” as when it is practised at the
expense of justice and true sympathy. A “wounding pity,” to use a phrase
of Mr. Stevenson’s, is one of the commonest forms of objectionable
sentiment. In short, pity is a sentiment like any other, having in
itself no determinate personality, as first or second, and no
determinate moral character: personal reference and moral rank depend
upon the conditions under which it is suggested. The reason that it
strikes us as appropriate to call pity “altruistic” apparently is that
it often leads directly and obviously to helpful practical activity, as
toward the poor or the sick. But “altruistic” is used to imply something
more than kindly or benevolent, some radical psychological or moral
distinction between this sentiment or class of sentiments and others
called egoistic, and this distinction appears not to exist. All social
sentiments are altruistic in the sense that they involve reference to
another person; few are so in the sense that they exclude the self. The
idea of a division on this line appears to flow from a vague presumption
that personal ideas must have a separateness answering to that of
material bodies.
I do not mean to deny or depreciate the fact of personal opposition; it
is real and most important, though it does not rest upon any such
essential and, as it were, material separateness as the common way of
thinking implies. At a given moment personal symbols may stand for
different and opposing tendencies; thus the missionary may be urging me
to contribute to his cause, and, if he is skilful, the impulses he
awakens will move me in that direction; but if I think of my wife and
children and the summer outing I had planned to give them from my
savings, an opposite impulse appears. And in all such cases the very
fact of opposition and the attention thereby drawn to the conflicting
impulses gives emphasis to them, so that common elements are overlooked
and the persons in the imagination seem separate and exclusive.
In such cases, however, the harmonizing or moralizing of the situation
consists precisely in evoking or appealing to the common element in the
apparently conflicting personalities, that is to some sentiment of
justice or right. Thus I may say to myself, “I can afford a dollar, but
ought not, out of consideration for my family, to give more,” and may be
able to imagine all parties accepting this view of the case.
Opposition between one’s self and someone else is also a very real
thing; but this opposition, instead of coming from a separateness like
that of material bodies, is, on the contrary, dependent upon a measure
of community between one’s self and the disturbing other, so that the
hostility between one’s self and a social person may always be described
as hostile sympathy. And the sentiments connected with opposition, like
resentment, pertain neither to myself, considered separately, nor to the
symbol of the other person, but to ideas including both. I shall discuss
these matters at more length in subsequent chapters; the main thing here
is to note that personal opposition does not involve mechanical
separateness, but arises from the emphasis of inconsistent elements in
ideas having much in common.
The relations to one another and to the mind of the various persons one
thinks of might be rudely pictured in some such way as this. Suppose we
conceive the mind as a vast wall covered with electric-light bulbs, each
of which represents a possible thought or impulse whose presence in our
consciousness may be indicated by the lighting up of the bulb. Now each
of the persons we know is represented in such a scheme, not by a
particular area of the wall set apart for him, but by a system of hidden
connections among the bulbs which causes certain combinations of them to
be lit up when his characteristic symbol is suggested. If something
presses the button corresponding to my friend A, a peculiarly shaped
figure appears upon the wall; when that is released and B’s button is
pressed another figure appears, including perhaps many of the same
lights, yet unique as a whole though not in its parts; and so on with as
many people as you please. It should also be considered that we usually
think of a person in relation to some particular social situation, and
that those phases of him that bear on this situation are the only ones
vividly conceived. To recall someone is commonly to imagine how this or
that idea would strike him, what he would say or do in our place, and so
on. Accordingly, only some part, some appropriate and characteristic
part, of the whole figure that might be lighted up in connection with a
man’s symbol, is actually illuminated.
To introduce the self into this illustration we might say that the
lights near the centre of the wall were of a particular color—say
red—which faded, not too abruptly, into white toward the edges. This red
would represent self-feeling, and other persons would be more or less
colored by it accordingly as they were or were not intimately identified
with our cherished activities. In a mother’s mind, for instance, her
child would lie altogether in the inmost and reddest area. Thus the same
sentiment may belong to the self and to several other persons at the
same time. If a man and his family are suffering from his being thrown
out of work his apprehension and resentment will be part of his idea of
each member of his family, as well as part of his self-idea and of the
idea of people whom he thinks to blame.
I trust it will be plain that there is nothing fantastic, unreal, or
impractical about this way of conceiving people, that is by observing
them as facts of the imagination. On the contrary, the fantastic,
unreal, and practically pernicious way is the ordinary and traditional
one of speculating upon them as shadowy bodies, without any real
observation of them as mental facts. It is the man as imagined that we
love or hate, imitate, or avoid, that helps or harms us, that moulds our
wills and our careers. What is it that makes a person real to us; is it
material contact or contact in the imagination? Suppose, for instance,
that on suddenly turning a corner I collide with one coming from the
opposite direction: I receive a slight bruise, have the breath knocked
out of me, exchange conventional apologies, and immediately forget the
incident. It takes no intimate hold upon me, means nothing except a
slight and temporary disturbance in the animal processes. Now suppose,
on the other hand, that I take up Froude’s “Cæsar,” and presently find
myself, under the guidance of that skilful writer, imagining a hero
whose body long ago turned to clay. He is alive in my thought: there is
perhaps some notion of his visible presence, and along with this the
awakening of sentiments of audacity, magnanimity and the like, that glow
with intense life, consume my energy, make me resolve to be like Cæsar
in some respect, and cause me to see right and wrong and other great
questions as I conceive he would have seen them. Very possibly he keeps
me awake after I go to bed—every boy has lain awake thinking of book
people. My whole after life will be considerably affected by this
experience, and yet this is a contact that takes place only in the
imagination. Even as regards the physical organism it is immeasurably
more important, as a rule, than the material collision. A blow in the
face, if accidental and so not disturbing to the imagination, affects
the nerves, the heart, and the digestion very little, but an injurious
word or look may cause sleepless nights, dyspepsia, or palpitation. It
is, then, the personal idea, the man in the imagination, the real man of
power and fruits, that we need primarily to consider, and he appears to
be somewhat different from the rather conventional and material man of
traditionary social philosophy.
According to this view of the matter society is simply the collective
aspect of personal thought. Each man’s imagination, regarded as a mass
of personal impressions worked up into a living, growing whole, is a
special phase of society; and Mind or Imagination as a whole, that is
human thought considered in the largest way as having a growth and
organization extending throughout the ages, is the _locus_ of society in
the widest possible sense.
It may be objected that society in this sense has no definite limits,
but seems to include the whole range of experience. That is to say, the
mind is all one growth, and we cannot draw any distinct line between
personal thought and other thought. There is probably no such thing as
an idea that is wholly independent of minds other than that in which it
exists; through heredity, if not through communication, all is connected
with the general life, and so in some sense social. What are spoken of
above as personal ideas are merely those in which the connection with
other persons is most direct and apparent. This objection, however,
applies to any way of defining society, and those who take the material
standpoint are obliged to consider whether houses, factories, domestic
animals, tilled land, and so on are not really parts of the social
order. The truth, of course, is that all life hangs together in such a
manner that any attempt to delimit a part of it is artificial. Society
is rather a phase of life than a thing by itself; it is life regarded
from the point of view of personal intercourse. And personal intercourse
may be considered either in its primary aspects, such as are treated in
this book, or in secondary aspects, such as groups, institutions, or
processes. Sociology, I suppose, is the science of these things.
CHAPTER IV
SYMPATHY OR COMMUNION AS AN ASPECT OF SOCIETY
THE MEANING OF SYMPATHY AS HERE USED—ITS RELATION TO THOUGHT,
SENTIMENT, AND SOCIAL EXPERIENCE—THE RANGE OF SYMPATHY IS A
MEASURE OF PERSONALITY, _e.g._, OF POWER, OF MORAL RANK, AND OF
SANITY—A MAN’S SYMPATHIES REFLECT THE STATE OF THE SOCIAL
ORDER—SPECIALIZATION AND BREADTH—SYMPATHY REFLECTS SOCIAL PROCESS
IN THE MINGLING OF LIKENESS WITH DIFFERENCE—ALSO IN THAT IT IS A
PROCESS OF SELECTION GUIDED BY FEELING—THE MEANING OF LOVE IN
SOCIAL DISCUSSION—LOVE IN RELATION TO SELF—THE STUDY OF SYMPATHY
REVEALS THE VITAL UNITY OF HUMAN LIFE.
The personal idea in its more penetrating interpretations involves
sympathy, in the sense of primary communication or an entering into and
sharing the mind of someone else. When I converse with a man, through
words, looks, or other symbols, I have more or less intelligence or
_communion_ with him, we get on common ground and have similar ideas and
sentiments. If one uses sympathy in this connection—and it is perhaps
the most available word—one has to bear in mind that it denotes the
sharing of any mental state that can be communicated, and has not the
special implication of pity or other “tender emotion” that it very
commonly carries in ordinary speech.[29] This emotionally colorless
usage is, however, perfectly legitimate, and is, I think, more common in
classical English literature than any other. Thus Shakespeare, who uses
sympathy five times, if we may trust the “Shakespeare Phrase Book,”
never means by it the particular emotion of compassion, but either the
sharing of a mental state, as when he speaks of “sympathy in choice,” or
mere resemblance, as when Iago mentions the lack of “sympathy in years,
manners and beauties” between Othello and Desdemona. This latter sense
is also one which must be excluded in our use of the word, since what is
here meant is an active process of mental assimilation, not mere
likeness.
In this chapter sympathy, in the sense of communion or personal insight,
will be considered chiefly with a view to showing something of its
nature as a phase or member of the general life of mankind.
The content of it, the matter communicated, is chiefly thought and
sentiment, in distinction from mere sensation or crude emotion. I do not
venture to say that these latter cannot be shared, but certainly they
play a relatively small part in the communicative life. Thus although to
get one’s finger pinched is a common experience, it is impossible, to me
at least, to recall the sensation when another person has his finger
pinched. So when we say that we feel sympathy for a person who has a
headache, we mean that we pity him, not that we share the headache.
There is little true communication of physical pain, or anything of that
simple sort. The reason appears to be that as ideas of this kind are due
to mere physical contacts, or other simple stimuli, in the first
instance, they are and remain detached and isolated in the mind, so that
they are unlikely to be recalled except by some sensation of the sort
originally associated with them. If they become objects of thought and
conversation, as is likely to be the case when they are agreeable, they
are by that very process refined into sentiments. Thus when the
pleasures of the table are discussed the thing communicated is hardly
the sensation of taste but something much subtler, although partly based
upon that. Thought and sentiment are from the first parts or aspects of
highly complex and imaginative personal ideas, and of course may be
reached by anything which recalls any part of those ideas. They are
aroused by personal intercourse because in their origin they are
connected with personal symbols. The sharing of a sentiment ordinarily
comes to pass by our perceiving one of these symbols or traits of
expression which has belonged with the sentiment in the past and now
brings it back. And likewise with thought: it is communicated by words,
and these are freighted with the net result of centuries of intercourse.
Both spring from the general life of society and cannot be separated
from that life, nor it from them.
It is not to be inferred that we must go through the same visible and
tangible experiences as other people before we can sympathize with them.
On the contrary, there is only an indirect and uncertain connection
between one’s sympathies and the obvious events—such as the death of
friends, success or failure in business, travels, and the like—that one
has gone through. Social experience is a matter of imaginative, not of
material, contacts; and there are so many aids to the imagination that
little can be judged as to one’s experience by the merely external
course of his life. An imaginative student of a few people and of books
often has many times the range of comprehension that the most varied
career can give to a duller mind; and a man of genius, like Shakespeare,
may cover almost the whole range of human sentiment in his time, not by
miracle, but by a marvellous vigor and refinement of imagination. The
idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great
variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.
One’s range of sympathy is a measure of his personality, indicating how
much or how little of a man he is. It is in no way a special faculty,
but a function of the whole mind to which every special faculty
contributes, so that what a person is and what he can understand or
enter into through the life of others, are very much the same thing. We
often hear people described as sympathetic who have little mental power,
but are of a sensitive, impressionable, quickly responsive type of mind.
The sympathy of such a mind always has some defect corresponding to its
lack of character and of constructive force. A strong, deep
understanding of other people implies mental energy and stability; it is
a work of persistent, cumulative imagination which may be associated
with a comparative slowness of direct sensibility. On the other hand, we
often see the union of a quick sensitiveness to immediate impressions
with an inability to comprehend what has to be reached by reason or
constructive imagination.
Sympathy is a requisite to social power. Only in so far as a man
understands other people and thus enters into the life around him has he
any effective existence; the less he has of this the more he is a mere
animal, not truly in contact with human life. And if he is not in
contact with it he can of course have no power over it. This is a
principle of familiar application, and yet one that is often overlooked,
practical men having, perhaps, a better grasp of it than theorists. It
is well understood by men of the world that effectiveness depends at
least as much upon address, _savoir faire_, tact, and the like,
involving sympathetic insight into the minds of other people, as upon
any more particular faculties. There is nothing more practical than
social imagination; to lack it is to lack everything. All classes of
persons need it—the mechanic, the farmer, and the tradesman, as well as
the lawyer, the clergyman, the railway president, the politician, the
philanthropist, and the poet. Every year thousands of young men are
preferred to other thousands and given positions of more responsibility
largely because they are seen to have a power of personal insight which
promises efficiency and growth. Without “calibre,” which means chiefly a
good imagination, there is no getting on much in the world. The strong
men of our society, however much we may disapprove of the particular
direction in which their sympathy is sometimes developed, or the ends
their power is made to serve, are very human men, not at all the
abnormal creatures they are sometimes asserted to be. I have met a fair
number of such men, and they have generally appeared, each in his own
way, to be persons of a certain scope and breadth that marked them off
from the majority.
A person of definite character and purpose, who comprehends our way of
thought, is sure to exert power over us. He cannot altogether be
resisted; because, if he understands us, he can make us understand him,
through the word, the look, or other symbol, which both of us connect
with the common sentiment or idea; and thus by communicating an impulse
he can move the will. Sympathetic influence enters into our system of
thought as a matter of course, and affects our conduct as surely as
water affects the growth of a plant. The kindred spirit can turn on a
system of lights, to recur to the image of the last chapter, and so
transform the mental illumination. This is the nature of all authority
and leadership, as I shall try to explain more fully in another chapter.
Again, sympathy, in the broad sense in which it is here used, underlies
also the moral rank of a man and goes to fix our estimate of his justice
and goodness. The just, the good, or the right under any name, is of
course not a thing by itself, but is a finer product wrought up out of
the various impulses that life affords, and colored by them. Hence no
one can think and act in a way that strikes us as right unless he feels,
in great part, the same impulses that we do. If he shares the feelings
that seem to us to have the best claims, it naturally follows, if he is
a person of stable character, that he does them justice in thought and
action. To be upright, public-spirited, patriotic, charitable, generous,
and just implies that a man has a broad personality which feels the
urgency of sympathetic or imaginative motives that in narrower minds are
weak or lacking. He has achieved the higher sentiments, the wider range
of personal thought. And so far as we see in his conduct that he feels
such motives and that they enter into his decisions, we are likely to
call him good. What is it to do good, in the ordinary sense? Is it not
to help people to enjoy and to work, to fulfil the healthy and happy
tendencies of human nature; to give play to children, education to
youth, a career to men, a household to women, and peace to old age? And
it is sympathy that makes a man wish and need to do these things. One
who is large enough to live the life of the race will feel the impulses
of each class as his own, and do what he can to gratify them as
naturally as he eats his dinner. The idea that goodness is something
apart from ordinary human nature is pernicious; it is only an ampler
expression of that nature.
On the other hand, all badness, injustice, or wrong is, in one of its
aspects, a lack of sympathy. If a man’s action is injurious to interests
which other men value, and so impresses them as wrong, it must be
because, at the moment of action, he does not feel those interests as
they do. Accordingly the wrong-doer is either a person whose sympathies
do not embrace the claims he wrongs, or one who lacks sufficient
stability of character to express his sympathies in action. A liar, for
instance, is either one who does not feel strongly the dishonor,
injustice, and confusion of lying, or one who, feeling them at times,
does not retain the feeling in decisive moments. And so a brutal person
may be such either in a dull or chronic way, which does not know the
gentler sentiments at any time, or in a sudden and passionate way which
perhaps alternates with kindness.
Much the same may be said regarding mental health in general; its
presence or absence may always be expressed in terms of sympathy. The
test of sanity which everyone instinctively applies is that of a certain
tact or feeling of the social situation, which we expect of all
right-minded people and which flows from sympathetic contact with other
minds. One whose words and bearing give the impression that he stands
apart and lacks intuition of what others are thinking is judged as more
or less absentminded, queer, dull, or even insane or imbecile, according
to the character and permanence of the phenomenon. The essence of
insanity, from the social point of view (and, it would seem, the only
final test of it) is a confirmed lack of touch with other minds in
matters upon which men in general are agreed; and imbecility might be
defined as a general failure to compass the more complex sympathies.
A man’s sympathies as a whole reflect the social order in which he
lives, or rather they are a particular phase of it. Every group of which
he is really a member, in which he has any vital share, must live in his
sympathy; so that his mind is a microcosm of so much of society as he
truly belongs to. Every social phenomenon, we need to remember, is
simply a collective view of what we find distributively in particular
persons—public opinion is a phase of the judgments of individuals;
traditions and institutions live in the thought of particular men,
social standards of right do not exist apart from private consciences,
and so on. Accordingly, so far as a man has any vital part in the life
of a time or a country that life is imaged in those personal ideas or
sympathies which are the impress of his intercourse.
So, whatever is peculiar to our own time, implies a corresponding
peculiarity in the sympathetic life of each one of us. Thus the age, at
least in the more intellectually active parts of life, is strenuous,
characterized by the multiplication of points of personal contact
through enlarged and accelerated communication. The mental aspect of
this is a more rapid and multitudinous flow of personal images,
sentiments, and impulses. Accordingly there prevails among us an
animation of thought that tends to lift men above sensuality; and there
is also possible a choice of relations that opens to each mind a more
varied and congenial development than the past afforded. On the other
hand, these advantages are not without their cost; the intensity of life
often becomes a strain, bringing to many persons an overexcitation which
weakens or breaks down character; as we see in the increase of suicide
and insanity, and in many similar phenomena. An effect very generally
produced upon all except the strongest minds appears to be a sort of
superficiality of imagination, a dissipation and attenuation of
impulses, which watches the stream of personal imagery go by like a
procession, but lacks the power to organize and direct it.
The different degrees of urgency in personal impressions are reflected
in the behavior of different classes of people. Everyone must have
noticed that he finds more real openness of sympathy in the country than
in the city—though perhaps there is more of a superficial readiness in
the latter—and often more among plain, hand-working people than among
professional and business men. The main reason for this, I take it, is
that the social imagination is not so hard worked in the one case as in
the other. In the mountains of North Carolina the hospitable inhabitants
will take in any stranger and invite him to spend the night; but this is
hardly possible upon Broadway; and the case is very much the same with
the hospitality of the mind. If one sees few people and hears a new
thing only once a week, he accumulates a fund of sociability and
curiosity very favorable to eager intercourse; but if he is assailed all
day and every day by calls upon feeling and thought in excess of his
power to respond, he soon finds that he must put up some sort of a
barrier. Sensitive people who live where life is insistent take on a
sort of social shell whose function is to deal mechanically with
ordinary relations and preserve the interior from destruction. They are
likely to acquire a conventional smile and conventional phrases for
polite intercourse, and a cold mask for curiosity, hostility, or
solicitation. In fact, a vigorous power of resistance to the numerous
influences that in no way make for the substantial development of his
character, but rather tend to distract and demoralize him, is a primary
need of one who lives in the more active portions of present society,
and the loss of this power by strain is in countless instances the
beginning of mental and moral decline. There are times of abounding
energy when we exclaim with Schiller,
“Seid willkommen, Millionen,
Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!”
but it is hardly possible or desirable to maintain this attitude
continuously. Universal sympathy is impracticable; what we need is
better control and selection, avoiding both the narrowness of our class
and the dissipation of promiscuous impressions. It is well for a man to
open out and take in as much of life as he can organize into a
consistent whole, but to go beyond that is not desirable. In a time of
insistent suggestion, like the present, it is fully as important to many
of us to know when and how to restrict the impulses of sympathy as it is
to avoid narrowness. And this is in no way inconsistent, I think, with
that modern democracy of sentiment—also connected with the enlargement
of communication—which deprecates the limitation of sympathy by wealth
or position. Sympathy must be selective, but the less it is controlled
by conventional and external circumstances, such as wealth, and the more
it penetrates to the essentials, of character, the better. It is this
liberation from convention, locality, and chance, I think, that the
spirit of the time calls for.
Again, the life of this age is more diversified than life ever was
before, and this appears in the mind of the person who shares it as a
greater variety of interests and affiliations. A man may be regarded as
the point of intersection of an indefinite number of circles
representing social groups, having as many arcs passing through him as
there are groups. This diversity is connected with the growth of
communication, and is another phase of the general enlargement and
variegation of life. Because of the greater variety of imaginative
contacts it is impossible for a normally open-minded individual not to
lead a broader life, in some respects at least, than he would have led
in the past. Why is it, for instance, that such ideas as brotherhood and
the sentiment of equal right are now so generally extended to all
classes of men? Primarily, I think, because all classes have become
imaginable, by acquiring power and means of expression. He whom I
imagine without antipathy becomes my brother. If we feel that we must
give aid to another, it is because that other lives and strives in our
imaginations, and so is a part of ourselves. The shallow separation of
self and other in common speech obscures the extreme simplicity and
naturalness of such feelings. If I come to imagine a person suffering
wrong it is not “altruism” that makes me wish to right that wrong, but
simple human impulse. He is my life, as really and immediately as
anything else. His symbol arouses a sentiment which is no more his than
mine.
Thus we lead a wider life; and yet it is also true that there is
demanded of us a more distinct specialization than has been required in
the past. The complexity of society takes the form of organization, that
is of a growing unity and breadth sustained by the co-operation of
differentiated parts, and the man of the age must reflect both the unity
and the differentiation; he must be more distinctly a specialist and at
the same time more a man of the world.
It seems to many a puzzling question whether, on the whole, the breadth
or the specialization is more potent in the action of modern life upon
the individual; and by insisting on one aspect or the other it is easy
to frame an argument to show either that personal life is becoming
richer, or that man is getting to be a mere cog in a machine.[30] I
think, however, that these two tendencies are not really opposite but
complementary; that it is not a case of breadth _versus_ specialization,
but, in the long run at least, of breadth _plus_ specialization to
produce a richer and more various humanity. There are many evils
connected with the sudden growth in our day of new social structures,
and the subjection of a part of the people to a narrow and deadening
routine is one of them, but I think that a healthy specialization has no
tendency to bring this about. On the contrary, it is part of a
liberating development. The narrow specialist is a bad specialist; and
we shall learn that it is a mistake to produce him.
In an organized life isolation cannot succeed, and a right
specialization does not isolate. There is no such separation between
special and general knowledge or efficiency as is sometimes supposed. In
what does the larger knowledge of particulars consist, if not in
perceiving their relation to wholes? Has a student less general
knowledge because he is familiar with a specialty, or is it not rather
true that in so far as he knows one thing well it is a window through
which he sees things in general?
There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it
earnestly at a particular point. If one takes his stand in a field of
corn when the young plants have begun to sprout, all the plants in the
field will appear to be arranged in a system of rows radiating from his
feet; and no matter where he stands the system will appear to centre at
that point. It is so with any standpoint in the field of thought and
intercourse; to possess it is to have a point of vantage from which the
whole may, in a particular manner, be apprehended. It is surely a matter
of common observation that a man who knows no one thing intimately has
no views worth hearing on things in general. The farmer philosophizes in
terms of crops, soils, markets, and implements, the mechanic generalizes
his experience of wood and iron, the seaman reaches similar conclusions
by his own special road; and if the scholar keeps pace with these it
must be by an equally virile productivity. It is a common opinion that
breadth of culture is a thing by itself, to be imparted by a particular
sort of studies, as, for instance, the classics, modern languages, and
so on. And there is a certain practical truth in this, owing, I think,
to the fact that certain studies are taught in a broad or cultural way,
while others are not. But the right theory of the matter is that
speciality and culture are simply aspects of the same healthy mental
growth, and that any study is cultural when taught in the best way. And
so the humblest careers in life may involve culture and breadth of view,
if the incumbent is trained, as he should be, to feel their larger
relations.
A certain sort of writers often assume that it is the tendency of our
modern specialized production to stunt the mind of the workman by a
meaningless routine; but fair opportunities of observation and some
practical acquaintance with machinery and the men who use it lead me to
think that this is not the _general_ fact. On the contrary, it is
precisely the broad or cultural traits of general intelligence,
self-reliance, and adaptability that make a man at home and efficient in
the midst of modern machinery, and it is because the American workman
has these traits in a comparatively high degree that he surpasses others
in the most highly specialized production. One who goes into our shops
will find that the intelligent and adaptive workman is almost always
preferred and gets higher wages; and if there are large numbers employed
upon deadening routine it is partly because there is unfortunately a
part of our population whose education makes them unfit for anything
else. The type of mechanic which a complex industrial system requires,
and which it is even now, on the whole, evolving, is one that combines
an intimate knowledge of particular tools and processes with an
intelligent apprehension of the system in which he works. If he lacks
the latter he requires constant oversight and so becomes a nuisance.
Anyone acquainted with such matters knows that “gumption” in workmen is
fully as important and much harder to find than mere manual skill; and
that those who possess it are usually given superior positions. During
the late war with Spain it became obvious that the complicated machinery
of a modern warship is ineffectual without intelligent, self-reliant,
and determined “men behind the guns” to work it; and, of course, the
same holds true of other kinds of machinery. And if we pass from tools
to personal relations we shall find that the specialized production so
much deprecated is only one phase of a wider general life, a life of
comparative freedom, intelligence, education, and opportunity, whose
general effect is to enlarge the individual. No doubt there are cases in
which intelligence seems to have passed out of the man into the machine,
leaving the former a mere “tender”; but I think these are not
representative of the change as a whole.
The idea of a necessary antagonism between specialization and breadth
seems to me an illusion of the same class as that which opposes the
individual to the social order. First one aspect and then another is
looked at in artificial isolation, and it is not perceived that we are
beholding but one thing, after all.
Not only does the sympathetic life of a man reflect and imply the
_state_ of society, but we may also discern in it some inkling of those
processes, or principles of change, that we see at large in the general
movement of mankind. This is a matter rather beyond the scope of this
book; but a few illustrations will show, in a general way, what I mean.
The act of sympathy follows the general law that nature works onward by
mixing like and unlike, continuity and change; and so illustrates the
same principle that we see in the mingling of heredity with variation,
specific resemblance with a differentiation of sexes and of individuals,
tradition with discussion, inherited social position with competition,
and so on. The likeness in the communicating persons is necessary for
comprehension, the difference for interest. We cannot feel strongly
toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable; nor
yet toward the wholly like because it is stale—identity must always be
dull company. The power of other natures over us lies in a stimulating
difference which causes excitement and opens communication, in ideas
similar to our own but not identical, in states of mind attainable but
not actual. If one has energy he soon wearies of any habitual round of
activities and feelings, and his organism, competent to a larger life,
suffers pains of excess and want at the same time. The key to the
situation is another person who can start a new circle of activities and
give the faculties concerned with the old a chance to rest. As Emerson
has remarked, we come into society to be played upon. “Friendship,” he
says again, “requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness,
that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other
party.... Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I
have in his being mine is that the _not mine_ is _mine_.... There must
be very two before there can be very one.”[31] So Goethe, speaking of
Spinoza’s attraction for him, remarks that the closest unions rest on
contrast;[32] and it is well known that such a contrast was the basis of
his union with Schiller, “whose character and life,” he says, “were in
complete contrast to my own.”[33] Of course, some sorts of sympathy are
especially active in their tendency, like the sympathy of vigorous boys
with soldiers and sea-captains; while others are comparatively quiet,
like those of old people renewing common memories. It is vivid and
elastic where the tendency to growth is strong, reaching out toward the
new, the onward, the mysterious; while old persons, the under-vitalized
and the relaxed or wearied prefer a mild sociability, a comfortable
companionship in habit; but even with the latter there must always be a
stimulus given, something new suggested or something forgotten recalled,
not merely a resemblance of thought but a “resembling difference.”
And sympathy between man and woman, while it is very much complicated
with the special instinct of sex, draws its life from this same mixture
of mental likeness and difference. The love of the sexes is above all a
need, a need of new life which only the other can unlock.
“Ich musst’ ihn lieben, weil mit ihm mein Leben
Zum Leben ward, wie ich es nie gekannt,”[34]
says the princess in Tasso; and this appears to express a general
principle. Each sex represents to the other a wide range of fresh and
vital experience inaccessible alone. Thus the woman usually stands for a
richer and more open emotional life, the man for a stronger mental
grasp, for control and synthesis. Alfred without Laura feels dull,
narrow, and coarse, while Laura on her part feels selfish and
hysterical.
Again, sympathy is selective, and thus illustrates a phase of the vital
process more talked about at present than any other. To go out into the
life of other people takes energy, as everyone may see in his own
experience; and since energy is limited and requires some special
stimulus to evoke it, sympathy becomes active only when our imaginations
are reaching out after something we admire or love, or in some way feel
the need to understand and make our own. A healthy mind, at least, does
not spend much energy on things that do not, in some way, contribute to
its development: ideas and persons that lie wholly aside from the
direction of its growth, or from which it has absorbed all they have to
give, necessarily lack interest for it and so fail to awaken sympathy.
An incontinent response to every suggestion offered indicates the
breaking down of that power of inhibition or refusal that is our natural
defence against the reception of material we cannot digest, and looks
toward weakness, instability, and mental decay. So with persons from
whom we have nothing to gain, in any sense, whom we do not admire, or
love, or fear, or hate, and who do not even interest us as psychological
problems or objects of charity, we can have no sympathy except of the
most superficial and fleeting sort. I do not overlook the fact that a
large class of people suffer a loss of human breadth and power by
falling into a narrow and exclusive habit of mind; but at the same time
personality is nothing unless it has character, individuality, a
distinctive line of growth, and to have this is to have a principle of
rejection as well as reception in sympathy.
Social development as a whole, and every act of sympathy as a part of
that development, is guided and stimulated in its selective growth by
feeling. The outgoing of the mind into the thought of another is always,
it would seem, an excursion in search of the congenial; not necessarily
of the pleasant, in the ordinary sense, but of that which is fitting or
congruous with our actual state of feeling. Thus we would not call
Carlyle or the Book of Job pleasant exactly, yet we have moods in which
these writers, however lacking in amenity, seem harmonious and
attractive.
In fact, our mental life, individual and collective, is truly a never
finished work of art, in the sense that we are ever striving, with such
energy and materials as we possess, to make of it a harmonious and
congenial whole. Each man does this in his own peculiar way, and men in
the aggregate do it for human nature at large, each individual
contributing to the general endeavor. There is a tendency to judge every
new influence, as the painter judges every fresh stroke of his brush, by
its relation to the whole achieved or in contemplation, and to call it
good or ill according to whether it does or does not make for a
congruous development. We do this for the most part instinctively, that
is, without deliberate reasoning; something of the whole past,
hereditary and social, lives in our present state of mind, and welcomes
or rejects the suggestions of the moment. There is always some profound
reason for the eagerness that certain influences arouse in us, through
which they tap our energy and draw us in their direction, so that we
cling to and augment them, growing more and more in their sense. Thus if
one likes a book, so that he feels himself inclined to take it down from
time to time and linger in the companionship of the author, he may be
sure he is getting something that he needs, though it may be long before
he discovers what it is. It is quite evident that there must be, in
every phase of mental life, an æsthetic impulse to preside over
selection.
In common thought and speech sympathy and love are closely connected;
and in fact, as most frequently used, they mean somewhat the same thing,
the sympathy ordinarily understood being an affectionate sympathy, and
the love a sympathetic affection. I have already suggested that sympathy
is not dependent upon any particular emotion, but may, for instance, be
hostile as well as friendly; and it might also be shown that affection,
though it stimulates sympathy and so usually goes with it, is not
inseparable from it, but may exist in the absence of the mental
development which true sympathy requires. Whoever has visited an
institution for the care of idiots and imbeciles must have been struck
by the exuberance with which the milk of human kindness seems to flow
from the hearts of these creatures. If kept quiet and otherwise properly
cared for they are mostly as amiable as could be wished, fully as much
so, apparently, as persons of normal development; while at the same time
they offer little or no resistance to other impulses, such as rage and
fear, that sometimes possess them. Kindliness seems to exist primarily
as an animal instinct, so deeply rooted that mental degeneracy, which
works from the top down, does not destroy it until the mind sinks to the
lower grades of idiocy.
However, the excitant of love, in all its finer aspects, is a felt
possibility of communication, a dawning of sympathetic renewal. We grow
by influence, and where we feel the presence of an influence that is
enlarging or uplifting, we begin to love. Love is the normal and usual
accompaniment of the healthy expansion of human nature by communion; and
in turn is the stimulus to more communion. It seems not to be a special
emotion in quite the same way that anger, grief, fear, and the like are,
but something more primary and general, the stream, perhaps, of which
these and many other sentiments are special channels or eddies.
Love and sympathy, then, are two things which, though distinguishable,
are very commonly found together, each being an instigator of the other;
what we love we sympathize with, so far as our mental development
permits. To be sure, it is also true that when we hate a person, with an
intimate, imaginative, human hatred, we enter into his mind, or
sympathize—any strong interest will arouse the imagination and create
some sort of sympathy—but affection is a more usual stimulus.
Love, in this sense of kindly sympathy, may have all degrees of
emotional intensity and of sympathetic penetration, from a sort of
passive good-nature, not involving imagination or mental activity of any
sort, up to an all-containing human enthusiasm, involving the fullest
action of the highest faculties, and bringing with it so strong a
conviction of complete good that the best minds have felt and taught
that God is Love. Thus understood it is not any specific sort of
emotion, at least not that alone, but a general outflowing of the mind
and heart, accompanied by that gladness that the fullest life carries
with it. When the apostle John says that God is love, and that everyone
that loveth knoweth God, he evidently means something more than personal
affection, something that knows as well as feels, that takes account of
all special aspects of life and is just to all.
Ordinary personal affection does not fill our ideal of right or justice,
but encroaches, like all special impulses. It is not at all uncommon to
wrong one person out of affection for another. If, for instance, I am
able to procure a desirable position for a friend, it may well happen
that there is another and a fitter man, whom I do not know or do not
care for, from whose point of view my action is an injurious abuse of
power. It is evident that good can be identified with no simple emotion,
but must be sought in some wider phase of life that embraces all points
of view. So far as love approaches this comprehensiveness it tends
toward justice, because the claims of all live and are adjusted in the
mind of him who has it.
“Love’s hearts are faithful but not fond,
Bound for the just but not beyond.”
Thus love of a large and symmetrical sort, not merely a narrow
tenderness, implies justice and right, since a mind that has the breadth
and insight to feel this will be sure to work out magnanimous principles
of conduct.
It is in some such sense as this, as an expansion of human nature into a
wider life, that I can best understand the use of the word love in the
writings of certain great teachers, for instance in such passages as the
following:
“What is Love, and why is it the chief good, but because it is an
overpowering enthusiasm.... He who is in love is wise and is becoming
wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing
from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it
possesses.”[35]
“A great thing is love, ever a great good; which alone makes light all
the heavy and bears equally every inequality. For its burden is not a
burden, and it makes every bitter sweet and savory.... Love would be
arisen, not held down by anything base. Love would be free, and
alienated from every worldly affection, that its intimate desire may
not be hindered, that it may not become entangled through any temporal
good fortune, nor fall through any ill. There is nothing sweeter than
love, nothing braver, nothing higher, nothing broader, nothing
joyfuller, nothing fuller or better in heaven or on earth, since love
is born of God, nor can rest save in God above all created things.
“He that loves, flies, runs, and is joyful; is free and not
restrained. He gives all for all and has all in all, since he is at
rest above all in the one highest good from which every good flows and
proceeds. He regards not gifts, but beyond all good things turns to
the giver. Love oft knows not the manner, but its heat is more than
every manner. Love feels no burden, regards not labors, strives toward
more than it attains, argues not of impossibility, since it believes
that it may and can all things. Therefore it avails for all things,
and fulfils and accomplishes much where one not a lover falls and lies
helpless.”[36]
The sense of joy, of freshness, of youth, and of the indifference of
circumstances, that comes with love, seems to be connected with its
receptive, outgoing nature. It is the fullest life, and when we have it
we feel happy because our faculties are richly employed; young because
reception is the essence of youth, and indifferent to conditions because
we feel by our present experience that welfare is independent of them.
It is when we have lost our hold upon this sort of happiness that we
begin to be anxious about security and comfort, and to take a
distrustful and pessimistic attitude toward the world in general.
In the literature of the feelings we often find that love and self are
set over against each other, as by Tennyson when he says:
“Love took up the harp of life and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight.”
Let us consider for a moment whether, or in what sense, this antithesis
is a just one.
As regards its relation to self we may, perhaps, distinguish two kinds
of love, one of which is mingled with self-feeling and the other is not.
The latter is a disinterested, contemplative joy, in feeling which the
mind loses all sense of its private existence; while the former is
active, purposeful, and appropriate, rejoicing in its object with a
sense of being one with it as against the rest of the world.
In so far as one feels the disinterested love, that which has no designs
with reference to its object, he has no sense of “I” at all, but simply
exists in something to which he feels no bounds. Of this sort, for
instance, seem to be the delight in natural beauty, in the landscape and
the shining sea, the joy and rest of art—so long as we have no thought
of production or criticism—and the admiration of persons regarding whom
we have no intentions, either of influence or imitation. It appears to
be the final perfection of this unspecialized joy that the Buddhist
sages seek in Nirvana. Love of this sort obliterates that idea of
separate personality whose life is always unsure and often painful. One
who feels it leaves the precarious self; his boat glides out upon a
wider stream; he forgets his own deformity, weakness, shame or failure,
or if he thinks of them it is to feel free of them, released from their
coil. No matter what you and I may be, if we can comprehend that which
is fair and great we may still have it, may transcend ourselves and go
out into it. It carries us beyond the sense of all individuality, either
our own or others’, into the feeling of universal and joyous life. The
“I,” the specialized self, and the passions involved with it, have a
great and necessary part to play, but they afford no continuing city;
they are so evidently transient and insecure that the idealizing mind
cannot rest in them, and is glad to forget them at times and to go out
into a life joyous and without bounds in which thought may be at peace.
But love that plans and strives is always in some degree self-love. That
is, self-feeling is correlated with individualized, purposeful thought
and action, and so begins to spring up as soon as love lingers upon
something, forms intentions and begins to act. The love of a mother for
her child is appropriative, as is apparent from the fact that it is
capable of jealousy. Its characteristic is not selflessness, by any
means, but the association of self-feeling with the idea of _her_ child.
It is no more selfless in its nature than the ambitions of a man, and
may or may not be morally superior; the idea that it involves
self-abnegation seems to spring from the crudely material notion of
personality which assumes that other persons are external to the self.
And so of all productive, specialized love. I shall say more of the self
in the next chapter, but my belief is that it is impossible to cherish
and strive for special purposes without having self-feeling about them;
without becoming more or less capable of resentment, pride, and fear
regarding them. The imaginative and sympathetic aims that are commonly
spoken of as self-renunciation are more properly an enlargement of the
self, and by no means destroy, though they may transform, the “I.” A
wholly selfless love is mere contemplation, an escape from conscious
speciality, and a dwelling in undifferentiated life. It sees all things
as one and makes no effort.
These two sorts of love are properly complementary, one corresponding to
production and giving each of us a specialized intensity and
effectiveness, while in the other we find enlargement and relief. They
are indeed closely bound together and each contributory to the other.
The self and the special love that goes with it seem to grow by a sort
of crystallization about them of elements from the wider life. The man
first loves the woman as something transcendent, divine, or universal,
which he dares not think of appropriating; but presently he begins to
claim her as _his_ in antithesis to the rest of the world, and to have
hopes, fears, and resentments regarding her; the painter loves beauty
contemplatively, and then tries to paint it; the poet delights in his
visions, and then tries to tell them, and so on. It is necessary to our
growth that we should be capable of delighting in that upon which we
have no designs, because we draw our fresh materials from this region.
The sort of self-love that is harmful is one that has hardened about a
particular object and ceased to expand. On the other hand, it seems that
the power to enter into universal life depends upon a healthy
development of the special self. “Willst du in’s Unendliche schreiten,”
said Goethe, “geh nur im Endlichen nach allen Seiten.” That which we
have achieved by special, selfful endeavor becomes a basis of inference
and sympathy, which gives a wider reach to our disinterested
contemplation. While the artist is trying to paint he forfeits the pure
joy of contemplation; he is strenuous, anxious, vain, or mortified; but
when he ceases trying he will be capable, just because of this
experience, of a fuller appreciation of beauty in general than he was
before. And so of personal affection; the winning of wife, home, and
children involves constant self-assertion, but it multiplies the power
of sympathy. We cannot, then, exalt one of these over the other; what
would seem desirable is that the self, without losing its special
purpose and vigor, should keep expanding, so that it should tend to
include more and more of what is largest and highest in the general
life.
It appears, then, that sympathy, in the sense of mental sharing or
communication, is by no means a simple matter, but that so much enters
into it as to suggest that by the time we thoroughly understood one
sympathetic experience we should be in a way to understand the social
order itself. An act of communication is a particular aspect of the
whole which we call society, and necessarily reflects that of which it
is a characteristic part. To come into touch with a friend, a leader, an
antagonist, or a book, is an act of sympathy; but it is precisely in the
totality of such acts that society consists. Even the most complex and
rigid institutions may be looked upon as consisting of innumerable
personal influences or acts of sympathy, organized, in the case of
institutions, into a definite and continuing whole by means of some
system of permanent symbols, such as laws, constitutions, sacred
writings, and the like, in which personal influences are preserved. And,
turning the matter around, we may look upon every act of sympathy as a
particular expression of the history, institutions, and tendencies of
the society in which it takes place. Every influence which you or I can
receive or impart will be characteristic of the race, the country, the
epoch, in which our personalities have grown up.
The main thing here is to bring out the _vital_ unity of every phase of
personal life, from the simplest interchange of a friendly word to the
polity of nations or of hierarchies. The common idea of the matter is
crudely mechanical—that there are persons as there are bricks and
societies as there are walls. A person, or some trait of personality or
of intercourse, is held to be the element of society, and the latter is
formed by the aggregation of these elements. Now there is no such thing
as an element of society in the sense that a brick is the element of a
wall; this is a mechanical conception quite inapplicable to vital
phenomena. I should say that living wholes have aspects but not
elements.
In the Capitoline Museum at Rome is a famous statue of Venus, which,
like many works of this kind, is ingeniously mounted upon a pivot, so
that one who wishes to study it can place it at any angle with reference
to the light that he may prefer. Thus he may get an indefinite number of
views, but in every view what he really observes, so far as he observes
intelligently, is the whole statue in a particular aspect. Even if he
fixes his attention upon the foot, or the great toe, he sees this part,
if he sees it rightly, in relation to the work as a whole. And it seems
to me that the study of human life is analogous in character. It is
expedient to divide it into manageable parts in some way; but this
division can only be a matter of aspects, not of elements. The various
chapters of this book, for instance, do not deal with separable
subjects, but merely with phases of a common subject, and the same is
true of any work in psychology, history or biology.
CHAPTER V
THE SOCIAL SELF—1. THE MEANING OF “I”
THE “EMPIRICAL SELF”—“I” AS A STATE OF FEELING—ITS RELATION TO THE
BODY—AS A SENSE OF POWER OR CAUSATION—AS A SENSE OF SPECIALITY OR
DIFFERENTIATION IN A SOCIAL LIFE—THE REFLECTED OR LOOKING-GLASS
“I”—“I” IS ROOTED IN THE PAST AND VARIES WITH SOCIAL CONDITIONS—ITS
RELATION TO HABIT—TO DISINTERESTED LOVE—HOW CHILDREN LEARN THE
MEANING OF “I”—THE SPECULATIVE OR METAPHYSICAL “I” IN CHILDREN—THE
LOOKING-GLASS “I” IN CHILDREN—THE SAME IN ADOLESCENCE—“I” IN
RELATION TO SEX—SIMPLICITY AND AFFECTATION—SOCIAL SELF-FEELING IS
UNIVERSAL.
It is well to say at the outset that by the word “self” in this
discussion is meant simply that which is designated in common speech by
the pronouns of the first person singular, “I,” “me,” “my,” “mine,” and
“myself.” “Self” and “ego” are used by metaphysicians and moralists in
many other senses, more or less remote from the “I” of daily speech and
thought, and with these I wish to have as little to do as possible. What
is here discussed is what psychologists call the empirical self, the
self that can be apprehended or verified by ordinary observation. I
qualify it by the word social not as implying the existence of a self
that is not social—for I think that the “I” of common language always
has more or less distinct reference to other people as well as the
speaker—but because I wish to emphasize and dwell upon the social aspect
of it.
Although the topic of the self is regarded as an abstruse one this
abstruseness belongs chiefly, perhaps, to the metaphysical discussion of
the “pure ego”—whatever that may be—while the empirical self should not
be very much more difficult to get hold of than other facts of the mind.
At any rate, it may be assumed that the pronouns of the first person
have a substantial, important, and not very recondite meaning, otherwise
they would not be in constant and intelligible use by simple people and
young children the world over. And since they have such a meaning why
should it not be observed and reflected upon like any other matter of
fact? As to the underlying mystery, it is no doubt real, important, and
a very fit subject of discussion by those who are competent, but I do
not see that it is a _peculiar_ mystery. I mean that it seems to be
simply a phase of the general mystery of life, not pertaining to “I”
more than to any other personal or social fact; so that here as
elsewhere those who are not attempting to penetrate the mystery may
simply ignore it. If this is a just view of the matter, “I” is merely a
fact like any other.
The distinctive thing in the idea for which the pronouns of the first
person are names is apparently a characteristic kind of feeling which
may be called the my-feeling or sense of appropriation. Almost any sort
of ideas may be associated with this feeling, and so come to be named
“I” or “mine,” but the feeling, and that alone it would seem, is the
determining factor in the matter. As Professor James says in his
admirable discussion of the self, the words “me” and “self” designate
“all the things which have the power to produce in a stream of
consciousness excitement of a certain peculiar sort.”[37] This view is
very fully set forth by Professor Hiram M. Stanley, whose work, “The
Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling,” has an extremely suggestive chapter
on self-feeling.
I do not mean that the feeling aspect of the self is necessarily more
important than any other, but that it is the immediate and decisive sign
and proof of what “I” is; there is no appeal from it; if we go behind it
it must be to study its history and conditions, not to question its
authority. But, of course, this study of history and conditions may be
quite as profitable as the direct contemplation of self-feeling. What I
would wish to do is to present each aspect in its proper light.
The emotion or feeling of self may be regarded as an instinct, doubtless
evolved in connection with its important function in stimulating and
unifying the special activities of individuals.[38] It is thus very
profoundly rooted in the history of the human race and apparently
indispensable to any plan of life at all similar to ours. It seems to
exist in a vague though vigorous form at the birth of each individual,
and, like other instinctive ideas or germs of ideas, to be defined and
developed by experience, becoming associated, or rather incorporated,
with muscular, visual and other sensations; with perceptions,
apperceptions and conceptions of every degree of complexity and of
infinite variety of content; and, especially, with personal ideas.
Meantime the feeling itself does not remain unaltered, but undergoes
differentiation and refinement just as does any other sort of crude
innate feeling. Thus, while retaining under every phase its
characteristic tone or flavor, it breaks up into innumerable
self-sentiments. And concrete self-feeling, as it exists in mature
persons, is a whole made up of these various sentiments, along with a
good deal of primitive emotion not thus broken up. It partakes fully of
the general development of the mind, but never loses that peculiar gusto
of appropriation that causes us to name a thought with a first-personal
pronoun. The other contents of the self-idea are of little use,
apparently, in defining it, because they are so extremely various. It
would be no more futile, it seems to me, to attempt to define fear by
enumerating the things that people are afraid of, than to attempt to
define “I” by enumerating the objects with which the word is associated.
Very much as fear means primarily a state of feeling, or its expression,
and not darkness, fire, lions, snakes, or other things that excite it,
so “I” means primarily self-feeling, or its expression, and not body,
clothes, treasures, ambition, honors, and the like, with which this
feeling may be connected. In either case it is possible and useful to go
behind the feeling and enquire what ideas arouse it and why they do so,
but this is in a sense a secondary investigation.
Since “I” is known to our experience primarily as a feeling, or as a
feeling-ingredient in our ideas, it cannot be described or defined
without suggesting that feeling. We are sometimes likely to fall into a
formal and empty way of talking regarding questions of emotion, by
attempting to define that which is in its nature primary and
indefinable. A formal definition of self-feeling, or indeed of any sort
of feeling, must be as hollow as a formal definition of the taste of
salt, or the color red; we can expect to know what it is only by
experiencing it. There can be no final test of the self except the way
we feel; it is that toward which we have the “my” attitude. But as this
feeling is quite as familiar to us and as easy to recall as the taste of
salt or the color red, there should be no difficulty in understanding
what is meant by it. One need only imagine some attack on his “me,” say
ridicule of his dress or an attempt to take away his property or his
child, or his good name by slander, and self-feeling immediately
appears. Indeed, he need only pronounce, with strong emphasis, one of
the self-words, like “I” or “my,” and self-feeling will be recalled by
association. Another good way is to enter by sympathy into some
self-assertive state of mind depicted in literature; as, for instance,
into that of Coriolanus when, having been sneered at as a “boy of
tears,” he cries out:
“Boy!...
If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there,
That, like an eagle in a dovecote, I
Fluttered your Volscians in Corioli;
Alone I did it.—Boy!”
Here is a self indeed, which no one can fail to feel, though he might be
unable to describe it. What a ferocious scream of the outraged ego is
that “I” at the end of the second line!
So much is written on this topic that ignores self-feeling and thus
deprives “self” of all vivid and palpable meaning, that I feel it
permissible to add a few more passages in which this feeling is forcibly
expressed. Thus in Lowell’s poem, “A Glance Behind the Curtain,”
Cromwell says:
“I, perchance,
Am one raised up by the Almighty arm
To witness some great truth to all the world.”
And his Columbus, on the bow of his vessel, soliloquizes:
“Here am I, with no friend but the sad sea,
The beating heart of this great enterprise,
Which, without me, would stiffen in swift death.”
And so the “I am the way” which we read in the New Testament is surely
the expression of a sentiment not very different from these. In the
following we have a more plaintive sentiment of self:
_Philoctetes._— And know’st thou not, O boy, whom thou dost see?
_Neoptolemus._— How can I know a man I ne’er beheld?
_Philoctetes._— And didst thou never hear my name, nor fame
Of these my ills, in which I pined away?
_Neoptolemus._— Know that I nothing know of what thou ask’st.
_Philoctetes._— O crushed with many woes, and of the Gods
Hated am I, of whom, in this my woe,
No rumor travelled homeward, nor went forth
Through any clime of Hellas.[39]
We all have thoughts of the same sort as these, and yet it is possible
to talk so coldly or mystically about the self that one begins to forget
that there is, really, any such thing.
But perhaps the best way to realize the naïve meaning of “I” is to
listen to the talk of children playing together, especially if they do
not agree very well. They use the first person with none of the
conventional self-repression of their elders, but with much emphasis and
variety of inflection, so that its emotional animus is unmistakable.
Self-feeling of a reflective and agreeable sort, an appropriative zest
of contemplation, is strongly suggested by the word “gloating.” To
gloat, in this sense, is as much as to think “mine, mine, mine,” with a
pleasant warmth of feeling. Thus a boy gloats over something he has made
with his scroll-saw, over the bird he has brought down with his gun, or
over his collection of stamps or eggs; a girl gloats over her new
clothes, and over the approving words or looks of others; a farmer over
his fields and his stock; a business man over his trade and his bank
account; a mother over her child; the poet over a successful quatrain;
the self-righteous man over the state of his soul; and in like manner
everyone gloats over the prosperity of any cherished idea.
I would not be understood as saying that self-feeling is clearly marked
off in experience from other kinds of feeling; but it is, perhaps, as
definite in this regard as anger, fear, grief, and the like. To quote
Professor James, “The emotions themselves of self-satisfaction and
abasement are of a unique sort, each as worthy to be classed as a
primitive emotional species as are, for example, rage or pain.”[40] It
is true here, as wherever mental facts are distinguished, that there are
no fences, but that one thing merges by degrees into another. Yet if “I”
did not denote an idea much the same in all minds and fairly
distinguishable from other ideas, it could not be used freely and
universally as a means of communication.
As many people have the impression that the verifiable self, the object
that we name with “I,” is usually the material body, it may be well to
say that this impression is an illusion, easily dispelled by anyone who
will undertake a simple examination of facts. It is true that when we
philosophize a little about “I” and look around for a tangible object to
which to attach it, we soon fix upon the material body as the most
available _locus_; but when we use the word naïvely, as in ordinary
speech, it is not very common to think of the body in connection with
it; not nearly so common as it is to think of other things. There is no
difficulty in testing this statement, since the word “I” is one of the
commonest in conversation and literature, so that nothing is more
practicable than to study its meaning at any length that may be desired.
One need only listen to ordinary speech until the word has occurred,
say, a hundred times, noting its connections, or observe its use in a
similar number of cases by the characters in a novel. Ordinarily it will
be found that in not more than ten cases in a hundred does “I” have
reference to the body of the person speaking. It refers chiefly to
opinions, purposes, desires, claims, and the like, concerning matters
that involve no thought of the body. _I_ think or feel so and so; _I_
wish or intend so and so; _I_ want this or that; are typical uses, the
self-feeling being associated with the view, purpose, or object
mentioned. It should also be remembered that “my” and “mine” are as much
the names of the self as “I” and these, of course, commonly refer to
miscellaneous possessions.
I had the curiosity to attempt a rough classification of the first
hundred “I’s” and “me’s” in Hamlet, with the following results. The
pronoun was used in connection with perception, as “I hear,” “I see,”
fourteen times; with thought, sentiment, intention, etc., thirty-two
times; with wish, as “I pray you,” six times; as speaking—“I’ll speak to
it”—sixteen times; as spoken to, twelve times; in connection with
action, involving perhaps some vague notion of the body, as “I came to
Denmark,” nine times; vague or doubtful, ten times; as equivalent to
bodily appearance—“No more like my father than I to Hercules”—once. Some
of the classifications are arbitrary, and another observer would
doubtless get a different result; but he could not fail, I think, to
conclude that Shakespeare’s characters are seldom thinking of their
bodies when they say “I” or “me.” And in this respect they appear to be
representative of mankind in general.
As already suggested, instinctive self-feeling is doubtless connected in
evolution with its important function in stimulating and unifying the
special activities of individuals. It appears to be associated chiefly
with ideas of the exercise of power, of being a cause, ideas that
emphasize the antithesis between the mind and the rest of the world. The
first definite thoughts that a child associates with self-feeling are
probably those of his earliest endeavors to control visible objects—his
limbs, his playthings, his bottle, and the like. Then he attempts to
control the actions of the persons about him, and so his circle of power
and of self-feeling widens without interruption to the most complex
objects of mature ambition. Although he does not say “I” or “my” during
the first year or two, yet he expresses so clearly by his actions the
feeling that adults associate with these words that we cannot deny him a
self even in the first weeks.
The correlation of self-feeling with purposeful activity is easily seen
by observing the course of any productive enterprise. If a boy sets
about making a boat, and has any success, his interest in the matter
waxes, he gloats over it, the keel and stern are dear to his heart, and
its ribs are more to him than those of his own frame. He is eager to
call in his friends and acquaintances, saying to them, “See what I am
doing! Is it not remarkable?”, feeling elated when it is praised, and
resentful or humiliated when fault is found with it. But so soon as he
finishes it and turns to something else, his self-feeling begins to fade
away from it, and in a few weeks at most he will have become
comparatively indifferent. We all know that much the same course of
feeling accompanies the achievements of adults. It is impossible to
produce a picture, a poem, an essay, a difficult bit of masonry, or any
other work of art or craft, without having self-feeling regarding it,
amounting usually to considerable excitement and desire for some sort of
appreciation; but this rapidly diminishes with the activity itself, and
often lapses into indifference after it ceases.
It may perhaps be objected that the sense of self, instead of being
limited to times of activity and definite purpose, is often most
conspicuous when the mind is unoccupied or undecided, and that the idle
and ineffectual are commonly the most sensitive in their self-esteem.
This, however, may be regarded as an instance of the principle that all
instincts are likely to assume troublesome forms when denied wholesome
expression. The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of
life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.
The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the
communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own. Self-feeling has
its chief scope _within_ the general life, not outside of it, the
special endeavor or tendency of which it is the emotional aspect finding
its principal field of exercise in a world of personal forces, reflected
in the mind by a world of personal impressions.
As connected with the thought of other persons it is always a
consciousness of the peculiar or differentiated aspect of one’s life,
because that is the aspect that has to be sustained by purpose and
endeavor, and its more aggressive forms tend to attach themselves to
whatever one finds to be at once congenial to one’s own tendencies and
at variance with those of others with whom one is in mental contact. It
is here that they are most needed to serve their function of stimulating
characteristic activity, of fostering those personal variations which
the general plan of life seems to require. Heaven, says Shakespeare,
doth divide
“The state of man in divers functions,
Setting endeavor in continual motion,”
and self-feeling is one of the means by which this diversity is
achieved.
Agreeably to this view we find that the aggressive self manifests itself
most conspicuously in an appropriativeness of objects of common desire,
corresponding to the individual’s need of power over such objects to
secure his own peculiar development, and to the danger of opposition
from others who also need them. And this extends from material objects
to lay hold, in the same spirit, of the attentions and affections of
other people, of all sorts of plans and ambitions, including the noblest
special purposes the mind can entertain, and indeed of any conceivable
idea which may come to seem a part of one’s life and in need of
assertion against someone else. The attempt to limit the word self and
its derivatives to the lower aims of personality is quite arbitrary; at
variance with common-sense as expressed by the emphatic use of “I” in
connection with the sense of duty and other high motives, and
unphilosophical as ignoring the function of the self as the organ of
specialized endeavor of higher as well as lower kinds.
That the “I” of common speech has a meaning which includes some sort of
reference to other persons is involved in the very fact that the word
and the ideas it stands for are phenomena of language and the
communicative life. It is doubtful whether it is possible to use
language at all without thinking more or less distinctly of someone
else, and certainly the things to which we give names and which have a
large place in reflective thought are almost always those which are
impressed upon us by our contact with other people. Where there is no
communication there can be no nomenclature and no developed thought.
What we call “me,” “mine,” or “myself” is, then, not something separate
from the general life, but the most interesting part of it, a part whose
interest arises from the very fact that it is both general and
individual. That is, we care for it just because it is that phase of the
mind that is living and striving in the common life, trying to impress
itself upon the minds of others. “I” is a militant social tendency,
working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of
tendencies. So far as it can it waxes, as all life does. To think of it
as apart from society is a palpable absurdity of which no one could be
guilty who really _saw_ it as a fact of life.
“Der Mensch erkennt sich nur im Menschen, nur
Das Leben lehret jedem was er sei.”[41]
If a thing has no relation to others of which one is conscious he is
unlikely to think of it at all, and if he does think of it he cannot, it
seems to me, regard it as emphatically _his_. The appropriative sense is
always the shadow, as it were, of the common life, and when we have it
we have a sense of the latter in connection with it. Thus, if we think
of a secluded part of the woods as “ours,” it is because we think, also,
that others do not go there. As regards the body I doubt if we have a
vivid my-feeling about any part of it which is not thought of, however
vaguely, as having some actual or possible reference to someone else.
Intense self-consciousness regarding it arises along with instincts or
experiences which connect it with the thought of others. Internal
organs, like the liver, are not thought of as peculiarly ours unless we
are trying to communicate something regarding them, as, for instance,
when they are giving us trouble and we are trying to get sympathy.
“I,” then, is not all of the mind, but a peculiarly central, vigorous,
and well-knit portion of it, not separate from the rest but gradually
merging into it, and yet having a certain practical distinctness, so
that a man generally shows clearly enough by his language and behavior
what his “I” is as distinguished from thoughts he does not appropriate.
It may be thought of, as already suggested, under the analogy of a
central colored area on a lighted wall. It might also, and perhaps more
justly, be compared to the nucleus of a living cell, not altogether
separate from the surrounding matter, out of which indeed it is formed,
but more active and definitely organized.
The reference to other persons involved in the sense of self may be
distinct and particular, as when a boy is ashamed to have his mother
catch him at something she has forbidden, or it may be vague and
general, as when one is ashamed to do something which only his
conscience, expressing his sense of social responsibility, detects and
disapproves; but it is always there. There is no sense of “I,” as in
pride or shame, without its correlative sense of you, or he, or they.
Even the miser gloating over his hidden gold can feel the “mine” only as
he is aware of the world of men over whom he has secret power; and the
case is very similar with all kinds of hid treasure. Many painters,
sculptors, and writers have loved to withhold their work from the world,
fondling it in seclusion until they were quite done with it; but the
delight in this, as in all secrets, depends upon a sense of the value of
what is concealed.
In a very large and interesting class of cases the social reference
takes the form of a somewhat definite imagination of how one’s self—that
is any idea he appropriates—appears in a particular mind, and the kind
of self-feeling one has is determined by the attitude toward this
attributed to that other mind. A social self of this sort might be
called the reflected or looking-glass self:
“Each to each a looking-glass
Reflects the other that doth pass.”
As we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass, and are interested
in them because they are ours, and pleased or otherwise with them
according as they do or do not answer to what we should like them to be;
so in imagination we perceive in another’s mind some thought of our
appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are
variously affected by it.
A self-idea of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the
imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of
his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as
pride or mortification. The comparison with a looking-glass hardly
suggests the second element, the imagined judgment, which is quite
essential. The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere
mechanical reflection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment, the
imagined effect of this reflection upon another’s mind. This is evident
from the fact that the character and weight of that other, in whose mind
we see ourselves, makes all the difference with our feeling. We are
ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man,
cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined
one, and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments
of the other mind. A man will boast to one person of an action—say some
sharp transaction in trade—which he would be ashamed to own to another.
It should be evident that the ideas that are associated with
self-feeling and form the intellectual content of the self cannot be
covered by any simple description, as by saying that the body has such a
part in it, friends such a part, plans so much, etc., but will vary
indefinitely with particular temperaments and environments. The tendency
of the self, like every aspect of personality, is expressive of
far-reaching hereditary and social factors, and is not to be understood
or predicted except in connection with the general life. Although
special, it is in no way separate—speciality and separateness are not
only different but contradictory, since the former implies connection
with a whole. The object of self-feeling is affected by the general
course of history, by the particular development of nations, classes,
and professions, and other conditions of this sort.
The truth of this is perhaps most decisively shown in the fact that even
those ideas that are most generally associated or colored with the “my”
feeling, such as one’s idea of his visible person, of his name, his
family, his intimate friends, his property, and so on, are not
universally so associated, but may be separated from the self by
peculiar social conditions. Thus the ascetics, who have played so large
a part in the history of Christianity and of other religions and
philosophies, endeavored not without success to divorce their
appropriative thought from all material surroundings, and especially
from their physical persons, which they sought to look upon as
accidental and degrading circumstances of the soul’s earthly sojourn. In
thus estranging themselves from their bodies, from property and comfort,
from domestic affections—whether of wife or child, mother, brother or
sister—and from other common objects of ambition, they certainly gave a
singular direction to self-feeling, but they did not destroy it: there
can be no doubt that the instinct, which seems imperishable so long as
mental vigor endures, found other ideas to which to attach itself; and
the strange and uncouth forms which ambition took in those centuries
when the solitary, filthy, idle, and sense-tormenting anchorite was a
widely accepted ideal of human life, are a matter of instructive study
and reflection. Even in the highest exponents of the ascetic ideal, like
St. Jerome, it is easy to see that the discipline, far from effacing the
self, only concentrated its energy in lofty and unusual channels. The
self-idea may be that of some great moral reform, of a religious creed,
of the destiny of one’s soul after death, or even a cherished conception
of the deity. Thus devout writers, like George Herbert and Thomas à
Kempis, often address _my_ God, not at all conventionally as I conceive
the matter, but with an intimate sense of appropriation. And it has been
observed that the demand for the continued and separate existence of the
individual soul after death is an expression of self-feeling, as by J.
A. Symonds, who thinks that it is connected with the intense egotism and
personality of the European races, and asserts that the millions of
Buddhism shrink from it with horror.[42]
Habit and familiarity are not of themselves sufficient to cause an idea
to be appropriated into the self. Many habits and familiar objects that
have been forced upon us by circumstances rather than chosen for their
congeniality remain external and possibly repulsive to the self; and, on
the other hand, a novel but very congenial element in experience, like
the idea of a new toy, or, if you please, Romeo’s idea of Juliet, is
often appropriated almost immediately, and becomes, for the time at
least, the very heart of the self. Habit has the same fixing and
consolidating action in the growth of the self that it has elsewhere,
but is not its distinctive characteristic.
As suggested in the previous chapter, self-feeling may be regarded as in
a sense the antithesis, or better perhaps, the complement, of that
disinterested and contemplative love that tends to obliterate the sense
of a divergent individuality. Love of this sort has no sense of bounds,
but is what we feel when we are expanding and assimilating new and
indeterminate experience, while self-feeling accompanies the
appropriating, delimiting, and defending of a certain part of
experience; the one impels us to receive life, the other to individuate
it. The self, from this point of view, might be regarded as a sort of
citadel of the mind, fortified without and containing selected treasures
within, while love is an undivided share in the rest of the universe. In
a healthy mind each contributes to the growth of the other: what we love
intensely or for a long time we are likely to bring within the citadel,
and to assert as part of ourself. On the other hand, it is only on the
basis of a substantial self that a person is capable of progressive
sympathy or love.
The sickness of either is to lack the support of the other. There is no
health in a mind except as it keeps expanding, taking in fresh life,
feeling love and enthusiasm; and so long as it does this its
self-feeling is likely to be modest and generous; since these sentiments
accompany that sense of the large and the superior which love implies.
But if love closes, the self contracts and hardens: the mind having
nothing else to occupy its attention and give it that change and renewal
it requires, busies itself more and more with self-feeling, which takes
on narrow and disgusting forms, like avarice, arrogance, and fatuity. It
is necessary that we should have self-feeling about a matter during its
conception and execution; but when it is accomplished or has failed the
self ought to break loose and escape, renewing its skin like the snake,
as Thoreau says. No matter what a man does, he is not fully sane or
human unless there is a spirit of freedom in him, a soul unconfined by
purpose and larger than the practicable world. And this is really what
those mean who inculcate the suppression of the self; they mean that its
rigidity must be broken up by growth and renewal, that it must be more
or less decisively “born again.” A healthy, self must be both vigorous
and plastic, a nucleus of solid, well-knit private purpose and feeling,
guided and nourished by sympathy.
The view that “self” and the pronouns of the first person are names
which the race has learned to apply to an instinctive attitude of mind,
and which each child in turn learns to apply in a similar way, was
impressed upon me by observing my child M. at the time when she was
learning to use these pronouns. When she was two years and two weeks old
I was surprised to discover that she had a clear notion of the first and
second persons when used possessively. When asked, “Where is your nose?”
she would put her hand upon it and say “my.” She also understood that
when someone else said “my” and touched an object, it meant something
opposite to what was meant when she touched the same object and used the
same word. Now, anyone who will exercise his imagination upon the
question how this matter must appear to a mind having no means of
knowing anything about “I” and “my” except what it learns by hearing
them used, will see that it should be very puzzling. Unlike other words,
the personal pronouns have, apparently, no uniform meaning, but convey
different and even opposite ideas when employed by different persons. It
seems remarkable that children should master the problem before they
arrive at considerable power of abstract reasoning. How should a little
girl of two, not particularly reflective, have discovered that “my” was
not the sign of a definite object like other words, but meant something
different with each person who used it? And, still more surprising, how
should she have achieved the correct use of it with reference to herself
which, it would seem, _could not be copied from anyone else_, simply
because no one else used it to describe what belonged to her? The
meaning of words is learned by associating them with other phenomena.
But how is it possible to learn the meaning of one which, as used by
others, is never associated with the same phenomenon as when properly
used by one’s self? Watching her use of the first person, I was at once
struck with the fact that she employed it almost wholly in a possessive
sense, and that, too, when in an aggressive, self-assertive mood. It was
extremely common to see R. tugging at one end of a plaything and M. at
the other, screaming, “My, my.” “Me” was sometimes nearly equivalent to
“my,” and was also employed to call attention to herself when she wanted
something done for her. Another common use of “my” was to demand
something she did not have at all. Thus if R. had something the like of
which she wanted, say a cart, she would exclaim, “Where’s _my_ cart?”
It seemed to me that she might have learned the use of these pronouns
about as follows. The self-feeling had always been there. From the first
week she had wanted things and cried and fought for them. She had also
become familiar by observation and opposition with similar appropriative
activities on the part of R. Thus she not only had the feeling herself,
but by associating it with its visible expression had probably divined
it, sympathized with it, resented it, in others. Grasping, tugging, and
screaming would be associated with the feeling in her own case and would
recall the feeling when observed in others. They would constitute a
language, precedent to the use of first-personal pronouns, to express
the self-idea. All was ready, then, for the word to name this
experience. She now observed that R., when contentiously appropriating
something, frequently exclaimed, “_my_,” “_mine_,” “give it to _me_,”
“_I_ want it,” and the like. Nothing more natural, then, than that she
should adopt these words as names for a frequent and vivid experience
with which she was already familiar in her own case and had learned to
attribute to others. Accordingly it appeared to me, as I recorded in my
notes at the time, that “‘my’ and ‘mine’ are simply names for concrete
images of appropriativeness,” embracing both the appropriative feeling
and its manifestation. If this is true the child does not at first work
out the I-and-you idea in an abstract form. The first-personal pronoun
is a sign of a concrete thing after all, but that thing is not primarily
the child’s body, or his muscular sensations as such, but the phenomenon
of aggressive appropriation, practised by himself, witnessed in others,
and incited and interpreted by a hereditary instinct. This seems to get
over the difficulty above mentioned, namely, the seeming lack of a
common content between the meaning of “my” when used by another and when
used by one’s self. This common content is found in the appropriative
feeling and the visible and audible signs of that feeling. An element of
difference and strife comes in, of course, in the opposite actions or
purposes which the “my” of another and one’s own “my” are likely to
stand for. When another person says “mine” regarding something which I
claim, I sympathize with him enough to understand what he means, but it
is a hostile sympathy, overpowered by another and more vivid “mine”
connected with the idea of drawing the object my way.
In other words, the meaning of “I” and “mine” is learned in the same way
that the meanings of hope, regret, chagrin, disgust, and thousands of
other words of emotion and sentiment are learned: that is, by having the
feeling, imputing it to others in connection with some kind of
expression, and hearing the word along with it. As to its communication
and growth the self-idea is in no way peculiar that I see, but
essentially like other ideas. In its more complex forms, such as are
expressed by “I” in conversation and literature, it is a social
sentiment, or type of sentiments, defined and developed by intercourse,
in the manner suggested in a previous chapter.