SENTIMENT
Assis sur un banc de Mail, M. l’abbé Lantaigne, supérieur du grand
séminaire, et M. Bergeret, maître de conférences à la Faculté des
lettres, conversaient, selon leur coutume d’été. Ils étaient sur
toutes choses d’un sentiment contraire; jamais deux hommes ne
furent plus différents d’esprit et de caractère. Mais seuls dans la
ville ils s’intéressaient aux idées générales. Cette sympathie les
réunissait.—ANATOLE FRANCE
§ 68. =The Nature of Sentiment.=—In ordinary speech, the word
‘sentiment,’ like the word ‘feeling,’ is used in many different senses;
and, unlike ‘feeling,’ it has not settled down to a single meaning
within psychology. We must therefore define it arbitrarily; and we
shall reserve it, in this book, to denote _the feeling-complex which
gathers about a judgement or an imaginative construction_. In emotion,
we are brought face to face with an incident or situation which
overwhelms us, takes possession of us; the emotion arises in the state
of primary attention. A very strong and complex feeling is formed,
and is rendered still stronger and still more complex by the organic
sensations that come with our bodily attitude towards the situation (p.
216). In =sentiment=, we are also brought face to face with an incident
or situation; but this is of a kind that demands secondary attention,
effortful and divisive attention, now to one phase or feature and
now to another. We take possession of it, so to speak, in place of
its taking possession of us. Otherwise, the sentiment resembles the
emotion; a complex feeling is formed, and is reinforced by organic
sensations; the bodily expression of sentiment is of the same kind as
that of emotion. Suppose, for instance, that we sit down to a book by
a new author. If we are actively and not passively interested; if we
read critically, in the light of previous study and present knowledge;
if we judge as we read; then our _felt realisation_ of the aptness,
fitness, rightness of the author’s style is a sentiment. Or suppose
that we are looking at a painting by a great master. If we can see how
form and colour flowed straight out of the brush; if we can appreciate
this fluency as the reward of toil upon toil, essay after essay; if
our own critical vision can seize the painter’s idea, and note the
individuality with which that idea was conceived and is now expressed;
then our _felt realisation_ of the beauty of the painting is, again,
a sentiment. These are examples offered from the standpoint of the
critic; and such examples come naturally to mind, since criticism is
both commoner and more articulate than creative art; but it need hardly
be said that the artist too, as his construction proceeds, will have
the same sort of experience, and probably in more intensive form.
_The sentiment thus stands upon a higher level of mental development
than the emotion_; there is no other difference. And it follows from
what we have said of thought (p. 262) that _the sentiment is a rare
experience_. Just as there are many apparent judgements that are not
really thought at all, so there are many apparent sentiments that are
based upon borrowed judgements, and have never been anything more than
feeling-attitudes, more or less explicit; and just as secondary lapses
into derived primary attention, so will a true sentiment lapse, with
time and repetition, into a feeling-attitude. Hence, in describing and
identifying the sentiments, we must be constantly on guard against
confusing them with attitudes based on ready-made judgements, and with
attitudes based upon what were once true judgements but are now matters
of habitual acceptance. Our ‘sentiment’ of honour, for example, may
never have cost us a moment’s attention. A definition of honour has
come to us, by tradition and precept, and we have accepted it without
thought; situations which involve honour take possession of us, as
emotive situations do, and we reply by the feeling-attitude. Or again,
our ‘sentiment’ of beauty in pictorial art may once have been a real
sentiment; we may have laboriously studied art-canons, have studiously
dissected art-forms by secondary attention, have steeped ourselves
in appreciation and criticism. Now, after all this labour, we have
nothing but an attitude to a new picture; we ‘instinctively’ approve
or disapprove of a work of art, without making any positive effort
to analyse it. To talk, in these cases, about a moral or an æsthetic
sentiment would be psychologically wrong; we experience simply two
feeling-attitudes.
If, then, psychology were concerned simply with the part played
in the mental life by the sentiments proper, the subject might be
dismissed in a few words; the sentiments would figure in a text-book
of psychology very much as the ‘rare earths’ figure in an elementary
chemistry. We cannot thus dismiss them, and for two reasons. In the
first place, _the experience of a true sentiment_, in any one of the
great departments in which sentiments may appear,—we shall mention
them presently,—_leaves behind it a remarkably varied train of
feeling-attitudes_; and these attitudes are thenceforward a permanent
possession; we give illustrations in § 69. Secondly, _the experience of
a sentiment, and the possession of the consequent variety of attitudes,
enable one empathically to realise the attitudes and responses
of those who, in other departments, have reached the same mental
level_. Not only is there a ‘freemasonry among artists’; there is a
freemasonry among all men and women who have at any time really judged
or constructed; so that the radical reformer and the conservative
reactionary, the austere moralist and the disciple of art for art’s
sake, feel at home with each other, can get to close quarters with each
other; their ideas and beliefs may differ as the east differs from the
west, but—if they have honestly wrestled with their problem—there
is a felt psychological community between them. The great writer who
goes by the name of Anatole France has brought out this truth, in
his own ironical way, in the quotation which heads the chapter. So
that individually and socially the sentiments demand consideration;
the attitudes which derive from them enrich and diversify individual
experience, and establish a social bond of empathic understanding among
those who would else be psychological strangers.
§ 69. =The Variety of Feeling-Attitude.=—Let us take an elementary
example of the variety of attitudes which follows in the wake of a
sentiment. The sentiment which we select is one of those most widely
attained: the _sentiment of fitness of literary style_. If, now, you
read Lafcadio Hearn’s _Japan_,—as who has not?—you cannot fail to
notice the differences of paragraphing. There are paragraphs which
follow one another in the ordinary way, without break. There are
paragraphs separated by a blank space, the width of a line of print.
There are paragraphs that begin with a dash. There are paragraphs
separated by a line or triangle of asterisks. There are paragraphs
which end with a series of periods. And these modes of connective
separation, as we may be allowed to call them, are themselves variously
combined.
Hearn has tried by such rather clumsy means to arouse in his reader
the specific feeling-attitude in which he wrote. He tries to do the
same thing, on a more minute scale, by his system of punctuation;
and the net outward result is an unpleasant spottiness of page. Let
us, however, keep to the internal; and let us consider only the
paragraphing. If you pause to think of it, the paragraph-feeling itself
is a somewhat subtle thing; a properly rounded paragraph gives you a
feeling of temporary completeness, while yet it invites you to look
ahead, leaves you in a certain suspense; a poorly finished paragraph
gives you the same feeling of disappointment, of being ‘taken in,’ that
you get from a weak ending to a stanza, or from a musical progression
that fails to hold its tone-colour. The paragraph that is set off from
what follows by a blank line rouses a feeling of greater completeness;
you are to stop and take breath, to let your thought play backward a
little before you go on; still you are to look forward. The paragraph
that begins with a dash opens up the subject from a new angle; you are
to hold what you have read, but you are now to see it in a fresh light;
the feeling is that of a pleasurable curiosity, with the prospect of
reference forth and back. The paragraphs with asterisks between them
are like different roads of survey in a country that you are touring;
each one is complete in itself, but you are to remember them all for a
future synthesis; at the moment you have a sense of relief, but this
is mixed with a somewhat exciting responsibility; the author expects
you to be ready for him when he comes to summarising. Lastly, the train
of periods means a trail of feeling; the device, which is far more
freely used by French than by English writers, invites you to let your
thought play ahead a little, in the context of the feeling aroused by
the paragraph, before you go on. Take the description of the local
Shint[=o] festival: “By immemorial custom the upper stories of all the
dwellings had been tightly closed: woe to the Peeping Tom who should
be detected, on such a day, in the impious act of _looking down upon
the god_!...” Elementary enough, in all conscience; and needlessly
emphasised by the italics; and yet tremendously effective; one’s ideas
trail off, in a context of feeling, from the seacoast village of Japan
to the inland English town, from outraged godhead to the desecration of
humanity; not sentimentally, or one has missed the writer’s intention,
but in a continuous train of attitudes which derive from literary
sentiment. It is a pity, psychologically, that ‘sentimental’ is the
adjective of ‘sentimentality’; for sentimentality is at the opposite
pole to sentiment, as sentiment is here used; but we cannot help the
twists of language.
No doubt, a greater artist than Hearn would have printed his pages in
the conventional way, and would still have made his appeal, without
signposts, to the expert reader. Yet we may be grateful to him for a
psychological object-lesson; he has given outward expression to a set
of attitudes that we should otherwise have been obliged to seek and
identify for ourselves. All the same, the attitudes would have been
there, as certainly and definitely as if they had been indicated; and
we could have found them, if we had ever experienced the sentiment
of literary fitness. You see what enrichment of the life of feeling
such a sentiment breeds, and you see how helpless we should be without
it. The proverbs say _de gustibus non est disputandum_, and _quot
homines tot sententiæ_, as if taste and opinion were matters of the
merest chance. They are never that, however far they may lie below the
level of sentiment and judgement; for there are solid uniformities
of sense-feeling, and there is in every society a basal community of
ideas; while, upon the higher level, they are as sure and as uniform as
individual differences of talent and temperament allow. They are far
more sure and far more uniform than the outsider imagines; technical
discussion and technical appreciation have always a reasoned foundation
of agreement. Competent critics may debate whether Whistler’s picture
of his Mother or that of Miss Alexander is the greater portrait; but
think how much must be agreed upon before the debate can begin!
§ 70. =The Forms of Sentiment.=—Emotions go in pairs; an emotion is
either joy or sorrow, either hope or fear; there is no midway emotion
that is something between the two, but is neither the one nor the
other. The sense-feelings, too, go in pairs; a feeling is either
exciting or subduing, for instance, and cannot be anything between.
When, however, the situation that arouses feeling is met by us in the
state of secondary attention, then there is a third possibility; and
_the sentiments, in fact, run in threes_. Here is a theory: is it true
or false? If we judge it true, we have the sentiment of _belief_; if
we judge it false, the sentiment of _disbelief_. But we need not come
to a final judgement; facts _a_, _b_, _c_, we will suppose, tell for
the theory, and facts _x_, _y_, _z_ tell against it; we oscillate,
uncertainly, between the two predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’; and the
result is the suspensive sentiment of _doubt_. Language is an unsafe
guide in these matters; partly because the same term may stand both
for sentiment and for feeling-attitude, but partly also because the
sentiments, being less common than emotions, have not always received
specific names. In principle, nevertheless, there is in every case a
third sentiment, corresponding with oscillation of judgement, between
the two extremes.
The three just mentioned, belief-doubt-disbelief, belong to the class
of =intellectual= sentiments. An attempt has been made to examine them
under experimental conditions; with the result that they prove to be
of rare occurrence; that they are characterised in different minds—as
might perhaps be expected, from the complexity of the situation—by
different complexes, by the kinæsthesis of bodily attitude, by
internal speech, by the interplay of visual imagery; and that they
are ordinarily replaced by the feeling-attitudes of certainty and
uncertainty. The mental patterns of belief and disbelief turn out to
be the same; and this result is psychologically reasonable; for the
positive and negative of the terms are logical, an affair of meaning;
so far as experience goes, disbelief is as positive as belief. Hence it
is natural that both of them should be represented in feeling-attitude
by the same ‘certainty,’ Another group of intellectual sentiments, less
often named, but familiar to everyone who has set to work seriously to
master a new writer or a new subject, consists of _agreement, obscurity
and contradiction_. These have not, to the author’s knowledge,
been subjected to analysis; indeed, the present paragraphs can do
little more than catalogue a few of the more obvious sentiments; the
experiences are difficult to induce, and their detailed study is yet to
come.
In the sphere of the =moral= or =social= sentiments, we have such
opposites as trust-distrust, honour-dishonour, justice-injustice. There
is always a suspensive sentiment, corresponding with oscillation of
judgement, though its name can be made only approximative; we may,
perhaps, speak of trust-trial-distrust, honour-ambiguity-dishonour,
justice-equivocalness-injustice; think yourself into concrete
situations, and you will get the meaning of the terms! Social
situations are, however, of great practical importance; and we
usually meet them, not by a sentiment, but by some emotion based upon
instinctive tendencies; vanity, shame, pride, sympathy are emotions of
this sort. The same thing holds of =religious= situations. Triads like
faith-perplexity-denial, communion-insecurity-estrangement point to the
state of secondary attention; but in general the religious situation
sets up an emotion.
We come, lastly, to the =æsthetic= sentiments. These are confused,
by the majority of civilised mankind, with the emotions aroused by
the _subject_ of the work of art; whereas this subject is really of
very minor importance; of no importance at all, if it is dictated
by tradition and environment; and of secondary importance, only as
it is chosen by the artist, from a number of possible subjects,
because it allows the expression of personality or offers a test of
difficulties overcome. What do you suppose Michael Angelo was trying
to do when he painted the _Last Judgement_, or Titian when he painted
the _Entombment of Christ_? The æsthetic sentiments are, in reality,
those of success-bafflement-failure, ease-confusion-difficulty,
approbation-criticism-condemnation, and the like. When Ruskin said
“Everything that Velasquez does may be taken as absolutely right by
the student,” the unmeasured approbation expresses a true æsthetic
sentiment; Ruskin had _worked_ over Velasquez. When a recent writer on
art directs us, in Millet’s _Gleaners_, to “these forms bowed down by
labour, these coarse habiliments, these work-hardened hands,” he is
outside the sphere of æsthetics altogether, and his appeal lies—at the
best—to a social emotion.
_These groups of sentiments, the intellectual, the moral or social,
the religious and the æsthetic, are usually regarded as distinct and
different._ It is true that they are called forth by different kinds
of situation. We must remember, however, that _there are only two kinds
of mental pattern involved_: the thought-pattern and the pattern of
constructive imagination; and we have seen that these are themselves
broadly similar. It is not likely, therefore, that the sentiments, or
the feeling-attitudes that derive from them, differ in anything but
inessentials from group to group; M. Bergeret and M. l’abbé Lantaigne
felt in very much the same way. The variety of the feeling-attitudes
is, indeed, surprisingly large; the point here is that this variety is
essentially the same, whether one be sage or saint, artist or moralist.
§ 71. =The Situations and Their Appeal.=—If we wish to enquire into
the nature of _the situations which arouse a sentiment_, two courses
are open to us. We may undertake a study of origins; we may trace the
history of primitive science and primitive art, and so on; and we may
then try to generalise, both as regards the circumstances which called
forth the scientific or artistic response, and as regards the appeal
that such circumstances make to the human organism. Or we may turn our
attention to acknowledged masterpieces, and try in like manner to ‘get
behind’ them; trusting in this event rather to the typical than to the
general. Both courses have been followed, and followed assiduously; but
the outcome is still uncertain.
_The tendency has been to refer a group of sentiments to some single
root in human nature._ That is only natural; for it is always
satisfactory to simplify; and when once the investigator has hit
upon what he takes to be the primule or germ of later development,
he is prepared to accept whatever makes for his theory and to reject
whatever tells against it (p. 98). Yet we must remind ourselves that
man’s instinctive tendencies are not carried intact throughout his
history; man reasons, as we said (p. 210), on the basis of fragments
of instinctive tendency, disjoined from their original connections
and recombined to suit the occasion. _We may, for instance, refer the
intellectual sentiments to a native curiosity_ (p. 205); but what is
curiosity? A very mixed medley of instinctive responses: Professor
Thorndike includes under it “attention to novel objects and human
behaviour, cautious approach, reaching and grasping, the food-trying
reactions of putting in the mouth, tasting and biting, general
exploration with the eyes and manipulation with the hands,” as well as
“the love of sensory life for its own sake.” Again, _we may refer the
moral and social sentiments to a native sympathy or empathy_; but here,
also, we should find, in the concrete, a mixed medley of particular
responses. These references are, nevertheless, fairly satisfactory.
What shall we say of religion and art?
_There seems to be no original artistic tendency or art-instinct._
In primitive times, the body was decorated with a view to attracting
notice, and especially to attracting a mate. Then, by slow degrees,
decoration travelled from person to surroundings: first, from the
body to the clothes, and then again from clothes to house. But as the
primitive house is a rude structure, and its owner poor, not much
can be done by way of individual house-adornment; and so we find the
members of a tribe clubbing together, so to speak, to decorate the
common house, the temple. Æsthetics now enters into the service of
religion.
Again: as the tribes settled down to agricultural pursuits, man became
a labourer and learned to work; systematic and regular work grew to
be a necessity. But work means play; if we labour, we must also have
recreation. How, then, shall grown-up people play? They have lost
their interest in childish games. Æsthetics comes to the rescue; art
is the play, the proper recreation, of grown-up workers; we speak, and
speak rightly, of Shakespeare’s ‘plays’ and of ‘playing’ the violin.
Æsthetics has now lost its distinctively religious meaning, and has
been turned to secular purposes.
In no less than three ways, therefore, has æsthetics proved itself to
be of practical importance. It has been useful in courtship; it has
been useful as enhancing the impressiveness of religious ceremonies;
it is still eminently useful as the play of adults. _Curiosity and
empathy have both entered into it_; curiosity in the manipulation
of shells and feathers, of brush and cutting edge; empathy in the
affairs of courtship and worship. Further than this we can hardly go.
The psychological essence of tragedy, in Hamlet or Antigone, and the
psychological essence of comedy, in Dogberry and Verges, still escape
us; there are many theories, but no one of them is convincing.
It seems, also, that _there is no specific religious tendency or
instinct_. Religion has been ascribed to fear, to an instinct of
dependence, to an instinctive recognition of the infinite, and so on;
but modern writers agree that it cannot derive from a single source.
“Religion,” says Professor Leuba, “is rooted in instinctive impulses
and in instincts,—in fear, acquisitiveness, pugnacity, curiosity,
love, etc. But the relation that instinct bears to religion is no other
than that obtaining between instinct and commerce or any complex social
activity.” Religion, like art, has a strong practical sanction; the
worshipper expects to control the forces of nature, and to secure the
action of gods and spirits upon human minds and bodies; while religion
itself satisfies the desire for power and for social recognition,
quickens intelligence, and regulates and unifies the community. We
understand something of the growth of religious ideas, as we know
something of the development of art; but the contents of a religious
system, and the products of artistic construction, do not take us far
towards the explication of human tendencies.
In a word, then, the problem which we have here formulated is too
difficult for solution now or in the near future. We cannot ‘get
behind’ the masterpiece, the achievement of civilisation; the
conditions are too complex. We cannot draw any certain conclusion
from the study of origins; for primitive man, as we know him, is very
like ourselves, both in convention and in reasoning; Professor Boas
finds no evidence that “hereditary mental faculty has been improved by
civilisation”; the savage may be untutored, but he is as complicatedly
human as the best of us. We can say, negatively, that _neither the
situations which are met by sentiment nor the tendencies to which
these situations appeal are unique_; and that is, in itself, something
gained. No genuine problem is insoluble; and further work, partly
along the older lines and partly perhaps by new methods which bear
directly upon man’s instinctive tendencies, will some day answer the
questions raised in these paragraphs.
§ 72. =Mood, Passion, Temperament.=—With lapse of secondary
attention, the sentiments lapse, as we have seen, into
feeling-attitudes. It appears, from ordinary observation, that they
may also persist, in weakened form, as =moods=. Thus, the moods
acquiescence-indecision-incredulity correspond with the sentiments
belief-doubt-disbelief; and we speak of a critical humour, a religious
frame of mind, and so on. It is doubtful whether the sentiments rise
to the intensity of =passion=; we speak, it is true, of a passionate
humility, of a passion of disapprobation or of renunciation; but it is
probable that these experiences are emotive, singly and not multiply
determined.
A detailed classification of the =temperaments= would include forms
characterised by special susceptibility to sentiment and by type of
response, intellectual, artistic, and so forth. Meantime, the crude
fourfold arrangement of p. 227 seems to cover the cases: the ascetic
temperament, for instance, falls under the melancholic, the critical
under the phlegmatic, the ‘artistic’ of current speech under the
choleric or sanguine.
Questions and Exercises
(1) What do you mean by ‘style’? Do not write commonplace; think the
question out, and answer it in psychological terms.
(2) Have some argumentative passage read aloud to you. Notice how the
intellectual feeling-attitudes rise and disappear, as the argument
proceeds. Differentiate them, and try to give them names; mark the
sentences which call them forth; try to determine if their nature and
arousal correspond with the writer’s intention.
(3) What modes of feeling-response may be aroused by music? Illustrate,
if possible, by actual examples.
(4) Are there any movements that characteristically express certain
sentiments, as clenching the fist (for instance) expresses anger?
(5) Matthew Arnold defined poetry as “a criticism of life” (look up
the passage, in the Preface to Poems of Wordsworth, and be sure that
you understand it!). Does this definition suggest any further field of
usefulness for æsthetics? May æsthetics properly be extended to cover
it?
(6) How does ‘curiosity’ differ from ‘inquisitiveness’?
(7) Can you recall any characters, in literature or fiction, who might
stand as embodiments of some social or religious sentiment?
(8) Two traditional explanations of the ludicrous are (_a_) the
theory of degradation: that when we laugh we are realising our own
superiority, and (_b_) the theory of incongruity: that the comic
situation always involves a nullifying of expectation. What criticisms
can you offer?
(9) What sort of temperament are we thinking of when we agree to call
Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goldsmith, Sterne, Lamb, Dickens and George
Eliot ‘humorists’?
(10) Aristotle lays it down that tragedy “accomplishes by pity and fear
the purgation of such emotions.” Can you read a positive and definite
meaning into this statement? Can you rephrase it, in terms of our
psychology of sentiment? Is it then adequate?
(11) How do we know that a greater artist than Hearn would have printed
his pages in the conventional way? What means has an author, who does
print in the conventional way, of emphasising the points at which he
wishes feeling-attitudes to arise?
(12) You should analyse some sentiments at first hand. Ask a friend
to write out a number of descriptions, statements, questions, that
have evoked in his own experience the sentiments (say) of belief and
doubt, or of honour and ambiguity. Let him arrange them in pairs:
belief-doubt, honour-ambiguity. Then take a pair, and read the two
statements in quick succession. You will be surprised to find how
matter-of-course and indifferent your attitude is; but presently some
member of a pair will grip you, start you thinking; and you will then
have the opportunity to observe. Write out (or better, dictate) a full
report.
References
J. Sully, The Human Mind, ii., 1892, ch. xvi.; An Essay on Laughter,
1902, ch. v.; W. Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, 1896,
Lect. xxv., § 4; Ethics, i., 1897, ch. iii.; T. Ribot, The Psychology
of the Emotions, 1897, chs. vi. ff.; E. B. Titchener, Text-book of
Psychology, 1910, 500 ff.; E. L. Thorndike, The Original Nature of Man,
1913, 41, 102 f., 140 f.
Special References: F. Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man, 1911; J. H.
Leuba, A Psychological Study of Religion, 1912; L. Hearn, Japan, An
Attempt at Interpretation, 1904; A. C. Haddon, Evolution in Art, 1895;
G. Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, 1896; G. Moore, Modern Painting,
1898.