THE TREND OF SENTIMENT
MEANING AND GENERAL TREND OF SENTIMENT—ATTENUATION—REFINEMENT—SENSE
OF JUSTICE—TRUTH AS JUSTICE—AS REALISM—AS EXPEDIENCY—AS ECONOMY OF
ATTENTION—HOPEFULNESS.
By sentiment I mean socialized feeling, feeling which has been raised
by thought and intercourse out of its merely instinctive state and
become properly human. It implies imagination, and the medium in which
it chiefly lives is sympathetic contact with the minds of others. Thus
love is a sentiment, while lust is not; resentment is, but not rage;
the fear of disgrace or ridicule, but not animal terror, and so on.
Sentiment is the chief motive-power of life, and as a rule lies deeper
in our minds and is less subject to essential change than thought, from
which, however, it is not to be too sharply separated.
Two traits in the growth of sentiment are perhaps characteristic of
modern life, both of which, as will appear, are closely bound up with
the other psychological changes that have already been discussed.
First a trend toward diversification: under the impulse of a growing
diversity of suggestion and intercourse many new varieties and shades
of sentiment are developed. Like a stream which is distributed for
irrigation, the general current of social feeling is drawn off into
many small channels.
Second a trend toward humanism, meaning by this a wider reach and
application of the sentiments that naturally prevail in the familiar
intercourse of primary groups. Following a tendency evident in all
phases of the social mind, these expand and organize themselves at
the expense of sentiments that go with the more formal or oppressive
structures of an earlier epoch.
The diversification of sentiment seems to involve some degree of
attenuation, or decline in volume, and also some growth of refinement.
By the former I mean that the constant and varied demands upon feeling
which modern life makes—in contrast to the occasional but often severe
demands of a more primitive society—give rise, very much as in the case
of the irrigating stream, to the need and practice of more economy and
regularity in the flow, so that “animated moderation”[90] in feeling
succeeds the alternations of apathy and explosion characteristic of a
ruder condition. Thus our emotional experience is made up of diverse
but for the most part rather mild excitements, so that the man most at
home in our civilization, though more nimble in sentiment than the man
of an earlier order, is perhaps somewhat inferior in depth. Something
of the same difference can be seen between the city man and the farmer;
while the latter is inferior in versatility and readiness of feeling,
he has a greater store of it laid up, which is apt to give superior
depth and momentum to such sentiment as he does cherish. Who has not
experienced the long-minded faithfulness and kindness, or perhaps
resentment, of country people, and contrasted them with the less stable
feelings of those who live a more urbane life?
In saying that life tends toward refinement it is only a general trend
that is asserted. We must admit that many phases of refined sentiment
have been more perfectly felt and expressed in the past than they are
now; but this is a matter of the maturity of special types of culture,
rather than of general progress. Thus the Italian Renaissance produced
wonders of refinement in art, as in the painting, let us say, of
Botticelli; but it was, on the whole, a bloody, harsh and sensual time
compared with ours, a time when assassination, torture and rape were
matters of every day. So, also, there is a refinement of the sense
of language in Shakespeare and his contemporaries which we can only
admire, while their plays depict a rather gross state of feeling. A
course of reading in English fiction, beginning with Chaucer and ending
with James, Howells and Mrs. Ward, would certainly leave the impression
that our sensibilities had, on the whole, grown finer.
And this is even more true of the common people than of the well-to-do
class with which literature is chiefly occupied: the tendency to
the diffusion of refinement being more marked than its increase in
a favored order. The sharp contrast in manners and feelings between
the “gentleman,” as formerly understood, and the peasant, artisan and
trading classes has partly disappeared. Differences in wealth and
occupation no longer necessitate differences in real culture, the
opportunities for which are coming to be open to all classes, and
in America, at least, the native-bred farmer or hand-worker is not
uncommonly, in essential qualities, a gentleman.
The general fact is that the activities of life, to which feeling
responds, have become more various and subtle and less crudely
determined by animal conditions. Material variety and comfort is
one phase of this: we become habituated to a comparatively delicate
existence and so are trained to shun coarseness. Communication, by
giving abundance and choice of social contacts, also acts to diversify
and refine sentiment; the growth of order disaccustoms us to violence,
and democracy tends to remove the degrading spectacle of personal or
class oppression.
This modern refinement has the advantage that, being a general rise
in level rather than the achievement of a class or a nation, it is
probably secure. It is not, like the refinement of Greece, the somewhat
precarious fruit of transient conditions, but a possession of the race,
in no more danger of dying out than the steam-engine.
To the trend toward humanism and the sentiments—such as justice, truth,
kindness and service—that go with it, I shall devote the rest of this
chapter and the one that follows:
The basis of all sentiment of this kind is the sense of community, or
of sharing in a common social or spiritual whole, membership in which
gives to all a kind of inner equality, no matter what their special
parts may be. It is felt, however, that the differences among men
should be functional and intrinsic, not arbitrary or accidental. The
sense of justice is usually strong among the members of a sympathetic
group, the basis for determining what is just being the perception of
some purpose which every one is to serve, each in his own way, so that
he who rightly holds a higher place is the one who can function best
for the common good. It does not hurt my self-respect or my allegiance
to remain a common seaman while another becomes captain of the ship,
provided I recognize that he is the fitter man for the place; and if
the distribution of stations in society were evidently of this sort
there would be no serious protest against it. What makes trouble is the
growth of an ideal of fair play which the actual system of things does
not satisfy.
The widening of sympathy and the consciousness of larger unity have
brought the hope and demand for a corresponding extension of justice;
and all sorts of humanity—not to speak of the lower animals—profit
by this wider sentiment. Classes seek to understand each other; the
personality of women and children is recognized and fostered; there
is some attempt to sympathize with alien nations and races, civilized
or savage, and to help them to their just place in the common life of
mankind.
Our conception of international rights reflects the same view, and
the American, at least, desires that his country should treat other
countries as one just man treats another, and is proud when he can
believe that she has done so. It is surely of some significance that in
the most powerful of democracies national selfishness, in the judgment
of a competent European observer, is less cynical and obtrusive than
in any of the great states of Europe.[91]
Truth is a kind of justice, and wherever there is identification of
oneself with the life of the group it is fostered, and lying tends to
be felt as mean and impolitic. Serious falsehood among friends is, I
believe, universally abhorred—by savages and children as well as by
civilized adults. To lie to a friend is to hit him from behind, to trip
him up in the dark, and so the moral sentiment of every group attempts
to suppress falsehood among its members, however it may be encouraged
as against outsiders. “Wherefore,” says St. Paul, “putting away lying,
speak every man truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of
another.”[92]
Our democratic system aims to be a larger organization of moral
unity, and so far as it is so, in the feeling of the individual, it
fosters this open and downright attitude toward his fellows. In idea,
and largely in fact, we are a commonwealth, of which each one is a
member by his will and intelligence, as well as by necessity, and with
which, accordingly, the human sentiment of loyalty among those who are
members one of another is naturally in force. The very disgust with
which, in a matter like assessment for taxation, men contemplate the
incompatibility that sometimes exists between truth and fairness, is a
tribute to the prevailing sentiment of sincerity.
An artificial system, that is one which, however solid its hidden
foundations—and of course all systems rest on fact of some sort—does
not visibly flow from principles of truth and fairness, fails to
arouse this loyalty of partnership. One may be devoted to it, but
his devotion will be based rather on reverence for something above
him than on a sense of participation, and will call for submission
rather than for straightforward dealing. It would seem that lying and
servility are natural in the attitude of a subject toward a master,
that is toward a superior but uncomprehending power; while truth is
generated in sympathy. Tyranny may be said to make falsehood a virtue,
and in contemporary Russia, for instance, stealth and evasion are the
necessary and justifiable means of pursuing the aims of human nature.
Another reason for the association of freedom with truth is that the
former is a training in the sense of social cause and effect; the free
play of human forces being a constant demonstration of the power of
reality as against sham. The more men experiment intelligently with
life, the more they come to believe in definite causation and the less
in trickery. Freedom means continuous experiment, a constant testing
of the individual and of all kinds of social ideas and arrangements.
It tends, then, to a social realism; “Her open eyes desire the truth.”
The best people I know are pervaded by the feeling that life is so real
that it is not worth while to make believe. “Knights of the unshielded
heart,” they desire nothing so much as to escape from all pretense and
prudery and confront things as they really are—confident that they are
not irremediably bad. I read in a current newspaper that “brutal,
unvarnished, careless frankness is the pose of the new type of girl.
She has not been developed in a school of evasion. To pretend you gave
a hundred dollars for a gown when you really gave fifty for it, is a
sorry jest for her and a waste of time.... If she owns to the new gown
she tells you its cost, the name of the inexpensive dressmaker who made
it, and just where she economized in its price.”
There is a tribute to truth in the very cynicism and shamelessness with
which flagitious politicians and financiers declare and defend their
practices. Like Napoleon or Macchiavelli they have at least cast off
superstition and are dealing with reality, though they apprehend it
only in a low and partial aspect. If they lie, they do so deliberately,
scientifically, with a view to producing a certain effect upon people
whom they regard as fools. It only needs that this rational spirit
should ally itself with higher sentiment and deeper insight in order
that it should become a source of virtue.
I will not here inquire minutely how far or in what sense honesty is
the best policy, but it is safe to say that the more life is organized
upon a basis of freedom and justice the more truth there is in the
proverb. When the general state of things is anarchical, as in the
time of Macchiavelli, rationalism may lead to the cynical use of
falsehood as the tool suited to the material; nor is it deniable that
this is often the case at the present day. But modern democracy aims
to organize justice, and in so far as it succeeds it creates a medium
in which truth tends to survive and falsehood to perish. We all wish
to live in such a medium: there is nothing more grateful than the
conviction that the order of things is sincere, is founded on reality
of some sort; and in a good measure the American, for instance, does
have this conviction. It makes democracy a soft couch for the soul:
one can let himself go and does not have to make believe; pretence is
no part of the system; be your real self and you will find your right
place.
“I know how the great basement of all power
Is frankness, and a true tongue to the world;
And how intriguing secrecy is proof
Of fear and weakness, and a hollow state.”
An artificial system must maintain itself by suppressing the free play
of social forces and inculcating its own artificial ideas in place of
those derived from experience. Free association, free speech, free
thinking, in so far as they touch upon matters vital to authority,
are and always have been put down under such systems, and this means
that the whole mind of the people is emasculated, as the mind of
Italy was by Spanish rule and religious reaction in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. “Oriental mendacity” is ascribed to the
insecurity of life and property under arbitrary rule; but it is not
merely life and property that are affected. The very idea of truth
and reason in human affairs can hardly prevail under a system which
affords no observation to corroborate it. The fact that in diplomacy,
for instance, there is a growing belief that it pays to be simple and
honest, I take to be a reflection of the fact that the international
system, based more and more on intelligent public opinion, is
gradually coming to be a medium in which truth is fit to live.
Perhaps something of this hostility to truth will linger in all
establishments, however they may be humanized: they all involve a kind
of vested interest in certain ideas which is not favorable to entire
frankness. It sometimes appears that one who would be quite honest and
stand for human nature should avoid not only religious, political and
educational allegiance, but law, journalism, and all positions where
one has to speak as part of an institution. As a rule the great seers
and thinkers have stood as much aside from institutions as the nature
of the human mind permits.
Still another reason for the keener sense of truth in our day is the
need to economize attention. In societies where life is dull, fiction,
circumlocution and elaborate forms of intercourse serve as a sort of
pastime; and the first arouses no resentment unless some definite
injury is attempted by it. Although the Chinese are upright in keeping
their pecuniary engagements, we are told that mere truth is not valued
by them, and is not inculcated by their classic moralists. So in Italy
the people seem to think that a courteous and encouraging lie is kinder
than the bare truth, as when a man will pretend to give you information
when he knows nothing about the matter. A strenuous civilization like
ours makes one intolerant of all this. It is not that we are always
hurried; but we are so often made to feel the limitations of our
attention that we dislike to waste it. Thought is life, and we wish
to get the most reality for a given outlay of it that is to be had.
We wish to come at once to the Real Thing, whether it be a business
proposition or the most subtle theory.
Another sentiment favored by the times is social courage and
hopefulness, a disposition to push forward with confidence regarding
the future both of the individual and of society at large. That this
attitude is the prevalent one, in American democracy at least, nearly
all observers are agreed. “Let any one,” says Dr. Lyman Abbott,
“stand on one of our great highways and watch the countenances of
the passers-by; the language written on most of them is that of
eagerness, ambition, expectation, hope.”[93] There is something
ruthless about this headlong optimism, which is apt to deny and neglect
failure and despair, as certain religious sects of the day deny and
neglect physical injury; but it answers its purpose of sustaining
the combatants. It springs from a condition in which the individual,
not supported in any one place by a rigid system, is impelled from
childhood to trust himself to the common current of life, to make
experiments, to acquire a habit of venture and a working knowledge of
social forces. The state of things instigates endeavor, and, as a rule,
rewards it sufficiently to keep up one’s courage, while occasional
failure at least takes away that vague dread of the unknown which
is often worse than the reality. Life is natural and vivid, not the
wax-works of an artificial order, and has that enlivening effect that
comes from being thrown back upon human nature. A real pessimism—one
which despairs of the general trend of things—is rare and without
much influence, even the revolutionary sects maintaining that the
changes they desire are in the line of a natural evolution. Discontent
is affirmative and constructive rather than stagnant: it works out
programmes and hopefully agitates for their realization. There is a
kind of piety and trust in God to be seen in the confidence with which
small bodies of men anticipate the success of principles they believe
to be right.
FOOTNOTES:
[90] Bagehot’s phrase. See his Physics and Politics.
[91] See James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, chap. 87.
[92] Ephesians, iv, 25.
[93] In Shaler’s United States, ii, 594.