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.