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.