Simple or Animal Anger—Social Anger—The Function of Hostility—The Doctrine of Non-resistance—Control and Transformation of Hostility by Reason—Hostility as Pleasure or Pain—The Importance of Accepted Social Standards—Fear.
Anger, like other emotions, seems to exist at birth as a simple, instinctive animal tendency, and to undergo differentiation and development parallel with the growth of imagination. Perez, speaking of children at about the age of two months, says, “they begin to push away objects that they do not like, and have real fits of passion, frowning, growing red in the face, trembling all over, and sometimes shedding tears.” They also show anger at not getting the breast or bottle, or when washed or undressed, or when their toys are taken away. At about one year old “they will beat people, animals, and inanimate objects if they are angry with them,”[[65]] throw things at offending persons, and the like.
I have observed phenomena similar to these, and no doubt all have who have seen anything of little children. If there are any writers who tend to regard the mind at birth as almost tabula rasa so far as special instincts are concerned, consisting of little more than a faculty of receiving and organizing impressions, it must be wholesome for them to associate with infants and notice how unmistakable are the signs of a distinct and often violent emotion, apparently identical with the anger or rage of adults. What grown-up persons feel seems to be different, not in its emotional essence, but in being modified by association with a much more complicated system of ideas.
This simple, animal sort of anger, excited immediately by something obnoxious to the senses, does not entirely disappear in adult life. Probably most persons who step upon a barrel-hoop or run their heads against a low doorway can discern a moment of instinctive anger toward the harming object. Even our more enduring forms of hostility seem often to partake of this direct, unintellectual character. Most people, but especially those of a sensitive, impressible nature, have antipathies to places, animals, persons, words—to all sorts of things in fact—which appear to spring directly out of the subconscious life, without any mediation of thought. Some think that an animal or instinctive antipathy to human beings of a different race is natural to all mankind. And among people of the same race there are undoubtedly persons whom other persons loathe without attributing to them any hostile state of mind, but with a merely animal repugnance. Even when the object of hostility is quite distinctly a mental or moral trait, we often seem to feel it in an external way, that is, we see it as behavior but do not really understand it as thought or sentiment. Thus duplicity is hateful whether we can see any motive for it or not, and gives a sense of slipperiness and insecurity so tangible that one naturally thinks of some wriggling animal. In like manner vacillation, fawning, excessive protestation or self-depreciation, and many other traits, may be obnoxious to us in a somewhat physical way without our imagining them as states of mind.
But for a social, imaginative being, whose main interests are in the region of communicative thought and sentiment, the chief field of anger, as of other emotions, is transferred to this region. Hostility ceases to be a simple emotion due to a simple stimulus, and breaks up into innumerable hostile sentiments associated with highly imaginative personal ideas. In this mentally higher form it may be regarded as hostile sympathy, or a hostile comment on sympathy. That is to say, we enter by sympathy or personal imagination into the state of mind of others, or think we do, and if the thoughts we find there are injurious to or uncongenial with the ideas we are already cherishing, we feel a movement of anger.
This is forcibly expressed in a brief but admirable study of antipathy by Sophie Bryant. Though the antipathy she describes is of a peculiarly subtle kind, it is plain that the same sort of analysis may be applied to any form of imaginative hostility.
“A is drawn out toward B to feel what he feels. If the new feeling harmonizes, distinctly or obscurely, with the whole system of A’s consciousness—or the part then identified with his will—there follows that joyful expansion of self beyond self which is sympathy. But if not—if the new feeling is out of keeping with the system of A’s will—tends to upset the system, and brings discord into it—there follows the reaction of the whole against the hostile part which, transferred to its cause in B, pushes out B’s state, as the antithesis of self, yet threatening self, and offensive.” Antipathy, she says, “is full of horrid thrill.” “The peculiar horror of the antipathy springs from the unwilling response to the state abhorred. We feel ourselves actually like the other person, selfishly vain, cruelly masterful, artfully affected, insincere, ungenial, and so on.”... “There is some affinity between those who antipathize.”[[66]] And with similar meaning Thoreau remarks that “you cannot receive a shock unless you have an electric affinity for that which shocks you,” and that “He who receives an injury is to some extent an accomplice of the wrong-doer.”[[67]]
Thus the cause of hostility is imaginative or sympathetic, an inimical idea attributed to another mind. We cannot feel this way toward that which is totally unlike us, because the totally unlike is unimaginable, has no interest for us. This, like all social feeling, requires a union of likeness with difference.
It is clear that closer association, and more knowledge of one another, offer no security against hostile feeling. Whether intimacy will improve our sentiment toward another man or not depends upon the true relation of his way of thinking and feeling to ours, which intimacy is likely to reveal. There are many persons with whom we get on very well at a certain distance, who would turn out intensely antipathetic if we had to live in the same house with them. Probably all of us have experienced in one form or another the disgust and irritation that may come from enforced intimacy with people we liked well enough as mere acquaintances, and with whom we can find no particular fault, except that they rub us the wrong way. Henry James, speaking of the aversion of the brothers Goncourt for Saint Beuve, remarks that it was “a plant watered by frequent intercourse and protected by punctual notes.”[[68]] It is true that an active sense of justice may do much to overcome unreasonable antipathies; but there are so many urgent uses for our sense of justice that it is well not to fatigue it by excessive and unnecessary activity. Justice involves a strenuous and symmetrical exercise of the imagination and reason, which no one can keep up all the time; and those who display it most on important occasions ought to be free to indulge somewhat their whims and prejudices in familiar intercourse.
Neither do refinement, culture, and taste have any necessary tendency to diminish hostility. They make a richer and finer sympathy possible, but at the same time multiply the possible occasions of antipathy. They are like a delicate sense of smell, which opens the way to as much disgust as appreciation. Instead of the most sensitive sympathy, the finest mental texture, being a safeguard against hostile passions, it is only too evident from a study of the lives of men of genius that these very traits make a sane and equable existence peculiarly difficult. Read, for instance, the confessions of Rousseau, and observe how a fine nature, full of genuine and eager social idealism, is subject to peculiar sufferings and errors through the sensibility and imagination such a nature must possess. The quicker the sympathy and ideality, the greater the suffering from neglect and failure, the greater also the difficulty of disciplining the multitude of intense impressions and maintaining a sane view of the whole. Hence the pessimism, the extravagant indignation against real or supposed wrong-doers, and not infrequently, as in Rousseau’s case, the almost insane bitterness of jealousy and mistrust.