To a person in robust condition, with plenty of energy to spare, a thorough-going anger, far from being painful, is an expansive, I might say glorious, experience, while the fit is on and has full control. A man in a rage does not want to get out of it, but has a full sense of life which he impulsively seeks to continue by repelling suggestions tending to calm him. It is only when it has begun to pall upon him that he is really willing to be appeased. This may be seen by observing the behavior of impulsive children, and also of adults whose passions are undisciplined.
An enduring hatred may also be a source of satisfaction to some minds, though this I believe to be unusual in these days, and becoming more so. One who reads Hazlitt’s powerful and sincere, though perhaps unhealthy, essay on the Pleasure of Hating, will see that the thing is possible. In most cases remorse and distress set in so soon as the fit of anger begins to abate, and its destructive incompatibility with the established order and harmony of the mind begins to be felt. There is a conviction of sin, the pain of a shattered ideal, just as there is after yielding to any other unchastened passion. The cause of the pain seems to be not so much the peculiar character of the feeling as its exorbitant intensity.
Any simple and violent passion is likely to be felt as painful and wrong in its after-effects because it destroys that harmony or synthesis that reason and conscience strive to produce; and this effect is probably more and more felt as the race advances and mental life becomes more complex. The conditions of civilization require of us so extensive and continuous an expenditure of psychical force, that we no longer have the superabundance of emotional energy that makes a violent outlet agreeable. Habits and principles of self-control naturally arise along with the increasing need for economy and rational guidance of emotion; and whatever breaks through them causes exhaustion and remorse. Any gross passion comes to be felt as “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” Spasms of violent feeling properly belong with a somewhat apathetic habit of life, whose accumulating energies they help to dissipate, and are as much out of place to-day as the hard-drinking habits of our Saxon ancestors.
The sort of men that most feel the need of hostility as a spur to exertion are, I imagine, those of superabundant vitality and somewhat sluggish temperament, like Goethe and Bismarck, both of whom declared that it was essential to them. There is also a great deal of old-fashioned personal hatred in remote and quiet places, like the mountains of North Carolina, and probably among all classes who do not much feel the stress of civilization. But to most of those who share fully in the life of the time, intense personal animosities are painful and destructive, and many fine spirits are ruined by failure to inhibit them.
The kind of man most characteristic of these times, I take it, does not allow himself to be drawn into the tangle of merely personal hatred, but, cultivating a tolerance for all sorts of men, he yet maintains a sober and determined antagonism toward all tendencies or purposes that conflict with his true self, with whatever he has most intimately appropriated and identified with his character. He is always courteous, cherishes as much as possible those kindly sentiments which are not only pleasant and soothing but do much to oil the machinery of his enterprises, and by wasting no energy on futile passion is enabled to think all the more clearly and act the more inflexibly when he finds antagonism necessary. A man of the world of the modern type is hardly ever dramatic in the style of Shakespeare’s heroes. He usually expresses himself in the most economical manner possible, and if he has to threaten, for instance, knows how to do it by a movement of the lips, or the turn of a phrase in a polite note. If cruder and more violent tactics are necessary, to impress vulgar minds, he is very likely to depute this rough work to a subordinate. A foreman of track hands may have to be a loud-voiced, strong-armed, palpably aggressive person; but the president of the road is commonly quiet and mild-mannered.
The mind is greatly aided in the control of animosity by the existence of ready-made and socially accepted standards of right. Suffering from his own angry passions and from those of others, one looks out for some criterion, some rule of what is just and fair among persons, which he may hold himself and others to, and moderate antagonism by removing the sense of peculiar injury. Opposition itself, within certain limits, comes to be regarded as part of the reasonable order of things. In this view the function of moral standards is the same as that of courts of justice in grosser conflicts. All good citizens want the laws to be definite and vigorously enforced, in order to avoid the uncertainty, waste, and destruction of a lawless condition. In the same way right-minded people want definite moral standards, enforced by general opinion, in order to save the mental wear and tear of unguided feeling. It is a great relief to a person harassed by hostile emotion to find a point of view from which this emotion appears wrong or irrational, so that he can proceed definitely and with the sanction of his reason to put it down. The next best thing, perhaps, is to have the hostility definitely approved by reason, so that he may indulge it without further doubt. The unsettled condition is worst of all.
This control of hostility by a sense of common allegiance to rule is well illustrated by athletic games. When properly conducted they proceed upon a definite understanding of what is fair, and no lasting anger is felt for any hurts inflicted, so long as this standard of fairness is maintained. It is the same in war: soldiers do not necessarily feel any anger at other soldiers who are trying to shoot them to death. That is thought of as within the rules of the game. As Admiral Cervera’s chief of staff is reported to have said to Admiral Sampson, “You know there is nothing personal in this.” But if the white flag is used treacherously, explosive bullets employed, or the moral standard otherwise transgressed, there is hard feeling. It is very much the same with the multiform conflicts of purpose in modern industrial life. It is not clear that competition as such, apart from the question of fairness or unfairness, has any tendency to increase hostility. Competition and the clash of purposes are inseparable from activity, and are felt to be so. Ill-feeling flourishes no more in an active, stirring state of society than in a stagnant state. The trouble with our industrial relations is not the mere extent of competition, but the partial lack of established laws, rules, and customs, to determine what is right and fair in it. This partial lack of standards is connected with the rapid changes in industry and industrial relations among men, with which the development of law and of moral criteria has by no means kept pace. Hence there arises great uncertainty as to what some persons and classes may rightly and fairly require of other persons and classes; and this uncertainty lets loose angry imaginations.
It will be evident that I do not look upon affection, or anger, or any other particular mode of feeling, as in itself good or bad, social or anti-social, progressive or retrogressive. It seems to me that the essentially good, social, or progressive thing, in this regard, is the organization and discipline of all emotions by the aid of reason, in harmony with a developing general life, which is summed up for us in conscience. That this development of the general life is such as to tend ultimately to do away with hostile feeling altogether, is not clear. The actively good people, the just men, reformers, and prophets, not excepting him who drove the money-changers from the Temple, have been and are, for the most part, people who feel the spur of resentment; and it is not evident that this can cease to be the case. The diversity of human minds and endeavors seems to be an essential part of the general plan of things, and shows no tendency to diminish. This diversity involves a conflict of ideas and purposes, which, in those who take it earnestly, is likely to occasion hostile feeling. This feeling should become less wayward, violent, bitter, or personal, in a narrow sense, and more disciplined, rational, discriminating, and quietly persistent. That it ought to disappear is certainly not apparent.
Something similar to what has been said of anger will hold true of any well-marked type of instinctive emotion. If we take fear, for instance, and try to recall our experience of it from early childhood on, it seems clear that, while the emotion itself may change but little, the ideas, occasions, suggestions that excite it depend upon the state of our intellectual and social development, and so undergo great alteration. The feeling does not tend to disappear, but to become less violent and spasmodic, more and more social as regards the objects that excite it, and more and more subject, in the best minds, to the discipline of reason.
The fears of little children[[72]] are largely excited by immediate sensible experiences—darkness, solitude, sharp noises, and so on. Sensitive persons often remain throughout life subject to irrational fears of this sort, and it is well known that they play a conspicuous part in hysteria, insanity, and other weak or morbid conditions. But for the most part the healthy adult mind becomes accustomed and indifferent to these simple phenomena, and transfers its emotional sensibility to more complex interests. These interests are for the most part sympathetic, involving our social rather than our material self—our standing in the minds of other people, the well-being of those we care for, and so on. Yet these fears—fear of standing alone, of losing one’s place in the flow of human action and sympathy, fear for the character and success of those near to us—have often the very quality of childish fear. A man cast out of his regular occupation and secure place in the system of the world feels a terror like that of the child in the dark; just as impulsive, perhaps just as purposeless and paralyzing. The main difference seems to be that the latter fear is stimulated by a complex idea, implying a socially imaginative habit of mind.