The ascendency of personal authority is usually greater in proportion as the mind is of a simple, visually imaginative, rather than reflective turn. People of the sort commonly called “emotional,” with ready and vivid personal feeling but little constructive power, are likely to yield to an ascendent influence as a whole, with little selection or reconstruction. Their individuality is expressed chiefly in the choice of a master; having chosen, they are all his. If they change masters they change morals at the same time. The mental unity of which they, like all the rest of us, are in search, is found in allegiance to a concrete personality, which saves them the impossible task of abstract thought. Such people, however, usually feel an attraction toward stability in others, and secure it for themselves by selecting a steadfast personality to anchor their imaginations to.
This, of course, is possible or congenial only to those who lack the mental vigor to make in a more intellectual manner that synthesis of which moral judgment is the expression. Those who have this vigor make use of many examples, and if they acknowledge the pre-eminence of anyone, he is likely to be vaguely conceived and to be in reality no more than the symbol of their own moral conclusions.
The immediate power of personal images or influences over our sense of right is probably greater in all of us than we realize. “It is wonderful,” says George Eliot in “Middlemarch,” “how much uglier things will look when we only think we are blamed for them ... and, on the other hand, it is astonishing how pleasantly conscience takes our encroachments on those who never complain, or have nobody to complain for them.” That is to say, other persons, by awaking social self-feeling in us, give life and power to certain sentiments of approval or disapproval regarding our own actions. The rule, already suggested, that the self of a sensitive person, in the presence of an ascendent personality, tends to become his interpretation of what the other thinks of him, is a prime factor in determining the moral judgments of all of us. Everyone must have felt the moral renewal that comes with the mere presence of one who is vigorously good, whose being enlivens our aspiration and shames our backsliding, who makes us really feel the desirability of the higher life and the baseness and dulness of the lower.
In one of Mr. Theodore Child’s papers on French art he relates that Dagnan said after the death of Bastien-Lepage, “With every new picture I paint in future I shall try to think if he would have been satisfied with it.” Almost the same has been said by an American author with reference to Robert Louis Stevenson. And these instances are typical of the general fact that our higher selves, our distinctively right views and choices, are dependent upon imaginative realization of the points of view of other persons. There is, I think, no possibility of being good without living, imaginatively of course, in good company; and those who uphold the moral power of personal example, as against that of abstract thought are certainly in the right. A mental crisis, by its very difficulty, is likely to call up the thought of some person we have been used to look to as a guide, and the confronting of the two ideas, that of the person and that of the problem, compels us to answer the question What would he have thought of it? The guide we appeal to may be a person in the room, or a distant friend, or an author whom we have never seen, or an ideal person of religion. The strong, good men we have once imagined live in our minds and fortify there the idea of worthiness. They were free and noble and make us unhappy to be less.
Of course the influence of other persons often goes by contraries. The thought of one who is repugnant to us often brings a strong sense of the wrong of that for which he stands, and our conviction of the hatefulness of any ill trait is much enlivened by intimate contact with one who exhibits it.
The moral potency of confession, and of all sorts of publicity, rests upon the same basis. In opening ourselves to another we are impelled to imagine how our conduct appears to him; we take an outside view of ourselves. It makes a great difference to whom we confess: the higher the character of the person whose mind we imagine, the more enlightening and elevating is the view of ourselves that we get. Even to write our thoughts in a diary, and so to confess, not to a particular person, but to that vague image of an interlocutor that connects itself with all articulate expression, makes things look different.
It is, perhaps, much the same with prayer. To pray, in a higher sense, is to confront our moral perplexities with the highest personal ideal we can form, and so to be unconsciously integrating the two, straightening out the one in accordance with the other. It would seem that social psychology strongly corroborates the idea that prayer is an essential aspect of the higher life; by showing, I mean, that thought, and especially vivid thought, is interlocutory in its very nature, and that aspiration almost necessarily takes, more or less distinctly, the form of intercourse with an ideal being.
Whatever publishes our conduct introduces new and strong factors into conscience; but whether this publicity is wholesome or otherwise depends upon the character of the public; or, more definitely, upon whether the idea of ourselves that we impute to this public is edifying or degrading. In many cases, for instance, it is ruinous to a person’s character to be publicly disgraced, because he, or she, presently accepts the degrading self that seems to exist in the minds of others. There are some people to whom we should be ashamed to confess our sins, and others, perhaps, to whom we should not like to own our virtues. Certainly it should not be assumed that it is good for us to have our acts displayed before the generality of persons: while this may be a good thing as regards matters, like the tax-roll, that relate to our obvious duty to the immediate community, it has in most things a somewhat vulgarizing effect, tending to promote conformity rather than a distinctive life. If the scholar’s study were on the market-place, so that the industrious townspeople could see how many hours of the day he spends in apparent idleness, he might lack courage to pursue his vocation. In short, we need privacy as against influences that are not edifying, and communion with those that are.
Even telling the truth does not result so much from a need of mental accuracy, though this is strong in some minds, as from a sense of the unfairness of deceiving people of our own sort, and of the shame of being detected in so doing. Consequently the maxim, “Truth for friends and lies for enemies,” is very generally followed, not only by savages and children, but, more or less openly, by civilized people. Most persons feel reluctant to tell a lie in so many words, but few have any compunctions in deceiving by manner, and the like, persons toward whom they feel no obligation. We all know business men who will boast of their success in deceiving rivals; and probably few of us hold ourselves to quite the same standard of honor in dealing with one we believe to be tricky and ill-disposed toward us, that we would if we thought him honest and well meaning. “Conscience is born of love” in this as in many matters. A thoughtful observer will easily see that injustice and not untruth is the essence of lying, as popularly conceived.
It is because of our need to recall vanished persons, that all goodness and justice, all right of any large sort, depend upon an active imagination. Without it we are the prisoners of the immediate environment and of the suggestions of the lower organism. It is only this that enables us to live with the best our lives have afforded, and maintain higher suggestions to compete with the baser ones that assail us. Let us hear Professor James again: “When for motives of honor and conscience I brave the condemnation of my own family, club and ‘set’; when as a Protestant I turn Catholic; as a Catholic, free-thinker; as a ‘regular practitioner,’ homeopath, or what not, I am always inwardly strengthened in my course, and steeled against the loss of my actual social self by the thought of other and better possible social judges than those whose verdict goes against me now. The ideal social self which I thus seek in appealing to their decision may be very remote; it may be represented as barely possible. I may not hope for its realization during my lifetime; I may even expect the future generations, which would approve me if they knew me, to know nothing about me when I am dead and gone.”[[100]] As regards the nearness or remoteness of the companion it would perhaps be sufficient to say that if imagined he is actually present, so far as our mental and moral life are concerned, and except as affecting the vividness of our idea of him, it makes no immediate difference whether we ever saw him or whether he ever had any corporeal existence at all.