[86] Democracy in America, vol. ii, book i, chap. 10.
[87] Henry Van Brunt, Greek Lines, 225. Some of these phrases, such as “illiterate combinations,” could never apply to the work of good architects.
[88] Democracy in America, vol. ii, book i, chap. 11.
[89] Emerson, Alphonso of Castile.
CHAPTER XVI
THE TREND OF SENTIMENT
Meaning and General Trend of Sentiment—Attenuation—Refinement—Sense of Justice—Truth as Justice—As Realism—As Expediency—As Economy of Attention—Hopefulness.
By sentiment I mean socialized feeling, feeling which has been raised by thought and intercourse out of its merely instinctive state and become properly human. It implies imagination, and the medium in which it chiefly lives is sympathetic contact with the minds of others. Thus love is a sentiment, while lust is not; resentment is, but not rage; the fear of disgrace or ridicule, but not animal terror, and so on. Sentiment is the chief motive-power of life, and as a rule lies deeper in our minds and is less subject to essential change than thought, from which, however, it is not to be too sharply separated.
Two traits in the growth of sentiment are perhaps characteristic of modern life, both of which, as will appear, are closely bound up with the other psychological changes that have already been discussed.
First a trend toward diversification: under the impulse of a growing diversity of suggestion and intercourse many new varieties and shades of sentiment are developed. Like a stream which is distributed for irrigation, the general current of social feeling is drawn off into many small channels.
Second a trend toward humanism, meaning by this a wider reach and application of the sentiments that naturally prevail in the familiar intercourse of primary groups. Following a tendency evident in all phases of the social mind, these expand and organize themselves at the expense of sentiments that go with the more formal or oppressive structures of an earlier epoch.