Special references are: G. Berkeley, A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710, Introd. (A. C. Fraser, Selections from Berkeley, 1884, 16, 18, 22); T. H. Huxley, Hume, 1881, 96 f.; E. B. Tylor, Anthropology, 1881, chs. iv., v.
[CHAPTER XI]
Sentiment
Assis sur un banc de Mail, M. l’abbé Lantaigne, supérieur du grand séminaire, et M. Bergeret, maître de conférences à la Faculté des lettres, conversaient, selon leur coutume d’été. Ils étaient sur toutes choses d’un sentiment contraire; jamais deux hommes ne furent plus différents d’esprit et de caractère. Mais seuls dans la ville ils s’intéressaient aux idées générales. Cette sympathie les réunissait.—Anatole France
§ 68. The Nature of Sentiment.—In ordinary speech, the word ‘sentiment,’ like the word ‘feeling,’ is used in many different senses; and, unlike ‘feeling,’ it has not settled down to a single meaning within psychology. We must therefore define it arbitrarily; and we shall reserve it, in this book, to denote the feeling-complex which gathers about a judgement or an imaginative construction. In emotion, we are brought face to face with an incident or situation which overwhelms us, takes possession of us; the emotion arises in the state of primary attention. A very strong and complex feeling is formed, and is rendered still stronger and still more complex by the organic sensations that come with our bodily attitude towards the situation (p. 216). In sentiment, we are also brought face to face with an incident or situation; but this is of a kind that demands secondary attention, effortful and divisive attention, now to one phase or feature and now to another. We take possession of it, so to speak, in place of its taking possession of us. Otherwise, the sentiment resembles the emotion; a complex feeling is formed, and is reinforced by organic sensations; the bodily expression of sentiment is of the same kind as that of emotion. Suppose, for instance, that we sit down to a book by a new author. If we are actively and not passively interested; if we read critically, in the light of previous study and present knowledge; if we judge as we read; then our felt realisation of the aptness, fitness, rightness of the author’s style is a sentiment. Or suppose that we are looking at a painting by a great master. If we can see how form and colour flowed straight out of the brush; if we can appreciate this fluency as the reward of toil upon toil, essay after essay; if our own critical vision can seize the painter’s idea, and note the individuality with which that idea was conceived and is now expressed; then our felt realisation of the beauty of the painting is, again, a sentiment. These are examples offered from the standpoint of the critic; and such examples come naturally to mind, since criticism is both commoner and more articulate than creative art; but it need hardly be said that the artist too, as his construction proceeds, will have the same sort of experience, and probably in more intensive form.
The sentiment thus stands upon a higher level of mental development than the emotion; there is no other difference. And it follows from what we have said of thought (p. 262) that the sentiment is a rare experience. Just as there are many apparent judgements that are not really thought at all, so there are many apparent sentiments that are based upon borrowed judgements, and have never been anything more than feeling-attitudes, more or less explicit; and just as secondary lapses into derived primary attention, so will a true sentiment lapse, with time and repetition, into a feeling-attitude. Hence, in describing and identifying the sentiments, we must be constantly on guard against confusing them with attitudes based on ready-made judgements, and with attitudes based upon what were once true judgements but are now matters of habitual acceptance. Our ‘sentiment’ of honour, for example, may never have cost us a moment’s attention. A definition of honour has come to us, by tradition and precept, and we have accepted it without thought; situations which involve honour take possession of us, as emotive situations do, and we reply by the feeling-attitude. Or again, our ‘sentiment’ of beauty in pictorial art may once have been a real sentiment; we may have laboriously studied art-canons, have studiously dissected art-forms by secondary attention, have steeped ourselves in appreciation and criticism. Now, after all this labour, we have nothing but an attitude to a new picture; we ‘instinctively’ approve or disapprove of a work of art, without making any positive effort to analyse it. To talk, in these cases, about a moral or an æsthetic sentiment would be psychologically wrong; we experience simply two feeling-attitudes.
If, then, psychology were concerned simply with the part played in the mental life by the sentiments proper, the subject might be dismissed in a few words; the sentiments would figure in a text-book of psychology very much as the ‘rare earths’ figure in an elementary chemistry. We cannot thus dismiss them, and for two reasons. In the first place, the experience of a true sentiment, in any one of the great departments in which sentiments may appear,—we shall mention them presently,—leaves behind it a remarkably varied train of feeling-attitudes; and these attitudes are thenceforward a permanent possession; we give illustrations in § 69. Secondly, the experience of a sentiment, and the possession of the consequent variety of attitudes, enable one empathically to realise the attitudes and responses of those who, in other departments, have reached the same mental level. Not only is there a ‘freemasonry among artists’; there is a freemasonry among all men and women who have at any time really judged or constructed; so that the radical reformer and the conservative reactionary, the austere moralist and the disciple of art for art’s sake, feel at home with each other, can get to close quarters with each other; their ideas and beliefs may differ as the east differs from the west, but—if they have honestly wrestled with their problem—there is a felt psychological community between them. The great writer who goes by the name of Anatole France has brought out this truth, in his own ironical way, in the quotation which heads the chapter. So that individually and socially the sentiments demand consideration; the attitudes which derive from them enrich and diversify individual experience, and establish a social bond of empathic understanding among those who would else be psychological strangers.
[§ 69]. The Variety of Feeling-Attitude.—Let us take an elementary example of the variety of attitudes which follows in the wake of a sentiment. The sentiment which we select is one of those most widely attained: the sentiment of fitness of literary style. If, now, you read Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan,—as who has not?—you cannot fail to notice the differences of paragraphing. There are paragraphs which follow one another in the ordinary way, without break. There are paragraphs separated by a blank space, the width of a line of print. There are paragraphs that begin with a dash. There are paragraphs separated by a line or triangle of asterisks. There are paragraphs which end with a series of periods. And these modes of connective separation, as we may be allowed to call them, are themselves variously combined.