As previously intimated, we have to sharply distinguish between pride and such emotions as self-satisfaction and self-complacency. These latter emotions of personality deal solely with the self in its own sight, while pride is always not over self to self, but over self to others. The self-satisfied often are proud, but this is not necessarily implied. The comparative element enters in self-satisfaction, as in all true pride, but the comparison is primarily with oneself, not with others. If we succeed in our own eyes, we may think little about others. A pure self-satisfaction, like a purely altruistic pride, is a rare and late phenomenon. Pride about others, pride to oneself, are both very apt to be tinged with the original pride over others. One says of a friend, “I feel proud of him”; but while this has a certain reality and psychic value of altruistic mode, yet the innate and fundamental selfishness of pride tends to make a place in what appears to be the most disinterested form. Personal interest and aggrandisement is so inbred a motive from the earliest stages of evolution that it is never superseded.
A feeling of embarrassment is an emotion of personality which is closely connected with pride. Those who are most susceptible to pride are most apt to feel embarrassed. The one who has no tendency toward pride, who does not in the least care how he may appear before others or in relation to others, and so does not value his place among his fellows, cannot be embarrassed. He may be disturbed by the difficulties of some task, but only in the same way in which he would be agitated by any difficult work undertaken by and for himself alone. The emotion of embarrassment, like pride, conceives the self in its social relations. When one says that he felt greatly embarrassed in being called on unexpectedly to speak at a dinner, we perceive that he means emotion, not merely in view of the inherent difficulty of the task, but in view of what he himself may or may not do under the inspection of the critical. In this emotion there is a wonderful quickening of the self-sense, a painfully intense self-consciousness being suddenly generated as the peculiar relation of self to others is impressed upon him. This self-sense is powerfully reinforced by the self-sense of the bodily expression of self-consciousness. The whole bodily self seems conspicuously magnified, and we become painfully aware of hands, feet, and other members. This bodily self-sensitiveness, as often contributing strongly to this emotion-total, is very marked in cases of blushing. A girl, feeling embarrassed, blushes, and immediately becoming conscious of the blushing as itself an embarrassing circumstance, blushes again still more violently, and becoming conscious of this, becomes still more confused, and so on, a constant cumulation of psychic effect from reaction of expression. Sense of the expression of embarrassment is itself embarrassing, hence every embarrassment may become in itself a new source of embarrassment. However, that this peculiar self-consciousness cannot be forced in itself or in its expression, we see in the fact that the efforts of the maiden who exclaims in mock modesty, “I know I am blushing,” are entirely futile. This assumption of embarrassment may become embarrassing, and so a genuine expression be stimulated, which, however, is of quite another order from the one desired.
How such an emotion as that of embarrassment, which is disadvantageous from the first, could have originated under natural selection, can never be solved by the evolutionist who views all variation as originally springing from personal advantage. Here is a psychosis, always the reverse of serviceable, an emotion anticipatory of disgraceful defeat, and so is really premonitory, but yet one which ever unnerves, rather than nerves to successful action. He who never feels embarrassed, under any circumstances always has the best chance. Hence this psychosis must be strictly a negative evolution, an unfavourable variation determined by a persistent exciting by antagonists as serviceable to them. An adversary will always put his opponent in an embarrassing situation, and endeavour that he shall both be embarrassed and feel embarrassment. This emotion has thus been stimulated and fostered during ages of psychic evolution, and in advanced human evolution the stimulating it is one of the subtlest methods of offence.
A feeling of embarrassment is incipient shame, or perhaps the way for shame. But the feeling of embarrassment is generally anticipatory as to the potential, while shame is as to the actual; it is a feeling of present public degradation and loss. Both equally imply a capacity for pride; one who cannot be proud cannot be ashamed. But shame, unlike the feeling of embarrassment, acts as serviceable variation to the individual, and is one of the weightiest negative guards to advantageous actions. It cannot promote very high and noble action, but it keeps above a certain low and base level. The member of society who has lost all pride and all sense of shame has ceased to feel the most powerful and useful of social incentives.[[E]]
[E]. As to the origin of bodily shame, we may suppose that this arose with reference to excreta as something rejected from the body, and therefore base and unworthy. With the refined even spitting and perspiring are shameful. It may be that sexual shame can be traced to the same root, but social convention and morality also have very large influence here.
There is a certain curious psychosis which may be called shame for want of a better term. I allude to the feeling which prompts one to shun oneself. One may not only be ashamed to look others in the eye, but even himself. He will not look at himself in a mirror because he feels a great loss of self-respect. This is not the opposite of vanity, a shame at viewing oneself because of unseemliness of feature, which is liable to general observation, but it is rather the reverse, the polar opposite of pure self-feeling, of self-respect and self-satisfaction. A feeling of shame with regard to oneself alone is still, of course, comparative; though it does not touch upon others, it implies a self-erected standard. This emotion, like the others just mentioned, is obviously very late.
However, perhaps the latest in the series, and the psychic culmination of all is humility. Humility, like meekness, marks a new order of evolution. In the highest human development pride is eliminated and supplanted by humility. A true self-estimate of personal achievement upon a very wide and impartial impersonal basis, either that of a scientific view of man’s place in the universe, or as influenced by high religious and moral ideals, leads to a feeling of humility. Egoism and self-assertiveness give place to altruistic modesty and refined reserve. The humble man always gives place rather than takes place. He does not lift himself above his fellows, but takes the lowest seat, and is servant of all. The humble man does not strive with others, not because too proud to do so, as Landor, but because he feels called to the highest and best work for its own sake. He says with Laotze, “Do, not strive.” Unthinking of getting ahead or falling behind others, he aims consistently and constantly at an ideal of perfect fruitage, so high an ideal that he always feels his own unworthiness in his own sight and in that of others, though aware of his desert by the ordinary standards of his community, country, or generation. Worldly successes produce no elation in the lowly of heart; they view themselves, not with self-depreciation, but with the justness of the largest view, as Newton, who, when complimented upon his attainments, replied that he had but picked up a few pebbles by the ocean of truth. Spiritual and ethical principles sway these, and not personal ambition. And it must be noted that humility is not simply lack of pride under circumstances which naturally allow of it, an insensitiveness to pride, a wholly negative state, which is nothing in itself, but it is a positive feeling and emotion in view of oneself in relation to others. Thus the humble man is he of high pride capacity, and who consciously refrains from pride when usual standards would allow it. “That is something to be proud of,” “He has a right to be proud,” and similar expressions mark the lower standards of which he never avails himself. The best and noblest specimens of mankind renounce the “world,” “the lust of the eye and pride of life,” and live by their self-erected ideals. And if we ask how the spirit of humility and disinterestedness can arise and progress in a natural evolution, we must answer that it holds its place and wins its way by reason of its greater inherent value and fruitfulness. He who has himself in view has lost sight of his work. By this psychic mode alone is the largest, most perfect, most permanent work accomplished, and ultimately, often posthumously, it is appreciated at its real worth. Those originating and master minds in human history who have opened new avenues of spiritual progress, have usually been of this modest, unassuming, humble type. Thus in a wholly natural manner the higher law of an ideal life prevails over the lower law of life which works only by competition in the struggle for existence.