In a larger way the generally friendly attitude towards others, genial expansive receptivity, is at the basis of what is called "charity for human weakness." The gentle cynic can see and tolerate other men's weaknesses:
"He knows how much of what men paint themselves
Would blister in the light of what they are;
He sees how much of what was great now shares
An eminence transformed and ordinary;
He knows too much of what the world has hushed
In others, to be loud now for himself."[2]
[Footnote 2: Edwin Arlington Robinson: "Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford," in his Man Against the Sky.]
The devoutly religious have displayed keen psychological insight when they made man's salvation dependent on God's charity, and identified, as did Dante, charity with love.[3]
[Footnote 3: "Love and the gentle heart are one and the same thing." The New Life. XX (son XI) Amore e cor gentile son una cosa. To Dante the spontaneous impulse to love is the basis of all altruism. To feel and to follow this impulse is to be truly noble, to have a "cor gentile," a gentle heart.]
Hate. Hate may be described as an extreme form of disaffection usually provoked by some marked interference with our activities, desires, or ideals. But in less intense degree the negative feeling towards others may be provoked immediately and unmistakably by most casual evidence of voice, manner, or bearing. Such immediate revulsions of feeling contrast with the instances of "instinctive sympathy" previously cited, and are as direct and uncontrollable. Even kindly disposed persons cannot help experiencing in the presence of some persons they have never seen before, a half-conscious thrill of repulsion or a dislike colored with dread. A shifting gaze, a noticeably pretentious manner, a marked obsequiousness, a grating voice, a chillness of demeanor, a physical deformity, these, however little they may have to do with a person's genuine qualities, do affect our attitudes toward them. As the familiar verse has it:
"I do not like you, Dr. Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell,
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like you, Dr. Fell."
We may later revise our estimates, but the initial reaction is made, and often remains as a subconscious qualification of our general attitude toward another. People of worldly experience learn to trust their first reactions, to "size a man up" almost intuitively, and to be surprised if their first impressions go astray.
From this merely instinctive revulsion the negative attitude may rise to that terrible form of destructive antipathy which is "hate," as popularly understood. In between lie degrees of dislike depending partly on the strength of the initial antipathy, but equally so on the degree to which others, whether persons, institutions, or ideas, interfere with our activities, desires, or ideals. The man who seriously obstructs our love, our pleasure, or our ambition, or who tries to do so, provokes hate, and its concomitants of jealousy, rage, and pugnacity. It is not only that we dislike the mere presence of the person (in the opposite case the mere presence of the beloved object is a joy), but we dislike it for what it portends in danger and threat to ourselves. The more serious the evil or disaster for which a person comes to stand, the more violent the hatred for him, despite his personal fascinations. The villain is not infrequently a "damned smiling villain."
The provocation of hate is complicated by the fact that it is closely associated with fear. We dislike those who threaten our happiness partly because we fear them. And we fear, as was pointed out in more detail in the discussion of that powerful human trait, the unfamiliar, the strange, the startling, the unexpected. The facility with which sensational newspapers can work up in an ignorant population a hate for foreign nations, especially those of a totally alien civilization, is made possible by the fear which these uninformed readers can feel at the dangerous possibilities of mysterious foreign hordes. The fomenting of fear is in nearly all such cases a prerequisite to the fomenting of hate. And the promotion of hate has historically been one of the frequent ingredients of international conflicts.