Before it becomes moral, before even it becomes psychological, it is biological. At bottom, it is a property of life, and its complete study would be a chapter of general psychology. If, limiting ourselves to what is strictly necessary, we try to follow the evolution of sympathy, from its most rudimentary to its highest forms, we distinguish three principal phases. The first, or physiological, consists in an agreement of motor tendencies, a synergia; the second, or psychological, consists in an agreement of the emotional states, a synæsthesia; the third, or intellectual, results from a community of representations or ideas, connected with feelings and movements.
First Phase.—In its primitive form sympathy is reflex, automatic, unconscious, or very slightly conscious; it is, according to Bain, the tendency to produce in ourselves an attitude, a state, a bodily movement which we perceive in another person. This is imitation in its most rudimentary form. Between sympathy and imitation, at any rate in this primitive period, I see only one difference of aspect: sympathy everywhere marks the passive, receptive side of the phenomenon—imitation, its active and motor side.[[144]]
It manifests itself in animals forming aggregates (not societies), such as a flock of sheep, or a pack of dogs who run, stop, bark all at the same time, through a purely physical impulse of imitation: in man, infectious laughter or yawning, walking in step, imitating the movements of a rope-walker while watching him, feeling a shock in one’s legs when one sees a man falling, and a hundred other occurrences of this kind are cases of physiological sympathy. It plays a great part in the psychology of crowds, with their rapid attacks and sudden panics. In nervous diseases, there is a superfluity of examples: epidemics of hysteric fits, convulsive barking, hiccup, etc. I omit the mental maladies (epidemics of suicide, double or triple madness) since we are only considering the purely physiological stage.
To sum up, sympathy is originally a property of living matter: as there is an organic memory and an organic sensitiveness, being those of the tissues and ultimate elements which compose them, there is an organic sympathy, made up of receptivity and imitative movements.
The second phase is that of sympathy in the psychological sense, necessarily accompanied by consciousness; it creates, in two or more individuals, analogous emotional states. Such are the cases in which we say that fear, indignation, joy or sorrow are communicated. It consists in feeling an emotion existing in another, and is revealed to us by its physiological expression. This phase consists of two stages.
1. The first might be defined as psychological unison. If, during this period of unison, we could read the minds of those who sympathise, we should see a single emotional fact reflected in the consciousness of several individuals. L. Noiré, in his book, Ursprung der Sprache, has proposed the theory that language originated in community of action among the earliest human beings. When working, marching, dancing, rowing, they uttered (according to this writer) sounds which became the appellatives of these different actions, or of various objects; and these sounds, being uttered by all, must have been understood by all. Whether this theory be correct or not (it has been accepted as such by Max Müller), it will serve as an illustration. But this state of sympathy does not, by itself, constitute a tie of affection or tenderness between those who feel it: it only prepares the way for such an emotion. It may be the basis of a certain social solidarity, because the same internal states excite the same acts, of a mechanical, exterior, non-moral solidarity.
2. The second stage is that of sympathy, in the restricted and popular sense of the word. This consists of psychological unison, plus a new element: there is added another emotional manifestation, tender emotion (benevolence, sympathy, pity, etc.). It is no longer sympathy pure and simple, it is a binary compound. The common habit of considering phenomena only under their higher and complete forms often misleads us as to their origin and constitution. Moreover, in order to understand that this is a case of duality—the fusion of two distinct elements—and that our analysis is not a factitious one, it is sufficient to point out that sympathy (in the etymological sense) may exist without any tender emotion—nay, that it may exclude instead of exciting it. According to Lubbock, while ants carry away their wounded, bees—though forming a society—are indifferent towards each other. It is well known that gregarious animals nearly always shun and desert a wounded member of the herd. Among men, how many there are who when they see suffering hasten to withdraw themselves from the spectacle, in order to escape the pain which it sympathetically awakens in them. This impulse may go the length of aversion, as typified by Dives in the Gospel. It is therefore a complete psychological error to consider sympathy as capable, unaided, of delivering men from egoism; it only takes the first step, and not always that.
Third Phase.—Under its intellectual form, sympathy is an agreement in feelings and actions, founded on unity of representation. The law of development is summed up in Spencer’s formula, “The degree and range of sympathy depend on the clearness and extent of representation.”[[145]] I should, however, add: on condition of being based on an emotional temperament. This last is the source par excellence of sympathy, because it vibrates like an echo; the active temperament lends itself less to such impulses, because it has so much to do in manifesting its own individuality that it can scarcely manifest those of others; finally, the phlegmatic temperament does so least of all, because it presents a minimum of emotional life; like Leibnitz’s monads, it has no windows.
In passing from the emotional to the intellectual phase, sympathy gains in extent and stability. In fact, emotional sympathy requires some analogy in temperament or nature; it can scarcely be established between the timid and the daring, between the cheerful and the melancholic; it may be extended to all human beings and to the animals nearest us, but not beyond them. On the contrary, it is the special attribute of intelligence to seek resemblances or analogies everywhere, to unify; it embraces the whole of nature. By the law of transfer (which we have already studied) sympathy follows this invading march, and comprehends even inanimate objects, as in the case of the poet, who feels himself in communion with the sea, the woods, the lakes, or the mountains. Besides, intellectual sympathy participates in the relative fixity of representation: we find a simple instance of this in animal societies, such as those of the bees, where unity, or sympathy among the members, is only maintained by the perception or representation of the queen.