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HUMAN NATURE AND THE SOCIAL ORDER

BY

CHARLES HORTON COOLEY

INSTRUCTOR IN SOCIOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

1902

Copyright, 1902, by

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Published, September, 1902

TROW DIRECTORY

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY

NEW YORK

CONTENTS

HUMAN NATURE AND THE

SOCIAL ORDER

CHAPTER I
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL

Are Aspects of the Same Thing—The Fallacy of Setting them in Opposition—Various Forms of this Fallacy.

“Society and the Individual” is really the subject of this whole book, and not merely of Chapter One. It is my general aim to set forth, from various points of view, what the individual is, considered as a member of a social whole; while the special purpose of this chapter is only to offer a preliminary statement of the matter, as I conceive it, afterward to be unfolded at some length and variously illustrated.

A separate individual is an abstraction unknown to experience, and so likewise is society when regarded as something apart from individuals. The real thing is Human Life, which may be considered either in an individual aspect or in a social, that is to say a general, aspect; but is always, as a matter of fact, both individual and general. In other words, “society” and “individuals” do not denote separable phenomena, but are simply collective and distributive aspects of the same thing, the relation between them being like that between other expressions one of which denotes a group as a whole and the other the members of the group, such as the army and the soldiers, the class and the students, and so on. This holds true of any social aggregate, great or small; of a family, a city, a nation, a race; of mankind as a whole: no matter how extensive, complex, or enduring a group may be, no good reason can be given for regarding it as essentially different in this respect from the smallest, simplest, or most transient.

So far, then, as there is any difference between the two, it is rather in our point of view than in the object we are looking at: when we speak of society, or use any other collective term, we fix our minds upon some general view of the people concerned, while when we speak of individuals we disregard the general aspect and think of them as if they were separate. Thus “the Cabinet” may consist of President Lincoln, Secretary Stanton, Secretary Seward, and so on; but when I say “the Cabinet” I do not suggest the same idea as when I enumerate these gentlemen separately. Society, or any complex group, may, to ordinary observation, be a very different thing from all of its members viewed one by one—as a man who beheld General Grant’s army from Missionary Ridge would have seen something other than he would by approaching every soldier in it. In the same way a picture is made up of so many square inches of painted canvas; but if you should look at these one at a time, covering the others, until you had seen them all, you would still not have seen the picture. There may, in all such cases, be a system or organization in the whole that is not apparent in the parts. In this sense, and in no other, is there a difference between society and the individuals of which it is composed; a difference not residing in the facts themselves but existing to the observer on account of the limits of his perception. A complete view of society would also be a complete view of all the individuals, and vice versa; there would be no difference between them.

And just as there is no society or group that is not a collective view of persons, so there is no individual who may not be regarded as a particular view of social groups. He has no separate existence; through both the hereditary and the social factors in his life a man is bound into the whole of which he is a member, and to consider him apart from it is quite as artificial as to consider society apart from individuals.

If this is true there is, of course, a fallacy in that not uncommon manner of speaking which sets the social and the individual over against each other as separate and antagonistic. The word “social” appears to be used in at least three fairly distinct senses, but in none of these does it mean something that can properly be regarded as opposite to individual or personal.

In its largest sense it denotes that which pertains to the collective aspect of humanity, to society in its widest and vaguest meaning. In this sense the individual and all his attributes are social, since they are all connected with the general life in one way or another, and are part of a collective development.

Again, social may mean what pertains to immediate intercourse, to the life of conversation and face-to-face sympathy—sociable in short. This is something quite different, but no more antithetical to individual than the other; it is in these relations that individuality most obviously exists and expresses itself.

In a third sense the word means conducive to the collective welfare, and thus becomes nearly equivalent to moral, as when we say that crime or sensuality is unsocial or anti-social; but here again it cannot properly be made the antithesis of individual—since wrong is surely no more individual than right—but must be contrasted with immoral, brutal, selfish, or some other word with an ethical implication.

There are a number of expressions which are closely associated in common usage with this objectionable antithesis; such words, for instance, as individualism, socialism, particularism, collectivism.[^[1]] These appear to be used with a good deal of vagueness, so that it is always in order to require that anyone who employs them shall make it plain in what sense they are to be taken. I wish to make no captious objections to particular forms of expression, and so far as these can be shown to have meanings that express the facts of life I have nothing to say against them. Of the current use of individualism and socialism in antithesis to each other, about the same may be said as of the words without the ism. I do not see that life presents two distinct and opposing tendencies that can properly be called individualism and socialism, any more than that there are two distinct and opposing entities, society and the individual, to embody these tendencies. The phenomena usually called individualistic are always socialistic in the sense that they are expressive of tendencies growing out of the general life, and, contrariwise, the so-called socialistic phenomena have always an obvious individual aspect. These and similar terms may be used, conveniently enough, to describe theories or programmes of the day, but whether they are suitable for purposes of careful study appears somewhat doubtful. If used, they ought, it seems to me, to receive more adequate definition than they have at present.

For example, all the principal epochs of European history might be, and most of them are, spoken of as individualistic on one ground or another, and without departing from current usage of the word. The decaying Roman Empire was individualistic if a decline of public spirit and an every-man-for-himself feeling and practice constitute individualism. So also was the following period of political confusion. The feudal system is often regarded as individualistic, because of the relative independence and isolation of small political units—quite a different use of the word from the preceding—and after this come the Revival of Learning, the Renaissance, and the Reformation, which are all commonly spoken of, on still other grounds, as assertions of individualism. Then we reach the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sceptical, transitional, and, again, individualistic; and so to our own time, which many hold to be the most individualistic of all. One feels like asking whether a word which means so many things as this means anything whatever.

There is always some confusion of terms in speaking of opposition between an individual and society in general, even when the writer’s meaning is obvious enough: it would be more accurate to say either that one individual is opposing many, or that one part of society is opposing other parts; and thus avoid confusing the two aspects of life in the same expression. When Emerson says that society is in a conspiracy against the independence of each of its members, we are to understand that any peculiar tendency represented by one person finds itself more or less at variance with the general current of tendencies organized in other persons. It is no more individual, nor any less social, in a large sense, than other tendencies represented by more persons. A thousand persons are just as truly individuals as one, and the man who seems to stand alone draws his being from the general stream of life just as truly and inevitably as if he were one of a thousand. Innovation is just as social as conformity, genius as mediocrity. These distinctions are not between what is individual and what is social, but between what is usual or established and what is exceptional or novel. In other words, wherever you find life as society there you will find life as individuality, and vice versa.

I think, then, that the antithesis, society versus the individual, is false and hollow whenever used as a general or philosophical statement of human relations. Whatever idea may be in the minds of those who set these words and their derivatives over against each other, the notion conveyed is that of two separable entities or forces; and certainly such a notion is untrue to fact.

Most people not only think of individuals and society as more or less separate and antithetical, but they look upon the former as antecedent to the latter. That persons make society would be generally admitted as a matter of course; but that society makes persons would strike many as a startling notion, though I know of no good reason for looking upon the distributive aspect of life as more primary or causative than the collective aspect. The reason for the common impression appears to be that we think most naturally and easily of the individual phase of life, simply because it is a tangible one, the phase under which men appear to the senses, while the actuality of groups, of nations, of mankind at large, is realized only by the active and instructed imagination. We ordinarily regard society, so far as we conceive it at all, in a vaguely material aspect, as an aggregate of physical bodies, not as the vital whole which it is; and so, of course, we do not see that it may be as original or causative as anything else. Indeed many look upon “society” and other general terms as somewhat mystical, and are inclined to doubt whether there is any reality back of them.

This naïve individualism of thought—which, however, does not truly see the individual any more than it does society—is reinforced by traditions in which all of us are brought up, and is so hard to shake off that it may be worth while to point out a little more definitely some of the prevalent ways of conceiving life which are permeated by it, and which anyone who agrees with what has just been said may regard as fallacious. My purpose in doing this is only to make clearer the standpoint from which succeeding chapters are written, and I do not propose any thorough discussion of the views mentioned.

First, then, we have mere individualism. In this the distributive aspect is almost exclusively regarded, collective phases being looked upon as quite secondary and incidental. Each person is held to be a separate agent, and all social phenomena are thought of as originating in the action of such agents. The individual is the source, the independent, the only human source, of events. Although this way of looking at things has been much discredited by the evolutionary science and philosophy of recent years, it is by no means abandoned, even in theory, and practically it enters as a premise, in one shape or another, into most of the current thought of the day. It springs naturally from the established way of thinking, congenial, as I have remarked, to the ordinary material view of things and corroborated by theological and other traditions.

Next is double causation, or a partition of power between society and the individual, thought of as separate causes. This notion, in one shape or another, is the one ordinarily met with in social and ethical discussion. It is no advance, philosophically, upon the preceding. There is the same premise of the individual as a separate, unrelated agent; but over against him is set a vaguely conceived general or collective interest and force. It seems that people are so accustomed to thinking of themselves as uncaused causes, special creators on a small scale, that when the existence of general phenomena is forced upon their notice they are likely to regard these as something additional, separate, and more or less antithetical. Our two forces contend with varying fortunes, the thinker sometimes sympathizing with one, sometimes with the other, and being an individualist or a socialist accordingly. The doctrines usually understood in connection with these terms differ, as regards their conception of the nature of life, only in taking opposite sides of the same questionable antithesis. The socialist holds it desirable that the general or collective force should win; the individualist has a contrary opinion. Neither offers any change of ground, any reconciling and renewing breadth of view. So far as breadth of view is concerned a man might quite as well be an individualist as a socialist or collectivist, the two being identical in philosophy though antagonistic in programme. If one is inclined to neither party he may take refuge in the expectation that the controversy, resting, as he may hold that it does, on a false conception of life, will presently take its proper place among the forgotten débris of speculation.

Thirdly we have primitive individualism. This expression has been used to describe the view that sociality follows individuality in time, is a later and additional product of development. This view is a variety of the preceding, and is, perhaps, formed by a mingling of individualistic preconceptions with a somewhat crude evolutionary philosophy. Individuality is usually conceived as lower in moral rank as well as precedent in time. Man was a mere individual, mankind a mere aggregation of such, but he has gradually become socialized, he is progressively merging into a social whole. Morally speaking, the individual is the bad, the social the good, and we must push on the work of putting down the former and bringing in the latter.

Of course the view which I regard as sound, is that individuality is neither prior in time nor lower in moral rank than sociality; but that the two have always existed side by side as complementary aspects of the same thing, and that the line of progress is from a lower to a higher type of both, not from the one to the other. If the word social is applied only to the higher forms of mental life it should, as already suggested, be opposed not to individual, but to animal, sensual, or some other word implying mental or moral inferiority. If we go back to a time when the state of our remote ancestors was such that we are not willing to call it social, then it must have been equally undeserving to be described as individual or personal; that is to say, they must have been just as inferior to us when viewed separately as when viewed collectively. To question this is to question the vital unity of human life.

The life of the human species, like that of other species, must always have been both general and particular, must always have had its collective and distributive aspects. The plane of this life has gradually risen, involving, of course, both the aspects mentioned. Now, as ever, they develop as one, and may be observed united in the highest activities of the highest minds. Shakespeare, for instance, is in one point of view a unique and transcendent individual; in another he is a splendid expression of the general life of mankind: the difference is not in him but in the way we choose to look at him.

Finally, there is the social faculty view. This expression might be used to indicate those conceptions which regard the social as including only a part, often a rather definite part, of the individual. Human nature is thus divided into individualistic or non-social tendencies or faculties, and those that are social. Thus, certain emotions, as love, are social; others, as fear or anger, are unsocial or individualistic. Some writers have even treated the intelligence as an individualistic faculty, and have found sociality only in some sorts of emotion or sentiment.

This idea of instincts or faculties that are peculiarly social is well enough if we use this word in the sense of pertaining to conversation or immediate fellow-feeling. Affection is certainly more social in this sense than fear. But if it is meant that these instincts or faculties are in themselves morally higher than others, or that they alone pertain to the collective life, the view is, I think, very questionable. At any rate the opinion I hold, and expect to explain more fully in the further course of this book, is that man’s psychical outfit is not divisible into the social and the non-social; but that he is all social in a large sense, is all a part of the common human life, and that his social or moral progress consists less in the aggrandizement of particular faculties or instincts and the suppression of others, than in the discipline of all with reference to a progressive organization of life which we know in thought as conscience.

Some instincts or tendencies may grow in relative importance, may have an increasing function, while the opposite may be true of others. Such relative growth and diminution of parts seems to be a general feature of evolution, and there is no reason why it should be absent from our mental development. But here as well as elsewhere most parts, if not all, are or have been functional with reference to a life collective as well as distributive; there is no sharp separation of faculties, and progress takes place rather by gradual adaptation of old organs to new functions than by disuse and decay.

CHAPTER II
SUGGESTION AND CHOICE

The Meaning of these Terms and their Relation to each Other—Individual and Social Aspects of Will or Choice—Suggestion and Choice in Children—The Scope of Suggestion commonly Underestimated—Practical Limitations upon Deliberate Choice—Illustrations of the Action of the Milieu—The Greater or Less Activity of Choice Reflects the State of Society—Suggestibility.

The antithesis between suggestion and choice is another of those familiar ideas which are not always so clear as they should be.

The word suggestion is used here to denote an influence that works in a comparatively mechanical or reflex way, without calling out that higher selective activity of the mind implied in choice or will. Thus the hypnotic subject who performs apparently meaningless actions at the word of the operator is said to be controlled by suggestion; so also is one who catches up tricks of speech and action from other people without meaning to. From such instances the idea is extended to embrace any thought or action which is mentally simple and seems not to involve choice. The behavior of people under strong emotion is suggestive; crowds are suggestible; habit is a kind of suggestion, and so on.

I prefer this word to imitation, which some use in this or a similar sense, because the latter, as ordinarily understood, seems to cover too little in some directions and too much in others. In common use it means an action that results in visible or audible resemblance. Now although our simple reactions to the influence of others are largely of this sort, they are by no means altogether so; the actions of a child during the first six months of life, for instance, are very little imitative in this sense; on the other hand, the imitation that produces a visible resemblance may be a voluntary process of the most complex sort imaginable, like the skilful painting of a portrait. However, it makes little difference what words we use if we have sound meanings back of them, and I am far from intending to find fault with writers, like Professor Baldwin and M. Tarde, who adopt the word and give it a wide and unusual application. For my purpose, however, it does not seem expedient to depart so far from ordinary usage.

The distinction between suggestion and choice is not, I think, a sharp opposition between separable or radically different things, but rather a way of indicating the lower and higher stages of a series. What we call choice or will appears to be an ill-defined area of more strenuous mental activity within a much wider field of activity similar in kind but less intense. It is not sharply divisible from the mass of involuntary thought. The truth is that the facts of the mind, of society, indeed of any living whole, seldom admit of sharp division, but show gradual transitions from one thing to another: there are no fences in these regions. We speak of suggestion as mechanical; but it seems probable that all psychical life is selective, or, in some sense, choosing, and that the rudiments of consciousness and will may be discerned or inferred in the simplest reaction of the lowest living creature. In our own minds the comparatively simple ideas which are called suggestions are by no means single and primary, but each one is itself a living, shifting, multifarious bit of life, a portion of the fluid “stream of thought” formed by some sort of selection and synthesis out of simpler elements. On the other hand, our most elaborate and volitional thought and action is suggested in the sense that it consists not in creation out of nothing, but in a creative synthesis or reorganization of old material.

The distinction, then, is one of degree rather than of kind; and choice, as contrasted with suggestion, is, in its individual aspect, a comparatively elaborate process of mental organization or synthesis, of which we are reflectively aware, and which is rendered necessary by complexity in the elements of our thought. In its social aspect—for all, or nearly all, our choices relate in one way or another to the social environment—it is an organization of comparatively complex social relations. Precisely as the conditions about us and the ideas suggested by those conditions become intricate, are we forced to think, to choose, to define the useful and the right, and, in general, to work out the higher intellectual life. When life is simple, thought and action are comparatively mechanical or suggestive; the higher consciousness is not aroused, the reflective will has little or nothing to do; the captain stays below and the inferior officers work the ship. But when life is diverse, thought is so likewise, and the mind must achieve the higher synthesis, or suffer that sense of division which is its peculiar pain. In short, the question of suggestion and choice is only another view of the question of uniformity and complexity in social relations.

Will, or choice, like all phases of mental life, may be looked at either in a particular or a general aspect; and we have, accordingly, individual will or social will, depending upon our point of view, as to whether we regard the activity singly or in a mass. But there is no real separation; they are only different phases of the same thing. Any choice that I can make is a synthesis of suggestions derived in one way or another from the general life; and it also reacts upon that life, so that my will is social as being both effect and cause with reference to it. If I buy a straw hat you may look at my action separately, as my individual choice, or as part of a social demand for straw hats, or as indicating non-conformity to a fashion of wearing some other sort of hats, and so on. There is no mystery about the matter; nothing that need puzzle anyone who is capable of perceiving that a thing may look differently from different standpoints, like the post that was painted a different color on each of its four sides.

It is, I think, a mistake of superficial readers to imagine that psychologists or sociologists are trying to depreciate the will, or that there is any tendency to such depreciation in a sound evolutionary science or philosophy. The trouble with the popular view of will, derived chiefly from tradition, is not that it exaggerates its importance, which would perhaps be impossible; but, first, that it thinks of will only in the individual aspect, and does not grasp the fact—plain enough it would seem—that the act of choice is cause and effect in a general life; and, second, that it commonly overlooks the importance of involuntary forces, or at least makes them separate from and antithetical to choice—as if the captain were expected to work the ship all alone, or in opposition to the crew, instead of using them as subordinate agents. There is little use in arguing abstractly points like these; but if the reader who may be puzzled by them will try to free himself from metaphysical formulæ, and determine to see the facts as they are, he will be in a way to get some healthy understanding of the matter.[^[2]]

By way of illustrating these general statements I shall first offer a few remarks concerning suggestion and choice in the life of children, and then go on to discuss their working in adult life and upon the career as a whole.

There appears to be quite a general impression that children are far more subject to control through suggestion or mechanical imitation than grown-up people are; in other words, that their volition is less active. I am not at all sure that this is the case: their choices are, as a rule, less stable and consistent than ours, their minds have less definiteness of organization, so that their actions appear less rational and more externally determined; but on the other hand they have less of the mechanical subjection to habit that goes with a settled character. Choice is a process of growth, of progressive mental organization through selection and assimilation of the materials which life presents, and this process is surely never more vigorous than in childhood and youth. It can hardly be doubted that the choosing and formative vigor of the mind is greater under the age of twenty-five than after: the will of middle age is stronger in the sense that it has more momentum, but it has less acceleration, runs more on habit, and so is less capable of fresh choice.

I am distrustful of that plausible but possibly illusive analogy between the mind of the child and the mind of primitive man, which, in this connection, would suggest a like simplicity and inertness of thought in the two. Our children achieve in a dozen years a mental development much above that of savages, and supposing that they do, in some sense, recapitulate the progress of the race, they certainly cover the ground at a very different rate of speed, which involves a corresponding intensity of mental life. After the first year certainly, if not from birth, they share our social order, and we induct them so rapidly into its complex life that their minds have perhaps as much novelty and diversity to synthetize as ours do.

Certainly one who begins to observe children with a vague notion that their actions, after the first few months, are almost all mechanically imitative, is likely to be surprised. I had this notion, derived, perhaps without much warrant, from a slight acquaintance with writings on child-study current previous to 1893, when my first child was born. He was a boy—I will call him R.—in whom imitativeness, as ordinarily understood, happened to be unusually late in its development. Until he was more than two years and a half old all that I noticed that was obviously imitative, in the sense of a visible or audible repetition of the acts of others, was the utterance of about six words that he learned to say during his second year. It is likely that very close observation, assisted by the clearer notion of what to look for that comes by experience, would have discovered more: but no more was obvious to ordinary expectant attention. The obvious thing was his constant use of experiment and reflection, and the slow and often curious results that he attained in this manner. At two and a half he had learned, for instance, to use a fork quite skilfully. The wish to use it was perhaps an imitative impulse, in a sense, but his methods were original and the outcome of a long course of independent and reflective experiment. His skill was the continuation of a dexterity previously acquired in playing with long pins, which he ran into cushions, the interstices of his carriage, etc. The fork was apparently conceived as an interesting variation upon the hat-pin, and not, primarily, as a means of getting food or doing what others did. In creeping or walking, at which he was very slow, partly on account of a lame foot, he went through a similar series of devious experiments, which apparently had no reference to what he saw others do.

He did not begin to talk—beyond using the few words already mentioned—until over two years and eight months old; having previously refused to interest himself in it, although he understood others as well, apparently, as any child of his age. He preferred to make his wants known by grunts and signs; and instead of delighting in imitation he evidently liked better a kind of activity that was only indirectly connected with the suggestions of others.

I frequently tried to produce imitation, but almost wholly without success. For example, when he was striving to accomplish something with his blocks I would intervene and show him, by example, how, as I thought, it might be done, but these suggestions were invariably, so far as I remember or have recorded, received with indifference or protest. He liked to puzzle it out quietly for himself, and to be shown how to do a thing often seemed to destroy his interest in it. Yet he would profit by observation of others in his own fashion, and I sometimes detected him making use of ideas to which he seemed to pay no attention when they were first presented. In short, he showed that aversion, which minds of a pondering, constructive turn perhaps always show, to anything which suddenly and crudely broke in upon his system of thought. At the same time that he was so backward in the ordinary curriculum of childhood, he showed in other ways, which it is perhaps unnecessary to describe, that comparison and reflection were well developed. This preoccupation with private experiment and reflection, and reluctance to learn from others, were undoubtedly a cause of his slow development, particularly in speech, his natural aptitude for which appeared in a good enunciation and a marked volubility as soon as he really began to talk.

Imitation came all at once: he seemed to perceive quite suddenly that this was a short cut to many things, and took it up, not in a merely mechanical or suggestive way, but consciously, intelligently, as a means to an end. The imitative act, however, was often an end in itself, an interesting exercise of his constructive faculties, pursued at first without much regard to anything beyond. This was the case with the utterance of words, and, later, with spelling, with each of which he became fascinated for its own sake and regardless of its use as a means of communication.

In a second child, M., a girl, I was able to observe the working of a mind of a different sort, and of a much more common type as regards imitation. When two months and seven days old she was observed to make sounds in reply to her mother when coaxed with a certain pitch and inflection of voice. These sounds were clearly imitative, since they were seldom made at other times, but not mechanically so. They were produced with every appearance of mental effort and of delight in its success. Only vocal imitations, of this rudimentary sort, were observed until eight months was nearly reached, when the first manual imitation, striking a button-hook upon the back of a chair, was noticed. This action had been performed experimentally before, and the imitation was merely a repetition suggested by seeing her mother do it, or perhaps by hearing the sound. After this the development of imitative activity proceeded much in the usual way, which has often been described.

In both of these cases I was a good deal impressed with the idea that the life of children, as compared with that of adults, is less determined in a merely suggestive way, and involves more will and choice, than is commonly supposed. Imitation, in the sense of visible or audible repetition, was not so omnipresent as I had expected, and when present seemed to be in great part rational and voluntary rather than mechanical. It is very natural to assume that to do what someone else does requires no mental effort; but this, as applied to little children, is, of course, a great mistake. They cannot imitate an act except by learning how to do it, any more than grown-up people can, and for a child to learn a word may be as complicated a process as for an older person to learn a difficult piece on the piano. A novel imitation is not at all mechanical, but a strenuous voluntary activity, accompanied by effort and followed by pleasure in success. All sympathetic observers of children must be impressed, I imagine, by the evident mental stress and concentration which often accompanies their endeavors, whether imitative or not, and is followed, as in adults, by the appearance of relief when the action has come off successfully.[^[3]]

The “imitative instinct” is sometimes spoken of as if it were a mysterious something that enabled the child to perform involuntarily and without preparation acts that are quite new to him. It will be found difficult, if one reflects upon the matter, to conceive what could be the nature of an instinct or hereditary tendency, not to do a definite thing previously performed by our ancestors—as is the case with ordinary instinct—but to do anything, within vague limits, which happened to be done within our sight or hearing. This doing of new things without definite preparation, either in heredity or experience, would seem to involve something like special creation in the mental and nervous organism: and the imitation of children has no such character. It is quite evidently an acquired power, and if the act imitated is at all complex the learning process involves a good deal of thought and will. If there is an imitative instinct it must, apparently, be something in the way of a taste for repetition, which stimulates the learning process without, however, having any tendency to dispense with it. The taste for repetition seems, in fact, to exist, at least in most children, but even this may be sufficiently explained as a phase of the general mental tendency to act upon uncontradicted ideas. It is a doctrine now generally taught by psychologists that the idea of an action is itself a motive to that action, and tends intrinsically to produce it unless something intervenes to prevent. This being the case, it would appear that we must always have some impulse to do what we see done, provided it is something we understand sufficiently to be able to form a definite idea of doing it.[^[4]] I am inclined to the view that it is unnecessary to assume, in man, a special imitative instinct, but that “as Preyer and others have shown in the case of young children, mimicry arises mainly from pleasure in activity as such, and not from its peculiar quality as imitation.”[^[5]] An intelligent child imitates because he has faculties crying for employment, and imitation is a key that lets them loose: he needs to do things and imitation gives him things to do. An indication that sensible resemblance to the acts of others is not the main thing sought is seen in such cases as the following: M. had a trick of raising her hands above her head, which she would perform, when in the mood for it, either imitatively, when someone else did it, or in response to the words “How big is M.?” but she responded more readily in the second or non-imitative way than in the other. This example well illustrates the reason for my preference of the word suggestion over imitation to describe these simple reactions. In this case the action performed had no sort of resemblance to the form of words “How big is M.?” that started it, and could be called imitative only in a recondite sense. All that is necessary is that there should be a suggestion, that something should be presented that is connected in the child’s mind with the action to be produced. Whether this connection is by sensible resemblance or not seems immaterial.

There seems to be some opposition between imitation of the visible, external kind, and reflection. Children of one sort are attracted by sensible resemblance and so are early and conspicuously imitative. If this is kept up in a mechanical way after the acts are well learned, and at the expense of new efforts, it would seem to be a sign of mental apathy, or even defect, as in the silly mimicry of some idiots. Those of another sort are preoccupied by the subtler combinations of thought which do not, as a rule, lead to obvious imitation. Such children are likely to be backward in the development of active faculties, and slow to observe except where their minds are specially interested. They are also, if I may judge by R., slow to interpret features and tones of voice, guileless and unaffected, just because of this lack of keen personal perceptions, and not quickly sympathetic.

Accordingly, it is not at all clear that children are, on the whole, any more given to imitation of the mechanical sort, any more suggestible, than adults. They appear so to us chiefly, perhaps, for two reasons. In the first place, we fail to realize the thought, the will, the effort, they expend upon their imitations. They do things that have become mechanical to us, and we assume that they are mechanical to them, though closer observation and reflection would show us the contrary. These actions are largely daring experiments, strenuous syntheses of previously acquired knowledge, comparable in quality to our own most earnest efforts, and not to the thoughtless routine of our lives. We do not see that their echoing of the words they hear is often not a silly repetition, but a difficult and instructive exercise of the vocal apparatus. Children imitate much because they are growing much, and imitation is a principal means of growth. This is true at any age; the more alive and progressive a man is the more actively he is admiring and profiting by his chosen models.

A second reason is that adults imitate at longer range, as it were, so that the imitative character of their acts is not so obvious. They come into contact with more sorts of persons, largely unknown to one another, and have access to a greater variety of suggestions in books. Accordingly they present a deceitful appearance of independence simply because we do not see their models.

Though we may be likely to exaggerate the difference between children and adults as regards the sway of suggestive influences, there is little danger of our overestimating the importance of these in the life of mankind at large. The common impression among those who have given no special study to the matter appears to be that suggestion has little part in the mature life of a rational being; and though the control of involuntary impulses is recognized in tricks of speech and manner, in fads, fashions, and the like, it is not perceived to touch the more important points of conduct. The fact, however, is that the main current of our thought is made up of impulses absorbed without deliberate choice from the life about us, or else arising from hereditary instinct, or from habit; while the function of higher thought and of will is to organize and apply these impulses. To revert to an illustration already suggested, the voluntary is related to the involuntary very much as the captain of a ship is related to the seamen and subordinate officers. Their work is not altogether of a different sort from his, but is of a lower grade in a mental series. He supplies the higher sort of co-ordination, but the main bulk of the activity is of the mentally lower order.

The chief reason why popular attention should fix itself upon voluntary thought and action, and tend to overlook the involuntary, is that choice is acutely conscious, and so must, from its very nature, be the focus of introspective thought. Because he is an individual, a specialized, contending bit of psychical force, a man very naturally holds his will, in its individual aspect, to be of supreme moment. If we did not feel a great importance in the things we do we could not will to do them. And in the life of other people voluntary action seems supreme, for very much the same reasons that it does in our own. It is always in the foreground, active, obvious, intrusive, the thing that creates differences and so fixes the attention. We notice nothing except through contrast; and accordingly the mechanical control of suggestion, affecting all very much alike, is usually unperceived. As we do not notice the air, precisely because it is always with us, so, for the same reason, we do not notice a prevailing mode of dress. In like manner we are ignorant of our local accent and bearing, and are totally unaware, for the most part, of all that is common to our time, our country, our customary environment. Choice is a central area of light and activity upon which our eyes are fixed; while the unconscious is a dark, illimitable background enveloping this area. Or, again, choice is like the earth, which we unconsciously assume to be the principal part of creation, simply because it is the centre of our interest and the field of our exertions.

The practical limitations upon the scope of choice arise, first, from its very nature as a selective and organizing agent, working upon comparatively simple or suggestive ideas as its raw material, and, second, from the fact that it absorbs a great deal of vital energy. Owing to the first circumstance its activity is always confined to points where there is a competition of ideas. So long as an idea is uncontradicted, not felt to be in any way inconsistent with others, we take it as a matter of course. It is a truth, though hard for us to realize, that if we had lived in Dante’s time we should have believed in a material Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, as he did, and that our doubts of this, and of many other things which his age did not question, have nothing to do with our natural intelligence, but are made possible and necessary by competing ideas which the growth of knowledge has enabled us to form. Our particular minds or wills are members of a slowly growing whole, and at any given moment are limited in scope by the state of the whole, and especially of those parts of the whole with which they are in most active contact. Our thought is never isolated, but always some sort of a response to the influences around us, so that we can hardly have thoughts that are not in some way aroused by communication. Will—free will if you choose—is thus a co-operative whole, not an aggregation of disconnected fragments, and the freedom of the individual is freedom under law, like that of the good citizen, not anarchy. We learn to speak by the exercise of will, but no one, I suppose, will assert that an infant who hears only French is free to learn English. Where suggestions are numerous and conflicting we feel the need to choose; to make these choices is the function of will, and the result of them is a step in the progress of life, an act of freedom or creation, if you wish to call it so; but where suggestion is single, as with religious dogma in ages of faith, we are very much at its mercy. We do not perceive these limitations, because there is no point of vantage from which we can observe and measure the general state of thought; there is nothing to compare it with. Only when it begins to change, when competing suggestions enter our minds and we get new points of view from which we can look back upon it, do we begin to notice its power over us.[^[6]]

The exhausting character of choice, of making up one’s mind, is a matter of common experience. In some way the mental synthesis, this calling in and reducing to order the errant population of the mind, draws severely upon the vital energy, and one of the invariable signs of fatigue is a dread of making decisions and assuming responsibility. In our complicated life the will can, in fact, manage only a small part of the competing suggestions that are within our reach. What we are all forced to do is to choose a field of action which for some reason we look upon as specially interesting or important, and exercise our choice in that; in other matters protecting ourselves, for the most part, by some sort of mechanical control—some accepted personal authority, some local custom, some professional tradition, or the like. Indeed, to know where and how to narrow the activity of the will in order to preserve its tone and vigor for its most essential functions, is a great part of knowing how to live. An incontinent exercise of choice wears people out, so that many break down and yield even essentials to discipline and authority in some form; while many more wish, at times, to do so and indulge themselves, perhaps, in Thomas à Kempis, or “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life.” Not a few so far exhaust the power of self-direction as to be left drifting at the mercy of undisciplined passions. There are many roads to degeneracy, and persons of an eager, strenuous nature not infrequently take this one.

A common instance of the insidious power of milieu is afforded by the transition from university education to getting a living. At a university one finds himself, if he has any vigor of imagination, in one of the widest environments the world can afford. He has access to the suggestions of the richest minds of all times and countries, and has also, or should have, time and encouragement to explore, in his own way, this spacious society. It is his business to think, to aspire, and grow; and if he is at all capable of it he does so. Philosophy and art and science and the betterment of mankind are real and living interests to him, largely because he is in the great stream of higher thought that flows through libraries. Now let him graduate and enter, we will say, upon the lumber business at Kawkawlin. Here he finds the scope of existence largely taken up with the details of this industry—wholesome for him in some ways, but likely to be overemphasized. These and a few other things are repeated over and over again, dinned into him, everywhere assumed to be the solid things of life, so that he must believe in them; while the rest grows misty and begins to lose hold upon him. He cannot make things seem real that do not enter into his experience, and if he resists the narrowing environment it must be by keeping touch with a larger world, through books or other personal intercourse, and by the exercise of imagination. Marcus Aurelius told himself that he was free to think what he chose, but it appears that he realized this freedom by keeping books about him that suggested the kind of thoughts he chose to think; and it is only in some such sense as this implies that the assertion is true. When the palpable environment does not suit us we can, if our minds are vigorous enough, build up a better one out of remembered material; but we must have material of some sort.

It is easy to feel the effect of surroundings in such cases as this, because of the sharp and definite change, and because the imagination clings to one state long after the senses are subdued to the other; but it is not so with national habits and sentiments, which so completely envelop us that we are for the most part unaware of them. The more thoroughly American a man is the less he can perceive Americanism. He will embody it; all he does, says, or writes, will be full of it; but he can never truly see it, simply because he has no exterior point of view from which to look at it. If he goes to Europe he begins to get by contrast some vague notion of it, though he will never be able to see just what it is that makes futile his attempts to seem an Englishman, a German, or an Italian. Our appearance to other peoples is like one’s own voice, which one never hears quite as others hear it, and which sounds strange when it comes back from the phonograph.

The control of those larger movements of thought and sentiment that make a historical epoch is still less conscious, more inevitable. Only the imaginative student, in his best hours, can really free himself—and that only in some respects—from the limitations of his time and see things from a height. For the most part the people of other epochs seem strange, outlandish, or a little insane. We can scarcely rid ourselves of the impression that the way of life we are used to is the normal, and that other ways are eccentric. Dr. Sidis holds that the people of the Middle Ages were in a quasi-hypnotic state, and instances the crusades, dancing manias, and the like.[^[7]] But the question is, would not our own time, viewed from an equal distance, appear to present the signs of abnormal suggestibility? Will not the intense preoccupation with material production, the hurry and strain of our cities, the draining of life into one channel, at the expense of breadth, richness, and beauty, appear as mad as the crusades, and perhaps of a lower type of madness? Could anything be more indicative of a slight but general insanity than the aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago?

An illustration of this unconsciousness of what is distinctive in our time is the fact that those who participate in momentous changes have seldom any but the vaguest notion of their significance. There is perhaps no time in the history of art that seems to us now so splendid, so dramatic, as that of the sudden rise of Gothic architecture in northern France, and the erection of the church of St. Denis at Paris was its culmination: yet Professor C. E. Norton, speaking of the Abbot Suger, who erected it, and of his memoirs, says, “Under his watchful and intelligent oversight the church became the most splendid and the most interesting building of the century; but of the features that gave it special interest, that make it one of the most important monuments of mediæval architecture, neither Suger, in his account of it, nor his biographer, nor any contemporary writer, says a single word.”[^[8]] To Suger and his time the Gothic, it would seem, was simply a new and improved way of building a church, a technical matter with which he had little concern, except to see that it was duly carried out according to specifications. It was developed by draughtsmen and handicraftsmen, mostly nameless, who felt their own thrill of constructive delight as they worked, but had no thought of historical glory. It is no doubt the same in our own time, and Mr. Bryce has noted with astonishment the unconsciousness or indifference of those who founded cities in western America, to the fact that they were doing something that would be memorable and influential for ages.[^[9]]

I have already said, or implied, that the activity of the will reflects the state of the social order. A constant and strenuous exercise of volition implies complexity in the surrounding life from which suggestions come, while in a simple society choice is limited in scope and life is comparatively mechanical. It is the variety of social intercourse or, what comes to the same thing, the character of social organization, that determines the field of choice; and accordingly there is a tendency for the scope of the will to increase with that widening and intensification of life that is so conspicuous a feature of recent history. This change is bound up with the extension and diffusion of communication, opening up innumerable channels by which competing suggestions may enter the mind. We are still dependent upon environment—life is always a give and take with surrounding conditions—but environment is becoming very wide, and in the case of imaginative persons may extend itself to almost any ideas that the past or present life of the race has brought into being. This brings opportunity for congenial choice and characteristic personal growth, and at the same time a good deal of distraction and strain. There is more and more need of stability, and of a vigorous rejection of excessive material, if one would escape mental exhaustion and degeneracy. Choice is like a river; it broadens as it comes down through history—though there are always banks—and the wider it becomes the more persons drown in it. Stronger and stronger swimming is required, and types of character that lack vigor and self-reliance are more and more likely to go under.

The aptitude to yield to impulse in a mechanical or reflex way is called suggestibility. As might be expected, it is subject to great variations in different persons, and in the same person under different conditions. Abnormal suggestibility has received much study, and there is a great body of valuable literature relating to it. I wish in this connection only to recall a few well-known principles which the student of normal social life needs to have in mind.

As would naturally follow from our analysis of the relation between suggestion and choice, suggestibility is simply the absence of the controlling and organizing action of the reflective will. This function not being properly performed, thought and action are disintegrated and fly off on tangents; the captain being disabled the crew breaks up into factions, and discipline goes to pieces. Accordingly, whatever weakens the reason, and thus destroys the breadth and symmetry of consciousness, produces some form of suggestibility. To be excited is to be suggestible, that is to become liable to yield impulsively to an idea in harmony with the exciting emotion. An angry man is suggestible as regards denunciation, threats, and the like, a jealous one as regards suspicions, and similarly with any passion.

The suggestibility of crowds is a peculiar form of that limitation of choice by the environment already discussed. We have here a very transient environment which owes its power over choice to the vague but potent emotion so easily generated in dense aggregates. The thick humanity is in itself exciting, and the will is further stupefied by the sense of insignificance, by the strangeness of the situation, and by the absence, as a rule, of any separate purpose to maintain an independent momentum. A man is like a ship in that he cannot guide his course unless he has way on. If he drifts he will shift about with any light air; and the man in the crowd is usually drifting, is not pursuing any settled line of action in which he is sustained by knowledge and habit. This state of mind, added to intense emotion directed by some series of special suggestions, is the source of the wild and often destructive behavior of crowds and mobs, as well as of a great deal of heroic enthusiasm. An orator, for instance, first unifying and heightening the emotional state of his audience by some humorous or pathetic incident, will be able, if tolerably skilful, to do pretty much as he pleases with them, so long as he does not go against their settled habits of thought. Anger, always a ready passion, is easily aroused, appeals to resentment being the staples of much popular oratory, and under certain conditions readily expresses itself in stoning, burning, and lynching. And so with fear: General Grant in describing the battle of Shiloh gives a picture of several thousand men on a hill-side in the rear, incapable of moving, though threatened to be shot for cowardice where they lay. Yet these very men, calmed and restored to their places, were among those who heroically fought and won the next day’s battle. They had been restored to the domination of another class of suggestions, namely those implied in military discipline.[^[10]]

Suggestibility from exhaustion or strain is a rather common condition with many of us. Probably all eager brain workers find themselves now and then in a state where they are “too tired to stop.” The overwrought mind loses the healthy power of casting off its burden, and seems capable of nothing but going on and on in the same painful and futile course. One may know that he is accomplishing nothing, that work done in such a state of mind is always bad work, and that “that way madness lies,” but yet be too weak to resist, chained to the wheel of his thought so that he must wait till it runs down. And such a state, however induced, is the opportunity for all sorts of undisciplined impulses, perhaps some gross passion, like anger, dread, the need of drink, or the like.

According to Mr. Tylor,[^[11]] fasting, solitude, and physical exhaustion by dancing, shouting, or flagellation are very generally employed by savage peoples to bring on abnormal states of mind of which suggestibility—the sleep of choice, and control by some idea from the subconscious life—is always a trait. The visions and ecstasies following the fastings, watchings, and flagellations of Christian devotees of an earlier time seem to belong, psychologically, in much the same category.

It is well known that suggestibility is limited by habit, or, more accurately stated, that habit is itself a perennial source of suggestions that set bounds and conditions upon the power of fresh suggestions. A total abstainer will resist the suggestion to drink, a modest person will refuse to do anything indecent, and so on. People are least liable to yield to irrational suggestions, to be stampeded with the crowd, in matters with which they are familiar, so that they have habits regarding them. The soldier, in his place in the ranks and with his captain in sight, will march forward to certain death, very likely without any acute emotion whatever, simply because he has the habits that constitute discipline; and so with firemen, policemen, sailors, brakemen, physicians, and many others who learn to deal with life and death as calmly as they read a newspaper. It is all in the day’s work.

As regards the greater or less suggestibility of different persons there is, of course, no distinct line between the normal and the abnormal; it is simply a matter of the greater or less efficiency of the higher mental organization. Most people, perhaps, are so far suggestible that they make no energetic and persistent attempt to interpret in any broad way the elements of life accessible to them, but receive the stamp of some rather narrow and simple class of suggestions to which their allegiance is yielded. There are innumerable people of much energy but sluggish intellect, who will go ahead—as all who have energy must do—but what direction they take is a matter of the opportune suggestion. The humbler walks of religion and philanthropy, for instance, the Salvation Army, the village prayer-meeting, and the city mission, are full of such. They do not reason on general topics, but believe and labor. The intellectual travail of the time does not directly touch them. At some epoch in the past, perhaps in some hour of emotional exaltation, something was printed on their minds to remain there till death, and be read and followed daily. To the philosopher such people are fanatics; but their function is as important as his. They are repositories of moral energy—which he is very likely to lack—they are the people who brought in Christianity and have kept it going ever since. And this is only one of many comparatively automatic types of mankind. Rationality, in the sense of a patient and open-minded attempt to think out the general problems of life, is, and perhaps always must be, confined to a small minority even of the most intelligent populations.

CHAPTER III
SOCIABILITY AND PERSONAL IDEAS

The Sociability of Children—Imaginary Conversation and its Significance—The Nature of the Impulse to Communicate—There is No Separation Between Real and Imaginary Persons—Nor Between Thought and Intercourse—The Study and Interpretation of Expression by Children—The Symbol or Sensuous Nucleus of Personal Ideas—Personal Physiognomy in Art and Literature—In the Idea of Social Groups—Sentiment in Personal Ideas—The Personal Idea is the Immediate Social Reality—Society Must be Studied in the Imagination—The Possible Reality of Incorporeal Persons—The Material Notion of Personality Contrasted with the Notion Based on a Study of Personal Ideas—Self and Other in Personal Ideas—Personal Opposition—Further Illustration and Defence of the View of Persons and Society Here Set Forth.

To any but a mother a new-born child hardly seems human. It appears rather to be a strange little animal, wonderful indeed, exquisitely finished even to the finger-nails; mysterious, awakening a fresh sense of our ignorance of the nearest things of life, but not friendly, not lovable. It is only after some days that a kindly nature begins to express itself and to grow into something that can be sympathized with and personally cared for. The earliest signs of it are chiefly certain smiles and babbling sounds, which are a matter of fascinating observation to anyone interested in the genesis of social feeling.

Spasmodic smiles or grimaces occur even during the first week of life, and at first seem to mean nothing in particular. I have watched the face of an infant a week old while a variety of expressions, smiles, frowns, and so on, passed over it in rapid succession: it was as if the child were rehearsing a repertory of emotional expression belonging to it by instinct. So soon as they can be connected with anything definite these rudimentary smiles appear to be a sign of satisfaction. Mrs. Moore says that her child smiled on the sixth day “when comfortable,”[^[12]] and that this “never occurred when the child was known to be in pain.” Preyer notes a smile on the face of a sleeping child, after nursing, on the tenth day.[^[13]] They soon begin to connect themselves quite definitely with sensible objects, such as bright color, voices, movements, and fondling. At the same time the smile gradually develops from a grimace into a subtler, more human expression, and Dr. Perez, who seems to have studied a large number of children, says that all whom he observed smiled, when pleased, by the time they were two months old.[^[14]] When a child is, say, five months old, no doubt can remain, in most cases, that the smile has become an expression of pleasure in the movements, sounds, touches, and general appearance of other people. It would seem, however, that personal feeling is not at first clearly differentiated from pleasures of sight, sound, and touch of other origin, or from animal satisfactions having no obvious cause. Both of my children expended much of their early sociability on inanimate objects, such as a red Japanese screen, a swinging lamp, a bright door-knob, an orange, and the like, babbling and smiling at them for many minutes at a time; and M., when about three months old and later, would often lie awake laughing and chattering in the dead of night. The general impression left upon one is that the early manifestations of sociability indicate less fellow-feeling than the adult imagination likes to impute, but are expressions of a pleasure which persons excite chiefly because they offer such a variety of stimuli to sight, hearing, and touch; or, to put it otherwise, kindliness, while existing almost from the first, is vague and undiscriminating, has not yet become fixed upon its proper objects, but flows out upon all the pleasantness the child finds about him, like that of St. Francis, when, in his “Canticle of the Sun,” he addresses the sun and the moon, stars, winds, clouds, fire, earth, and water, as brothers and sisters. Indeed, there is nothing about personal feeling which sharply marks it off from other feeling; here as elsewhere we find no fences, but gradual transition, progressive differentiation.

I do not think that early smiles are imitative. I observed both my children carefully to discover whether they smiled in response to a smile, and obtained negative results when they were under ten months old. A baby does not smile by imitation, but because he is pleased; and what pleases him in the first year of life is usually some rather obvious stimulus to the senses. If you wish a smile you must earn it by acceptable exertion; it does no good to smirk. The belief that many people seem to have that infants respond to smiling is possibly due to the fact that when a grown-up person appears, both he and the infant are likely to smile, each at the other; but although the smiles are simultaneous one need not be the cause of the other, and many observations lead me to think that it makes no difference to the infant whether the grown-up person smiles or not. He has not yet learned to appreciate this rather subtle phenomenon.

At this and at all later ages the delight in companionship so evident in children may be ascribed partly to specific social emotion or sentiment, and partly to a need of stimulating suggestions to enable them to gratify their instinct for various sorts of mental and physical activity. The influence of the latter appears in their marked preference for active persons, for grown-up people who will play with them—provided they do so with tact—and especially for other children. It is the same throughout life; alone one is like fireworks without a match: he cannot set himself off, but is a victim of ennui, the prisoner of some tiresome train of thought that holds his mind simply by the absence of a competitor. A good companion brings release and fresh activity, the primal delight in a fuller existence. So with the child: what excitement when visiting children come! He shouts, laughs, jumps about, produces his playthings and all his accomplishments. He needs to express himself, and a companion enables him to do so. The shout of another boy in the distance gives him the joy of shouting in response.

But the need is for something more than muscular or sensory activities. There is also a need of feeling, an overflowing of personal emotion and sentiment, set free by the act of communication. By the time a child is a year old the social feeling that at first is indistinguishable from sensuous pleasure has become much specialized upon persons, and from that time onward to call it forth by reciprocation is a chief aim of his life. Perhaps it will not be out of place to emphasize this by transcribing two or three notes taken from life.

“M. will now [eleven months old] hold up something she has found, e. g., the petal of a flower, or a little stick, demanding your attention to it by grunts and squeals. When you look and make some motion or exclamation she smiles.”

“R. [four years old] talks all day long, to real companions, if they will listen, if not to imaginary ones. As I sit on the steps this morning he seems to wish me to share his every thought and sensation. He describes everything he does, although I can see it, saying, ‘Now I’m digging up little stones,’ etc. I must look at the butterfly, feel of the fuzz on the clover stems, and try to squawk on the dandelion stems. Meanwhile he is reminded of what happened some other time, and he gives me various anecdotes of what he and other people did and said. He thinks aloud. If I seem not to listen he presently notices it and will come up and touch me, or bend over and look up into my face.”

“R. [about the same time] is hilariously delighted and excited when he can get anyone to laugh or wonder with him at his pictures, etc. He himself always shares by anticipation, and exaggerates the feeling he expects to produce. When B. was calling, R., with his usual desire to entertain guests, brought out his pull-book, in which pulling a strip of pasteboard transforms the picture. When he prepared to work this he was actually shaking with eagerness—apparently in anticipation of the coming surprise.”

“I watch E. and R. [four and a half years old] playing McGinty on the couch and guessing what card will turn up. R. is in a state of intense excitement which breaks out in boisterous laughter and all sorts of movements of the head and limbs. He is full of an emotion which has very little to do with mere curiosity or surprise relating to the card.”

I take it that the child has by heredity a generous capacity and need for social feeling, rather too vague and plastic to be given any specific name like love. It is not so much any particular personal emotion or sentiment as the undifferentiated material of many: perhaps sociability is as good a word for it as any.

And this material, like all other instinct, allies itself with social experience to form, as time goes on, a growing and diversifying body of personal thought, in which the phases of social feeling developed correspond, in some measure, to the complexity of life itself. It is a process of organization, involving progressive differentiation and integration, such as we see everywhere in nature.

In children and in simple-minded adults, kindly feeling may be very strong and yet very naïve, involving little insight into the emotional states of others. A child who is extremely sociable, bubbling over with joy in companionship, may yet show a total incomprehension of pain and a scant regard for disapproval and punishment that does not take the form of a cessation of intercourse. In other words, there is a sociability that asks little from others except bodily presence and an occasional sign of attention, and often learns to supply even these by imagination. It seems nearly or quite independent of that power of interpretation which is the starting-point of true sympathy. While both of my children were extremely sociable, R. was not at all sympathetic in the sense of having quick insight into others’ states of feeling.

Sociability in this simple form is an innocent, unself-conscious joy, primary and unmoral, like all simple emotion. It may shine with full brightness from the faces of idiots and imbeciles, where it sometimes alternates with fear, rage, or lust. A visitor to an institution where large numbers of these classes are collected will be impressed, as I have been, with the fact that they are as a rule amply endowed with those kindly impulses which some appear to look upon as almost the sole requisite for human welfare. It is a singular and moving fact that there is a class of cases, mostly women, I think, in whom kindly emotion is so excitable as to be a frequent source of hysterical spasms, so that it has to be discouraged by frowns and apparent harshness on the part of those in charge. The chief difference between normal people and imbeciles in this regard is that, while the former have more or less of this simple kindliness in them, social emotion is also elaborately compounded and worked up by the mind into an indefinite number of complex passions and sentiments, corresponding to the relations and functions of an intricate life.

When left to themselves children continue the joys of sociability by means of an imaginary playmate. Although all must have noticed this who have observed children at all, only close and constant observation will enable one to realize the extent to which it is carried on. It is not an occasional practice, but, rather, a necessary form of thought, flowing from a life in which personal communication is the chief interest and social feeling the stream in which, like boats on a river, most other feelings float. Some children appear to live in personal imaginations almost from the first month; others occupy their minds in early infancy mostly with solitary experiments upon blocks, cards, and other impersonal objects, and their thoughts are doubtless filled with the images of these. But, in either case, after a child learns to talk and the social world in all its wonder and provocation opens on his mind, it floods his imagination so that all his thoughts are conversations. He is never alone. Sometimes the inaudible interlocutor is recognizable as the image of a tangible playmate, sometimes he appears to be purely imaginary. Of course each child has his own peculiarities. R., beginning when about three years of age, almost invariably talked aloud while he was playing alone—which, as he was a first child, was very often the case. Most commonly he would use no form of address but “you,” and perhaps had no definite person in mind. To listen to him was like hearing one at the telephone; though occasionally he would give both sides of the conversation. At times again he would be calling upon some real name, Esyllt or Dorothy, or upon “Piggy,” a fanciful person of his own invention. Every thought seemed to be spoken out. If his mother called him he would say, “I’ve got to go in now.” Once when he slipped down on the floor he was heard to say, “Did you tumble down? No. I did.”

The main point to note here is that these conversations are not occasional and temporary effusions of the imagination, but are the naïve expression of a socialization of the mind that is to be permanent and to underly all later thinking. The imaginary dialogue passes beyond the thinking aloud of little children into something more elaborate, reticent, and sophisticated; but it never ceases. Grown people, like children, are usually unconscious of these dialogues; as we get older we cease, for the most part, to carry them on out loud, and some of us practise a good deal of apparently solitary meditation and experiment. But, speaking broadly, it is true of adults as of children, that the mind lives in perpetual conversation. It is one of those things that we seldom notice just because they are so familiar and involuntary; but we can perceive it if we try to. If one suddenly stops and takes note of his thoughts at some time when his mind has been running free, as when he is busy with some simple mechanical work, he will be likely to find them taking the form of vague conversations. This is particularly true when one is somewhat excited with reference to a social situation. If he feels under accusation or suspicion in any way he will probably find himself making a defence, or perhaps a confession, to an imaginary hearer. A guilty man confesses “to get the load off his mind;” that is to say, the excitement of his thought cannot stop there but extends to the connected impulses of expression and creates an intense need to tell somebody. Impulsive people often talk out loud when excited, either “to themselves,” as we say when we can see no one else present, or to anyone whom they can get to listen. Dreams also consist very largely of imaginary conversations; and, with some people at least, the mind runs in dialogue during the half-waking state before going to sleep. There are many other familiar facts that bear the same interpretation—such, for instance, as that it is much easier for most people to compose in the form of letters or dialogue than in any other; so that literature of this kind has been common in all ages.

Goethe, in giving an account of how he came to write “Werther” as a series of letters, discusses the matter with his usual perspicuity, and lets us see how habitually conversational was his way of thinking. Speaking of himself in the third person, he says: “Accustomed to pass his time most pleasantly in society, he changed even solitary thought into social converse, and this in the following manner: He had the habit, when he was alone, of calling before his mind any person of his acquaintance. This person he entreated to sit down, walked up and down by him, remained standing before him, and discoursed with him on the subject he had in mind. To this the person answered as occasion required, or by the ordinary gestures signified his assent or dissent—in which every man has something peculiar to himself. The speaker then continued to carry out further that which seemed to please the guest, or to condition and define more closely that of which he disapproved; and finally was polite enough to give up his own notion.... How nearly such a dialogue is akin to a written correspondence is clear enough; only in the latter one sees returned the confidence one has bestowed, while in the former one creates for himself a confidence which is new, everchanging and unreturned.”[^[15]] “Accustomed to pass his time most pleasantly in society, he changed even solitary thought into social converse,” is not only a particular but a general truth, more or less applicable to all thought. The fact is that language, developed by the race through personal intercourse and imparted to the individual in the same way, can never be dissociated from personal intercourse in the mind; and since higher thought involves language, it is always a kind of imaginary conversation. The word and the interlocutor are correlative ideas.

The impulse to communicate is not so much a result of thought as it is an inseparable part of it. They are like root and branch, two phases of a common growth, so that the death of one presently involves that of the other. Psychologists now teach that every thought involves an active impulse as part of its very nature; and this impulse, with reference to the more complex and socially developed forms of thought, takes the shape of a need to talk, to write, and so on; and if none of these is practicable, it expends itself in a wholly imaginary communication.

Montaigne, who understood human nature as well, perhaps, as anyone who ever lived, remarks: “There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.”[^[16]] And it was doubtless because he had many such thoughts which no one was at hand to appreciate, that he took to writing essays. The uncomprehended of all times and peoples have kept diaries for the same reason. So, in general, a true creative impulse in literature or art is, in one aspect, an expression of this simple, childlike need to think aloud or to somebody; to define and vivify thought by imparting it to an imaginary companion; by developing that communicative element which belongs to its very nature, and without which it cannot live and grow. Many authors have confessed that they always think of some person when they write, and I am inclined to believe that this is always more or less definitely the case, though the writer himself may not be aware of it. Emerson somewhere says that “the man is but half himself; the other half is his expression,” and this is literally true. The man comes to be through some sort of expression, and has no higher existence apart from it; overt or imaginary it takes place all the time.

Men apparently solitary, like Thoreau, are often the best illustrations of the inseparability of thought and life from communication. No sympathetic reader of his works, I should say, can fail to see that he took to the woods and fields not because he lacked sociability, but precisely because his sensibilities were so keen that he needed to rest and protect them by a peculiar mode of life, and to express them by the indirect and considerate method of literature. No man ever labored more passionately to communicate, to give and receive adequate expression, than he did. This may be read between the lines in all his works, and is recorded in his diary. “I would fain communicate the wealth of my life to men, would really give them what is most precious in my gift. I would secrete pearls with the shell-fish and lay up honey with the bees for them. I will sift the sunbeams for the public good. I know no riches I would keep back. I have no private good unless it be my peculiar ability to serve the public. This is the only individual property. Each one may thus be innocently rich. I enclose and foster the pearl till it is grown. I wish to communicate those parts of my life which I would gladly live again.”[^[17]] This shows, I think, a just notion of the relation between the individual and society, privacy and publicity. There is, in fact, a great deal of sound sociology in Thoreau.

Since, therefore, the need to impart is of this primary and essential character, we ought not to look upon it as something separable from and additional to the need to think or to be; it is only by imparting that one is enabled to think or to be. Everyone, in proportion to his natural vigor, necessarily strives to communicate to others that part of his life which he is trying to unfold in himself. It is a matter of self-preservation, because without expression thought cannot live. Imaginary conversation—that is, conversation carried on without the stimulus of a visible and audible response—may satisfy the needs of the mind for a long time. There is, indeed, an advantage to a vigorously constructive and yet impressible imagination in restricting communication; because in this way ideas are enabled to have a clearer and more independent development than they could have if continually disturbed by criticism or opposition. Thus artists, men of letters, and productive minds of all sorts often find it better to keep their productions to themselves until they are fully matured. But, after all, the response must come sooner or later or thought itself will perish. The imagination, in time, loses the power to create an interlocutor who is not corroborated by any fresh experience. If the artist finds no appreciator for his book or picture he will scarcely be able to produce another.

People differ much in the vividness of their imaginative sociability. The more simple, concrete, dramatic, their habit of mind is, the more their thinking is carried on in terms of actual conversation with a visible and audible interlocutor. Women, as a rule, probably do this more vividly than men, the unlettered more vividly than those trained to abstract thought, and the sort of people we call emotional more vividly than the impassive. Moreover, the interlocutor is a very mutable person, and is likely to resemble the last strong character we have been in contact with. I have noticed, for instance, that when I take up a book after a person of decided and interesting character has been talking with me I am likely to hear the words of the book in his voice. The same is true of opinions, moral standards, and the like, as well as of physical traits. In short, the interlocutor, who is half of all thought and life, is drawn from the accessible environment.

It is worth noting here that there is no separation between real and imaginary persons; indeed, to be imagined is to become real, in a social sense, as I shall presently point out. An invisible person may easily be more real to an imaginative mind than a visible one; sensible presence is not necessarily a matter of the first importance. A person can be real to us only in the degree in which we imagine an inner life which exists in us, for the time being, and which we refer to him. The sensible presence is important chiefly in stimulating us to do this. All real persons are imaginary in this sense. If, however, we use imaginary in the sense of illusory, an imagination not corresponding to fact, it is easy to see that visible presence is no bar to illusion. Thus I meet a stranger on the steamboat who corners me and tells me his private history. I care nothing for it, and he half knows that I do not; he uses me only as a lay figure to sustain the agreeable illusion of sympathy, and is talking to an imaginary companion quite as he might if I were elsewhere. So likewise good manners are largely a tribute to imaginary companionship, a make believe of sympathy which it is agreeable to accept as real, though we may know, when we think, that it is not. To conceive a kindly and approving companion is something that one involuntarily tries to do, in accordance with that instinctive hedonizing inseparable from all wholesome mental processes, and to assist in this by at least a seeming of friendly appreciation is properly regarded as a part of good breeding. To be always sincere would be brutally to destroy this pleasant and mostly harmless figment of the imagination.

Thus the imaginary companionship which a child of three or four years so naïvely creates and expresses, is something elementary and almost omnipresent in the thought of a normal person. In fact, thought and personal intercourse may be regarded as merely aspects of the same thing: we call it personal intercourse when the suggestions that keep it going are received through faces or other symbols present to the senses; reflection when the personal suggestions come through memory and are more elaborately worked over in thought. But both are mental, both are personal. Personal images, as they are connected with nearly all our higher thought in its inception, remain inseparable from it in memory. The mind is not a hermit’s cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse. We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot; and in the measure that a mind is lacking in this power it is degenerate. Apart from this mental society there is no wisdom, no power, justice, or right, no higher existence at all. The life of the mind is essentially a life of intercourse.

Let us now consider somewhat more carefully the way in which ideas of people grow up in the mind, and try to make out, as nearly as we can, their real nature and significance.

The studies through which the child learns, in time, to interpret personal expression are very early begun. On her twelfth day M. was observed to get her eyes upon her mother’s face; and after gazing for some time at it she seemed attracted to the eyes, into which she looked quite steadily. From the end of the first month this face study was very frequent and long-continued. Doubtless anyone who notices infants could multiply indefinitely observations like the following:

“M., in her eighth week, lies in her mother’s lap gazing up at her face with a frown of fixed and anxious attention. Evidently the play of the eyes and lips, the flashing of the teeth, and the wrinkles of expression are the object of her earnest study. So also the coaxing noises which are made to please her.”

“She now [four months and twenty-one days old] seems to fix her attention almost entirely upon the eyes, and will stare at them for a minute or more with the most intent expression.”

The eye seems to receive most notice. As Perez says: “The eye is one of the most interesting and attractive of objects; the vivacity of the pupil set in its oval background of white, its sparkles, its darts of light, its tender looks, its liquid depths, attract and fascinate a young child....”[^[18]] The mouth also gets much attention, especially when in movement; I have sometimes noticed a child who is looking into the eyes turn from them to the mouth when the person commences to talk: the flashing of the teeth then adds to its interest. The voice is also the object of close observation. The intentness with which a child listens to it, the quickness with which he learns to distinguish different voices and different inflections of the same voice, and the fact that vocal imitation precedes other sorts, all show this. It cannot fail to strike the observer that observation of these traits is not merely casual, but a strenuous study, often accompanied by a frown of earnest attention. The mind is evidently aroused, something important is going on, something conscious, voluntary, eager. It would seem likely that this something is the storing up, arrangement, and interpretation of those images of expression which remain throughout life the starting-point of personal imaginations.

The wrinkles about the eyes and mouth, which are perhaps the most expressive parts of the countenance, would not be so noticeable at first as the eyes, the lips, and the teeth, but they are always in the field of vision, and in time their special significance as a seat of expression comes to be noticed and studied. M. appeared to understand a smile sufficiently to be pleased by it about the end of the tenth month. The first unequivocal case of smiling in response to a smile was noticed on the twenty-sixth day of this month. Even at this age smiling is not imitative in the sense of being a voluntary repetition of the other’s action, but appears to be merely an involuntary expression of pleasure. Facial expression is one of the later things to be imitated, for the reason, apparently, that the little child cannot be aware of the expression of his own countenance as he can hear his own voice or see his own hands; and therefore does not so soon learn to control it and to make it a means of voluntary imitation. He learns this only when he comes to study his features in the looking-glass. This children do as early as the second year, when they may be observed experimenting before the mirror with all sorts of gestures and grimaces.

The interpretation of a smile, or of any sort of facial expression, is apparently learned much as other things are. By constant study of the face from the first month the child comes, in time, to associate the wrinkles that form a smile with pleasant experiences—fondling, coaxing, offering of playthings or of the bottle, and so on. Thus the smile comes to be recognized as a harbinger of pleasure, and so is greeted with a smile. Its absence, on the other hand, is associated with inattention and indifference. Toward the end of the fifth month M., on one occasion, seemed to notice the change from a smile to a frown, and stopped smiling herself. However, a number of observations taken in the tenth month show that even then it was doubtful whether she could be made to smile merely by seeing someone else do it; and, as I say, the first unequivocal case was noticed toward the end of this month.

Such evidence as we have from the direct observation of children does not seem to me to substantiate the opinion that we have a definite instinctive sensibility to facial expression. Whatever hereditary element there is I imagine to be very vague, and incapable of producing definite phenomena without the aid of experience. I experimented upon my own and some other children with frowns, attempts at ferocity, and pictures of faces, as well as with smiles—in order to elicit instinctive apprehension of expression, but during the first year these phenomena seemed to produce no definite effect. At about fifteen months M. appeared to be dismayed by a savage expression assumed while playing with her, and at about the same period became very sensitive to frowns. The impression left upon me was that after a child learns to expect a smiling face as the concomitant of kindness, he is puzzled, troubled, or startled when it is taken away, and moreover learns by experience that frowns and gravity mean disapproval and opposition. I imagine that children fail to understand any facial expression that is quite new to them. An unfamiliar look, an expression of ferocity for example, may excite vague alarm simply because it is strange; or, as is very likely with children used to kind treatment, this or any other contortion of the face may be welcomed with a laugh on the assumption that it is some new kind of play. I feel sure that observation will dissipate the notion of any definite instinctive capacity to interpret the countenance.

I might also mention, as having some bearing upon this question of definite hereditary ideas, that my children did not show that instinctive fear of animals that some believe to be implanted in us. R., the elder, until about three years of age, delighted in animals, and when taken to the menagerie regarded the lions and tigers with the calmest interest; but later, apparently as a result of rude treatment by a puppy, became exceedingly timid. M. has never, so far as I know, shown any fear of any animal.

As regards sounds, there is no doubt of a vague instinctive susceptibility, at least to what is harsh—sharp, or plaintive. Children less than a month old will show pain at such sounds. A harsh cry, or a sharp sound like that of a tin horn, will sometimes make them draw down the mouth and cry even during the first week.

Darwin records that in one of his children sympathy “was clearly shown at six months and eleven days by his melancholy face, with the corners of his mouth well depressed, when his nurse pretended to cry.”[^[19]] Such manifestations are probably caused rather by the plaintive voice than by facial expression; at any rate, I have never been able to produce them by the latter alone.

Some believe that young children have an intuition of personal character quicker and more trustworthy than that of grown people. If this were so it would be a strong argument in favor of the existence of a congenital instinct which does not need experience and is impaired by it. My own belief is that close observation of children under two years of age will lead to the conclusion that personal impressions are developed by experience. Yet it is possibly true that children three years old or more are sometimes quicker and more acute judges of some traits, such as sincerity and good will, than grown people. In so far as it is a fact it may perhaps be explained in this way. The faces that children see and study are mostly full of the expression of love and truth. Nothing like it occurs in later life, even to the most fortunate. These images, we may believe, give rise in the child’s mind to a more or less definite ideal of what a true and kindly face should be, and this ideal he uses with great effect in detecting what falls short of it. He sees that there is something wrong with the false smile; it does not fit the image in his mind; some lines are not there, others are exaggerated. He does not understand what coldness and insincerity are, but their expression puzzles and alarms him, merely because it is not what he is used to. The adult loses this clear, simple ideal of love and truth, and the sharp judgment that flows from it. His perception becomes somewhat vulgarized by a flood of miscellaneous experience, and he sacrifices childish spontaneity to wider range and more complex insight, valuing and studying many traits of which the child knows nothing. It will not be seriously maintained that, on the whole, we know people better when we are children than we do later.

I put forward these scanty observations for what little they may be worth, and not as disproving the existence of special instincts in which Darwin and other great observers have believed. I do not maintain that there is no hereditary aptitude to interpret facial expression—there must be some sort of an instinctive basis to start from—but I think that it develops gradually and in indistinguishable conjunction with knowledge gained by experience.

Apparently, then, voice, facial expression, gesture, and the like, which later become the vehicle of personal impressions and the sensible basis of sympathy, are attractive at first chiefly for their sensuous variety and vividness, very much as other bright, moving, sounding things are attractive; and the interpretation of them comes gradually by the interworking of instinct and observation. This interpretation is nothing other than the growth, in connection with these sensuous experiences, of a system of ideas that we associate with them. The interpretation of an angry look, for instance, consists in the expectation of angry words and acts, in feelings of resentment or fear, and so on; in short, it is our whole mental reaction to this sign. It may consist in part of sympathetic states of mind, that is in states of mind that we suppose the other to experience also; but it is not confined to such. These ideas that enrich the meaning of the symbol—the resentment or fear, for instance—have all, no doubt, their roots in instinct; we are born with the crude raw material of such feelings. And it is precisely in the act of communication, in social contact of some sort, that this material grows, that it gets the impulses that give it further definition, refinement, organization. It is by intercourse with others that we expand our inner experience. In other words, and this is the point of the matter, the personal idea consists at first and in all later development, of a sensuous element or symbol with which is connected a more or less complex body of thought and sentiment; the whole social in genesis, formed by a series of communications.

What do we think of when we think of a person? Is not the nucleus of the thought an image of the sort just mentioned, some ghost of characteristic expression? It may be a vague memory of lines around the mouth and eyes, or of other lines indicating pose, carriage, or gesture; or it may be an echo of some tone or inflection of the voice. I am unable, perhaps, to call up any distinct outline of the features of my best friend, of my own mother, or my child; but I can see a smile, a turn of the eyelid, a way of standing or sitting, indistinct and flitting glimpses, but potent to call up those past states of feeling of which personal memories are chiefly formed. The most real thing in physical presence is not height, nor breadth, nor the shape of the nose or forehead, nor that of any other comparatively immobile part of the body, but it is something in the plastic, expressive features: these are noticed and remembered because they tell us what we most care to know.

The judgment of personal character seems to take place in much the same way. We estimate a man, I think, by imagining what he would do in various situations. Experience supplies us with an almost infinite variety of images of men in action, that is of impressions of faces, tones, and the like, accompanied by certain other elements making up a situation. When we wish to judge a new face, voice, and form, we unconsciously ask ourselves where they would fit; we try them in various situations, and if they fit, if we can think of them as doing the things without incongruity, we conclude that we have that kind of a man to deal with. If I can imagine a man intimidated, I do not respect him; if I can imagine him lying, I do not trust him; if I can see him receiving, comprehending, resisting men and disposing them in accordance with his own plans, I ascribe executive ability to him; if I can think of him in his study patiently working out occult problems, I judge him to be a scholar; and so on. The symbol before us reminds us of some other symbol resembling it, and this brings with it a whole group of ideas which constitutes our personal impression of the new man.[^[20]]

The power to make these judgments is intuitive, imaginative, not arrived at by ratiocination, but it is dependent upon experience. I have no belief in the theory, which I have seen suggested, that we unconsciously imitate other people’s expression, and then judge of their character by noting how we feel when we look like them. The men of uncommon insight into character are usually somewhat impassive in countenance and not given to facial imitation. Most of us become to some extent judges of the character of dogs, so that we can tell by the tone of a dog’s bark whether he is a biting dog or only a barking dog. Surely imitation can have nothing to do with this; we do not imitate the dog’s bark to learn whether he is serious or not; we observe, remember, and imagine; and it seems to me that we judge people in much the same way.

These visible and audible signs of personality, these lines and tones whose meaning is impressed upon us by the intense and constant observation of our childhood, are also a chief basis of the communication of impressions in art and literature.

This is evidently the case in those arts which imitate the human face and figure. Painters and illustrators give the most minute study to facial expression, and suggest various sentiments by bits of light and shade so subtle that the uninitiated cannot see what or where they are, although their effect is everything as regards the depiction of personality. It is the failure to reproduce them that makes the emptiness of nearly all copies of famous painting or sculpture that represents the face. Perhaps not one person in a thousand, comparing the “Mona Lisa” or the “Beatrice Cenci” with one of the mediocre copies generally standing near them, can point out where the painter of the latter has gone amiss; yet the difference is like that between life and a wax image. The chief fame of some painters rests upon their power to portray and suggest certain rare kinds of feeling. Thus the people of Fra Angelico express to the eye the higher love, described in words by St. Paul and Thomas à Kempis. It is a distinctly human and social sentiment; his persons are nearly always in pairs, and, in his Paradise for instance, almost every face among the blest is directed in rapture toward some other face. Other painters, as Botticelli and Perugino—alike in this respect though not in most—depict a more detached sort of sentiment; and their people look out of the picture in isolated ecstasy or meditation.

Sculpture appeals more to reminiscence of attitude, facial expression being somewhat subordinate, though here also the difference between originals and copies is largely in the lines of the eyes and mouth, too delicate to be reproduced by the mechanical instruments which copy broader outlines quite exactly.

As to literature, it is enough to recall the fact that words allusive to traits of facial expression, and especially to the eye, are the immemorial and chosen means of suggesting personality.[^[21]] To poetry, which seeks the sensuous nucleus of thought, the eye is very generally the person; as when Shakespeare says:

“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state....”

or Milton:

“Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.”

Poetry, however, usually refrains from minute description of expression, a thing impossible in words, and strikes for a vivid, if inexact, impression, by the use of such phrases as “a fiery eye,” “a liquid eye,” and “The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling.”[^[22]]

We also get from every art a personal impression that does not come from the imitation of features and tones, nor from a description of these in words, but is the personality of the author himself, subtly communicated by something that we interpret as signs of his state of mind. When one reads Motley’s histories he gets a personal impression not only of the Prince of Orange or Alexander of Parma, but also of Mr. Motley; and the same is true or may be true of any work of art, however “objective” it may be. What we call style, when we say “The style is the man,” is the equivalent, in the artist’s way of doing things, of those visible and audible traits of the form and voice by which we judge people who are bodily present.[^[23]] “Every work of genius,” says John Burroughs, “has its own physiognomy—sad, cheerful, frowning, yearning, determined, meditative.” Just as we are glad of the presence of certain forms and faces, because of the mood they put us in, so we are glad of the physiognomy of certain writers in their books, quite apart from the intellectual content of what they say; and this is the subtlest, most durable, most indispensable charm of all. Every lover of books has authors whom he reads over and over again, whom he cares for as persons and not as sources of information, who are more to him, possibly, than any person he sees. He continually returns to the cherished companion and feeds eagerly upon his thought. It is because there is something in the book which he needs, which awakens and directs trains of thought that lead him where he likes to be led. The thing that does this is something personal and hard to define; it is in the words and yet not in any definite information that they convey. It is rather an attitude, a way of feeling, communicated by a style faithful to the writer’s mind. Some people find pleasure and profit, for example, in perusing even the somewhat obscure and little inspired portions of Goethe’s writings, like the “Campaigns in France”; it would perhaps be impossible to tell why, further than by saying that they get the feeling of something calm, free and onward which is Goethe himself, and not to be had elsewhere.

And so anyone who practises literary composition, even of a pedestrian sort, will find at least one reward for his pains in a growing insight into the personality of great writers. He will come to feel that such a word was chosen or such a sentence framed in just that way, under the influence of such a purpose or sentiment, and by putting these impressions together, will presently arrive at some personal acquaintance with any author whose character and aims are at all congenial with his own.

We feel this more in literature than in any other art, and more in prose of an intimate sort than in any other kind of literature. The reason appears to be that writing, particularly writing of a familiar kind, like letters and autobiographies, is something which we all practise in one way or another, and which we can, therefore, interpret; while the methods of other arts are beyond our imaginations. It is easy to share the spirit of Charles Lamb writing his Letters, or of Montaigne dictating his Essays, or of Thackeray discoursing in the first person about his characters; because they merely did what all of us do, only did it better. On the other hand, Michelangelo, or Wagner, or Shakespeare—except in his sonnets—remains for most of us personally remote and inconceivable. But a painter, or a composer, or a sculptor, or a poet, will always get an impression of personality, of style, from another artist of the same sort, because his experience enables him to feel the subtle indications of mood and method. Mr. Frith, the painter, says in his autobiography that a picture “will betray the real character of its author; who, in the unconscious development of his peculiarities, constantly presents to the initiated signs by which an infallible judgment may be pronounced on the painter’s mind and character.”[^[24]] In fact, it is true of any earnest career that a man expresses his character in his work, and that another man of similar aims can read what he expresses. We see in General Grant’s Memoirs, how an able commander feels the personality of an opponent in the movements of his armies, imagines what he will do in various exigencies, and deals with him accordingly.

These personal impressions of a writer or other artist may or may not be accompanied by a vague imagination of his visible appearance. Some persons have so strong a need to think in connection with visual images that they seem to form no notion of personality without involuntarily imagining what the person looks like; while others can have a strong impression of feeling and purpose that seems not to be accompanied by any visual picture. There can be no doubt, however, that sensible images of the face, voice, etc., usually go with personal ideas. Our earliest personal conceptions grow up about such images; and they always remain for most of us the principal means of getting hold of other people. Naturally, they have about the same relative place in memory and imagination as they do in observation. Probably, if we could get to the bottom of the matter, it would be found that our impression of a writer is always accompanied by some idea of his sensible appearance, is always associated with a physiognomy, even when we are not aware of it. Can anyone, for example, read Macaulay and think of a soft and delicately inflected voice? I imagine not: these periods must be connected with a sonorous and somewhat mechanical utterance; the sort of person that speaks softly and with delicate inflections would have written otherwise. On the other hand, in reading Robert Louis Stevenson it is impossible, I should say, not to get the impression of a sensitive and flexible speech. Such impressions are mostly vague and may be incorrect, but for sympathetic readers they exist and constitute a real, though subtle, physiognomy.

Not only the idea of particular persons but that of social groups seems to have a sensible basis in these ghosts of expression. The sentiment by which one’s family, club, college, state or country is realized in his mind is stimulated by vague images, largely personal. Thus the spirit of a college fraternity seems to come back to me through a memory of the old rooms and of the faces of friends. The idea of country is a rich and various one and has connected with it many sensuous symbols—such as flags, music, and the rhythm of patriotic poetry—that are not directly personal; but it is chiefly an idea of personal traits that we share and like, as set over against others that are different and repugnant. We think of America as the land of freedom, simplicity, cordiality, equality, and so on, in antithesis to other countries which we suppose to be otherwise—and we think of these traits by imagining the people that embody them. For countless school children patriotism begins in sympathy with our forefathers in resistance to the hateful oppression and arrogance of the British, and this fact of early training largely accounts for the perennial popularity of the anti-British side in international questions. Where the country has a permanent ruler to typify it his image is doubtless a chief element in the patriotic idea. On the other hand, the impulse which we feel to personify country, or anything else that awakens strong emotion in us, shows our imaginations to be so profoundly personal that deep feeling almost inevitably connects itself with a personal image. In short, group sentiment, in so far as it is awakened by definite images, is only a variety of personal sentiment. A sort of vague agitation, however, is sometimes produced by mere numbers. Thus public opinion is sometimes thought of as a vast impersonal force, like a great wind, though ordinarily it is conceived simply as the opinion of particular persons, whose expressions or tones are more or less definitely imagined.

In the preceding I have considered the rise of personal ideas chiefly from the point of view of the visual or auditory element in them—the personal symbol or vehicle of communication; but of course there is a parallel growth in feeling. An infant’s states of feeling may be supposed to be nearly as crude as his ideas of the appearance of things; and the process that gives form, variety, and coherence to the latter does the same for the former. It is precisely the act of intercourse, the stimulation of the mind by a personal symbol, which gives a formative impulse to the vague mass of hereditary feeling-tendency, and this impulse, in turn, results in a larger power of interpreting the symbol. It is not to be supposed, for instance, that such feelings as generosity, respect, mortification, emulation, the sense of honor, and the like, are an original endowment of the mind. Like all the finer and larger mental life these arise in conjunction with communication and could not exist without it. It is these finer modes of feeling, these intricate branchings or differentiations of the primitive trunk of emotion, to which the name sentiments is usually applied. Personal sentiments are correlative with personal symbols, the interpretation of the latter meaning nothing more than that the former are associated with them; while the sentiments, in turn, cannot be felt except by the aid of the symbols. If I see a face and feel that here is an honest man, it means that I have, in the past, achieved through intercourse an idea of honest personality, with the visual elements of which the face before me has something in common, so that it calls up this socially achieved sentiment. And moreover in knowing this honest man my idea of honest personality will be enlarged and corrected for future use. Both the sentiment and its visual associations will be somewhat different from what they were.

Thus no personal sentiment is the exclusive product of any one influence, but all is of various origin and has a social history. The more clearly one can grasp this fact the better, at least if I am right in supposing that a whole system of wrong thinking results from overlooking it and assuming that personal ideas are separable and fragmentary elements in the mind. Of this I shall say more presently. The fact I mean is that expressed by Shakespeare, with reference to love, or loving friendship, in his thirty-first sonnet:

“Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,

Which I by lacking have supposed dead,

And there reigns love, and all love’s loving parts,

And all those friends which I thought buried.

Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,

Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,

Who all their parts of me to thee did give;

That due of many now is thine alone:

Their images I loved I view in thee,

And thou (all they) hast all the all of me.”

In this sonnet may be discerned, I think, a true theory of personal sentiment, quite accordant with the genetic point of view of modern psychology, and very important in the understanding of social relations.

Facial expression, tone of voice, and the like, the sensible nucleus of personal and social ideas, serve as the handle, so to speak, of such ideas, the principal substance of which is drawn from the region of inner imagination and sentiment. The personality of a friend, as it lives in my mind and forms there a part of the society in which I live, is simply a group or system of thoughts associated with the symbols that stand for him. To think of him is to revive some part of the system—to have the old feeling along with the familiar symbol, though perhaps in a new connection with other ideas. The real and intimate thing in him is the thought to which he gives life, the feeling his presence or memory has the power to suggest. This clings about the sensible imagery, the personal symbols already discussed, because the latter have served as bridges by which we have entered other minds and therein enriched our own. We have laid up stores, but we always need some help to get at them in order that we may use and increase them; and this help commonly consists in something visible or audible, which has been connected with them in the past and now acts as a key by which they are unlocked. Thus the face of a friend has power over us in much the same way as the sight of a favorite book, of the flag of one’s country, or the refrain of an old song; it starts a train of thought, lifts the curtain from an intimate experience. And his presence does not consist in the pressure of his flesh upon a neighboring chair, but in the thoughts clustering about some symbol of him, whether the latter be his tangible person or something else. If a person is more his best self in a letter than in speech, as sometimes happens, he is more truly present to me in his correspondence than when I see and hear him. And in most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

The world of sentiment and imagination, of all finer and warmer thought, is chiefly a personal world—that is, it is inextricably interwoven with personal symbols. If you try to think of a person you will find that what you really think is chiefly sentiments which you connect with his image; and, on the other hand, if you try to recall a sentiment you will find, as a rule, that it will not come up except along with symbols of the persons who have suggested it. To think of love, gratitude, pity, grief, honor, courage, justice, and the like, it is necessary to think of people by whom or toward whom these sentiments may be entertained.[^[25]] Thus justice may be recalled by thinking of Washington, kindness by Lincoln, honor by Sir Philip Sidney, and so on. The reason for this, as already intimated, is that sentiment and imagination are generated, for the most part, in the life of communication, and so belong with personal images by original and necessary association, having no separate existence except in our forms of speech. The ideas that such words as modesty and magnanimity stand for could never have been formed apart from social intercourse, and indeed are nothing other than remembered aspects of such intercourse. To live this higher life, then, we must live with others, by the aid of their visible presence, by reading their words, or by recalling in imagination these or other symbols of them. To lose our hold upon them—as, for example, by long isolation or by the decay of the imagination in disease or old age—is to lapse into a life of sensation and crude instinct.

So far as the study of immediate social relations is concerned the personal idea is the real person. That is to say, it is in this alone that one man exists for another, and acts directly upon his mind. My association with you evidently consists in the relation between my idea of you and the rest of my mind. If there is something in you that is wholly beyond this and makes no impression upon me it has no social reality in this relation. The immediate social reality is the personal idea; nothing, it would seem, could be much more obvious than this.

Society, then, in its immediate aspect, is a relation among personal ideas. In order to have society it is evidently necessary that persons should get together somewhere; and they get together only as personal ideas in the mind. Where else? What other possible locus can be assigned for the real contact of persons, or in what other form can they come in contact except as impressions or ideas formed in this common locus? Society exists in my mind as the contact and reciprocal influence of certain ideas named “I,” Thomas, Henry, Susan, Bridget, and so on. It exists in your mind as a similar group, and so in every mind. Each person is immediately aware of a particular aspect of society: and so far as he is aware of great social wholes, like a nation or an epoch, it is by embracing in this particular aspect ideas or sentiments which he attributes to his countrymen or contemporaries in their collective aspect. In order to see this it seems to me only necessary to discard vague modes of speech which have no conceptions back of them that will bear scrutiny, and look at the facts as we know them in experience.

Yet most of us, perhaps, will find it hard to assent to the view that the social person is a group of sentiments attached to some symbol or other characteristic element, which keeps them together and from which the whole idea is named. The reason for this reluctance I take to be that we are accustomed to talk and think, so far as we do think in this connection, as if a person were a material rather than a psychical fact. Instead of basing our sociology and ethics upon what a man really is as part of our mental and moral life, he is vaguely and yet grossly regarded as a shadowy material body, a lump of flesh, and not as an ideal thing at all. But surely it is only common-sense to hold that the social and moral reality is that which lives in our imaginations and affects our motives. As regards the physical it is only the finer, more plastic and mentally significant aspects of it that imagination is concerned with, and with that chiefly as a nucleus or centre of crystallization for sentiment. Instead of perceiving this we commonly make the physical the dominant factor, and think of the mental and moral only by a vague analogy to it.

Persons and society must, then, be studied primarily in the imagination. It is surely true, prima facie, that the best way of observing things is that which is most direct; and I do not see how anyone can hold that we know persons directly except as imaginative ideas in the mind. These are perhaps the most vivid things in our experience, and as observable as anything else, though it is a kind of observation in which accuracy has not been systematically cultivated. The observation of the physical aspects, however important, is for social purposes quite subsidiary: there is no way of weighing or measuring men which throws more than a very dim side-light on their personality. The physical factors most significant are those elusive traits of expression already discussed, and in the observation and interpretation of these physical science is only indirectly helpful. What, for instance, could the most elaborate knowledge of his weights and measures, including the anatomy of his brain, tell us of the character of Napoleon? Not enough, I take it, to distinguish him with certainty from an imbecile. Our real knowledge of him is derived from reports of his conversation and manner, from his legislation and military dispositions, from the impression made upon those about him and by them communicated to us, from his portraits and the like; all serving as aids to the imagination in forming a system that we call by his name. I by no means aim to discredit the study of man or of society with the aid of physical measurements, such as those of psychological laboratories; but I think that these methods are indirect and ancillary in their nature and are most useful when employed in connection with a trained imagination.

I conclude, therefore, that the imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society, and that to observe and interpret these must be a chief aim of sociology. I do not mean merely that society must be studied by the imagination—that is true of all investigations in their higher reaches—but that the object of study is primarily an imaginative idea or group of ideas in the mind, that we have to imagine imaginations. The intimate grasp of any social fact will be found to require that we divine what men think of one another. Charity, for instance, is not understood without imagining what ideas the giver and recipient have of each other; to grasp homicide we must, for one thing, conceive how the offender thinks of his victim and of the administrators of the law; the relation between the employing and hand-laboring classes is first of all a matter of personal attitudes which we must apprehend by sympathy with both, and so on. In other words, we want to get at motives, and motives spring from personal ideas. There is nothing particularly novel in this view; historians, for instance, have always assumed that to understand and interpret personal relations was their main business; but apparently the time is coming when this will have to be done in a more systematic and penetrating manner than in the past. Whatever may justly be urged against the introduction of frivolous and disconnected “personalities” into history, the understanding of persons is the aim of this and all other branches of social study.

It is important to face the question of persons who have no corporeal reality, as for instance the dead, characters of fiction or the drama, ideas of the gods and the like. Are these real people, members of society? I should say that in so far as we imagine them they are. Would it not be absurd to deny social reality to Robert Louis Stevenson, who is so much alive in many minds and so potently affects important phases of thought and conduct? He is certainly more real in this practical sense than most of us who have not yet lost our corporeity, more alive, perhaps, than he was before he lost his own, because of his wider influence. And so Colonel Newcome, or Romola, or Hamlet is real to the imaginative reader with the realest kind of reality, the kind that works directly upon his personal character. And the like is true of the conceptions of supernatural beings handed down by the aid of tradition among all peoples. What, indeed, would society be, or what would any one of us be, if we associated only with corporeal persons and insisted that no one should enter our company who could not show his power to tip the scales and cast a shadow?

On the other hand, a corporeally existent person is not socially real unless he is imagined. If the nobleman thinks of the serf as a mere animal and does not attribute to him a human way of thinking and feeling the latter is not real to him in the sense of acting personally upon his mind and conscience. And if a man should go into a strange country and hide himself so completely that no one knew he was there, he would evidently have no social existence for the inhabitants.

In saying this I hope I do not seem to question the independent reality of persons or to confuse it with personal ideas. The man is one thing and the various ideas entertained about him are another; but the latter, the personal idea, is the immediate social reality, the thing in which men exist for one another, and work directly upon one another’s lives. Thus any study of society that is not supported by a firm grasp of personal ideas is empty and dead—mere doctrine and not knowledge at all.

I believe that the vaguely material notion of personality, which does not confront the social fact at all but assumes it to be the analogue of the physical fact, is a main source of fallacious thinking about ethics, politics, and indeed every aspect of social and personal life. It seems to underlie all four of the ways of conceiving society and the individual alleged in the first chapter to be false. If the person is thought of primarily as a separate material form, inhabited by thoughts and feelings conceived by analogy to be equally separate, then the only way of getting a society is by adding on a new principle of socialism, social faculty, altruism, or the like. But if you start with the idea that the social person is primarily a fact in the mind, and observe him there, you find at once that he has no existence apart from a mental whole of which all personal ideas are members, and which is a particular aspect of society. Every one of these ideas, as we have seen, is the outcome of our experience of all the persons we have known, and is only a special aspect of our general idea of mankind.

To many people it would seem mystical to say that persons, as we know them, are not separable and mutually exclusive, like physical bodies, so that what is part of one cannot be part of another, but that they interpenetrate one another, the same element pertaining to different persons at different times, or even at the same time: yet this is a verifiable and not very abstruse fact.[^[26]] The sentiments which make up the largest and most vivid part of our idea of any person are not, as a rule, peculiarly and exclusively his, but each one may be entertained in conjunction with other persons also. It is, so to speak, at the point of intersection of many personal ideas, and may be reached through any one of them. Not only Philip Sidney but many other people call up the sentiment of honor, and likewise with kindness, magnanimity, and so on. Perhaps these sentiments are never precisely the same in any two cases, but they are nearly enough alike to act in about the same manner upon our motives, which is the main thing from a practical point of view. Any kindly face will arouse friendly feeling, any suffering child awaken pity, any brave man inspire respect. A sense of justice, of something being due to a man as such, is potentially a part of the idea of every man I know. All such feelings are a cumulative product of social experience and do not belong exclusively to any one personal symbol. A sentiment, if we consider it as something in itself, is vaguely, indeterminately personal; it may come to life, with only slight variations, in connection with any one of many symbols; whether it is referred to one or to another, or to two or more at once, is determined by the way one’s thoughts arrange themselves, by the connection in which the sentiment is suggested.

As regards one’s self in relation to other people, I shall have more to say in a later chapter; but I may say here that there is no view of the self, that will bear examination, which makes it altogether distinct, in our minds, from other persons. If it includes the whole mind, then, of course, it includes all the persons we think of, all the society which lives in our thoughts. If we confine it to a certain part of our thought with which we connect a distinctive emotion or sentiment called self-feeling, as I prefer to do, it still includes the persons with whom we feel most identified. Self and other do not exist as mutually exclusive social facts, and phraseology which implies that they do, like the antithesis egoism versus altruism, is open to the objection of vagueness, if not of falsity.[^[27]] It seems to me that the classification of impulses as altruistic and egoistic, with or without a third class called, perhaps, ego-altruistic, is empty; and I do not see how any other conclusion can result from a concrete study of the matter. There is no class of altruistic impulses specifically different from other impulses: all our higher, socially developed sentiments are indeterminately personal, and may be associated with self-feeling, or with whatever personal symbol may happen to arouse them. Those feelings which are merely sensual and have not been refined into sentiments by communication and imagination are not so much egoistic as merely animal: they do not pertain to social persons, either first or second, but belong in a lower stratum of thought. Sensuality is not to be confused with the social self. As I shall try to show later we do not think “I” except with reference to a complementary thought of other persons; it is an idea developed by association and communication.

The egoism-altruism way of speaking falsifies the facts at the most vital point possible by assuming that our impulses relating to persons are separable into two classes, the I impulses and the You impulses, in much the same way that physical persons are separable; whereas a primary fact throughout the range of sentiment is a fusion of persons, so that the impulse belongs not to one or the other, but precisely to the common ground that both occupy, to their intercourse or mingling. Thus the sentiment of gratitude does not pertain to me as against you, nor to you as against me, but springs right from our union, and so with all personal sentiment. Special terms like egoism and altruism are presumably introduced into moral discussions for the more accurate naming of facts. But I cannot discover the facts for which these are supposed to be names. The more I consider the matter the more they appear to be mere fictions of analogical thought. If you have no definite idea of personality or self beyond the physical idea you are naturally led to regard the higher phases of thought, which have no evident relation to the body, as in some way external to the first person or self. Thus instead of psychology, sociology, or ethics we have a mere shadow of physiology.

Pity is typical of the impulses ordinarily called altruistic; but if one thinks of the question closely it is hard to see how this adjective is especially applicable to it. Pity is not aroused exclusively by images or symbols of other persons, as against those of one’s self. If I think of my own body in a pitiable condition I am perhaps as likely to feel pity as if I think of someone else in such a condition.[^[28]] At any rate, self-pity is much too common to be ignored. Even if the sentiment were aroused only by symbols of other persons it would not necessarily be non-egoistic. “A father pitieth his children,” but any searching analysis will show that he incorporates the children into his own imaginative self. And, finally, pity is not necessarily moral or good, but is often mere “self-indulgence,” as when it is practised at the expense of justice and true sympathy. A “wounding pity,” to use a phrase of Mr. Stevenson’s, is one of the commonest forms of objectionable sentiment. In short, pity is a sentiment like any other, having in itself no determinate personality, as first or second, and no determinate moral character: personal reference and moral rank depend upon the conditions under which it is suggested. The reason that it strikes us as appropriate to call pity “altruistic” apparently is that it often leads directly and obviously to helpful practical activity, as toward the poor or the sick. But “altruistic” is used to imply something more than kindly or benevolent, some radical psychological or moral distinction between this sentiment or class of sentiments and others called egoistic, and this distinction appears not to exist. All social sentiments are altruistic in the sense that they involve reference to another person; few are so in the sense that they exclude the self. The idea of a division on this line appears to flow from a vague presumption that personal ideas must have a separateness answering to that of material bodies.

I do not mean to deny or depreciate the fact of personal opposition; it is real and most important, though it does not rest upon any such essential and, as it were, material separateness as the common way of thinking implies. At a given moment personal symbols may stand for different and opposing tendencies; thus the missionary may be urging me to contribute to his cause, and, if he is skilful, the impulses he awakens will move me in that direction; but if I think of my wife and children and the summer outing I had planned to give them from my savings, an opposite impulse appears. And in all such cases the very fact of opposition and the attention thereby drawn to the conflicting impulses gives emphasis to them, so that common elements are overlooked and the persons in the imagination seem separate and exclusive.

In such cases, however, the harmonizing or moralizing of the situation consists precisely in evoking or appealing to the common element in the apparently conflicting personalities, that is to some sentiment of justice or right. Thus I may say to myself, “I can afford a dollar, but ought not, out of consideration for my family, to give more,” and may be able to imagine all parties accepting this view of the case.

Opposition between one’s self and someone else is also a very real thing; but this opposition, instead of coming from a separateness like that of material bodies, is, on the contrary, dependent upon a measure of community between one’s self and the disturbing other, so that the hostility between one’s self and a social person may always be described as hostile sympathy. And the sentiments connected with opposition, like resentment, pertain neither to myself, considered separately, nor to the symbol of the other person, but to ideas including both. I shall discuss these matters at more length in subsequent chapters; the main thing here is to note that personal opposition does not involve mechanical separateness, but arises from the emphasis of inconsistent elements in ideas having much in common.

The relations to one another and to the mind of the various persons one thinks of might be rudely pictured in some such way as this. Suppose we conceive the mind as a vast wall covered with electric-light bulbs, each of which represents a possible thought or impulse whose presence in our consciousness may be indicated by the lighting up of the bulb. Now each of the persons we know is represented in such a scheme, not by a particular area of the wall set apart for him, but by a system of hidden connections among the bulbs which causes certain combinations of them to be lit up when his characteristic symbol is suggested. If something presses the button corresponding to my friend A, a peculiarly shaped figure appears upon the wall; when that is released and B’s button is pressed another figure appears, including perhaps many of the same lights, yet unique as a whole though not in its parts; and so on with as many people as you please. It should also be considered that we usually think of a person in relation to some particular social situation, and that those phases of him that bear on this situation are the only ones vividly conceived. To recall someone is commonly to imagine how this or that idea would strike him, what he would say or do in our place, and so on. Accordingly, only some part, some appropriate and characteristic part, of the whole figure that might be lighted up in connection with a man’s symbol, is actually illuminated.

To introduce the self into this illustration we might say that the lights near the centre of the wall were of a particular color—say red—which faded, not too abruptly, into white toward the edges. This red would represent self-feeling, and other persons would be more or less colored by it accordingly as they were or were not intimately identified with our cherished activities. In a mother’s mind, for instance, her child would lie altogether in the inmost and reddest area. Thus the same sentiment may belong to the self and to several other persons at the same time. If a man and his family are suffering from his being thrown out of work his apprehension and resentment will be part of his idea of each member of his family, as well as part of his self-idea and of the idea of people whom he thinks to blame.

I trust it will be plain that there is nothing fantastic, unreal, or impractical about this way of conceiving people, that is by observing them as facts of the imagination. On the contrary, the fantastic, unreal, and practically pernicious way is the ordinary and traditional one of speculating upon them as shadowy bodies, without any real observation of them as mental facts. It is the man as imagined that we love or hate, imitate, or avoid, that helps or harms us, that moulds our wills and our careers. What is it that makes a person real to us; is it material contact or contact in the imagination? Suppose, for instance, that on suddenly turning a corner I collide with one coming from the opposite direction: I receive a slight bruise, have the breath knocked out of me, exchange conventional apologies, and immediately forget the incident. It takes no intimate hold upon me, means nothing except a slight and temporary disturbance in the animal processes. Now suppose, on the other hand, that I take up Froude’s “Cæsar,” and presently find myself, under the guidance of that skilful writer, imagining a hero whose body long ago turned to clay. He is alive in my thought: there is perhaps some notion of his visible presence, and along with this the awakening of sentiments of audacity, magnanimity and the like, that glow with intense life, consume my energy, make me resolve to be like Cæsar in some respect, and cause me to see right and wrong and other great questions as I conceive he would have seen them. Very possibly he keeps me awake after I go to bed—every boy has lain awake thinking of book people. My whole after life will be considerably affected by this experience, and yet this is a contact that takes place only in the imagination. Even as regards the physical organism it is immeasurably more important, as a rule, than the material collision. A blow in the face, if accidental and so not disturbing to the imagination, affects the nerves, the heart, and the digestion very little, but an injurious word or look may cause sleepless nights, dyspepsia, or palpitation. It is, then, the personal idea, the man in the imagination, the real man of power and fruits, that we need primarily to consider, and he appears to be somewhat different from the rather conventional and material man of traditionary social philosophy.

According to this view of the matter society is simply the collective aspect of personal thought. Each man’s imagination, regarded as a mass of personal impressions worked up into a living, growing whole, is a special phase of society; and Mind or Imagination as a whole, that is human thought considered in the largest way as having a growth and organization extending throughout the ages, is the locus of society in the widest possible sense.

It may be objected that society in this sense has no definite limits, but seems to include the whole range of experience. That is to say, the mind is all one growth, and we cannot draw any distinct line between personal thought and other thought. There is probably no such thing as an idea that is wholly independent of minds other than that in which it exists; through heredity, if not through communication, all is connected with the general life, and so in some sense social. What are spoken of above as personal ideas are merely those in which the connection with other persons is most direct and apparent. This objection, however, applies to any way of defining society, and those who take the material standpoint are obliged to consider whether houses, factories, domestic animals, tilled land, and so on are not really parts of the social order. The truth, of course, is that all life hangs together in such a manner that any attempt to delimit a part of it is artificial. Society is rather a phase of life than a thing by itself; it is life regarded from the point of view of personal intercourse. And personal intercourse may be considered either in its primary aspects, such as are treated in this book, or in secondary aspects, such as groups, institutions, or processes. Sociology, I suppose, is the science of these things.

CHAPTER IV
SYMPATHY OR COMMUNION AS AN ASPECT OF SOCIETY

The Meaning of Sympathy as here Used—Its Relation to Thought, Sentiment, and Social Experience—The Range of Sympathy is a Measure of Personality, e.g., of Power, of Moral Rank, and of Sanity—A Man’s Sympathies Reflect the State of the Social Order—Specialization and Breadth—Sympathy Reflects Social Process in the Mingling of Likeness with Difference—Also in that it is a Process of Selection Guided by Feeling—The Meaning of Love in Social Discussion—Love in Relation to Self—The Study of Sympathy Reveals the Vital Unity of Human Life.

The personal idea in its more penetrating interpretations involves sympathy, in the sense of primary communication or an entering into and sharing the mind of someone else. When I converse with a man, through words, looks, or other symbols, I have more or less intelligence or communion with him, we get on common ground and have similar ideas and sentiments. If one uses sympathy in this connection—and it is perhaps the most available word—one has to bear in mind that it denotes the sharing of any mental state that can be communicated, and has not the special implication of pity or other “tender emotion” that it very commonly carries in ordinary speech.[^[29]] This emotionally colorless usage is, however, perfectly legitimate, and is, I think, more common in classical English literature than any other. Thus Shakespeare, who uses sympathy five times, if we may trust the “Shakespeare Phrase Book,” never means by it the particular emotion of compassion, but either the sharing of a mental state, as when he speaks of “sympathy in choice,” or mere resemblance, as when Iago mentions the lack of “sympathy in years, manners and beauties” between Othello and Desdemona. This latter sense is also one which must be excluded in our use of the word, since what is here meant is an active process of mental assimilation, not mere likeness.

In this chapter sympathy, in the sense of communion or personal insight, will be considered chiefly with a view to showing something of its nature as a phase or member of the general life of mankind.

The content of it, the matter communicated, is chiefly thought and sentiment, in distinction from mere sensation or crude emotion. I do not venture to say that these latter cannot be shared, but certainly they play a relatively small part in the communicative life. Thus although to get one’s finger pinched is a common experience, it is impossible, to me at least, to recall the sensation when another person has his finger pinched. So when we say that we feel sympathy for a person who has a headache, we mean that we pity him, not that we share the headache. There is little true communication of physical pain, or anything of that simple sort. The reason appears to be that as ideas of this kind are due to mere physical contacts, or other simple stimuli, in the first instance, they are and remain detached and isolated in the mind, so that they are unlikely to be recalled except by some sensation of the sort originally associated with them. If they become objects of thought and conversation, as is likely to be the case when they are agreeable, they are by that very process refined into sentiments. Thus when the pleasures of the table are discussed the thing communicated is hardly the sensation of taste but something much subtler, although partly based upon that. Thought and sentiment are from the first parts or aspects of highly complex and imaginative personal ideas, and of course may be reached by anything which recalls any part of those ideas. They are aroused by personal intercourse because in their origin they are connected with personal symbols. The sharing of a sentiment ordinarily comes to pass by our perceiving one of these symbols or traits of expression which has belonged with the sentiment in the past and now brings it back. And likewise with thought: it is communicated by words, and these are freighted with the net result of centuries of intercourse. Both spring from the general life of society and cannot be separated from that life, nor it from them.

It is not to be inferred that we must go through the same visible and tangible experiences as other people before we can sympathize with them. On the contrary, there is only an indirect and uncertain connection between one’s sympathies and the obvious events—such as the death of friends, success or failure in business, travels, and the like—that one has gone through. Social experience is a matter of imaginative, not of material, contacts; and there are so many aids to the imagination that little can be judged as to one’s experience by the merely external course of his life. An imaginative student of a few people and of books often has many times the range of comprehension that the most varied career can give to a duller mind; and a man of genius, like Shakespeare, may cover almost the whole range of human sentiment in his time, not by miracle, but by a marvellous vigor and refinement of imagination. The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.

One’s range of sympathy is a measure of his personality, indicating how much or how little of a man he is. It is in no way a special faculty, but a function of the whole mind to which every special faculty contributes, so that what a person is and what he can understand or enter into through the life of others, are very much the same thing. We often hear people described as sympathetic who have little mental power, but are of a sensitive, impressionable, quickly responsive type of mind. The sympathy of such a mind always has some defect corresponding to its lack of character and of constructive force. A strong, deep understanding of other people implies mental energy and stability; it is a work of persistent, cumulative imagination which may be associated with a comparative slowness of direct sensibility. On the other hand, we often see the union of a quick sensitiveness to immediate impressions with an inability to comprehend what has to be reached by reason or constructive imagination.

Sympathy is a requisite to social power. Only in so far as a man understands other people and thus enters into the life around him has he any effective existence; the less he has of this the more he is a mere animal, not truly in contact with human life. And if he is not in contact with it he can of course have no power over it. This is a principle of familiar application, and yet one that is often overlooked, practical men having, perhaps, a better grasp of it than theorists. It is well understood by men of the world that effectiveness depends at least as much upon address, savoir faire, tact, and the like, involving sympathetic insight into the minds of other people, as upon any more particular faculties. There is nothing more practical than social imagination; to lack it is to lack everything. All classes of persons need it—the mechanic, the farmer, and the tradesman, as well as the lawyer, the clergyman, the railway president, the politician, the philanthropist, and the poet. Every year thousands of young men are preferred to other thousands and given positions of more responsibility largely because they are seen to have a power of personal insight which promises efficiency and growth. Without “calibre,” which means chiefly a good imagination, there is no getting on much in the world. The strong men of our society, however much we may disapprove of the particular direction in which their sympathy is sometimes developed, or the ends their power is made to serve, are very human men, not at all the abnormal creatures they are sometimes asserted to be. I have met a fair number of such men, and they have generally appeared, each in his own way, to be persons of a certain scope and breadth that marked them off from the majority.

A person of definite character and purpose, who comprehends our way of thought, is sure to exert power over us. He cannot altogether be resisted; because, if he understands us, he can make us understand him, through the word, the look, or other symbol, which both of us connect with the common sentiment or idea; and thus by communicating an impulse he can move the will. Sympathetic influence enters into our system of thought as a matter of course, and affects our conduct as surely as water affects the growth of a plant. The kindred spirit can turn on a system of lights, to recur to the image of the last chapter, and so transform the mental illumination. This is the nature of all authority and leadership, as I shall try to explain more fully in another chapter.

Again, sympathy, in the broad sense in which it is here used, underlies also the moral rank of a man and goes to fix our estimate of his justice and goodness. The just, the good, or the right under any name, is of course not a thing by itself, but is a finer product wrought up out of the various impulses that life affords, and colored by them. Hence no one can think and act in a way that strikes us as right unless he feels, in great part, the same impulses that we do. If he shares the feelings that seem to us to have the best claims, it naturally follows, if he is a person of stable character, that he does them justice in thought and action. To be upright, public-spirited, patriotic, charitable, generous, and just implies that a man has a broad personality which feels the urgency of sympathetic or imaginative motives that in narrower minds are weak or lacking. He has achieved the higher sentiments, the wider range of personal thought. And so far as we see in his conduct that he feels such motives and that they enter into his decisions, we are likely to call him good. What is it to do good, in the ordinary sense? Is it not to help people to enjoy and to work, to fulfil the healthy and happy tendencies of human nature; to give play to children, education to youth, a career to men, a household to women, and peace to old age? And it is sympathy that makes a man wish and need to do these things. One who is large enough to live the life of the race will feel the impulses of each class as his own, and do what he can to gratify them as naturally as he eats his dinner. The idea that goodness is something apart from ordinary human nature is pernicious; it is only an ampler expression of that nature.

On the other hand, all badness, injustice, or wrong is, in one of its aspects, a lack of sympathy. If a man’s action is injurious to interests which other men value, and so impresses them as wrong, it must be because, at the moment of action, he does not feel those interests as they do. Accordingly the wrong-doer is either a person whose sympathies do not embrace the claims he wrongs, or one who lacks sufficient stability of character to express his sympathies in action. A liar, for instance, is either one who does not feel strongly the dishonor, injustice, and confusion of lying, or one who, feeling them at times, does not retain the feeling in decisive moments. And so a brutal person may be such either in a dull or chronic way, which does not know the gentler sentiments at any time, or in a sudden and passionate way which perhaps alternates with kindness.

Much the same may be said regarding mental health in general; its presence or absence may always be expressed in terms of sympathy. The test of sanity which everyone instinctively applies is that of a certain tact or feeling of the social situation, which we expect of all right-minded people and which flows from sympathetic contact with other minds. One whose words and bearing give the impression that he stands apart and lacks intuition of what others are thinking is judged as more or less absentminded, queer, dull, or even insane or imbecile, according to the character and permanence of the phenomenon. The essence of insanity, from the social point of view (and, it would seem, the only final test of it) is a confirmed lack of touch with other minds in matters upon which men in general are agreed; and imbecility might be defined as a general failure to compass the more complex sympathies.

A man’s sympathies as a whole reflect the social order in which he lives, or rather they are a particular phase of it. Every group of which he is really a member, in which he has any vital share, must live in his sympathy; so that his mind is a microcosm of so much of society as he truly belongs to. Every social phenomenon, we need to remember, is simply a collective view of what we find distributively in particular persons—public opinion is a phase of the judgments of individuals; traditions and institutions live in the thought of particular men, social standards of right do not exist apart from private consciences, and so on. Accordingly, so far as a man has any vital part in the life of a time or a country that life is imaged in those personal ideas or sympathies which are the impress of his intercourse.

So, whatever is peculiar to our own time, implies a corresponding peculiarity in the sympathetic life of each one of us. Thus the age, at least in the more intellectually active parts of life, is strenuous, characterized by the multiplication of points of personal contact through enlarged and accelerated communication. The mental aspect of this is a more rapid and multitudinous flow of personal images, sentiments, and impulses. Accordingly there prevails among us an animation of thought that tends to lift men above sensuality; and there is also possible a choice of relations that opens to each mind a more varied and congenial development than the past afforded. On the other hand, these advantages are not without their cost; the intensity of life often becomes a strain, bringing to many persons an overexcitation which weakens or breaks down character; as we see in the increase of suicide and insanity, and in many similar phenomena. An effect very generally produced upon all except the strongest minds appears to be a sort of superficiality of imagination, a dissipation and attenuation of impulses, which watches the stream of personal imagery go by like a procession, but lacks the power to organize and direct it.

The different degrees of urgency in personal impressions are reflected in the behavior of different classes of people. Everyone must have noticed that he finds more real openness of sympathy in the country than in the city—though perhaps there is more of a superficial readiness in the latter—and often more among plain, hand-working people than among professional and business men. The main reason for this, I take it, is that the social imagination is not so hard worked in the one case as in the other. In the mountains of North Carolina the hospitable inhabitants will take in any stranger and invite him to spend the night; but this is hardly possible upon Broadway; and the case is very much the same with the hospitality of the mind. If one sees few people and hears a new thing only once a week, he accumulates a fund of sociability and curiosity very favorable to eager intercourse; but if he is assailed all day and every day by calls upon feeling and thought in excess of his power to respond, he soon finds that he must put up some sort of a barrier. Sensitive people who live where life is insistent take on a sort of social shell whose function is to deal mechanically with ordinary relations and preserve the interior from destruction. They are likely to acquire a conventional smile and conventional phrases for polite intercourse, and a cold mask for curiosity, hostility, or solicitation. In fact, a vigorous power of resistance to the numerous influences that in no way make for the substantial development of his character, but rather tend to distract and demoralize him, is a primary need of one who lives in the more active portions of present society, and the loss of this power by strain is in countless instances the beginning of mental and moral decline. There are times of abounding energy when we exclaim with Schiller,

“Seid willkommen, Millionen,

Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!”

but it is hardly possible or desirable to maintain this attitude continuously. Universal sympathy is impracticable; what we need is better control and selection, avoiding both the narrowness of our class and the dissipation of promiscuous impressions. It is well for a man to open out and take in as much of life as he can organize into a consistent whole, but to go beyond that is not desirable. In a time of insistent suggestion, like the present, it is fully as important to many of us to know when and how to restrict the impulses of sympathy as it is to avoid narrowness. And this is in no way inconsistent, I think, with that modern democracy of sentiment—also connected with the enlargement of communication—which deprecates the limitation of sympathy by wealth or position. Sympathy must be selective, but the less it is controlled by conventional and external circumstances, such as wealth, and the more it penetrates to the essentials, of character, the better. It is this liberation from convention, locality, and chance, I think, that the spirit of the time calls for.

Again, the life of this age is more diversified than life ever was before, and this appears in the mind of the person who shares it as a greater variety of interests and affiliations. A man may be regarded as the point of intersection of an indefinite number of circles representing social groups, having as many arcs passing through him as there are groups. This diversity is connected with the growth of communication, and is another phase of the general enlargement and variegation of life. Because of the greater variety of imaginative contacts it is impossible for a normally open-minded individual not to lead a broader life, in some respects at least, than he would have led in the past. Why is it, for instance, that such ideas as brotherhood and the sentiment of equal right are now so generally extended to all classes of men? Primarily, I think, because all classes have become imaginable, by acquiring power and means of expression. He whom I imagine without antipathy becomes my brother. If we feel that we must give aid to another, it is because that other lives and strives in our imaginations, and so is a part of ourselves. The shallow separation of self and other in common speech obscures the extreme simplicity and naturalness of such feelings. If I come to imagine a person suffering wrong it is not “altruism” that makes me wish to right that wrong, but simple human impulse. He is my life, as really and immediately as anything else. His symbol arouses a sentiment which is no more his than mine.

Thus we lead a wider life; and yet it is also true that there is demanded of us a more distinct specialization than has been required in the past. The complexity of society takes the form of organization, that is of a growing unity and breadth sustained by the co-operation of differentiated parts, and the man of the age must reflect both the unity and the differentiation; he must be more distinctly a specialist and at the same time more a man of the world.

It seems to many a puzzling question whether, on the whole, the breadth or the specialization is more potent in the action of modern life upon the individual; and by insisting on one aspect or the other it is easy to frame an argument to show either that personal life is becoming richer, or that man is getting to be a mere cog in a machine.[^[30]] I think, however, that these two tendencies are not really opposite but complementary; that it is not a case of breadth versus specialization, but, in the long run at least, of breadth plus specialization to produce a richer and more various humanity. There are many evils connected with the sudden growth in our day of new social structures, and the subjection of a part of the people to a narrow and deadening routine is one of them, but I think that a healthy specialization has no tendency to bring this about. On the contrary, it is part of a liberating development. The narrow specialist is a bad specialist; and we shall learn that it is a mistake to produce him.

In an organized life isolation cannot succeed, and a right specialization does not isolate. There is no such separation between special and general knowledge or efficiency as is sometimes supposed. In what does the larger knowledge of particulars consist, if not in perceiving their relation to wholes? Has a student less general knowledge because he is familiar with a specialty, or is it not rather true that in so far as he knows one thing well it is a window through which he sees things in general?

There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point. If one takes his stand in a field of corn when the young plants have begun to sprout, all the plants in the field will appear to be arranged in a system of rows radiating from his feet; and no matter where he stands the system will appear to centre at that point. It is so with any standpoint in the field of thought and intercourse; to possess it is to have a point of vantage from which the whole may, in a particular manner, be apprehended. It is surely a matter of common observation that a man who knows no one thing intimately has no views worth hearing on things in general. The farmer philosophizes in terms of crops, soils, markets, and implements, the mechanic generalizes his experience of wood and iron, the seaman reaches similar conclusions by his own special road; and if the scholar keeps pace with these it must be by an equally virile productivity. It is a common opinion that breadth of culture is a thing by itself, to be imparted by a particular sort of studies, as, for instance, the classics, modern languages, and so on. And there is a certain practical truth in this, owing, I think, to the fact that certain studies are taught in a broad or cultural way, while others are not. But the right theory of the matter is that speciality and culture are simply aspects of the same healthy mental growth, and that any study is cultural when taught in the best way. And so the humblest careers in life may involve culture and breadth of view, if the incumbent is trained, as he should be, to feel their larger relations.

A certain sort of writers often assume that it is the tendency of our modern specialized production to stunt the mind of the workman by a meaningless routine; but fair opportunities of observation and some practical acquaintance with machinery and the men who use it lead me to think that this is not the general fact. On the contrary, it is precisely the broad or cultural traits of general intelligence, self-reliance, and adaptability that make a man at home and efficient in the midst of modern machinery, and it is because the American workman has these traits in a comparatively high degree that he surpasses others in the most highly specialized production. One who goes into our shops will find that the intelligent and adaptive workman is almost always preferred and gets higher wages; and if there are large numbers employed upon deadening routine it is partly because there is unfortunately a part of our population whose education makes them unfit for anything else. The type of mechanic which a complex industrial system requires, and which it is even now, on the whole, evolving, is one that combines an intimate knowledge of particular tools and processes with an intelligent apprehension of the system in which he works. If he lacks the latter he requires constant oversight and so becomes a nuisance. Anyone acquainted with such matters knows that “gumption” in workmen is fully as important and much harder to find than mere manual skill; and that those who possess it are usually given superior positions. During the late war with Spain it became obvious that the complicated machinery of a modern warship is ineffectual without intelligent, self-reliant, and determined “men behind the guns” to work it; and, of course, the same holds true of other kinds of machinery. And if we pass from tools to personal relations we shall find that the specialized production so much deprecated is only one phase of a wider general life, a life of comparative freedom, intelligence, education, and opportunity, whose general effect is to enlarge the individual. No doubt there are cases in which intelligence seems to have passed out of the man into the machine, leaving the former a mere “tender”; but I think these are not representative of the change as a whole.

The idea of a necessary antagonism between specialization and breadth seems to me an illusion of the same class as that which opposes the individual to the social order. First one aspect and then another is looked at in artificial isolation, and it is not perceived that we are beholding but one thing, after all.

Not only does the sympathetic life of a man reflect and imply the state of society, but we may also discern in it some inkling of those processes, or principles of change, that we see at large in the general movement of mankind. This is a matter rather beyond the scope of this book; but a few illustrations will show, in a general way, what I mean.

The act of sympathy follows the general law that nature works onward by mixing like and unlike, continuity and change; and so illustrates the same principle that we see in the mingling of heredity with variation, specific resemblance with a differentiation of sexes and of individuals, tradition with discussion, inherited social position with competition, and so on. The likeness in the communicating persons is necessary for comprehension, the difference for interest. We cannot feel strongly toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable; nor yet toward the wholly like because it is stale—identity must always be dull company. The power of other natures over us lies in a stimulating difference which causes excitement and opens communication, in ideas similar to our own but not identical, in states of mind attainable but not actual. If one has energy he soon wearies of any habitual round of activities and feelings, and his organism, competent to a larger life, suffers pains of excess and want at the same time. The key to the situation is another person who can start a new circle of activities and give the faculties concerned with the old a chance to rest. As Emerson has remarked, we come into society to be played upon. “Friendship,” he says again, “requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party.... Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine is that the not mine is mine.... There must be very two before there can be very one.”[^[31]] So Goethe, speaking of Spinoza’s attraction for him, remarks that the closest unions rest on contrast;[^[32]] and it is well known that such a contrast was the basis of his union with Schiller, “whose character and life,” he says, “were in complete contrast to my own.”[^[33]] Of course, some sorts of sympathy are especially active in their tendency, like the sympathy of vigorous boys with soldiers and sea-captains; while others are comparatively quiet, like those of old people renewing common memories. It is vivid and elastic where the tendency to growth is strong, reaching out toward the new, the onward, the mysterious; while old persons, the under-vitalized and the relaxed or wearied prefer a mild sociability, a comfortable companionship in habit; but even with the latter there must always be a stimulus given, something new suggested or something forgotten recalled, not merely a resemblance of thought but a “resembling difference.”

And sympathy between man and woman, while it is very much complicated with the special instinct of sex, draws its life from this same mixture of mental likeness and difference. The love of the sexes is above all a need, a need of new life which only the other can unlock.

“Ich musst’ ihn lieben, weil mit ihm mein Leben

Zum Leben ward, wie ich es nie gekannt,”[^[34]]

says the princess in Tasso; and this appears to express a general principle. Each sex represents to the other a wide range of fresh and vital experience inaccessible alone. Thus the woman usually stands for a richer and more open emotional life, the man for a stronger mental grasp, for control and synthesis. Alfred without Laura feels dull, narrow, and coarse, while Laura on her part feels selfish and hysterical.

Again, sympathy is selective, and thus illustrates a phase of the vital process more talked about at present than any other. To go out into the life of other people takes energy, as everyone may see in his own experience; and since energy is limited and requires some special stimulus to evoke it, sympathy becomes active only when our imaginations are reaching out after something we admire or love, or in some way feel the need to understand and make our own. A healthy mind, at least, does not spend much energy on things that do not, in some way, contribute to its development: ideas and persons that lie wholly aside from the direction of its growth, or from which it has absorbed all they have to give, necessarily lack interest for it and so fail to awaken sympathy. An incontinent response to every suggestion offered indicates the breaking down of that power of inhibition or refusal that is our natural defence against the reception of material we cannot digest, and looks toward weakness, instability, and mental decay. So with persons from whom we have nothing to gain, in any sense, whom we do not admire, or love, or fear, or hate, and who do not even interest us as psychological problems or objects of charity, we can have no sympathy except of the most superficial and fleeting sort. I do not overlook the fact that a large class of people suffer a loss of human breadth and power by falling into a narrow and exclusive habit of mind; but at the same time personality is nothing unless it has character, individuality, a distinctive line of growth, and to have this is to have a principle of rejection as well as reception in sympathy.

Social development as a whole, and every act of sympathy as a part of that development, is guided and stimulated in its selective growth by feeling. The outgoing of the mind into the thought of another is always, it would seem, an excursion in search of the congenial; not necessarily of the pleasant, in the ordinary sense, but of that which is fitting or congruous with our actual state of feeling. Thus we would not call Carlyle or the Book of Job pleasant exactly, yet we have moods in which these writers, however lacking in amenity, seem harmonious and attractive.

In fact, our mental life, individual and collective, is truly a never finished work of art, in the sense that we are ever striving, with such energy and materials as we possess, to make of it a harmonious and congenial whole. Each man does this in his own peculiar way, and men in the aggregate do it for human nature at large, each individual contributing to the general endeavor. There is a tendency to judge every new influence, as the painter judges every fresh stroke of his brush, by its relation to the whole achieved or in contemplation, and to call it good or ill according to whether it does or does not make for a congruous development. We do this for the most part instinctively, that is, without deliberate reasoning; something of the whole past, hereditary and social, lives in our present state of mind, and welcomes or rejects the suggestions of the moment. There is always some profound reason for the eagerness that certain influences arouse in us, through which they tap our energy and draw us in their direction, so that we cling to and augment them, growing more and more in their sense. Thus if one likes a book, so that he feels himself inclined to take it down from time to time and linger in the companionship of the author, he may be sure he is getting something that he needs, though it may be long before he discovers what it is. It is quite evident that there must be, in every phase of mental life, an æsthetic impulse to preside over selection.

In common thought and speech sympathy and love are closely connected; and in fact, as most frequently used, they mean somewhat the same thing, the sympathy ordinarily understood being an affectionate sympathy, and the love a sympathetic affection. I have already suggested that sympathy is not dependent upon any particular emotion, but may, for instance, be hostile as well as friendly; and it might also be shown that affection, though it stimulates sympathy and so usually goes with it, is not inseparable from it, but may exist in the absence of the mental development which true sympathy requires. Whoever has visited an institution for the care of idiots and imbeciles must have been struck by the exuberance with which the milk of human kindness seems to flow from the hearts of these creatures. If kept quiet and otherwise properly cared for they are mostly as amiable as could be wished, fully as much so, apparently, as persons of normal development; while at the same time they offer little or no resistance to other impulses, such as rage and fear, that sometimes possess them. Kindliness seems to exist primarily as an animal instinct, so deeply rooted that mental degeneracy, which works from the top down, does not destroy it until the mind sinks to the lower grades of idiocy.

However, the excitant of love, in all its finer aspects, is a felt possibility of communication, a dawning of sympathetic renewal. We grow by influence, and where we feel the presence of an influence that is enlarging or uplifting, we begin to love. Love is the normal and usual accompaniment of the healthy expansion of human nature by communion; and in turn is the stimulus to more communion. It seems not to be a special emotion in quite the same way that anger, grief, fear, and the like are, but something more primary and general, the stream, perhaps, of which these and many other sentiments are special channels or eddies.

Love and sympathy, then, are two things which, though distinguishable, are very commonly found together, each being an instigator of the other; what we love we sympathize with, so far as our mental development permits. To be sure, it is also true that when we hate a person, with an intimate, imaginative, human hatred, we enter into his mind, or sympathize—any strong interest will arouse the imagination and create some sort of sympathy—but affection is a more usual stimulus.

Love, in this sense of kindly sympathy, may have all degrees of emotional intensity and of sympathetic penetration, from a sort of passive good-nature, not involving imagination or mental activity of any sort, up to an all-containing human enthusiasm, involving the fullest action of the highest faculties, and bringing with it so strong a conviction of complete good that the best minds have felt and taught that God is Love. Thus understood it is not any specific sort of emotion, at least not that alone, but a general outflowing of the mind and heart, accompanied by that gladness that the fullest life carries with it. When the apostle John says that God is love, and that everyone that loveth knoweth God, he evidently means something more than personal affection, something that knows as well as feels, that takes account of all special aspects of life and is just to all.

Ordinary personal affection does not fill our ideal of right or justice, but encroaches, like all special impulses. It is not at all uncommon to wrong one person out of affection for another. If, for instance, I am able to procure a desirable position for a friend, it may well happen that there is another and a fitter man, whom I do not know or do not care for, from whose point of view my action is an injurious abuse of power. It is evident that good can be identified with no simple emotion, but must be sought in some wider phase of life that embraces all points of view. So far as love approaches this comprehensiveness it tends toward justice, because the claims of all live and are adjusted in the mind of him who has it.

“Love’s hearts are faithful but not fond,

Bound for the just but not beyond.”

Thus love of a large and symmetrical sort, not merely a narrow tenderness, implies justice and right, since a mind that has the breadth and insight to feel this will be sure to work out magnanimous principles of conduct.

It is in some such sense as this, as an expansion of human nature into a wider life, that I can best understand the use of the word love in the writings of certain great teachers, for instance in such passages as the following:

“What is Love, and why is it the chief good, but because it is an overpowering enthusiasm.... He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.”[^[35]]

“A great thing is love, ever a great good; which alone makes light all the heavy and bears equally every inequality. For its burden is not a burden, and it makes every bitter sweet and savory.... Love would be arisen, not held down by anything base. Love would be free, and alienated from every worldly affection, that its intimate desire may not be hindered, that it may not become entangled through any temporal good fortune, nor fall through any ill. There is nothing sweeter than love, nothing braver, nothing higher, nothing broader, nothing joyfuller, nothing fuller or better in heaven or on earth, since love is born of God, nor can rest save in God above all created things.

“He that loves, flies, runs, and is joyful; is free and not restrained. He gives all for all and has all in all, since he is at rest above all in the one highest good from which every good flows and proceeds. He regards not gifts, but beyond all good things turns to the giver. Love oft knows not the manner, but its heat is more than every manner. Love feels no burden, regards not labors, strives toward more than it attains, argues not of impossibility, since it believes that it may and can all things. Therefore it avails for all things, and fulfils and accomplishes much where one not a lover falls and lies helpless.”[^[36]]

The sense of joy, of freshness, of youth, and of the indifference of circumstances, that comes with love, seems to be connected with its receptive, outgoing nature. It is the fullest life, and when we have it we feel happy because our faculties are richly employed; young because reception is the essence of youth, and indifferent to conditions because we feel by our present experience that welfare is independent of them. It is when we have lost our hold upon this sort of happiness that we begin to be anxious about security and comfort, and to take a distrustful and pessimistic attitude toward the world in general.

In the literature of the feelings we often find that love and self are set over against each other, as by Tennyson when he says:

“Love took up the harp of life and smote on all the chords with might;

Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight.”

Let us consider for a moment whether, or in what sense, this antithesis is a just one.

As regards its relation to self we may, perhaps, distinguish two kinds of love, one of which is mingled with self-feeling and the other is not. The latter is a disinterested, contemplative joy, in feeling which the mind loses all sense of its private existence; while the former is active, purposeful, and appropriate, rejoicing in its object with a sense of being one with it as against the rest of the world.

In so far as one feels the disinterested love, that which has no designs with reference to its object, he has no sense of “I” at all, but simply exists in something to which he feels no bounds. Of this sort, for instance, seem to be the delight in natural beauty, in the landscape and the shining sea, the joy and rest of art—so long as we have no thought of production or criticism—and the admiration of persons regarding whom we have no intentions, either of influence or imitation. It appears to be the final perfection of this unspecialized joy that the Buddhist sages seek in Nirvana. Love of this sort obliterates that idea of separate personality whose life is always unsure and often painful. One who feels it leaves the precarious self; his boat glides out upon a wider stream; he forgets his own deformity, weakness, shame or failure, or if he thinks of them it is to feel free of them, released from their coil. No matter what you and I may be, if we can comprehend that which is fair and great we may still have it, may transcend ourselves and go out into it. It carries us beyond the sense of all individuality, either our own or others’, into the feeling of universal and joyous life. The “I,” the specialized self, and the passions involved with it, have a great and necessary part to play, but they afford no continuing city; they are so evidently transient and insecure that the idealizing mind cannot rest in them, and is glad to forget them at times and to go out into a life joyous and without bounds in which thought may be at peace.

But love that plans and strives is always in some degree self-love. That is, self-feeling is correlated with individualized, purposeful thought and action, and so begins to spring up as soon as love lingers upon something, forms intentions and begins to act. The love of a mother for her child is appropriative, as is apparent from the fact that it is capable of jealousy. Its characteristic is not selflessness, by any means, but the association of self-feeling with the idea of her child. It is no more selfless in its nature than the ambitions of a man, and may or may not be morally superior; the idea that it involves self-abnegation seems to spring from the crudely material notion of personality which assumes that other persons are external to the self. And so of all productive, specialized love. I shall say more of the self in the next chapter, but my belief is that it is impossible to cherish and strive for special purposes without having self-feeling about them; without becoming more or less capable of resentment, pride, and fear regarding them. The imaginative and sympathetic aims that are commonly spoken of as self-renunciation are more properly an enlargement of the self, and by no means destroy, though they may transform, the “I.” A wholly selfless love is mere contemplation, an escape from conscious speciality, and a dwelling in undifferentiated life. It sees all things as one and makes no effort.

These two sorts of love are properly complementary, one corresponding to production and giving each of us a specialized intensity and effectiveness, while in the other we find enlargement and relief. They are indeed closely bound together and each contributory to the other. The self and the special love that goes with it seem to grow by a sort of crystallization about them of elements from the wider life. The man first loves the woman as something transcendent, divine, or universal, which he dares not think of appropriating; but presently he begins to claim her as his in antithesis to the rest of the world, and to have hopes, fears, and resentments regarding her; the painter loves beauty contemplatively, and then tries to paint it; the poet delights in his visions, and then tries to tell them, and so on. It is necessary to our growth that we should be capable of delighting in that upon which we have no designs, because we draw our fresh materials from this region. The sort of self-love that is harmful is one that has hardened about a particular object and ceased to expand. On the other hand, it seems that the power to enter into universal life depends upon a healthy development of the special self. “Willst du in’s Unendliche schreiten,” said Goethe, “geh nur im Endlichen nach allen Seiten.” That which we have achieved by special, selfful endeavor becomes a basis of inference and sympathy, which gives a wider reach to our disinterested contemplation. While the artist is trying to paint he forfeits the pure joy of contemplation; he is strenuous, anxious, vain, or mortified; but when he ceases trying he will be capable, just because of this experience, of a fuller appreciation of beauty in general than he was before. And so of personal affection; the winning of wife, home, and children involves constant self-assertion, but it multiplies the power of sympathy. We cannot, then, exalt one of these over the other; what would seem desirable is that the self, without losing its special purpose and vigor, should keep expanding, so that it should tend to include more and more of what is largest and highest in the general life.

It appears, then, that sympathy, in the sense of mental sharing or communication, is by no means a simple matter, but that so much enters into it as to suggest that by the time we thoroughly understood one sympathetic experience we should be in a way to understand the social order itself. An act of communication is a particular aspect of the whole which we call society, and necessarily reflects that of which it is a characteristic part. To come into touch with a friend, a leader, an antagonist, or a book, is an act of sympathy; but it is precisely in the totality of such acts that society consists. Even the most complex and rigid institutions may be looked upon as consisting of innumerable personal influences or acts of sympathy, organized, in the case of institutions, into a definite and continuing whole by means of some system of permanent symbols, such as laws, constitutions, sacred writings, and the like, in which personal influences are preserved. And, turning the matter around, we may look upon every act of sympathy as a particular expression of the history, institutions, and tendencies of the society in which it takes place. Every influence which you or I can receive or impart will be characteristic of the race, the country, the epoch, in which our personalities have grown up.

The main thing here is to bring out the vital unity of every phase of personal life, from the simplest interchange of a friendly word to the polity of nations or of hierarchies. The common idea of the matter is crudely mechanical—that there are persons as there are bricks and societies as there are walls. A person, or some trait of personality or of intercourse, is held to be the element of society, and the latter is formed by the aggregation of these elements. Now there is no such thing as an element of society in the sense that a brick is the element of a wall; this is a mechanical conception quite inapplicable to vital phenomena. I should say that living wholes have aspects but not elements.

In the Capitoline Museum at Rome is a famous statue of Venus, which, like many works of this kind, is ingeniously mounted upon a pivot, so that one who wishes to study it can place it at any angle with reference to the light that he may prefer. Thus he may get an indefinite number of views, but in every view what he really observes, so far as he observes intelligently, is the whole statue in a particular aspect. Even if he fixes his attention upon the foot, or the great toe, he sees this part, if he sees it rightly, in relation to the work as a whole. And it seems to me that the study of human life is analogous in character. It is expedient to divide it into manageable parts in some way; but this division can only be a matter of aspects, not of elements. The various chapters of this book, for instance, do not deal with separable subjects, but merely with phases of a common subject, and the same is true of any work in psychology, history or biology.

CHAPTER V
THE SOCIAL SELF—1. THE MEANING OF “I”

The “Empirical Self”—“I” as a State of Feeling—Its Relation to the Body—As a Sense of Power or Causation—As a Sense of Speciality or Differentiation in a Social Life—The Reflected or Looking-glass “I”—“I” is Rooted in the Past and Varies with Social Conditions—Its Relation to Habit—To Disinterested Love—How Children Learn the Meaning of “I”—The Speculative or Metaphysical “I” in Children—The Looking-glass “I” in Children—The Same in Adolescence—“I” in Relation to Sex—Simplicity and Affectation—Social Self-feeling is Universal.

It is well to say at the outset that by the word “self” in this discussion is meant simply that which is designated in common speech by the pronouns of the first person singular, “I,” “me,” “my,” “mine,” and “myself.” “Self” and “ego” are used by metaphysicians and moralists in many other senses, more or less remote from the “I” of daily speech and thought, and with these I wish to have as little to do as possible. What is here discussed is what psychologists call the empirical self, the self that can be apprehended or verified by ordinary observation. I qualify it by the word social not as implying the existence of a self that is not social—for I think that the “I” of common language always has more or less distinct reference to other people as well as the speaker—but because I wish to emphasize and dwell upon the social aspect of it.

Although the topic of the self is regarded as an abstruse one this abstruseness belongs chiefly, perhaps, to the metaphysical discussion of the “pure ego”—whatever that may be—while the empirical self should not be very much more difficult to get hold of than other facts of the mind. At any rate, it may be assumed that the pronouns of the first person have a substantial, important, and not very recondite meaning, otherwise they would not be in constant and intelligible use by simple people and young children the world over. And since they have such a meaning why should it not be observed and reflected upon like any other matter of fact? As to the underlying mystery, it is no doubt real, important, and a very fit subject of discussion by those who are competent, but I do not see that it is a peculiar mystery. I mean that it seems to be simply a phase of the general mystery of life, not pertaining to “I” more than to any other personal or social fact; so that here as elsewhere those who are not attempting to penetrate the mystery may simply ignore it. If this is a just view of the matter, “I” is merely a fact like any other.

The distinctive thing in the idea for which the pronouns of the first person are names is apparently a characteristic kind of feeling which may be called the my-feeling or sense of appropriation. Almost any sort of ideas may be associated with this feeling, and so come to be named “I” or “mine,” but the feeling, and that alone it would seem, is the determining factor in the matter. As Professor James says in his admirable discussion of the self, the words “me” and “self” designate “all the things which have the power to produce in a stream of consciousness excitement of a certain peculiar sort.”[^[37]] This view is very fully set forth by Professor Hiram M. Stanley, whose work, “The Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling,” has an extremely suggestive chapter on self-feeling.

I do not mean that the feeling aspect of the self is necessarily more important than any other, but that it is the immediate and decisive sign and proof of what “I” is; there is no appeal from it; if we go behind it it must be to study its history and conditions, not to question its authority. But, of course, this study of history and conditions may be quite as profitable as the direct contemplation of self-feeling. What I would wish to do is to present each aspect in its proper light.

The emotion or feeling of self may be regarded as an instinct, doubtless evolved in connection with its important function in stimulating and unifying the special activities of individuals.[^[38]] It is thus very profoundly rooted in the history of the human race and apparently indispensable to any plan of life at all similar to ours. It seems to exist in a vague though vigorous form at the birth of each individual, and, like other instinctive ideas or germs of ideas, to be defined and developed by experience, becoming associated, or rather incorporated, with muscular, visual and other sensations; with perceptions, apperceptions and conceptions of every degree of complexity and of infinite variety of content; and, especially, with personal ideas. Meantime the feeling itself does not remain unaltered, but undergoes differentiation and refinement just as does any other sort of crude innate feeling. Thus, while retaining under every phase its characteristic tone or flavor, it breaks up into innumerable self-sentiments. And concrete self-feeling, as it exists in mature persons, is a whole made up of these various sentiments, along with a good deal of primitive emotion not thus broken up. It partakes fully of the general development of the mind, but never loses that peculiar gusto of appropriation that causes us to name a thought with a first-personal pronoun. The other contents of the self-idea are of little use, apparently, in defining it, because they are so extremely various. It would be no more futile, it seems to me, to attempt to define fear by enumerating the things that people are afraid of, than to attempt to define “I” by enumerating the objects with which the word is associated. Very much as fear means primarily a state of feeling, or its expression, and not darkness, fire, lions, snakes, or other things that excite it, so “I” means primarily self-feeling, or its expression, and not body, clothes, treasures, ambition, honors, and the like, with which this feeling may be connected. In either case it is possible and useful to go behind the feeling and enquire what ideas arouse it and why they do so, but this is in a sense a secondary investigation.

Since “I” is known to our experience primarily as a feeling, or as a feeling-ingredient in our ideas, it cannot be described or defined without suggesting that feeling. We are sometimes likely to fall into a formal and empty way of talking regarding questions of emotion, by attempting to define that which is in its nature primary and indefinable. A formal definition of self-feeling, or indeed of any sort of feeling, must be as hollow as a formal definition of the taste of salt, or the color red; we can expect to know what it is only by experiencing it. There can be no final test of the self except the way we feel; it is that toward which we have the “my” attitude. But as this feeling is quite as familiar to us and as easy to recall as the taste of salt or the color red, there should be no difficulty in understanding what is meant by it. One need only imagine some attack on his “me,” say ridicule of his dress or an attempt to take away his property or his child, or his good name by slander, and self-feeling immediately appears. Indeed, he need only pronounce, with strong emphasis, one of the self-words, like “I” or “my,” and self-feeling will be recalled by association. Another good way is to enter by sympathy into some self-assertive state of mind depicted in literature; as, for instance, into that of Coriolanus when, having been sneered at as a “boy of tears,” he cries out:

“Boy!...

If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there,

That, like an eagle in a dovecote, I

Fluttered your Volscians in Corioli;

Alone I did it.—Boy!”

Here is a self indeed, which no one can fail to feel, though he might be unable to describe it. What a ferocious scream of the outraged ego is that “I” at the end of the second line!

So much is written on this topic that ignores self-feeling and thus deprives “self” of all vivid and palpable meaning, that I feel it permissible to add a few more passages in which this feeling is forcibly expressed. Thus in Lowell’s poem, “A Glance Behind the Curtain,” Cromwell says:

“I, perchance,

Am one raised up by the Almighty arm

To witness some great truth to all the world.”

And his Columbus, on the bow of his vessel, soliloquizes:

“Here am I, with no friend but the sad sea,

The beating heart of this great enterprise,

Which, without me, would stiffen in swift death.”

And so the “I am the way” which we read in the New Testament is surely the expression of a sentiment not very different from these. In the following we have a more plaintive sentiment of self:

Philoctetes.— And know’st thou not, O boy, whom thou dost see? Neoptolemus.— How can I know a man I ne’er beheld? Philoctetes.— And didst thou never hear my name, nor fame Of these my ills, in which I pined away? Neoptolemus.— Know that I nothing know of what thou ask’st. Philoctetes.— O crushed with many woes, and of the Gods Hated am I, of whom, in this my woe, No rumor travelled homeward, nor went forth Through any clime of Hellas.[^[39]]

We all have thoughts of the same sort as these, and yet it is possible to talk so coldly or mystically about the self that one begins to forget that there is, really, any such thing.

But perhaps the best way to realize the naïve meaning of “I” is to listen to the talk of children playing together, especially if they do not agree very well. They use the first person with none of the conventional self-repression of their elders, but with much emphasis and variety of inflection, so that its emotional animus is unmistakable.

Self-feeling of a reflective and agreeable sort, an appropriative zest of contemplation, is strongly suggested by the word “gloating.” To gloat, in this sense, is as much as to think “mine, mine, mine,” with a pleasant warmth of feeling. Thus a boy gloats over something he has made with his scroll-saw, over the bird he has brought down with his gun, or over his collection of stamps or eggs; a girl gloats over her new clothes, and over the approving words or looks of others; a farmer over his fields and his stock; a business man over his trade and his bank account; a mother over her child; the poet over a successful quatrain; the self-righteous man over the state of his soul; and in like manner everyone gloats over the prosperity of any cherished idea.

I would not be understood as saying that self-feeling is clearly marked off in experience from other kinds of feeling; but it is, perhaps, as definite in this regard as anger, fear, grief, and the like. To quote Professor James, “The emotions themselves of self-satisfaction and abasement are of a unique sort, each as worthy to be classed as a primitive emotional species as are, for example, rage or pain.”[^[40]] It is true here, as wherever mental facts are distinguished, that there are no fences, but that one thing merges by degrees into another. Yet if “I” did not denote an idea much the same in all minds and fairly distinguishable from other ideas, it could not be used freely and universally as a means of communication.

As many people have the impression that the verifiable self, the object that we name with “I,” is usually the material body, it may be well to say that this impression is an illusion, easily dispelled by anyone who will undertake a simple examination of facts. It is true that when we philosophize a little about “I” and look around for a tangible object to which to attach it, we soon fix upon the material body as the most available locus; but when we use the word naïvely, as in ordinary speech, it is not very common to think of the body in connection with it; not nearly so common as it is to think of other things. There is no difficulty in testing this statement, since the word “I” is one of the commonest in conversation and literature, so that nothing is more practicable than to study its meaning at any length that may be desired. One need only listen to ordinary speech until the word has occurred, say, a hundred times, noting its connections, or observe its use in a similar number of cases by the characters in a novel. Ordinarily it will be found that in not more than ten cases in a hundred does “I” have reference to the body of the person speaking. It refers chiefly to opinions, purposes, desires, claims, and the like, concerning matters that involve no thought of the body. I think or feel so and so; I wish or intend so and so; I want this or that; are typical uses, the self-feeling being associated with the view, purpose, or object mentioned. It should also be remembered that “my” and “mine” are as much the names of the self as “I” and these, of course, commonly refer to miscellaneous possessions.

I had the curiosity to attempt a rough classification of the first hundred “I’s” and “me’s” in Hamlet, with the following results. The pronoun was used in connection with perception, as “I hear,” “I see,” fourteen times; with thought, sentiment, intention, etc., thirty-two times; with wish, as “I pray you,” six times; as speaking—“I’ll speak to it”—sixteen times; as spoken to, twelve times; in connection with action, involving perhaps some vague notion of the body, as “I came to Denmark,” nine times; vague or doubtful, ten times; as equivalent to bodily appearance—“No more like my father than I to Hercules”—once. Some of the classifications are arbitrary, and another observer would doubtless get a different result; but he could not fail, I think, to conclude that Shakespeare’s characters are seldom thinking of their bodies when they say “I” or “me.” And in this respect they appear to be representative of mankind in general.

As already suggested, instinctive self-feeling is doubtless connected in evolution with its important function in stimulating and unifying the special activities of individuals. It appears to be associated chiefly with ideas of the exercise of power, of being a cause, ideas that emphasize the antithesis between the mind and the rest of the world. The first definite thoughts that a child associates with self-feeling are probably those of his earliest endeavors to control visible objects—his limbs, his playthings, his bottle, and the like. Then he attempts to control the actions of the persons about him, and so his circle of power and of self-feeling widens without interruption to the most complex objects of mature ambition. Although he does not say “I” or “my” during the first year or two, yet he expresses so clearly by his actions the feeling that adults associate with these words that we cannot deny him a self even in the first weeks.

The correlation of self-feeling with purposeful activity is easily seen by observing the course of any productive enterprise. If a boy sets about making a boat, and has any success, his interest in the matter waxes, he gloats over it, the keel and stern are dear to his heart, and its ribs are more to him than those of his own frame. He is eager to call in his friends and acquaintances, saying to them, “See what I am doing! Is it not remarkable?”, feeling elated when it is praised, and resentful or humiliated when fault is found with it. But so soon as he finishes it and turns to something else, his self-feeling begins to fade away from it, and in a few weeks at most he will have become comparatively indifferent. We all know that much the same course of feeling accompanies the achievements of adults. It is impossible to produce a picture, a poem, an essay, a difficult bit of masonry, or any other work of art or craft, without having self-feeling regarding it, amounting usually to considerable excitement and desire for some sort of appreciation; but this rapidly diminishes with the activity itself, and often lapses into indifference after it ceases.

It may perhaps be objected that the sense of self, instead of being limited to times of activity and definite purpose, is often most conspicuous when the mind is unoccupied or undecided, and that the idle and ineffectual are commonly the most sensitive in their self-esteem. This, however, may be regarded as an instance of the principle that all instincts are likely to assume troublesome forms when denied wholesome expression. The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.

The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own. Self-feeling has its chief scope within the general life, not outside of it, the special endeavor or tendency of which it is the emotional aspect finding its principal field of exercise in a world of personal forces, reflected in the mind by a world of personal impressions.

As connected with the thought of other persons it is always a consciousness of the peculiar or differentiated aspect of one’s life, because that is the aspect that has to be sustained by purpose and endeavor, and its more aggressive forms tend to attach themselves to whatever one finds to be at once congenial to one’s own tendencies and at variance with those of others with whom one is in mental contact. It is here that they are most needed to serve their function of stimulating characteristic activity, of fostering those personal variations which the general plan of life seems to require. Heaven, says Shakespeare, doth divide

“The state of man in divers functions,

Setting endeavor in continual motion,”

and self-feeling is one of the means by which this diversity is achieved.

Agreeably to this view we find that the aggressive self manifests itself most conspicuously in an appropriativeness of objects of common desire, corresponding to the individual’s need of power over such objects to secure his own peculiar development, and to the danger of opposition from others who also need them. And this extends from material objects to lay hold, in the same spirit, of the attentions and affections of other people, of all sorts of plans and ambitions, including the noblest special purposes the mind can entertain, and indeed of any conceivable idea which may come to seem a part of one’s life and in need of assertion against someone else. The attempt to limit the word self and its derivatives to the lower aims of personality is quite arbitrary; at variance with common-sense as expressed by the emphatic use of “I” in connection with the sense of duty and other high motives, and unphilosophical as ignoring the function of the self as the organ of specialized endeavor of higher as well as lower kinds.

That the “I” of common speech has a meaning which includes some sort of reference to other persons is involved in the very fact that the word and the ideas it stands for are phenomena of language and the communicative life. It is doubtful whether it is possible to use language at all without thinking more or less distinctly of someone else, and certainly the things to which we give names and which have a large place in reflective thought are almost always those which are impressed upon us by our contact with other people. Where there is no communication there can be no nomenclature and no developed thought. What we call “me,” “mine,” or “myself” is, then, not something separate from the general life, but the most interesting part of it, a part whose interest arises from the very fact that it is both general and individual. That is, we care for it just because it is that phase of the mind that is living and striving in the common life, trying to impress itself upon the minds of others. “I” is a militant social tendency, working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of tendencies. So far as it can it waxes, as all life does. To think of it as apart from society is a palpable absurdity of which no one could be guilty who really saw it as a fact of life.

“Der Mensch erkennt sich nur im Menschen, nur

Das Leben lehret jedem was er sei.”[^[41]]

If a thing has no relation to others of which one is conscious he is unlikely to think of it at all, and if he does think of it he cannot, it seems to me, regard it as emphatically his. The appropriative sense is always the shadow, as it were, of the common life, and when we have it we have a sense of the latter in connection with it. Thus, if we think of a secluded part of the woods as “ours,” it is because we think, also, that others do not go there. As regards the body I doubt if we have a vivid my-feeling about any part of it which is not thought of, however vaguely, as having some actual or possible reference to someone else. Intense self-consciousness regarding it arises along with instincts or experiences which connect it with the thought of others. Internal organs, like the liver, are not thought of as peculiarly ours unless we are trying to communicate something regarding them, as, for instance, when they are giving us trouble and we are trying to get sympathy.

“I,” then, is not all of the mind, but a peculiarly central, vigorous, and well-knit portion of it, not separate from the rest but gradually merging into it, and yet having a certain practical distinctness, so that a man generally shows clearly enough by his language and behavior what his “I” is as distinguished from thoughts he does not appropriate. It may be thought of, as already suggested, under the analogy of a central colored area on a lighted wall. It might also, and perhaps more justly, be compared to the nucleus of a living cell, not altogether separate from the surrounding matter, out of which indeed it is formed, but more active and definitely organized.

The reference to other persons involved in the sense of self may be distinct and particular, as when a boy is ashamed to have his mother catch him at something she has forbidden, or it may be vague and general, as when one is ashamed to do something which only his conscience, expressing his sense of social responsibility, detects and disapproves; but it is always there. There is no sense of “I,” as in pride or shame, without its correlative sense of you, or he, or they. Even the miser gloating over his hidden gold can feel the “mine” only as he is aware of the world of men over whom he has secret power; and the case is very similar with all kinds of hid treasure. Many painters, sculptors, and writers have loved to withhold their work from the world, fondling it in seclusion until they were quite done with it; but the delight in this, as in all secrets, depends upon a sense of the value of what is concealed.

In a very large and interesting class of cases the social reference takes the form of a somewhat definite imagination of how one’s self—that is any idea he appropriates—appears in a particular mind, and the kind of self-feeling one has is determined by the attitude toward this attributed to that other mind. A social self of this sort might be called the reflected or looking-glass self:

“Each to each a looking-glass

Reflects the other that doth pass.”

As we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass, and are interested in them because they are ours, and pleased or otherwise with them according as they do or do not answer to what we should like them to be; so in imagination we perceive in another’s mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it.

A self-idea of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification. The comparison with a looking-glass hardly suggests the second element, the imagined judgment, which is quite essential. The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment, the imagined effect of this reflection upon another’s mind. This is evident from the fact that the character and weight of that other, in whose mind we see ourselves, makes all the difference with our feeling. We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined one, and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments of the other mind. A man will boast to one person of an action—say some sharp transaction in trade—which he would be ashamed to own to another.

It should be evident that the ideas that are associated with self-feeling and form the intellectual content of the self cannot be covered by any simple description, as by saying that the body has such a part in it, friends such a part, plans so much, etc., but will vary indefinitely with particular temperaments and environments. The tendency of the self, like every aspect of personality, is expressive of far-reaching hereditary and social factors, and is not to be understood or predicted except in connection with the general life. Although special, it is in no way separate—speciality and separateness are not only different but contradictory, since the former implies connection with a whole. The object of self-feeling is affected by the general course of history, by the particular development of nations, classes, and professions, and other conditions of this sort.

The truth of this is perhaps most decisively shown in the fact that even those ideas that are most generally associated or colored with the “my” feeling, such as one’s idea of his visible person, of his name, his family, his intimate friends, his property, and so on, are not universally so associated, but may be separated from the self by peculiar social conditions. Thus the ascetics, who have played so large a part in the history of Christianity and of other religions and philosophies, endeavored not without success to divorce their appropriative thought from all material surroundings, and especially from their physical persons, which they sought to look upon as accidental and degrading circumstances of the soul’s earthly sojourn. In thus estranging themselves from their bodies, from property and comfort, from domestic affections—whether of wife or child, mother, brother or sister—and from other common objects of ambition, they certainly gave a singular direction to self-feeling, but they did not destroy it: there can be no doubt that the instinct, which seems imperishable so long as mental vigor endures, found other ideas to which to attach itself; and the strange and uncouth forms which ambition took in those centuries when the solitary, filthy, idle, and sense-tormenting anchorite was a widely accepted ideal of human life, are a matter of instructive study and reflection. Even in the highest exponents of the ascetic ideal, like St. Jerome, it is easy to see that the discipline, far from effacing the self, only concentrated its energy in lofty and unusual channels. The self-idea may be that of some great moral reform, of a religious creed, of the destiny of one’s soul after death, or even a cherished conception of the deity. Thus devout writers, like George Herbert and Thomas à Kempis, often address my God, not at all conventionally as I conceive the matter, but with an intimate sense of appropriation. And it has been observed that the demand for the continued and separate existence of the individual soul after death is an expression of self-feeling, as by J. A. Symonds, who thinks that it is connected with the intense egotism and personality of the European races, and asserts that the millions of Buddhism shrink from it with horror.[^[42]]

Habit and familiarity are not of themselves sufficient to cause an idea to be appropriated into the self. Many habits and familiar objects that have been forced upon us by circumstances rather than chosen for their congeniality remain external and possibly repulsive to the self; and, on the other hand, a novel but very congenial element in experience, like the idea of a new toy, or, if you please, Romeo’s idea of Juliet, is often appropriated almost immediately, and becomes, for the time at least, the very heart of the self. Habit has the same fixing and consolidating action in the growth of the self that it has elsewhere, but is not its distinctive characteristic.

As suggested in the previous chapter, self-feeling may be regarded as in a sense the antithesis, or better perhaps, the complement, of that disinterested and contemplative love that tends to obliterate the sense of a divergent individuality. Love of this sort has no sense of bounds, but is what we feel when we are expanding and assimilating new and indeterminate experience, while self-feeling accompanies the appropriating, delimiting, and defending of a certain part of experience; the one impels us to receive life, the other to individuate it. The self, from this point of view, might be regarded as a sort of citadel of the mind, fortified without and containing selected treasures within, while love is an undivided share in the rest of the universe. In a healthy mind each contributes to the growth of the other: what we love intensely or for a long time we are likely to bring within the citadel, and to assert as part of ourself. On the other hand, it is only on the basis of a substantial self that a person is capable of progressive sympathy or love.

The sickness of either is to lack the support of the other. There is no health in a mind except as it keeps expanding, taking in fresh life, feeling love and enthusiasm; and so long as it does this its self-feeling is likely to be modest and generous; since these sentiments accompany that sense of the large and the superior which love implies. But if love closes, the self contracts and hardens: the mind having nothing else to occupy its attention and give it that change and renewal it requires, busies itself more and more with self-feeling, which takes on narrow and disgusting forms, like avarice, arrogance, and fatuity. It is necessary that we should have self-feeling about a matter during its conception and execution; but when it is accomplished or has failed the self ought to break loose and escape, renewing its skin like the snake, as Thoreau says. No matter what a man does, he is not fully sane or human unless there is a spirit of freedom in him, a soul unconfined by purpose and larger than the practicable world. And this is really what those mean who inculcate the suppression of the self; they mean that its rigidity must be broken up by growth and renewal, that it must be more or less decisively “born again.” A healthy, self must be both vigorous and plastic, a nucleus of solid, well-knit private purpose and feeling, guided and nourished by sympathy.

The view that “self” and the pronouns of the first person are names which the race has learned to apply to an instinctive attitude of mind, and which each child in turn learns to apply in a similar way, was impressed upon me by observing my child M. at the time when she was learning to use these pronouns. When she was two years and two weeks old I was surprised to discover that she had a clear notion of the first and second persons when used possessively. When asked, “Where is your nose?” she would put her hand upon it and say “my.” She also understood that when someone else said “my” and touched an object, it meant something opposite to what was meant when she touched the same object and used the same word. Now, anyone who will exercise his imagination upon the question how this matter must appear to a mind having no means of knowing anything about “I” and “my” except what it learns by hearing them used, will see that it should be very puzzling. Unlike other words, the personal pronouns have, apparently, no uniform meaning, but convey different and even opposite ideas when employed by different persons. It seems remarkable that children should master the problem before they arrive at considerable power of abstract reasoning. How should a little girl of two, not particularly reflective, have discovered that “my” was not the sign of a definite object like other words, but meant something different with each person who used it? And, still more surprising, how should she have achieved the correct use of it with reference to herself which, it would seem, could not be copied from anyone else, simply because no one else used it to describe what belonged to her? The meaning of words is learned by associating them with other phenomena. But how is it possible to learn the meaning of one which, as used by others, is never associated with the same phenomenon as when properly used by one’s self? Watching her use of the first person, I was at once struck with the fact that she employed it almost wholly in a possessive sense, and that, too, when in an aggressive, self-assertive mood. It was extremely common to see R. tugging at one end of a plaything and M. at the other, screaming, “My, my.” “Me” was sometimes nearly equivalent to “my,” and was also employed to call attention to herself when she wanted something done for her. Another common use of “my” was to demand something she did not have at all. Thus if R. had something the like of which she wanted, say a cart, she would exclaim, “Where’s my cart?”

It seemed to me that she might have learned the use of these pronouns about as follows. The self-feeling had always been there. From the first week she had wanted things and cried and fought for them. She had also become familiar by observation and opposition with similar appropriative activities on the part of R. Thus she not only had the feeling herself, but by associating it with its visible expression had probably divined it, sympathized with it, resented it, in others. Grasping, tugging, and screaming would be associated with the feeling in her own case and would recall the feeling when observed in others. They would constitute a language, precedent to the use of first-personal pronouns, to express the self-idea. All was ready, then, for the word to name this experience. She now observed that R., when contentiously appropriating something, frequently exclaimed, “my,” “mine,” “give it to me,” “I want it,” and the like. Nothing more natural, then, than that she should adopt these words as names for a frequent and vivid experience with which she was already familiar in her own case and had learned to attribute to others. Accordingly it appeared to me, as I recorded in my notes at the time, that “‘my’ and ‘mine’ are simply names for concrete images of appropriativeness,” embracing both the appropriative feeling and its manifestation. If this is true the child does not at first work out the I-and-you idea in an abstract form. The first-personal pronoun is a sign of a concrete thing after all, but that thing is not primarily the child’s body, or his muscular sensations as such, but the phenomenon of aggressive appropriation, practised by himself, witnessed in others, and incited and interpreted by a hereditary instinct. This seems to get over the difficulty above mentioned, namely, the seeming lack of a common content between the meaning of “my” when used by another and when used by one’s self. This common content is found in the appropriative feeling and the visible and audible signs of that feeling. An element of difference and strife comes in, of course, in the opposite actions or purposes which the “my” of another and one’s own “my” are likely to stand for. When another person says “mine” regarding something which I claim, I sympathize with him enough to understand what he means, but it is a hostile sympathy, overpowered by another and more vivid “mine” connected with the idea of drawing the object my way.

In other words, the meaning of “I” and “mine” is learned in the same way that the meanings of hope, regret, chagrin, disgust, and thousands of other words of emotion and sentiment are learned: that is, by having the feeling, imputing it to others in connection with some kind of expression, and hearing the word along with it. As to its communication and growth the self-idea is in no way peculiar that I see, but essentially like other ideas. In its more complex forms, such as are expressed by “I” in conversation and literature, it is a social sentiment, or type of sentiments, defined and developed by intercourse, in the manner suggested in a previous chapter.

R., though a more reflective child than M., was much slower in understanding these pronouns, and in his thirty-fifth month had not yet straightened them out, sometimes calling his father “me.” I imagine that this was partly because he was placid and uncontentious in his earliest years, manifesting little social self-feeling, but chiefly occupied with impersonal experiment and reflection; and partly because he saw little of other children by antithesis to whom his self could be awakened. M., on the other hand, coming later, had R.’s opposition on which to whet her naturally keen appropriativeness. And her society had a marked effect in developing self-feeling in R., who found self-assertion necessary to preserve his playthings, or anything else capable of appropriation. He learned the use of “my,” however, when he was about three years old, before M. was born. He doubtless acquired it in his dealings with his parents. Thus he would perhaps notice his mother claiming the scissors as mine and seizing upon them, and would be moved sympathetically to claim something in the same way—connecting the word with the act and the feeling rather than the object. But as I had not the problem clearly in mind at that time I made no satisfactory observations.

I imagine, then, that as a rule the child associates “I” and “me” at first only with those ideas regarding which his appropriative feeling is aroused and defined by opposition. He appropriates his nose, eye, or foot in very much the same way as a plaything—by antithesis to other noses, eyes, and feet, which he cannot control. It is not uncommon to tease little children by proposing to take away one of these organs, and they behave precisely as if the “mine” threatened were a separable object—which it might be for all they know. And, as I have suggested, even in adult life, “I,” “me,” and “mine” are applied with a strong sense of their meaning only to things distinguished as peculiar to us by some sort of opposition or contrast. They always imply social life and relation to other persons. That which is most distinctively mine is very private, it is true, but it is that part of the private which I am cherishing in antithesis to the rest of the world, not the separate but the special. The aggressive self is essentially a militant phase of the mind, having for its apparent function the energizing of peculiar activities, and although the militancy may not go on in an obvious, external manner, it always exists as a mental attitude.

In some of the best-known discussions of the development of the sense of self in children the chief emphasis has been placed upon the speculative or quasi-metaphysical ideas concerning “I” which children sometimes formulate as a result either of questions from their elders, or of the independent development of a speculative instinct. The most obvious result of these inquiries is to show that a child, when he reflects upon the self in this manner, usually locates “I” in the body. Interesting and important as this juvenile metaphysics is, as one phase of mental development, it should certainly not be taken as an adequate expression of the childish sense of self, and probably President G. Stanley Hall, who has collected valuable material of this kind, does not so take it.[^[43]] This analysis of the “I,” asking one’s self just where it is located, whether particular limbs are embraced in it, and the like, is somewhat remote from the ordinary, naïve use of the word, with children as with grown people. In my own children I only once observed anything of this sort, and that was in the case of R., when he was struggling to achieve the correct use of his pronouns; and a futile, and as I now think mistaken, attempt was made to help him by pointing out the association of the word with his body. On the other hand, every child who has learned to talk uses “I,” “me,” “mine,” and the like hundreds of times a day, with great emphasis, in the simple, naïve way that the race has used them for thousands of years. In this usage they refer to claims upon playthings, to assertions of one’s peculiar will or purpose, as “I don’t want to do it that way,” “I am going to draw a kitty,” and so on, rarely to any part of the body. And when a part of the body is meant it is usually by way of claiming approval for it, as “Don’t I look nice?” so that the object of chief interest is after all another person’s attitude. The speculative “I,” though a true “I,” is not the “I” of common speech and workaday usefulness, but almost as remote from ordinary thought as the ego of metaphysicians, of which, indeed, it is an immature example.

That children, when in this philosophizing state of mind, usually refer “I” to the physical body, is easily explained by the fact that their materialism, natural to all crude speculation, needs to locate the self somewhere, and the body, the one tangible thing over which they have continuous power, seems the most available home for it.

The process by which self-feeling of the looking-glass sort develops in children may be followed without much difficulty. Studying the movements of others as closely as they do they soon see a connection between their own acts and changes in those movements; that is, they perceive their own influence or power over persons. The child appropriates the visible actions of his parent or nurse, over which he finds he has some control, in quite the same way as he appropriates one of his own members or a plaything, and he will try to do things with this new possession, just as he will with his hand or his rattle. A girl six months old will attempt in the most evident and deliberate manner to attract attention to herself, to set going by her actions some of those movements of other persons that she has appropriated. She has tasted the joy of being a cause, of exerting social power, and wishes more of it. She will tug at her mother’s skirts, wriggle, gurgle, stretch out her arms, etc., all the time watching for the hoped-for effect. These performances often give the child, even at this age, an appearance of what is called affectation, that is she seems to be unduly preoccupied with what other people think of her. Affectation, at any age, exists when the passion to influence others seems to overbalance the established character and give it an obvious twist or pose. It is instructive to find that even Darwin was, in his childhood, capable of departing from truth for the sake of making an impression. “For instance,” he says in his autobiography, “I once gathered much valuable fruit from my father’s trees and hid it in the shrubbery, and then ran in breathless haste to spread the news that I had discovered a hoard of stolen fruit.”[^[44]]

The young performer soon learns to be different things to different people, showing that he begins to apprehend personality and to foresee its operation. If the mother or nurse is more tender than just she will almost certainly be “worked” by systematic weeping. It is a matter of common observation that children often behave worse with their mother than with other and less sympathetic people. Of the new persons that a child sees it is evident that some make a strong impression and awaken a desire to interest and please them, while others are indifferent or repugnant. Sometimes the reason can be perceived or guessed, sometimes not; but the fact of selective interest, admiration, prestige, is obvious before the end of the second year. By that time a child already cares much for the reflection of himself upon one personality and little for that upon another. Moreover, he soon claims intimate and tractable persons as mine, classes them among his other possessions, and maintains his ownership against all comers. M., at three years of age, vigorously resented R.’s claim upon their mother. The latter was “my mamma,” whenever the point was raised.

Strong joy and grief depend upon the treatment this rudimentary social self receives. In the case of M. I noticed as early as the fourth month a “hurt” way of crying which seemed to indicate a sense of personal slight. It was quite different from the cry of pain or that of anger, but seemed about the same as the cry of fright. The slightest tone of reproof would produce it. On the other hand, if people took notice and laughed and encouraged, she was hilarious. At about fifteen months old she had become “a perfect little actress,” seeming to live largely in imaginations of her effect upon other people. She constantly and obviously laid traps for attention, and looked abashed or wept at any signs of disapproval or indifference. At times it would seem as if she could not get over these repulses, but would cry long in a grieved way, refusing to be comforted. If she hit upon any little trick that made people laugh she would be sure to repeat it, laughing loudly and affectedly in imitation. She had quite a repertory of these small performances, which she would display to a sympathetic audience, or even try upon strangers. I have seen her at sixteen months, when R. refused to give her the scissors, sit down and make believe cry, putting up her under lip and snuffling, meanwhile looking up now and then to see what effect she was producing.[^[45]]

In such phenomena we have plainly enough, it seems to me, the germ of personal ambition of every sort. Imagination co-operating with instinctive self-feeling has already created a social “I,” and this has become a principal object of interest and endeavor.

Progress from this point is chiefly in the way of a greater definiteness, fulness, and inwardness in the imagination of the other’s state of mind. A little child thinks of and tries to elicit certain visible or audible phenomena, and does not go back of them; but what a grown-up person desires to produce in others is an internal, invisible condition which his own richer experience enables him to imagine, and of which expression is only the sign. Even adults, however, make no separation between what other people think and the visible expression of that thought. They imagine the whole thing at once, and their idea differs from that of a child chiefly in the comparative richness and complexity of the elements that accompany and interpret the visible or audible sign. There is also a progress from the naïve to the subtle in socially self-assertive action. A child obviously and simply, at first, does things for effect. Later there is an endeavor to suppress the appearance of doing so; affection, indifference, contempt, etc., are simulated to hide the real wish to affect the self-image. It is perceived that an obvious seeking after good opinion is weak and disagreeable.

I doubt whether there are any regular stages in the development of social self-feeling and expression common to the majority of children. The sentiments of self develop by imperceptible gradations out of the crude appropriative instinct of new-born babes, and their manifestations vary indefinitely in different cases. Many children show “self-consciousness” conspicuously from the first half year; others have little appearance of it at any age. Still others pass through periods of affectation whose length and time of occurrence would probably be found to be exceedingly various. In childhood, as at all times of life, absorption in some idea other than that of the social self tends to drive “self-consciousness” out.

Nearly everyone, however, whose turn of mind is at all imaginative goes through a season of passionate self-feeling during adolescence, when, according to current belief, the social impulses are stimulated in connection with the rapid development of the functions of sex. This is a time of hero-worship, of high resolve, of impassioned reverie, of vague but fierce ambition, of strenuous imitation that seems affected, of gêne in the presence of the other sex or of superior persons, and so on.