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tance of sympathy, fellow-feeling in the management of human affairs. One of the reasons why many university scholars make poor teachers is because they cannot place themselves back at the point where a subject was as live and fresh and virgin to them as it is to their students.

An extraordinary degree or a decided hypertrophy of emotional susceptibility is as dangerous a trait as its possession in a reasonable degree is a utility and an enrichment of life. It results in the hysteria or sentimentalism which adds to the real evils and difficulties of life, fancied grievances and disasters, when confronted with any good or beautiful action, dissolves into ecstacy, and when faced with a problem or a difficulty, dissolves into tears. Doctors will not treat their own children because the overplus of sympathy is a hindrance to action. Sentimental ladies are not the most efficient charity workers or prisoner reformers.

While there is a general tendency to experience sympathetically the feelings of others, this becomes specialized in most people, and one tends to experience most immediately and intensely the emotions of one's own kind, physically, socially, and intellectually. Sympathy is a specialization of man's general gregariousness, and becomes more specialized as one becomes habituated exclusively to a small group. Within this small group, individuals not only experience the emotions of others, but like to share and communicate their own emotions.

The nearer people are to us in mode of life, social status, and intellectual interests, the closer is community of feeling and 'consciousness of kind'. Two Americans meeting in a foreign country have a quick and sympathetic understanding of each other. Two alumni of the same college meeting in a distant city have a common basis of interest and feeling.

This easy give and take of feeling and emotion makes the deep attractiveness of intimate companionship. Our companion has but to mention a name or a place, and we experience the same associations, the pleasures, or antipathies which he does. A gesture, a curious glance of the eye, a pause, we understand as quickly as if he had spoken a sentence. But not only do we understand his feelings; he (or she) under

stands ours. And for most people, all their interests and enjoyments are heightened by the presence of an intimately known companion.

Many children manifest very clearly this tendency of active sympathy; they demand that their every emotion shall be shared at once. "Oh! come and look" is their constant cry when out for a walk, and every object that excites their curiosity or admiration is brought at once, or pointed out, to their companion. . . On the other hand, another child, brought up under identical conditions, but in whom this impulse is relatively weak, will explore a garden, interested and excited for hours, without once feeling the need for sympathy, without once calling on others to share his emotion.13

In adult life, few people care to go to theater or to a concert alone, and a man at a club will wander half through the diningroom until he will find some one with whom he will feel like sitting through a dinner conversation.

The fact that emotions exhibited in one individual are readily aroused in another makes art possible and makes it interesting. A poet by a phrase, a musician by a chord or melody, can suddenly reproduce in us his own feeling of gaiety or exhaltation. A painter by disposition of line and color can suggest the majesty of mountains, or the sadness of a sunset as he himself has experienced it. In novels and dramas we can relive the feelings that the writer imagines to have been experienced by others. It is testimony to the easy excitability of sympathy as well as to an artist's skill that this can sometimes be done in a few lines or paragraphs. Witness the famous opening of Poe's 'Fall of the House of Usher':

During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone on horseback through a singularly dreary. tract of country; and at length found myself as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was, but with the first glimpse of the building, an insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit, I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half pleasurable, because poetic sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of 18McDougall, p. 172.

the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me, upon the mere house and the simple landscape features of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant eye-like windows, upon a few rank sedges, and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees-with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium; the bitter lapse into everyday life, the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it-I paused to think-what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher.

To Aristotle tragedy seemed to afford a cleansing or 'katharsis of the soul' through the sympathetic experience of pity or fear. To Schopenhauer music was the greatest of the arts because it made us at one with the sorrows and the strivings of the world. All the representative arts are vivid ways of making us feel with the passions or emotions that stir mankind. And those men are poets, painters, or musicians who, besides having a unique gift of expression, whether in word, tone, or color, have themselves an unusually high sensitivity to the moods of other men and to the imagined moods of the natural scenes among which they move.14

In experience, the presence or absence of genuine sympathy with the emotions of others determines to no small extent the character of our dealings with them. Even courts of justice take motives into account and juries have been known to ask for clemency for a murderer because of their keen realization of the provocation which he had undergone. Fellow feeling with others may again warp our judgments or soften them; in our judgment of the work of our friends, it is difficult altogether to discount our personal interest and affection. On the other hand, we may have the most sincere admiration and respect for a man, and yet be seriously hampered in our dealings with him, socially or professionally, by a total lack of sympathy with his motives and desires.

14 Poets generally are so susceptible to emotional shades and nuances that they read them into situations where they are not present, and then reproduce them sympathetically in their works. The so-called 'pathetic fallacy' is an excellent illustration of this. Poets sympathize with the emotions of a landscape, which possesses none, and which were, in the first place, their own.

CHAPTER VI

(Gregariousness Continued)

PRAISE AND BLAME AND THEIR HUMAN EFFECTS

Closely related to man's gregarious character is his susceptibility to the praise and blame of his fellows. That is, among the things which instinctively satisfy men are objective marks of praise or approval on the part of other people; among the things which annoy them, sometimes to the point of acute distress, are marks of disapproval, scorn, or blame. This is illustrated most simply and directly in the satisfaction felt at 'intimate approval as by smiles, pats', kindly words, or epithets applied by other people to one's own actions or ideas, and the discomfort, amounting sometimes to pain, that is felt at frowns, hoots, sneers, and epithets of scorn or derision. One student of this subject notes "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 a cry of pain or 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." 1

Man's sensitiveness to praise and blame is paralleled by his instinctive tendency to express them.

Smiles, respectful stares, encouraging shouts occur as instinctive responses of relief from hunger, rescue from fear, gorgeous display, instinctive acts of strength, daring and victory, and other impressive instinctive behavior that is harmless to the onlooker. Similarly, frowns, hoots, and sneers seem bound as original responses to the observation of empty-handedness, deformity, physical meanness, pusillanimity, and defect. As in the case of all original tendencies, such behavior is easily complicated and, in the end, much distorted by training; but the resulting total cannot be explained by nurture alone.2

1 Cooley: Human Nature and The Social Order, p. 116. Thorndike: Educational Psychology, Briefer Course, p. 90.

Man's instinctive tendency to respond to praise and blame and to exhibit them is, next to gregariousness-through which men in the first place are able to live together, the individual human trait most significant for social life. For while the desire for praise, the avoidance of blame, and the expression of both are instinctive, the occasions on which they are called forth depend on the traditions and group habits to which the individual has been exposed. He soon learns that in the society in which he is living, certain acts will bring him the praise of others; certain other acts will bring him their disapproval. The whole scope of his activity may thus be profoundly modified by the penalties and prizes in the way of praise and blame, which society attaches to different modes of action. And the more explicit and outward signs there are of the approval or scorn of others, the more will individual action be subject to social control.

In this connection, it is impossible to forbear quoting a famous passage from the 'Republic', which is as good psychology today as when Plato wrote it:

Whenever they (the public) crowd to the popular assembly, the law courts, the theaters, the camp, or any public gathering of large bodies, and there sit in a dense and uproarious mass to censure some of the things said or done, and applaud others, always in excess; shouting and clapping until in addition to their own noise, the rocks and the places wherein they are echo back redoubled the uproar of their censure and applause. At such a moment how is such a young man, think you, to retain his self-possession? Can any private education that he has received hold out against such a torrent of censure and applause, and avoid being swept down the stream wherever it may lead, until he is brought to adopt the language of these men, as to what is honorable and dishonorable, and to imitate all their practises, and to become their very counterpart.3

We have already had occasion to point out that education is the method by which society inculcates in its younger members habits which are regarded as socially beneficial. In its broadest sense the whole social environment is an individual's education. And it is an education chiefly through experience

Davies and Vaughan Republic: Translation Section, p. 492.

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