Chapter VI
.
Footnote 28:
Some may question whether we can pity ourselves in this way. But it seems to me that we avoid self-pity only by not vividly imagining ourselves in a piteous plight; and that if we do so imagine ourselves the sentiment follows quite naturally.
Footnote 29:
Sympathy in the sense of compassion is a specific emotion or sentiment, and has nothing necessarily in common with sympathy in the sense of communion. It might be thought, perhaps, that compassion was one form of the sharing of feeling; but this appears not to be the case. The sharing of painful feeling may precede and cause compassion, but is not the same with it. When I feel sorry for a man in disgrace, it is, no doubt, in most cases, because I have imaginatively partaken of his humiliation; but my compassion for him is not the thing that is shared, but is something additional, a comment on the shared feeling. I may imagine how a suffering man feels—sympathize with him in that sense—and be moved not to pity but to disgust, contempt, or perhaps admiration. Our feeling makes all sorts of comments on the imagined feeling of others. Moreover it is not essential that there should be any real understanding in order that compassion may be felt. One may compassionate a worm squirming on a hook, or a fish, or even a tree. As between persons pity, while often a helpful and healing emotion, leading to kindly acts, is sometimes indicative of the absence of true sympathy. We all wish to be understood, at least in what we regard as our better aspects, but few of us wish to be pitied except in moments of weakness and discouragement. To accept pity is to confess that one falls below the healthy standard of vigor and self-help. While a real understanding of our deeper thought is rare and precious, pity is usually cheap, many people finding an easy pleasure in indulging it, as one may in the indulgence of grief, resentment, or almost any emotion. It is often felt by the person who is its object as a sort of an insult, a back-handed thrust at self-respect, the unkindest cut of all. For instance, as between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, and is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.
Footnote 30:
Much of what is ordinarily said in this connection indicates a confusion of the two ideas of specialization and isolation. These are not only different but, in what they imply, quite opposite and inconsistent. Speciality implies a whole to which the special part has a peculiar relation, while isolation implies that there is no whole.
Footnote 31:
See his Essay on Friendship.
Footnote 32:
Lewes’s Life of Goethe, vol. i, p. 282.
Footnote 33:
Goethe, Biographische Einzelheiten, Jacobi.
Footnote 34:
“I had to love him, for with him my life grew to such life as I had never known.”—Act 3, sc. 2.
Footnote 35:
Emerson, Address on The Method of Nature.
Footnote 36:
De Imitatione Christi, part iii., chap. 5, pars. 3 and 4.
Footnote 37:
“_The words_ ME, _then, and_ SELF, _so far as they arouse feeling and connote emotional worth, are_ OBJECTIVE _designations meaning_ ALL THE THINGS _which have the power to produce in a stream of consciousness excitement of a certain peculiar sort_.” Psychology, i., p. 319. A little earlier he says: “_In its widest possible sense_, however, _a man’s self is the sum total of all he_ CAN _call his_, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses and yacht and bank account. All these things give him the same emotions.” Idem, p. 291.
So Wundt says of “Ich”: “Es ist ein _Gefühl_, nicht eine Vorstellung, wie es häufig genannt wird.” Grundriss der Psychologie 4. Auflage, S. 265.
Footnote 38:
It is, perhaps, to be thought of as a more general instinct, of which anger, etc., are differentiated forms, rather than as standing by itself.
Footnote 39:
Plumptre’s Sophocles, p. 352.
Footnote 40:
Psychology, i., p. 307.
Footnote 41:
“Only in man does man know himself; life alone teaches each one what he is.”—Goethe, Tasso, act 2, sc. 3.
Footnote 42:
John Addington Symonds, by H. F. Brown, vol. ii. p. 120.
Footnote 43:
Compare Some Aspects of the Early Sense of Self, American Journal of Psychology, ix., p 351.
Footnote 44:
Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, by F. Darwin, p. 27.
Footnote 45:
This sort of thing is very familiar to observers of children. See, for instance, Miss Shinn’s Notes on the Development of a Child, p. 153.
Footnote 46:
John Addington Symonds, by H. F. Brown, vol. 1, p. 63.
Footnote 47:
P. 70.
Footnote 48:
P. 74.
Footnote 49:
P. 120.
Footnote 50:
P. 125.
Footnote 51:
P. 348.
Footnote 52:
Attributed to Mme. de Staël.
Footnote 53:
I do not attempt to distinguish between these words, though there is a difference, ill defined however, in their meanings. As ordinarily used both designate a phase of self-assertion regarded as censurable, and this is all I mean by either.
Footnote 54:
Letters, p. 46.
Footnote 55:
Compare Stanley, The Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling, p. 271 _et seq._
Footnote 56:
Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, Chap. XII., Carlyle’s Translation.
Footnote 57:
Quoted by Gummere, Germanic Origins, p. 266.
Footnote 58:
Œnone.
Footnote 59:
Travels, chap. 10, in Carlyle’s translation.
Footnote 60:
Stanley, The Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling, p. 280.
Footnote 61:
“Strive manfully; habit is subdued by habit. If you know how to dismiss men, they also will dismiss you, to do your own things.”—De Imitatione Christi, book i., chap. 21, par. 2.
Footnote 62:
De Imitatione Christi, book iii., chap. 23, par. 1.
Footnote 63:
Tulloch’s Pascal, p. 100.
Footnote 64:
See his History of European Morals, vol. ii., p. 369.
Footnote 65:
Perez, The First Three Years of Childhood, p. 66.
Footnote 66:
Mind, new series, vol. iv., p. 365.
Footnote 67:
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, pp. 303, 328.
Footnote 68:
See his essay on the Journal of the Brothers Goncourt.
Footnote 69:
See his Life and Letters, vol. ii., p. 192.
Footnote 70:
Compare Professor Simon N. Patten’s Theory of Social Forces, p. 135.
Footnote 71:
Thoreau, A Week, etc., p. 304.
Footnote 72:
Compare G. Stanley Hall’s study of Fear in the American Journal of Psychology, viii., p. 147.
Footnote 73:
The terrors of our dreams are caused largely by social imaginations. Thus Stevenson, in one of his letters, speaks of “my usual dreams of social miseries and misunderstandings and all sorts of crucifixions of the spirit.”—Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, i., p. 79.
Footnote 74:
Maine, Ancient Law, p. 62.
Footnote 75:
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, v., 16, Carlyle’s Translation.
Footnote 76:
In reading studies of a particular aspect of life, like M. Tarde’s brilliant work, Les Lois de l’Imitation, it is well to remember that there are many such aspects, any of which, if expounded at length and in an interesting manner, might appear for the time to be of more importance than any other. I think that other phases of social
## activity, such, for instance, as communication, competition,
differentiation, adaptation, idealization, have as good claims as imitation to be regarded as the social process, and that a book similar in character to M. Tarde’s might, perhaps, be written upon any one of them. The truth is that the real process is a multiform thing of which these are glimpses. They are good so long as we recognize that they _are_ glimpses and use them to help out our perception of that many-sided whole which life is; but if they become _doctrines_ they are objectionable.
The Struggle for Existence is another of these glimpses of life which just now seems to many the dominating fact of the universe, chiefly because attention has been fixed upon it by copious and interesting exposition. As it has had many predecessors in this place of importance, so doubtless it will have many successors.
Footnote 77:
Decline and Fall, vol. vii., p. 82; Milman-Smith edition.
Footnote 78:
Emerson, address on New England Reformers.
Footnote 79:
Psychology, vol. ii., p. 409.
Footnote 80:
See Darwin’s Life and Letters, by his son, vol. i., p. 47.
Footnote 81:
Emerson, New England Reformers.
Footnote 82:
Psychology, vol. ii., p. 314.
Footnote 83:
In Harper’s Magazine, vol. 78, p. 870.
Footnote 84:
Reminiscences quoted by Garland in McClure’s Magazine, April, 1897.
Footnote 85:
From a letter published in the newspapers at the time of the dedication of the Grant Monument, in April, 1897.
Footnote 86:
Mr. Howells remarks that “in Europe life is histrionic and dramatized, and that in America, except when it is trying to be European, it is direct and sincere.”—“Their Silver Wedding Journey,” Harper’s Magazine, September, 1899.
Footnote 87:
Related by W. H. Gibson, in Harper’s Magazine for May, 1897.
Footnote 88:
The fact that the Roman system meant organized _ennui_ in thought, the impossibility of entertaining large and hopeful views of life, is strikingly brought out by the aid of contemporary documents in Dill’s Roman Society. Prisoners of a shrinking system, the later Romans had no outlook except toward the past. Anything onward and open in thought was inconceivable by them.
Footnote 89:
See Primitive Culture, by E. B. Tylor, chap. xiv.
Footnote 90:
J. A. Symonds, History of the Renaissance in Italy, The Fine Arts, p. 329. Hamerton has some interesting observations on mystery in art in his life of Turner, p. 352; also Ruskin in Modern Painters, part v., chaps. 4 and 5.
Footnote 91:
Tennyson, The Holy Grail.
Footnote 92:
See p. 248.
Footnote 93:
See his Instinct and Reason, p. 569.
Footnote 94:
M. J. Guyau, Esquisse d’une Morale sans Obligation ni Sanction, English translation, p. 93.
Footnote 95:
Idem, p. 149.
Footnote 96:
Idem, p. 87.
Footnote 97:
Idem, p. 82.
Footnote 98:
Studies of Childhood, p. 284.
Footnote 99:
See his First Three Years of Childhood, p. 287.
Footnote 100:
Psychology, vol. i., p. 315.
Footnote 101:
Emerson, History.
Footnote 102:
Idem, Spiritual Laws.
Footnote 103:
Amer. Jour. of Psychology, vol. 7, p. 86.
Footnote 104:
See pp. 101, 210, 226.
Footnote 105:
The Pathology of Mind, p. 425.
Footnote 106:
C. L. Dana, Nervous Diseases, p. 425.
Footnote 107:
Aus Meinem Leben, Book XI.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Page Changed from Changed to
138 wie es haufig genannt wird.” wie es häufig genannt wird.” Grundriss der Psychologie Grundriss der Psychologie
● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Used numbers for footnotes, placing them all at the end of the last chapter. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.