Introduction to the Science of Sociology Part 53

This impulse is an affair of attentive consciousness. The perception of an action prompts us to reproduce it when and so far as it excites interest or is at least intimately connected with what does excite interest. Further, the interest must be of such a nature that it is more fully gratified by partially or wholly repeating the interesting action.

Thus imitation is a special development of attention. Attention is always striving after a more vivid, more definite, and more complete apprehension of its object. Imitation is a way in which this endeavor may gratify itself when the interest in the object is of a certain kind.

It is obvious that we do not try to imitate all manner of actions, without distinction, merely because they take place under our eyes. What is familiar and commonplace or what for any other reason is unexciting or insipid fails to stir us to re-enact it. It is otherwise with what is strikingly novel or in any way impressive, so that our attention dwells on it with relish or fascination. It is, of course, not true that whatever act fixes attention prompts to imitation. This is only the case where imitation helps attention, where it is, in fact, a special development of attention. This is so when interest is directly concentrated on the activity itself for its own sake rather than for the sake of its possible consequences and the like ulterior motives. But it is not necessary that the act in itself should be interesting; in a most important cla.s.s of cases the interest centers, not directly in the external act imitated, but in something else with which this act is so intimately connected as virtually to form a part of it. Thus there is a tendency to imitate not only interesting acts but also the acts of interesting persons. Men are apt to imitate the gestures and modes of speech of those who excite their admiration or affection or some other personal interest. Children imitate their parents or their leaders in the playground. Even the mannerisms and tricks of a great man are often unconsciously copied by those who regard him as a hero. In such instances the primary interest is in the whole personality of the model; but this is more vividly and distinctly brought before consciousness by reproducing his external peculiarities. Our result, then, is that interest in an action prompts to imitation in proportion to its intensity, provided the interest is of a kind which will be gratified or sustained by imitative activity.

b) _Learning by imitation._--Let us now turn to the other side of the question. Let us consider the case in which the power of performing an action is acquired in and by the process of imitation itself. Here there is a general rule which is obvious when once it is pointed out. It is part of the still more general rule that "to him that hath shall be given." Our power of imitating the activity of another is strictly proportioned to our pre-existing power of performing the same general kind of action independently. For instance, one devoid of musical faculty has practically no power of imitating the violin playing of Joachim. Imitation may develop and improve a power which already exists, but it cannot create it. Consider the child beginning for the first time to write in a copybook. He learns by imitation; but it is only because he has already some rudimentary ability to make such simple figures as pothooks that the imitative process can get a start. At the outset, his pothooks are very unlike the model set before him. Gradually he improves; increased power of independent production gives step by step increased power of imitation, until he approaches too closely the limits of his capacity in this direction to make any further progress of an appreciable kind.

But this is an incomplete account of the matter. The power of learning by imitation is part of the general power of learning by experience; it involves mental plasticity. An animal which starts life with congenital tendencies and apt.i.tudes of a fixed and stereotyped kind, so that they admit of but little modification in the course of individual development, has correspondingly little power of learning by imitation.

At higher levels of mental development the imitative impulse is far less conspicuous because impulsive activity in general is checked and overruled by activity organized in a unified system. Civilized men imitate not so much because of immediate interest in the action imitated as with a view to the attainment of desirable results.

3. The Three Levels of Sympathy[148]

Sympathy is not an instinct or a tendency, i.e., a group of co-ordinated movements adapted to a particular end, and showing itself in consciousness as an emotion, such as fear, anger, s.e.x attraction; it is, on the contrary, a highly generalized psycho-physiological property. To the specialized character of each emotion it opposes a character of almost unlimited plasticity. We have not to consider it under all its aspects but as one of the most important manifestations of emotional life, as the basis of the tender emotions, and one of the foundations of social and moral existence.

a) _The first phase._--In its primitive form sympathy is reflex, automatic, unconscious, or very slightly conscious; it is, according to Bain, the tendency to produce in ourselves an att.i.tude, a state, a bodily movement which we perceive in another person. This is imitation in its most rudimentary form. Between sympathy and imitation, at any rate in this primitive period, I see only one difference of aspect: sympathy everywhere marks the pa.s.sive, receptive side of the phenomenon; imitation, its active and motor side.

It manifests itself in animals forming aggregates (not societies), such as a flock of sheep, or a pack of dogs who run, stop, bark all at the same time, through a purely physical impulse of imitation; in man, infectious laughter or yawning, walking in step, imitating the movements of a rope-walker while watching him, feeling a shock in one's legs when one sees a man falling, and a hundred other occurrences of this kind are cases of physiological sympathy. It plays a great part in the psychology of crowds, with their rapid attacks and sudden panics. In nervous diseases, there is a superfluity of examples: epidemics of hysteric fits, convulsive barking, hiccup, etc. I omit the mental maladies (epidemics of suicide, double or triple madness) since we are only considering the purely physiological stage.

To sum up, sympathy is originally a property of living matter: as there is an organic memory and an organic sensitiveness, being those of the tissues and ultimate elements which compose them, there is an organic sympathy, made up of receptivity and imitative movements.

b) _The second phase._--The next phase is that of sympathy in the psychological sense, necessarily accompanied by consciousness; it creates in two or more individuals a.n.a.logous emotional states. Such are the cases in which we say that fear, indignation, joy, or sorrow are communicated. It consists in feeling an emotion existing in another, and is revealed to us by its physiological expression. This phase consists of two stages.

(1) The first might be defined as psychological unison. If, during this period of unison, we could read the minds of those who sympathize, we should see a single emotional fact reflected in the consciousness of several individuals. L. Noire, in his book, _Ursprung der Sprache_, has proposed the theory that language originated in community of action among the earliest human beings. When working, marching, dancing, rowing, they uttered (according to this writer) sounds which became the appellatives of these different actions, or of various objects; and these sounds, being uttered by all, must have been understood by all.

Whether this theory be correct or not (it has been accepted as such by Max Muller), it will serve as an ill.u.s.tration. But this state of sympathy does not by itself const.i.tute a tie of affection or tenderness between those who feel it; it only prepares the way for such an emotion.

It may be the basis of a certain social solidarity, because the same internal states excite the same acts of a mechanical, exterior, non-moral solidarity.

(2) The second stage is that of sympathy, in the restricted and popular sense of the word. This consists of psychological unison, _plus_ a new element: there is added another emotional manifestation, tender emotion (benevolence, sympathy, pity, etc.). It is no longer sympathy pure and simple, it is a binary compound. The common habit of considering phenomena only under their higher and complete forms often misleads us as to their origin and const.i.tution. Moreover, in order to understand that this is a case of duality--the fusion of two distinct elements--and that our a.n.a.lysis is not a fact.i.tious one, it is sufficient to point out that sympathy (in the etymological sense) may exist without any tender emotion--nay, that it may exclude instead of excite it. According to Lubbock, while ants carry away their wounded, bees--though forming a society--are indifferent toward each other. It is well known that gregarious animals nearly always shun and desert a wounded member of the herd. Among men, how many there are who, when they see suffering, hasten to withdraw themselves from the spectacle, in order to escape the pain which it sympathetically awakens in them. This impulse may go to the length of aversion, as typified by Dives in the Gospel. It is therefore a complete psychological error to consider sympathy as capable, unaided, of delivering men from egoism; it only takes the first step, and not always that.

c) _The third phase._--Under its intellectual form, sympathy is an agreement in feelings and actions, founded on unity of representation.

The law of development is summed up in Spencer's formula, "The degree and range of sympathy depend on the clearness and extent of representation." I should, however, add: on condition of being based on an emotional temperament. This last is the source _par excellence_ of sympathy, because it vibrates like an echo; the active temperament lends itself less to such impulses, because it has so much to do in manifesting its own individuality that it can scarcely manifest those of others; finally, the phlegmatic temperament does so least of all, because it presents a minimum of emotional life; like Leibnitz' monads, it has no windows.

In pa.s.sing from the emotional to the intellectual phase, sympathy gains in extent and stability. In fact, emotional sympathy requires some a.n.a.logy in temperament or nature; it can scarcely be established between the timid and the daring, between the cheerful and the melancholic; it may be extended to all human beings and to the animals nearest us, but not beyond them. On the contrary, it is the special attribute of intelligence to seek resemblances or a.n.a.logies everywhere, to unify; it embraces the whole of nature. By the law of transfer (which we have already studied) sympathy follows this invading march and comprehends even inanimate objects, as in the case of the poet, who feels himself in communion with the sea, the woods, the lakes, or the mountains. Besides, intellectual sympathy partic.i.p.ates in the relative fixity of representation; we find a simple instance of this in animal societies, such as those of the bees, where unity or sympathy among the members is only maintained by the perception or representation of the queen.

4. Rational Sympathy[149]

As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. For, as to be in pain or distress of any kind excites the most excessive sorrow, so to conceive or to imagine that we are in it excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or dulness of the conception.

That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels, may be demonstrated by many obvious observations, if it should not be thought sufficiently evident of itself. When we see a stroke aimed, and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer. The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in his situation. Persons of delicate fibers and a weak const.i.tution of body complain that in looking on the sores and ulcers which are exposed by beggars in the streets they are apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in the corresponding part of their own bodies. The horror which they conceive at the misery of those wretches affects that particular part in themselves more than any other because that horror arises from conceiving what they themselves would suffer if they really were the wretches whom they are looking upon, and if that particular part in themselves was actually affected in the same miserable manner. The very force of this conception is sufficient, in their feeble frames, to produce that itching or uneasy sensation complained of. Men of the most robust make observe that in looking upon sore eyes they often feel a very sensible soreness in their own, which proceeds from the same reason; that organ, being in the strongest man more delicate than any other part of the body, is the weakest.

Upon some occasions sympathy may seem to arise merely from the view of a certain emotion in another person. The pa.s.sions upon some occasions may seem to be transfused from one man to another instantaneously and antecedent to any knowledge of what excited them in the person princ.i.p.ally concerned. Grief and joy, for example, strongly expressed in the look and gestures of any person at once affect the spectator with some degree of a like painful or agreeable emotion. A smiling face is, to everybody that sees it, a cheerful object, as a sorrowful countenance, on the other hand, is a melancholy one.

This, however, does not hold universally, or with regard to every pa.s.sion. There are some pa.s.sions of which the expressions excite no sort of sympathy, but, before we are acquainted with what gave occasion to them, serve rather to disgust and provoke us against them. The furious behavior of an angry man is more likely to exasperate us against himself than against his enemies. As we are unacquainted with his provocation, we cannot bring his case home to ourselves, nor conceive anything like the pa.s.sions which it excites. But we plainly see what is the situation of those with whom he is angry, and to what violence they may be exposed from so enraged an adversary. We readily, therefore, sympathize with their fear or resentment, and are immediately disposed to take part against the man from whom they appear to be in danger.

If the very appearances of grief and joy inspire us with some degree of the like emotions, it is because they suggest to us the general idea of some good or bad fortune that has befallen the person in whom we observe them: and in these pa.s.sions this is sufficient to have some little influence upon us. The effects of grief and joy terminate in the person who feels these emotions, of which the expressions do not, like those of resentment, suggest to us the idea of any other person for whom we are concerned and whose interests are opposite to his. The general idea of good or bad fortune, therefore, creates some concern for the person who has met with it; but the general idea of provocation excites no sympathy with the anger of the man who has received it. Nature, it seems, teaches us to be more averse to enter into this pa.s.sion, and, till informed of its cause, to be disposed rather to take part against it.

Even our sympathy with the grief or joy of another, before we are informed of the cause of either, is always extremely imperfect. General lamentations, which express nothing but the anguish of the sufferer, create rather a curiosity to inquire into his situation, along with some disposition to sympathize with him, than any actual sympathy that is very sensible. The first question which we ask is, What has befallen you? Till this be answered, though we are uneasy both from the vague idea of his misfortune and still more from torturing ourselves with conjectures about what it may be, yet our fellow-feeling is not very considerable.

Sympathy, therefore, does not arise so much from the view of the pa.s.sion as from that of the situation which excites it. We sometimes feel for another a pa.s.sion of which he himself seems to be altogether incapable, because, when we put ourselves in his case, that pa.s.sion arises in our breast from the imagination, though it does not in his from the reality.

We blush for the impudence and rudeness of another, though he himself appears to have no sense of the impropriety of his own behavior, because we cannot help feeling with what confusion we ourselves should be covered, had we behaved in so absurd a manner.

Of all the calamities to which the condition of mortality exposes mankind, the loss of reason appears, to those who have the least spark of humanity, by far the most dreadful; and they behold that last stage of human wretchedness with deeper commiseration than any other. But the poor wretch who is in it laughs and sings, perhaps, and is altogether insensible to his own misery. The anguish which humanity feels, therefore, at the sight of such an object cannot be the reflection of any sentiment of the sufferer. The compa.s.sion of the spectator must arise altogether from the consideration of what he himself would feel if he was reduced to the same unhappy situation, and, what perhaps is impossible, was at the same time able to regard it with his present reason and judgment.

What are the pangs of a mother when she hears the meanings of her infant, that, during the agony of disease, cannot express what it feels?

In her idea of what it suffers, she joins to its real helplessness her own consciousness of that helplessness and her own terrors for the unknown consequences of its disorder; and, out of all these, forms for her own sorrow the most complete image of misery and distress. The infant, however, feels only the uneasiness of the present instant, which can never be great. With regard to the future it is perfectly secure in its thoughtlessness and want of anxiety, the great tormentors of the human breast, from which reason and philosophy will in vain attempt to defend it when it grows up to a man.

But whatever may be the cause of sympathy, or however it may be excited, nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast; nor are we ever so much shocked as by the appearance of the contrary. Those who are fond of deducing all our sentiments from certain refinements of self-love think themselves at no loss to account, according to their own principles, both for this pleasure and for this pain. Man, say they, conscious of his own weakness and of the need which he has for the a.s.sistance of others, rejoices whenever he observes that they adopt his own pa.s.sions because he is then a.s.sured of that a.s.sistance and grieves whenever he observes the contrary, because he is then a.s.sured of their opposition. But both the pleasure and the pain are always felt so instantaneously, and often upon such frivolous occasions, that it seems evident that neither of them can be derived from any such self-interested consideration. A man is mortified when, after having endeavored to divert the company, he looks round and sees that n.o.body laughs at his jests but himself. On the contrary, the mirth of the company is highly agreeable to him and he regards this correspondence of their sentiments with his own as the greatest applause.

5. Art, Imitation, and Appreciation[150]

The investigation into the psychology of ma.s.ses, as well as the experiments on suggestive therapeutics, have proved to how great an extent mental states may be transmitted from individual to individual by unconscious imitation of the accompanying movements. The doctrine of universal sympathy, a clear statement of which was given long ago in the ethical theory of Adam Smith, has thus acquired a psychological justification in the modern theories of imitative movement. Contemporary science has at last learned to appreciate the fundamental importance of imitation for the development of human culture. And some authors have even gone so far as to endeavor to deduce all sociological laws from this one principle. At the same time natural history has begun to pay more and more attention to the indispensability of imitation for the full development of instincts, as well as for training in those activities which are the most necessary in life.

It is fortunate for the theory of art that the importance of the imitative functions has thus been simultaneously acknowledged in various departments of science. Whatever one may think of the somewhat audacious generalizations which have been made in the recent application of this new principle, it is incontestable that the aesthetic activities can be understood and explained only by reference to the universal tendency to imitate. It is also significant that writers on aesthetic had felt themselves compelled to set up a theory of imitation long before experimental psychologists had begun to turn their attention in this direction. In Germany the enjoyment of form and form-relations has, since Vischer's time, been interpreted as the result of the movements by which, not only our eye, but also our whole body follows the outlines of external things. In France Jouffroy stated the condition for the receiving of aesthetic impressions to be a "power of internally imitating the states which are externally manifested in living nature."

In England, finally, Vernon Lee and Anstruther Thompson have founded a theory of beauty and ugliness upon this same psychical impulse to copy in our own unconscious movements the forms of objects. And in the writings of, for instance, Home, Hogarth, Dugald Stewart, and Spencer, there can be found a mult.i.tude of isolated remarks on the influence which is in a direct way exercised on our mental life by the perception of lines and forms.

In most of these theories and observations, however, the imitative activity has been noticed only in so far as it contributes to the aesthetic delight which may be derived from sensual impressions. But its importance is by no means so restricted as this; on the contrary, we believe it to be a fundamental condition for the existence of intuition itself. Without all these imperceptible tracing movements with which our body accompanies the adaptation of the eye-muscles to the outlines of external objects, our notions of depth, height, and distance, and so on, would certainly be far less distinct than they are. On the other hand, the habit of executing such movements has, so to say, brought the external world within the sphere of the internal. The world has been measured with man as a standard, and objects have been translated into the language of mental experience. The impressions have hereby gained, not only in emotional tone, but also in intellectual comprehensibility.

Greater still is the importance of imitation for our intuition of moving objects. And a difficult movement itself is fully understood only when it has been imitated, either internally or in actual outward activity.

The idea of a movement, therefore, is generally a.s.sociated with an arrested impulse to perform it. Closer introspection will show everyone to how great a part our knowledge, even of persons, is built up of motor elements. By unconscious and imperceptible copying in our own body the external behavior of a man, we may learn to understand him with benevolent or malevolent sympathy. And it will, no doubt, be admitted by most readers that the reason why they know their friends and foes better than they know anyone else is that they carry the remembrance of them not only in their eyes, but in their whole body. When in idle moments we find the memory of an absent friend surging up in our minds with no apparent reason, we may often note, to our astonishment, that we have just been unconsciously adopting one of his characteristic att.i.tudes, or imitating his peculiar gestures or gait.

It may, however, be objected that the above-mentioned instances refer only to a particular cla.s.s of individuals. In other minds, it will be said, the world-picture is entirely built up of visual and acoustic elements. It is also impossible to deny that the cla.s.sification of minds in different types, which modern psychology has introduced, is as legitimate as it is advantageous for the purposes of research. But we can hardly believe that such divisions have in view anything more than a relative predominance of the several psychical elements. It is easily understood that a man in whose store of memory visual or acoustic images occupy the foremost place may be inclined to deny that motor sensations of unconscious copying enter to any extent into his psychical experience. But an exclusively visual world-image, if such a thing is possible, must evidently be not only emotionally poorer, but also intellectually less distinct and less complete, than an intuition, in which such motor elements are included.

The importance of motor sensations in the psychology of knowledge is by itself of no aesthetic interest. The question has been touched upon in this connection only because of the ill.u.s.tration which it gives to the imitation theory. If, as we believe is the case, it is really necessary, for the purpose of acquiring a complete comprehension of things and events, to "experience" them--that is to say, to pursue and seize upon them, not only with that particular organ of sense to which they appeal, but also by tracing movements of the whole body--then there is no need to wonder at the universality of the imitative impulse. Imitation does not only, according to this view, facilitate our training in useful activities, and aid us in deriving an aesthetic delight from our sensations; it serves also, and perhaps primarily, as an expedient for the accommodating of ourselves to the external world, and for the explaining of things by reference to ourselves. It is therefore natural that imitative movements should occupy so great a place among the activities of children and primitive men. And we can also understand why this fundamental impulse, which has played so important a part in racial as well as in individual education, may become so great as to be a disease and dominate the whole of conscious life. As children we all imitated before we comprehended, and we have learned to comprehend by imitating. It is only when we have grown familiar by imitation with the most important data of perception that we become capable of appropriating knowledge in a more rational way. Although no adult has any need to resort to external imitation in order to comprehend new impressions, it is still only natural that in a pathological condition he should relapse into the primitive imitative reaction. And it is equally natural that an internal, i.e., arrested, imitation should take place in all our perceptions. After this explanation of the universality of this phenomenon we have no further need to occupy ourselves with the general psychology of imitation. We have here only to take notice of its importance for the communication of feeling.

As is well known, it is only in cases of abnormally increased sensibility--for instance, in some of the stages of hypnotism and thought transmission--that the motor counterpart of a mental state can be imitated with such faithfulness and completeness that the imitator is thereby enabled to partake of all the _intellectual_ elements of the state existing in another. The hedonic qualities, on the other hand, which are physiologically conditioned by much simpler motor counterparts, may of course be transmitted with far greater perfection: it is easier to suggest a pleasure than a thought. It is also evident that it is the most general hedonic and volitional elements which have been considered by the German authors on aesthetic in their theories on internal imitation ("Die innere Nachahmung"). They seem to have thought that the adoption of the att.i.tudes and the performance of the movements which usually accompany a given emotional state will also succeed to some extent in producing a similar emotional state. This a.s.sumption is perfectly legitimate, even if the connection between feeling and movement be interpreted in the a.s.sociative way. And it needs no justification when the motor changes are considered as the physiological correlate of the feeling itself.

Everyday experience affords many examples of the way in which feelings are called into existence by the imitation of their expressive movements. A child repeats the smiles and the laughter of its parents, and can thus partake of their joy long before it is able to understand its cause. Adult life naturally does not give us many opportunities of observing this pure form of direct and almost automatic transmission.

But even in adult life we may often meet with an exchange of feeling which seems almost independent of any intellectual communication. Lovers know it, and intimate friends like the brothers Goncourt, to say nothing of people who stand in so close a rapport with each other as a hypnotiser and his subject. And even where there is no previous sympathetic relation, a state of joy or sadness may often, if it is only distinctly expressed, pa.s.s over, so to say, from the individual who has been under the influence of its objective cause, to another who, as it were, borrows the feeling, but remains unconscious of its cause. We experience this phenomenon almost daily in the influence exerted upon us by social intercourse, and even by those aspects of nature--for instance, blue open sky or overhanging mountains--which naturally call up in us the physical manifestation of emotional states. The coercive force with which our surroundings--animate or inanimate--compel us to adopt the feelings which are suggested by their att.i.tudes, forms, or movements, is perhaps as a rule too weak to be noticed by a self-controlled, unemotional man. But if we want an example of this influence at its strongest, we need but remember how difficult it is for an individual to resist the contagion of collective feeling. On public occasions the common mood, whether of joy or sorrow, is often communicated even to those who were originally possessed by the opposite feeling. So powerful is the infection of great excitement that--according to M. Fere--even a perfectly sober man who takes part in a drinking bout may often be tempted to join in the antics of his drunken comrades in a sort of second-hand intoxication, "drunkenness by induction." In the great mental epidemics of the Middle Ages this kind of contagion operated with more fatal results than ever before or afterward. But even in modern times a popular street riot may often show us something of the same phenomenon. The great tumult in London in 1886 afforded, it is said, a good opportunity of observing how people who had originally maintained an indifferent att.i.tude were gradually carried away by the general excitement, even to the extent of joining in the outrages. In this instance the contagious effect of expressional movements was undoubtedly facilitated by their connection with so primary an impulse as that of rapine and destruction. But the case is the same with all the activities which appear as the outward manifestations of our strongest feeling-states. They all consist of instinctive actions with which everyone is well familiar from his own experience. It is therefore natural that anger, hate, or love may be communicated almost automatically from an individual to ma.s.ses, and from ma.s.ses to individuals.

Now that the principle of the interindividual diffusion of feeling has been stated and explained, we may return to our main line of research and examine its bearings on the expressional impulse. We have seen that in the social surroundings of the individual there is enacted a process resembling that which takes place within his own organism. Just as functional modifications spread from organ to organ, just as wider and wider zones of the system are brought into partic.i.p.ation in the primary enhancement or inhibition, so a feeling is diffused from an individual to a circle of sympathisers who repeat its expressional movements. And just as all the widened "somatic resonances" contribute to the primary feeling-tone increased strength and increased definiteness, so must the emotional state of an individual be enhanced by retroactive stimulation from the expressions by which the state has, so to say, been continued in others. By the reciprocal action of primary movements and borrowed movements, which mutually imitate each other, the social expression operates in the same way as the individual expression. And we are ent.i.tled to consider it as a secondary result of the general expressional impulse, that when mastered by an overpowering feeling we seek enhancement or relief by retroaction from sympathisers, who reproduce and in their expression represent the mental state by which we are dominated.

In point of fact, we can observe in the manifestations of all strong feelings which have not found a satisfactory relief in individual expression, a pursuit of social resonance. A happy man wants to see glad faces around him, in order that from their expression he may derive further nourishment and increase for his own feeling. Hence the benevolent att.i.tude of mind which as a rule accompanies all strong and pure joy. Hence also the widespread tendency to express joy by gifts or hospitality. In moods of depression we similarly desire a response to our feeling from our surroundings. In the depth of despair we may long for a universal cataclysm to extend, as it were, our own pain. As joy naturally makes men good, so pain often makes them hard and cruel. That this is not always the case is a result of the increased power of sympathy which we gain by every experienced pain. Moreover, we have need of sympathetic rapport for our motor reactions against pain. All the active manifestations of sorrow, despair, or anger which are not wholly painful in themselves are facilitated by the reciprocal influence of collective excitement. Thus all strong feelings, whether pleasurable or painful, act as socialising factors. This socialising action may be observed at all stages of development. Even the animals seek their fellows in order to stimulate themselves and each other by the common expression of an overpowering feeling. As has been remarked by Espinas, the flocking together of the male birds during the pairing season is perhaps as much due to this craving for mutual stimulation as to the desire to compete for the favor of the hen. The howling choirs of the macaws and the drum concerts of the chimpanzees are still better and unmistakable instances of collective emotional expression. In man we find the results of the same craving for social expression in the gatherings for rejoicing or mourning which are to be met with in all tribes, of all degrees of development. And as a still higher development of the same fundamental impulse, there appears in man the artistic activity.

The more conscious our craving for retroaction from sympathisers, the more there must also be developed in us a conscious endeavor to cause the feeling to be appropriated by as many as possible and as completely as possible. The expressional impulse is not satisfied by the resonance which an occasional public, however sympathetic, is able to afford. Its natural aim is to bring more and more sentient beings under the influence of the same emotional state. It seeks to vanquish the refractory and arouse the indifferent. An echo, a true and powerful echo--that is what it desires with all the energy of an unsatisfied longing. As a result of this craving the expressional activities lead to artistic production. The work of art presents itself as the most effective means by which the individual is enabled to convey to wider and wider circles of sympathisers an emotional state similar to that by which he is himself dominated.

E. SUGGESTION

1. A Sociological Definition of Suggestion[151]

The nature of suggestion manifestly consists not in any external peculiarities whatever. It is based upon the peculiar kind of relation of the person making the suggestion to the "ego" of the subject during the reception and realization of the suggestion.

Suggestion, is, in general, one of many means of influence of man on man that is exercised with or without intention on persons, who respond either consciously or unconsciously.

For a closer acquaintance with what we call "suggestion," it may be observed that our perceptive activities are divided into (a) active, and (b) pa.s.sive.