1. Also free will, determinism, egoism, and altruism, which involve, in my opinion, a kindred misconception.

2. It should easily be understood that one who agrees with what was said in the preceding chapter about the relation between society and the individual, can hardly entertain the question whether the individual will is free or externally determined. This question assumes as true what he holds to be false, namely that the particular aspect of mankind is separable from the collective aspect. The idea underlying it is that of an isolated fragment of life, the will, on the one hand, and some great mass of life, the environment, on the other; the question being which of these two antithetical forces shall be master. If one, then the will is free; if the other, then it is determined. It is as if each man’s mind were a castle besieged by an army, and the question were whether the army should make a breach and capture the occupants. It is hard to see how this way of conceiving the matter could arise from a direct observation of actual social relations. Take, for instance, the case of a member of Congress, or of any other group of reasoning, feeling, and mutually influencing creatures. Is he free in relation to the rest of the body or do they control him? The question appears senseless. He is influenced by them and also exerts an influence upon them. While he is certainly not apart from their power, he is controlled, if we use that word, through his own will and not in spite of it. And it seems plain enough that a relation similar in kind holds between the individual and the nation, or between the individual and humanity in general. If you think of human life as a whole and of each individual as a member and not a fragment, as, in my opinion, you must if you base your thoughts on a direct study of society and not upon metaphysical or theological preconceptions, the question whether the will is free or not is seen to be meaningless. The individual will appears to be a specialized part of the general life, more or less divergent from other parts and possibly contending with them; but this very divergence is a part of its function—just as a member of Congress serves that body by urging his particular opinions—and in a large view does not separate but unites it to life as a whole. It is often necessary to consider the individual with reference to his opposition to other persons, or to prevailing tendencies, and in so doing it may be convenient to speak of him as separate from and antithetical to the life about him: but this separateness and opposition are incidental, like the right hand pulling against the left to break a string, and there seems to be no sufficient warrant for extending it into a general or philosophical proposition.

There may be some sense in which the question of the freedom of the will is still of interest; but it seems to me that the student of social relations may well pass it by as one of those scholastic controversies which are settled, if at all, not by being decided one way or the other, but by becoming obsolete.

3. The imitativeness of children is stimulated by the imitativeness of parents. A baby cannot hit upon any sort of a noise, but the admiring family, eager for communication, will imitate it again and again, hoping to get a repetition. They are usually disappointed, but the exercise probably causes the child to notice the likeness of the sounds and so prepares the way for imitation. It is perhaps safe to say that up to the end of the first year the parents are more imitative than the child.

4. “In like manner any act or expression is a stimulus to the nerve-centres that perceive or understand it. Unless their action is inhibited by the will, or by counter-stimulation, they must discharge themselves in movements that more or less closely copy the originals.”—Giddings, Principles of Sociology, 110.

5. H. M. Stanley, The Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling, p. 53.

6. Goethe, in various places, contrasts modern art and literature with those of the Greeks in respect to the fact that the former express individual characteristics, the latter those of a race and an epoch. Thus in a letter to Schiller—No. 631 of the Goethe-Schiller correspondence—he says of Paradise Lost, “In the case of this poem, as with all modern works of art, it is in reality the individual that manifests itself that awakens the interest.”

Can there be some illusion mixed with the truth of this idea? Is it not the case that the nearer a thing is to our habit of thought the more clearly we see the individual, and the more vaguely, if at all, the universal? And would not an ancient Greek, perhaps, have seen as much of what was peculiar to each artist, and as little of what was common to all, as we do in a writer of our own time? The principle is much the same as that which makes all Chinamen look pretty much alike to us: we see the type because it is so different from what we are used to, but only one who lives within it can fully perceive the differences among individuals.

7. See the latter chapters of his Psychology of Suggestion.

8. See Harper’s Magazine, vol. 79, p. 770.

9. See The American Commonwealth, vol. ii., p. 705.

10. Memoirs of U. S. Grant, vol. i., p. 344.

11. See his Primitive Culture, vol. ii., p. 372.

12. K. C. Moore, The Mental Development of a Child, p. 37.

13. The Senses and the Will, p. 295.

14. See his First Three Years of Childhood, p. 13.

15. Oxenford’s Translation, vol. i., p. 501.

16. See his Essay on Vanity.

17. Early Spring in Massachusetts, p. 232.

18. The First Three Years of Childhood, p. 77.

19. See his Biographical Sketch of an Infant, Mind, vol. ii., p. 289.

20. A good way to interpret a man’s face is to ask oneself how he would look saying “I” in an emphatic manner. This seems to help the imagination in grasping what is most essential and characteristic in him.

21. Only four words—“heart,” “love,” “man,” “world”—take up more space in the index of “Familiar Quotations” than “eye.”

22. On the fear of (imaginary) eyes see G. Stanley Hall’s study of Fear in The American Journal of Psychology, vol. 8, p. 147.

23. Two apparently opposite views are current as to what style is. One regards it as the distinctive or characteristic in expression, that which marks off a writer or other artist from all the rest; according to the other, style is mastery over the common medium of expression, as language or the technique of painting or sculpture. These are not so inconsistent as they seem. Good style is both; that is, a significant personality expressed in a workmanlike manner.

24. P. 493.

25. With me, at least, this is the case. Some whom I have consulted find that certain sentiments—for instance, pity—may be directly suggested by the word, without the mediation of a personal symbol. This hardly affects the argument, as it will not be doubted that the sentiment was in its inception associated with a personal symbol.

26. This idea that social persons are not mutually exclusive but composed largely of common elements is implied in Professor William James’s doctrine of the Social Self and set forth at more length in Professor James Mark Baldwin’s Social and Ethical Interpretations of Mental Development. Like other students of social psychology I have received much instruction and even more helpful provocation from the latter brilliant and original work. To Professor James my obligation is perhaps greater still.

27. I distinguish, of course, between egotism, which is an English word of long standing, and egoism, which was, I believe, somewhat recently introduced by moralists to designate, in antithesis to altruism, certain theories or facts of ethics. I do not object to these words as names of theories, but as purporting to be names of facts of conduct I do, and have in mind more particularly their use by Herbert Spencer in his Principles of Psychology and other works. As used by Spencer they seem to me valid from a physiological standpoint only, and fallacious when employed to describe mental, social, or moral facts. The trouble is, as with his whole system, that the physiological aspect of life is expounded and assumed, apparently, to be the only aspect that science can consider. Having ventured to find fault with Spencer, I may be allowed to add that I have perhaps learned as much from him as from any other writer. If only his system did not appear at first quite so complete and final one might more easily remain loyal to it in spite of its deficiencies. But when these latter begin to appear its very completeness makes it seem a sort of a prison-wall which one must break down to get out.

I shall try to show the nature of egotism and selfishness in Chapter VI.

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.

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.

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.

31. See his Essay on Friendship.

32. Lewes’s Life of Goethe, vol. i, p. 282.

33. Goethe, Biographische Einzelheiten, Jacobi.

34. “I had to love him, for with him my life grew to such life as I had never known.”—Act 3, sc. 2.

35. Emerson, Address on The Method of Nature.

36. De Imitatione Christi, part iii., chap. 5, pars. 3 and 4.

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.