Sentiment
Assis sur un banc de Mail, M. l’abbÉ Lantaigne, supÉrieur du grand sÉminaire, et M. Bergeret, maÎtre de confÉrences À la FacultÉ des lettres, conversaient, selon leur coutume d’ÉtÉ. Ils Étaient sur toutes choses d’un sentiment contraire; jamais deux hommes ne furent plus diffÉrents d’esprit et de caractÈre. Mais seuls dans la ville ils s’intÉressaient aux idÉes gÉnÉrales. Cette sympathie les rÉunissait.—Anatole France
§ 68. The Nature of Sentiment.—In ordinary speech, the word ‘sentiment,’ like the word ‘feeling,’ is used in many different senses; and, unlike ‘feeling,’ it has not settled down to a single meaning within psychology. We must therefore define it arbitrarily; and we shall reserve it, in this book, to denote the feeling-complex which gathers about a judgement or an imaginative construction. In emotion, we are brought face to face with an incident or situation which overwhelms us, takes possession of us; the emotion arises in the state of primary attention. A very strong and complex feeling is formed, and is rendered still stronger and still more complex by the organic sensations that come with our bodily attitude towards the situation (p. 216). In sentiment, we are also brought face to face with an incident or situation; but this is of a kind that demands secondary attention, effortful and divisive attention, now to one phase or feature and now to another. We take possession of it, so to speak, in place of its taking possession of us. Otherwise, the sentiment resembles the emotion; a complex feeling is formed, and is reinforced by organic sensations; the bodily expression of sentiment is of the same kind as that of emotion. Suppose, for instance, that we sit down to a book by a new author. If we are actively and not passively interested; if we read critically, in the light of previous study and present knowledge; if we judge as we read; then our felt realisation of the aptness, fitness, rightness of the author’s style is a sentiment. Or suppose that we are looking at a painting by a great master. If we can see how form and colour flowed straight out of the brush; if we can appreciate this fluency as the reward of toil upon toil, essay after essay; if our own critical vision can seize the painter’s idea, and note the individuality with which that idea was conceived and is now expressed; then our felt realisation of the beauty of the painting is, again, a sentiment. These are examples offered from the standpoint of the critic; and such examples come naturally to mind, since criticism is both commoner and more articulate than creative art; but it need hardly be said that the artist too, as his construction proceeds, will have the same sort of experience, and probably in more intensive form.
The sentiment thus stands upon a higher level of mental development than the emotion; there is no other difference. And it follows from what we have said of thought (p. 262) that the sentiment is a rare experience. Just as there are many apparent judgements that are not really thought at all, so there are many apparent sentiments that are based upon borrowed judgements, and have never been anything more than feeling-attitudes, more or less explicit; and just as secondary lapses into derived primary attention, so will a true sentiment lapse, with time and repetition, into a feeling-attitude. Hence, in describing and identifying the sentiments, we must be constantly on guard against confusing them with attitudes based on ready-made judgements, and with attitudes based upon what were once true judgements but are now matters of habitual acceptance. Our ‘sentiment’ of honour, for example, may never have cost us a moment’s attention. A definition of honour has come to us, by tradition and precept, and we have accepted it without thought; situations which involve honour take possession of us, as emotive situations do, and we reply by the feeling-attitude. Or again, our ‘sentiment’ of beauty in pictorial art may once have been a real sentiment; we may have laboriously studied art-canons, have studiously dissected art-forms by secondary attention, have steeped ourselves in appreciation and criticism. Now, after all this labour, we have nothing but an attitude to a new picture; we ‘instinctively’ approve or disapprove of a work of art, without making any positive effort to analyse it. To talk, in these cases, about a moral or an Æsthetic sentiment would be psychologically wrong; we experience simply two feeling-attitudes.
If, then, psychology were concerned simply with the part played in the mental life by the sentiments proper, the subject might be dismissed in a few words; the sentiments would figure in a text-book of psychology very much as the ‘rare earths’ figure in an elementary chemistry. We cannot thus dismiss them, and for two reasons. In the first place, the experience of a true sentiment, in any one of the great departments in which sentiments may appear,—we shall mention them presently,—leaves behind it a remarkably varied train of feeling-attitudes; and these attitudes are thenceforward a permanent possession; we give illustrations in § 69. Secondly, the experience of a sentiment, and the possession of the consequent variety of attitudes, enable one empathically to realise the attitudes and responses of those who, in other departments, have reached the same mental level. Not only is there a ‘freemasonry among artists’; there is a freemasonry among all men and women who have at any time really judged or constructed; so that the radical reformer and the conservative reactionary, the austere moralist and the disciple of art for art’s sake, feel at home with each other, can get to close quarters with each other; their ideas and beliefs may differ as the east differs from the west, but—if they have honestly wrestled with their problem—there is a felt psychological community between them. The great writer who goes by the name of Anatole France has brought out this truth, in his own ironical way, in the quotation which heads the chapter. So that individually and socially the sentiments demand consideration; the attitudes which derive from them enrich and diversify individual experience, and establish a social bond of empathic understanding among those who would else be psychological strangers.
§ 69. The Variety of Feeling-Attitude.—Let us take an elementary example of the variety of attitudes which follows in the wake of a sentiment. The sentiment which we select is one of those most widely attained: the sentiment of fitness of literary style. If, now, you read Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan,—as who has not?—you cannot fail to notice the differences of paragraphing. There are paragraphs which follow one another in the ordinary way, without break. There are paragraphs separated by a blank space, the width of a line of print. There are paragraphs that begin with a dash. There are paragraphs separated by a line or triangle of asterisks. There are paragraphs which end with a series of periods. And these modes of connective separation, as we may be allowed to call them, are themselves variously combined.
Hearn has tried by such rather clumsy means to arouse in his reader the specific feeling-attitude in which he wrote. He tries to do the same thing, on a more minute scale, by his system of punctuation; and the net outward result is an unpleasant spottiness of page. Let us, however, keep to the internal; and let us consider only the paragraphing. If you pause to think of it, the paragraph-feeling itself is a somewhat subtle thing; a properly rounded paragraph gives you a feeling of temporary completeness, while yet it invites you to look ahead, leaves you in a certain suspense; a poorly finished paragraph gives you the same feeling of disappointment, of being ‘taken in,’ that you get from a weak ending to a stanza, or from a musical progression that fails to hold its tone-colour. The paragraph that is set off from what follows by a blank line rouses a feeling of greater completeness; you are to stop and take breath, to let your thought play backward a little before you go on; still you are to look forward. The paragraph that begins with a dash opens up the subject from a new angle; you are to hold what you have read, but you are now to see it in a fresh light; the feeling is that of a pleasurable curiosity, with the prospect of reference forth and back. The paragraphs with asterisks between them are like different roads of survey in a country that you are touring; each one is complete in itself, but you are to remember them all for a future synthesis; at the moment you have a sense of relief, but this is mixed with a somewhat exciting responsibility; the author expects you to be ready for him when he comes to summarising. Lastly, the train of periods means a trail of feeling; the device, which is far more freely used by French than by English writers, invites you to let your thought play ahead a little, in the context of the feeling aroused by the paragraph, before you go on. Take the description of the local Shint[=o] festival: “By immemorial custom the upper stories of all the dwellings had been tightly closed: woe to the Peeping Tom who should be detected, on such a day, in the impious act of looking down upon the god!...” Elementary enough, in all conscience; and needlessly emphasised by the italics; and yet tremendously effective; one’s ideas trail off, in a context of feeling, from the seacoast village of Japan to the inland English town, from outraged godhead to the desecration of humanity; not sentimentally, or one has missed the writer’s intention, but in a continuous train of attitudes which derive from literary sentiment. It is a pity, psychologically, that ‘sentimental’ is the adjective of ‘sentimentality’; for sentimentality is at the opposite pole to sentiment, as sentiment is here used; but we cannot help the twists of language.
No doubt, a greater artist than Hearn would have printed his pages in the conventional way, and would still have made his appeal, without signposts, to the expert reader. Yet we may be grateful to him for a psychological object-lesson; he has given outward expression to a set of attitudes that we should otherwise have been obliged to seek and identify for ourselves. All the same, the attitudes would have been there, as certainly and definitely as if they had been indicated; and we could have found them, if we had ever experienced the sentiment of literary fitness. You see what enrichment of the life of feeling such a sentiment breeds, and you see how helpless we should be without it. The proverbs say de gustibus non est disputandum, and quot homines tot sententiÆ, as if taste and opinion were matters of the merest chance. They are never that, however far they may lie below the level of sentiment and judgement; for there are solid uniformities of sense-feeling, and there is in every society a basal community of ideas; while, upon the higher level, they are as sure and as uniform as individual differences of talent and temperament allow. They are far more sure and far more uniform than the outsider imagines; technical discussion and technical appreciation have always a reasoned foundation of agreement. Competent critics may debate whether Whistler’s picture of his Mother or that of Miss Alexander is the greater portrait; but think how much must be agreed upon before the debate can begin!
§ 70. The Forms of Sentiment.—Emotions go in pairs; an emotion is either joy or sorrow, either hope or fear; there is no midway emotion that is something between the two, but is neither the one nor the other. The sense-feelings, too, go in pairs; a feeling is either exciting or subduing, for instance, and cannot be anything between. When, however, the situation that arouses feeling is met by us in the state of secondary attention, then there is a third possibility; and the sentiments, in fact, run in threes. Here is a theory: is it true or false? If we judge it true, we have the sentiment of belief; if we judge it false, the sentiment of disbelief. But we need not come to a final judgement; facts a, b, c, we will suppose, tell for the theory, and facts x, y, z tell against it; we oscillate, uncertainly, between the two predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’; and the result is the suspensive sentiment of doubt. Language is an unsafe guide in these matters; partly because the same term may stand both for sentiment and for feeling-attitude, but partly also because the sentiments, being less common than emotions, have not always received specific names. In principle, nevertheless, there is in every case a third sentiment, corresponding with oscillation of judgement, between the two extremes.
The three just mentioned, belief-doubt-disbelief, belong to the class of intellectual sentiments. An attempt has been made to examine them under experimental conditions; with the result that they prove to be of rare occurrence; that they are characterised in different minds—as might perhaps be expected, from the complexity of the situation—by different complexes, by the kinÆsthesis of bodily attitude, by internal speech, by the interplay of visual imagery; and that they are ordinarily replaced by the feeling-attitudes of certainty and uncertainty. The mental patterns of belief and disbelief turn out to be the same; and this result is psychologically reasonable; for the positive and negative of the terms are logical, an affair of meaning; so far as experience goes, disbelief is as positive as belief. Hence it is natural that both of them should be represented in feeling-attitude by the same ‘certainty,’ Another group of intellectual sentiments, less often named, but familiar to everyone who has set to work seriously to master a new writer or a new subject, consists of agreement, obscurity and contradiction. These have not, to the author’s knowledge, been subjected to analysis; indeed, the present paragraphs can do little more than catalogue a few of the more obvious sentiments; the experiences are difficult to induce, and their detailed study is yet to come.
In the sphere of the moral or social sentiments, we have such opposites as trust-distrust, honour-dishonour, justice-injustice. There is always a suspensive sentiment, corresponding with oscillation of judgement, though its name can be made only approximative; we may, perhaps, speak of trust-trial-distrust, honour-ambiguity-dishonour, justice-equivocalness-injustice; think yourself into concrete situations, and you will get the meaning of the terms! Social situations are, however, of great practical importance; and we usually meet them, not by a sentiment, but by some emotion based upon instinctive tendencies; vanity, shame, pride, sympathy are emotions of this sort. The same thing holds of religious situations. Triads like faith-perplexity-denial, communion-insecurity-estrangement point to the state of secondary attention; but in general the religious situation sets up an emotion.
We come, lastly, to the Æsthetic sentiments. These are confused, by the majority of civilised mankind, with the emotions aroused by the subject of the work of art; whereas this subject is really of very minor importance; of no importance at all, if it is dictated by tradition and environment; and of secondary importance, only as it is chosen by the artist, from a number of possible subjects, because it allows the expression of personality or offers a test of difficulties overcome. What do you suppose Michael Angelo was trying to do when he painted the Last Judgement, or Titian when he painted the Entombment of Christ? The Æsthetic sentiments are, in reality, those of success-bafflement-failure, ease-confusion-difficulty, approbation-criticism-condemnation, and the like. When Ruskin said “Everything that Velasquez does may be taken as absolutely right by the student,” the unmeasured approbation expresses a true Æsthetic sentiment; Ruskin had worked over Velasquez. When a recent writer on art directs us, in Millet’s Gleaners, to “these forms bowed down by labour, these coarse habiliments, these work-hardened hands,” he is outside the sphere of Æsthetics altogether, and his appeal lies—at the best—to a social emotion.
These groups of sentiments, the intellectual, the moral or social, the religious and the Æsthetic, are usually regarded as distinct and different. It is true that they are called forth by different kinds of situation. We must remember, however, that there are only two kinds of mental pattern involved: the thought-pattern and the pattern of constructive imagination; and we have seen that these are themselves broadly similar. It is not likely, therefore, that the sentiments, or the feeling-attitudes that derive from them, differ in anything but inessentials from group to group; M. Bergeret and M. l’abbÉ Lantaigne felt in very much the same way. The variety of the feeling-attitudes is, indeed, surprisingly large; the point here is that this variety is essentially the same, whether one be sage or saint, artist or moralist.
§ 71. The Situations and Their Appeal.—If we wish to enquire into the nature of the situations which arouse a sentiment, two courses are open to us. We may undertake a study of origins; we may trace the history of primitive science and primitive art, and so on; and we may then try to generalise, both as regards the circumstances which called forth the scientific or artistic response, and as regards the appeal that such circumstances make to the human organism. Or we may turn our attention to acknowledged masterpieces, and try in like manner to ‘get behind’ them; trusting in this event rather to the typical than to the general. Both courses have been followed, and followed assiduously; but the outcome is still uncertain.
The tendency has been to refer a group of sentiments to some single root in human nature. That is only natural; for it is always satisfactory to simplify; and when once the investigator has hit upon what he takes to be the primule or germ of later development, he is prepared to accept whatever makes for his theory and to reject whatever tells against it (p. 98). Yet we must remind ourselves that man’s instinctive tendencies are not carried intact throughout his history; man reasons, as we said (p. 210), on the basis of fragments of instinctive tendency, disjoined from their original connections and recombined to suit the occasion. We may, for instance, refer the intellectual sentiments to a native curiosity (p. 205); but what is curiosity? A very mixed medley of instinctive responses: Professor Thorndike includes under it “attention to novel objects and human behaviour, cautious approach, reaching and grasping, the food-trying reactions of putting in the mouth, tasting and biting, general exploration with the eyes and manipulation with the hands,” as well as “the love of sensory life for its own sake.” Again, we may refer the moral and social sentiments to a native sympathy or empathy; but here, also, we should find, in the concrete, a mixed medley of particular responses. These references are, nevertheless, fairly satisfactory. What shall we say of religion and art?
There seems to be no original artistic tendency or art-instinct. In primitive times, the body was decorated with a view to attracting notice, and especially to attracting a mate. Then, by slow degrees, decoration travelled from person to surroundings: first, from the body to the clothes, and then again from clothes to house. But as the primitive house is a rude structure, and its owner poor, not much can be done by way of individual house-adornment; and so we find the members of a tribe clubbing together, so to speak, to decorate the common house, the temple. Æsthetics now enters into the service of religion.
Again: as the tribes settled down to agricultural pursuits, man became a labourer and learned to work; systematic and regular work grew to be a necessity. But work means play; if we labour, we must also have recreation. How, then, shall grown-up people play? They have lost their interest in childish games. Æsthetics comes to the rescue; art is the play, the proper recreation, of grown-up workers; we speak, and speak rightly, of Shakespeare’s ‘plays’ and of ‘playing’ the violin. Æsthetics has now lost its distinctively religious meaning, and has been turned to secular purposes.
In no less than three ways, therefore, has Æsthetics proved itself to be of practical importance. It has been useful in courtship; it has been useful as enhancing the impressiveness of religious ceremonies; it is still eminently useful as the play of adults. Curiosity and empathy have both entered into it; curiosity in the manipulation of shells and feathers, of brush and cutting edge; empathy in the affairs of courtship and worship. Further than this we can hardly go. The psychological essence of tragedy, in Hamlet or Antigone, and the psychological essence of comedy, in Dogberry and Verges, still escape us; there are many theories, but no one of them is convincing.
It seems, also, that there is no specific religious tendency or instinct. Religion has been ascribed to fear, to an instinct of dependence, to an instinctive recognition of the infinite, and so on; but modern writers agree that it cannot derive from a single source. “Religion,” says Professor Leuba, “is rooted in instinctive impulses and in instincts,—in fear, acquisitiveness, pugnacity, curiosity, love, etc. But the relation that instinct bears to religion is no other than that obtaining between instinct and commerce or any complex social activity.” Religion, like art, has a strong practical sanction; the worshipper expects to control the forces of nature, and to secure the action of gods and spirits upon human minds and bodies; while religion itself satisfies the desire for power and for social recognition, quickens intelligence, and regulates and unifies the community. We understand something of the growth of religious ideas, as we know something of the development of art; but the contents of a religious system, and the products of artistic construction, do not take us far towards the explication of human tendencies.
In a word, then, the problem which we have here formulated is too difficult for solution now or in the near future. We cannot ‘get behind’ the masterpiece, the achievement of civilisation; the conditions are too complex. We cannot draw any certain conclusion from the study of origins; for primitive man, as we know him, is very like ourselves, both in convention and in reasoning; Professor Boas finds no evidence that “hereditary mental faculty has been improved by civilisation”; the savage may be untutored, but he is as complicatedly human as the best of us. We can say, negatively, that neither the situations which are met by sentiment nor the tendencies to which these situations appeal are unique; and that is, in itself, something gained. No genuine problem is insoluble; and further work, partly along the older lines and partly perhaps by new methods which bear directly upon man’s instinctive tendencies, will some day answer the questions raised in these paragraphs.
§ 72. Mood, Passion, Temperament.—With lapse of secondary attention, the sentiments lapse, as we have seen, into feeling-attitudes. It appears, from ordinary observation, that they may also persist, in weakened form, as moods. Thus, the moods acquiescence-indecision-incredulity correspond with the sentiments belief-doubt-disbelief; and we speak of a critical humour, a religious frame of mind, and so on. It is doubtful whether the sentiments rise to the intensity of passion; we speak, it is true, of a passionate humility, of a passion of disapprobation or of renunciation; but it is probable that these experiences are emotive, singly and not multiply determined.
A detailed classification of the temperaments would include forms characterised by special susceptibility to sentiment and by type of response, intellectual, artistic, and so forth. Meantime, the crude fourfold arrangement of p. 227 seems to cover the cases: the ascetic temperament, for instance, falls under the melancholic, the critical under the phlegmatic, the ‘artistic’ of current speech under the choleric or sanguine.
Questions and Exercises
(1) What do you mean by ‘style’? Do not write commonplace; think the question out, and answer it in psychological terms.
(2) Have some argumentative passage read aloud to you. Notice how the intellectual feeling-attitudes rise and disappear, as the argument proceeds. Differentiate them, and try to give them names; mark the sentences which call them forth; try to determine if their nature and arousal correspond with the writer’s intention.
(3) What modes of feeling-response may be aroused by music? Illustrate, if possible, by actual examples.
(4) Are there any movements that characteristically express certain sentiments, as clenching the fist (for instance) expresses anger?
(5) Matthew Arnold defined poetry as “a criticism of life” (look up the passage, in the Preface to Poems of Wordsworth, and be sure that you understand it!). Does this definition suggest any further field of usefulness for Æsthetics? May Æsthetics properly be extended to cover it?
(6) How does ‘curiosity’ differ from ‘inquisitiveness’?
(7) Can you recall any characters, in literature or fiction, who might stand as embodiments of some social or religious sentiment?
(8) Two traditional explanations of the ludicrous are (a) the theory of degradation: that when we laugh we are realising our own superiority, and (b) the theory of incongruity: that the comic situation always involves a nullifying of expectation. What criticisms can you offer?
(9) What sort of temperament are we thinking of when we agree to call Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goldsmith, Sterne, Lamb, Dickens and George Eliot ‘humorists’?
(10) Aristotle lays it down that tragedy “accomplishes by pity and fear the purgation of such emotions.” Can you read a positive and definite meaning into this statement? Can you rephrase it, in terms of our psychology of sentiment? Is it then adequate?
(11) How do we know that a greater artist than Hearn would have printed his pages in the conventional way? What means has an author, who does print in the conventional way, of emphasising the points at which he wishes feeling-attitudes to arise?
(12) You should analyse some sentiments at first hand. Ask a friend to write out a number of descriptions, statements, questions, that have evoked in his own experience the sentiments (say) of belief and doubt, or of honour and ambiguity. Let him arrange them in pairs: belief-doubt, honour-ambiguity. Then take a pair, and read the two statements in quick succession. You will be surprised to find how matter-of-course and indifferent your attitude is; but presently some member of a pair will grip you, start you thinking; and you will then have the opportunity to observe. Write out (or better, dictate) a full report.
References
J. Sully, The Human Mind, ii., 1892, ch. xvi.; An Essay on Laughter, 1902, ch. v.; W. Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, 1896, Lect. xxv., § 4; Ethics, i., 1897, ch. iii.; T. Ribot, The Psychology of the Emotions, 1897, chs. vi. ff.; E. B. Titchener, Text-book of Psychology, 1910, 500 ff.; E. L. Thorndike, The Original Nature of Man, 1913, 41, 102 f., 140 f.
Special References: F. Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man, 1911; J. H. Leuba, A Psychological Study of Religion, 1912; L. Hearn, Japan, An Attempt at Interpretation, 1904; A. C. Haddon, Evolution in Art, 1895; G. Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, 1896; G. Moore, Modern Painting, 1898.
