An Introduction to Social Psychology
Chapter 5: The Nature of the Sentiments and the Constitution of Some of the Complex Emotions
William McDougall
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WE seldom experience the primary emotions discussed in Chapter III. in the pure or unmixed forms in which they are commonly manifested by the animals. Our emotional states commonly arise from the simultaneous excitement of two or more of the instinctive dispositions; and the majority of the names currently used to denote our various emotions are the names of such mixed, secondary, or complex emotions. That the great variety of our emotional states may be properly regarded as the result of the compounding of a relatively small number of primary or simple emotions is no new discovery. Descartes, for example, recognised only six primary emotions, or passions as he termed them, namely—admiration, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness, and he wrote, "All the others are composed of some out of these six and derived from them." He does not seem to have formulated any principles for the determination of the primaries and the distinction of them from the secondaries.
The compounding of the primary emotions is largely, though not wholly, due to the existence of sentiments, and some of the complex emotional processes can only be generated from sentiments. Before going on to discuss the complex emotions, we must therefore try to
( 126) understand as clearly as possible the nature of a sentiment.
The word "sentiment" is still used in several different senses. M. Ribot and other French authors use its French equivalent as covering all the feelings and emotions, as the most general name for the affective aspect of mental processes. We owe to Mr. A. F. Shand [1] the recognition of features of our mental constitution of a most important kind that have been strangely overlooked by other psychologists, and the application of the word "sentiments" to denote features of this kind. Mr. Shand points out that our emotions, or, more strictly speaking, our emotional dispositions, tend to become organised in systems about the various objects and classes of objects that excite them. Such an organised system of emotional tendencies is not a fact or mode of experience, but is a feature of the complexly organised structure of the mind that underlies all our mental activity. To such an organised system of emotional tendencies centred about some object Mr. Shand proposes to apply the name "sentiment." This application of the word is in fair accordance with its usage in popular speech, and there can be little doubt that it will rapidly be adopted by psychologists.
The conception of a sentiment, as defined by Mr. Shand, enables us at once to reduce to order many of the facts of the life of impulse and emotion, a province of psychology which hitherto has been chaotic and obscure. That, in spite of the great amount of discussion of the affective life in recent centuries, it should have been reserved for a contemporary writer to make this very important discovery is an astonishing fact, so obvious and so necessary does the conception seem when
( 127) once it has been grasped. The failure of earlier writers to arrive at the conception must be attributed to the long prevalence of the narrow and paralysing doctrine according to which the task of the psychologist is merely to observe, analyse, and describe the content of his own consciousness.
The typical sentiments are love and hate, and it will suffice for our present purpose if we briefly consider the nature and mode of formation of these two. Now, it is a source of great confusion that, sentiments never having been clearly distinguished from the emotions until Mr. Shand performed this great service to psychology, the words love and hate have been used to denote both emotions and sentiments. Thus the disposition of the primary emotion we have discussed under the name of "tender emotion" is an essential constituent of the system of emotional dispositions that constitutes the sentiment of love; and the name "love" is often applied both to this emotion and to the sentiment. In a similar way the word "hate" is commonly applied to a complex emotion compounded of anger and fear and disgust, as well as to the sentiment which comprises the dispositions to these emotions as its most essential constituents. But it is clear that one may properly be said to love or to hate a man at the times when he is not at all present to one's thought and when one is experiencing no emotion of any kind. What is meant by saying that a man loves or hates an-other is that he is liable to experience any one of a number of emotions and feelings on contemplating that other, the nature of the emotion depending upon the situation of the other ; that is to say, common speech recognises that love and hate are, not merely emotions, but enduring tendencies to experience certain emotions whenever the loved or hated object comes to mind; therefore, in
(128) refusing to apply the names "love" and "hate" to any of the emotions and in restricting them to these enduring complex dispositions which are the sentiments, no more violence is done to language than is absolutely necessary for the avoidance of the confusion that has hitherto prevailed. It must be noted that the sentiments of love and hate comprise many of the same emotional dispositions; but the situations of the object of the sentiment that evoke the same emotions are very different and in the main of opposite character in the two cases. Thus, as Shand points out, when a man has acquired the sentiment of love for a person or other object, he is apt to experience tender emotion in its presence, fear or anxiety when it is in danger, anger when it is threatened, sorrow when it is lost, joy when the object prospers or is re, stored to him, gratitude towards him who does good to it, and so on; and, when he hates a person, he experiences fear or anger or both on his approach, joy when that other is injured, anger when he receives favours.
It is going too far to say, as Shand does, that with inversion of the circumstances of the object all the emotions called forth by the loved object are repeated in relation to the hated object; for the characteristic and most essential emotion of the sentiment of love is tender emotion, and this is not evoked by any situation of the hated object; its disposition has no place in the sentiment of hate. It is clear, nevertheless, that the objects of these two very different sentiments may arouse many of the same emotions, and that the two sentiments comprise emotional dispositions that are in part identical, or, in other words, that some of the emotional dispositions, or central nuclei of the instincts, are members of sentiments of both kinds. It is, I think, helpful, at least to those who make use of visual imagery, to attempt to picture
( 129) a sentiment as a nervous disposition and to schematise it crudely by the aid of a diagram. Let us draw a number of circles lying in a row, and let each circle stand for one of the primary emotional dispositions. We are to suppose that the excitement of each one of these is accompanied by the corresponding emotion with its specific impulse. These dispositions must be regarded as natively independent of one another, or unconnected. Let A be the object of a sentiment of hate and B be the object
of a sentiment of love; and let a in our diagram stand for the complex neural disposition whose excitement underlies the idea or presentation of A, and let ß be the corresponding disposition concerned in the presentation of B. Then we must suppose that a becomes intimately connected with R, F, and P, the central nuclei of the instincts of repulsion, fear, and pugnacity, and less intimately with C and S, those of curiosity and of submission, but not at all with T, the central nucleus of the tender or parental instinct. Whenever, then, a comes
(130) into play (i.e., whenever the idea of A rises to consciousness) its excitement tends to spread at once to all these dispositions ; and we must suppose that they are thrown into a condition of sub-excitement which very easily rises to discharging point in any one of them, or in several together—e.g., in P and R, when the emotional state of the subject becomes one of mingled anger and disgust, and the impulses of these two emotions determine his actions, attitudes, and expressions. Similarly ß must be supposed to be connected most intimately with T, the disposition of the tender emotion, and less intimately with A, S, C, P and F and not at all with R. If this diagram represents the facts however crudely and inadequately, we may say that the structural basis of the sentiment is a system of nerve-paths by means of which the disposition of the idea of the object of the sentiment is functionally connected with several emotional dispositions. The idea, taken in the usual sense of the word as something that is stored in the mind, may therefore be said to be the essential nucleus of the sentiment, without which it cannot exist, and through the medium of which several emotional dispositions are connected together to form a functional system. The emotional dispositions comprised within the system of any sentiment are, then, not directly connected together ; and, in accordance with the law of forward conduction, the excitement of any one of them will not spread backwards to the cognitive dispositions, but only in the efferent direction, as indicated by the arrows in the diagram. Hence any one such disposition may become an organic constituent of an indefinitely large dumber of sentiments.
The process by which such a complex psycho-physical disposition or system of dispositions is built up may be supposed to be essentially that process (discussed in
( 131) Chapter II.) by which an instinctive disposition becomes capable of being directly excited by other objects than its natively given objects, working in conjunction with the law of habit. The oftener the object of the sentiment becomes the object of any one of the emotions comprised in the system of the sentiment, the more readily will it evoke that emotion again, because, in accordance with the law of habit, the connexions of the psycho-physical dispositions become more intimate the more frequently they are brought into operation.
After this brief exposition, and this attempt at a physiological interpretation, of Mr. Shand's doctrine of the sentiment, we may pass on to consider some of the complex emotions, and to attempt to exhibit them as fusions of the primary emotions we have distinguished. If we find that most of the complex emotions can be satisfactorily displayed as fusions of some two, or more, of the primary emotions we have distinguished, together with feelings of pleasure and pain, excitement and relaxation, this will be good evidence that the emotions we have designated as the primaries are truly primary, and it will confirm the principle by which we were guided in the choice of these primaries, the principle, _namely, that each primary emotion accompanies the excitement of one of the instincts, and is the affective aspect of a simple instinctive mental process.
Since the primary emotions may be combined in a large number of different ways, and since the primaries that enter into the composition of a secondary emotion may be present in many different degrees of intensity, the whole range of complex emotions presents an indefinitely large number of qualities that shade imperceptibly into one another without sharp dividing lines. The names provided by common speech designate merely
( 132) a certain limited number of the most prominent of these complexes.
In seeking to analyse the complex emotions we must rely largely on the method recommended by Mr. Shand —we must, that is to say, observe the conative tendencies of the emotions, the nature of the actions to which they impel us. For every emotion, no matter how complex it may be, has its characteristic conjunction of motor tendencies, which together give rise to the characteristic attitudes and expressions of the emotion. How true this is we may realise by considering how successfully a skilful actor can portray even the more complex emotions.
And in attempting to analyse any emotion we must consider it as experienced and displayed at a high pitch of intensity; for we cannot hope to recognise the elementary qualities and impulses of the primary emotions in complexes of low intensity.
We may roughly divide the complex emotional states into two groups—on the one hand those which do not necessarily imply the existence of any organised sentiment, and on the other hand those which can be experienced only in virtue of the existence of some sentiment within the system of which they may be said to be excited. We will consider first some of the more important emotions of the former class.
Some of the Complex Emotions that do not necessarily imply the Existence of Sentiments
Admiration.—This is certainly a true emotion, and is as certainly not primary. It is distinctly a complex affective state and implies a considerable degree of mental development. We can hardly suppose any of the animals to be capable of admiration in the proper sense
( 133) of the word, nor is it displayed by very young children. It is not merely a pleasurable perception or contemplation. One may get a certain pleasure from the perception or contemplation of an object without feeling any admiration for it; e.g., a popular ditty played on a barrel-organ may give one pleasure, though one admires neither the ditty nor the mode of its production, and though one may a little despise oneself on account of the pleasure one feels. Nor is it merely intellectual and pleasurable appreciation of the greatness or excellence of the object. There seem to be two primary emotions essentially involved in the complex state provoked by the contemplation of the admired object, namely, wonder and negative self-feeling or the emotion of submission. Wonder is revealed by the impulse to approach and to continue to contemplate the admired object, for, as we saw, this is the characteristic impulse of the instinct of curiosity; and wonder is clearly expressed on the face in intense admiration. In children one may observe the element of wonder very clearly expressed and dominant. "Oh, how wonderful!" or—"Oh, how clever!" or—"How did you do it?" are phrases in which a child naturally expresses its admiration and by which the element of wonder and the impulse of curiosity are clearly revealed. And as soon as we feel that we completely understand the object we have admired, and can wholly account for it, our wonder ceases and the emotion evoked by it is no longer admiration.
But admiration is more than wonder.[2] We do not simply proceed to examine the admired object as we should one that provokes merely our curiosity or wonder. We approach it slowly, with a certain hesitation;
(134) we are humbled by its presence, and, in the case of a person whom we intensely admire, we become shy, like a child in the presence of an adult stranger; we have the impulse to shrink together, to be still, and to avoid attracting his attention ; that is to say, the instinct of submission, of self-abasement, is excited, with its corresponding emotion of negative self-feeling, by the perception that we are in the presence of a superior power, something greater than ourselves. Now, this instinct and this emotion are primarily and essentially social. The primary condition of their excitement is the presence of a person bigger and more powerful than oneself; and, when we admire such an object as a picture or a machine, or other work of art, the emotion still has this social character and personal reference; the creator of the work of art is more or less clearly present to our minds as the object of our emotion, and often we say, "What a wonderful man he is!"
Is, then, the emotion of admiration capable of being evoked in us only by other persons and their works? It is obviously true that we admire natural objects, a beautiful flower or landscape, or a shell, or the perfect structure of an animal and its nice adaptation to its mode of life. In these cases no known person is called to mind as the object of our admiration; but, just because admiration implies and refers to another person, is essentially, in so far as it involves negative self-feeling, an attitude towards a person, it leads us to postulate a per-son or personal power as the creator of the object that calls it forth. Hence in all ages the admiration of men for natural objects has led them to personify the power, or powers, that have brought those objects into being, either as superhuman beings who have created, and who preside over, particular classes of objects, or as a su-
(135) -preme Creator of all things; and, if the intellect rejects all such conceptions as anthropomorphic survivals from a ruder age, the admiration of natural objects still leads men to personify, under the name of Nature, the power that has produced them. It is, I think, true that, if this sense of a personal power is not suggested by any object that we contemplate, the emotion we experience is merely wonder, or at least is not admiration. It is be-cause negative self-feeling is an essential element in admiration that the extremely confident, self-satisfied, and thoroughly conceited person is incapable of admiration, and that genuine admiration implies a certain humility and generosity. It may be added that much admiration —all æsthetic admiration, in fact—includes also an element of pleasure, the conditions of which may be very complex.
As an "example of the further complication of an emotion, let us consider the nature ,of our emotion if the object that excites our admiration is also of a threatening or mysterious nature and, therefore, capable of exciting fear—a tremendous force in action such as the Victoria Falls, or a display of the aurora borealis, or a magnificent thunderstorm. The impulse of admiration to draw near humbly and to contemplate the object is more or less neutralised by an impulse to withdraw, to run away, the impulse of fear. We are kept suspended in the middle distance, neither approaching very near nor going quite away; admiration is blended with fear, and we experience the emotion we call awe.
Awe is of many shades, ranging from, that in which admiration is but slightly tinged with fear to that in which fear is but slightly tinged with admiration. Admiration is, then, a binary compound, awe a tertiary compound. And awe may be further blended to form a still
( 136) more complex emotion. Suppose that the power that ex-cites awe is also one that we have reason to regard as beneficent, one that, while capable of annihilating us in a moment, yet works for our good, sustains and protects us, one that evokes our gratitude. Awe then be-comes compounded with gratitude and we experience the highly compound emotion of reverence. Reverence is the religious emotion par excellence; few merely human powers are capable of exciting reverence, this blend of wonder, fear, gratitude, and negative self-feeling. Those human beings who inspire reverence, or who are by custom and convention considered to be entitled to inspire it, usually owe their reverend character to their being regarded as the ministers and dispensers of Divine power.
What, then, is gratitude, which enters into the emotion of reverence for the Divine power? Gratitude is itself complex. It is a binary compound of tender emotion and negative self-feeling. To this view it may be objected—If tender emotion is the emotion of the pa-rental instinct whose impulse is to protect, how can this emotion be evoked by the Divine power? The answer to this question is—In the same way as the child's tender emotion towards the parent is evoked, namely, by sympathy. Tender emotion occupies a peculiar position among the primary emotions, in that, being directed to-wards some other person and its impulse directly making for the good of that other, it is peculiarly apt to evoke by sympathetic reaction, of the kind we studied in Chapter IV., the same emotion in its object; and this sympathetically evoked tender emotion then finds its object most readily in the person to whom it owes its rise. But gratitude is not simply tender emotion sympathetically excited; a child or even an animal may excite our
(137) tender emotion in this way ; e.g., it may give us some-thing that is utterly useless or embarrassing to us, and by doing so may touch our hearts, as we say ; but I do not think that we then feel gratitude, even if the gift involves self-sacrifice on the part of the giver. Mr. Shand maintains that into gratitude there enters some sympathetic sorrow for the person who excites it, on ac-count of the loss or sacrifice sustained by him in giving us that for which we are grateful. It is in this way he would account for the tender element in gratitude; for, according to his view, all tenderness is a blending of joy and sorrow, which are for him primary emotions. But surely we may-experience gratitude for a kindness done to us that involves no loss or sacrifice for the giver, but is for him an act of purely pleasurable beneficence. I submit, then, that the other element in gratitude, the element that renders it different from, and more complex than, simple tenderness, is that negative self-feeling which is evoked by the sense of the superior power of another. The act that is to inspire gratitude must make us aware, not only of the kindly feeling, the tender emotion, of the other towards us; it must also make us aware of his power, we must see that he is able to do for us something that we cannot do for ourselves. This element of negative self-feeling, then, is blended with tenderness in true gratitude, and its impulse, the impulse to withdraw from the attention of, or to humble oneself in the presence of, its object, more or less neutralises the impulse of the tender emotion to approach its object; the attitude typical and symbolical of gratitude is that of kneeling to kiss the hand that gives. This element of negative self-feeling renders gratitude an emotion that is not purely pleasurable to many natures, makes it one that a proud man does not easily experience, and one that
( 138) does less to develop a sentiment of affection than the giver of good things is apt to expect. And, if the seemingly beneficent act is done, not from pure kindliness or tenderness, but with condescension, if positive self-feeling and a gratified sense of power accompany or enter into the motive of the act, it is apt to evoke negative self-feeling without tenderness, a negative self-feeling painful in quality that may lead to the growth of a sentiment of dislike rather than of love.
Into reverence of the kind we have considered negative self-feeling enters from two sources, as an element of admiration and again as an element of gratitude. But there is a different kind of reverence into which tenderness enters directly, and not merely as an element of gratitude. Let us imagine ourselves standing before a great Gothic cathedral. whose delicate and beautiful stonework is crumbling to dust. We shall probably feel admiration for it, and the spectacle of its decay, or of its delicate and perishable nature, awakens directly our tender emotion and protective impulse; i.e., we experience a tender admiration, a complex emotion for which we have no special name. Now let us imagine our-selves entering the cathedral, passing between vast columns of stone where the dim mysterious light is lost in dark recesses and where reign a stillness and a gloom like that of a great forest; an element of fear is added to our emotion of tender admiration, and this converts it to reverence (or, if our tender emotion does not persist, to awe). This is a reverence that has less of the personal note, because less of negative self-feeling, than that of which gratitude is a component.[3]
( 139)
The history of religion seems to show us the gradual genesis of this highly complex emotion. Primitive religion seems to have kept separate the superhuman objects of its component emotions, the terrible or awe-inspiring powers on the one hand, the kindly beneficent powers that inspired gratitude on the other. And it was not until religious doctrine had undergone a long evolution that, by a process of syncretism or fusion, it achieved the conception of a Deity whose attributes were capable of evoking all the elements of the complex emotion of reverence.
There is another group of complex emotions of which anger and fear are the most prominent constituents. When an object excites our disgust, and at the same time our anger, the emotion we experience is scorn. The two impulses are apt to be very clearly expressed, the shrinking and aversion of disgust, and the impulse of anger to attack, to strike, and to destroy its object. This emotion is most commonly evoked by the actions of other men, by mean cruelty or underhand opposition to our efforts; it is therefore one from which original moral judgments often spring. It is, I think, very apt to be complicated by positive self-feeling--we feel ourselves magnified by the presence of the moral weakness or littleness of the other, -just as on a lower plane the physical weakness or smallness of those about one excites this positive self-feeling, with its tendency to expand the chest, throw up the head, and strut in easy confidence. The name "scorn" is often applied to an affective state of which this emotion is an element ; but, if this element is dominant, the emotion is that we experience when we are said to despise another,
(140) and its name is contempt, the substantive corresponding to the verb despise ; scorn, then, is a binary compound of anger and disgust, or a tertiary compound if positive self-feeling is added to these ; while contempt is a binary compound of disgust and positive self-feeling, differing from scorn in the absence of the element of anger.
Fear and disgust are very apt to be combined, as on the near view of a snake or an alligator, and in some persons this binary emotion is provoked by a large number of animals, rats, moths, worms, spiders, and so on, and also by the mere appearance of some men, though more often by their characters. It is the emotion we call loathing, and, in its most intense form, horror. Loathing is apt to be complicated by wonder, which then, in spite of the combined impulses of fear and disgust, keeps us hovering in the neighbourhood of the loathsome object, fascinated, as we say, or in horrible fascination.
Again, anger, fear, and disgust may be blended to form a tertiary compound, to which, if to any emotion, the name "hate" can be most properly applied, although it is better to reserve this name for the sentiment of in-tense dislike or hate, within the system of which this complex emotion is most commonly excited.
Envy is allied to this group of emotions. Without feeling confident as to its analysis, I would suggest that it is a binary compound of negative self-feeling and of anger; the former emotion being evoked by the superior power or position of the object, the latter by the sense that the envied person is excluding us from the enjoyment of the goods or the position that he has or occupies..—I do not think that true envy arises except when this sense of deprivation by, or opposition on the part of, the object is present; as when, for example, another takes the prize we aimed at, or achieves the position we
(141) hoped to occupy, and therefore appears as an obstacle to the realisation of our ends.
Complex Emotions that Imply the Existence of Sentiments
We may now consider some of the complex emotional states that we only experience in virtue of having previously acquired some sentiment for the object of the emotion.
Within the sentiment of love several well-defined compounds arise. Reproach seems to be a fusion of anger and of tender emotion. "Oh, how could you do it!" is the natural expression of reproach. The person who is the object of the sentiment of love performs some action which, if performed by an indifferent person, would provoke our anger simply ; but tender emotion, which is habitually evoked by the mere thought of the object of our love, prevents the full development of our anger, fuses with it and softens it to reproach. This is the simplest form, as when a mother chides her little son for cruelty to an animal. A more complex form arises when the sentiment is reciprocated, or supposed to be reciprocated, and its object acts in a way that seems to show indifference to us. In this case the pain of the wound given to our self-regarding sentiment and of the check to our tender emotion is the prominent feature of the affective state and overshadows anger; perhaps the name "reproach" is most properly given to this more complex state.
The threat of injury or destruction against the object of the sentiment of love excites in us anticipatory pain of its loss and perhaps also some anticipation of the sympathetic pain we should feel if the threat were real-
( 142) -ised; and this pain, mingling with tender emotion, and perhaps with a little anger against the source of the threatened harm, gives rise to the state we call anxiety or solicitude. In popular language we are said to fear the loss of, or injury to, the object; but that fear enters into this emotion seems to be very questionable.
Jealousy presents a difficult problem. Animals and very young children are commonly said to exhibit jealousy. A favourite dog will be emotionally moved by the sight of his master fondling a kitten or another dog; he will sometimes slink away and hide himself and sulk, or he will keep pushing himself forward to be caressed, with sidelong glances at the kitten. Some very young children behave in a similar way when their mother nurses another child. And in both cases the jealous creature is apt to exhibit anger towards the intruder. These facts do not necessitate the assumption that jealousy is a primary emotion, although, possibly, in order fully to account for them, we should have to admit an instinct of possession or ownership.) But even in these cases the existence of a sentiment of affection, however rudimentary, seems to be implied by this conduct. Certainly full-blown jealousy is only developed where some sentiment of love or attachment exists; and the conditions of its excitement, which constitute the object of the emotion, are complex, being, not a single person and his situation or actions, but the relations between three per-sons. The presence of a third person who attempts to draw to himself the regard of the object of the sentiment does not of itself excite jealousy, though it may excite anger. Jealousy involves anger of this sort towards the third person, but also some painful check to one's own
(143) tender emotion and sentiment. It is, perhaps, possible to imagine a love so wholly disinterested that it would demand no reciprocation of its tender feeling. Such a sentiment would be incapable of jealousy, and, perhaps, a mother's love sometimes approximates to this type, though seldom. The sentiment of love commonly feeds upon, is sustained by, and demands reciprocation, which, being given, excites in turn a positive self-feeling or elation that fuses with the tender emotion, adding greatly to its pleasurable character. And the sentiment is apt to demand for its complete satisfaction the maximum of such reciprocation; so long as we feel that this maxi-mum is not attained we are uneasy, we lack the complete satisfaction of the self-expansive impulse, the impulse of positive self-feeling. And jealousy arises when the object of the sentiment gives to another, or merely is thought to give to another, any part of the regard thus claimed for the self. It is thus an unstable state of emotion, of which the most constant element is the pain-fully checked positive self-feeling, and which tends to oscillate between two poles, revenge and reproach, ac-cording as one or the other person is more prominently before consciousness. In some cases the tender emotion may be at a minimum or even perhaps lacking, and the sentiment within which this kind of jealousy arises is a purely egoistic sentiment: the object of it is regarded merely as a part of one's property, a part of one's larger self, as one of the props on which one's pride is built up; and the marks of affection, or of subjection, of the object towards oneself are valued merely as contributing to feed one's positive self-feeling and self-regarding sentiment. In this case any expression of regard for a third person on the part of the object of the sentiment
( 144) provokes a jealousy of which the anger turns mainly upon that object itself.[5]
There is an emotion that is properly called vengeful emotion; it is not merely anger, though anger may be a large element in it. It is of especial interest to the moralist, because it has been one of the principal sources of the institution of public justice, more especially of the branch dealing with personal injuries; for the pursuit and punishment of murderers by the State, or by officers of the law, has only gradually replaced the system of private vengeance and the blood-feud. One respect in which the impulse of revenge differs from that of simple anger is its long persistence owing to its being developed in connection with a sentiment, generally the self-regarding sentiment. The act that, more certainly than any other, provokes vengeful emotion is the public insult; which, if not immediately resented, lowers one in the eyes of one's fellows. Such an insult calls out one's positive self-feeling, with its impulse to assert oneself and to make good one's value and power in the public eye. If the insult is at once avenged, the emotion is perhaps properly called resentment. It is when immediate satisfaction of the impulse of angry self-assertion is impossible that it gives rise to a painful desire; it is then the insult rankles in one's breast ; and this desire can only be satisfied by an assertion of one's power, by returning an equally great or greater insult or injury to the offender—by "getting even with him." This painful struggle of positive self-feeling, maintaining one's anger
( 145) against the offender, is vengeful emotion or the emotion of revenge.
Though the emotion is most easily evoked, perhaps, by public insult, it may arise also from injury deliberately done to any part of the larger self, any part of that large sphere of objects to which one's self-regarding sentiment extends—e.g., injury or insult to one's family or tribe, or to any larger society with which a man identifies him-self ; this we see in the case of the blood-feuds, where the killing of one member of a family or tribe excites this emotion in all its other members, who continue to harbour it until they have "got even" with the family of the slayer by killing him or another of its members. On a still greater scale it may be provoked as a collective emotion throughout a nation by defeat in war. In this case the painful conation or desire that arises from the checked impulse of positive self-feeling is apt to predominate greatly over the element of anger. The attitude of the French nation towards Germany for many years after the Franco-Prussian War, and of a large part of the British nation towards the Boers after Majuba, was determined by this emotion excited within the system of that most widely extended form of the self-regarding sentiment which we call the patriotic sentiment
The view that vengeful emotion is essentially a fusion of anger and wounded self-feeling is not generally accepted. The question has been a good deal discussed in connection with the history of punishment. Dr. Steinmetz, a German authority,[6] takes the view that "revenge is essentially rooted in the feeling of power and authority, its aim is to enhance the `self-feeling' which has been lowered or degraded by the injury suffered." And he
(146) supports this view by showing that primitively revenge is undirected, i.e., seeks satisfaction in any violent assertion of one's power. The best illustration of such undirected revenge is, perhaps, the running amok of the Malay.[7] In these cases the man who has suffered injury or insult does not deliberately plan out and execute his vengeance on those who have injured him. He broods for a time, no doubt filled with the painful desire arising from his instinct of self-assertion, and then suddenly takes his kris and runs through his village, cutting down every living being he encounters, until he himself is slain. This brooding and fierce dejection produced by insult is sometimes very intense among other savages. We know how Achilles sulked in his tent, and cases have been de-scribed of savages who have lain prone on the ground for days together and have even died when ?his emotion and its impulse could find no satisfaction.
Professor Westermarck,[8] on the other hand, maintains against Steinmetz that self-feeling is not an essential element in vengeful emotion. He writes : "Resentment may be described as an aggressive attitude of mind to-wards a cause of pain. Anger is sudden resentment, in which the hostile reaction against the cause of pain is unrestrained by deliberation. Revenge, on the other hand, is a more deliberate form of non-moral resentment, in which the hostile reaction is more or less re-strained by reason and calculation. It is impossible, however, to draw any distinct limit between these two types of resentment, as also to discern where an actual desire to inflict pain comes in." [9]
( 147)
This view of anger and revenge and of the relations between them is very different to the one proposed in the preceding pages. Westermarck makes resentment the fundamental type of this kind of emotional reaction, and distinguishes two varieties of it, anger and revenge, which, he holds, differ merely in that while anger is sudden and impulsive resentment, revenge is deliberate and controlled resentment. This, I venture to think, is a failure of analysis due to non-recognition of the guiding principle we have followed, the principle that the primary emotions are the affective aspects of the fundamental instinctive mental processes and that all the other emotions are derived from them by fusion or blending. Westermarck seeks to support his view by saying that, if one has written a book and it has been adversely criticised, though our self-feeling receives a painful check we do not seek vengeance on the critic but rather set out to write a better book. Now, it is dangerous to trust to the consideration of the emotions of the most cultivated and intellectual class of men in seeking light on the origin of the emotions, but I think that most authors would avenge themselves on the unjust and damaging critic, if they could find an easy opportunity; and our literary disputes frequently are but the most re-fined expression of this emotion.
Our account of these emotions is nearer to that of Steinmetz, but differs from it in recognising that vengeful emotion is essentially a binary compound of anger and positive self-feeling. These two elements may be fused in all proportions, so that revenge ranges from the hot, blind fury of the Malay running amok, or from the emotion of the child furiously striking out at all about him, to the comparatively cold, plotting revenge that can postpone and pursue its satisfaction for years. And
( 148) the distinction we make between resentment and revenge is that resentment is the fusion of anger and positive self-feeling immediately evoked by an act of aggression and does not necessarily imply the existence of a developed self-regarding sentiment, whereas revenge is the same emotion developed within the system of the self-regarding sentiment—to which circumstance it owes its persistent character—with the addition of painful feeling arising from the continued thwarting of the two impulses.
The vengeful emotion has been regarded by some authors, e.g., by Dr. Mercier,[10] as the root of moral indignation, and Westermarck gives this position to his "resentment." He divides resentments into two great classes, the moral and the non-moral ; the non-moral class consisting of anger and revenge, the moral class of moral indignation and disapproval. This classification seems to involve a cross-division and a confusion, not only be-cause he fails to seize the difference between anger and revenge, but also because he has no criterion by which to distinguish his moral from his non-moral resentments. Whether revenge is ever a moral emotion, and whether the disinterested anger against the cruel oppressor that we have called moral indignation (the anger that arises, in the way we have studied in Chapter III., out of the parental instinct exercised on behalf of the defenceless creature) is ever non-moral—these are questions that may be left to the moralists for decision; but that these two emotions, revenge and moral indignation, are not only intrinsically different, but that they are evoked by very different situations, seems as indisputable as that while one is essentially egoistic the other is essentially altruistic. These two emotions together are the main
(149) roots of all justice; neither alone would have sufficed to engender a system of law and custom that would se-cure personal rights and liberties, and neither alone would suffice to secure the efficient administration of justice.
Approval and disapproval have been treated of by Westermarck and other writers as emotions. But to describe them as emotions is to perpetuate the chaos of psychological terminology.[11] They are not emotions but judgments, and though, like other judgments, they are often directly determined by emotions, that is not always the case; for even moral approval and disapproval may be unemotional intellectual judgments made in logical accordance with previously adopted principles.
Shame is an emotion second to none in the extent of its influence upon social behaviour. There are several words closely connected with shame, the loose usage of which is a source of great confusion, e.g., shyness, bashfulness, and modesty ; these are sometimes said to be the names of emotions, sometimes of instincts. But shyness and modesty, like courage, generosity, and meanness, are qualities of character and of conduct arising out of the possession of instincts and sentiments, while shame is a true secondary emotion, and bashfulness, if not an emotion in the strict sense of the word, is an emotional state.
Shame has given much trouble to psychologists, be-cause it seems to imply and to depend upon self-consciousness, while yet the behaviour of animals and of very young children, whom we can credit only with the merest rudiments of self-consciousness, sometimes seems
( 150) to express shame. Professor Baldwin [12] has dealt with these emotions in children more successfully perhaps than any other author. He distinguishes two periods in the development of what he calls the bashfulness of the child; an earlier period, during which what he calls organic bashfulness is evoked by the presence of strangers —this organic bashfulness, which is shown by most children in their first year, he identifies with fear; a later period in which the child makes efforts to draw attention to himself—this he calls the period of true bashfulness. Baldwin's description of the facts seems to be accurate, but he fails to show the origin of the bashfulness he describes and fails also to show its relation to shame.
The way has been prepared for the solution of these and other difficulties connected with shame by our recognition of positive and negative self-feeling as primary emotions, and by our acceptance of the important distinction between emotions and sentiments that Shand has so clearly pointed out. The earliest reactions of a child towards strangers are, no doubt, symptoms of fear, as Baldwin says. But truly bashful behaviour, which is not usually displayed until the third year, has nothing to do with fear, and is, I submit, symptomatic of a struggle between the two opposed impulses of the instincts of self-display and self-abasement, with their emotions of positive and negative self-feeling: a struggle rather than a fusion, for the impulses and emotions of the two instincts are so directly opposed that fusion is hardly possible. Consider the little boy of three who, in the presence of a stranger, hides quietly behind his mother's skirt with head hung low, averted face, and sidelong glances,
(151) until suddenly he emerges, saying, "Can you do this?" and turns a somersault at the feet of the stranger. In adults the slightly painful agitation that most of us feel when we have to figure before an audience seems to be of the same nature as this childish bashfulness, and to be due to a similar struggle between these two impulses and emotions. Our negative self-feeling is evoked by the presence of persons whom we regard as our superiors, or who, by reason of their number and of their forming a collective whole, are able to make, on us an impression of power, but it is not until our positive self-feeling is also excited, until we feel ourselves called upon to make a display of ourselves or our powers, to address the audience, to play a part as an equal among the superior beings, or even merely to walk across the room before the eyes of a crowd, that we experience the slightly painful, slightly pleasurable, but often very in-tense, emotional agitation which is properly called bashfulness. Whether this state is at all possible in the absence of self-consciousness it is difficult to say. For al-though either instinct may be excited quite independently of, and prior to the rise of, self-consciousness, it would seem that the idea of the self and some development of the self-regarding sentiment are necessary conditions of the conjunction of the two opposed emotions; in their absence one of the opposed emotions would simply preclude or drive out the other. In situations that evoke bashfulness the negative self-feeling is, perhaps, as a rule, more directly induced by the presence of the other person or persons, while the positive self-feeling is more dependent on the idea of the self and on the egoistic sentiment.
But the state of bashfulness we have considered is not shame. Shame, in the full sense of the word, is only
( 152) possible when the self-regarding sentiment has become well developed about the idea of the self, its attributes and powers. Then any exhibition of the self to others as deficient in these powers and attributes, which constitute the self in so far as it is the object of the self-regarding sentiment, provokes shame. The self may appear defective or inferior to others in all other respects and no shame, though perhaps bashfulness, will be induced. Thus a man whose self, as object of his self-respect, includes courage or athletic prowess will feel shame if he appears cowardly or bodily incapable ; whereas most women, whose selves as objects of their self-regarding sentiments have not the attribute of physical courage or athletic capacity, will run away from a mouse or show themselves incapable of jumping over a fence without the least pang of shame.
Shame, then, is not merely negative self-feeling, nor is it merely negative and positive self-feeling struggling together; it is bashfulness qualified by the pain of baffled positive self-feeling, whose impulse is strong and persistent owing to the fact that the emotion is excited within the system of the self-regarding sentiment. The conduct that excites our shame is that which lowers us in the eyes of our fellows, so that we feel it to be impossible for our positive self-feeling to attain satisfaction. Shame thus differs from vengeful emotion, which also is provoked by a blow to our self-esteem, in that the blow comes, not from another, but from ourselves; or rather, though it comes from others, it is occasioned by our own conduct, and therefore, though the check to our impulse of self-assertion may provoke our anger, this anger, unlike that of vengeful emotion, is directed against ourselves, and is therefore incapable of finding
(153) satisfaction. Hence the pain of the check to our positive self-feeling, which, when it comes from another, may find some relief in the active pursuit of vengeance, can in this case find no relief but is augmented by the pain of baffled anger. Shame, then, seems to be closely allied to vengeful emotion and, especially in brutal natures, is apt to be accompanied by it; but it differs from vengeful emotion in two respects—first, the check to positive self-feeling not only gives a rise to a painful and angry desire for self-assertion, but there is no possibility of satisfaction for this desire, of "getting even" with the person from whom the check comes, because that person is oneself; secondly, there is an element of negative self-feeling, with its impulse to withdraw oneself from the notice of others, evoked by the recognition of one's own shortcoming. In revenge in its purest form this element of negative self-feeling has no part; but, if in the face of insult or injury one has behaved in a cowardly manner, it may complicate the emotional state, which then becomes an imperfect blend of revenge and shame.
Mere bashfulness very readily passes into shame; for, when in that state, one is acutely aware of one's self in relation to others, and therefore one notices at once any slight defect of one's conduct, and any censure or disapproval passed upon it occasions a painful check to positive self-feeling that converts bashfulness to shame. The full understanding of shame implies a study of the self-regarding sentiment, which, however, we must post-pone to a later page.
We are now in a position to inquire into the nature of sorrow and joy, which we have rejected from our list of primary emotions, because, as was said, they are
( 154) algedonic or pleasure-pain qualifications of emotional states rather than emotions capable of standing alone.
First, a remark must be made upon one feature of emotions that has been too much neglected. Apart from the pleasure that attends the successful, and the pain that attends the unsuccessful, conation or striving towards an end involved in every emotional state, each primary emotion seems to have a certain intrinsic feeling-tone, just as the sensations that are synthesised in perception have their feeling-tone independently of the success or lack of success of the perceptual conation. And the intrinsic feeling-tone of the emotions seems to follow the same rule as that of sensations, namely, that with increase of intensity of the emotion pleasant tends to give way to unpleasant feeling-tone ; so that, while at moderate intensities some are pleasant and others unpleasant, at the highest intensity all alike become unpleasant or painful; and, perhaps, at the lowest intensity all are pleasant. If that is the case, then, like the sensations, the emotions differ greatly from one another in regard to the position of the neutral point of feeling-tone in the scales of their intensities. Thus fear at low intensity does but add a pleasurable zest to any pursuit, as we see especially clearly in children, sportsmen, and adventurous spirits generally; whereas at high intensity it is the most horrible of all experiences. On the other hand, tender-emotion is pleasantly toned, save, perhaps, at its highest intensity; and positive self-feeling is even more highly pleasurable and remains so, probably, even at its highest intensity.
How, then, are we to regard joy and sorrow? Is joy mere pleasure, and are the two words synonymous? Obviously not; joy is universally recognised as something more than, and higher than, mere pleasure. Whenever
( 155) did poet write of pleasure in the lofty strain of the beautiful lines that Coleridge wrote of joy?
"O pure of heart, thou needst not ask of me
What this strong music in the soul may be!
What, and wherein it doth exist,
This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,
This beautiful and beauty-making power,
Joy, virtuous lady! Joy that ne'er was given
Save to the pure, and in their purest hour.
Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud—
We in ourselves rejoice!
And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,
All melodies the echoes of that voice,
All colours a suffusion from that light."
Clearly joy is more than pleasure, however intense. Let us examine what is by common consent the purest type of joy—the joy of a loving mother as she tends her beautiful and healthy child. In this case many factors contribute to produce the joyful emotion : (I) There is æsthetic pleasure in the contemplation of the beauty of the object, a pleasure that any onlooker may share; (2) sympathetic pleasure reflected by, or induced in, the mother from her smiling child; (3) tender-emotion, in itself pleasantly toned and progressively attaining satisfaction; (4) positive self-feeling, also intrinsically pleas-ant and also attaining an ideal satisfaction ; for the mother is proud of her child as an evidence of her own worth; (5) each of these two primary emotions of the mother is developed within the system of a strong sentiment, the one within the system of her love for her child, the other within the system of her regard for herself, the two strongest sentiments of her nature, which, in so far as the child is identified with herself, become welded together to constitute a master sentiment or passion ; this
(156) renders the emotions more intense and more enduring ; (6) the fact that the emotions are not aroused as merely isolated experiences by some casually presented object, but are developed within strongly organised and enduring sentiments gives them a prospective reference; they project themselves into an indefinitely prolonged future, and so hope or pleasant anticipation is added to the complex.
Joy is always, as in this instance, a complex emotional state, in which one or more of the primary emotions, developed within the system of a strong sentiment, plays an essential part. We ought, then, properly to speak, not of joy, but of joyous emotion. And if, by an illegitimate effort of abstraction, we should seek to separate joy from the emotions with which it forms an inseparable whole, we should have to say that it is pleasure, but pleasure of a high type, pleasure of complex origin, arising from the harmonious operation of one or more sentiments that constitute a considerable feature of the total mental organisation.
Reflexion upon sorrow yields similar results. Take the parallel case of the mother sorrowing for the loss of her child. There is tender emotion, which, though intrinsically of pleasant feeling-tone, is in this case painful because its impulse is baffled and cannot attain more than the most scanty and imperfect satisfaction in little acts, such as the laying of flowers on the grave; and this emotion, being developed within a strong sentiment, is persistent, and the pain of its ineffectual impulse constantly recurs : again, pride and hope have been dashed down and few can avoid some negative self-feeling under such conditions; for a part of the larger self has been torn away, and some thought of some effort that
( 157) might have been made but was not is very apt to increase the insensity of this painful negative self-feeling.
In this case, then, we should properly speak of a sorrowful emotion, which emotion is a painfully toned binary compound of tender emotion and negative self-feeling. And as in this case, so in every other, sorrow implies one or more of the primary emotions excited within a sentiment. Perhaps in every case tender emotion must be an element; for, take away the tender emotion and only painful negative self-feeling or humiliation remains ; take away that emotion also and nothing re-mains but some painful depressed feeling that cannot properly be called sorrow, though it might perhaps be called grief. Some such state as this last might be produced by an event that should destroy the sentiment of love at the same time that it removed its object; e.g., a friend, the object of a strong sentiment, suddenly by some cruel act shows us that he has renounced our friendship and, at the same time, that he is unworthy of it. Under these conditions might be realised a state of intolerable pain, a state almost devoid of impulse or de-sire, that might be called grief, but not sorrow. But it is hard to imagine even under such conditions a state without some anger, some resentment or disgust, and the corresponding impulse. In so far as grief is properly distinguishable from sorrow, it differs in having less of tender emotion and more of anger, as when the bereaved and grief-stricken father curses God, or the Fates, or the Universe.
In this connection we may consider the difference between pity and sorrow. Pity in its simplest form is tender emotion tinged with sympathetically induced pain. It differs from sorrow, which also is essentially a painful tender emotion, in the sympathetic character of the
(158) pain, and in that it does not imply the existence of any sentiment of affection or love, as sorrow does, and is therefore a more transient experience, and one with less tendency to look before and after. There is also, of course, a sorrowful pity, as when one watches the painful and mortal illness of a dear friend. In this case there is tender emotion and there is sympathetically induced pain which makes the state one of pity; but there is also pain arising from the prospect of the loss of the object of our sentiment of love, which makes the emotion a sorrowful one. That sorrow does not necessarily include an element of sympathetic pain is clearly shown by the sorrow of those who have lost a loved one whom they sincerely believe to have entered on a happier life. The pain of sorrow is, then, a self-regarding pain, where-as the pain of pity is not; hence pity is rightly regarded as the nobler emotion.
Before passing on from this subject, it seems worth while to inquire, What is happiness? Is happiness merely pleasure or a sum of pleasures, and if not, what is it? If only moralists had condescended to ask this question earnestly and had found the answer to it, how much of the energy devoted to ethical discussion during the last century might profitably have been turned into other channels ! The utilitarians constantly assumed that happiness and pleasure are to be identified, and used happiness and sum of pleasures as synonymous terms, generally without pausing to consider, or to seek to justify, this identification. The principle that the ultimate test of the relative worth of different kinds of conduct and character must be the estimation of the degree in which they contribute to bring about the greatest happiness of the greatest number, this principle, which if the phrase "greatest number" is taken as referring to the remoter,
( 159) as well as to the immediate, future cannot easily be rejected, was treated as identical with the maxim that the aim of all conduct should be to increase the sum of pleasures to the greatest possible extent; and this maxim, illuminated by Bentham's dictum that "pushpin is as good as poetry provided the pleasure be as great," was naturally repulsive to many of the finer natures ; it provoked in them a reaction and drove them to grope among obscure and mystical ideas for their ethical foundations, and so has greatly delayed the general acceptance of the great truth embodied in the utilitarian doctrines. J. S. Mill, like the rest, identified happiness with sum of pleasures, and attempted to improve the position by recognising higher and lower qualities of pleasure, and by regarding the higher as indefinitely more desirable than the lower. This was an effort in the right direction, but so long as happiness is regarded as merely a sum of pleasures, whether higher or lower, and pleasure and pain as the only motives to action, the utilitarian position is untenable.[13]
It is, I think, indisputable that a man may be unhappy while he actually experiences pleasure, and that he might experience one pleasure after another throughout a considerable period without ceasing to be unhappy. Consider the case of a man whose lifelong ambition and hopes have recently been dashed to the ground. If he were fond of music, he might, when the first shock of disappointment had passed away, attend a concert and derive pleasure from the music, or indulge in other pleasures, and yet be continuously unhappy. No doubt his unhappiness would make it more difficult to find pleasure and might make
( 159) his pleasure thin in quality ; but the two modes of experience are, though antagonistic, not absolutely incompatible and mutually exclusive.
In a similar way, a man may be happy while experiencing pain, not merely physical pain, but pain in the proper sense of the word—i.e., painful feeling. Imagine the case of a man of fine nature who in the past in a moment of weakness has done a mean thing, but who by his efforts has completely repaired the injury done, has set his relations to others on an entirely satisfactory footing, and has become thoroughly happy. If his mind goes back to that act of meanness, he will have a painful feeling and yet he may continue to be happy without inter-mission. Or imagine another, perhaps a clearer, case—that of a person who finds an exalted happiness in seeking to relieve the lot of the sick and distressed. Such a person will often feel sympathetic pain, but, so long as he knows he is doing good to others, he is happy and does not cease to be happy in those moments of pitiful emotion. We may even believe that the cause of such sympathetic pain may increase the happiness of him who feels it. Suppose that to a tender-hearted, sympathetic person, who finds his happiness in doing good to others, a friend pours out his troubles in a moment of confidence; the recipient feels sympathetic pain, but his happiness is at the same time increased because he sees that his friend confides in him and finds relief in doing so. Do not facts of this order show clearly that happiness is no mere sum of pleasures? What, then, is it? It may, I think, be indirectly defined by saying that happiness is related to joy in the same way that joy is related to pleasure.[14] Pleasure is a qualification of consciousness of momentary duration or, at most, of a fleet-
( 160) -ing character, and it arises from some mental process that involves but a mere fragment of one's whole being. Joy arises from the harmonious operation of an organised system or sentiment that constitutes a considerable feature or part of one's whole being; it has, therefore, potentially at least, a greater persistence and continuity and a deeper resonance ; it is, as it were, more massive than pleasure; it is more intimately and essentially a part of oneself, so that one cannot stand aside and contemplate it in philosophic or depreciatory detachment, as one may contemplate one's pleasures. Happiness arises from the harmonious operation of all the sentiments of a well-organised and unified personality, one in which the principal sentiments support one another in a succession of actions all of which tend towards the same or closely allied and harmonious ends. Hence the richer, the more highly developed, the more completely unified or integrated is the personality, the more capable is it of sustained happiness in spite of inter-current pains of all sorts. In the child or in the adult of imperfectly developed and unified personality, the pleasure or pain of the moment is apt to fill or dominate the whole of consciousness as a simple wave of feeling, whereas in the perfected personality it appears as a mere ripple on the surface of a strong tide that sets steadily in one direction.
If this account of happiness is correct, it follows that to add to the sum of happiness is not merely to add to the sum of pleasures, but is rather to contribute to the development of higher forms of personality, personalities capable, not merely of pleasure, as the animals are, but, of happiness. If this conclusion is sound, it is of no small importance to the social sciences ; it goes far to reconcile the doctrine of such moralists as T. H. Green with that of the more enlightened utilitarians; for the
( 161) one party insists that the proper end of moral effort is the development of personalities, the other that it is the in-crease of happiness, and these we now see to be identical ends.
In Chapter III. it was said that the definition of emotion there adopted necessitates the exclusion of surprise, as well as of joy and sorrow, from the list of true and primary emotions. This is because surprise is an affective state that implies no corresponding instinct and has no specific conative tendency. It is merely a condition of general excitement which supervenes upon any totally unexpected and violent mental impression; or perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is produced by an impression which is contrary to anticipation, and to which, therefore, we cannot immediately adjust our-selves, which does not evoke at once an appropriate emotional and conative response. It is the momentary state of confused excitement which intervenes between the reception of the impression and the assumption of the appropriate attitude towards it, a moment of conflict and confusion between the habitual anticipatory attitude determined by the course of previous experience and the new attitude provoked by the unusual course of events.APPENDIX TO CHAPTER V
In the previous editions no attempt was made to deal with the emotion of remorse. The following note is added to make good this serious omission.
Remorse is an emotion which has been commonly regarded by moralists as the most intense of the effects produced by the activity of that peculiar entity "the conscience." It is a complex emotional state implying the existence of a well-developed self-
( 163) -regarding sentiment and, generally, of moral sentiments. It arises upon the recollection of some past action that one deeply regrets; like all regret it is painful owing to the fact that the impulse or desire, which is the root of it and which may be the impulse of any one of several instincts, is directed towards the past rather than towards the future, and is therefore seen to be necessarily and for ever baffled. But it differs from other forms of regret in that the regretted event is one brought about by one's own action. Hence the anger which arises from the baffled desire is directed against oneself, and can find no satisfaction in the utterance of reproaches or curses; for these, being directed against oneself, do but add to the painfulness of the whole complex state; and even the doing of penance (i.e., the infliction of punishment upon oneself), though it yields some satisfaction to the baffled impulse, does not heal the wound to one's self-regard caused by the recognition of the irrevocable failure to realise one's ideal of self. Through this last factor remorse is closely allied with shame, and it might perhaps be adequately defined as shameful and angry regret.
