Page:An introduction to ethics.djvu/91

 It would be a very dull and uninteresting world, if we all controlled the facial expression of our emotions. Conversation and social intercourse would lose half their charm, if the social emotions were not expressed on our faces. The difference between a vivacious and a dull person often depends largely on the expressiveness of their features. And a more distinctively ethical question is involved. The habitual concealment of our emotions is apt to encourage a general tendency to dissimulation.

Further, it is not desirable that all emotions should be suppressed. To subdue all emotions is to rob life of much of its glow and warmth. It is as disastrous to deprive life of its emotions as it is to destroy all its desires. But not every form of emotion is valuable either to the individual or to the society of which he is a member. The emotions of jealousy and fear, for instance, are not in general desirable. But the energy that expresses itself in these emotions may be diverted into socially valuable directions. The energy that would express itself in jealousy may be turned into emulation, and fear may be transmuted into the emotion of respect. The moral educator may become the Alchymist of Character.

(2) Emotions should be allowed to work themselves out in activity of some kind. Nothing is worse than simply to bottle up emotions. Pent-up emotions "work like madness in the brain." If the emotion is simply dammed up it may breed poison in the moral life of the child, or it may later strike out a socially injurious path for itself. If anger be simply pent-up, it may become a brooding spirit of revenge, which may emerge later on in an activity of a far