Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/322

 308 SOPHIA BEYANT : to walk hard and thump the ground at the knotty points of an imaginary argument. Indirect evidence is not rare though less certain. It has its use as cumulative in building up a basis of probability. Exuberant expression is well known to go often with shallow- ness of feeling, violent exasperation with little real anger, plentiful grumbling with slight discontent, irritability with insignificant irritation. The last case is very curious : we sometimes encounter persons so full of perpetual quiet quarrelsomeness with the small incidents of life the weather, the gnats, the hardness of their beds, or the softness, the air, the food, and all minor things that we tire ourselves out by sympathy with the sufferings of their ill-balanced physique. But it is only we not they who are seriously worried. They do not " worry " really in themselves : they only worry us. More strictly the expression is out of all proportion to the consciousness : the incidents do upset them, but most of the irritation escapes in external irritability. The person in marked contrast suffers irritation as such with the minimum of outward show, until the point is reached when the will comes into play to do something. The poets know this when they tell us in many ways of the " grief too deep for tears," and to common experience it is very familiar. A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear, A stifled, drowsy, nnimpassioned grief That knows no natural outlet, no relief In word, or sigh, or tear. On the other hand it must be remembered that expression of feeling is frequently a stimulus to further feelings of the same kind : the worrying people worry themselves from the outside, by magnifying their troubles objectively. Self- control restrains the excess of feeling in this way, though the persons of good natural self-control are likely to be so partly because of deeper natural feeling. 1 1 The following example is curiously definite. Two friends A and 1 '. compared notes as to their experiences on the extraction of a tooth under the influence of nitrous oxide. When A revived after the operation, the dentist said: "I fear it hurt you badly in spite of the gas". She looked up surprised and said : " I never felt it at all''. " Well," he said, " you screamed like one in agony." In B's case there were two teeth. On reviving she began the conversation by the remark : " That second one was much the worst ". This time the dentist was surprised, because the comment was true. " Surely you did not feel them ? " he said. " You were so perfectly still and silent." She had felt them vividly and dis- tinctly, though not for what they were, and the difference in conscious disturbance between the two operations was specially conspicuous. It would seem that in these two persons to feel meant not to scream and to scream meant not to feel.