Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 4.djvu/336

322 the semblance of an equanimity which knows nothing of the agitation of pleasure or pain, may be expected to give the last touch of refinement to emotional expression.

If these were all the facts bearing on the future of our emotional life, we might well inquire what effect the habitual suppression of emotional expression is likely to have on the quality of the emotions themselves. It is probably clear to everybody that our feelings are very much affected by the range of free expression accorded them. At least the violent intensity of a passion is destroyed by successful control of all the muscles, and, even if a slow, smouldering fire of hate or jealousy may coexist with a comparatively quiet exterior, the emotional force is in this case robbed of its glory. It would thus appear that, with social progress, as men are thrown more and more in each other's society, their feelings will undergo a very considerable transformation; some types of emotion disappearing, it may be, altogether, the rest being so mollified as to be scarcely recognizable as the venerable forms of human love, terror, and joy. But, oddly enough, we find another set of influences, due to the very same social conditions as the first, which tends to counteract these, fostering and deepening feeling, and encouraging its manifestations. Mr. Spencer thinks that the habit of expressing pleasure and pain arose as animals became gregarious. This condition exposed the members of the same flock to common experiences of danger, etc.; and in this way, from uttering the sounds of terror under like circumstances and at the same times, they would come to interpret them when given forth by their companions. At the same time the gregarious mode of life clearly made animals able to assist one another in a large variety of ways. Now, on this supposition, which seems extremely plausible, the habit of expressing feeling is an attainment of social life, and, so far from disappearing with the advance of this life, it should, one would think, go on developing. In point of fact, we see in a number of ways how social progress serves to enlarge the area of sympathetic feeling. As a man becomes more of a citizen, he is probably more and more desirous to be in unison of feeling and intention with his fellow-citizens, at least with that section of them whom he most respects. The sympathy he looks for presupposes, it is clear, some expression of his own feelings, and a responsive expression on the part of his neighbors. In this way, then, there are two tendencies of social culture curiously conflicting in their results. By virtue of the one a man seeks to repress feeling and not to obtrude it unnecessarily on his fellow-citizens. By force of the other he is ever craving with more and more vigor for a lively interchange of sentiments with others. What resultant, it may be asked, do these opposite forces produce?

Without trying to determine the precise direction of this compound effect, it may be just suggested that a kind of compromise between the opposing forces is frequently effected by means of