Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/134

 Il6 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING

experience a keen sympathetic grief ; but if I should learn that the cause of her anguish was the death of a poodle dog, my participation in her grief would come to a rather abrupt end. That is, whenever the feeling of another seems to us incongruous or incommensurate with its cause, it arouses a dissimilar or opposite feeling in us. The third means of arousing feeling is the mental representation, the image or idea either of an immediate personal experience which would awaken feeling, or of an experience of another which would arouse sympathy. This may be called a secondary or representative experience.

Broadly speaking, there are two means at the disposal of the orator for arousing the feelings of his audience.

I. Delivery. By delivery is meant all the physical proc esses involved in the communication of the speaker s thought and feeling general bearing, poses, gestures, contraction of the facial muscles, modulation of the voice, etc. We shall not stop to consider whether there.be any occult, secret, unanalysable power by which one mind may impress another apart from physical expressions. Some persons seem to possess such a power, and it may be that all have some measure of it. But whatever power of such a kind there may be, it lies in its very nature beyond the reach of profit able discussion. Certainly the ordinary means by which one person communicates his ideas and feelings to others or awakens them in others is physical action of some sort. The appeal is to the eye and ear, or more exactly to the mind through the eye and the ear.

In delivery two ways in which feeling may be aroused in the audience should be distinguished.

(i) By some peculiarity in the appearance, the manner or the voice of the speaker. The peculiarity may excite pleasant or unpleasant feelings. Slovenly or neat dress, awkward or easy manner, harsh or sweet tones of the voice, etc., will inevitably produce corresponding emotional reac tions. There is here no communication of feeling; for in born peculiarities of bearing, appearance, manner, voice,

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