The peculiar relations to other persons attending any marked personal deficiency or peculiarity are likely to aggravate, if not to produce, abnormal manifestations of self-feeling. Any such trait sufficiently noticeable to interrupt easy and familiar intercourse with others, and make people talk and think _about_ a person or _to_ him rather than _with_ him, can hardly fail to have this effect. If he is naturally inclined to pride or irritability, these tendencies, which depend for correction upon the flow of sympathy, are likely to be increased. One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore. He finds himself apart, “not in it,” and feels chilled, fearful, and suspicious. Thus “queerness” is no sooner perceived than it is multiplied by reflection from other minds. The same is true in some degree of dwarfs, deformed or disfigured persons, even the deaf and those suffering from the infirmities of old age. The chief misery of the decline of the faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it, is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of others can alleviate. CHAPTER VII HOSTILITY SIMPLE OR ANIMAL ANGER—SOCIAL ANGER—THE FUNCTION OF HOSTILITY—THE DOCTRINE OF NON-RESISTANCE—CONTROL AND TRANSFORMATION OF HOSTILITY BY REASON—HOSTILITY AS PLEASURE OR PAIN—THE IMPORTANCE OF ACCEPTED SOCIAL STANDARDS—FEAR. Anger, like other emotions, seems to exist at birth as a simple, instinctive animal tendency, and to undergo differentiation and development parallel with the growth of imagination. Perez, speaking of children at about the age of two months, says, “they begin to push away objects that they do not like, and have real fits of passion, frowning, growing red in the face, trembling all over, and sometimes shedding tears.” They also show anger at not getting the breast or bottle, or when washed or undressed, or when their toys are taken away. At about one year old “they will beat people, animals, and inanimate objects if they are angry with them,”[65] throw things at offending persons, and the like.