It is often asserted or assumed that hostile feeling is in its very nature obnoxious and painful to the human mind, and persists in spite of us, as it were, because it is forced upon us by the competitive conditions of existence. This view seems to me hardly sound. I should rather say that the mental and social harmfulness of anger, in common experience, is due not so much to its peculiar character as hostile feeling, as to the fact that, like lust, it is so surcharged with instinctive energy as to be difficult to control and limit to its proper function; while, if not properly disciplined, it of course introduces disorder and pain into the mental life. To a person in robust condition, with plenty of energy to spare, a thorough-going anger, far from being painful, is an expansive, I might say glorious, experience, _while the fit is on and has full control_. A man in a rage does not want to get out of it, but has a full sense of life which he impulsively seeks to continue by repelling suggestions tending to calm him. It is only when it has begun to pall upon him that he is really willing to be appeased. This may be seen by observing the behavior of impulsive children, and also of adults whose passions are undisciplined. An enduring hatred may also be a source of satisfaction to some minds, though this I believe to be unusual in these days, and becoming more so. One who reads Hazlitt’s powerful and sincere, though perhaps unhealthy, essay on the Pleasure of Hating, will see that the thing is possible. In most cases remorse and distress set in so soon as the fit of anger begins to abate, and its destructive incompatibility with the established order and harmony of the mind begins to be felt. There is a conviction of sin, the pain of a shattered ideal, just as there is after yielding to any other unchastened passion. The cause of the pain seems to be not so much the peculiar character of the feeling as its exorbitant intensity. Any simple and violent passion is likely to be felt as painful and wrong in its after-effects because it destroys that harmony or synthesis that reason and conscience strive to produce; and this effect is probably more and more felt as the race advances and mental life becomes more complex. The conditions of civilization require of us so extensive and continuous an expenditure of psychical force, that we no longer have the superabundance of emotional energy that makes a violent outlet agreeable. Habits and principles of self-control naturally arise along with the increasing need for economy and rational guidance of emotion; and whatever breaks through them causes exhaustion and remorse. Any gross passion comes to be felt as “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” Spasms of violent feeling properly belong with a somewhat apathetic habit of life, whose accumulating energies they help to dissipate, and are as much out of place to-day as the hard-drinking habits of our Saxon ancestors.