Human nature and the social orderCooley, Charles Horton
Science
Human nature and the social order
Cooley, Charles Horton
Individualism; Social psychology; Sociology
In the preceding I have considered the rise of personal ideas chiefly
from the point of view of the visual or auditory element in them—the
personal symbol or vehicle of communication; but of course there is a
parallel growth in feeling. An infant’s states of feeling may be
supposed to be nearly as crude as his ideas of the appearance of things;
and the process that gives form, variety, and coherence to the latter
does the same for the former. It is precisely the act of intercourse,
the stimulation of the mind by a personal symbol, which gives a
formative impulse to the vague mass of hereditary feeling-tendency, and
this impulse, in turn, results in a larger power of interpreting the
symbol. It is not to be supposed, for instance, that such feelings as
generosity, respect, mortification, emulation, the sense of honor, and
the like, are an original endowment of the mind. Like all the finer and
larger mental life these arise in conjunction with communication and
could not exist without it. It is these finer modes of feeling, these
intricate branchings or differentiations of the primitive trunk of
emotion, to which the name sentiments is usually applied. Personal
sentiments are correlative with personal symbols, the interpretation of
the latter meaning nothing more than that the former are associated with
them; while the sentiments, in turn, cannot be felt except by the aid of
the symbols. If I see a face and feel that here is an honest man, it
means that I have, in the past, achieved through intercourse an idea of
honest personality, with the visual elements of which the face before me
has something in common, so that it calls up this socially achieved
sentiment. And moreover in knowing this honest man my idea of honest
personality will be enlarged and corrected for future use. Both the
sentiment and its visual associations will be somewhat different from
what they were.
Thus no personal sentiment is the exclusive product of any one
influence, but all is of various origin and has a social history. The
more clearly one can grasp this fact the better, at least if I am right
in supposing that a whole system of wrong thinking results from
overlooking it and assuming that personal ideas are separable and
fragmentary elements in the mind. Of this I shall say more presently.
The fact I mean is that expressed by Shakespeare, with reference to
love, or loving friendship, in his thirty-first sonnet:
“Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,
Which I by lacking have supposed dead,
And there reigns love, and all love’s loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought buried.
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
Who all their parts of me to thee did give;
That due of many now is thine alone:
Their images I loved I view in thee,
And thou (all they) hast all the all of me.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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