Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiaritiesFinck, Henry T.
Science
Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities
Finck, Henry T.
Beauty, Personal; Love
(3) Thirdly, Love intensifies human feelings by producing a state of
_emotional hyperæsthesia_, or supersensitiveness, which has the effect
of a microphone in multiplying the loudness of every impression. Music
teachers whose acoustic nerves are rendered excessively irritable by
overwork; students whose eyes, from reading late at night, are in the
same condition, are annoyed by sights and sounds which ordinary mortals
barely notice. But Love with its sleepless night daily fevers, and
prolonged fastings is more potent than any other cause in producing such
a state of extreme sensitiveness to every impression. Lovers’ souls may
therefore be aptly compared to Æolian harps. If you leave the strings of
such an instrument in a state of very loose tension, they resemble the
souls of ordinary mortals not in Love: for it takes a very strong breeze
to elicit any sound from them. But raise them to a higher state of
tension, like the souls of lovers, and the faintest breath of air will
cause them to sound in sympathetic unison all their harmonics—which is
another name for _overtones_.
_Development of Sympathy._—Not only does Love thus owe much of its
unique intenseness to Sympathy, but there are weighty reasons for
believing that Love has already played an important _rôle_, and is
destined to play a still more important one, in modifying the meaning of
Sympathy and in extending its influence to society in general.
When the absence of true Romantic Love among savages was being pointed
out more emphasis should have been placed on the fact that they seem to
be utter strangers to sympathy. Far from sharing another’s delights and
sorrows, a savage takes an intense delight in witnessing a man enduring
the agonies of deliberate torture. Cruelty seems to give him the same
thrill of joy that sympathetic assistance gives to a refined person.
How are we to account for this strange delight in another’s sufferings?
By noting the extreme coarseness and callousness of the primitive man’s
nerves. Just as some savages are known to have such hardened hides and
lungs that they can sleep naked in a snowstorm with impunity, where a
white man would be sure to perish of cold or subsequent pneumonia; so
the savage requires the coarsest of stimulants to make any impression on
his sluggish emotions. The sight of an enemy tied to a tree and being
flayed alive tickles his nerves by suggesting his own comfortable
freedom in comparison, and by showing him an enemy absolutely in his
power; while his imagination is not sufficiently vivid to enable him to
put himself in the other’s place to feel his contortions and suppressed
moans re-echoing in his own soul.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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