As to the kinds of retrospective emotion the largest division is, of course, into the painful and pleasurable. We have touched only on some of the painful, but each painful emotion has its analogous pleasurable emotion. We have used the terms sorrow and grief as synonyms. If we should make a distinction, it would be to put sadness or sorrow in antithesis to happiness, and grief to joy; that is, sorrow proceeds from outward circumstances, grief from subjective conditions. However, popular usage is not firm on this point. Regret is a mild sorrow. Remorse is the ethical side of sorrow. Resignation is a very late phase of emotion related to sorrow. A person says, My child was crushed in the accident, yet I do not grieve, but am quite resigned. Here certainly is a new mode of feeling about past harm, and it is a mode as far above sorrow proper as sorrow is above anger in the evolutionary scale. We do not lament or weep over the past, but there is self-conscious, self-constrained sinking of the will, and a composure which is not apathy, but a gentle emotion wave. Nor is there a callousness; one is not hardened, but softened, and made the more sensitive. The emotion of resignation is thus cultivated and to be cultivated, and is yet in the volition stage which marks the early form of all emotions. Even in the highest human types resignation does not come, it must be brought; the instinctive impulse upon contemplating past personal evil is toward sorrow or anger and revenge, which must be checked, and resignation directly willed and assumed as the proper emotion. Resignation, then, as a growing point in psychic evolution, a distinct attainment as frame of mind, is generally and rightly accounted a virtue. At present, then, it seems the culmination of retrospective emotion with regard to past personal injuries, and it exercises and will more and more exercise a most important function in human psychic development. CHAPTER XIII _DESIRE_