In this sonnet may be discerned, I think, a true theory of personal sentiment, quite accordant with the genetic point of view of modern psychology, and very important in the understanding of social relations.

Facial expression, tone of voice, and the like, the sensible nucleus of personal and social ideas, serve as the handle, so to speak, of such ideas, the principal substance of which is drawn from the region of inner imagination and sentiment. The personality of a friend, as it lives in my mind and forms there a part of the society in which I live, is simply a group or system of thoughts associated with the symbols that stand for him. To think of him is to revive some part of the system—to have the old feeling along with the familiar symbol, though perhaps in a new connection with other ideas. The real and intimate thing in him is the thought to which he gives life, the feeling his presence or memory has the power to suggest. This clings about the sensible imagery, the personal symbols already discussed, because the latter have served as bridges by which we have entered other minds and therein enriched our own. We have laid up stores, but we always need some help to get at them in order that we may use and increase them; and this help commonly consists in something visible or audible, which has been connected with them in the past and now acts as a key by which they are unlocked. Thus the face of a friend has power over us in much the same way as the sight of a favorite book, of the flag of one’s country, or the refrain of an old song; it starts a train of thought, lifts the curtain from an intimate experience. And his presence does not consist in the pressure of his flesh upon a neighboring chair, but in the thoughts clustering about some symbol of him, whether the latter be his tangible person or something else. If a person is more his best self in a letter than in speech, as sometimes happens, he is more truly present to me in his correspondence than when I see and hear him. And in most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

The world of sentiment and imagination, of all finer and warmer thought, is chiefly a personal world—that is, it is inextricably interwoven with personal symbols. If you try to think of a person you will find that what you really think is chiefly sentiments which you connect with his image; and, on the other hand, if you try to recall a sentiment you will find, as a rule, that it will not come up except along with symbols of the persons who have suggested it. To think of love, gratitude, pity, grief, honor, courage, justice, and the like, it is necessary to think of people by whom or toward whom these sentiments may be entertained.^[25] Thus justice may be recalled by thinking of Washington, kindness by Lincoln, honor by Sir Philip Sidney, and so on. The reason for this, as already intimated, is that sentiment and imagination are generated, for the most part, in the life of communication, and so belong with personal images by original and necessary association, having no separate existence except in our forms of speech. The ideas that such words as modesty and magnanimity stand for could never have been formed apart from social intercourse, and indeed are nothing other than remembered aspects of such intercourse. To live this higher life, then, we must live with others, by the aid of their visible presence, by reading their words, or by recalling in imagination these or other symbols of them. To lose our hold upon them—as, for example, by long isolation or by the decay of the imagination in disease or old age—is to lapse into a life of sensation and crude instinct.

So far as the study of immediate social relations is concerned the personal idea is the real person. That is to say, it is in this alone that one man exists for another, and acts directly upon his mind. My association with you evidently consists in the relation between my idea of you and the rest of my mind. If there is something in you that is wholly beyond this and makes no impression upon me it has no social reality in this relation. The immediate social reality is the personal idea; nothing, it would seem, could be much more obvious than this.

Society, then, in its immediate aspect, is a relation among personal ideas. In order to have society it is evidently necessary that persons should get together somewhere; and they get together only as personal ideas in the mind. Where else? What other possible locus can be assigned for the real contact of persons, or in what other form can they come in contact except as impressions or ideas formed in this common locus? Society exists in my mind as the contact and reciprocal influence of certain ideas named “I,” Thomas, Henry, Susan, Bridget, and so on. It exists in your mind as a similar group, and so in every mind. Each person is immediately aware of a particular aspect of society: and so far as he is aware of great social wholes, like a nation or an epoch, it is by embracing in this particular aspect ideas or sentiments which he attributes to his countrymen or contemporaries in their collective aspect. In order to see this it seems to me only necessary to discard vague modes of speech which have no conceptions back of them that will bear scrutiny, and look at the facts as we know them in experience.

Yet most of us, perhaps, will find it hard to assent to the view that the social person is a group of sentiments attached to some symbol or other characteristic element, which keeps them together and from which the whole idea is named. The reason for this reluctance I take to be that we are accustomed to talk and think, so far as we do think in this connection, as if a person were a material rather than a psychical fact. Instead of basing our sociology and ethics upon what a man really is as part of our mental and moral life, he is vaguely and yet grossly regarded as a shadowy material body, a lump of flesh, and not as an ideal thing at all. But surely it is only common-sense to hold that the social and moral reality is that which lives in our imaginations and affects our motives. As regards the physical it is only the finer, more plastic and mentally significant aspects of it that imagination is concerned with, and with that chiefly as a nucleus or centre of crystallization for sentiment. Instead of perceiving this we commonly make the physical the dominant factor, and think of the mental and moral only by a vague analogy to it.

Persons and society must, then, be studied primarily in the imagination. It is surely true, prima facie, that the best way of observing things is that which is most direct; and I do not see how anyone can hold that we know persons directly except as imaginative ideas in the mind. These are perhaps the most vivid things in our experience, and as observable as anything else, though it is a kind of observation in which accuracy has not been systematically cultivated. The observation of the physical aspects, however important, is for social purposes quite subsidiary: there is no way of weighing or measuring men which throws more than a very dim side-light on their personality. The physical factors most significant are those elusive traits of expression already discussed, and in the observation and interpretation of these physical science is only indirectly helpful. What, for instance, could the most elaborate knowledge of his weights and measures, including the anatomy of his brain, tell us of the character of Napoleon? Not enough, I take it, to distinguish him with certainty from an imbecile. Our real knowledge of him is derived from reports of his conversation and manner, from his legislation and military dispositions, from the impression made upon those about him and by them communicated to us, from his portraits and the like; all serving as aids to the imagination in forming a system that we call by his name. I by no means aim to discredit the study of man or of society with the aid of physical measurements, such as those of psychological laboratories; but I think that these methods are indirect and ancillary in their nature and are most useful when employed in connection with a trained imagination.

I conclude, therefore, that the imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society, and that to observe and interpret these must be a chief aim of sociology. I do not mean merely that society must be studied by the imagination—that is true of all investigations in their higher reaches—but that the object of study is primarily an imaginative idea or group of ideas in the mind, that we have to imagine imaginations. The intimate grasp of any social fact will be found to require that we divine what men think of one another. Charity, for instance, is not understood without imagining what ideas the giver and recipient have of each other; to grasp homicide we must, for one thing, conceive how the offender thinks of his victim and of the administrators of the law; the relation between the employing and hand-laboring classes is first of all a matter of personal attitudes which we must apprehend by sympathy with both, and so on. In other words, we want to get at motives, and motives spring from personal ideas. There is nothing particularly novel in this view; historians, for instance, have always assumed that to understand and interpret personal relations was their main business; but apparently the time is coming when this will have to be done in a more systematic and penetrating manner than in the past. Whatever may justly be urged against the introduction of frivolous and disconnected “personalities” into history, the understanding of persons is the aim of this and all other branches of social study.

It is important to face the question of persons who have no corporeal reality, as for instance the dead, characters of fiction or the drama, ideas of the gods and the like. Are these real people, members of society? I should say that in so far as we imagine them they are. Would it not be absurd to deny social reality to Robert Louis Stevenson, who is so much alive in many minds and so potently affects important phases of thought and conduct? He is certainly more real in this practical sense than most of us who have not yet lost our corporeity, more alive, perhaps, than he was before he lost his own, because of his wider influence. And so Colonel Newcome, or Romola, or Hamlet is real to the imaginative reader with the realest kind of reality, the kind that works directly upon his personal character. And the like is true of the conceptions of supernatural beings handed down by the aid of tradition among all peoples. What, indeed, would society be, or what would any one of us be, if we associated only with corporeal persons and insisted that no one should enter our company who could not show his power to tip the scales and cast a shadow?

On the other hand, a corporeally existent person is not socially real unless he is imagined. If the nobleman thinks of the serf as a mere animal and does not attribute to him a human way of thinking and feeling the latter is not real to him in the sense of acting personally upon his mind and conscience. And if a man should go into a strange country and hide himself so completely that no one knew he was there, he would evidently have no social existence for the inhabitants.

In saying this I hope I do not seem to question the independent reality of persons or to confuse it with personal ideas. The man is one thing and the various ideas entertained about him are another; but the latter, the personal idea, is the immediate social reality, the thing in which men exist for one another, and work directly upon one another’s lives. Thus any study of society that is not supported by a firm grasp of personal ideas is empty and dead—mere doctrine and not knowledge at all.

I believe that the vaguely material notion of personality, which does not confront the social fact at all but assumes it to be the analogue of the physical fact, is a main source of fallacious thinking about ethics, politics, and indeed every aspect of social and personal life. It seems to underlie all four of the ways of conceiving society and the individual alleged in the first chapter to be false. If the person is thought of primarily as a separate material form, inhabited by thoughts and feelings conceived by analogy to be equally separate, then the only way of getting a society is by adding on a new principle of socialism, social faculty, altruism, or the like. But if you start with the idea that the social person is primarily a fact in the mind, and observe him there, you find at once that he has no existence apart from a mental whole of which all personal ideas are members, and which is a particular aspect of society. Every one of these ideas, as we have seen, is the outcome of our experience of all the persons we have known, and is only a special aspect of our general idea of mankind.

To many people it would seem mystical to say that persons, as we know them, are not separable and mutually exclusive, like physical bodies, so that what is part of one cannot be part of another, but that they interpenetrate one another, the same element pertaining to different persons at different times, or even at the same time: yet this is a verifiable and not very abstruse fact.^[26] The sentiments which make up the largest and most vivid part of our idea of any person are not, as a rule, peculiarly and exclusively his, but each one may be entertained in conjunction with other persons also. It is, so to speak, at the point of intersection of many personal ideas, and may be reached through any one of them. Not only Philip Sidney but many other people call up the sentiment of honor, and likewise with kindness, magnanimity, and so on. Perhaps these sentiments are never precisely the same in any two cases, but they are nearly enough alike to act in about the same manner upon our motives, which is the main thing from a practical point of view. Any kindly face will arouse friendly feeling, any suffering child awaken pity, any brave man inspire respect. A sense of justice, of something being due to a man as such, is potentially a part of the idea of every man I know. All such feelings are a cumulative product of social experience and do not belong exclusively to any one personal symbol. A sentiment, if we consider it as something in itself, is vaguely, indeterminately personal; it may come to life, with only slight variations, in connection with any one of many symbols; whether it is referred to one or to another, or to two or more at once, is determined by the way one’s thoughts arrange themselves, by the connection in which the sentiment is suggested.

As regards one’s self in relation to other people, I shall have more to say in a later chapter; but I may say here that there is no view of the self, that will bear examination, which makes it altogether distinct, in our minds, from other persons. If it includes the whole mind, then, of course, it includes all the persons we think of, all the society which lives in our thoughts. If we confine it to a certain part of our thought with which we connect a distinctive emotion or sentiment called self-feeling, as I prefer to do, it still includes the persons with whom we feel most identified. Self and other do not exist as mutually exclusive social facts, and phraseology which implies that they do, like the antithesis egoism versus altruism, is open to the objection of vagueness, if not of falsity.^[27] It seems to me that the classification of impulses as altruistic and egoistic, with or without a third class called, perhaps, ego-altruistic, is empty; and I do not see how any other conclusion can result from a concrete study of the matter. There is no class of altruistic impulses specifically different from other impulses: all our higher, socially developed sentiments are indeterminately personal, and may be associated with self-feeling, or with whatever personal symbol may happen to arouse them. Those feelings which are merely sensual and have not been refined into sentiments by communication and imagination are not so much egoistic as merely animal: they do not pertain to social persons, either first or second, but belong in a lower stratum of thought. Sensuality is not to be confused with the social self. As I shall try to show later we do not think “I” except with reference to a complementary thought of other persons; it is an idea developed by association and communication.

The egoism-altruism way of speaking falsifies the facts at the most vital point possible by assuming that our impulses relating to persons are separable into two classes, the I impulses and the You impulses, in much the same way that physical persons are separable; whereas a primary fact throughout the range of sentiment is a fusion of persons, so that the impulse belongs not to one or the other, but precisely to the common ground that both occupy, to their intercourse or mingling. Thus the sentiment of gratitude does not pertain to me as against you, nor to you as against me, but springs right from our union, and so with all personal sentiment. Special terms like egoism and altruism are presumably introduced into moral discussions for the more accurate naming of facts. But I cannot discover the facts for which these are supposed to be names. The more I consider the matter the more they appear to be mere fictions of analogical thought. If you have no definite idea of personality or self beyond the physical idea you are naturally led to regard the higher phases of thought, which have no evident relation to the body, as in some way external to the first person or self. Thus instead of psychology, sociology, or ethics we have a mere shadow of physiology.

Pity is typical of the impulses ordinarily called altruistic; but if one thinks of the question closely it is hard to see how this adjective is especially applicable to it. Pity is not aroused exclusively by images or symbols of other persons, as against those of one’s self. If I think of my own body in a pitiable condition I am perhaps as likely to feel pity as if I think of someone else in such a condition.^[28] At any rate, self-pity is much too common to be ignored. Even if the sentiment were aroused only by symbols of other persons it would not necessarily be non-egoistic. “A father pitieth his children,” but any searching analysis will show that he incorporates the children into his own imaginative self. And, finally, pity is not necessarily moral or good, but is often mere “self-indulgence,” as when it is practised at the expense of justice and true sympathy. A “wounding pity,” to use a phrase of Mr. Stevenson’s, is one of the commonest forms of objectionable sentiment. In short, pity is a sentiment like any other, having in itself no determinate personality, as first or second, and no determinate moral character: personal reference and moral rank depend upon the conditions under which it is suggested. The reason that it strikes us as appropriate to call pity “altruistic” apparently is that it often leads directly and obviously to helpful practical activity, as toward the poor or the sick. But “altruistic” is used to imply something more than kindly or benevolent, some radical psychological or moral distinction between this sentiment or class of sentiments and others called egoistic, and this distinction appears not to exist. All social sentiments are altruistic in the sense that they involve reference to another person; few are so in the sense that they exclude the self. The idea of a division on this line appears to flow from a vague presumption that personal ideas must have a separateness answering to that of material bodies.

I do not mean to deny or depreciate the fact of personal opposition; it is real and most important, though it does not rest upon any such essential and, as it were, material separateness as the common way of thinking implies. At a given moment personal symbols may stand for different and opposing tendencies; thus the missionary may be urging me to contribute to his cause, and, if he is skilful, the impulses he awakens will move me in that direction; but if I think of my wife and children and the summer outing I had planned to give them from my savings, an opposite impulse appears. And in all such cases the very fact of opposition and the attention thereby drawn to the conflicting impulses gives emphasis to them, so that common elements are overlooked and the persons in the imagination seem separate and exclusive.

In such cases, however, the harmonizing or moralizing of the situation consists precisely in evoking or appealing to the common element in the apparently conflicting personalities, that is to some sentiment of justice or right. Thus I may say to myself, “I can afford a dollar, but ought not, out of consideration for my family, to give more,” and may be able to imagine all parties accepting this view of the case.

Opposition between one’s self and someone else is also a very real thing; but this opposition, instead of coming from a separateness like that of material bodies, is, on the contrary, dependent upon a measure of community between one’s self and the disturbing other, so that the hostility between one’s self and a social person may always be described as hostile sympathy. And the sentiments connected with opposition, like resentment, pertain neither to myself, considered separately, nor to the symbol of the other person, but to ideas including both. I shall discuss these matters at more length in subsequent chapters; the main thing here is to note that personal opposition does not involve mechanical separateness, but arises from the emphasis of inconsistent elements in ideas having much in common.

The relations to one another and to the mind of the various persons one thinks of might be rudely pictured in some such way as this. Suppose we conceive the mind as a vast wall covered with electric-light bulbs, each of which represents a possible thought or impulse whose presence in our consciousness may be indicated by the lighting up of the bulb. Now each of the persons we know is represented in such a scheme, not by a particular area of the wall set apart for him, but by a system of hidden connections among the bulbs which causes certain combinations of them to be lit up when his characteristic symbol is suggested. If something presses the button corresponding to my friend A, a peculiarly shaped figure appears upon the wall; when that is released and B’s button is pressed another figure appears, including perhaps many of the same lights, yet unique as a whole though not in its parts; and so on with as many people as you please. It should also be considered that we usually think of a person in relation to some particular social situation, and that those phases of him that bear on this situation are the only ones vividly conceived. To recall someone is commonly to imagine how this or that idea would strike him, what he would say or do in our place, and so on. Accordingly, only some part, some appropriate and characteristic part, of the whole figure that might be lighted up in connection with a man’s symbol, is actually illuminated.

To introduce the self into this illustration we might say that the lights near the centre of the wall were of a particular color—say red—which faded, not too abruptly, into white toward the edges. This red would represent self-feeling, and other persons would be more or less colored by it accordingly as they were or were not intimately identified with our cherished activities. In a mother’s mind, for instance, her child would lie altogether in the inmost and reddest area. Thus the same sentiment may belong to the self and to several other persons at the same time. If a man and his family are suffering from his being thrown out of work his apprehension and resentment will be part of his idea of each member of his family, as well as part of his self-idea and of the idea of people whom he thinks to blame.

I trust it will be plain that there is nothing fantastic, unreal, or impractical about this way of conceiving people, that is by observing them as facts of the imagination. On the contrary, the fantastic, unreal, and practically pernicious way is the ordinary and traditional one of speculating upon them as shadowy bodies, without any real observation of them as mental facts. It is the man as imagined that we love or hate, imitate, or avoid, that helps or harms us, that moulds our wills and our careers. What is it that makes a person real to us; is it material contact or contact in the imagination? Suppose, for instance, that on suddenly turning a corner I collide with one coming from the opposite direction: I receive a slight bruise, have the breath knocked out of me, exchange conventional apologies, and immediately forget the incident. It takes no intimate hold upon me, means nothing except a slight and temporary disturbance in the animal processes. Now suppose, on the other hand, that I take up Froude’s “Cæsar,” and presently find myself, under the guidance of that skilful writer, imagining a hero whose body long ago turned to clay. He is alive in my thought: there is perhaps some notion of his visible presence, and along with this the awakening of sentiments of audacity, magnanimity and the like, that glow with intense life, consume my energy, make me resolve to be like Cæsar in some respect, and cause me to see right and wrong and other great questions as I conceive he would have seen them. Very possibly he keeps me awake after I go to bed—every boy has lain awake thinking of book people. My whole after life will be considerably affected by this experience, and yet this is a contact that takes place only in the imagination. Even as regards the physical organism it is immeasurably more important, as a rule, than the material collision. A blow in the face, if accidental and so not disturbing to the imagination, affects the nerves, the heart, and the digestion very little, but an injurious word or look may cause sleepless nights, dyspepsia, or palpitation. It is, then, the personal idea, the man in the imagination, the real man of power and fruits, that we need primarily to consider, and he appears to be somewhat different from the rather conventional and material man of traditionary social philosophy.

According to this view of the matter society is simply the collective aspect of personal thought. Each man’s imagination, regarded as a mass of personal impressions worked up into a living, growing whole, is a special phase of society; and Mind or Imagination as a whole, that is human thought considered in the largest way as having a growth and organization extending throughout the ages, is the locus of society in the widest possible sense.

It may be objected that society in this sense has no definite limits, but seems to include the whole range of experience. That is to say, the mind is all one growth, and we cannot draw any distinct line between personal thought and other thought. There is probably no such thing as an idea that is wholly independent of minds other than that in which it exists; through heredity, if not through communication, all is connected with the general life, and so in some sense social. What are spoken of above as personal ideas are merely those in which the connection with other persons is most direct and apparent. This objection, however, applies to any way of defining society, and those who take the material standpoint are obliged to consider whether houses, factories, domestic animals, tilled land, and so on are not really parts of the social order. The truth, of course, is that all life hangs together in such a manner that any attempt to delimit a part of it is artificial. Society is rather a phase of life than a thing by itself; it is life regarded from the point of view of personal intercourse. And personal intercourse may be considered either in its primary aspects, such as are treated in this book, or in secondary aspects, such as groups, institutions, or processes. Sociology, I suppose, is the science of these things.