Part 7

The cultivation of the aesthetic, pleasurable and benevolent emotions on the one hand, and the elimination of violent emotional excitements or discordant and morbid emotions on the other, are conditions as essential for the physical health as for the happiness of the individual. Emotional sensibility is a condition necessary for the full appreciation and enjoyment of art, and of all that is pleasurable and beautiful, but when emotion is allowed to colour reason, the mind is closed to truth, knowledge and logic.

Art gratifies the emotions as truth should gratify the intellect. It is not always fully realized how large a part emotional elements, which may embrace every form of sensory and erotic excitation, as well as the whole tone of the subjective mind, play in the most intellectual criticism of an artistic achievement. Of these elements some may be irrelevant as well as irrational, and by no means realized by the critic at the time of writing his appreciation. Elliot Smith and Pear illustrate this point in a way few people would want to dispute. "Let us suppose that a musical critic, after hearing a new symphony by an unconventional composer, immediately writes a lengthy appreciation of the performance. It is clear that nobody would expect him to be able to give off-hand an account of his reasons for every sentence of the criticism. But it is obvious that a single phrase in this account may be but the apex of a whole pyramid of memories emanating from the critic's technical training, his attitude towards the new departure, experiences highly coloured with emotion which a few notes of music may have evoked, and his mental condition at the time he heard the performance. Nobody denies that these may have shaped or even determined his criticism. But who believes either that they were all conscious at the time of writing the article, or that he could resuscitate them without much time and trouble and perhaps the help of a cross-examiner?"

In addition to the causal, largely emotional, elements might be added a prime determinant in artistic appreciation, namely, cosmic suggestion. In the case of a leading critic, overwhelmingly self-confident and secure of his position, the mere knowledge of the consensus of informed and uninformed opinion being favourable or otherwise might conceivably arouse an equally illogical desire to be esoteric and different at all costs. An antagonistic autosuggestion of this sort unconsciously underlying a critic's attitude would more than negative any body of opinion in one direction.[74] But if such artificial and diverse influences can affect the most highly trained and most honest critic, how much more will they affect the credulous and untrained? Far greater will be the power of authoritative opinion in influencing those whose emotional sensibility is blunt and untrained, who gape in unresponsive perplexity at some artist's canvas, waiting to have the emotions they do not feel suggested to them, and who, when given the lead, infuse by the power of association into the meaningless daub or the subtlest motif alike the same spirit of satisfaction they derive from the garish crudities which alone, unaided, find a responsive echo in their breasts. It is well known that the less tutored the intellect the more real, as a rule, are the creatures of the imagination. Children and savages have a wonderful faculty for believing in the reality of their illusions. Does not this account for the fact that the less clearly a thing is understood the greater is the power of the imagination in supplying a meaning. A certain dimness and mystery or quality of incomprehensibility invariably adds to the respect and awe paid to works of art and their creators, officially labelled as "great." Sometimes mere age or distance produces the requisite dimness. Racine considered this atmosphere of distance a necessary device of stagecraft for the proper presentation of a hero. "On peut dire que le respect que l'on a pour les heros augmente a mesure qu'ils s'eloignent de nous."[75] In the same way the intensity of horror bestowed upon the arch-villain of the piece is increased in proportion to the distance away from which he is regarded; in other words, the less you know about him. But this does not hold good for the heroes of the histrionic stage more truly than for the heroes and arch-villains of the wider stage of the world. The principle can be applied equally to the heroes of art, religion, politics or war. It is not, of course, the dimness or distance _per se_ which magnifies the object of appreciation; unaided that would merely have the opposite effect. The factor of dimness, by placing the object further from the grasp of _reason_, enables the playwright, politician, or critic, as the case may be, to play with greater ease and certainty upon the emotions of his audience, and by force of suggestion to endue his puppet more completely with the symbolic quality he wishes to present. In spite of Medici prints, oleographic processes and the extension of culture which renders any one liable to receive choice samples of the Italian Masters free with a packet of cigarettes, what William Hazlitt said with reference to Michael Angelo is still literally true. "We know," he writes, "nothing of him but his name. It is an abstraction of fame and greatness. Our admiration of him supports itself, and our idea of his superiority seems self-evident, because it is attached to his name only."

Convention is a very real and wellnigh irresistible power. Not a few of our most cherished valuations--artistic, religious, political and social--are conventional fetishes which have been slowly evolved in the course of a great number of years as the result of determining factors, for the most part accidental and forgotten, and probably called into existence for totally different and unconnected reasons. Yet the appropriate emotional reaction, evoked by the association of an object with such a conventional valuation or sentiment, may be just as keenly and genuinely felt as though it resulted from the awakening of some instinctive or innate law of our nature. Impressionability is not a quality to be despised, but on the contrary to be carefully guarded from contamination. It is by means of emotion that all pleasure and pain, all aversion and attraction, and all sense of the aesthetic is recorded by the senses. Emotional sensibility may be compared to an instrument that may be so finely made that it is capable of registering the most delicate and exact vibrations so that any harsh sound will injure it, while, on the other hand, it may be made of a texture so coarse that it will respond instantly and indiscriminately to any loud and crude noise. This instrument has an inherent quality of excellence with a potentiality of exactness that may be developed in a great variety of directions.

The many factors which play a part in aesthetic appreciation have been abundantly explored by psychological writers.[76] They have traced the great variety of ways in which art can be the means of evoking sympathetic emotions by connecting its subject with the inexhaustible interest in personality. They have cited the part played in inducing pleasurable sensations in music by the association of range, depth of tone and pitch with the expression of human passions; and in pictorial art, the appeal to muscular sensibility by suggested associations with movement and form, or the effect of straight lines and rounded forms in inducing sensations of vigour and repose. More obvious are the appeals to the sexual instincts. There are also associations that give beauty to colours, pleasurableness to those tints that suggest youth, health, vigour and feminine charm.

It is easy to understand the agreeableness of symbols of strength and solidity; the restfulness of economy in presentation, the pleasing effect of contrast and symmetry, variety and unity, of balance and the laws of proportion and musical ratios, or of harmony and regularity. The laws of relativity or comparison and of familiarity and strangeness are factors which play a part in all appreciation. Finally, there is a more exclusively intellectual pleasure in the process of analytical valuation of artistic production.

We cannot acquire truth by means of the emotions, which can but be the means of informing us of our personal relation towards our environment. They may reveal us to ourselves, or may register the reflection of our environment within us; but the consequences of emotion cannot be regarded as ephemeral, for all emotional excitation must have a permanent residual effect upon the tone of the subjective mind.

(3) JUDGMENT OF ENDS

Without attempting to catalogue or enumerate the various intellectual and mental processes, consigning them to interminable classes and subdivisions of volitional, cognitive, affective and cogitative states or acts, labelled like so many distinct specimens in a collector's museum, it may yet be possible to detach certain features involved in the process of moral judgment which are distinguishable from the essentially instinctive, emotional and suggested elements we have been considering. The danger involved in reducing psychological processes to their constituent elements and treating of each element as though it were static and dissociated, is that it is apt to obscure a true appreciation of the actual manifestations of personality which result from complex and interactionary elements in continuous motion, forming one integral whole in constant process of influencing and being influenced by its environment. The whole is always more and something different from the sum of its parts. The factors here specially referred to which may determine in greater or lesser degree the nature and direction of moral valuation are deliberative, critical and analytic. These are essentially the intellectual and _objective_[77] processes exercised to the best advantage when freed to the greatest possible extent from instinctive and emotional complications. Judgments formed under such conditions involve the realization of the ends and effects of conduct, and an assignment of "desirableness" to those ends. It is clear that an intellectual judgment of this nature, assigning value to the ends of conduct, must take into account those inherent characteristics and instincts which underlie all motives and interests. Thus, we recognize the fact of the instinct of self-preservation, and are right in assigning the qualification "good" to life as denoting its desirableness; similarly the instinct of acquisition is general and fundamental in the human species,[78] we accordingly assign the qualification "good" to property and wealth, and to its destruction, "evil"; the abstract value of the end of this instinct is intensified and held in greater respect the more it is realized to have been the means by which the surplus energy of mankind has been utilized to accumulate the capital essential to the development of civilization. The desirableness of both life and wealth is also considerably increased or modified by collateral associations, by the pleasures they enable us to experience.

There is in all judgment of the morality of an action a perception of the end or consequence of that action. The clearness or dimness of the perception will depend upon the habits of thought and the organization of motives--or lack of it--which result from the native tendencies and development of the subjective mind. The norm of valuation which we apply to moral conduct is conditioned by many conscious and unconscious factors which determine our idea of "desirableness," and the standard will approximate to the conventional and common standard of the community in so far as we are influenced by our environment--or in proportion to our amenability to cosmic suggestion. It is on account of the obvious desire for pleasure and for avoidance of pain that Utilitarians are justified in making use of that general fact as a standard of utility. This in no way implies that the motives of all conduct are efforts to obtain pleasurable sensation or to avoid pain. The mistake of this discredited doctrine of psychological hedonism lay in confusing the motive or impulse to action with the valuation of conduct. It is an unfortunate but undeniable fact that conduct is least often determined by valuation. Realization or anticipation of the end of action is not the necessary stimulus of action, neither does it conform to volition or striving; but realization of consequences frequently inhibits the fulfilment of volition. Both conduct and volition are determined by the relation of subject to object, and by the constitution of the ego, conditioned, as it is, by the innumerable factors of heredity and environment.

(4) COSMIC SUGGESTION

Public opinion is often spoken of as something mysterious and powerful, to be recognized and submitted to, but not to be explained. Napoleon is credited with having said: "Public opinion is a power invisible, mysterious, and irresistible." Some writers, failing to appreciate the true significance and nature of this dynamic factor in the formation of public sentiment, are content to fall back on the convenient subterfuge of Divine agency as full and sufficient explanation. Thus they speak of a "common consciousness" which is the arbiter of the morals and faiths of men, a consciousness which is subject to evolutionary progress, and yet owes its existence to Divine revelation.

However inadequately, the attempt has nevertheless been made in these pages to present a wider and, at the same time, a more precise definition of those psychic and vital forces, included in the term environment, which play so great a part in the formation and growth of human beliefs, opinions and sentiments, in binding together nations, communities and groups, and no less a part in setting them against one another. For lack of a better, the designation "cosmic suggestion" has been used as a generic term to describe the force resulting from the accumulative suggestions or impulsions of aggregations of individual agents, between whom and the subjects or recipients a state of _rapport_ is more or less established. It is an aspect, or perhaps more accurately a product, of the vital energy of the cosmos. In a community or a mass of men moved by common emotions and ideas, each individual plays the double role of operator and affected object or recipient.

The communication of a proposition by suggestion is distinguished from, though often accompanied by, other means by which ideas are communicated through the senses, involving rational processes which produce conviction. Emotional suggestions are either rejected or accepted unquestioningly in the absence of any logical reason. The supreme importance and general applicability in normal waking life of this wider aspect of hypnotic suggestion is seldom adequately appreciated by students of social development. That the faiths and convictions of men do not depend upon their appeal to "man's reasoning faculties" is, however, usually admitted. Lecky frequently dwells on this fact, as in the following passage: "In most men the love of truth is so languid, and their reluctance to encounter mental prejudices is so great, that they yield their judgments without an effort to the current, withdraw their minds from all opinions or arguments opposed to their own, and thus speedily convince themselves of the truth of what they wish to believe."

Dr. McDougall recognizes, as do most modern psychologists, the great social importance of this "current" of which Lecky speaks; he terms it mass-suggestion. "Children," he says, "largely in virtue of their suggestibility, rapidly absorb the knowledge, beliefs, and especially the sentiments of their social environment. But most adults also remain suggestible, especially towards mass-suggestion, and towards the propositions which they know to be supported by the whole weight of society, or by long tradition."[79] This also he calls prestige suggestion. Individual suggestibility, he considers, is conditioned by native disposition and character, and dependent upon the relative strengths of the two instincts of self-assertion and subjection. He does not, however, appear to assign to this factor of suggestion any conspicuous part in the excitation of such emotions as, for instance, anger, moral indignation, shame and remorse. But the simultaneous excitation of the same emotion in crowds is attributed to the action of the gregarious instinct which is accountable for the sympathetic induction of emotion. The explanation given of the fact that the instinctive behaviour of one animal directly excites similar behaviour on the part of his fellows, consists in the assumption that among gregarious animals each of the principal instincts has a special perceptual inlet that is adapted to receive the sense-impressions made by the expressions of the same instinct in other animals of the same species: thus, for example, the fear instinct, _inter alia_, has a special perceptual inlet that renders it excitable by the sound of the cry of fear; the instinct of pugnacity is similarly excited through a perceptual inlet by the sound of the roar of anger, and so on. Whatever the value of this assumption it is clear that the emotional excitement of an aggregation of individuals reacts with cumulative intensity upon each member of it. It is sufficient, however, to say that there exists in the human species a fundamental impulse of gregarious attraction, analogous in the physical world to the law of gravitation, which tends to produce aggregations of men and to intensify their suggestibility in relation to sheer weight of numbers and proximity. If we accept the view that the subjective mind is liable to be directly influenced by other subjective minds with which it is _en rapport_, the hypothesis of special perceptual inlets, designed for each instinct to receive only the corresponding sense-impressions derived from the efferent action of the same instinct in other individuals, becomes of secondary importance. Any cause which simultaneously provokes emotional excitement in a large body of people tends to bring them into _rapport_, thence onwards a community of feeling has been established, like elements coalesce, foreign elements are dissipated or repulsed, the mass will think, feel and act as a collective whole, the impulse or emotion of one will re-echo in all, as when a certain note is struck all the chords in the instrument which are attuned to it are set vibrating. A skilful orator who can once succeed in evoking strong emotional response in his audience is in the most favourable position for transmitting any proposition by suggestion; any assertion is then likely to be received unquestioningly and with the strength of conviction, any suggestion to be resolved into action.

An orator of the ecstatic and fanatical type will endeavour, by working himself into a frenzy of excitement, to throw himself into the _subjective_ state, for thus he is in closest _rapport_ with his environment. This is the secret of the power of demagogues and of other worthless and otherwise insignificant individuals. It is said to have been the method of one of the most extraordinary characters of modern times--Rasputin, or Grigori Yefimovitsch, a gross, illiterate, debauched and fanatical Siberian monk, who, up to the time of his murder in December 1916, had the reputation of being the most powerful man in Russia. According to the few reliable accounts of him that are obtainable, the influence of this man's personality and the religio-erotic frenzies which characterized his ministrations were such that women of the highest culture and refinement would prostitute themselves, body and soul, in obedience to his suggestion, ministers and high state officials habitually sought his favours, and among the masses he was a constant object of idolatry.

Does any one suppose that if Mark Antony could have circulated his famous speech on the death of Caesar in pamphlet form, or could have published his appeal in a leading daily, he would have chosen that method? Or if he had done so that he would have attained as striking a result as by the fire of his oratory? This brings us to a consideration of the difference between written propaganda and that which is spoken or acted and accompanied by emotional suggestion.