Chapter 9

EMPATHY

_THE mountain rises._ What do we mean when we employ this form of words? Some mountains, we are told, have originated in an _upheaval._ But even if this particular mountain did, we never saw it and geologists are still disputing about HOW and WHETHER. So the _rising_ we are talking about is evidently not that probable or improbable _upheaval._ On the other hand all geologists tell us that every mountain is undergoing a steady _lowering_ through its particles being weathered away and washed down; and our knowledge of landslips and avalanches shows us that the mountain, so far from rising, is _descending._ Of course we all know that, objects the Reader, and of course nobody imagines that the rock and the earth of the mountain is rising, or that the mountain is getting up or growing taller! All we mean is that the mountain _looks_ as if it were rising.

The mountain _looks!_ Surely here is a case of putting the cart before the horse. No; we cannot explain the mountain _rising_ by the mountain _looking,_ for the only _looking_ in the business is _our_ looking _at_ the mountain. And if the Reader objects again that these are all _figures of speech,_ I shall answer that _Empathy_ is what explains why we employ figures of speech at all, and occasionally employ them, as in the case of this rising mountain, when we know perfectly well that the figure we have chosen expresses the exact reverse of the objective truth. Very well; then, (says the Reader) we will avoid all figures of speech and say merely: when we look at the mountain _we somehow or other think of the action of rising._ Is that sufficiently literal and indisputable?

So literal and indisputable a statement of the case, I answer, that it explains, when we come to examine it, why we have said that the mountain rises. For if the Reader remembers my chapter on shape-perception, he will have no difficulty in answering why we should have a thought of rising when we look at the mountain, since we cannot look at the mountain, nor at a tree, a tower or anything of which we similarly say that it _rises,_ without lifting our glance, raising our eye and probably raising our head and neck, all of which raising and lifting unites into a general awareness of something _rising._ The rising of which we are aware is going on in us. But, as the Reader will remember also, when we are engrossed by something outside ourselves, as we are engrossed in looking at the shape (for we can _look_ at only the shape, not the _substance)_ of that mountain we cease thinking about ourselves, and cease thinking about ourselves exactly in proportion as we are thinking of the mountain's shape. What becomes therefore of our awareness of raising or lifting or _rising?_ What can become of it (so long as it continues to be there!) except that it coalesces with the shape we are looking at; in short that the _rising_ continuing to be thought, but no longer to be thought of with reference to ourselves (since we aren't thinking of ourselves), is thought of in reference to what we _are_ thinking about, namely the mountain, or rather the mountain's shape, which is, so to speak, responsible for any thought of rising, since it obliges us to lift, raise or rise ourselves in order to take stock of it. It is a case exactly analogous to our transferring the measuring done by our eye to the line of which we say that it _extends_ from A to B, when in reality the only _extending_ has been the extending of our glance. It is a case of what I have called the tendency to merge the _activities_ of the perceiving subject with the qualities of the perceived object. Indeed if I insisted so much upon this tendency of our mind, I did so largely because of its being at the bottom of the phenomenon of _Empathy,_ as we have just seen it exemplified in the _mountain which rises._

If this is Empathy, says the Reader (relieved and reassured), am I to understand that Empathy is nothing beyond _attributing what goes on in us when we look at a shape to the shape itself?_

I am sorry that the matter is by no means so simple! If what we attributed to each single shape was only the precise action which we happen to be accomplishing in the process of looking at it, Empathy would indeed be a simple business, but it would also be a comparatively poor one. No. The _rising_ of the mountain is an idea started by the awareness of our own lifting or raising of our eyes, head or neck, and it is an idea containing the awareness of that lifting or raising. But it is far more than the idea merely of that lifting or raising which we are doing at this particular present moment and in connexion with this particular mountain. That present and particular raising and lifting is merely the nucleus to which gravitates our remembrance of all similar acts of raising, or _rising._ which we have ever accomplished or seen accomplished, _raising_ or _rising_ not only of our eyes and head, but of every other part of our body, and of every part of every other body which we ever perceived to be rising. And not merely the thought of past _rising_ but the thought also of future rising. All these risings, done by ourselves or watched in others, actually experienced or merely imagined, have long since united together in our mind, constituting a sort of composite photograph whence all differences are eliminated and wherein all similarities are fused and intensified: the general idea of _rising,_ not "I rise, rose, will rise, it rises, has risen or will rise" but merely _rising as_ such, _rising_ as it is expressed not in any particular tense or person of the verb _to rise,_ but in that verb's infinitive. It is this universally applicable notion of rising, which is started in our mind by the awareness of the particular present acts of raising or rising involved in our looking at that mountain, and it is this general idea of rising, _i.e._ of _upward movement,_ which gets transferred to the mountain along with our own particular present activity of raising some part of us, and which thickens and enriches and marks that poor little thought of a definite raising with the interest, the emotional fullness gathered and stored up in its long manifold existence. In other words: what we are transferring (owing to that tendency to merge the activities of the perceiving subject with the qualities of the perceived object) from ourselves to the looked at shape of the mountain, is not merely the thought of the rising which is really being done by us at that moment, but the thought and emotion, the _idea of rising as such_ which had been accumulating in our mind long before we ever came into the presence of that particular mountain. And it is this complex mental process, by which we (all unsuspectingly) invest that inert mountain, that bodiless shape, with the stored up and averaged and essential modes of our activity--it is this process whereby we make the mountain _raise itself,_ which constitutes what, accepting Prof. Titchener's translation[*] of the German word _Einfuehlung,_ I have called Empathy.

[*] From _en_ and _pascho, epathon_.

The German word _Einfuehlung_ "feeling into"--derived from a _verb to feel oneself into something_ ("sich in Etwas ein fuehlen") was in current use even before Lotze and Viscber applied it to aesthetics, and some years before Lipps (1897) and Wundt (1903) adopted it into psychological terminology; and as it is now consecrated, and no better occurs to me, I have had to adopt it, although the literal connotations of the German word have surrounded its central meaning (as I have just defined it) with several mischievous misinterpretations. Against two of these I think it worth while to warn the Reader, especially as, while so doing, I can, in showing what it is not, make it even clearer what Empathy really is. The first of these two main misinterpretations is based upon the reflexive form of the German verb "_sich einfuehlen_" (to feel _oneself_ into) and it defines, or rather does not define, Empathy as a metaphysical and quasi-mythological projection of the ego into the object or shape under observation; a notion incompatible with the fact that Empathy, being only another of those various mergings of the activities of the perceiving subject with the qualities of the perceived object wherewith we have already dealt, depends upon a comparative or momentary abeyance of all thought of an ego; if we became aware that it is _we_ who are thinking the rising, we who are _feeling_ the rising, we should not think or feel that the mountain did the rising. The other (and as we shall later see) more justifiable misinterpretation of the word Empathy is based on its analogy with _sympathy,_ and turns it into a kind of sympathetic, or as it has been called, _inner, i.e._ merely _felt, mimicry_ of, for instance, the mountain's _rising._ Such mimicry, not only _inner_ and _felt,_ but outwardly manifold, does undoubtedly often result from very lively _empathic_ imagination. But as it is the mimicking, inner or outer, of movements and actions which, like the _rising_ of the mountain, take place only in our imagination, it presupposes such previous animation of the inanimate, and cannot therefore be taken either as constituting or explaining Empathy itself.

Such as I have defined and exemplified it in our Rising Mountain, Empathy is, together with mere Sensation, probably the chief factor of preference, that is of an alternative of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, in aesthetic contemplation, the muscular adjustments and the measuring, comparing and coordinating activities by which Empathy is started, being indeed occasionally difficult and distressing, but giving in themselves little more than a negative satisfaction, at the most that of difficulty overcome and suspense relieved. But although nowhere so fostered as in the contemplation of shapes, Empathy exists or tends to exist throughout our mental life. It is, indeed, one of our simpler, though far from absolutely elementary, psychological processes, entering into what is called imagination, sympathy, and also into that inference from our own inner experience which has shaped all our conceptions of an outer world, and given to the intermittent and heterogeneous sensations received from without the framework of our constant and highly unified inner experience, that is to say, of our own activities and aims. Empathy can be traced in all of modes of speech and thought, particularly in the universal attribution of _doing_ and _having_ and _tending_ where all we can really assert is successive and varied _being._ Science has indeed explained away the anthropomorphic implications of _Force_ and _Energy, Attraction_ and _Repulsion_; and philosophy has reduced _Cause_ and _Effect_ from implying intention and effort to meaning mere constant succession. But Empathy still helps us to many valuable analogies; and it is possible that without its constantly checked but constantly renewed action, human thought would be without logical cogency, as it certainly would be without poetical charm. Indeed if Empathy is so recent a discovery, this may be due to its being part and parcel of our thinking; so that we are surprised to learn its existence, as Moliere's good man was to hear that be talked prose.