Charles Horton Cooley

“ Will not the intense preoccupation with material production, the hurry and strain of our cities, the draining of life into one channel, at the expense of breadth, richness, and beauty, appear as mad as the crusades, and perhaps of a lower type of madness? Could anything be more indicative of a slight but general insanity than the aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago?
An illustration of this unconsciousness of what is distinctive in our time is the fact that those who participate in momentous changes have seldom any but the vaguest notion of their significance. ”

“ It has often been remarked that to one in love the beloved person appears as a mystery, enveloped, as it were, in a sort of purple cloud. This is doubtless because the lover is undergoing strange alteration in his own mind; fresh vague passions are rising into consciousness out of the dark storehouse of hereditary instinct; he is cast loose from his old anchorage and does not know whither he is driven. The consequent feeling of a power and a strangeness upon him he associates, of course, with the person—commonplace enough, perhaps, to others—who is the symbol and occasion of the experience. ”

“ When I feel sorry for a man in disgrace, it is, no doubt, in most cases, because I have imaginatively partaken of his humiliation; but my compassion for him is not the thing that is shared, but is something additional, a comment on the shared feeling. I may imagine how a suffering man feels—sympathize with him in that sense—and be moved not to pity but to disgust, contempt, or perhaps admiration. ”

“ To have a conspicuously individual way of doing everything is impossible to a sane person, and to attempt it would be to do one’s self a gratuitous injury, by closing the channels of sympathy through which we partake of the life around us. We should save our strength for matters in regard to which persistent conviction impels us to insist upon our own way.
Society, like every living, advancing whole, requires a just union of stability and change, uniformity and differentiation. Conformity is the phase of stability and uniformity, while non-conformity is the phase of differentiation and change. ”

“ Indeed, to know where and how to narrow the activity of the will in order to preserve its tone and vigor for its most essential functions, is a great part of knowing how to live. An incontinent exercise of choice wears people out, so that many break down and yield even essentials to discipline and authority in some form; while many more wish, at times, to do so and indulge themselves, perhaps, in Thomas à Kempis, or “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life.” Not a few so far exhaust the power of self-direction as to be left drifting at the mercy of undisciplined passions. ”

“ Again, any practicable idea of freedom must connect it with some standard of right, in which, like opposing claims in a clearing-house, the divergent tendencies of each person, and of different persons, are disciplined and reconciled. The wrong is the unfree; it is that which tends, on the whole, to restrict personal development. It is no contribution to freedom to turn loose the insane or the criminal, or to allow children to run on the streets instead of going to school. The only test of all these things—of right, freedom, progress, and the like—is the instructed conscience ”

“ But a credible creed is an excellent thing, and the lack of it is a real moral deficiency.
Now in times of intellectual unsettlement, like the present, the ideal may become disorganized and scattered, the face of God blurred to the view, like the reflection of the sun in troubled waters. And at the same time the creeds become incredible, so that, until new ones can be worked out and diffused, each man must either make one for himself—a task to which few are equal—or undergo distraction, or cease to think about such matters, if he can. ”

“ The contrast between our attitudes toward crime and toward insanity is primarily a matter of personal idea and impulse. We understand the criminal act, or think we do, and we feel toward it resentment, or hostile sympathy; while we do not understand the insane act, and so do not resent it, but regard it with pity, curiosity, or disgust. If one man strikes down another to rob him, or in revenge, we can imagine the offender’s state of mind, his motive lives in our thought and is condemned by conscience precisely as if we thought of doing the act ourselves. ”

“ There is no better phenomenon in which to observe personal ascendency than public speaking. When a man takes the floor in an assembly, all eyes are fixed upon him, all imaginations set to work to divine his personality and significance. If he looks like a true and steadfast man, of a spirit kindred with our own, we incline to him before he speaks, and believe that what he says will be congenial and right. ”

“ A child born in a slum, brought up in a demoralized family, and put at some confining and mentally deadening work when ten or twelve years old, is no more free to be healthy, wise, and moral than a Chinese child is free to read Shakespeare. Every social ill involves the enslavement of individuals.
This idea of freedom is quite in accord with a general, though vague, sentiment among us; it is an idea of fair play, of giving everyone a chance; and nothing arouses more general and active indignation among our people than the belief that someone or some class is not getting a fair chance. ”

“ Thus a boy gloats over something he has made with his scroll-saw, over the bird he has brought down with his gun, or over his collection of stamps or eggs; a girl gloats over her new clothes, and over the approving words or looks of others; a farmer over his fields and his stock; a business man over his trade and his bank account; a mother over her child; the poet over a successful quatrain; the self-righteous man over the state of his soul; and in like manner everyone gloats over the prosperity of any cherished idea. ”

“ The suggestibility of crowds is a peculiar form of that limitation of choice by the environment already discussed. We have here a very transient environment which owes its power over choice to the vague but potent emotion so easily generated in dense aggregates. The thick humanity is in itself exciting, and the will is further stupefied by the sense of insignificance, by the strangeness of the situation, and by the absence, as a rule, of any separate purpose to maintain an independent momentum. A man is like a ship in that he cannot guide his course unless he has way on. ”

“ There is pressure in the obscure reservoirs of hereditary passion. In some way, which we can hardly expect to define, this energy is tapped, an instinct is disengaged, the personal suggestion conveyed in the glance is felt as the symbol, the master-key that can unlock hidden tendency. It is much the same as when electricity stored and inert in a jar is loosed by a chance contact of wires that completes the circuit; the mind holds fast the life-imparting suggestion ”

“ Every occupation which is followed with enthusiasm has its heroes, men who stand for the idea of power or efficient action as understood by persons of a particular training and habit. The world of commerce and industry is full of hero-worship, and men who have made great fortunes are admired, not unjustly, for the personal prowess such success implies; while people of a finer intellectual development have their notion of power correspondingly refined, and to them the artist, the poet, the man of science, the philanthropist, may stand for the highest sort of successful action. ”

“ How far can I use you as a symbol in the development of my instinctive tendency? The scientific historian may insist on asking, What are you? because the instinct he is trying to gratify is the need to make things consistent to the intelligence. But few persons have this need strongly developed, in comparison with those of a more emotional character; and so most will care more for the other questions. The scientific point of view can never be that of the most of mankind, and science, it seems to me, can hardly be more than the critic and chastener of popular faith, not its leader. ”

“ If we ask what are the mental traits that distinguish a leader, the only answer seems to be that he must, in one way or another, be a great deal of a man, or at least appear to be. He must stand for something to which men incline, and so take his place by right as a focus of their thought.
Evidently he must be the best of his kind available. It is impossible that he should stand forth as an archetype, unless he is conceived as superior, in some respect, to all others within range of the imagination. Nothing that is seen to be second-rate can be an ideal ”

“ There is, of course, the desire to accomplish some worthy end, to effectuate some cherished sentiment which the world appears to ignore, to benefit the oppressed, to advance human knowledge, or the like. But behind that is the vague need of self-expression, of creation, of a momentous experience, so that one may know that one has really lived. And the finer imaginations are likely to find this career of novelty and daring, not in the somewhat outworn paths of war and exploration, but in new and precarious kinds of social activity. ”

“ If a man appears to be about to do something brutal or dishonest, we may either encounter him on his present low plane of life by knocking him down or calling a policeman, or we may try to work upon his higher consciousness by giving him to understand that we feel sure a person of his self-respect and good repute will not degrade himself, but that if anything so improbable and untoward should occur, he must, of course, expect the disappointment and contempt of those who before thought well of him. In other words, we threaten, as courteously as possible, his social self. ”

“ No matter what a man does, he is not fully sane or human unless there is a spirit of freedom in him, a soul unconfined by purpose and larger than the practicable world. And this is really what those mean who inculcate the suppression of the self; they mean that its rigidity must be broken up by growth and renewal, that it must be more or less decisively “born again.” A healthy, self must be both vigorous and plastic, a nucleus of solid, well-knit private purpose and feeling, guided and nourished by sympathy. ”

“ In our view of freedom we have a right to survey all times and countries and from them form for our own social order an ideal condition, which shall offer to each individual all the encouragements to growth and culture that the world has ever or anywhere enjoyed. Any narrowness or lack of symmetry in life in general is reflected in the contraction or warping of personal development, and so constitutes a lack of freedom. The social order should not exaggerate one or a few aspects of human nature at the expense of others, but extend its invitations to all our higher tendencies. ”

“ Ordinary personal affection does not fill our ideal of right or justice, but encroaches, like all special impulses. It is not at all uncommon to wrong one person out of affection for another. If, for instance, I am able to procure a desirable position for a friend, it may well happen that there is another and a fitter man, whom I do not know or do not care for, from whose point of view my action is an injurious abuse of power. It is evident that good can be identified with no simple emotion, but must be sought in some wider phase of life that embraces all points of view. ”

“ To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self.
As hero-worship becomes more imaginative, it merges insensibly into that devotion to ideal persons that is called religious. It has often been pointed out that the feeling men have toward a visible leader and master like Lincoln, Lee, Napoleon, or Garibaldi, is psychologically much the same thing as the worship of the ideal persons of religion. ”

“ This image is probably distorted, since pride deceives by a narrowing of the imagination, but it is stable, and because it is so, because he feels sure of it, he is not disturbed by any passing breath of blame. If he is aware of such a thing at all he dismisses it as a vagary of no importance, feeling the best judgment of the world to be securely in his favor. If he should ever lose this conviction, if some catastrophe should shatter the image, he would be a broken man, and, if far gone in years, would perhaps not raise his head again. ”

“ What we call distinctively an ideal is only a relatively complex and finished product of this activity. The past, as it lives in our minds, is never a mere repetition of old experience, but is always colored by our present feeling, is always idealized in some sense; and it is the same with our anticipation of the future, so that to wholesome thought expectation is hope. Thus the mind is ever an artist, re-creating things in a manner congenial to itself, and special arts are only a more deliberate expression of a general tendency. ”

“ If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sense of youth. To admire, to expand one’s self, to forget the rut, to have a sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of life. ”

“ Every outreaching person has masters in whose imagined presence he drops resistance and becomes like clay in the hands of the potter, that they may make something better of him. He does this from a feeling that the master is more himself than he is; there is a receptive enthusiasm, a sense of new life that swallows up the old self and makes his ordinary personality appear tedious, base and despicable. Humility of this sort goes with self-reverence, because a sense of the higher or ideal self plunges the present and commonplace self into humility. ”

“ A subtler kind of withdrawal takes place in the imagination alone by curtailing ambition, by trimming down one’s idea of himself to a measure that need not fear further diminution. How secure and restful it would be if one could be consistently and sincerely humble! There is no sweeter feeling than contrition, self-abnegation, after a course of alternate conceit and mortification. ”