Sympathizer

“ Still, it is to be noted that the sympathizer does not fully attain the level of the sufferer; hence the sufferer, aware of this, and desiring the satisfaction of a full accord with his friend, tones down his own vehemence till it can be fully met by the other; which very circumstance is eventually for his own good, and adds to, rather than detracts from, the tranquillizing influence of a friendly presence. We sober down our feelings still more before casual acquaintance and strangers; and hence the greater equality of temper in the man of the world than in the recluse. ”

“ I wish to disparage no one—certainly not those who sympathize with me; but I must say I need success more than I need sympathy, and that I have not seen the so much greater evidence of getting success from my sympathizers than from those who are denounced as the contrary. ”

“ Chapter V. makes an application of these remarks to explain the difference between the Amiable and the Respectable Virtues. The soft, the gentle, and the amiable qualities are manifested when, as sympathizers, we enter fully into the expressed sentiments of another; the great, the awful and respectable virtues of self-denial, are shown when the principal person concerned brings down his own case to the level that the most ordinary sympathy can easily attain to. ”

“ Do we become more, or less, sympathetic as we get more civilised? Two people who think and feel alike are said to be in sympathy, and the more primitive and uniform the conditions of life are, the more must those who live together under them think and feel alike. ”

“ So far our sentiments are founded upon the direct sympathy with the person who acts. Nor is the indirect sympathy with those who receive the benefit of such actions less sensibly felt. Whenever we place ourselves in the situation of these last, with what warm and affectionate fellow-feeling do we enter into their gratitude towards those who served them so essentially? We embrace, as it were, their benefactor along with them. Our heart readily sympathizes with the highest transports of their grateful affection. No honours, no rewards, we think, can be too great for them to bestow upon him. ”

“ Sympathy the sympathy of the Priest and the Levite, looking on, and acknowledging, but holding itself aloof from mortal suffering. Can such hollow sympathy reach the broken of heart, and does the blessing of those who are ready to perish answer it? Does it hold back the lash from the slave, or sweeten his bitter bread? One's heart and soul are becoming weary of this sympathy, this heartless mockery of feeling; sick of the common cant of hypocrisy, wreathing the artificial flowers of sentiment over unutterable pollution and unimaginable wrong. ”

“ It is not my habit to boast of a warm heart for the poor and suffering. But my sympathy is no less sincere because I do not carry my love and solicitude for the common people constantly at my tongue's end. ”

“ Yet I seek not a fellow-feeling in my misery. No sympathy may I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be participated. But now, that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I seek for sympathy? I am content to suffer alone, while my sufferings shall endure: when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my memory. ”

“ Humanity is thus taught him by sympathy: where is this sympathy placed?—in the nerves: the nerves are the communicants with outward nature; the more delicate the nerves, the finer the sympathies; hence, women and children are more alive to sympathy than men. Well, mark me: do not these nerves have attraction and sympathy—-not only with human suffering, but with the powers of what is falsely termed inanimate nature? ”

“ As it is, sympathy implies an imaginative extension of individuality, which is of enormous social value. But we remain, none the less, isolated each in his own universe, and our fellow-men and women are but shapes in the panorama, the strange, fantastic dream, which the Veiled Showman unrolls before us. ”

“ There is some sympathy which enervates instead of strengthening. It thinks of itself, it thinks of the happiness of having to itself the object of its sympathy, it seeks merely to soothe. But the true sympathy goes far beyond that; the true sympathy never thinks of itself at all. It is simply concentrated upon one thought—how can I, in this trial-time, when my brother or my sister is stricken down by my side, how can I nerve and strengthen him or her to rise to the glorious vocation to which God has called him or called her, to strengthen them to be what God would have them be? ”

“ But after the dawn of self-consciousness, the social affections are developed, sympathy comes into existence, and this sympathy is as truly a part of our nature as any of our other affections are; the only difference between it and those which are more primitive being this, that it (sympathy, namely) exists only after self-consciousness has declared itself, whereas the others exist before that idea has been called forth. ”

“ To be candid, Sir, I like practical sympathy better than sentimental; the one is a reality, the other a sham or a mawkish emotion, little less than a self-compliment to a refined but useless sensibility—something which excites the sentimentalism of a drawing-room, when we are looking on the print of an hospital or the wreck of a vessel hanging on the wall, but which gives no relief to a rescued sailor, or a discharged incurable. ”

“ On all sides he is met by practice widely at variance with profession. Pride, worldliness, [Pg 220] want of sympathy exist among those who should be the foremost to guide, sustain, and receive him. All the warm springs which gushed up in his broken heart are choked, his softened spirit is hardened again, and he returns in despair to bury his sorrows and drown his anxieties in the debauchery of his former creed. ”

“ Viewed from the side of feeling or affect, the gregarious instinct is seen as "sympathy," which in its most characteristic form is the process which produces in every member of the group [p. 91] any affective state which may arise in one of its number. Here, again, the sympathy is especially important from the standpoint of the welfare of the group when the member of the group whose affect is the object of the sympathy is its leader. ”

“ Bain has shown that the love of applause, the feeling of praise, the desire to win the respect of our fellows, even the fear to merit their condemnation, spring from the instinct of sympathy. Indeed, sympathy itself is founded upon the instinct of self-preservation; seen alike in that feeling which impels the members of a community to band together for protection, or in that altruism which prompts the strong to help the weak in their burdens. ”

“ How, I would simply ask, can he feel for others who has no sense of sympathy with his own suffering nature? If the well of human kindness be dried up within him, how can he give to the parched throats the refreshing waters of compassion? ”

“ But perhaps we have not yet learned human sympathy; or perhaps it is the divine that we should have instead. Perhaps our sympathy is too often one of common objects or of common lusts. Perhaps each one seeks his glory, rather that he may dazzle others with it than lend his light to them. ”

“ Our sympathy with sorrow, though not more real, has been more taken notice of than our sympathy with joy. The word sympathy, in its most proper and primitive signification, denotes our fellow-feeling with the sufferings, not that with the enjoyments, of others. A late ingenious and subtile philosopher thought it necessary to prove, by arguments, that we had a real sympathy with joy, and that congratulation was a principle of human nature.1 Nobody, I believe, ever thought it necessary to prove that compassion was such. ”

“ Wells himself is not far from this view. See God the Invisible King, pp. 73, 76, and this book, pp. 39-40.
"But sympathy!" it may be said—"You have left sympathy out of the reckoning. Unless we are not only 'individuals' but iron-clad egotists, we suffer with others more keenly, sometimes, than in our own persons." Sympathy, no doubt, is, like the summer sun and the frost of winter, a fact of common experience causing us alternate joy and pain; but it means no sort of breach in the wall of "individuation." ”

“ But until it does declare itself, our sympathy has no existence. In proof of this you have only to observe how little sympathy very young children have in the sufferings or enjoyments of each other. In them the idea of self is either not developed at all, or it is but feebly developed; the mere feeling of self is predominant or all-absorbing, and hence they are wrapped up in their own sensational and emotional world, and take little or no interest in the happiness or misery of their companions. ”

“ This leads us on to the class of sympathetic emotions. For the sympathetic emotions are those which centre, not round the self, but round some other self in whose welfare an interest is, in some way and for some reason, aroused. ”

“ He certainly intended no jeer at the religion of his subordinates. It was simply that he wanted understanding.
Now sympathy is inherent in all children, and is the means whereby they acquire all the real knowledge they have. A girl being a mother to her doll, a boy being a soldier or hunter, is exercising and training the most valuable of all gifts—imaginative sympathy. It is the only emotion which brings real knowledge of the world about you. ”

“ These souls, which are alone capable of separating themselves from themselves, alone enjoy the privilege of sympathizing with themselves and of receiving of their own sufferings only a reflex, softened by sympathy. ”

“ Moreover, she recognized amidst all his roughness a certain kind of sympathy which she could not resent, because it was not aggressive. For to some natures the expression of sympathy is an irritation; to be sympathized with means to be pitied, and to be pitied means to be looked down upon. ”

“ Of the social Passions As it is a divided sympathy which renders the whole set of passions just now mentioned, upon most occasions, so ungraceful and disagreeable; so there is another set opposite to these, which a redoubled sympathy renders almost always peculiarly agreeable and becoming. Generosity, humanity, kindness, compassion, mutual friendship and esteem, all the social and benevolent affections, when expressed in the countenance or behaviour, even towards those who are not peculiarly connected with ourselves, please the indifferent spectator upon almost every occasion. ”

“ We regard it as the simple continuation in another of the sympathetic contagion, of the solidarity which is first manifested in the interior of an organism. In the exterior as well as in the interior of our body, sympathy is the only psychological law of expression; to interpret is to sympathize. In a mechanical view, this sympathy is a real communication of movements, as when the vibrations of a bell set another bell in vibration; in the psychological and social view, it is a real solidarity of sensations, impressions, and volitions. ”

“ There is, indeed, a sense in which their idea was correct, for sympathy is one of the most precious seeds with which poor humanity is entrusted, and did not botany enable these two to unite in planting that seed, and is not sympathy the germ of full-blown love? ”

“ We call it sometimes sympathy; but the word sympathy is associated more frequently in our minds with the idea of compassionate participation in the sufferings of those we love. Sometimes we term it a spirit of imitation, but that phrase implies rather a conscious effort to act like those whom we love, than that involuntary tendency to become like them, which is the real character of the principle in question. ”

“ How much pleasanter it is to us to gratify our selfish affection by giving them what they want, as Wentworth did King Charles, than to brace them to endure hardness for the sake of others!
We are so apt to give and to ask for weakening consolation. Sympathy in the ordinary use of the term is more weakening than anything, and it is pleasant to give and to take. ”

“ One old divine, having read some of the plutocratic papers on the Pullman strike and their anathemas of sympathy, when one workingman’s heart, throbbing responsive to the divine law of love, prompted him to aid his brother in distress, discussed sympathy. He said sympathy was one of the perennial flowers of the Celestial City, and that angels had transplanted it in Eden for the happiness of Adam and Eve, and that the winds had scattered the seed throughout the earth. He said there was no humanity, no elevating, refining, ennobling influences in operation where there was no sympathy. ”

“ Because from the depths of human suffering, pain, and death, that we see around 69us, a heavenly sympathy is born within our souls, and we become desirous of helping those in need, a sympathizing pity, prompting us to extend the cord of love we hold, until it encircles and draws upward, into realms of ineffable peace, the storm-tossed spirits in pain. ”

“ If the consciousness of the most sincere and cordial comprehension of, and sympathy with, your sufferings can be of any comfort to you, you may rely upon me in fullest measure, for I do not believe that there are many people in this universe who have inspired another being with such real and continual sympathy as you have me. ”

“ ALLIED by birth, and in mind, and similar in age—and in thought still more intimately connected, the sympathy which bound our souls together, at first sight, is less extraordinary. Shall we any longer wonder at its irresistible impulse?—Shall we strive to oppose the link of nature that draws us to each other? ”