It is true that sympathy does not necessarily follow from the mere fact of gregariousness.Cattle do not help a wounded comrade; on the contrary, they are more likely to dispatch him.But a dog will lick another sick dog, and even bring him food; and the sympathy of monkeys is proved by many observations to be strong.In man, then, we may lay it down that the sight of suffering or danger to others is a direct exciter of interest, and an immediate stimulus, if no complication hinders, to acts of relief.There is nothing unaccountable or pathological about this --
nothing to justify Professor Bain's assimilation of it to the 'fixed ideas'
of insanity, as 'clashing with the regular outgoings of the will.' It may be as primitive as any other 'outgoing,' and may be due to a random variation selected, quite as probably as gregariousness and maternal love are, even in Spencer's opinion, due to such variations.
It is true that sympathy is peculiarly liable to inhibition from other instincts which its stimulus may call forth.The traveller whom the good Samaritan rescued may well have prompted such instinctive fear or disgust in the priest and Levite who passed him by, that their sympathy could not come to the front.Then, of course, habits, reasoned reflections, and calculations may either check or reinforce one's sympathy; as may also the instincts of love or hate, if these exist, for the suffering individual.The hunting and pugnacious instincts, when aroused, also inhibit our sympathy absolutely.
This accounts for the cruelty of collections of men hounding each other on to bait or torture a victim.The blood mounts to the eyes, and sympathy's chance is gone.
The hunting instinct has an equally remote origin in the evolution of the race. The hunting and the fighting in- stinct combine in many manifestations.They both support the emotion of anger; they combine in the fascination which stories of atrocity have for most minds; and the utterly blind excitement of giving the rein to our fury when our blood is up (an excitement whose intensity is greater than that of any other human passion save one) is only explicable as an impulse aboriginal in character, and having more to do with immediate and overwhelming tendencies to muscular discharge than to any possible reminiscences of effects of experience, or association of ideas.I say this here, because the pleasure of disinterested cruelty has been thought a paradox, and writers have sought to show that it is no primitive attribute of our nature, but rather a resultant of the subtle combination of other less malignant elements of mind.This is a hopeless task.If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals must have been among the most important of man's primitive functions, the fighting and the chasing instincts must have become ingrained.Certain perceptions must immediately, and without the intervention of inferences and ideas, have prompted emotions and motor discharges; and both the latter must, from the nature of the case, have been very violent, and therefore, when unchecked, of an intensely pleasurable kind.It is just because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially where a fight or a hunt is promised as part of the fun.
As Rochefoucauld says, there is something in the misfortunes of our very friends that does not altogether displease us; and an apostle of peace will feel a certain vicious thrill run through him, and enjoy a vicarious brutality, as he turns to the column in his newspaper at the top of which 'Shocking Atrocity' stands printed in large capitals.See how the crowd hocks round a street-brawl! Consider the enormous annual sale of revolvers to persons, not one in a thousands of whom has any serious intention of using them, but of whom each one has his carnivorous self-consciousness agreeably tickled by the notion, as he clutches the handle of his weapon, that he will be rather a dangerous customer to meet.See the ignoble crew that escorts every great pugilist -- parasites who feel as if the glory of his brutality rubbed off upon them, and whose darling hope, from day today, is to arrange some set-to of which they may share the rapture without enduring the pains! The first blows at a prize-fight are apt to make a refined spectator sick; but his blood is soon up in favor of one party, and it will then seem as if the other fellow could not be banged and pounded and mangled enough -- the refined spectator would like to reinforce the blows himself.Over the sinister orgies of blood of certain depraved and insane persons let a curtain be drawn, as well as over the ferocity with which otherwise fairly decent men may be animated, when (at the sacking of a town, for instance), the excitement of victory long de- layed, the sudden freedom of rapine and of lust, the contagion of a crowd, and the impulse to imitate and outdo, all combine to swell the blind drunkenness of the killing-instinct, and carry it to its extreme.No ! those who try to account for this from above downwards, as if it resulted from the consequences of the victory being rapidly inferred, and from the agreeable sentiments associated with them in the imagination, have missed the root of the matter.
Our ferocity is blind, and can only be explained from below.Could we trace it back through our line of descent, we should see it taking more and more the form of a fatal reflex response, and at the same time becoming more and more the pure and direct emotion that it is.
In childhood it takes this form.The boys who pullout grasshoppers'
