No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Empathy, the involuntary projection of oneself into an object, received its first extended formulation in the Mikrokosmos of Hermann Lotze (1858). To Lotze Einfühlung, or empathy as it has been termed in English, was a phenomenon which accounts for our knowledge of the external world. “The world,” he said, “becomes alive to us through this power to see in forms the joy and sorrow of existence that they hide: there is no shape so coy that our fancy cannot sympathetically enter into it.” In this knowledge our consciousness of our own bodily sensations is a factor: “Unquestionably the vividness of these perceptions is added to by our abiding remembrance of the activity of our own body … every movement which we execute, every attitude in which we repose, has its meaning rendered plain to us by the feeling of exertion or of enjoyment.” Entering thus into our own sensations, by means of them we are also enabled to know the feelings of creatures and objects beyond their immediate range:
… we, thus aided by our sentience, assuredly can comprehend also the alien silent form. Nor is it only into the peculiar vital feelings of that which in nature is near to us that we enter into the joyous flight of the singing bird or the graceful fleeting of the gazelle; we not only countract our mental feelers to the most minute creatures, to enter in reverie into the narrow round of existence of a mussel-fish and the monotonous bliss of its openings and shuttings, we not only expand into the slender proportions of the tree whose twigs are animated by the pleasure of graceful bending and waving; nay, even to the inanimate do we transfer these interpretative feelings, transforming through them the dead weights and supports of buildings into so many limbs of a living body whose inner tensions pass over into ourselves.
1 Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) calls it “attributing what goes on in us when we look at a shape to the shape itself” (The Beautiful [Cambridge, 1913], p. 65).
2 Empathy was noticed by Aristotle (Rhetoric iii.2.1411b). The psychological phenomena which it accounts for were observed and recorded in the eighteenth century by an impressive number of critics and philosophers in isolated passages: by Dennis, Addison, John Baillie, Hume, Gerard, Karnes, Reynolds, Herder, and Kant. Coleridge anticipated the observations of later aesthetic psychologists with remarkable exactness. (See C. D. Thorpe, “Some Notices of ‘Empathy’ before Lipps,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, xxiii [1937], pp. 525-526; “Empathy,” Dictionary of World Literature, ed. Joseph T. Shipley [New York, 1943], pp. 186-188.)
3 The term empathy was coined by Edward B. Titchener, in Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Process (New York, 1909).
4 Microcosmus, tr. E. Hamilton and E. E. C. Jones (New York, 1886), i, 584-586.
5 The work of Robert Vischer (1873) and Lipps' classic Raumesthetik (1893-97) emphasize the mental and conceptual aspects of Einfühlung. (See Thorpe, “Empathy,” op. cit.).
6 “Sich einfühlen” might mean either “to feel into” or “to feel within or inside of” the object of contemplation. Thus Einfühlung could be either a projection of the ego into the object or a merging of the ego with the object. In the first case the percipient could observe his own physical reactions during the act of contemplation; but if the ego is merged with the object it must be unconscious of its own existence and thus incapable of introspection. Empathy in this alternative would be an entirely hypothetical explanation for certain facts otherwise unexplainable. Thus, as Ogden, Richards, and Wood have noted, “… Lipps contended that if Empathy was in progress we could not be aware of the inner imitation or muscular movements which (in the similar view of Groos) accompany the process” (The Foundations of Aesthetics [London, 1925], p. 70). But if this is so, how can we be sure that “inner imitation” actually occurs?
7 Op. cit., p. 67.
8 Vernon Lee and C. Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness (London and New York, 1912), p. 21.
9 This definition of Beauty is obviously extremely broad. Surely there are objects “favorable to our existence” which we would hesitate to call beautiful. One may enjoy a football game, for example, without feeling that one has undergone an aesthetic experience.
10 The Beautiful, p. 67.
11 “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 …” (ibid., pp. 68-69).
12 The Aesthetic Attitude (New York, 1920), p. 109.
13 Ibid., p. 111.
14 Ibid., p. 117.
15 Ibid., p. 122.
16 Ibid., pp. 137-138.
17 “… Empathy is what explains why we employ figures of speech at all, and occasionally employ them … when we know perfectly well that the figure we have chosen expresses the exact reverse of the objective truth” (The Beautiful, p. 62).
18 The Aesthetic Attitude, p. 135. The motor-content of “crawling” may be the grounds of Langfeld's identification of this figure with empathy.
19 A History of Aesthetics (New York, 1939), pp. 537-538.
20 (New York, 1931), pp. 373 ff.
21 (Seattle, Washington, 1930).
22 Ibid., p. 32.
23 “Empathy is closely allied with sympathy. As a matter of fact it is difficult to draw a sharp line of demarcation. Evidently sympathy presupposes our projecting ourselves into the situation of the other person” (ibid., p. 34).
24 Ibid., pp. 35-38.
25 See Gilbert and Kuhn, op. cit., pp. 537-538.
26 “Empathy,” Dictionary of World Literature, p. 186.
27 These passages are cited as illustrations of empathy in DeVries, op. cit., p. 41.
28 Last Poems (London, 1930), p. 24.
29 Charles Cowden Clarke, quoted by Sir Sidney Colvin, John Keats (New York, 1917), p. 20. A comment by Hoxie N. Fairchild is apt: “The surest sign of poetic promise in this anecdote is not so much the singling out of epithets as the organic response to them, the being made to feel like a whale by words about whales” (The Romantic Quest [New York, 1931], p. 310).
30 William Sharp, The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn, quoted by Colvin, op. cit., p. 80.
31 The Letters of John Keats, ed. M. B. Forman, 2nd ed. (London and New York, 1935), p. 67. Hereafter to be referred to as Letters.
32 Cf. Shelley: “Incest is, like many other incorrect things, a very poetical circumstance” (The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. H. B. Forman [London, 1880], viii, 143). Hereafter to be referred to as Works.
33 Letters, pp. 227-228.
34 Loc. cit. Cf. p. 216, on his brother Tom in his last illness: “His identity presses upon me so all day that I am obliged to go out … I am obliged to write, and plunge into abstract images to ease myself of his countenance his voice and feebleness.”
35 Ibid., p. 229.
36 Ibid., p. 69.
37 On the authority of Richard Woodhouse, quoted by Amy Lowell, John Keats (Boston and New York, 1925), ii, 103.
38 “What astonishes me more than anything is the tone, the coloring, the slate, the stone, the moss, the rock-weed; or, if I may so say, the intellect, the countenance of such places …” (Letters, p. 156).
39 “I cannot think with Hazlitt that these scenes make man appear little. I never forgot my stature so completely—I live in the eye; and my imagination, surpassed, is at rest—” (ibid., p. 157).
40 Ibid., p. 129.
41 Ibid., p. 241. Mario Praz has interpreted this passage as a typical example of the Romantic love for far-off times and distant places, analogous to Flaubert's heavily picturesque Salammbo (La Carne, La Morte e il Diavolo [Milan and Rome, 1930], p. 200). It illustrates, in his opinion, an escapist decadence. I disagree; the tone is not languidly aesthetic, but healthy and exuberantly imaginative.
42 “… supplementary to his demand for a detached state of spirit for poetic experience was his conception of the poetic nature as a free entity with capacity to penetrate wherever it may choose, able to project itself into and merge itself in complete identification with the objects of its contemplation” (C. D. Thorpe, The Mind of John Keats [New York and London, 1926], pp. 105-106).
43 Letters, pp. 316-317.
44 See Shipley, op. cit., p. 219.
45 “… the secret of Keats's imagery, the excellence which sets him above his contemporaries in mastery of phrase, is a highly dynamic power momentarily caught at rest and concentrated and imprisoned within an otherwise static image … this concentration in Keats is effected with no loss, but indeed with a startling gain, in strength, life, and intensity” (W. J. Bate, Negative Capability [Cambridge, Mass., 1939], p. 61).
46 For an even more notable use of the word see Hyperion, i. 74: “Tall oaks branch-charmed by the earnest stars.”
47 Coleridge, Christabel, ii. 601-609:
48 See for a contrary view L. P. deVries, op. cit., pp. 40-47.
49 J. M. Murry seems to deny that the Grecian Urn is a poem about art. “The supremacy which he [Keats] asserts is the supremacy of the changeless, and in the strict metaphysical sense, eternal world of the Imagination. He is not asserting the supremacy of Art over Nature; but of the Imaginative vision of Nature over the immersion in Nature to which, in our total animal existence, we are ‘condemned‘” (Studies in Keats, New and Old [New York and London, 1939], p. 75n). Mr. Murry's distinction is over-ingenious, but his analysis of the Ode is brilliant.
50 “In calling the scene a ‘leaf-fringed legend’ Keats will have remembered that the necks and shoulders of this kind of urn are regularly encircled by bands of leaf-pattern ornament” (Colvin, op. cit., p. 416).
51 “… axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses” (Keats, Letters, p. 142).
52 See iii. iii. 84 ff., iii. iv., iv. 206 ff.
53 “What was, in my opinion, deficient in his poetry, was … the want of reality in the characters with which he peopled his splendid scenes, and to which he addressed or imparted the utterance of his impassioned feelings” (T. L. Peacock, Memoirs of Shelley [London, 1909], p. 83).
54 It is perhaps significant that Shelley heartily disliked Michelangelo for his “rude, external, mechanical quality” (Works, viii, p. 121).
55 The organic reactions of Prometheus to the tortures of “Jove's winged hounds” are painfully vivid, but we have too little sense of his body to share them. Shelley describes, but fails to exemplify empathy in
56 This statement is not intended as a qualitative judgment.
57 “… in this have I long believed that my power consists,” Shelley wrote; “in sympathy and that part of the imagination which relates to sentiment and contemplation. I am formed, if for anything not in common with the herd of mankind, to apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling …” (Shelley's Literary and Philosophical Criticism, ed. J. Shawcross [London, 1909], pp. 160-161).
58 “… as to real flesh and blood, you know that I do not deal in those articles; you might as well go to a gin-shop for a leg of mutton, as expect anything human or earthly from me” (Works, viii, 244).
59 See Mark Rampion's amusingly choleric comment in Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point (New York, 1928), p. 144. “The lark couldn't be allowed to be a mere bird, with blood and feathers and a nest and an appetite for caterpillars. Oh no! That wasn't nearly poetical enough, that was much too coarse. It had to be a disembodied spirit.”
60 See Alastor, 11. 323-325; A Vision of the Sea.
61 See Prometheus Unbound, ii. iv. 163-174, v. 1-5.
62 Cf. 1. 62: “… Be thou me, impetuous one!”
63 “His success was a double triumph; and often after he was earnestly entreated to write again in a style that commanded popular favor, while it was not less instinct with truth and genius. But the bent of his mind went the other way; and even when employed on subjects whose interest depended on character and incident, he would start off in another direction, and leave the delineations of human passion …” (Mary Shelley, Note to The Cenci).
64 Note to Prometheus Unbound.