played the part of Mrs Beverley in the Gamester, and on Stukely's abrupt declaration of his unprincipled passion at the moment of her husband's imprisonment, threw into her face that noble succession of various emotions; first seeming not to understand him, then, as her doubt is removed, rising into sudden indignation, then turning to pity, and ending in a burst of hysteric scorn and laughter; was this the effect of stratagem or forethought, as a painter arranges a number of colours on his palette? No;-but by placing herself amply in the situation of her heroine, and entering into all the circumstances, and feeling the dignity of insulted virtue and misfortune, that wonderful display of keen and high-wrought expressions burst from her involuntarily at the same moment, and kindled her face almost into a blaze of lightning." That this explanation is incompatible with the exercise of a suppressing influence on faculties the expression of which would mar the representation cannot be maintained, though, in proportion as the sympathy of the actor with his imaginary personage is real, this influence may be less needed. One condoling with a friend in affliction may feel real sympathy with him, and yet may sometimes be intruded on by cares or reflections interesting only to himself, the expression of which he, from consideration to that friend, may strive to repress. That sympathy with imaginary persons may be as strong as with really existing beings, none who are or have been capable of being deeply interested in a novel or drama can doubt. Nor is this sympathy subject to different laws: if in the case of the actor it is necessary that he should possess the capacity of entering into his part, of feeling the passions which it embodies, so is it necessary to sympathy that there should be some resemblance of character. It is not from an individual deficient in Ideality and Wonder that we should look for sympathy with the enthusiasm of the poet, nor from one wanting the last-named faculty and Veneration that we should expect it with the aspirations of a devout mind. Carry the deficiency to an extreme degree, and you will not only have an absence of sympathy but absence of understanding; there will be no more capacity for comprehending enthusiasm for beauty or religious fervour, than the blind man possesses for judging of colours, or the deaf of sounds.

But to sympathy, whether that of understanding or that of fellow-feeling, there is certainly something more necessary than a mere capacity of experiencing the same emotions. We are all alike capable of experiencing hunger or bodily pain, but our power of sympathizing with them is very various. Those whom a little annoyance of any kind affecting themselves may discom

pose, may be exceedingly stoical when the heaviest of a similar kind falls on the heads of others. Mothers who are extremely fond of their own children, are often very loth to listen to the panegyrics, or to witness the caresses, bestowed on foreign offspring. The sympathetic disposition, the power of transposing ourselves into the states and feelings of others, however it may be connected with similarity of character, and, in the same individual, become more perfect as this increases, forms an independent principle in human nature, performing the highest objects and acting in connection with the highest faculties. This principle acts in connection with benevolence, at once producing and resulting from it, since we not only feel benevolence to those with whom we sympathize, but most readily sympathize with those to whom we feel good will; with the imagination, since our sympathies are always far stronger where we portray vividly to ourselves the situation of others, than where their remoteness or our dulness dims the picture; with the intellectual faculties, since without this power none of those inward glimpses into character could be obtained, on which an intimate knowledge of it depends. The whole field of human sympathy, vast as it is, is pervaded, I conceive, by one leading principle; and this principle, again, I conceive to have a circle of operations even beyond what is generally included in this sphere, namely, as a leading agent in the production of what, in the most extended sense, we understand by the plastic and dramatic arts.

To develope this proposition, and to trace through some of its modes of operation the sympathetic principle, to shew more fully its necessity and influence in man's intellectual and moral constitution, and the forms in which this unfolds itself, I now proceed, while I reserve to the conclusion of my paper the evidence in support of its connexion with the organ No. 21.

"When we rejoice in the prosperity of others and compassionate their distresses, we, as it were, substitute them for ourselves, their interest for our own, and have the same kind of pleasure in their prosperity, and sorrow in their distress, as we have from reflection upon our own."*"Without some degree of this power of substitution or of transposition, we should be incapable of understanding, nay, much less of compassionating their distress. "As we have no immediate experience," says Adam Smith,t" of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother

Bishop Butler's Sermons preached at the Rolls Chapel. Sermon v. On Compassion.

Theory of Moral Sentiments, chap. i. sect. 1.

is upon the rack, as long as we are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way than by representing to us what would be our own if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring the same torments, we enter, as it were, into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. For as to be in pain or distress of any kind excites the severest sorrow, so to conceive or imagine we are in it excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or the dulness of the conceptions. That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels, may be demonstrated by many obvious observations, if it should not be thought sufficiently evident of itself. When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall we feel it in some measure and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer. The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally twist and writhe and balance their own bodies, as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in his situation. Persons of delicate fibres and a weak constitution, complain that in looking on the sores and ulcers which are exposed by beggars in the streets, they are apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in the correspondent parts of their own bodies. The horror they conceive at the misery of those wretches affects that particular part in themselves more than any other, because that horror arises from conceiving what they themselves would suffer if they really were the wretches whom they are looking upon, and if that particular part in themselves were actually affected in the same miserable manner. The very force of this conception is sufficient in their feeble frames to produce that itching or uneasy sensation complained of. Men of the most robust make, observe that, in

looking upon sore eyes, they often feel a very sensible soreness in their own, which proceeds from the same reason; that organ being in the strongest man more delicate than any other part of the body is in the weakest. Neither is it those circumstances only which create pain or sorrow that call forth our fellow-feeling. Whatever is the passion which arises from any object in the person principally concerned, an analogous emotion springs up at the thought of his situation in the breast of every attentive spectator. Our joy for the deliverance of those heroes of tragedy or romance who interest us is as sincere as our grief for their distress, and our fellow-feeling with their misery is not more real than that with their happiness. We enter into their gratitude towards those faithful friends who did not desert them in their difficulties; and we heartily go along with their resentment against those perfidious traitors who injured, abandoned, or deceived them. In every passion of which the mind is susceptible, the emotions of the bystander always correspond to what, by bringing the case home to himself, he imagines should be the sentiments of the

sufferer."

This passage, displaying great variety of mental power, is above all remarkable for the keen sense of analogy indicated in tracing to one common principle the various kinds of sympathy. It will probably be admitted that Adam Smith has been correct in his generalization; and if so, it will be equally obvious that many phenomena included under the functions of the organ No. 21 are in their nature strictly sympathetic. Such, for instance, are the cases of the man described by Cabanis, and cited by Gall in his section on this organ, who laboured under an invincible disposition to imitate every one he saw of the young idiot described by M. Pinel, who manifested a similarly irresistible automatic inclination*—of a gentleman possessing a large organ of Imitation, who (not an uncommon case) insensibly and unconsciously fell into the voice and tone of those with whom he was conversing. Such also must be considered the cases of those patients of a lunatic asylum mentioned by Boerhaave, among whom, one of their number having been seized with epilepsy, the disorder raged like an epidemic until Boerhaave stopped it by threatening to cauterize with a red-hot iron any patient who should in future have a fit. This case, which is mentioned by Dr Combe in his Treatise on Mental Derangement, under the head of

*See for both t. v. p. 334 of the Fonctions du Cerveau, or part i. of my Essay, p. 141 of the present volume of this Journal.

See vol. ii. of this Journal, p. 589.

Imitation, is an extreme case of those physical sympathies spoken of by Adam Smith. The horrible spectacle of the epileptic patient had possessed their imaginations, had taken possession of their senses, their sympathies, and their fears; the bodily symptoms appear to have followed by the same law, as in the instances just alluded to; and not until the powerful impression which the convulsions of the sick man had left on their minds, was effaced by another more recent and equally powerful, did the disorder cease. Nor does the case of the production of this disorder by such means appear singular. "Epileptics," says M. Esquirol, "should not dwell pell-mell with the insane, as is the practice in almost all the hospitals where epileptics and the insane are received. The sight of an epileptic fit is sufficient to render epileptic a person in a good state of health. How much greater is the danger for insane persons, frequently so much more liable to strong impressions."* Marvellous do such instances appear. And the reflection that they are but extreme cases of the operation of mind on body, varying only in degree from those of ordinary occurrence, serves but to make us more deeply reflect on the mystery (around us and within us) in which that connection is involved. How belief, and fear, and anger, should have so intense a corporeal influence; how a fit of irritation should convert the nourishment of a woman's breast into an active and instant poison;† how a young man in the prime and flush of life, from receiving a conviction that he should die within the twentyfour hours, should begin rapidly to exhibit all the symptoms of approaching decay, and be only saved by a medicine which wrapped his brain in oblivion; how a patient sick of the palsy,‡ on whom it was proposed to try the effect of inhaling nitrous oxide, should, mistaking a thermometer for the virtue-giving tube, be cured by faith in a remedy which he had never used, must, to our understanding, appear little less than miraculous. If, indeed, there be any way by which these instances may seem to fall in more with the general laws of nature, it would be but by rising into a theory which would remove the wonder in the individual case, only to substitute for it a general explanation still more at variance with our present notions. To me, indeed, such facts, the wonderful phenomena of Mesmerism, more especially the "clairvoyance" of which so many authentic instances are on record, and even the strange

* Esquirol, ed. 1838, tom. ii. p. 164, Brussels edition.
† Elliotson's Physiology, part 3.

Paris's Life of Davy.