‘One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep, ‘Hammer* your thoughts into unity’. For days I could think of nothing else and for years I tested all I did by that sentence [...]”* William Butler Yeats, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (*cited in Frank Tuohy, Yeats, 1976, p.51 )

*hammer images "Thor's Hammer is a symbol of the struggle against chaos and evil. It's the weapon used by Thor against giants, monsters, and other trollish folk who threaten the common good. It seems particularly appropriate in these troubled times" (http://www.ragweedforge.com/ThorsHammer.html). See especially http://www.mackaos.com.au/Articles/Mjol.html

_______________________________________________________________________________

---

“SYMPATHY”

 

SYM- Gr. { having the same or a like form; conformed; so sy{sm}mmorphism, likeness of form, condition of being conformed. sympalmograph ….sympatetic, nonce-wd. [after PERIPATETIC], a fellow-walker, a companion in a walk.} having a fellow feeling, f. { SYM- + suffering, feeling, to suffer. Cf. F. sympathie (from 15th c.), It., Sp. simpatia, Pg. sympathia.]

 

1. a. A (real or supposed) affinity between certain things, by virtue of which they are similarly or correspondingly affected by the same influence, affect or influence one another (esp. in some occult way), or attract or tend towards each other. Obs. exc. Hist. or as merged in other senses.

……..

b. Physiol. and Path. A relation between two bodily organs or parts (or between two persons) such that disorder, or any condition, of the one induces a corresponding condition in the other….

 

2. Agreement, accord, harmony, consonance, concord; agreement in qualities, likeness, conformity, correspondence. Obs. or merged in 3a.

[1567 FENTON Trag. Disc. ii. (1898) I. 90 If he had bene aunswerd with a sympathia, or equalitie of frendshipp. Ibid. xiii. II. 247 Whereof [sc. of the passion or fever of love] there seamed alredie a sympathia, or equalitie, betwene the two younglinges. 1574 J. …

 

3. a. Conformity of feelings, inclinations, or temperament, which makes persons agreeable to each other; community of feeling; harmony of disposition.

1596 SPENSER Hymn Beauty 199 Loue is a celestiall harmonie, Of likely harts..Which ioyne together in sweete sympathie, To worke ech others ioy and true content. 1633 HEYWOOD Eng. Trav. I. i, So sweet a simpathie, As crownes a noble marriage. 1775 HARRIS Philos. Arrangem. Wks. (1841) 291 There is..a social sympathy in the soul of man, which prompts..individuals..to congregate, and form themselves into tribes. 1822-7 GOOD Study Med. (1829) IV. 61 The sympathies and antipathies, the whims and prejudices that..haunt us. 1833 H. MARTINEAU Briery Creek ii. 26 It was impossible that there could be much sympathy between two men so unlike. 1876 MOZLEY Univ. Serm. x. (1877) 206 They enjoy the sympathy of kindred souls.

 

b. The quality or state of being affected by the condition of another with a feeling similar or corresponding to that of the other; the fact or capacity of entering into or sharing the feelings of another or others; fellow-feeling. Also, a feeling or frame of mind evoked by and responsive to some external influence. Const. with (a person, etc., or a feeling).

1662 R. MATHEW Unl. Alch. p. x, Out of faithful and true simpathy and fellow-feeling with you. 1667 MILTON P.L. IV. 465 With answering looks Of sympathie and love. Ibid. x. 540 Horror on them fell, And horrid sympathie. 1756 BURKE Subl. & Beaut. I. xiii, Sympathy must be considered as a sort of Substitution, by which we are put in the place of another man, and affected in many respects as he is affected. 1784 COWPER Task VI. 1 There is in souls a sympathy with sounds..Some chord in unison with what we hear Is touched within us, and the heart replies. 1833 COLERIDGE Table-t. 30 Aug., For compassion a human heart suffices: but for full and adequate sympathy with joy, an angel's only. 1856 FROUDE Hist. Eng. I. v. 447 Our sympathies are naturally on the side of the weak and the unsuccessful. 1859 HAWTHORNE Fr. & It. Journals II. 277 Such depth and breadth of sympathy with Nature. 1862 SIR B. BRODIE Psychol. Inq. II. iii. 99 A cheerful disposition..leads to sympathy with others in all the smaller concerns of life. 1880 DISRAELI Endym. xvi, The sympathy of sorrow is stronger than the sympathy of prosperity. 1907 Verney Mem. I. 76 A favourite daughter, to whom he turned on all occasions for sympathy and affection.

 

c. spec. The quality or state of being thus affected by the suffering or sorrow of another; a feeling of compassion or commiseration. Const. for, with (a person), for, in, with, {dag}rarely of (an event, experience, etc.).

1600 S. NICHOLSON Acolastus' After-witte D2, The showres which daily from mine eyes are raining, Draw the dum creatures to a sympathie. a1701 MAUNDRELL Journ. Jerus. (1732) 34 A kind of Sympathy in the River, for the Death of Adonis. 1777 S. J. PRATT Emma Corbett (ed. 4) II. 107, I wanted to express my sympathy of your present misfortune. 1783 BURKE Sp. Fox's E. India Bill Wks. 1808 IV. 20 To awaken something of sympathy for the unfortunate natives. 1796 {emem} Corr. (1844) IV. 360 Your sympathy makes our ill-health a great deal more tolerable. 1807 SOUTHEY Espriella's Lett. (1808) II. 323 They have..little sympathy for distresses which they have never felt. 1829 LANDOR Imag. Conv., Penn & Peterborough II. 269 Joining in the amusements of others is..the next thing to sympathy in their distresses. 1850 TENNYSON In Mem. lxxxv. 88 Canst thou feel for me Some painless sympathy with pain? 1872 KINGSLEY Lett. (1878) II. 381 Every expression of human sympathy brings some little comfort. 1893 Academy 30 Dec. 581/1 Sympathy with the bereaved parents and for the bride was..deeply felt.

 

d. In weakened sense: A favourable attitude of mind towards a party, cause, etc.; disposition to agree or approve. Const. with, rarely for, in….

 

Emotionalist Moral Philosophy: Sympathy and the Moral Theory that Overthrew Kings

George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University

 

According to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755), sympathy is defined as "fellow-feeling; mutual sensibility; the quality of being affected by the affections [feelings] of another." More than one hundred years later, John Ruskin, the great Victorian critic of art and society, similarly explained that sympathy, "the imaginative understanding of the natures of others, and the power of putting ourselves in their place, is the faculty on which virtue depends" (Fors Clavigera, 1873).

 

During the second half of the eighteenth century and throughout most of the nineteenth, sympathy, which today signifies little more than compassion or pity, was a word of almost magical significance that described a particular mixture of emotional perception and emotional communication. Johnson and Ruskin derived their ideas of sympathy from a British school of moral philosophy that referred ethics to feelings in a radical manner, one that eventually caused fundamental changes in politics, culture, religion, and conceptions of human nature. This sentimentalist or emotionalist school of ethics, which provided an important part of the foundations of both Romanticism and the French Revolution, developed in response to the English empiricists Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

 

1. Locke claimed that we have no innate ideas of good and evil.

 

2. In an attempt to find another basis for arguments that men and women were moral beings, Thomas Burnett and Anthony Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, founders of this new school of moral philosophy, replaced innate ideas with emotional reactions, thought with emotion. Extending Locke's own notion that the mind has an innate power or principle that perceives differences in color, Burnett suggested that a similar power perceives differences in moral value. Shaftesbury, the more influential of the two, then argued that we have an internal moral sense much like the senses of sight, hearing, and taste.

 

3. The Scottish school of emotionalist moral philosophers -- Adam Smith (better known now for his economics), Dugald Stewart, and Thomas Reid -- identified the moral sense with the imagination, whose job it is to make us feel the effects upon others of our actions. In other words, the sympathetic imagination, as it was called, provides the psychological mechanism of the Golden Rule: we do not steal from others because our imagination projects us into their vantage point (into their minds), and we thus experience how it would feel to be a victim.

1. Implications for psychology and theories of human nature

 

For the first time, philosophers no longer urged that the healthy human mind is organized hierarchically with reason, like a king, ruling will and passions. Reason now shares rule with feelings or emotions. (Note how passions, a word with negative connotations, is replaced by a pair of more positive terms and how more democratic the new theory appears.)

2. Implications for art and literatures

 

The emotions become the proper subject of the arts, and the ideal of art moves from one of neoclassical order and balance to a Romantic emphasis upon power, energy, intensity, and sincerity.

 

http://www.victorianweb.org/philosophy/phil4.html

 

Oxford English Dictionary