There are others who are almost
incapable of being excited by a distant idea. There are many
gradations between. And there are people who are insensitive to facts,
and aroused only by ideas. But though the emotion is aroused by the
idea, we are unable to satisfy the emotion by acting ourselves upon
the scene itself. The idea of the starving Russian child evokes a
desire to feed the child. But the person so aroused cannot feed it. He
can only give money to an impersonal organization, or to a
personification which he calls Mr. Hoover. His money does not reach
that child. It goes to a general pool from which a mass of children
are fed. And so just as the idea is second hand, so are the effects of
the action second hand. The cognition is indirect, the conation is
indirect, only the effect is immediate. Of the three parts of the
process, the stimulus comes from somewhere out of sight, the response
reaches somewhere out of sight, only the emotion exists entirely
within the person. Of the child's hunger he has only an idea, of the
child's relief he has only an idea, but of his own desire to help he
has a real experience. It is the central fact of the business, the
emotion within himself, which is first hand.
Within limits that vary, the emotion is transferable both as regards
stimulus and response. Therefore, if among a number of people,
possessing various tendencies to respond, you can find a stimulus
which will arouse the same emotion in many of them, you can substitute
it for the original stimuli.
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