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Updated: May 2, 2025
Every experienced physician must have met with instances of single and childless women who have devoted themselves with extraordinary zeal to habitual religious exercises, and who, having gone insane as a culmination of their emotional fervour, have straightway exhibited the saddest mixture of religious and erotic symptoms a boiling over of lust in voice, face, gestures, under the pitiful degradation of disease.... The fanatical religious sects, such as the Shakers and the like, which spring up from time to time in communities and disgust them by the offensive way in which they mingle love and religion, are inspired in great measure by sexual feeling; on the one hand, there is probably the cunning of a hypocritical knave, or the self-deception of a half-insane one, using the weaknesses of weak women to minister to his vanity or his lust under a religious guise; on the other hand, there is an exaggerated self-feeling, often rooted in the sexual passion, which is unwittingly fostered under the cloak of religious emotion, and which is apt to conduct to madness or to sin.
Our artist did not belong to the class of great talkers; it was only in a small circle that he could be brought to say anything, but then it was always with humor and gayety. A few energetic exclamations of his are preserved. A well-known sculptor, expressing himself one day with much self-feeling, entered into a dispute with Thorwaldsen, and set his own works over the latter's.
His two words, "boys" and "fun," were the magic ones that caused the tension to relax and generated the emotion of elation. We then sat back in our chairs and, possibly, crossed our legs I can't be certain as to that. At any rate, in a single sentence this man had made us his co-ordinates and caused the negative self-feeling to vanish.
It is not, however, religion or beauty or genius that is the object of our inquiry at this moment, but simply the common element in the experience of each of these which we know as the disappearance of self-feeling.
But it may equally well be to get rid of him, to gratify my self-feeling by becoming the dispenser of bounty, or to inspire admiration in the onlooker. The intention, as I have used the word above, is to relieve the beggar, with such consequences of the act as may be foreseen at the time.
What I interpreted as misconduct was but a straining at his leash in an effort to extricate himself from the incubus of the negative self-feeling. He was, and probably is, a dull fellow and realized that he could not cope with the other boys in the school studies, and so was but trying to win some notice in other fields of activity. To him notoriety was preferable to obscurity.
No matter how we disguise it to ourselves and others, the main ends of purpose are power and place. True, we may wish for power and place so as to help others; we may wish them as the result of constructive work and achievement, but the enlargement of self-feeling is the end result of the striving. To be poor is to be inferior in feeling and applies equally to men and women.
We may speak of unipetalar selves, who include only their own bodies in self-feeling; of bipetalar selves who include in it their families, and from there on we go to selves who include their work, their community, their nation, until we reach those very rare souls whose petals cover all living things.
The best psychological theory of the experience of volition makes it the imaging of a movement or action, followed by feelings of strain, and then of the movement carried out. The anticipation is the essential. Without anticipation, as in the reflex, winking, the action appears involuntary. Without the feeling of effort or strain, as in simply raising the empty hand, the self-feeling is weaker.
Does a man take his difficulties with courage and good cheer does he make the "best of it" or is he plunged into doubt and indecision by obstacles or complications? Is he calm, cool, collected, well poised, in that he watches and works without too much emotion and maintains self-feeling against adversity?
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