hich
Empathy is started, being indeed occasionally difficult and
distressing, but giving in themselves little more than a negative
satisfaction, at the most that of difficulty overcome and suspense
relieved. But although nowhere so fostered as in the contemplation
of shapes, 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, and given to the intermittent and heterogeneous sensations
received from without the framework of our constant and highly
unified inner experience, that is to say, of our own activities and
aims. Empathy can be traced in all of modes of speech and thought,
particularly in the universal attribution of _doing_ and _having_ and
_tending_ where all we can really assert is successive and varied
_being._ Science has indeed explained away the anthropomorphic
implications of _Force_ and _Energy, Attraction_ and _Repulsion_;
and philosophy has reduced _Cause_ and _Effect_ from implying
intention and effort to meaning mere constant succession. But
Empathy still helps us to many valuable analogies; and it is possible
that without its constantly checked but constantly renewed action,
human thought would be without logical cogency, as it certainly
would be without poetical charm. Indeed if Empathy is so recent a
discovery, this may be due to its being part and parcel of our
thinking; so that we are surprised to learn its existence, as Moliere's
good man was to hear that be talked prose.

CHAPTER X

THE MOVEMENT OF LINES

ANY tendency to Empathy is perpetually being checked by the need
for practical thinking. We are made to think in the most summary
fashion from one to another of those grouped possibilities, past,
present and future, which we call a Thing; and in such discursive
thinking we not only leave far behind the _aspect,_ the shape, which
has started a given scheme of Empathy, a given _movement of
lines,_ but we are often faced by facts which utterly contradict it.
When, instead of looking at a particular _aspect_ of that mountain,
we set to climbing it ourselves, the mountain ceases to "rise"; it
becomes passive to the activity which our muscular sensations and
our difficulty of breathing locate most unmistakably in ourselve