e of its
importance for the communication of feeling.

As is well known, it is only in cases of abnormally increased
sensibility--for instance, in some of the stages of hypnotism and
thought transmission--that the motor counterpart of a mental state can
be imitated with such faithfulness and completeness that the imitator is
thereby enabled to partake of all the _intellectual_ elements of the
state existing in another. The hedonic qualities, on the other hand,
which are physiologically conditioned by much simpler motor
counterparts, may of course be transmitted with far greater perfection:
it is easier to suggest a pleasure than a thought. It is also evident
that it is the most general hedonic and volitional elements which have
been considered by the German authors on aesthetic in their theories on
internal imitation ("Die innere Nachahmung"). They seem to have thought
that the adoption of the attitudes and the performance of the movements
which usually accompany a given emotional state will also succeed to
some extent in producing a similar emotional state. This assumption is
perfectly legitimate, even if the connection between feeling and
movement be interpreted in the associative way. And it needs no
justification when the motor changes are considered as the physiological
correlate of the feeling itself.

Everyday experience affords many examples of the way in which feelings
are called into existence by the imitation of their expressive
movements. A child repeats the smiles and the laughter of its parents,
and can thus partake of their joy long before it is able to understand
its cause. Adult life naturally does not give us many opportunities of
observing this pure form of direct and almost automatic transmission.
But even in adult life we may often meet with an exchange of feeling
which seems almost independent of any intellectual communication. Lovers
know it, and intimate friends like the brothers Goncourt, to say nothing
of people who stand in so close a rapport with each other as a
hypnotiser and his subject. And even where there is no previous
sympathetic relation, a state of joy or sadness may often, if it is only
distinctly expressed, pass over, so to say, from the individual who has
been under the influence of its objective cause, to another who, as it
were, borrows the feeling, but remains unconscious of its cause. We
experience this phenomenon almost daily in the influence exerted upon us
by social inter