s to him not merely the visible
but indeed the entire personality. Another reason of especial
significance is the development of public means of transportation.
Before the appearance of omnibuses, railroads, and street cars in the
nineteenth century, men were not in a situation where for periods of
minutes or hours they could or must look at each other without talking
to one another. Modern social life increases in ever growing degree the
role of mere visual impression which always characterizes the
preponderant part of all sense relationship between man and man, and
must place social attitudes and feelings upon an entirely changed basis.
The greater perplexity which characterizes the person who only sees, as
contrasted with the one who only hears, brings us to the problems of
the emotions of modern life: the lack of orientation in the collective
life, the sense of utter lonesomeness, and the feeling that the
individual is surrounded on all sides by closed doors.

2. The Expression of the Emotions[139]

Actions of all kinds, if regularly accompanying any state of the mind,
are at once recognized as expressive. These may consist of movements of
any part of the body, as the wagging of a dog's tail, the shrugging of a
man's shoulders, the erection of the hair, the exudation of
perspiration, the state of the capillary circulation, labored breathing,
and the use of the vocal or other sound-producing instruments. Even
insects express anger, terror, jealousy, and love by their stridulation.
With man the respiratory organs are of especial importance in
expression, not only in a direct, but to a still higher degree in an
indirect, manner.

Few points are more interesting in our present subject than the
extraordinarily complex chain of events which lead to certain expressive
movements. Take, for instance, the oblique eyebrows of a man suffering
from grief or anxiety. When infants scream loudly from hunger or pain,
the circulation is affected, and the eyes tend to become gorged with
blood; consequently the muscles surrounding the eyes are strongly
contracted as a protection. This action, in the course of many
generations, has become firmly fixed and inherited; but when, with
advancing years and culture, the habit of screaming is partially
repressed, the muscles round the eyes still tend to contract, whenever
even slight distress is felt. Of these muscles, the pyramidals of the
nose are less under the control of the will than