f one of these great driving forces, or a complex of them.
Anger, pity, and fear, in their less extreme forms, pour floods
of energy into the activities in which they take overt expression.
It needs no special knowledge to recognize the fact
that the normal interests and enterprises of life are quickened
and sustained when some great emotional drive can be roused
in their support. Ambition, loyalty, love, or hate may stir
men to and sustain them in long and difficult enterprises
which they would neither undertake nor continue were these
motive forces removed. The soldier does not fight persistently
and well wholly, or often even in part, because he has
thought out the situation and found the cause of his country
to be just. He is stirred and sustained by the energies which
the emotional complex called "patriotism" has roused and
concentrated toward action. A scientist performing long and
difficult researches, a father sacrificing rest and comfort that
his children may be well provided for, a boy working to pay
his way through college, are all persisting in courses of action,
because of the driving power which the emotions, more
or less mixed, of curiosity, or tenderness, or self-assertion
have released.

But just as the original nature with which man is born is
modifiable, so are his emotional reactions. Each individual's
emotional reactions are peculiar and specific, because of the
particular contacts to which they have been exposed, and the
organization of instincts and habits which have come to be
their more or less fixed character. Any emotional experience
consists of an intermingling of many and diverse feelings.
And these particular complexes of emotions become for each
individual organized about particular persons or objects or
situations. The emotional reactions of an individual are,
indeed, accurately symptomatic of the character of the
individual and the culture of his time. They are aroused, it goes
without saying, on very different occasions and by very
different objects, among different men and different groups.
In the sixteenth century pious persons could watch heretics
being burned in oil with a sense of deep religious exaltation.
Certain Fijian tribes slaughter their aged parents with the
most tender filial devotion. In certain savage communities,
to eat in public arouses on the part of the individual a sense
of acute shame.

Since those emotions are, on the whole, pleasantly toned
which accompany