into"--derived from a
_verb to feel oneself into something_ ("sich in Etwas ein fuehlen")
was in current use even before Lotze and Viscber applied it to
aesthetics, and some years before Lipps (1897) and Wundt (1903)
adopted it into psychological terminology; and as it is now
consecrated, and no better occurs to me, I have had to adopt it,
although the literal connotations of the German word have
surrounded its central meaning (as I have just defined it) with
several mischievous misinterpretations. Against two of these I think
it worth while to warn the Reader, especially as, while so doing, I
can, in showing what it is not, make it even clearer what Empathy
really is. The first of these two main misinterpretations is based
upon the reflexive form of the German verb "_sich einfuehlen_" (to
feel _oneself_ into) and it defines, or rather does not define,
Empathy as a metaphysical and quasi-mythological projection of the
ego into the object or shape under observation; a notion
incompatible with the fact that Empathy, being only another of those
various mergings of the activities of the perceiving subject with the
qualities of the perceived object wherewith we have already dealt,
depends upon a comparative or momentary abeyance of all thought
of an ego; if we became aware that it is _we_ who are thinking the
rising, we who are _feeling_ the rising, we should not think or feel
that the mountain did the rising. The other (and as we shall later see)
more justifiable misinterpretation of the word Empathy is based on
its analogy with _sympathy,_ and turns it into a kind of sympathetic,
or as it has been called, _inner, i.e._ merely _felt, mimicry_ of, for
instance, the mountain's _rising._ Such mimicry, not only _inner_
and _felt,_ but outwardly manifold, does undoubtedly often result
from very lively _empathic_ imagination. But as it is the mimicking,
inner or outer, of movements and actions which, like the _rising_ of
the mountain, take place only in our imagination, it presupposes
such previous animation of the inanimate, and cannot therefore be
taken either as constituting or explaining Empathy itself.

Such as I have defined and exemplified it in our Rising Mountain,
Empathy is, together with mere Sensation, probably the chief factor
of preference, that is of an alternative of satisfaction and
dissatisfaction, in aesthetic contemplation, the muscular adjustments
and the measuring, comparing and coordinating activities by w