ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a growing power of sympathy, of entering into and sharing the minds of other persons. Sympathy in the sense of compassion is a specific emotion or sentiment, and has nothing necessarily in common with sympathy in the sense of communion. Sympathy, in the sense of understanding or personal insight, will be considered chiefly with a view to showing something of its nature as a phase or member of the general life of mankind. Sympathy must be selective, but the less it is controlled by conventional and external circumstances, such as wealth, and the more it penetrates to the essentials of character, the better. The act of sympathy follows the general law that nature works onward by mixing like and unlike, continuity and change. Social development as a whole, and every act of sympathy as a part of that development, is guided and stimulated in its selective growth by feeling.
