more harmful kind. The ill effects of pent-up grief are well known, and a flood of tears may bring wonderful relief.
In many cases the emotional energy may be directed into other and more valuable channels. It may be transmuted into cognitive or conative energy. "To a certain extent, whatever currents are diverted from the regions below must swell the activity of the thought-tracts of the brain."[1] The emotional power that has been excited should not be allowed simply to accumulate as a dead weight. Nor should it be permitted to evaporate without bearing some practical fruit. "There is no more contemptible type of character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed. Rousseau, inflaming all the mothers of France, by his eloquence, to follow Nature and nurse their babies themselves, while he sends his own children to the foundling hospital, is the classical example of what I mean. The habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of a Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on the seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale. ... The remedy would be never to suffer oneself to have an emotion at a concert without expressing it afterwards in some active way. Let the expression be the least thing in the world—speaking genially to one's aunt, or giving up one's seat in a horse-car,
- ↑ James: Principles of Psychology, ii. p. 466.
