A young man in love with a girl is
ashamed when told that he is in love, because his reverence for
one whom he regards as a higher being cannot be brought into
relationship with his own lower personality. A child in the same
way feels shame in approaching a big, grown-up person, who seems
a higher sort of being. Sometimes, likewise, we feel shame in
approaching a stranger, for a new person tends to seem higher and
more interesting than ourselves. It is not so in approaching a
new natural phenomenon, because we do not compare it with
ourselves. Another kind of shame is seen when this mental contest
is lower than our personality, and on this account in conflict
with it, as when we are ashamed of sexual thoughts. Sexual ideas
tend to evoke shame, Hohenemser remarks, because they so easily
tend to pass into sexual feelings; when they do not so pass (as
in scientific discussions) they do not evoke shame.
It will be seen that this discussion of modesty is highly
generalized and abstracted; it deals simply with the formal
mechanism of the process. Hohenemser admits that fear is a form
of psychic stasis, and I have sought to show that modesty is a
complexus of fears. We may very well accept the conception of
psychic stasis at the outset. The analysis of modesty has still
to be carried very much further.
The discussion of modesty is complicated by the difficulty, and even
impossibility, of excluding closely-allied emotions--shame, shyness,
bashfulness, timidity, etc.
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