Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 April 1884 — Sensitiveness. [ARTICLE]

Sensitiveness.

The charm of not being sensitive is that one is thereby saved much pain. There is, indeed, a foolish sensitiveness which springs only from vanity. This deserves but little sympathy, unless the sufferer be very young; for by the time that maturity is reached a man ought to hive got sufficiently rid of his vanity not to be tortured thereby. Then there is the more rational sensitiveness which proceeds from an exquisite perception of the proper relation of things, and is united with the most delicate tact and kindly consideration for others. The man who possesses this kind of sensitiveness will often feel profoundly for others who.do not feel for themselves. He will blush and wince at an indignity offered to a friend, or even to one who has no special claim upon his affection. Thissubtlepsychologic quality is at once a powerful, a pleasurable, a useful, and a most unhappy gift. It is powerful because it is a substitute for that seer-like talent which enables a man to read the souls of his brethren. It is pleasurable because it prorides the person in whom it inheres with exquisite thrills when any noble thought or action or any grand work of art is presented to his contemplation. It is useful because it bestows a certain knowledge of life and character independent of that acquired by personal experiences. And it is unhappy because it compels its possessor to sympathize too universally with the miseries not of friends exclusively, but of all sentient creatures. The sensitiveness of small people is another affair altogether. The woman who quarrels with her friend because the latter received an invitation which the former did not, and men and women in general who cannot endure, without sharp pangs of envy, some small supremacy, social or professional, obtained by an acquaintance—these are fair instances of petty sensitiveness. The worst of it is that small natures like these have nobody to educate them, to help to enlarge them. Large natures can educate themselves. After years of turbulence and struggle they can attain that supreme and superb calm which nothing ruffles. Not that the grand sensitiveness which renders their perception of misery, small apd great, has wholly died out, but that the emotions have become trained by the intellect, and that vast serene resignanation reigns which is born of a recognition of the inevitable. Possibly religious faith may be united with this condition; but, if so, it is not the faith rooted in conventional theology, but that which is the outcome of an intelligent contemplation of the economy of the universe, so far as we can see it.— Sunday Times.