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Rae Greiner, 1909: The Introduction of the Word Empathy into

English
Empathy is a hot topic these days, on the lips of cognitive scientists, philosophers, literary critics, and U.S.
Presidents alike. But what is it? Consider the opening paragraph of the opening essay of a 2011 collection entitled
The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. In These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena,
C. Daniel Batson writes:
Students of empathy can seem a cantankerous lot. Although they typically agree that empathy is
important, they often disagree about why it is important, about what effects it has, about where it comes
from, and even about what it is. The term empathy is currently applied to more than a half-dozen
phenomena. These phenomena are related to one another, but they are not elements, aspects, facets, or
components of a single thing that is empathy, as one might say that an attitude has cognitive, affective,
and behavioral components. Rather, each is a conceptually distinct, stand-alone psychological state.
Further, each of those states has been called by names other than empathy. Opportunities for
disagreement abound. (3, original emphasis)

As Batson goes on to suggest, empathy can be difficult to define because it is often invoked to provide an
answer to two quite different questions (3). The first is this one: how do we know what others think and feel? And
the second: how can we explain the impulse to respond to the feelings of others? The first is principally a question
of knowledge. It asks how we are able to infer the contents of other minds, or how and to what extent we project
those contents from our own. The second, centered on motivation and behavior, is primarily ethical. It seeks to
understand as well as promote prosocial action (4).
The empathy of the moment has accrued a number of unique (and contradictory) meanings and associations,
from benevolent, altruistic care to the biochemical and physiological responses of our minds and bodies as we
mimic or mirror the feelings of othersas, for example, in the primitive empathy of motor mimicry, an automatic
or reactive bodily response that (some say) is carried out unselfconsciously, without intention or will (Bavelas et.
al.). We might well wonder, then, what relation empathy has to sympathy, a concept with which it is sometimes
aligned, sometimes treated synonymously, and sometimes contrasted. It might seem intuitively correct to assume
a wide distance between the two, if one takes as a starting point such recent titles as The Empathetic Brain and
Imitation, Empathy and Mirror Neurons.[1] Empathy is without a doubt the preferred term for describing brain
phenomena that, it would appear, only the most cutting-edge technology has made visible. Yet empathy in the
late-nineteenth-century, Darwinian era looks surprisingly like the empathy of today. There was, of course, no talk
of mirror neurons then, but the material body and the interworking of its parts had become vital to those whose
interest in loosening the grip of morality on our understanding of human experience had directed their attention to
muscles and nerves.[2] Indeed, we find family resemblances when we look back farther still. When, in 1987, the
psychology professors Nancy Eisenberg and Paul A. Miller distinguished empathy from sympathydefining
empathy as a vicarious emotional matching occurring in the apprehension of anothers affective state and
sympathy as involving sorrow or concern for anothers welfarethey opened their essay with references to
David Hume and Immanuel Kant (92). Hume is among the first in a long line of thinkers who stress the emotional
origins of moral behavior; Kant stands with those for whom cognition is key. If it is true that psychologists
generally have been less concerned than philosophers with delineating the ontological nature of morality, the
status of the emotions and the thinking mind, as well as the ostensible divide between them, has continued to
occupy students of empathy and sympathy since the Scottish Enlightenment (Eisenberg and Miller 91).
Empathy is the decidedly younger term, at least in English. Moreover, though empathy is favored over
sympathy in modern discourse (for reasons we will explore), it rose to prominence and accrued new meaning in
a fieldpsychological aestheticswhich for many of us no doubt remains unfamiliar.

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Edward B. Titchener

When the British psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener translated the German Einfhlung into the English
empathy in 1909, he drew upon a number of recent writings dedicated in part to revising and refining the terms
aesthetic and moral implications. Einfhlung had been used by the German Romantics to describe aesthetic
experience, particularly the experience of feeling into the natural world, but had become the object of serious
philosophical scrutiny only in the later nineteenth century through the work of German philosophers like Robert
Vischer and Theodor Lipps. The remainder of this essay considers why the introduction of that new term was
important, what it meant, and how it differed from (or was continuous with) existing understandings of sympathy. It
argues that while empathy and sympathy may sometimes be conceived differently, and necessarily so, a brief
look at the history of these terms reveals that both share common merits. Finally, it suggests that empathy should
be thought of less as an improvement over a sympathy understood as old-fashioned, pitying condescension than
an innovation in theorizing a relation with which the first philosophers of sympathy were also concerned, that
between the thinking mind, emotion, and aesthetic form. Such issues had preoccupied writers in the eighteenth
century, when the fields of psychology and aesthetics were in their infancy. Empathy does not supplant a nave,
outmoded sympathy but seeks to answer different questions or to answer old ones in new ways.
Indeed, empathy, or rather sympathy, had been understood in aesthetic terms at least since Adam Smith, Hume,
and their eighteenth-century contemporaries began the rigorous study of moral feeling, into which aesthetic
experience fell. The highly physicalized empathy of the early twentieth century in many ways represents a
continuation of, rather than a radical break from, a sympathy that in Smith and Humes day was not without its
own bodily discourse of taste and appetites, or its embroilment in debates concerning the nature of attraction and
repulsion. Even the architectural, geometrical emphasis that, as we shall see, characterized empathy for writers
like Vernon Lee was not without precedent. In Beauty & Ugliness (1912; first published in two-part essay form in
1897), a work attributed to both Lee and Clementina (Kit) Anstruther-Thomson, Lee contends that to articulate
properly the aesthetic process one must connect an analytic vocabulary to an affective one: visible qualities like
red, blue, tall, long, triangular, [and] square, she writes, tell us of no aesthetic peculiarities; [f]or those we

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must go to the names of our moods: pleasant, unpleasant, harmonious, jarring, unified, etc. (271, original
emphasis). Lee, following Lippss lead, goes on to describe in brilliant detail how we empathize with triangles and
squares. But in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume too had had a good deal to say about the relationship
between shape and color, ideation, and emotional response, as when he describes how we revolve in our mind
the ideas of circles, squares, parallelograms, [and] triangles of different sizes and proportions, or describes a
man looking at a kind of color wheel missing a particular shade of blue (1.1.7.20). Let all the different shades of
that colour, except that single one, be placed before him, descending gradually from the deepest to the lightest,
Hume writes; it is plain, that he will perceive a blank, where that shade is wanting. . . . Now I ask, whether it is
possible for him, from his own imagination, to supply this deficiency, and raise up to himself the idea of that
particular shade, though it had never been conveyed to him by his senses? (1.1.1.10). Hume answers in the
affirmative, drawing a parallel between color perception and sympathy with others. Both require imagination for
filling in the gaps, yet neither is simply subjective. Our sympathetic responses are modified and corrected in the
same way as are our judgments of color, line, and size. Both become objective in accordance with general rules.
Empathys significance to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century theories of the visual and plastic arts may
thus be seen as an extension of (if also distinctive from) that early connection between sympathetic
responsiveness, judgment, and aesthetic form. In Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics,
1873-1893 (1994), Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou describe the crucial twenty-year period
during which Einfhlung acquired that modern significance as an important background for understanding the
aesthetic transformations that would epitomize early-twentieth-century art. The formal experimentation of
Futurism, Cubism, and Neoplasticism, they suggest, was not without intellectual pedigree, specifically in the
shift away from the erstwhile philosophical and physiological problem of how we perceive form and space
toward the fledgling psychological problem of how we come to appreciate or take delight in the characteristics of
form and space, and the analogous problem of how we might artistically exploit pure form and space as artistic
entities in themselves (1-2). The emphasis on pleasure is important. Though the intellectual tradition they trace
leads them all the way back to Kants conception of purposiveness (Zweckmigkeit), which they define as the
sense of internal harmony that we presume to exist in the world and thus the heuristic rule or standard by which
we relate to the forms of nature and art, the final decades of the nineteenth century were marked by a profound
attention to bodily response (Mallgrave and Ikonomou 6). Translating Einfhlung as in-feeling, Mallgrave and
Ikonomou are keen to emphasize the physiological basis of, for instance, Robert Vischers muscular empathy,
which links aesthetic appreciation to the rhythmic experiences of the bodys self-motions, or his conviction that
certain loud colors might actually provoke an auditory response (23). As Vischer puts it, [w]e move in and
with the forms (101). Whether carried far away in observing fleeting clouds, or mentally attempting to scale
[the] fir tree and reach up within it, we caress [forms] spatial discontinuities; by moving in this way in the
imagination, we reproduce the kinetic motion of our internal organs and project it into other, even stationary,
objects (101). This experience of a rhythmic continuity between self and other, outside and in, defines empathy in
Vischers view. By objectifying the self in external, spatial forms, projecting it into and becoming analogous with
them, subject merges with object. Self and world unite.
Mallgrave and Ikonomou underscore how radical this proposal can seem once we recognize the pervasiveness of
empathy in our unconscious, everyday activities. For Vischers conception of empathy involves a pervasive
attitude, an openness that we maintain with the world, which in turn suggests (as Hume had done) that the self is
a fiction, a form borne of imagination and maintained only by force of habit (Mallgrave and Ikonomou 25). One
of empathys most pleasurable rewards, then, might be in the letting go (or loosening up) of that fiction. External
objects lose their distinctiveness from the self when my feeling and my mental representation of a given object
become one (25). This has important implications for the artist whose attempts at intensifying expressions of
form do not attempt to copy nature but reveal the richly affective and energic processes concealed therein: art
might strive to objectify the human condition in a sensuous and harmoniously refined form, translating the
instability of emotional life and the chaotic disorder of nature into a free, beautiful objectivity (26). As Titchener
explained in his Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes (1909), an authors choice
and arrangement of words could produce attitudinal feels: visceral pressures, muscular tonicity, and altered
breathing and facial expressions felt by authors and readers alike (181). This collection of responses he calls
empathy, yet it is not simply that aesthetic experience leads to physiological effects. For even ordinary,
run-of-the-mill thinking and understanding involve similar exertions, in a kind of motor empathy in which one
act[s] the feeling out, though as a rule in imaginal and not sensational terms (185). Not only do I see such

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abstract concepts as gravity and modesty and pride and courtesy and stateliness, Titchener explains; I feel or
act them in the minds muscles (21).
Such an empathy seems to have come a long way from sympathy as it is commonly understood, especially if by
that word we mean something closer to the sentimental pitying often associated with Victorian morality (as we
saw at the beginning of this essay, sympathy retains for many contemporary theorists an association with pity that
empathy does not). Suzanne Keen reminds us in Empathy and the Novel (2007) that Victorian novelists like
George Eliot were explicit in articulat[ing] a project for the cultivation of the sympathetic imagination, whereby
novel readers might learn, by extending themselves into the experiences, motives, and emotions of fictional
characters, to sympathize with real others in their everyday lives (38). Sympathy was urged as an urgent ethical
response to the increasingly urban, disconnected, and morally uncertain world of full-blown capitalism. For some,
though, that possibility came with messages fraught with danger, as from those who worried that novel reading
corrupted readers (especially girls) by causing them to think and feel things they ought not, as well as from those
who, from a different angle, considered sympathy a poor, overly personal substitute for large-scale social reform.
Such concerns were as old as the novel itself, as was the sneaking suspicion that sympathy provided a cover for
less than noble desires. As one Madame Riccoboni wryly remarked in 1769, [o]ne would readily create
unfortunates in order to taste the sweetness of feeling sorry for them (qtd. in Boltanski 101). Yet Keens use of
the terms empathy and sympathy more or less interchangeably marks an effort to rescue sympathy from the
bad press it received not so much then as now, once empathy, having shed the moralistic overtones that had
accrued to sympathy, was judged the more modern and better of the two. As I have written elsewhere, after 1909
(if not before it), sympathy seemed to belong to the Victorians, empathy to us (Thinking 418).
How this came to pass over the course of the nineteenth century is a story too long and complex to cover fully
here.[3] Yet in some ways the shift is easy to explain. As Neil Vickers writes, in eighteenth-century Britain,
proto-psychology and proto-aesthetics laboured under a common burden: that of having to prove their
worth in moral terms (4).[4] The first psychologists we might sayadmittedly, by stretching the termwere the
moral doctors described by Karl Philipp Moritz in 1782 as the physicians of heart and head (qtd. in Vickers 5).
The shift from moral medicine to morality-free scientific rigor (if it ever, finally, took place) was neither quick nor
unambivalent. As Vickers reminds us, Samuel Taylor Coleridge apologized for using the term psychological in
series of lectures he gave on Shakespeare in 1811-12 (the patient was Hamlet). Yet serious examination of the
mindstudied attention to the relay between perception, cognition, and affective responsewas beginning to lead
many thinkers toward more neutral, less patently moral explanations for human behavior. And as psychology
(along with many other branches of science) became increasingly professionalized as the century progressed, so
a new psychological aesthetics developed in tandem with other scientific developments, and, as Carolyn Burdett
explains, physiology and psychology converged ( Introduction 1).By the latter half of the nineteenth century,
Burdett argues, evolutionary theory offered new ways to understand such psycho-physiological phenomena as
reflex actions and spontaneous emotional response, thus linking even the most seemingly sovereign of human
experiences, such as the feeling of love for another person or the love of God, to vestigial instinctive behaviors
which had once conferred evolutionary advantage (1). As emotion fell under the powerful sway of physiology, so
too did aesthetic response. If love was in some fundamental way biochemical, perhaps a sensation borne of the
nervous system, the same might be true for experiences of the beautiful, including the sympathetic facilitynow
becoming empatheticto have aesthetic experiences with, and of, others. As Lipps argued in Empathy, Inner
Imitation and Sense-Feelings (1903), when in empathy with another person I experience a spatial extension of
the ego, I assume the place of that figure. I am transported into it. As far as my consciousness is concerned, I
am totally identical with it (qtd. in Jahoda 155). That, he continues, is aesthetic imitation, and it is at the same
time aesthetic Einfhlung (155). For Lipps, aesthetic enjoyment is objectivated self-enjoyment in that it
enabled a formal experience of self (Pinotti 94). For Lee, following from Lipps while carving out her own theory of
anthropomorphic aesthetics, empathy involved emotional memory: physical motions, grown abstract through
continual repetition, are sensations that in empathy we feel, thrillingly, to have been revived (Beauty 1).[5]
For many such writers, empathy necessarily involved a cognitive component, though how strong, and how
dominant, varied. As Burdett notes, Lee and Anstruther-Thomsons Beauty & Ugliness offered an
empirically-based account of aesthetic experience in which bodily sensation precedes and leads to emotion: we
fear because we tremble, not the other way around (Vernon Lee 3). But Lee balked at entirely severing
morality from aesthetic experience. Inspired, Burdett argues, by a proposition central to Darwins 1871 Descent of

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Manthat female aesthetic choice shapes and even dictates (hetero-)sexual selectionLee was at once
receptive to arguments for the primacy of sensation and resistant to any mechanistic understanding of aesthetic
response (11). From Vischer she took the idea that we imaginatively experience our own bodies via those
external objects into which our emotions are projected; from Lippss Spatial Aesthetics and Optical Illusion (1897),
she took the notion that the seeming vitality of objects, including the erectness and balance of a Doric column,
is among those ideas of movement and dynamism produced by empathy (Burdett Vernon Lee 20, original
emphasis). Such ideas are made out of the accumulated and synthesized, abstracted memory store of our
experiences of sensory motor activity, out of imagined similar movements, and out of an unconscious knowledge
of primordial dynamism as such (Burdett 20). They are, for Lee, tantamount to life, for beauty confirms us to
ourselves: forms and shapes, she believed, are how we keep feeling that we are alive (Burdett 20).
If by 1932 empathy had become a widely accepted term amongst psychologists, sympathy had in certain circles
suffered a decline, at least in popular perception.[6] It is worth remembering, however, that the moral and social
theories of Smith and Hume are thick with references to the mental activities, perceptual and imaginative acuities,
and ethical conundrums that, in the parlance of our own day, can seem to belong exclusively to empathy as well
as the moment. Projection and mirroring, the role of inference, fiction, and the imagination in inhabiting other
mindsthese were central to the broad eighteenth-century attempt to reconceive how feeling fundamentally
affected nearly every aspect of human life. Though their aims and conclusions sometimes differ, Smiths
insistence that our sympathies arise not simply by viewing anothers emotional expression firsthand, but from
reflecting upon the situation which excites it, isnt so far from the in-feeling that interested Lipps, Lee, and the
rest (12). It too involves an experience of form, in what Smith calls the going along with others: imaginatively
re-creating their mental movements, crafting narrative accounts so as to understand (and simulate) their attitudes,
feelings, and thoughts (83). As with Lees abstracted memories, feelings in Smiths sympathetic process must
first be abstractedturned into the stuff of storyto be imaginatively passed on and shared. His denial that feelings
could pass from one body to the next in the contagious fashion Hume described, and his resistance to the idea
that our sympathies arose in response to bodily feeling of any kind, turned sympathy into a mental process. It also
made emotion thoroughly social. No man can think of his own character, Smith wrote in The Theory of Moral
Sentiments (1759), without imagining how he appears to the minds of others; lacking that mental mirror, even
the self is an object which he cannot easily see, [and] which naturally he does not look at (110). Smith illustrates
the point by describing a man living in total isolation: on a good day, he might view his own temper and character
with that sort of satisfaction with which we consider a well-contrived machine; on a bad day, he is but a very
awkward and clumsy contrivance (192-93). Selfhood is so unthinkable on the social margins that only a minimal
subjectivity is possible outside it. A man who cannot suppose the idea of some other being, who is the natural
judge of the person who feels, is also incapable of having a self (193). Physiological accounts of empathy thus
share with Smithian sympathy a crucial insight: that we project our feeling into other forms in order to experience
ourselves.
Indeed, it is also worth remembering in closing that empathy and sympathy were overlapping terms even for those
who initially sought to clarify empathys aesthetic dimensions or to distinguish it from the moral sentiments
associated with sympathy. In his commentary on Doric columns, for instance, Lipps had written that while the
arrangement of materials constituted its technical creation, only a combination of aesthetic relations for our
imagination constitutes a work of art: the essential of the work of art, he continues, is an imaginary world
unified and self-contained (qtd. in Lee Recent 434). It may be difficult to see how any ordinary morality could
function in this self-contained, imaginary world. Yet in Recent Aesthetics, published in 1904 in the
Quarterly Review, Vernon Lee cites this same passage, declaring that
[t]his phenomenon of aesthetic Einfhlung is . . . analogous to that of moral sympathy. Just as when we
put ourselves in the place or more vulgarly in the skin of a fellow creature, we are, in fact, attributing
to him the feelings we should have in similar circumstances, so, in looking at the Doric column . . . we are
attributing to the lines and surfaces, to the spatial forms, those dynamic experiences which we should
have were we to put our bodies into similar conditions. (434)

As sympathy with the grief of our neighours can constitute a similar grief in our own experiences, so too an
aesthetic attribution of our own dynamic modes to visible forms implies the realisation in our consciousness of

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the various conflicting strains and pressures, of the resistance and the yielding which constitute any given
dynamic and volitional experiences of our own (434). The Doric columns valiant effort to defy gravity revives in
us a sense of the human condition. Its is a little drama we have experienced millions of times (434).[7]
Certainly, one must be wary of overstating the similarities between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
conceptions of sympathy and a fin de sicle empathy bearing the undeniable stamp of its post-Darwinian making.
At present, though, the pendulum often swings too far in the opposite direction, making empathy seem inarguably
superior to its old-fashioned cousin. In Upheavals of Thought: the Intelligence of Emotions (2003), Martha
Nussbaum offers a corrective, asserting the continuing relevance of a sympathy that, unlike empathy, always
entails an ethical stance: a malevolent person who imagines the situation of the other and takes pleasure in her
distress may be empathetic, she writes, but will surely not be judged sympathetic. Sympathy, by comparison,
includes a judgment that the other persons distress is bad (302). There are no doubt plenty of good reasons
why a recent study citing evidence for the altruistic behavior of rats toward their distressed fellows should refer to
such behavior as empathetic rather than sympathetic (the moral question, surely, is number one).[8] But
Nussbaums distinction may nevertheless give us reason to pause before jettisoning sympathy altogether in
explaining more human endeavors. We will do well, as historians and scholars of a long and lengthening
nineteenth century, to continue scrutinizing the empathy/sympathy relation as well as its ostensible divide.
Rae Greiner is Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University and editor of the journal Victorian Studies. Her
book, Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, is forthcoming from The Johns Hopkins
University Press.

HOW TO CITE THIS BRANCH ENTRY (MLA format)

Greiner, Rae. 1909: The Introduction of the Word Empathy into English. BRANCH: Britain, Representation and
Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net.
Web. [Here, add your last date of access to BRANCH].
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Bavelas, Janet Beavin, Alex Black, Charles R. Lemery, and Jennifer Mullett. Motor Mimicry as Primitive
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ENDNOTES

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[1] For instance, see de Vignemont and Singers The Empathetic Brain: How, When and Why? and Iacobonis
Imitation, Empathy, and Mirror Neurons.

[2] Though no one was talking of mirror neurons in the late nineteenth century, neurons had been named in
1891 by Heinrich Wilhelm Gottfried von Waldeyer-Hartz; three years later, Franz Nissl successfully stained them
with dahlia violet. My thanks to the anonymous reader of this essay who clarified this point.

[3] I cover some of this ground in my forthcoming book on sympathy and realism, forthcoming from the Johns
Hopkins University Press in 2012. For a more thorough account, Keens work is a good place to start.

[4] Vickerss essay is part of a special issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
devoted to nineteenth-century psychology and aesthetics.

[5] Lee found Lippss account of empathy overly abstract: [o]ne might almost believe that it is the dislike of
admitting the participation of the body in the phenomenon of aesthetic Empathy which has impelled Lipps to make
aesthetics more and more abstract, a priori, and metaphysical (Beauty 60). From Lippss study has come, she
writes, if not the theory, at least the empirical and the logical demonstration of the process to which Professor
Lipps has given the convenient but misleading name Einfhlung (60).

[6] As Gardner Murphy wrote that year in An Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology, the term Einfhlung
(empathy) has in fact come into general psychological use (qtd. in Jahoda 162).

[7] According to Jahoda, Lipps treated empathy and sympathy interchangeably except in the case of negative
Einfhlung, which Jahoda calls rather an elusive concept (158).

[8] See Bartal et.al., Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats.

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