Admiration

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• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  A friend of the writer gave as a proof of the almost human intelligence of his dog that he took him one day down to his boat on the shore, but found the boat full of dirt and water. He remembered that the sponge was up at the house, a third of at mile distant; but, disliking to go back himself, he made various gestures of wiping out the boat and so forth, saying to his terrier, "Sponge, sponge; go fetch the sponge." But he had little expectation of a result, since the dog had never received the slightest training with the boat or the sponge. Nevertheless, off he trotted to the house, and, to his owner's great surprise and admiration, brought the sponge in his jaws. Sagacious as this was, it required nothing but ordinary contiguous association of ideas. The terrier was only exceptional in the minuteness of his spontaneous observation. Most terriers would have taken no interest in the boat-cleaning operation, nor noticed what the sponge was for. This terrier, in having picked those details out of the crude mass of his best-experience distinctly enough to be reminded of them, was truly enough ahead of his peers on the line which leads to human reason. But his act was not yet an act of reasoning proper. It might fairly have been called so if, unable to find the sponge at the house, he had brought back a dipper or a mop instead. Such a substitution would have shown that, embedded in the very different appearances of these articles, he had been able to discriminate the identical partial attribute of capacity to take up water, and had reflected, "For the present purpose they are identical." This, which the dog did not do, any man but the very stupidest could not fail to do.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  But, now, since nature never makes a jump, it is evident that we should find the lowest men occupying in this respect an intermediate position between the brutes and the highest men. And so we do. Beyond the analogies which their own minds suggest by breaking up the literal sequence of their experience, there is a whole world of analogies which they can appreciate when imparted to them by their betters, but which they could never excogitate alone. This answers the question why Darwin and Newton had to be waited for so long. The flash of similarity between an apple and the moon, between the rivalry for food in nature and the rivalry for man's selection, was too recondite to have occurred to any but exceptional minds. Genius, then, as has been already said, is identical with the possession of similar association to an extreme degree. Professor Bain says: "This I count the leading fact of genius. I consider it quite impossible to afford any explanation of intellectual originality except on the supposition of unusual energy on this point." Alike in the arts, in literature, in practical affairs, and in science, association by similarity is the prime condition of success.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  space above the horizontal, as 1-1'-2'-2, will symbolize all that passes through the mind during the time 1-2 whose line it covers. The entire diagram from 0 to 0' represents a finite length of thought's stream. Can we now define the psychic constitution of each vertical section of this segment? We can, though in a very rough way. Immediately after 0, even before we have opened our mouths to speak, the entire thought is present to our mind in the form of an intention to utter that sentence. This intention, though it has no simple name, and though it is a transitive state immediately displaced by the first word, is yet a perfectly determinate phase of thought, unlike anything else (see p. 168). Again, immediately before 0', after the last word of the sentence is spoken, all will admit that we again think its entire content as we inwardly realize its completed deliverance. All vertical sections made through any other parts of the diagram will be respectively filled with other ways of feeling the sentence's meaning. Through 2, for example, the cards will be the part of the object most emphatically present to the mind; through 4, the table. The stream is made higher in the drawing at its end than at its beginning, because the final way of feeling the content is fuller and richer than the initial way. As Joubert says, "we only know just what we meant to say, after we have said it." And as M. V. Egger remarks, "before speaking, one barely knows what one intends to say, but afterwards one is filled with admiration and surprise at having said and thought it so well." This latter author seems to me to have kept at much closer quarters with the facts than any other analyst of consciousness.[251] But even he does not quite hit the mark, for, as I understand him, he thinks that each word as it occupies the mind displaces the rest of the thought's content. He distinguishes the 'idea' (what I have called the total object or meaning) from the consciousness of the words, calling the former a very feeble state, and contrasting it with the liveliness of the words, even when these are only silently rehearsed. "The feeling," he says, "of the words makes ten or twenty times more noise in our consciousness than the sense of the phrase, which for consciousness is a very slight matter."[252] And having distinguished these two things, he goes on to separate them in time, saying that the idea may either precede or follow the words, but that it is a 'pure illusion' to suppose them simultaneous.[253] Now I believe that in all cases where the words are understood , the total idea may be and usually is present not only before and after the phrase has been spoken, but also whilst each separate word is uttered.[254] It is the overtone, halo, or fringe of the word as spoken in that sentence . It is

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "It is far too little recognized how entirely the intellect is built up of practical interests. The theory of Evolution is beginning to do very good service by its reduction of all mentality to the type of reflex action. Cognition, in this view, is but a fleeting moment, a cross-section at a certain point of what in its totality Is a motor phenomenon. In the lower forms of life no one will pretend that cognition is anything more than a guide to appropriate action. The germinal question concerning things brought for the first time before consciousness is not the theoretic 'What is that?' but the practical 'Who goes there?' or rather, as Horwicz has admirably put it, 'What is to be done?'—'Was fang' ich an?' In all our discussions about the intelligence of lower animals the only test we use is that of their acting as if for a purpose. Cognition, in short, is incomplete until discharged in act. And although it is true that the later mental development, which attains its maximum through the hypertrophied cerebrum of man, gives birth to a vast amount of theoretic activity over and above that which is immediately ministerial to practice, Set the earlier claim is only postponed, not effaced, and the active nature asserts its rights to the end. "If there be any truth at all in this view, it follows that however vaguely a philosopher may define the ultimate universal datum, he cannot be said to leave it unknown to us so long as he in the slightest degree pretends that our emotional or active attitude towards it should be of one sort rather than another. He who says, 'Life is real, life is earnest,' however much he may speak of the fundamental mysteriousness of things, gives a distinct definition to that mysteriousness by ascribing to it the right to claim from us the particular mood called seriousness, which means the unwillingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain. The same is true of him who says that all is vanity. Indefinable as the predicate vanity may be in se, it is clearly enough something which permits anæsthesia, mere escape from suffering, to be our rule of life. There is no more ludicrous incongruity than for agnostics to proclaim with one breath that the substance of things is unknowable, and with the next that the thought of it should inspire us with admiration of its glory, reverence, and a willingness to add our cooperative push in the direction towards which its manifestations seem to be drifting. The unknowable may be unfathomed, but if it make such distinct demands upon our activity, we surely are not ignorant of its essential quality.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  and speak. "But if two or three minutes were allowed him to peruse an octave page, he then could spell the single words out from his memory as well as if the book lay open before him. . . . That there was no deception I could test by means of a new Latin law-dissertation which had just come into my hands, which he never could have seen, and of which both subject and language were unknown to him. He read off [mentally] many lines, skipping about too, of the page which had been given him to see, no worse than if the experiment had been made with a child's story." Drobisch describes this case as if it were one of unusual persistence in the visual image ['primary memory,' vide supra , p. 431]. But he adds that the youth 'remembered his pages a long time.' In the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for Jan. 1871 (VI. 6) is an account by Mr. W. D Henkle (together with the stock classic examples of preternatural memory) of an almost blind Pennsylvania farmer who could remember the day of the week on which any date had fallen for forty-two years past, and also the kind of weather it was, and what he was doing on each of more than fifteen thousand days. Pity that such a magnificent faculty as this could not have found more worthy application! What these cases show is that the mere organic retentiveness of a man need bear no definite relation to his other mental powers. Men of the highest general powers will often forget nothing, however insignificant. One of the most generally accomplished men I know has a memory of this sort. He never keeps written note of anything, yet is never at a loss for a fact which he has once heard. He remembers the old addresses of all his New York friends, living in numbered streets, addresses which they themselves have long since moved away from and forgotten. He says that he should probably recognize an individual fly, if he had seen him thirty years previous—he is, by the way, an entomologist. As an instance of his desultory memory, he was introduced to a certain colonel at a club. The conversation fell upon the signs of age in man. The colonel challenged him to estimate his age. He looked at him, and gave the exact day of his birth, to the wonder of all. But the secret of this accuracy was that, having picked up some days previously an army-register, he had idly turned over its list of names, with dates of birth, graduation, promotions, etc., attached, and when the colonel's name was mentioned to him at the club, these figures, on which he had not bestowed a moment's thought, involuntarily surged up in his mind. Such a memory is of course a priceless boon. [579] Cf. Ebbinghaus: Ueber das Gedächtniss (1885), pp. 67, 45. One may hear a person say: "I have a very poor

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  But as, according to our view, there are two stages in reasoned thought, one where similarity merely operates to call up cognate thoughts, and another farther stage, where the bond of identity between the cognate thoughts is noticed; so minds of genius may be divided into two main sorts, those who notice the bond and those who merely obey it. The first are the abstract reasoners, properly so called, the men of science, and philosophers—the analysts, in a word; the latter are the poets, the critics—the artists, in a word, the men of intuitions. These judge rightly, classify cases, characterize them by the most striking analogic epithets, but go no further. At first sight it might seem that the analytic mind represented simply a higher intellectual stage, and that the intuitive mind represented an arrested stage of intellectual development; but the difference is not so simple as this. Professor Bain has said that a man's advance to the scientific stage (the stage of noticing and abstracting the bond of similarity) may often be due to an absence of certain emotional sensibilities. The sense of color, he says, may no less determine a mind away from science than it determines it toward painting There must be a penury in one's interest in the details of particular forms in order to permit the forces of the intellect to be concentrated on what is common to many forms.[357] In other words, supposing a, mind fertile in the suggestion of analogies, but, at the same time, keenly interested in the particulars of each suggested image, that mind would be far less apt to single out the particular character which called up the analogy than one whose interests were less generally lively. A certain richness of the æsthetic nature may, therefore, easily keep one in the intuitive stage. All the poets are examples of this. Take Homer: "Ulysses, too, spied round the house to see if any man were still alive and hiding, trying to get away from gloomy death. He found them all fallen in the blood and dirt, and in such number as the fish which the fishermen to the low shore, out of the foaming sea, drag with their meshy nets. These all, sick for the ocean water, are strewn around the sands, while the blazing sun takes their life from them. So there the suitors lay strewn round on one another." Or again: "And as when a Mæonian or a Carian woman stains ivory with purple to be a cheek-piece for horses, and it is kept in the chamber, and many horsemen have prayed to bear it off; but it is kept a treasure for a king, both a trapping for his horse and a glory to the driver—in such wise were thy stout thighs, Menelaos, and legs and fair ankles stained with blood."

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  hook to which it hangs, a means to fish it up by when sunk beneath the surface. Together, they form a network of attachments by which it is woven into the entire tissue of our thought. The 'secret of a good memory' is thus the secret of forming diverse and multiple associations with every fact we care to retain. But this forming of associations with a fact, what is it but thinking about the fact as much as possible? Briefly, then, of two men with the same outward experiences and the same amount of mere native tenacity, the one who thinks over his experiences most , and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory . We see examples of this on every hand. Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits. The college athlete who remains a dunce at his books will astonish you by his knowledge of men's 'records' in various feats and games, and will be a walking dictionary of sporting statistics. The reason is that he is constantly going over these things in his mind, and comparing and making series of them. They form for him not so many odd facts, but a concept-system—so they stick. So the merchant remembers prices, the politician other politicians' speeches and votes, with a copiousness which amazes outsiders, but which the amount of thinking they bestow on these subjects easily explains. The great memory for facts which a Darwin and a Spencer reveal in their books is not incompatible with the possession on their part of a brain with only a middling degree of physiological retentiveness. Let a man early in life set himself the task of verifying such a theory as that of evolution, and facts will soon cluster and cling to him like grapes to their stem. Their relations to the theory will hold them fast; and the more of these the mind is able to discern, the greater the erudition will become. Meanwhile the theorist may have little, if any, desultory memory. Unutilizable facts may be unnoted by him and forgotten as soon as heard. An ignorance almost as encyclopædic as his erudition may coexist with the latter, and hide, as it were, in the interstices of its web. Those who have had much to do with scholars and savants will readily think of examples of the class of mind I mean. In a system, every fact is connected with every other by some thought-relation. The consequence is that every fact is retained by the combined suggestive power of all the other facts in the system, and forgetfulness is well-nigh impossible. The reason why cramming is such a bad mode of study is now made clear. I mean by cramming that way of preparing for examinations by committing 'points' to memory during a few hours or days of intense application immediately preceding the final ordeal, little or no work having been performed during the

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  the explanation of their superiority. The intellectual character of Watt contained all the elements preparatory to a great stroke of similarity in such a case;—a high susceptibility, both by nature and by education, to the mechanical properties of bodies; ample previous knowledge or familiarity; and indifference to the superficial and sensational effects of things. It is not only possible, however, but exceedingly probable, that many men possessed all these accomplishments; they are of a kind not transcending common abilities. They would in some degree attach to a mechanical education almost as a matter of course. That the discovery was not sooner made supposes that something farther, and not of common occurrence, was necessary; and this additional endowment appears to be the identifying power of Similarity in general; the tendency to detect likeness in the midst of disparity and disguise. This supposition accounts for the fact, and is consistent with the known intellectual character of the inventor of the steam-engine."[502] Dr. Hodgson's account of association is by all odds the best yet propounded in English.[503] All these writers hold more or less explicitly to the notion of atomistic 'ideas' which recur. In Germany, the same mythological supposition has been more radically grasped, and carried out to a still more logical, if more repulsive, extreme, by Herbart[504] and his followers, who until recently may be said to have reigned almost supreme in their native country.[505] For Herbart each idea is a permanently existing entity, the entrance whereof into consciousness is but an accidental determination of its being. So far as it succeeds in occupying the theatre of consciousness, it crowds out another idea previously there. This act of inhibition gives it, however, a sort of hold on the other representation which on all later occasions facilitates its following the other into the mind. The ingenuity with which most special cases of association are formulated in this mechanical language of struggle and inhibition, is great, and surpasses in analytic thoroughness anything that has been done by the British school. This, however, is a doubtful merit, in a case where the elements dealt with are artificial; and I must confess that to my mind there is something almost hideous in the glib Herbartian jargon about Vorstellungsmassen and their Hemmungen and Hemmungssummen , and sinken and erheben and schweben , and Verschmelzungen and Complexionen . Herr Lipps, the most recent systematic German Psychologist, has, I regret to say, carried out the theory of ideas in a way which the great originality, learning, and acuteness he shows make only the more regrettable.[506] Such elaborately artificial constructions are, it seems to me, only a burden and a hindrance, not a help, to our science.[507] In French, M. Rabier in his chapter on Association,[508] handles the subject more vigorously and acutely than any one. His treatment of it, though short, seems to me for general soundness to rank second only to Hodgson's. In the last chapter we already invoked association to account for the effect of use in

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  to revive past objects corresponding in use to some one present, although diverse in all other circumstances. We become oblivious to the difference between a horse, a steam-engine, and a waterfall, when our minds are engrossed with the one circumstance of moving power. The diversity in these had no doubt for a long time the effect of keeping back their first identification; and to obtuse intellects, this identification might have been for ever impossible. A strong concentration of mind upon the single peculiarity of mechanical force, and a degree of indifference to the general aspect of the things themselves, must conspire with the intellectual energy of resuscitation by similars, in order to summon together in the view three structures so different. We can see, by an instance like this, how new adaptations of existing machinery might arise in the mind of a mechanical inventor. When it first occurred to a reflecting mind that moving water had a property identical with human or brute force, namely, the property of setting other masses in motion, overcoming inertia and resistance,—when the sight of the stream suggested through this point of likeness the power of the animal,—a new addition was made to the class of prime movers, and when circumstances permitted, this power could become a substitute for the others. It may seem to the modern understanding, familiar with water-wheels and drifting rafts, that the similarity here was an extremely obvious one. But if we put ourselves back into an early state of mind, when running water affected the mind by its brilliancy, its roar, and irregular devastation, we may easily suppose that to identify this with animal muscular energy was by no means an obvious effect. Doubtless when a mind arose, insensible by natural constitution to the superficial aspects of things, and having withal a great stretch of identifying intellect, such a comparison would then be possible. We may pursue the same example one stage further, and come to the discovery of steam power, or the identification of expanding vapor with the previously known sources of mechanical force. To the common eye, for ages, vapor presented itself as clouds in the sky; or as a hissing noise at the spout of a kettle, with the formation of a foggy curling cloud at a few inches' distance. The forcing up of the lid of a kettle may also have been occasionally observed. But how long was it ere any one was struck with the parallelism of this appearance with a blast of wind, a rush of water, or an exertion of animal muscle? The discordance was too great to be broken through by such a faint and limited amount of likeness. In one mind, however, the identification did take place, and was followed out into its consequences. The likeness had occurred to other minds previously, but not with the same results. Such minds must have been in some way or other distinguished above the millions of mankind; and we are now endeavoring to give

• From Story of O (1954)

  of sweetly made-up lips yielding beneath her own, for the porcelain or pearly sparkle of eyes half-closed in the half-light of couches at five in the afternoon, when the curtains are drawn and the lamp on the fireplace mantel lighted, for the voices that say: "Again, oh, please, again...," for the marine odor clinging to her fingers: this was a real, deeply-rooted taste. And she also enjoyed the pursuit just as much. Probably not for the pursuit itself, however amusing or fascinating it might be, but for the complete sense of freedom she experienced in the act of hunting. She, and she alone, set the rules and directed the proceedings (something she never did with men, or only in a most oblique manner). She initiated the discussions and set the rendezvous, the kisses came from her too, so much so that she preferred not to have someone kiss her first, and since she had first had lovers she almost never allowed the girl whom she was caressing to return her caresses. As much as she was in a hurry to behold her girlfriend naked, she was equally quick to find excuses why she herself should not undress. She often looked for excuses to avoid it, saying that she was cold, that it was the wrong time of the month for her. And, what is more, rare was the woman in whom she failed to detect some element of beauty. She remembered that, just out of the lycée, she had tried to seduce an ugly, disagreeable, constantly ill-natured little girl for the sole reason that she had a wild mop of blonde hair which, by its unevenly cut curls, created a forest of light and shade over a skin that, while lusterless, had a texture which was soft, smooth, and totally flat. But the little girl had repelled her advances, and if one day pleasure had ever lighted up the ungrateful wench's face, it had not been because of O. For O passionately loved to see faces enveloped in that mist which makes them so young and smooth, a timeless youth that does not restore childhood but enlarges the lips, widens the eyes the way make-up does, and renders the iris sparkling and clear. In this, admiration played a larger part than pride, for it was not her handiwork which moved her: at Roissy she had experienced the same uncomfortable feeling in the presence of the transfigured face of a girl possessed by a stranger. The nakedness and surrender of the bodies overwhelmed her, and she had the feeling that her girlfriends, when they simply agreed to display themselves naked in a locked room, were giving her a gift which she could never repay in kind. For the nakedness of vacations, in the sun and on the beaches, made no impression on her - not simply because it was public but because, being public and not absolute, she was to some extent protected from it. The beauty of other women, which with unfailing generosity she was inclined to find superior to her own, nevertheless reassured her concerning her own beauty, in which she saw, whenever she unexpectedly caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror, a kind of reflection of theirs. The power she acknowledged that her girlfriends had over her was at the same time a guarantee of her own power over men. And what

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Good allies don’t hide in the shadows : Dr. Isaac Sabat is quoted from the CNN article “Sharing the Weight: How to Know When—and How—to Support Marginalized People at Work,” by Julia Carpenter, October 30, 2018. Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube : Wojcicki is quoted from her Vanity Fair article “Exclusive: How to Break Up the Silicon Valley Boys Club,” March 16, 2017. Chapter 8: Transform Exclusion into Connection work done at Cornell University : The firehouse data can be found in the Cornell Chronicle article “Groups That Eat Together Perform Better Together,” by Susan Kelley, November 19, 2015. FOMO and being excluded : Dr. Sandra Robinson’s work is referenced on the University of British Columbia website article “Ostracism More Damaging Than Bullying in the Workplace,” by Andrew Riley, May 29, 2014. We had a chance to interview Mitt Romney : Romney’s story is from his foreword to Adrian Gostick and Dana Telford’s The Integrity Advantage , Gibbs Smith (2003). Emma Seppälä and Marissa King of Yale : Drs. Seppälä and King are quoted in the Inc . article “Tom Brady Just Answered ‘Yes’ to a Very Controversial Question,” by Bill Murphy Jr., April 26, 2020; and their Harvard Business Review article “Having Friends at Work Can Be Tricky, but It’s Worth It,” August 8, 2017. the wayward wisdom of Michael Scott : The quote is from season 2, episode 6 of The Office , “The Fight” (2005). Executive coach Peter Bregman : We spoke with Bregman and also borrowed from his Harvard Business Review article “How to Have Friends at Work When You’re the Boss,” March 19, 2014. Says Professor Art Markman : Dr. Markman is quoted from his Harvard Business Review article “Why Work Friendships Go Awry, and How to Prevent It,” June 8, 2018. We turn to a commencement address : Oprah’s 2013 commencement address can be read in its entirety in the Harvard Gazette article “Winfrey’s Commencement Address,” from May 30, 2013 (posted May 31, 2013). Beth Schinoff of Boston College : Drs. Schinoff et al. are quoted from their Harvard Business Review article “How Remote Workers Make Work Friends,” by Beth Schinoff, Blake E. Ashforth, and Kevin Corley, November 22, 2019. Chapter 9: Turn Doubts into Assurance Research conducted for us by Willis Towers Watson : The Willis Towers Watson data is from Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton’s The Carrot Principle , Simon & Schuster (2009). they are better able to bounce back from adversity : Dr. Algoe is quoted from her Social and Personality Psychology Compass paper “Find, Remind, and Bind: The Functions of Gratitude in Everyday Relationships,” May 31, 2012. Studies by a team of scientists : Dr. McCraty is quoted from the positive psychology.com article “The Neuroscience of Gratitude and How It Affects Anxiety and Grief,” by Madhuleena Roy Chowdhury, May 5, 2020.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  We’d already made a decision, but in ten short minutes what we learned from people’s responses to my question resulted in us tweaking our decision, making it better and a lot more thoughtful.” Verhun added, “After the call I received emails from the team saying that with that question I had demonstrated powerful leadership by intentionally including everyone while also being receptive to their views. It made me stop and realize that our entire leadership team needs to behave in a similar inclusive manner for all important decisions. By ensuring all voices have a chance to be heard, it helps team members deal with any uncertainty they may be feeling about a key decision, and feel they are more part of the solution.” Another manager who has brought an inclusive perspective to various leadership roles throughout his career is Mark Beck, who we met when he was a senior leader of Danaher, a seventy thousand–employee science and technology company. He now owns a group of precision manufacturing companies know as B-Square Precision Group. To encourage healthy debate, Beck says, he might take the side of a person whose view is under assault in a meeting, even if he doesn’t necessarily agree with it. This isn’t gamesmanship, it’s to show that the person is offering up a reasonable way of thinking that should be respected. “The attacker usually steps back a little and softens their tone when a leader does that,” he says. Another way Beck ensures his people will continue to offer their views: “When all arguments have been made, a leader has to make a decision,” he said. “You can still do it in a way that doesn’t seem like someone’s won and someone’s lost. A leader might say, ‘The arguments on both sides have been fantastic. I can see why it would be reasonable to go either way. But we’ve got to make a decision. Here’s why I think we need to go this way.’ Then, the next time, people on the team won’t be afraid to make a stand. No one will feel like they’ve lost; each teammate will know the leader appreciates his or her honest input.” Conflict-Avoidant versus PeacemakerIn all this, we do not wish to denigrate the role of a peacemaker in a team. Peacemaking can be an asset not only in one’s own career advancement but for a team as a whole. And a person whose nature is to avoid conflict may, in the proper setting, become just the one to play an important part in mending broken fences in a team. We admire the thinking of Drs. Emma Seppälä of Yale and Kim Cameron of the University of Michigan, whose research shows that employees who make the most positive impact on team performance foster social connections with others on the team and organization, are highly empathetic, go out of their way to help others, and help create a safe team culture that encourages members to express themselves—even if those conversations are difficult.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  In his grisly accounts of chimps pummeling one another to a bloody pulp and eating each other alive, Smith repeatedly refers to them as “our closest non-human relative.” You’d never know from reading his essay that we have an equally close nonhuman relative. The bonobo was left strangely—if typically—unmentioned. 13 Amid the macho posturing about the brutal implications of chimpanzee violence, doesn’t the equally relevant, nonwarring bonobo rate a mention, at least? Why all the yelling about yang with nary a whisper of yin? All darkness and no light may get audiences excited, but it can’t illuminate them. This oops-forgot-to-mention-the-bonobo technique is distressingly common in the literature on the ancient origins of war. But the bonobo’s conspicuous absence is notable not just in discussions of war. Look for the missing bonobo wherever someone claims an ancient pedigree for human male violence of any sort. See if you can find the bonobo in this account of the origins of rape, from The Dark Side of Man: “Men did not invent rape. Instead, they very likely inherited rape behavior from our ape ancestral lineage. Rape is a standard male reproductive strategy and likely has been one for millions of years. Male humans, chimpanzees, and orangutans routinely rape females. Wild gorillas violently abduct females to mate with them. Captive gorillas also rape females.” 14 (Emphasis is in the original.) Leaving aside the complications of defining rape in nonhuman species unable to communicate their experiences and motivations, rape—along with infanticide, war, and murder—has never been witnessed among bonobos in several decades of observation. Not in the wild. Not in the zoo. Never. Doesn’t that warrant a footnote, even? The Mysterious Disappearance of Margaret Power Even apart from doubts raised by bonobos, there are serious questions worth asking about the nature of chimp “warfare.” In the 1970s, Richard Wrangham was a graduate student studying the relation between food supply and chimp behavior at Jane Goodall’s research center at Gombe, Tanzania. In 1991, five years before Wrangham and Peterson’s Demonic Males came out, Margaret Power published a carefully researched book, The Egalitarians: Human and Chimpanzee, that asked important questions concerning some of Goodall’s research on chimpanzees (without, it must be said, ever expressing anything but admiration for Goodall’s scientific integrity and intentions). But Power’s name and her doubts are nowhere to be found in Demonic Males.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  24 The Seneca tribe of the Iroquois Nation adopted Morgan as an adult, giving him the name Tayadaowuhkuh, which means “bridging the gap.” At his home near Rochester, New York, Morgan spent his evenings studying and writing, trying to bring scientific rigor to understanding the intimate lives of people made distant by time or space. The only American scholar to have been cited by each of the other three intellectual giants of his century, Darwin, Freud, and Marx, many consider Morgan the most influential social scientist of his era and the father of American anthropology. Ironically, it may be Marx and Engels’s admiration that explains why Morgan’s work isn’t better known today. Though he was no Marxist, Morgan doubted important Darwinian assumptions concerning the centrality of sexual competition in the human past. This stance was enough to offend some of Darwin’s defenders—though not Darwin himself, who respected and admired Morgan. In fact, Morgan and his wife spent an evening with the Darwins during a trip to England. Years later, two of Darwin’s sons stayed with the Morgans at their home in upstate New York. Morgan was especially interested in the evolution of family structure and overall social organization. Contradicting Darwinian theory, he hypothesized a far more promiscuous sexuality as having been typical of prehistoric times. “The husbands lived in polygyny [i.e., more than one wife], and the wives in polyandry [i.e., more than one husband], which are seen to be as ancient as human society. Such a family was neither unnatural nor remarkable,” he wrote. “It would be difficult to show any other possible beginning of the family in the primitive period.” A few pages later Morgan concludes that “there seems to be no escape” from the conclusion that a “state of promiscuous intercourse” was typical of prehistoric times, “although questioned by so eminent a writer as Mr. Darwin.” 25 Morgan’s argument that prehistoric societies practiced group marriage (also known as the primal horde or omnigamy —the latter term apparently coined by French author Charles Fourier) so influenced Darwin’s thinking that he admitted, “It seems certain that the habit of marriage has been gradually developed, and that almost promiscuous intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world.” With his characteristic courteous humility, Darwin agreed that there were “present day tribes” where “all the men and women in the tribe are husbands and wives to each other.” In deference to Morgan’s scholarship, Darwin continued, “Those who have most closely studied the subject, and whose judgment is worth much more than mine, believe that communal marriage was the original and universal form throughout the world…. The indirect evidence in favour of this belief is extremely strong….” 26 Indeed it is. And the evidence—both direct and indirect—has grown much stronger than Darwin, or even Morgan, could have imagined. But first, a word about a word.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Her only motive is to avoid refusing and to please mamma. What is there in her? What is it gives her the power to look down on everything, to be calm independently of everything? How I should like to know it and to learn it of her!' thought Kitty, gazing into her serene face. The princess asked Varenka to sing again, and Varenka sang another song, also smoothly, distinctly, and well, standing erect at the piano and beating time on it with her thin, dark-skinned hand. The next song in the book was an Italian one. Kitty played the opening bars, and looked round at Varenka. 'Let's skip that,' said Varenka, flushing a little. Kitty let her eyes rest on Varenka's face, with a look of dismay and inquiry. 'Very well, the next one,' she said hurriedly, turning over the pages, and at once feeling that there was something connected with the song. 'No,' answered Varenka with a smile, laying her hand on the music, 'no, let's have that one.' And she sang it just as quietly, as coolly, and as well as the others. When she had finished, they all thanked her again, and went off to tea. Kitty and Varenka went out into the little garden that adjoined the house. 'Am I right, that you have some reminiscences connected with that song?' said Kitty. 'Don't tell me,' she added hastily, 'only say, if I'm right.' 'No, why not? I'll tell you simply,' said Varenka, and, without waiting for a reply, she went on: 'Yes, it brings up memories, once painful ones. I cared for someone once, and I used to sing him that song.' Kitty with big, wide-open eyes gazed silently, sympathetically at Varenka. 'I cared for him, and he cared for me; but his mother did not wish it, and he married another girl. He's living now not far from us, and I see him sometimes. You didn't think I had a love-story too,' she said, and there was a faint gleam in her handsome face of that fire which Kitty felt must once have glowed all over her. 'I didn't think so? Why, if I were a man, I could never care for anyone else after knowing you. Only I can't understand how he could, to please his mother, forget you and make you unhappy; he had no heart.' 'Oh no, he's a very good man, and I'm not unhappy; quite the contrary, I'm very happy. Well, so we shan't be singing any more now,' she added, turning towards the house. 'How good you are! how good you are!' cried Kitty, and stopping her, she kissed her. 'If I could only be even a little like you!' 'Why should you be like anyone? You're nice as you are,' said Varenka, smiling her gentle, weary smile.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  This Russian girl was not, as Kitty gathered, related to Madame Stahl, nor was she a paid attendant. Madame Stahl called her Varenka, and other people called her 'Mademoiselle Varenka.' Apart from the interest Kitty took in this girl's relations with Madame Stahl and with other unknown persons, Kitty, as often happens, felt an inexplicable attraction to Mademoiselle Varenka, and was aware when their eyes met that she too liked her. Of Mademoiselle Varenka one would not say that she had passed her first youth, but she was, as it were, a creature without youth; she might have been taken for nineteen or thirty. If her features were criticised separately, she was handsome rather than plain, in spite of the sickly hue of her face. She would have been a good figure too, if it had not been for her extreme thinness and the size of her head, which was too large for her medium height. But she was not likely to be attractive to men. She was like a fine flower, already past its bloom and without fragrance, though the petals were still unwithered. Moreover, she would have been unattractive to men also from the lack of just what Kitty had too much of—of the suppressed fire of vitality, and the consciousness of her own attractiveness. She always seemed absorbed in work about which there could be no doubt, and so it seemed she could not take interest in anything outside it. It was just this contrast with her own position that was for Kitty the great attraction of Mademoiselle Varenka. Kitty felt that in her, in her manner of life, she would find an example of what she was now so painfully seeking: interest in life, a dignity in life—apart from the worldly relations of girls with men, which so revolted Kitty, and appeared to her now as a shameful hawking about of goods in search of a purchaser. The more attentively Kitty watched her unknown friend, the more convinced she was this girl was the perfect creature she fancied her, and the more eagerly she wished to make her acquaintance. The two girls used to meet several times a day, and every time they met, Kitty's eyes said: 'Who are you? What are you? Are you really the exquisite creature I imagine you to be? But for goodness' sake don't suppose,' her eyes added, 'that I would force my acquaintance on you, I simply admire you and like you.' 'I like you too, and you're very, very sweet. And I should like you better still, if I had time,' answered the eyes of the unknown girl. Kitty saw, indeed, that she was always busy.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  I knew her for a very short time, but she left on me the impression of an exquisite flower, simply a flower. And to think she will soon be a mother!' She spoke easily and without haste, looking now and then from Levin to her brother, and Levin felt that the impression he was making was good, and he felt immediately at home, simple and happy with her, as though he had known her from childhood. 'Ivan Petrovitch and I settled in Alexey's study,' she said in answer to Stepan Arkadyevitch's question whether he might smoke, 'just so as to be able to smoke'—and glancing at Levin, instead of asking whether he would smoke, she pulled closer a tortoiseshell cigar-case and took a cigarette. 'How are you feeling today?' her brother asked her. 'Oh, nothing. Nerves, as usual.' 'Yes, isn't it extraordinarily fine,' said Stepan Arkadyevitch, noticing that Levin was scrutinising the picture. 'I have never seen a better portrait.' 'And extraordinarily like, isn't it?' said Vorkuev. Levin looked from the portrait to the original. A peculiar brilliance lighted up Anna's face when she felt his eyes on her. Levin flushed, and to cover her confusion would have asked whether she had seen Darya Alexandrovna lately; but at that moment Anna spoke. 'We were just talking, Ivan Petrovitch and I, of Vashtchenkov's last pictures. Have you seen them?' 'Yes, I have seen them,' answered Levin. 'But, I beg your pardon, I interrupted you . . . you were saying? . . .' Levin asked if she had seen Dolly lately. 'She was here yesterday. She was very indignant with the high school people on Grisha's account. The Latin teacher, it seems, had been unfair to him. 'Yes, I have seen his pictures. I didn't care for them very much,' Levin went back to the subject she had started. Levin talked now not at all with that purely businesslike attitude to the subject with which he had been talking all the morning. Every word in his conversation with her had a special significance. And talking to her was pleasant; still pleasanter it was to listen to her. Anna talked not merely naturally and cleverly, but cleverly and carelessly, attaching no value to her own ideas and giving great weight to the ideas of the person she was talking to. The conversation turned on the new movement in art, on the new illustrations of the Bible by a French artist. Vorkuev attacked the artist for a realism carried to the point of coarseness. Levin said that the French had carried conventionality further than anyone, and that consequently they see a great merit in the return to realism. In the fact of not lying they see poetry. Never had anything clever said by Levin given him so much pleasure as this remark.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  But now seeing her in black, she felt that she had not fully seen her charm. She saw her now as someone quite new and surprising to her. Now she understood that Anna could not have been in lilac, and that her charm was just that she always stood out against her attire, that her dress could never be noticeable on her. And her black dress, with its sumptuous lace, was not noticeable on her; it was only the frame, and all that was seen was she— simple, natural, elegant, and at the same time gay and eager. She was standing, holding herself, as always, very erect, and when Kitty drew near the group she was speaking to the master of the house, her head slightly turned towards him. 'No, I don't throw stones,' she was saying, in answer to something, 'though I can't understand it,' she went on, shrugging her shoulders, and she turned at once with a soft smile of protection towards Kitty. With a flying, feminine glance she scanned her attire, and made a movement of her head, hardly perceptible, but understood by Kitty, signifying approval of her dress and her looks. 'You came into the room dancing,' she added. 'This is one of my most faithful supporters,' said Korsunsky, bowing to Anna Arkadyevna, whom he had not yet seen. 'The princess helps to make balls happy and successful. Anna Arkadyevna, a waltz?' he said, bending down to her. 'Why, have you met?' inquired their host. 'Is there anyone we have not met? My wife and I are like white wolves—everyone knows us,' answered Korsunsky. 'A waltz, Anna Arkadyevna?' 'I don't dance, when it's possible not to dance,' she said. 'But tonight it's impossible,' answered Korsunsky. At that instant Vronsky came up. 'Well, since it's impossible tonight, let us start,' she said, not notic ing Vronsky's bow, and she hastily put her hand on Korsunsky's shoulder. 'What is she vexed with him about?' thought Kitty, discerning that Anna had intentionally not responded to Vronsky's bow. Vronsky went up to Kitty, reminding her of the first quadrille, and expressing his regret that he had not seen her all this time. Kitty gazed in admiration at Anna waltzing, and listened to him. She expected him to ask for a waltz, but he did not, and she glanced wonderingly at him. He flushed slightly, and hurriedly asked her to waltz, but he had only just put his arm round her waist and taken the first step when the music suddenly stopped. Kitty looked into his face, which was so close to her own, and long afterwards—for several years after—that look, full of love, to which he made no response, cut her to the heart with an agony of shame. 'Pardon! pardon! Waltz! waltz!' shouted Korsunsky from the other side of the room, and seizing the first young lady he came across he began dancing himself. XXIII V RONSKY and Kitty waltzed several times round the room.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  She knew Anna Arkadyevna, but only very slightly, and she came now to her sister's with some trepidation, at the prospect of meeting this fashionable Petersburg lady, whom every one spoke so highly of. But she made a favourable impression on Anna Arkadyevna—she saw that at once. Anna was unmistakably admiring her loveliness and her youth: before Kitty knew where she was she found herself not merely under Anna's sway, but in love with her, as young girls do fall in love with older and married women. Anna was not like a fashionable lady, nor the mother of a boy of eight years old. In the elasticity of her movements, the freshness and the unflagging eagerness which persisted in her face, and broke out in her smile and her glance, she would rather have passed for a girl of twenty, had it not been for a serious and at times mournful look in her eyes, which struck and attracted Kitty. Kitty felt that Anna was perfectly simple and was concealing nothing, but that she had another higher world of interests inaccessible to her, complex and poetic. After dinner, when Dolly went away to her own room, Anna rose quickly and went up to her brother, who was just lighting a cigar. 'Stiva,' she said to him, winking gaily, crossing him, and glancing towards the door, 'go, and God help you.' He threw down the cigar, understanding her, and departed through the doorway. When Stepan Arkadyevitch had disappeared, she went back to the sofa where she was sitting, surrounded by the children. Either because the children saw that their mother was fond of this aunt, or that they felt a special charm in her themselves, the two elder ones, and the younger following their lead, as children so often do, had clung about their new aunt since before dinner, and would not leave her side. And it had become a sort of game among them to sit as close as possible to their aunt, to touch her, hold her little hand, kiss it, play with her ring, or even touch the flounce of her skirt. 'Come, come, as we were sitting before,' said Anna Arkadvevna, sitting down in her place. And again Grisha poked his little face under her arm, and nestled with his head on her gown, beaming with pride and happiness. 'And when is your next ball?' she asked Kitty. 'Next week, and a splendid ball. One of those balls where one always enjoys oneself.' 'Why, are there balls where one always enjoys oneself?' Anna said, with tender irony. 'It's strange, but there are. At the Bobrishtchevs' one always enjoys oneself, and at the Nikitins' too, while at the Mezhkovs' it's always dull. Haven't you noticed it?' 'No, my dear, for me there are no balls now where one enjoys one self,' said Anna, and Kitty detected in her eyes that mysterious world which was not open to her. 'For me there are some less dull and tiresome.'

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Yashvin, a gambler and a rake, a man not merely without moral principles, but of immoral principles, Yashvin was Vronsky's greatest friend in the regiment. Vronsky liked him both for his exceptional physical strength, which he showed for the most part by being able to drink like a fish, and do without sleep without being in the slightest degree affected by it; and for his great strength of character, which he showed in his relations with his comrades and superior officers, commanding both fear and respect, and also at cards, when he would play for tens of thousands, and however much he might have drunk, always with such skill and decision, that he was reckoned the best player in the English Club. Vronsky respected and liked Yashvin particularly because he felt Yashvin liked him, not for his name and his money, but for himself. And of all men he was the only one with whom Vronsky would have liked to speak of his love. He felt that Yashvin, in spite of his apparent contempt for every sort of feeling, was the only man who could, so he fancied, comprehend the intense passion which now filled his whole life. Moreover, he felt certain that Yashvin, as it was, took no delight in gossip and scandal, and interpreted his feeling rightly, that is to say, knew and believed that this passion was not a jest, not a pastime, but something more serious and important. Vronsky had never spoken to him of his passion, but he was aware that he knew all about it, and that he put the right interpretation on it, and he was glad to see that in his eyes. 'Ah! yes,' he said, to the announcement that Vronsky had been at the Tverskoys'; and his black eyes shining, he plucked at his left moustache, and began twisting it into his mouth, a bad habit he had. 'Well, and what did you do yesterday? Win anything?' asked Vronsky. 'Eight thousand. But three don't count; he won't pay up.' 'Oh, then you can afford to lose over me,' said Vronsky, laughing. (Yashvin had betted heavily on Vronsky in the races.) 'No chance of my losing. Mahotin's the only one that's risky.' And the conversation passed to forecasts of the coming race, the only thing Vronsky could think of just now. 'Come along, I've finished,' said Vronsky, and getting up he went to the door. Yashvin got up too, stretching his long legs and his long back. 'It's too early for me to dine, but I must have a drink. I'll come along directly. Hi, wine!' he shouted, in his rich voice, that always rang out so loudly at drill, and set the windows shaking now. 'No, all right,' he shouted again immediately after. 'You're going home, so I'll go with you.' And he walked out with Vronsky.