That the Soul Discharges Her Passions upon False Objects

There is a common weakness of the mind, which I have observed in myself as much as in any man, and which I think deserves more examination than it ordinarily receives. When we are wounded by some great calamity — the death of one we loved, a dishonor we cannot avenge, a loss we did not foresee — and when the true cause of our suffering is either absent, already gone, or too powerful to be confronted, we do not therefore cease to feel. The passion must go somewhere. So we turn it upon whatever stands near enough to receive it.

A man who has been ruined by Fortune rails at his servant. A general, unable to strike the enemy who has defeated him, takes his fury out upon his own soldiers. A father, having lost a son to fever, shouts at the physician long after the physician could have done anything more. The grief is real; the target is convenient. We are not, in these moments, dishonest — we are simply unable to bear a passion that has nowhere honest to go.

“In default of a lawful enemy, a man will make war upon a stone. The soul requires some object to push against; without resistance, it turns upon itself, or upon the nearest thing at hand.”

I have done this myself, and I do not excuse myself for it. I have been angry at a friend for something a stranger did to me. I have been severe with a text I was reading because I was unhappy with myself. The mind, when it cannot find justice, manufactures a reasonable facsimile of it — the emotion is genuine, but the occasion is borrowed. We ought to notice when we are doing this; not because such displacements can always be avoided, but because a man who never notices them will believe, at the end of his life, that he was always angry at the right things.

What I find strangest about this habit is not that we do it — the soul must breathe, and it breathes by reacting — but that we so rarely suspect ourselves of it. We feel the anger fully, and feeling it fully, we take it for righteous. The object we have chosen to blame seems, in the moment of our fury, to genuinely deserve it. This is the soul’s great talent for self-deception: it does not merely find false targets, it convinces us they are true ones.