Note 150 — Chapter IV · SYMPATHY AND THE TENDER EMOTIONS.

The pathology of tender emotion does not offer sufficient interest to detain us. The altruistic tendency may be totally wanting in certain hypochondriac and demented patients, who, entrenched in an impenetrable egoism, have undergone a real “moral ossification.” Tenderness may become sentimentality towards persons, animals (zoophily), and things (nostalgia), etc. Morel (Études cliniques, vol. ii. sec. 4) quotes the case of a man of high intellectual capacity, in whom the most futile and ridiculous causes excited absurd accès de sensibilité. “The loss of domestic animals which he had reared threw him into a state of bewilderment and convulsions of tears, as if it had been the death of his best friends. I saw him one day almost delirious with grief at the death of one of the numerous frogs which he kept in his garden.” This morbid emotivity, coinciding with congenital or acquired weakness, and with convalescence or other adynamic states, throws into relief, by its exaggerated character, that state of relaxation which is, as we have seen, one of the principal marks of the tender emotion.