Since the present Study first appeared, Hohenemser, who considers that my analysis of modesty is unsatisfactory, has made a notable attempt to define the psychological mechanism of shame.  ("Versuch einer Analyse der Scham,” Archiv fuer die Gesamte Psychologie, Bd.  II, Heft 2-3, 1903.) He regards shame as a general psycho-physical phenomenon, “a definite tension of the whole soul,” with an emotion superadded.  “The state of shame consists in a certain psychic lameness or inhibition,” sometimes accompanied by physical phenomena of paralysis, such as sinking of the head and inability to meet the eye.  It is a special case of Lipps’s psychic stasis or damming up (psychische Stauung), always produced when the psychic activities are at the same time drawn in two or more different directions.  In shame there is always something present in consciousness which conflicts with the rest of the personality, and cannot be brought into harmony with it, which cannot be brought, that is, into moral (not logical) relationship with it.  A young man in love with a girl is ashamed when told that he is in love, because his reverence for one whom he regards as a higher being cannot be brought into relationship with his own lower personality.  A child in the same way feels shame in approaching a big, grown-up person, who seems a higher sort of being.  Sometimes, likewise, we feel shame in approaching a stranger, for a new person tends to seem higher and more interesting than ourselves.  It is not so in approaching a new natural phenomenon, because we do not compare it with ourselves.  Another kind of shame is seen when this mental contest is lower than our personality, and on this account in conflict with it, as when we are ashamed of sexual thoughts.  Sexual ideas tend to evoke shame, Hohenemser remarks, because they so easily tend to pass into sexual feelings; when they do not so pass (as in scientific discussions) they do not evoke shame.

It will be seen that this discussion of modesty is highly generalized and abstracted; it deals simply with the formal mechanism of the process.  Hohenemser admits that fear is a form of psychic stasis, and I have sought to show that modesty is a complexus of fears.  We may very well accept the conception of psychic stasis at the outset.  The analysis of modesty has still to be carried very much further.

The discussion of modesty is complicated by the difficulty, and even impossibility, of excluding closely-allied emotions—­shame, shyness, bashfulness, timidity, etc.—­all of which, indeed, however defined, adjoin or overlap modesty.[3] It is not, however, impossible to isolate the main body of the emotion of modesty, on account of its special connection, on the whole, with the consciousness of sex.  I here attempt, however imperfectly, to sketch out a fairly-complete analysis of its constitution and to trace its development.