Empathy, the involuntary projection of oneself into an object, received its first extended formulation in the Mikrokosmos of Hermann Lotze (1858). To Lotze Einfühlung, or empathy as it has been termed in English, was a phenomenon which accounts for our knowledge of the external world. “The world,” he said, “becomes alive to us through this power to see in forms the joy and sorrow of existence that they hide: there is no shape so coy that our fancy cannot sympathetically enter into it.” In this knowledge our consciousness of our own bodily sensations is a factor: “Unquestionably the vividness of these perceptions is added to by our abiding remembrance of the activity of our own body … every movement which we execute, every attitude in which we repose, has its meaning rendered plain to us by the feeling of exertion or of enjoyment.” Entering thus into our own sensations, by means of them we are also enabled to know the feelings of creatures and objects beyond their immediate range:
… we, thus aided by our sentience, assuredly can comprehend also the alien silent form. Nor is it only into the peculiar vital feelings of that which in nature is near to us that we enter into the joyous flight of the singing bird or the graceful fleeting of the gazelle; we not only countract our mental feelers to the most minute creatures, to enter in reverie into the narrow round of existence of a mussel-fish and the monotonous bliss of its openings and shuttings, we not only expand into the slender proportions of the tree whose twigs are animated by the pleasure of graceful bending and waving; nay, even to the inanimate do we transfer these interpretative feelings, transforming through them the dead weights and supports of buildings into so many limbs of a living body whose inner tensions pass over into ourselves.