The energy and attitude of the company we keep rubs off on us by what Emerson calls 'The Law of Affinity'. Their restlessness, greed, discontent and pettiness brings out like feelings in us. Their disease becomes our disease for the period of association. Such interactions must be avoided to the extent possible.
June-July 1847 Emerson in His Journals
"One other thing is to be remarked concerning the law of affinity. Every constitution has its natural enemies & poisons, which are to be avoided as ivy & dogwood are by those whom those plants injure.
There are those who, disputing, will make you dispute; and nervous and hysterical and animalized, will produce a like series of symptoms in you; though no other persons produce the like phenomena in you, & though you are conscious that they do not properly belong to you, but are a sort of extension of the diseases of the other party into you."
June-July 1847 Emerson in His Journals
"One other thing is to be remarked concerning the law of affinity. Every constitution has its natural enemies & poisons, which are to be avoided as ivy & dogwood are by those whom those plants injure.
There are those who, disputing, will make you dispute; and nervous and hysterical and animalized, will produce a like series of symptoms in you; though no other persons produce the like phenomena in you, & though you are conscious that they do not properly belong to you, but are a sort of extension of the diseases of the other party into you."
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