CHAPTER XXV.[395]

THE EMOTIONS.

In speaking of the instincts it has been impossible to keep them

separate from the emotional excitements which go with them. Objects

of rage, love, fear, etc., not only prompt a man to outward deeds,

but provoke characteristic alterations in his attitude and visage,

and affect his breathing, circulation, and other organic functions

in specific ways. When the outward deeds are inhibited, these latter

emotional expressions still remain, and we read the anger in the face,

though the blow may not be struck, and the fear betrays itself in

voice and color, though one may suppress all other sign. _Instinctive

reactions and emotional expressions thus shade imperceptibly into

each other. Every object that excites an instinct excites an emotion

as well._ Emotions, however, fall short of instincts, in that the

emotional reaction usually terminates in the subject's own body, whilst

the instinctive reaction is apt to go farther and enter into practical

relations with the exciting object.

Emotional reactions are often excited by objects with which we have no

practical dealings. A ludicrous object, for example, or a beautiful

object are not necessarily objects to which we _do_ anything; we

simply laugh, or stand in admiration, as the case may be. The class of

emotional, is thus rather larger than that of instinctive, impulses,

commonly so called. Its stimuli are more numerous, and its expressions

are more internal and delicate, and often less practical. The

physiological plan and essence of the two classes of impulse, however,

is the same.

As with instincts, so with emotions, the mere memory or imagination of

the object may suffice to liberate the excitement. One may get angrier

in thinking over one's insult than at the moment of receiving it; and

we melt more over a mother who is dead than we ever did when she was

living. In the rest of the chapter I shall use the word _object_ of

emotion indifferently to mean one which is physically present or one

which is merely thought of.

It would be tedious to go through a complete list of the reactions

which characterize the various emotions. For that the special treatises

must be referred to. A few examples of their variety, however, ought to

find a place here. Let me begin with the manifestations of Grief as a

Danish physiologist, C. Lange, describes them:[396]

"The chief feature in the physiognomy of grief is perhaps its

paralyzing effect on the voluntary movements. This effect is by no

means as extreme as that which fright produces, being seldom more than

that degree of weakening which makes it cost an effort to perform

actions usually done with ease. It is, in other words, a feeling

of weariness; and (as in all weariness) movements are made slowly,

heavily, without strength, unwillingly, and with exertion, and are

limited to the fewest possible. By this the grieving person gets

his outward stamp: he walks slowly, unsteadily, dragging his feet

and hanging his arms. His voice is weak and without resonance, in

consequence of the feeble activity of the muscles of expiration and

of the larynx. He prefers to sit still, sunk in himself and silent.

The tonicity or 'latent innervation' of the muscles is strikingly

diminished. The neck is bent, the head hangs ('bowed down' with

grief), the relaxation of the cheek- and jaw-muscles makes the face

look long and narrow, the jaw may even hang open. The eyes appear

large, as is always the case where the _orbicularis_ muscle is

paralyzed, but they may often be partly covered by the upper lid which

droops in consequence of the laming of its own _levator_. With this

condition of weakness of the voluntary nerve- and muscle-apparatus of

the whole body, there coexists, as aforesaid, just as in all states

of similar motor weakness, a subjective feeling of weariness and

heaviness, of something which weighs upon one; one feels 'downcast,'

'oppressed,' 'laden,' one speaks of his 'weight of sorrow,' one

must 'bear up' under it, just as one must 'keep down' his anger.

Many there are who 'succumb' to sorrow to such a degree that they

literally cannot stand upright, but sink or lean against surrounding

objects, fall on their knees, or, like Romeo in the monk's cell, throw

themselves upon the earth in their despair.

"But this weakness of the entire voluntary motor apparatus (the

so-called apparatus of 'animal' life) is only one side of the

physiology of grief. Another side, hardly less important, and in its

consequences perhaps even more so, belongs to another subdivision of

the motor apparatus, namely, the involuntary or 'organic' muscles,

especially those which are found in the walls of the blood-vessels,

and the use of which is, by contracting, to diminish the latter's

calibre. These muscles and their nerves, forming together the

'vaso-motor apparatus,' act in grief contrarily to the voluntary

motor apparatus. Instead of being paralyzed, like the latter, the

vascular muscles are more strongly contracted than usual, so that

the tissues and organs of the body become anæmic. The immediate

consequence of this bloodlessness is pallor and shrunkenness, and the

pale color and collapsed features are the peculiarities which, in

connection with the relaxation of the visage, give to the victim of

grief his characteristic physiognomy, and often give an impression

of emaciation which ensues too rapidly to be possibly due to real

disturbance of nutrition, or waste uncompensated by repair. Another

regular consequence of the bloodlessness of the skin is a feeling of

cold, and shivering. A constant symptom of grief is sensitiveness

to cold, and difficulty in keeping warm. In grief, the inner organs

are unquestionably anæmic as well as the skin. This is of course

not obvious to the eye, but many phenomena prove it. Such is the

diminution of the various secretions, at least of such as are

accessible to observation. The mouth grows dry, the tongue sticky, and

a bitter taste ensues which, it would appear, is only a consequence

of the tongue's dryness. [The expression 'bitter sorrow' may possibly

arise from this.] In nursing women the milk diminishes or altogether

dries up. There is one of the most regular manifestations of grief,

which apparently contradicts these other physiological phenomena, and

that is the weeping, with its profuse secretion of tears, its swollen

reddened face, red eyes, and augmented secretion from the nasal mucous

membrane."

Lange goes on to suggest that this may be a reaction from a previously

contracted vaso-motor state. The explanation seems a forced one. The

fact is that there are changeable expressions of grief. The weeping is

as apt as not to be immediate, especially in women and children. Some

men can never weep. The tearful and the dry phases alternate in all who

can weep, sobbing storms being followed by periods of calm; and the

shrunken, cold, and pale condition which Lange describes so well is

more characteristic of a severe settled sorrow than of an acute mental

pain. Properly we have two distinct emotions here, both prompted by the

same object, it is true, but affecting different persons, or the same

person at different times, and _feeling_ quite differently whilst they

last, as anyone's consciousness will testify. There is an excitement

during the crying fit which is not without a certain pungent pleasure

of its own; but it would take a genius for felicity to discover

any dash of redeeming quality in the feeling of dry and shrunken

sorrow.--Our author continues:

"If the smaller vessels of the lungs contract so that these organs

become anæmic, we have (as is usual under such conditions) the feeling

of insufficient breath, and of oppression of the chest, and these

tormenting sensations increase the sufferings of the griever, who

seeks relief by long-drawn sighs, instinctively, like every one who

lacks breath from whatever cause.[397]

"The anæmia of the brain in grief is shown by intellectual inertia,

dullness, a feeling of mental weariness, effort, and indisposition to

work, often by sleeplessness. Indeed it is the anæmia of the motor

centres of the brain which lies at the bottom of all that weakening

of the voluntary powers of motion which we described in the first

instance."

My impression is that Dr. Lange simplifies and universalizes the

phenomena a little too much in this description, and in particular that

he very likely overdoes the anæmia-business. But such as it is, his

account may stand as a favorable specimen of the sort of descriptive

work to which the emotions have given rise.

Take next another emotion, Fear, and read what Mr. Darwin says of its

effects:

"Fear is often preceded by astonishment, and is so far akin to it

that both lead to the senses of sight and hearing being instantly

aroused. In both cases the eyes and mouth are widely opened and the

eyebrows raised. The frightened man at first stands like a statue,

motionless and breathless, or crouches down as if instinctively to

escape observation. The heart beats quickly and violently, so that it

palpitates or knocks against the ribs; but it is very doubtful if it

then works more efficiently than usual, so as to send a greater supply

of blood to all parts of the body; for the skin instantly becomes pale

as during incipient faintness. This paleness of the surface, however,

is probably in large part, or is exclusively, due to the vaso-motor

centre being affected in such a manner as to cause the contraction of

the small arteries of the skin. That the skin is much affected under

the sense of great fear, we see in the marvellous manner in which

perspiration immediately exudes from it. This exudation is all the

more remarkable, as the surface is then cold, and hence the term, a

cold sweat; whereas the sudorific glands are properly excited into

action when the surface is heated. The hairs also on the skin stand

erect, and the superficial muscles shiver. In connection with the

disturbed action of the heart the breathing is hurried. The salivary

glands act imperfectly; the mouth becomes dry and is often opened

and shut. I have also noticed that under slight fear there is strong

tendency to yawn. One of the best marked symptoms is the trembling of

all the muscles of the body; and this is often first seen in the lips.

From this cause, and from the dryness of the mouth, the voice becomes

husky or indistinct or may altogether fail. 'Obstupui steteruntque

comæ, et vox faucibus hæsit.'... As fear increases into an agony of

terror, we behold, as under all violent emotions, diversified results.

The heart beats wildly or must fail to act and faintness ensue; there

is a death-like pallor; the breathing is labored; the wings of the

nostrils are widely dilated; there is a gasping and convulsive motion

of the lips, a tremor on the hollow cheek, a gulping and catching of

the throat; the uncovered and protruding eyeballs are fixed on the

object of terror; or they may roll restlessly from side to side, _huc

illuc volens oculos totumque pererrat_. The pupils are said to be

enormously dilated. All the muscles of the body may become rigid or

may be thrown into convulsive movements. The hands are alternately

clenched and opened, often with a twitching movement. The arms may

be protruded as if to avert some dreadful danger, or may be thrown

wildly over the head. The Rev. Mr. Hagenauer has seen this latter

action in a terrified Australian. In other cases there is a sudden and

uncontrollable tendency to headlong flight; and so strong is this that

the boldest soldiers may be seized with a sudden panic."[398]

Finally take Hatred, and read the synopsis of its possible effects as

given by Sig. Mantegazza:[399]

"Withdrawal of the head backwards, withdrawal of the trunk; projection

forwards of the hands, as if to defend one's self against the hated

object; contraction or closure of the eyes; elevation of the upper

lip and closure of the nose,--these are all elementary movements of

turning away. Next threatening movements, as: intense frowning; eyes

wide open; display of teeth; grinding teeth and contracting jaws;

opened mouth with tongue advanced: clenched fists; threatening action

of arms; stamping with the feet; deep inspirations--panting; growling

and various cries; automatic repetition of one word or syllable;

sudden weakness and trembling of voice; spitting. Finally, various

miscellaneous reactions and vaso-motor symptoms: general trembling;

convulsions of lips and facial muscles, of limbs and of trunk; acts of

violence to one's self, as biting fist or nails; sardonic laughter;

bright redness of face; sudden pallor of face; extreme dilatation of

nostrils; standing up of hair on head."

Were we to go through the whole list of emotions which have been

named by men, and study their organic manifestations, we should but

ring the changes on the elements which these three typical cases

involve. Rigidity of this muscle, relaxation of that, constriction

of arteries here, dilatation there, breathing of this sort or that,

pulse slowing or quickening, this gland secreting and that one dry,

etc., etc. We should, moreover, find that our descriptions had no

absolute truth; that they only applied to the average man; that every

one of us, almost, has some personal idiosyncrasy of expression,

laughing or sobbing differently from his neighbor, or reddening or

growing pale where others do not. We should find a like variation in

the objects which excite emotion in different persons. Jokes at which

one explodes with laughter nauseate another, and seem blasphemous to

a third; and occasions which overwhelm me with fear or bashfulness

are just what give you the full sense of ease and power. The internal

shadings of emotional feeling, moreover, merge endlessly into each

other. Language has discriminated some of them, as hatred, antipathy,

animosity, dislike, aversion, malice, spite, vengefulness, abhorrence,

etc., etc.; but in the dictionaries of synonyms we find these feelings

distinguished more by their severally appropriate objective stimuli

than by their conscious or subjective tone.

The result of all this flux is that the merely descriptive literature

of the emotions is one of the most tedious parts of psychology. And

not only is it tedious, but you feel that its subdivisions are to a

great extent either fictitious or unimportant, and that its pretences

to accuracy are a sham. But unfortunately there is little psychological

writing about the emotions which is not merely descriptive. As

emotions are described in novels, they interest us, for we are made

to share them. We have grown acquainted with the concrete objects

and emergencies which call them forth, and any knowing touch of

introspection which may grace the page meets with a quick and feeling

response. Confessedly literary works of aphoristic philosophy also

flash lights into our emotional life, and give us a fitful delight. But

as far as "scientific psychology" of the emotions goes, I may have been

surfeited by too much reading of classic works on the subject, but I

should as lief read verbal descriptions of the shapes of the rocks on

a New Hampshire farm as toil through them again. They give one nowhere

a central point of view, or a deductive or generative principle. They

distinguish and refine and specify _in infinitum_, without ever getting

on to another logical level. Whereas the beauty of all truly scientific

work is to get to ever deeper levels. Is there no way out from this

level of individual description in the case of the emotions? I believe

there is a way out, but I fear that few will take it.

The trouble with the emotions in psychology is that they are regarded

too much as absolutely individual things. So long as they are set down

as so many eternal and sacred psychic entities, like the old immutable

species in natural history, so long all that _can_ be done with them

is reverently to catalogue their separate characters, points, and

effects. But if we regard them as products of more general causes (as

'species' are now regarded as products of heredity and variation), the

mere distinguishing and cataloguing becomes of subsidiary importance.

Having the goose which lays the golden eggs, the description of each

egg already laid is a minor matter. Now the general causes of the

emotions are indubitably physiological. Prof. O. Lange, of Copenhagen,

in the pamphlet from which I have already quoted, published in 1885

a physiological theory of their constitution and conditioning, which

I had already broached the previous year in an article in Mind.

None of the criticisms which I have heard of it have made me doubt

its essential truth. I will therefore devote the next few pages to

explaining what it is. I shall limit myself in the first instance to

what may be called the _coarser_ emotions, grief, fear, rage, love,

in which every one recognizes a strong organic reverberation, and

afterwards speak of the _subtler_ emotions, or of those whose organic

reverberation is less obvious and strong.

EMOTION FOLLOWS UPON THE BODILY EXPRESSION IN THE COARSER EMOTIONS AT

LEAST.

Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions is that the

mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called

the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the

bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that _the bodily

changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that

our feeling of the same changes as they occur_ IS _the emotion_.

Common-sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a

bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry

and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of

sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately

induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be

interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we

feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because

we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are

sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states

following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in

form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then

see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it

right to strike, but we should not actually _feel_ afraid or angry.

Stated in this crude way, the hypothesis is pretty sure to meet

with immediate disbelief. And yet neither many nor far-fetched

considerations are required to mitigate its paradoxical character, and

possibly to produce conviction of its truth.

To begin with, no reader of the last two chapters will be inclined

to doubt the fact that _objects do excite bodily changes_ by a

preorganized mechanism, or the farther fact that _the changes are

so indefinitely numerous and subtle that the entire organism may be

called a sounding-board_, which every change of consciousness, however

slight, may make reverberate. The various permutations and combinations

of which these organic activities are susceptible make it abstractly

possible that no shade of emotion, however slight, should be without

a bodily reverberation as unique, when taken in its totality, as is

the mental mood itself. The immense number of parts modified in each

emotion is what makes it so difficult for us to reproduce in cold blood

the total and integral expression of any one of them. We may catch

the trick with the voluntary muscles, but fail with the skin, glands,

heart, and other viscera. Just as an artificially imitated sneeze lacks

something of the reality, so the attempt to imitate an emotion in the

absence of its normal instigating cause is apt to be rather 'hollow.'

The next thing to be noticed is this, that _every one of the bodily

changes, whatsoever it be, is_ FELT, _acutely or obscurely, the moment

it occurs._ If the reader has never paid attention to this matter, he

will be both interested and astonished to learn how many different

local bodily feelings he can detect in himself as characteristic of his

various emotional moods. It would be perhaps too much to expect him to

arrest the tide of any strong gust of passion for the sake of any such

curious analysis as this; but he can observe more tranquil states, and

that may be assumed here to be true of the greater which is shown to

be true of the less. Our whole cubic capacity is sensibly alive; and

each morsel of it contributes its pulsations of feeling, dim or sharp,

pleasant, painful, or dubious, to that sense of personality that every

one of us unfailingly carries with him. It is surprising what little

items give accent to these complexes of sensibility. When worried

by any slight trouble, one may find that the focus of one's bodily

consciousness is the contraction, often quite inconsiderable, of the

eyes and brows. When momentarily embarrassed, it is something in the

pharynx that compels either a swallow, a clearing of the throat, or a

slight cough; and so on for as many more instances as might be named.

Our concern here being with the general view rather than with the

details, I will not linger to discuss these, but, assuming the point

admitted that every change that occurs must be felt, I will pass on.

I now proceed to urge the vital point of my whole theory, which is

this: _If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from

our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we

find we have nothing left behind,_ no 'mind-stuff' out of which the

emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of

intellectual perception is all that remains. It is true that, although

most people when asked say that their introspection verifies this

statement, some persist in saying theirs does not. Many cannot be made

to understand the question. When you beg them to imagine away every

feeling of laughter and of tendency to laugh from their consciousness

of the ludicrousness of an object, and then to tell you what the

feeling of its ludicrousness would be like, whether it be anything more

than the perception that the object belongs to the class 'funny,'

they persist in replying that the thing proposed is a physical

impossibility, and that they always _must_ laugh if they see a funny

object. Of course the task proposed is not the practical one of seeing

a ludicrous object and annihilating one's tendency to laugh. It is the

purely speculative one of subtracting certain elements of feeling from

an emotional state supposed to exist in its fulness, and saying what

the residual elements are. I cannot help thinking that all who rightly

apprehend this problem will agree with the proposition above laid down.

What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of

quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling

lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral

stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible for me to think. Can

one fancy the state of rage and picture no ebullition in the chest,

no flushing of the face, no dilatation of the nostrils, no clenching

of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp

muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face? The present writer, for

one, certainly cannot. The rage is as completely evaporated as the

sensation of its so-called manifestations, and the only thing that

can possibly be supposed to take its place is some cold-blooded and

dispassionate judicial sentence, confined entirely to the intellectual

realm, to the effect that a certain person or persons merit

chastisement for their sins. In like manner of grief: what would it be

without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in

the breast-bone? A feelingless cognition that certain circumstances

are deplorable, and nothing more. Every passion in turn tells the

same story. A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity. I do

not say that it is a contradiction in the nature of things, or that

pure spirits are necessarily condemned to cold intellectual lives;

but I say that for _us_, emotion dissociated from all bodily feeling

is inconceivable. The more closely I scrutinize my states, the more

persuaded I become that whatever moods, affections, and passions I have

are in very truth constituted by, and made up of, those bodily changes

which we ordinarily call their expression or consequence; and the more

it seems to me that if I were to become corporeally anæsthetic, I

should be excluded from the life of the affections, harsh and tender

alike, and drag out an existence of merely cognitive or intellectual

form. Such an existence, although it seems to have been the ideal of

ancient sages, is too apathetic to be keenly sought after by those born

after the revival of the worship of sensibility, a few generations ago.

Let not this view be called materialistic. It is neither more nor

less materialistic than any other view which says that our emotions

are conditioned by nervous processes. No reader of this book is

likely to rebel against such a saying so long as it is expressed

in general terms; and if any one still finds materialism in the

thesis now defended, that must be because of the special processes

invoked. They are _sensational_ processes, processes due to inward

currents set up by physical happenings. Such processes have, it is

true, always been regarded by the platonizers in psychology as having

something peculiarly base about them. But our emotions must always be

_inwardly_ what they are, whatever be the physiological ground of their

apparition. If they are deep, pure, worthy, spiritual facts on any

conceivable theory of their physiological source, they remain no less

deep, pure, spiritual, and worthy of regard on this present sensational

theory. They carry their own inner measure of worth with them; and

it is just as logical to use the present theory of the emotions for

proving that sensational processes need not be vile and material, as to

use their vileness and materiality as a proof that such a theory cannot

be true.

If such a theory is true, then each emotion is the resultant of a sum

of elements, and each element is caused by a physiological process of a

sort already well known. The elements are all organic changes, and each

of them is the reflex effect of the exciting object. Definite questions

now immediately arise--questions very different from those which were

the only possible ones without this view. Those were questions of

classification: "Which are the proper genera of emotion, and which the

species under each?" or of description: "By what expression is each

emotion characterized?" The questions now are _causal_: "Just what

changes does this object and what changes does that object excite?"

and "How come they to excite these particular changes and not others?"

We step from a superficial to a deep order of inquiry. Classification

and description are the lowest stage of science. They sink into the

background the moment questions of genesis are formulated, and remain

important only so far as they facilitate our answering these. Now the

moment the genesis of an emotion is accounted for, as the arousal

by an object of a lot of reflex acts which are forthwith felt, _we

immediately see why there is no limit to the number of possible

different emotions which may exist, and why the emotions of different

individuals may vary indefinitely,_ both as to their constitution and

as to objects which call them forth. For there is nothing sacramental

or eternally fixed in reflex action. Any sort of reflex effect is

possible, and reflexes actually vary indefinitely, as we know.

"We have all seen men dumb, instead of talkative, with joy; we have

seen fright drive the blood into the head of its victim, instead of

making him pale; we have seen grief run restlessly about lamenting,

instead of sitting bowed down and mute; etc., etc., and this naturally

enough, for one and the same cause can work differently on different

men's blood-vessels (since these do not always react alike), whilst

moreover the impulse on its way through the brain to the vaso-motor

centre is differently influenced by different earlier impressions in

the form of recollections or associations of ideas."[400]

In short, _any classification of the emotions is seen to be as true and

as 'natural' as any other,_ if it only serves some purpose; and such a

question as "What is the 'real' or 'typical' expression of anger, or

fear?" is seen to have no objective meaning at all. Instead of it we

now have the question as to how any given 'expression' of anger or fear

may have come to exist; and that is a real question of physiological

mechanics on the one hand, and of history on the other, which (like all

real questions) is in essence answerable, although the answer may be

hard to find. On a later page I shall mention the attempts to answer it

which have been made.

DIFFICULTY OF TESTING THE THEORY EXPERIMENTALLY.

I have thus fairly propounded what seems to me the most fruitful way

of conceiving of the emotions. It must be admitted that it is so far

only a hypothesis, only _possibly_ a true conception, and that much is

lacking to its definite proof. The only way coercively to _dis_prove

it, however, would be to take some emotion, and then exhibit qualities

of feeling in it which should be _demonstrably_ additional to all those

which could possibly be derived from the organs affected at the time.

But to detect with certainty such purely spiritual qualities of feeling

would obviously be a task beyond human power. We have, as Professor

Lange says, absolutely no immediate criterion by which to distinguish

between spiritual and corporeal feelings; and, I may add, the more we

sharpen our introspection, the more _localized_ all our qualities of

feeling become (see above, Vol. I. p. 300) and the more difficult the

discrimination consequently grows.[401]

A positive proof of the theory would, on the other hand, be given if

we could find a subject absolutely anæsthetic inside and out, but not

paralytic, so that emotion-inspiring objects might evoke the usual

bodily expressions from him, but who, on being consulted, should say

that no subjective emotional affection was felt. Such a man would be

like one who, because he eats, appears to bystanders to be hungry, but

who afterwards confesses that he had no appetite at all. Cases like

this are extremely hard to find. Medical literature contains reports,

so far as I know, of but three. In the famous one of Remigius Leins no

mention is made by the reporters of his emotional condition. In Dr.

G. Winter's case[402] the patient is said to be inert and phlegmatic,

but no particular attention, as I learn from Dr. W., was paid to his

psychic condition. In the extraordinary case reported by Professor

Strümpell (to which I must refer later in another connection)[403] we

read that the patient, a shoemaker's apprentice of fifteen, entirely

anæsthetic, inside and out, with the exception of one eye and one ear,

had shown _shame_ on the occasion of soiling his bed, and _grief_, when

a formerly favorite dish was set before him, at the thought that he

could no longer taste its flavor. Dr. Strümpell is also kind enough to

inform me that he manifested _surprise, fear,_ and _anger_ on certain

occasions. In observing him, however, no such theory as the present one

seems to have been thought of; and it always remains possible that,

just as he satisfied his natural appetites and necessities in cold

blood, with no inward feeling, so his emotional expressions may have

been accompanied by a quite cold heart.[404] Any new case which turns

up of generalized anæsthesia ought to be carefully examined as to the

inward emotional sensibility as distinct from the 'expressions' of

emotion which circumstances may bring forth.

_Objections Considered_.

Let me now notice a few objections. The replies will make the theory

still more plausible.

_First Objection_. There is no real evidence, it may be said, for the

assumption that particular perceptions _do_ produce wide-spread bodily

effects by a sort of immediate physical influence, antecedent to the

arousal of an emotion or emotional idea.

_Reply._ There is most assuredly such evidence. In listening to

poetry, drama, or heroic narrative we are often surprised at the

cutaneous shiver which like a sudden wave flows over us, and at the

heart-swelling and the lachrymal effusion that unexpectedly catch us at

intervals. In listening to music the same is even more strikingly true.

If we abruptly see a dark moving form in the woods, our heart stops

beating, and we catch our breath instantly and before any articulate

idea of danger can arise. If our friend goes near to the edge of a

precipice, we get the well-known feeling of 'all-overishness,' and we

shrink back, although we positively _know_ him to be safe, and have

no distinct imagination of his fall. The writer well remembers his

astonishment, when a boy of seven or eight, at fainting when he saw

a horse bled. The blood was in a bucket, with a stick in it, and, if

memory does not deceive him, he stirred it round and saw it drip from

the stick with no feeling save that of childish curiosity. Suddenly the

world grew black before his eyes, his ears began to buzz, and he knew

no more. He had never heard of the sight of blood producing faintness

or sickness, and he had so little repugnance to it, and so little

apprehension of any other sort of danger from it, that even at that

tender age, as he well remembers, he could not help wondering how the

mere physical presence of a pailful of crimson fluid could occasion in

him such formidable bodily effects.

Professor Lange writes:

"No one has ever thought of separating the emotion produced by an

unusually loud sound from the true inward affections. No one hesitates

to call it a sort of fright, and it shows the ordinary signs of

fright. And yet it is by no means combined with the idea of danger,

or in any way occasioned by associations, memories, or other mental

processes. The phenomena of flight follow the noise immediately

without a trace of 'spiritual' fear. Many men can never grow used to

standing beside a cannon when it is fired off, although they perfectly

know that there is danger neither for themselves nor for others--the

bare sound is too much for them."[405]

Imagine two steel knife-blades with their keen edges crossing each

other at right angles, and moving to and fro. Our whole nervous

organization is 'on-edge' at the thought; and yet what emotion can be

there except the unpleasant nervous feeling itself, or the dread that

more of it may come? The entire fund and capital of the emotion here

is the senseless bodily effect which the blades immediately arouse.

This case is typical of a class: where an ideal emotion seems to

precede the bodily symptoms, it is often nothing but an anticipation

of the symptoms themselves. One who has already fainted at the sight

of blood may witness the preparations for a surgical operation with

uncontrollable heart-sinking and anxiety. He anticipates certain

feelings, and the anticipation precipitates their arrival. In cases

of morbid terror the subjects often confess that what possesses them

seems, more than anything, to be fear of the fear itself. In the

various forms of what Professor Bain calls 'tender emotion,' although

the appropriate object must usually be directly contemplated before the

emotion can be aroused, yet sometimes thinking of the symptoms of the

emotion itself may have the same effect. In sentimental natures the

thought of 'yearning' will produce real 'yearning.' And, not to speak

of coarser examples, a mother's imagination of the caresses she bestows

on her child may arouse a spasm of parental longing.

In such cases as these we see plainly how the emotion both begins and

ends with what we call its effects or manifestations. It has no mental

_status_ except as either the vivid feeling of the manifestations, or

the idea of them; and the latter thus constitute its entire material,

and sum and substance. And these cases ought to make us see how in all

cases the feeling of the manifestations may play a much deeper part in

the constitution of the emotion than we are wont to suppose.

* * * * *

The best proof that the immediate cause of emotion is a physical effect

on the nerves is furnished by _those pathological cases in which the

emotion is objectless_. One of the chief merits, in fact, of the view

which I propose seems to be that we can so easily formulate by its

means pathological cases and normal cases under a common scheme. In

every asylum we find examples of absolutely unmotived fear, anger,

melancholy, or conceit; and others of an equally unmotived apathy which

persists in spite of the best of outward reasons why it should give

way. In the former cases we must suppose the nervous machinery to be

so 'labile' in some one emotional direction that almost every stimulus

(however inappropriate) causes it to upset in that way, and to engender

the particular complex of feelings of which the psychic body of the

emotion consists. Thus, to take one special instance, if inability to

draw deep breath, fluttering of the heart, and that peculiar epigastric

change felt as 'precordial anxiety,' with an irresistible tendency to

take a somewhat crouching attitude and to sit still, and with perhaps

other visceral processes not now known, all spontaneously occur

together in a certain person; his feeling of their combination _is_ the

emotion of dread, and he is the victim of what is known as morbid fear.

A friend who has had occasional attacks of this most distressing of

all maladies tells me that in his case the whole drama seems to centre

about the region of the heart and respiratory apparatus, that his main

effort during the attacks is to get control of his inspirations and to

slow his heart, and that the moment he attains to breathing deeply and

to holding himself erect, the dread, _ipso facto_, seems to depart.[406]

The emotion here is nothing but the feeling of a bodily state, and it

has a purely bodily cause.

"All physicians who have been much engaged in general practice have

seen cases of dyspepsia in which constant low spirits and occasional

attacks of terror rendered the patient's condition pitiable in the

extreme. I have observed these cases often, and have watched them

closely, and I have never seen greater suffering of any kind than

I have witnessed during these attacks.... Thus, a man is suffering

from what we call nervous dyspepsia. Some day, we will suppose in the

middle of the afternoon, without any warning or visible cause, one

of these attacks of terror comes on. The first thing the man feels

is great but vague discomfort. Then he notices that his heart is

beating much too violently. At the same time shocks or flashes as of

electrical discharges, so violent as to be almost painful, pass one

after another through his body and limbs. Then in a few minutes he

falls into a condition of the most intense fear. He is not afraid of

anything; he is simply afraid. His mind is perfectly clear. He looks

for a cause of his wretched condition, but sees none. Presently his

terror is such that he trembles violently and utters low moans; his

body is damp with perspiration; his mouth is perfectly dry; and at

this stage there are no tears in his eyes, though his suffering is

intense. When the climax of the attack is reached and passed, there

is a copious flow of tears, or else a mental condition in which

the person weeps upon the least provocation. At this stage a large

quantity of pale urine is passed. Then the heart's action becomes

again normal, and the attack passes off."[407]

Again:

"There are outbreaks of rage so groundless and unbridled that all

must admit them to be expressions of disease. For the medical layman

hardly anything can be more instructive than the observation of such a

pathological attack of rage, especially when it presents itself pure

and unmixed with other psychical disturbances. This happens in that

rather rare disease named transitory mania. The patient predisposed

to this--otherwise an entirely reasonable person--will be attacked

suddenly without the slightest outward provocation, and thrown (to

use the words of the latest writer on the subject, O. Schwartzer,

Die transitorische Tobsucht, Wien, 1880), 'into a paroxysm of the

wildest rage, with a fearful and blindly furious impulse to do

violence and destroy.' He flies at those about him; strikes, kicks,

and throttles whomever he can catch; dashes every object about which

he can lay his hands on; breaks and crushes what is near him; tears

his clothes; shouts, howls, and roars, with eyes that flash and roll,

and shows meanwhile all those symptoms of vaso-motor congestion which

we have learned to know as the concomitants of anger. His face is

red, swollen, his cheeks hot, his eyes protuberant and their whites

bloodshot, the heart beats violently, the pulse marks 100-120 strokes

a minutes. The arteries of the neck are full and pulsating, the veins

are swollen, the saliva flows. The fit lasts only a few hours, and

ends suddenly with a sleep of from 8 to 12 hours, on waking from which

the patient has entirely forgotten what has happened."[408]

In these (outwardly) causeless emotional conditions the particular

paths which are explosive are discharged by any and every incoming

sensation. Just as, when we are seasick, every smell, every taste,

every sound, every sight, every movement, every sensible experience

whatever, augments our nausea, so the morbid terror or anger is

increased by each and every sensation which stirs up the nerve-centres.

Absolute quiet is the only treatment for the time. It seems impossible

not to admit that in all this the bodily condition takes the lead, and

that the mental emotion follows. The _intellect_ may, in fact, be so

little affected as to play the cold-blooded spectator all the while,

and note the absence of a real object for the emotion.[409]

A few words from Henle may close my reply to this first objection:

"Does it not seem as if the excitations of the bodily nerves met

the ideas half way, in order to raise the latter to the height of

emotions? [Note how justly this expresses our theory!] That they do

so is proved by the cases in which particular nerves, when specially

irritable, share in the emotion and determine its quality. When one is

suffering from an open wound, any grievous or horrid spectacle will

cause pain in the wound. In sufferers from heart-disease there is

developed a psychic excitability, which is often incomprehensible to

the patients themselves, but which comes from the heart's liability to

palpitate. I said that the very quality of the emotion is determined

by the organs disposed to participate in it. Just as surely as a dark

foreboding, rightly grounded on inference from the constellations,

will be accompanied by a feeling of oppression in the chest, so

surely will a similar feeling of oppression, when due to disease of

the thoracic organs, be accompanied by groundless forebodings. So

small a thing as a bubble of air rising from the stomach through

the œsophagus, and loitering on its way a few minutes and exerting

pressure on the heart, is able during sleep to occasion a nightmare,

and during waking to produce a vague anxiety. On the other hand, we

see that joyous thoughts dilate our blood-vessels, and that a suitable

quantity of wine, because it dilates the vessels, also disposes us to

joyous thoughts. If both the jest and the wine work together, they

supplement each other in producing the emotional effect, and our

demands on the jest are the more modest in proportion as the wine

takes upon itself a larger part of the task."[410]

* * * * *

_Second Objection._ If our theory be true, a necessary corollary of

it ought to be this: that any voluntary and cold-blooded arousal of

the so-called manifestations of a special emotion ought to give us the

emotion itself. Now this (the objection says) is not found to be the

case. An actor can perfectly simulate an emotion and yet be inwardly

cold; and we can all pretend to cry and not feel grief; and feign

laughter without being amused.

_Reply._ In the majority of emotions this test is inapplicable;

for many of the manifestations are in organs over which we have no

voluntary control. Few people in pretending to cry can shed real tears,

for example. But, within the limits in which it can be verified,

experience corroborates rather than disproves the corollary from our

theory, upon which the present objection rests. Every one knows how

panic is increased by flight, and how the giving way to the symptoms of

grief or anger increases those passions themselves. Each fit of sobbing

makes the sorrow more acute, and calls forth another fit stronger

still, until at last repose only ensues with lassitude and with the

apparent exhaustion of the machinery. In rage, it is notorious how we

'work ourselves up' to a climax by repeated outbreaks of expression.

Refuse to express a passion, and it dies. Count ten before venting

your anger, and its occasion seems ridiculous. Whistling to keep up

courage is no mere figure of speech. On the other hand, sit all day

in a moping posture, sigh, and reply to everything with a dismal

voice, and your melancholy lingers. There is no more valuable precept

in moral education than this, as all who have experience know: if we

wish to conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in ourselves, we must

assiduously, and in the first instance cold-bloodedly, go through the

_outward movements_ of those contrary dispositions which we prefer

to cultivate. The reward of persistency will infallibly come, in the

fading out of the sullenness or depression, and the advent of real

cheerfulness and kindliness in their stead. Smooth the brow, brighten

the eye, contract the dorsal rather than the ventral aspect of the

frame, and speak in a major key, pass the genial compliment, and your

heart must be frigid indeed if it do not gradually thaw!

This is recognized by all psychologists, only they fail to see its full

import. Professor Bain writes, for example:

"We find that a feeble [emotional] wave... is suspended inwardly by

being arrested outwardly; the currents of the brain and the agitation

of the centres die away if the external vent is resisted at every

point. It is by such restraint that we are in the habit of suppressing

pity, anger, fear, pride--on many trifling occasions. If so, it is a

fact that the suppression of the actual movements has a tendency to

suppress the nervous currents that incite them, so that the external

quiescence is followed by the internal. The effect would not happen in

any case _if there were not some dependence of the cerebral wave upon

the free outward vent or manifestation_.... By the same interposition

we may summon up a dormant feeling. By acting out the external

manifestations, we gradually infect the nerves leading to them,

and finally waken up the diffusive current by a sort of action _ab

extra_.... Thus it is that we are sometimes able to assume a cheerful

tone of mind by forcing a hilarious expression."[411]

We have a mass of other testimony of similar effect. Burke, in his

treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful, writes as follows of the

physiognomist Campanella:

"This man, it seems, had not only made very accurate observations on

human faces, but was very expert in mimicking such as were in any way

remarkable. When he had a mind to penetrate into the inclinations of

those he had to deal with, he composed his face, his gesture, and

his whole body, as nearly as he could, into the exact similitude of

the person he intended to examine; and then carefully observed what

turn of mind he seemed to acquire by the change. So that, says my

author, he was able to enter into the dispositions and thoughts of

people as effectually as if he had been changed into the very men. I

have often observed [Burke now goes on in his own person] that, on

mimicking the looks and gestures of angry, or placid, or frightened,

or daring men, I have involuntarily found my mind turned to that

passion whose appearance I strove to imitate; nay, I am convinced it

is hard to avoid it, though one strove to separate the passion from

its corresponding gestures."[412]

Against this it is to be said that many actors who perfectly mimic the

outward appearances of emotion in face, gait, and voice declare that

they feel no emotion at all. Others, however, according to Mr. Wm.

Archer, who has made a very instructive statistical inquiry among them,

say that the emotion of the part masters them whenever they play it

well.[413] Thus:

"'I often turn pale,' writes Miss Isabel Bateman, 'in scenes of terror

or great excitement. I have been told this many times, and I can

feel myself getting very cold and shivering and pale in thrilling

situations.' 'When I am playing rage or terror,' writes Mr. Lionel

Brough, 'I believe I do turn pale. My mouth gets dry, my tongue

cleaves to my palate. In Bob Acres, for instance (in the last

act), I have to continually moisten my mouth, or I shall become

inarticulate. I have to "swallow the lump," as I call it.' All artists

who have had much experience of emotional parts are absolutely

unanimous.... 'Playing with the brain,' says Miss Alma Murray, 'is

far less fatiguing than playing with the heart. An adventuress taxes

the physique far less than a sympathetic heroine. Muscular exertion

has comparatively little to do with it.'... 'Emotion while acting,'

writes Mr. Howe, 'will induce perspiration much more than physical

exertion. I always perspired profusely while acting Joseph Surface,

which requires little or no exertion.'... 'I suffer from fatigue,'

writes Mr. Forbes Robertson, 'in proportion to the amount of emotion

I may have been called upon to go through, and not from physical

exertion.'... 'Though I have played Othello,' writes Mr. Coleman,

'ever since I was seventeen (at nineteen I had the honor of acting

the Moor to Macready's Iago), husband my resources as I may, this is

the one part, the part of parts, which always leaves me physically

prostrate. I have never been able to find a pigment that would stay

on my face, though I have tried every preparation in existence. Even

the titanic Edwin Forrest told me that he was always knocked over in

Othello, and I have heard Charles Kean, Phelps, Brooke, Dillion, say

the same thing. On the other hand, I have frequently acted Richard

III. without turning a hair.'"[414]

The explanation for the discrepancy amongst actors is probably that

which these quotations suggest. The _visceral and organic_ part of the

expression can be suppressed in some men, but not in others, and on

this it is probable that the chief part of the felt emotion depends.

Coquelin and the other actors who are inwardly cold are probably able

to affect the dissociation in a complete way. Prof. Sikorsky of Kieff

has contributed an important article on the facial expression of the

insane to the Neurologisches Centralblatt for 1887. Having practised

facial mimicry himself a great deal, he says:

"When I contract my facial muscles in any mimetic combination, _I

feel no emotional excitement,_ so that the mimicry is in the fullest

sense of the word artificial, although quite irreproachable from the

expressive point of view."[415]

We find, however, from the context that Prof. S.'s practice before the

mirror has developed in him such a virtuosity in the control of his

facial muscles that he can entirely disregard their natural association

and contract them in any order of grouping, on either side of the face

isolatedly, and each one alone. Probably in him the facial mimicry is

an entirely restricted and localized thing, without sympathetic changes

of any sort elsewhere.

* * * * *

_Third Objection._ Manifesting an emotion, so far from increasing it,

makes it cease. Rage evaporates after a good outburst; it is _pent-up_

emotions that "work like madness in the brain."

_Reply._ The objection fails to discriminate between what is felt

_during_ and what is felt _after_ the manifestation. _During_ the

manifestation the emotion is always felt. In the normal course of

things this, being the natural channel of discharge, exhausts the

nerve-centres, and emotional calm ensues. But if tears or anger are

simply suppressed, whilst the object of grief or rage remains unchanged

before the mind, the current which would have invaded the normal

channels turns into others, for it must find some outlet of escape.

It may then work different and worse effects later on. Thus vengeful

brooding may replace a burst of indignation; a dry heat may consume

the frame of one who fain would weep, or he may, as Dante says, turn

to stone within; and then tears or a storming fit may bring a grateful

relief. This is when the current is strong enough to strike into a

pathological path when the normal one is dammed. When this is so, an

immediate outpour may be best. But here, to quote Prof. Bain again:

"There is nothing more implied than the fact that an emotion may be

too strong to be resisted, and we only waste our strength in the

endeavor. If we are really able to stem the torrent, there is no more

reason for refraining from the attempt than in the case of weaker

feelings. And undoubtedly the _habitual_ control of the emotions is

not to be attained without a systematic restraint, extended to weak

and strong."

When we teach children to repress their emotional talk and display,

it is not that they may _feel_ more--quite the reverse. It is that

they may _think_ more; for, to a certain extent, whatever currents

are diverted from the regions below, must swell the activity of the

thought-tracts of the brain. In apoplexies and other brain injuries we

get the opposite condition--an obstruction, namely, to the passage

of currents among the thought-tracts, and with this an increased

tendency of objects to start downward currents into the organs of

the body. The consequence is tears, laughter, and temper-fits, on

the most insignificant provocation, accompanying a proportional

feebleness in logical thought and the power of volitional attention and

decision,--just the sort of thing from which we try to wean our child.

It is true that we say of certain persons that "they would feel more

if they expressed less." And in another class of persons the explosive

energy with which passion manifests itself on critical occasions

seems correlated with the way in which they bottle it up during the

intervals. But these are only eccentric types of character, and within

each type the law of the last paragraph prevails. The sentimentalist is

so constructed that 'gushing' is his or her normal mode of expression.

Putting a stopper on the 'gush' will only to a limited extent cause

more 'real' activities to take its place; in the main it will simply

produce listlessness. On the other hand, the ponderous and bilious

'slumbering volcano,' let him repress the expression of his passions as

he will, will find them expire if they get no vent at all; whilst if

the rare occasions multiply which he deems worthy of their outbreak,

he will find them grow in intensity as life proceeds. On the whole, I

cannot see that this third objection carries any weight.

* * * * *

If our hypothesis is true, it makes us realize more deeply than ever

how much our mental life is knit up with our corporeal frame, in the

strictest sense of the term. Rapture, love, ambition, indignation, and

pride, considered as feelings, are fruits of the same soil with the

grossest bodily sensations of pleasure and of pain. But the reader will

remember that we agreed at the outset to affirm this only of what we

then called the 'coarser' emotions, and that those inward states of

emotional sensibility which appeared devoid at first sight of bodily

results should be left out of our account. We must now say a word or

two about these latter feelings, the 'subtler' emotions, as we then

agreed to call them.

THE SUBTLER EMOTIONS.

These are the moral, intellectual, and æsthetic feelings. Concords

of sounds, of colors, of lines, logical consistencies, teleological

fitnesses, affect us with a pleasure that seems ingrained in the very

form of the representation itself, and to borrow nothing from any

reverberation surging up from the parts below the brain. The Herbartian

psychologists have distinguished feelings due to the _form_ in which

ideas may be arranged. A mathematical demonstration may be as 'pretty,'

and an act of justice as 'neat,' as a drawing or a tune, although the

prettiness and neatness seem to have nothing to do with sensation. We

have, then, or some of us seem to have, genuinely _cerebral_ forms

of pleasure and displeasure, apparently not agreeing in their mode

of production with the 'coarser' emotions we have been analyzing.

And it is certain that readers whom our reasons have hitherto failed

to convince will now start up at this admission, and consider that

by it we give up our whole case. Since musical perceptions, since

logical ideas, can immediately arouse a form of emotional feeling,

they will say, is it not more natural to suppose that in the case of

the so-called 'coarser' emotions, prompted by other kinds of objects,

the emotional feeling is equally immediate, and the bodily expression

something that comes later and is added on?

* * * * *

In reply to this we must immediately insist that æsthetic emotion,

_pure and simple,_ the pleasure given us by certain lines and masses,

and combinations of colors and sounds, is an absolutely sensational

experience, an optical or auricular feeling that is primary, and

not due to the repercussion backwards of other sensations elsewhere

consecutively aroused. To this simple primary and immediate pleasure

in certain pure sensations and harmonious combinations of them, there

may, it is true, be _added_ secondary pleasures; and in the practical

enjoyment of works of art by the masses of mankind these secondary

pleasures play a great part. The more _classic_ one's taste is,

however, the less relatively important are the secondary pleasures

felt to be in comparison with those of the primary sensation as it

comes in.[416] Classicism and romanticism have their battles over this

point. Complex suggestiveness, the awakening of vistas of memory and

association, and the stirring of our flesh with picturesque mystery

and gloom, make a work of art _romantic_. The classic taste brands

these effects as coarse and tawdry, and prefers the naked beauty of the

optical and auditory sensations, unadorned with frippery or foliage.

To the romantic mind, on the contrary, the immediate beauty of these

sensations seems dry and thin. I am of course not discussing which

view is right, but only showing that the discrimination between the

primary feeling of beauty, as a pure incoming sensible quality, and the

secondary emotions which are grafted thereupon, is one that must be

made.

These secondary emotions themselves are assuredly for the most part

constituted of other incoming sensations aroused by the diffusive wave

of reflex effects which the beautiful object sets up. A glow, a pang

in the breast, a shudder, a fulness of the breathing, a flutter of the

heart, a shiver down the back, a moistening of the eyes, a stirring in

the hypogastrium, and a thousand unnamable symptoms besides, may be

felt the moment the beauty _excites_ us. And these symptoms also result

when we are excited by moral perceptions, as of pathos, magnanimity, or

courage. The voice breaks and the sob rises in the struggling chest, or

the nostril dilates and the fingers tighten, whilst the heart beats,

etc., etc.

As far as _these ingredients_ of the subtler emotions go, then, the

latter form no exception to our account, but rather an additional

illustration thereof. In all cases of intellectual or moral rapture

we find that, unless there be coupled a bodily reverberation of

some kind with the mere thought of the object and cognition of its

quality; unless we actually laugh at the neatness of the demonstration

or witticism; unless we thrill at the case of justice, or tingle

at the act of magnanimity; our state of mind can hardly be called

emotional at all. It is in fact a mere intellectual perception of

how certain things are to be called--neat, right, witty, generous,

and the like. Such a judicial state of mind as this is to be classed

among awarenesses of truth; it is a _cognitive_ act. As a matter of

fact, however, the moral and intellectual cognitions hardly ever do

exist thus unaccompanied. The bodily sounding-board is at work, as

careful introspection will show, far more than we usually suppose.

Still, where long familiarity with a certain class of effects, even

æsthetic ones, has blunted mere emotional excitability as much as it

has sharpened taste and judgment, we do get the intellectual emotion,

if such it can be called, pure and undefiled. And the dryness of it,

the paleness, the absence of all glow, as it may exist in a thoroughly

expert critic's mind, not only shows us what an altogether different

thing it is from the 'coarser' emotions we considered first, but makes

us suspect that almost the entire difference lies in the fact that

the bodily sounding-board, vibrating in the one case, is in the other

mute. "Not so very bad" is, in a person of consummate taste, apt to

be the highest limit of approving expression. "_Rien ne me choque_"

is said to have been Chopin's superlative of praise of new music. A

sentimental layman would feel, and ought to feel, horrified, on being

admitted into such a critic's mind, to see how cold, how thin, how void

of human significance, are the motives for favor or disfavor that there

prevail. The capacity to make a nice spot on the wall will outweigh a

picture's whole content; a foolish trick of words will preserve a poem;

an utterly meaningless fitness of sequence in one musical composition

set at naught any amount of 'expressiveness' in another.

I remember seeing an English couple sit for more than an hour

on a piercing February day in the Academy at Venice before the

celebrated 'Assumption' by Titian; and when I, after being chased

from room to room by the cold, concluded to get into the sunshine

as fast as possible and let the pictures go, but before leaving

drew reverently near to them to learn with what superior forms of

susceptibility they might be endowed, all I overheard was the woman's

voice murmuring: "What a _deprecatory_ expression her face wears!

What self-abneg_ation!_ How _unworthy_ she feels of the honor she is

receiving!" Their honest hearts had been kept warm all the time by

a glow of spurious sentiment that would have fairly made old Titian

sick. Mr. Ruskin somewhere makes the (for him terrible) admission that

religious people as a rule care little for pictures, and that when they

do care for them they generally prefer the worst ones to the best. Yes!

in every art, in every science, there is the keen perception of certain

relations being _right_ or not, and there is the emotional flush and

thrill consequent thereupon. And these are two things, not one. In the

former of them it is that experts and masters are at home. The latter

accompaniments are bodily commotions that they may hardly feel, but

that may be experienced in their fulness by _crétins_ and philistines

in whom the critical judgment is at its lowest ebb. The 'marvels' of

Science, about which so much edifying popular literature is written,

are apt to be 'caviare' to the men in the laboratories. And even

divine Philosophy itself, which common mortals consider so 'sublime'

an occupation, on account of the vastness of its data and outlook, is

too apt to the practical philosopher himself to be but a sharpening and

tightening business, a matter of 'points,' of screwing down things,

of splitting hairs, and of the 'intent' rather than the 'extent' of

conceptions. Very little emotion here!--except the effort of setting

the attention fine, and the feeling of ease and relief (mainly in the

breathing apparatus) when the inconsistencies are overcome and the

thoughts run smoothly for a while. Emotion and cognition seem then

parted even in this last retreat; and cerebral processes are almost

feelingless, so far as we can judge, until they summon help from parts

below.

NO SPECIAL BRAIN-CENTRES FOR EMOTION.

If the neural process underlying emotional consciousness be what I have

now sought to prove it, the physiology of the brain becomes a simpler

matter than has been hitherto supposed. Sensational, associational, and

motor elements are all that the organ need contain. The physiologists

who, during the past few years, have been so industriously exploring

the brain's functions, have limited their explanations to its cognitive

and volitional performances. Dividing the brain into sensory and motor

centres, they have found their division to be exactly paralleled by the

analysis made by empirical psychology of the perceptive and volitional

parts of the mind into their simplest elements. But the emotions

have been so ignored in all these researches that one is tempted to

suppose that if these investigators were asked for a theory of them

in brain-terms, they would have to reply, either that they had as yet

bestowed no thought upon the subject, or that they had found it so

difficult to make distinct hypotheses that the matter lay among the

problems of the future, only to be taken up after the simpler ones of

the present should have been definitively solved.

And yet it is even now certain that of two things concerning the

emotions, one must be true. Either separate and special centres,

affected to them alone, are their brain-seat, or else they correspond

to processes occurring in the motor and sensory centres already

assigned, or in others like them, not yet known. If the former be the

case, we must deny the view that is current, and hold the cortex to be

something more than the surface of 'projection' for every sensitive

spot and every muscle in the body. If the latter be the case, we must

ask whether the emotional _process_ in the sensory or motor centre

be an altogether peculiar one, or whether it resembles the ordinary

perceptive processes of which those centres are already recognized to

be the seat. Now if the theory I have defended be true, the latter

alternative is all that it demands. Supposing the cortex to contain

parts, liable to be excited by changes in each special sense-organ,

in each portion of the skin, in each muscle, each joint, and each

viscus, and to contain absolutely nothing else, we still have a scheme

capable of representing the process of the emotions. An object falls

on a sense-organ, affects a cortical part, and is perceived; or

else the latter, excited inwardly, gives rise to an idea of the same

object. Quick as a flash, the reflex currents pass down through their

preordained channels, alter the condition of muscle, skin, and viscus;

and these alterations, perceived, like the original object, in as many

portions of the cortex, combine with it in consciousness and transform

it from an object-simply-apprehended into an object-emotionally-felt.

No new principles have to be invoked, nothing postulated beyond the

ordinary reflex circuits, and the local centres admitted in one shape

or another by all to exist.

EMOTIONAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS.

_The revivability in memory of the emotions,_ like that of all the

feelings of the lower senses, is very small. We can remember that we

underwent grief or rapture, but not just how the grief or rapture felt.

This difficult _ideal_ revivability is, however, more than compensated

in the case of the emotions by a very easy _actual_ revivability. That

is, we can produce, not remembrances of the old grief or rapture, but

new griefs and raptures, by summoning up a lively thought of their

exciting cause. The cause is now only an idea, but this idea produces

the same organic irradiations, or almost the same, which were produced

by its original, so that the emotion is again a reality. We have

'recaptured' it. Shame, love, and anger are particularly liable to

be thus revived by ideas of their object. Professor Bain admits[417]

that "in their strict character of emotion proper, they [the emotions]

have the minimum of revivability; but being always incorporated with

the sensations of the higher senses, they share in the superior

revivability of sights and sounds." But he fails to point out that

the revived sights and sounds may be _ideal_ without ceasing to be

distinct; whilst the emotion, to be distinct, must become real again.

Prof. Bain seems to forget that an 'ideal emotion' and a real emotion

prompted by an ideal object are two very different things.

_An emotional temperament on the one hand, and a lively imagination

for objects and circumstances on the other, are thus the conditions,

necessary and sufficient, for an abundant emotional life._ No matter

how emotional the temperament may be, if the imagination be poor,

the occasions for touching off the emotional trains will fail to be

realized, and the life will be _pro tanto_ cold and dry. This is

perhaps a reason why it may be better that a man of thought should not

have too strong a visualizing power. He is less likely to have his

trains of meditation disturbed by emotional interruptions. It will be

remembered that Mr. Galton found the members of the Royal Society and

of the French Academy of Sciences to be below par in visualizing power.

If I may speak of myself, I am far less able to visualize now, at the

age of 46, than in my earlier years; and I am strongly inclined to

believe that the relative sluggishness of my emotional life at present

is quite as much connected with this fact as it is with the invading

torpor of hoary eld, or with the omnibus-horse routine of settled

professional and domestic life. I say this because I occasionally have

a flash of the old stronger visual imagery, and I notice that the

emotional commentary, so to call it, is then liable to become much

more acute than is its present wont. Charcot's patient, whose case is

given above on p. 58 ff., complained of his incapacity for emotional

feeling after his optical images were gone. His mother's death, which

in former times would have wrung his heart, left him quite cold;

largely, as he himself suggests, because he could form no definite

visual image of the event, and of the effect of the loss on the rest of

the family at home.

One final generality about the emotions remains to be noted: _They

blunt themselves by repetition more rapidly than any other sort of

feeling._ This is due not only to the general law of 'accommodation'

to their stimulus which we saw to obtain of all feelings whatever,

but to the peculiar fact that the 'diffusive wave' of reflex effects

tends always to become more narrow. It seems as if it were essentially

meant to be a provisional arrangement, on the basis of which precise

and determinate reactions might arise. The more we exercise ourselves

at anything, the fewer muscles we employ; and just so, the oftener

we meet an object, the more definitely we think and behave about it;

and the less is the organic perturbation to which it gives rise.

The first time we saw it we could perhaps neither act nor think at

all, and had no reaction but organic perturbation. The emotions of

startled surprise, wonder, or curiosity were the result. Now we look

on with absolutely no emotion.[418] This tendency to economy in the

nerve-paths through which our sensations and ideas discharge, is

the basis of all growth in efficiency, readiness, and skill. Where

would the general, the surgeon, the presiding chairman, be, if their

nerve-currents kept running down into their viscera, instead of keeping

up amid their convolutions? But what they gain for practice by this

law, they lose, it must be confessed, for feeling. For the world-worn

and experienced man, the sense of pleasure which he gets from the free

and powerful flow of thoughts, overcoming obstacles as they arise,

is the only compensation for that freshness of the heart which he

once enjoyed. This free and powerful flow means that brain-paths of

association and memory have more and more organized themselves in

him, and that through them the stimulus is drafted off into nerves

which lead merely to the writing finger or the speaking tongue.[419]

The trains of _intellectual_ association, the memories, the logical

relations, may, however, be voluminous in the extreme. Past emotions

may be among the things remembered. The more of all these trains an

object can set going in us, the richer our cognitive intimacy with it

is. This cerebral sense of richness seems itself to be a source of

pleasure, possibly even apart from the _euphoria_ which from time to

time comes up from respiratory organs. If there _be_ such a thing as a

purely spiritual emotion, I should be inclined to restrict it to this

cerebral sense of abundance and ease, this feeling, as Sir W. Hamilton

would call it, of unimpeded and not overstrained activity of thought.

Under ordinary conditions, it is a fine and serene but not an excited

state of consciousness. In certain intoxications it becomes exciting,

and it may be intensely exciting. I can hardly imagine a more frenzied

excitement than that which goes with the consciousness of seeing

absolute truth, which characterizes the coming to from nitrous-oxide

drunkenness. Chloroform, ether, and alcohol all produce this deepening

sense of insight into truth; and with all of them it may be a 'strong'

emotion; but then there also come with it all sorts of strange bodily

feelings and changes in the incoming sensibilities. I cannot see my way

to affirming that the emotion is independent of these. I will concede,

however, that if its independence is anywhere to be maintained, these

theoretic raptures seem the place at which to begin the defence.

THE GENESIS OF THE VARIOUS EMOTIONS.

On a former page (pp. 453-4) I said that two questions, and only two,

are important, if we regard the emotions as constituted by feelings due

to the diffusive wave.

(1) _What special diffusive effects do the various special objective

and subjective experiences excite?_ and

(2) _How come they to excite them?_

The works on physiognomy and expression are all of them attempts to

answer question 1. As is but natural, the effects upon the face have

received the most careful attention. The reader who wishes details

additional to those given above on pp. 443-7 is referred to the works

mentioned in the note below.[420]

As regards question 2, some little progress has of recent years been

made in answering it. Two things are certain:

_a._ The facial muscles of expression are not given us simply for

expression's sake;[421]

_b._ Each muscle is not affected to some one emotion exclusively, as

certain writers have thought.

Some movements of expression can be accounted for as _weakened

repetitions of movements which formerly_ (when they were stronger)

_were of utility to the subject._ Others are similarly weakened

repetitions of movements which under other conditions were

_physiologically necessary effects._ Of the latter reactions the

respiratory disturbances in anger and fear might be taken as

examples--organic reminiscences, as it were, reverberations in

imagination of the blowings of the man making a series of combative

efforts, of the pantings of one in precipitate flight. Such at least is

a suggestion made by Mr. Spencer which has found approval. And he also

was the first, so far as I know, to suggest that other movements in

anger and fear could be explained by the nascent excitation of formerly

useful acts.

"To have in a slight degree," he says, "such psychical states as

accompany the reception of wounds, and are experienced during flight,

is to be in a state of what we call fear. And to have in a slight

degree such psychical states as the processes of catching, killing,

and eating imply, is to have the desires to catch, kill, and eat. That

the propensities to the acts are nothing else than nascent excitations

of the psychical state involved in the acts, is proved by the natural

language of the propensities. Fear, when strong, expresses itself in

cries, in efforts to escape, in palpitations, in tremblings; and these

are just the manifestations that go along with an actual suffering

of the evil feared. The destructive passion is shown in a general

tension of the muscular system, in gnashing of teeth and protrusion

of the claws, in dilated eyes and nostrils, in growls; and these

are weaker forms of the actions that accompany the killing of prey.

To such objective evidences every one can add subjective evidences.

Every one can testify that the psychical state called fear consists of

mental representations of certain painful results; and that the one

called anger consists of mental representations of the actions and

impressions which would occur while inflicting some kind of pain."[422]

About fear I shall have more to say presently. Meanwhile the principle

of _revival in weakened form of reactions useful in more violent

dealings with the object inspiring the emotion,_ has found many

applications. So slight a symptom as the snarl or sneer, the one-sided

uncovering of the upper teeth, is accounted for by Darwin as a survival

from the time when our ancestors had large canines, and unfleshed them

(as dogs now do) for attack. Similarly the raising of the eyebrows in

outward attention, the opening of the mouth in astonishment, come,

according to the same author, from the utility of these movements

in extreme cases. The raising of the eyebrows goes with the opening

of the eye for better vision; the opening of the mouth with the

intensest listening, and with the rapid catching of the breath which

precedes muscular effort. The distention of the nostrils in anger is

interpreted by Spencer as an echo of the way in which our ancestors

had to breathe when, during combat, their "mouth was filled up by a

part of an antagonist's body that had been seized(!)." The trembling

of fear is supposed by Mantegazza to be for the sake of warming the

blood(!). The reddening of the face and neck is called by Wundt a

compensatory arrangement for relieving the brain of the blood-pressure

which the simultaneous excitement of the heart brings with it. The

effusion of tears is explained both by this author and by Darwin to

be a blood-withdrawing agency of a similar sort. The contraction

of the muscles around the eyes, of which the primitive use is to

protect those organs from being too much gorged with blood during the

screaming fits of infancy, survives in adult life in the shape of the

frown, which instantly comes over the brow when anything difficult or

displeasing presents itself either to thought or action.

"As the habit of contracting the brows has been followed by infants

during innumerable generations, at the commencement of every crying

or screaming fit," says Darwin, "it has become firmly associated with

the incipient sense of something distressing or disagreeable. Hence,

under similar circumstances, it would be apt to be continued during

maturity, although never then developed, into a crying fit. Screaming

or weeping begins to be voluntarily restrained at an early period of

life, whereas frowning is hardly ever restrained at any age."[423]

The intermittent expirations which constitute laughter have, according

to Dr. Hecker, the purpose of counteracting the anæmia of the brain,

which he supposes to be brought about by the action of the joyous or

comic stimulus upon the vaso-motor nerves.[424] A smile is the weak

vestige of a laugh. The tight closure of the mouth in all effort is

useful for retaining the air in the lungs so as to fix the chest

and give a firm basis of insertion for the muscles of the flanks.

Accordingly, we see the lips compress themselves upon every slight

occasion of resolve. The blood-pressure has to be high during the

sexual embrace; hence the palpitations, and hence also the tendency

to caressing action, which accompanies tender emotion in its fainter

forms. Other examples might be given; but these are quite enough to

show the scope of the principle of revival of useful action in weaker

form.

* * * * *

Another principle, to which Darwin perhaps hardly does sufficient

justice, may be called the principle of _reacting similarly to

analogous-feeling stimuli_. There is a whole vocabulary of descriptive

adjectives common to impressions belonging to different sensible

spheres--experiences of all classes are _sweet_, impressions of all

classes _rich_ or _solid_, sensations of all classes _sharp_. Wundt and

Piderit accordingly explain many of our most expressive reactions upon

moral causes as symbolic gustatory movements. As soon as any experience

arises which has an affinity with the feeling of sweet, or bitter, or

sour, the same movements are executed which would result from the taste

in point.[425] "All the states of mind which language designates by the

metaphors bitter, harsh, sweet, combine themselves, therefore, with the

corresponding mimetic movements of the mouth." Certainly the emotions

of disgust and satisfaction do express themselves in this mimetic

way. Disgust is an incipient regurgitation or retching, limiting its

expression often to the grimace of the lips and nose; satisfaction goes

with a sucking smile, or tasting motion of the lips. In Mantegazza's

loose if learned work, the attempt is made, much less successfully,

to bring in the eye and ear as additional sources of symbolically

expressive reaction. The ordinary gesture of negation--among us, moving

the head about its axis from side to side--is a reaction originally

used by babies to keep disagreeables from getting into their mouth,

and may be observed in perfection in any nursery.[426] It is now

evoked where the stimulus is only an unwelcome idea. Similarly the nod

forward in affirmation is after the analogy of taking food into the

mouth. The connection of the expression of moral or social disdain

or dislike, especially in women, with movements having a perfectly

definite original olfactory function, is too obvious for comment.

Winking is the effect of any threatening surprise, not only of what

puts the eyes in danger; and a momentary aversion of the eyes is very

apt to be one's first symptom of response to an unexpectedly unwelcome

proposition.--These may suffice as examples of movements expressive

from analogy.

But if certain of our emotional reactions can be explained by the

two principles invoked--and the reader will himself have felt how

conjectural and fallible in some of the instances the explanation

is--there remain many reactions which cannot so be explained at all,

and these we must write down for the present as purely idiopathic

effects of the stimulus. Amongst them are the effects on the viscera

and internal glands, the dryness of the mouth and diarrhœa and nausea

of fear, the liver-disturbances which sometimes produce jaundice after

excessive rage, the urinary secretion of sanguine excitement, and the

bladder-contraction of apprehension, the gaping of expectancy, the

'lump in the throat' of grief, the tickling there and the swallowing

of embarrassment, the 'precordial anxiety' of dread, the changes in

the pupil, the various sweatings of the skin, cold or hot, local or

general, and its flushings, together with other symptoms which probably

exist but are too hidden to have been noticed or named. It seems as

if even the changes of blood-pressure and heart-beat during emotional

excitement might, instead of being teleologically determined, prove to

be purely mechanical or physiological outpourings through the easiest

drainage-channels--the pneumogastrics and sympathetic nerves happening

under ordinary circumstances to be such channels.

Mr. Spencer argues that the _smallest_ muscles must be such channels;

and instances the tail in dogs, cats, and birds, the ears in horses,

the crest in parrots, the face and fingers in man, as the first organs

to be moved by emotional stimuli.[427] This principle (if it be one)

would apply still more easily to the muscles of the smaller arteries

(though not exactly to the heart); whilst the great variability of the

circulatory symptoms would also suggest that they are determined by

causes into which utility does not enter. The quickening of the heart

lends itself, it is true, rather easily to explanation by inherited

habit, organic memory of more violent excitement; and Darwin speaks in

favor of this view (see his Expression, etc., pp. 74-5). But, on the

other hand, we have so many cases of reaction which are indisputably

pathological, as we may say, and which could never be serviceable or

derived from what was serviceable, that I think we should be cautious

about pushing our explanations of the varied heart-beat too far in the

teleological direction. Trembling, which is found in many excitements

besides that of terror, is, _pace_ Mr. Spencer and Sig. Mantegazza,

quite pathological. So are terror's other strong symptoms. Professor

Mosso, as the total result of his study, writes as follows:

"We have seen that the graver the peril becomes, the more do the

reactions which are positively harmful to the animal prevail in number

and in efficacy. We already saw that the trembling and the palsy make

it incapable of flight or defence; we have also convinced ourselves

that in the most decisive moments of danger we are less able to see

[or to think] than when we are tranquil. In face of such facts we

must admit that the phenomena of fear cannot all be accounted for by

'selection.' Their extreme degrees are morbid phenomena which show

an imperfection in the organism. We might almost say that Nature had

not been able to frame a substance which should be excitable enough

to compose the brain and spinal marrow, and yet which should not be

so excited by exceptional stimulation as to overstep in its reactions

those physiological bounds which are useful to the conservation of the

creature."[428]

Professor Bain, if I mistake not, had long previously commented upon

fear in a similar way.

Mr. Darwin accounts for many emotional expressions by what he calls

the principle of antithesis. In virtue of this principle, if a certain

stimulus prompted a certain set of movements, then a contrary-feeling

stimulus would prompt exactly the opposite movements, although these

might otherwise have neither utility nor significance. It is in

this wise that Darwin explains the expression of impotence, raised

eyebrows, and shrugged shoulders, dropped arms and open palms, as

being the antithesis of the frowning brow, the thrown-back shoulders,

and clenched fists of rage, which is the emotion of power. No doubt

a certain number of movements can be formulated under this law; but

whether it expresses a _causal_ principle is more than doubtful. It

has been by most critics considered the least successful of Darwin's

speculations on this subject.

To sum up, we see the reason for a few emotional reactions; for others

a possible species of reason may be guessed; but others remain for

which no plausible reason can even be conceived. These may be reactions

which are purely mechanical results of the way in which our nervous

centres are framed, reactions which, although permanent in us now,

may be called accidental as far as their origin goes. In fact, in an

organism as complex as the nervous system there _must_ be many such

reactions, incidental to others evolved for utility's sake, but which

would never themselves have been evolved independently, for any utility

they might possess. Sea-sickness, the love of music, of the various

intoxicants, nay, the entire æsthetic life of man, shall have to

trace to this accidental origin.[429] It would be foolish to suppose

that none of the reactions called emotional could have arisen in this

_quasi_-accidental way.

This is all I have to say about the emotions. If one should seek

to name each particular one of them of which the human heart is the

seat, it is plain that the limit to their number would lie in the

introspective vocabulary of the seeker, each race of men having

found names for some shade of feeling which other races have left

undiscriminated. If then we should seek to break the emotions, thus

enumerated, into groups, according to their affinities, it is again

plain that all sorts of groupings would be possible, according as

we chose this character or that as a basis, and that all groupings

would be equally real and true. The only question would be, does

this grouping or that suit our purpose best? The reader may then

class the emotions as he will, as sad or joyous, sthenic or asthenic,

natural or acquired, inspired by animate or inanimate things, formal

or material, sensuous or ideal, direct or reflective, egoistic or

non-egoistic, retrospective, prospective or immediate, organismally

or environmentally initiated, or what more besides. All these are

divisions which have been actually proposed. Each of them has its

merits, and each one brings together some emotions which the others

keep apart. For a fuller account, and for other classificatory schemes,

I refer to the Appendix to Bain's Emotions and the Will, and to

Mercier's, Stanley's, and Read's articles on the Emotions, in Mind,

vols. ix, x, and xi. In vol. ix. p. 421 there is also an article by the

lamented Edmund Gurney in criticism of the view which in this chapter I

continue to defend.

* * * * *

[395] Parts of this chapter have already appeared in an article

published in 1884 in Mind.

[396] Ueber Gemüthsbewegungen, uebersetzt von H. Kurella (Leipzig,

1887).

[397] The bronchial tubes may be contracted as well as the

ramifications of the pulmonary artery. Professor J. Henle has, amongst

his Anthropologische Vorträge, an exquisite one on the 'Natural History

of the Sigh,' in which he represents our inspirations as the result of

a battle between the red muscles of our skeleton, ribs, and diaphragm,

and the white ones of the lungs, which seek to narrow the calibre of

the air-tubes. "In the normal state the former easily conquer, but

under other conditions they either conquer with difficulty or are

defeated.... The contrasted emotions express themselves in similarly

contrasted wise, by spasm and paralysis of the unstriped muscles, and

for the most part alike in all the organs which are provided with them,

as arteries, skin, and bronchial tubes. The contrast among the emotions

is generally expressed by dividing them into exciting and depressing

ones. It is a remarkable fact that the depressing emotions, like fear,

horror, disgust, increase the contraction of these smooth muscles,

whilst the exciting emotions, like joy, anger, etc., make them relax.

Contrasts of temperature act similarly, cold like the depressing,

and warmth like the exciting, emotions. Cold produces pallor and

goose-flesh, warmth smooths out the skin and widens the vessels. If one

notices the uncomfortable mood brought about by strained expectation,

anxiety before a public address, vexation at an unmerited affront,

etc., one finds that the suffering part of it concentrates itself

principally in the chest, and that it consists in a soreness, hardly

to be called pain, felt in the middle of the breast and due to an

unpleasant resistance which is offered to the movements of inspiration,

and sets a limit to their extent. The insufficiency of the diaphragm

is obtruded upon consciousness, and we try by the aid of the external

voluntary chest-muscles to draw a deeper breath. [This is the sigh.] If

we fail, the unpleasantness of the situation is increased, for then to

our mental distress is added the corporeally repugnant feeling of lack

of air, a slight degree of suffocation. If, on the contrary, the outer

muscles overcome the resistance of the inner ones, the oppressed breast

is lightened. We think we speak symbolically when we speak of a stone

weighing on our heart, or of a burden rolled from off our breast. But

really we only express the exact fact, for we should have to raise the

entire weight of the atmosphere (about 820 kilog.) at each inspiration,

if the air did not balance it by streaming into our lungs." (P. 55.)

It must not be forgotten that an inhibition of the inspiratory centre

similar to that produced by exciting the superior laryngeal nerve

may possibly play a part in these phenomena. For a very interesting

discussion of the respiratory difficulty and its connection with

anxiety and fear, see 'A Case of Hydrophobia' by the lamented Thos. B.

Curtis in the Boston Med. and Surg. Journal, Nov. 7 and 14, 1878, and

remarks thereon by James J. Putnam, _ibid._ Nov. 21.

[398] Origin of the Emotions, Darwin, pp. 290-2.

[399] La Physionomie et l'Expression des Sentiments (Paris, 1885), p.

140.

[400] Lange, _op. cit._ p. 75.

[401] Professor Höffding, in his excellent treatise on Psychology,

admits (p. 342) the mixture of bodily sensation with purely spiritual

affection in the emotions. He does not, however, discuss the

difficulties of discerning the spiritual affection (nor even show that

he has fairly considered them) in his contention that it exists.

[402] Ein Fall von allgemeiner Anæsthesie (Heidelberg, 1882).

[403] Ziemssen's Deutsches Archiv für klinische Medicin, xxii. 321.

[404] The not very uncommon cases of hysterical hemianæsthesia are not

complete enough to be utilized in this inquiry. Moreover, the recent

researches, of which some account was given in Chapter IV, tend to

show that hysterical anæsthesia is not a real absence of sensibility,

but a 'dissociation,' as M. Pierre Janet calls it, or splitting-off

of certain sensations from the rest of the person's consciousness,

this _rest_ forming the self which remains connected with the ordinary

organs of expression. The split-off consciousness forms a secondary

self; and M. Janet writes me that he sees no reason why sensations

whose 'dissociation' from the body of consciousness makes the patient

practically anæsthetic, might not, nevertheless, contribute to the

emotional life of the patient. They do still contribute to the function

of locomotion; for in his patient L. there was no ataxia in spite of

the anæsthesia. M. Janet writes me, apropos of his anæsthetic patient

L., that she seemed to 'suffer by hallucination.' "I have often pricked

or burned her without warning, and when she did not see me. She never

moved, and evidently perceived nothing. But if afterwards in her

movements she caught sight of her wounded arm, and _saw_ on her skin a

little drop of blood resulting from a slight cut, she would begin to

cry out and lament as if she suffered a great deal. 'My blood flows,'

she said one day; 'I _must be_ suffering a great deal!' She suffered

by hallucination. This sort of suffering is very general in hysterics.

It is enough for them to receive the slightest hint of a modification

in their body, when their imagination fills up the rest and invents

changes that were not felt." See the remarks published at a later date

in Janet's Automatisme Psychologique, pp. 214-15.

[405] _Op. cit._ p. 63.

[406] It must be confessed that there are cases of morbid fear in which

objectively the heart is not much perturbed. These, however, fail

to prove anything against our theory, for it is of course possible

that the cortical centres normally percipient of dread as a complex

of cardiac and other organic sensations due to real bodily change,

should become _primarily_ excited in brain-disease, and give rise to

an hallucination of the changes being there,--an hallucination of

dread, consequently, coexistent with a comparatively calm pulse, etc.

I say it is possible, for I am ignorant of observations which might

test the fact. Trance, ecstasy, etc., offer analogous examples,--not

to speak of ordinary dreaming. Under all these conditions one may have

the liveliest subjective feelings, either of eye or ear, or of the

more visceral and emotional sort, as a result of pure nerve-central

activity, and yet, as I believe, with complete peripheral repose.

[407] R. M. Bucke: Man's Moral Nature (N. Y., 1879), p. 97.

[408] Lange, _op. cit._ p. 61.

[409] I am inclined to think that in some hysteriform conditions of

grief, rage, etc., the visceral disturbances are less strong than

those which go to outward expression. We have then a tremendous verbal

display with a hollow inside. Whilst the bystanders are wrung with

compassion, or pale with alarm, the subject all the while lets himself

go, but feels his insincerity, and wonders how long he can keep up the

performance. The attacks are often surprisingly sudden in their onset.

The treatment here is to intimidate the patient by a stronger will.

Take out your temper, if he takes out his--"Nay, if thou'lt mouth, I'll

rant as well as thou." These are the cases of apparently great bodily

manifestation with comparatively little real subjective emotion, which

may be used to throw discredit on the theory advanced in the text.--It

is probable that the _visceral_ manifestations in these cases are quite

disproportionately slight, compared with those of the vocal organs. The

subject's state is somewhat similar to that of an actor who does not

feel his part.

[410] _Op. cit._ p. 73.--Lange lays great stress on the neurotic drugs,

as parts of his proof that influences of a physical nature upon the

body are the first thing in order in the production of emotions.

[411] Emotions and Will, pp. 361-2.

[412] Quoted by Dugald Stewart, Elements, etc. (Hamilton's ed.), iii.

140. Fechner (Vorschule der Aesthetik, 156) says almost the same thing

of himself: "One may find by one's own observation that the _imitation_

of the bodily expression of a mental condition makes us understand it

much better than the merely looking on.... When I walk behind some one

whom I do not know, and imitate as accurately as possible his gait and

carriage, I get the most curious impression of feeling as the person

himself must feel. To go tripping and mincing after the fashion of a

young woman puts one, so to speak, in a feminine mood of mind."

[413] 'The Anatomy of Acting,' in Longman's Magazine, vol. xi. pp. 266,

375, 498 (1888), since republished in book form.

[414] P. 394.

[415] P. 496.

[416] Even the feelings of the lower senses may have this secondary

escort, due to the arousing of associational trains which reverberate.

A flavor may fairly shake us by the ghosts of 'banquet halls deserted,'

which it suddenly calls up; or a smell may make us feel almost sick

with the waft it brings over our memory of 'gardens that are ruins,

and pleasure-houses that are dust.' "In the Pyrenees," says M. Guyau,

"after a summer-day's tramp carried to the extreme of fatigue, I met a

shepherd and asked him for some milk. He went to fetch from his hut,

under which a brook ran, a jar of milk plunged in the water and kept

at a coldness which was almost icy. In drinking this fresh milk _into

which all the mountain had put its perfume_, and of which each savory

swallow seemed to give new life, I certainly experienced a series of

feelings which the word _agreeable_ is insufficient to designate. It

was like a pastoral symphony, apprehended by the taste instead of by

the ear" (quoted by F. Paulhan from 'Les Problèmes de l'Æsthétique

Contemporaine,' p. 63).--Compare the dithyrambic about whiskey of Col.

R. Ingersoll, to which the presidential campaign of 1888 gave such

notoriety: "I send you some of the most wonderful whiskey that ever

drove the skeleton from a feast or painted landscapes in the brain

of man. It is the mingled souls of wheat and corn. In it you will

find the sunshine and shadow that chase each other over the billowy

fields, the breath of June, the carol of the lark, the dews of the

night, the wealth of summer, and autumn's rich content--all golden

with imprisoned light. Drink it, and you will hear the voice of men

and maidens singing the 'Harvest Home,' mingled with the laughter of

children. Drink it, and you will feel within your blood the star-lit

dawns, the dreamy, tawny dusks of many perfect days. For forty years

this liquid joy has been within the happy staves of oak, longing to

touch the lips of man."--It is in this way that I should reply to Mr.

Gurney's criticism on my theory. My "view," this writer says (Mind,

ix. 425), "goes far to confound the two things which in my opinion

it is the prime necessity of musical psychology to distinguish--the

effect chiefly sensuous of mere streams or masses of finely colored

sound, and the distinctive musical emotion to which _the form_ of

a sequence of sound, its melodic and harmonic individuality, even

realized in complete silence, is the vital and essential object. It is

with the former of these two very different things that the physical

reactions, the stirring of the hair--the tingling and the shiver--are

by far most markedly connected.... If I may speak of myself, there is

plenty of music from which I have received as much emotion in silent

representation as when presented by the finest orchestra; but it is

with the latter condition that I almost exclusively associate the

cutaneous tingling and hair-stirring. But to call my enjoyment of

the _form_, of the _note-after-note_ness of a melody a mere critical

'judgment of right' [see below, p. 473] would really be to deny to me

the power of expressing a fact of simple and intimate expression in

English. It is quintessentially emotion.... Now there are hundreds of

other bits of music ... which I judge to be _right_ without receiving

an iota of the emotion. For purposes of emotion they are to me like

geometrical demonstrations or like acts of integrity performed in

Peru." The Beethoven-rightness of which Gurney then goes on to speak,

as something different from the Clementi-rightness (even when the

respective pieces are only heard in idea), is probably a purely

_auditory-sensational_ thing. The Clementi-rightness also; only, for

reasons impossible to assign, the Clementi form does not give the same

sort of purely auditory satisfaction as the Beethoven form, and might

better be described perhaps negatively as _non-wrong_, i.e., free from

positively unpleasant acoustic quality. In organizations as musical

as Mr. Gurney's, purely acoustic form gives so intense a degree of

sensible pleasure that the lower bodily reverberation is of no account.

But I repeat that I see nothing in the facts which Mr. Gurney cites, to

lead one to believe in an emotion divorced from _sensational processes_

of any kind.

[417] In his chapter on 'Ideal Emotion,' to which the reader is

referred for farther details on this subject.

[418] Those feelings which Prof. Bain calls 'emotions of relativity,'

excitement of novelty, wonder, rapture of freedom, sense of power,

hardly survive any repetition of the experience. But as the text goes

on to explain, and as Goethe as quoted by Prof. Höffding says, this is

because "the soul is inwardly grown larger without knowing it, and can

no longer be filled by that first sensation. The man thinks that he has

lost, but really he has gained. What he has lost in rapture, he has

gained in inward growth." "It is," as Prof. Höffding himself adds, in

a beautiful figure of speech, "with our virgin feelings, as with the

first breath drawn by the new-born child, in which the lung expands

itself so that it can never be emptied to the same degree again. No

later breath can feel just like that first one." On this whole subject

of emotional blunting, compare Höffding's Psychologie, vi. E., and

Bain's Emotions and Will, chapter iv. of the first part.

[419] M. Fr. Paulhan, in a little work full of accurate observations

of detail (Les Phénomènes Affectifs et les Lois de leur Apparition),

seems to me rather to turn the truth upside down by his formula

that emotions are due to an inhibition of impulsive tendencies.

_One_ kind of emotion, namely, uneasiness, annoyance, distress, does

occur when any definite impulsive tendency is checked, and all of

M. P.'s illustrations are drawn from this sort. The other emotions

are themselves primary impulsive tendencies, of a diffusive sort

(involving, as M. P. rightly says, a _multiplicité des phénomènes_);

and just in proportion as more and more of these multiple tendencies

are checked, and replaced by some few narrow forms of discharge, does

the original emotion tend to disappear.

[420] A list of the older writings on the subject is given in

Mantegazza's work, La Physionomie et l'Expression, chap. I; others

in Darwin's first chapter. Bell's Anatomy of Expression, Mosso's La

Paura, Piderit's Wissenschaftliches System der Mimik und Physiognomik,

Duchenne's Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine, are, besides Lange and

Darwin, the most useful works with which I am acquainted. Compare also

Sully: Sensation and Intuition, chap. ii.

[421] One must remember, however, that just in so far forth as sexual

selection may have played a part in determining the human organism,

selection of expressive faces must have increased the average mobility

of the human countenance.

[422] Psychol., § 213.

[423] Weeping in childhood is almost as regular a symptom of anger

as it is of grief, which would account (on Darwin's principles) for

the frown of anger. Mr. Spencer has an account of the angry frown as

having arisen through the survival of the fittest, by its utility in

keeping the sun out of one's eyes when engaged in mortal combat(!).

(Principles of Psychology, ii. 546.) Professor Mosso objects to any

explanation of the frown by its utility for vision, that it is coupled,

during emotional excitement, with a dilatation of the pupil which is

very unfavorable for distinct vision, and that this ought to have been

weeded out by natural selection, if natural selection had the power to

fix the frown (see La Paura, chap. ix. § vi). Unfortunately this very

able author speaks as if all the emotions affected the pupil in the

same way. Fear certainly does make it dilate. But Gratiolet is quoted

by Darwin and others as saying that the pupils _contract_ in anger. I

have made no observations of my own on the point, and Mosso's earlier

paper on the pupil (Turin, 1875) I have not seen. I must repeat, with

Darwin, that we need more minute observations on this subject.

[424] Physiologie u. Psychologie des Lachens und des Komischen (Berlin,

1873), pp. 13, 15.

[425] These movements are explained teleologically, in the first

instance, by the efforts which the tongue is forced to make to adapt

itself to the better perception or avoidance of the sapid body. (Cf.

Physiol. Psych., ii. 423.)

[426] Professor Henle derives the negative wag of the head from an

incipient shudder, and remarks how fortunate is the abbreviation, as

when a lady declines a partner in the ball-room. The clapping of the

hands for applause he explains as a symbolic abridgment of an embrace.

The protrusion of the lips (_der prufende Zug_) which goes with all

sorts of dubious and questioning states of mind is derived by Dr.

Piderit from the _tasting_ movement which we can see on any one's mouth

when deciding whether a wine is good or not.

[427] _Loc. cit._ § 497. Why a dog's face-muscles are not more mobile

than they are Mr. Spencer fails to explain, as also why different

stimuli should innervate these small muscles in such different ways, if

easy drainage be the only principle involved. Charles Bell accounted

for the special part played by the facial muscles in expression by

their being _accessory muscles of respiration_, governed by nerves

whose origin is close to the respiratory centre in the medulla

oblongata. They are an adjuvant of _voice_, and like it their function

is _communication_. (See Bell's Anatomy of Expression. Appendix by

Alexander Shaw.)

[428] La Paura, Appendice, p. 295.

[429] See below, p. 627.

CHAPTER XXVI.[430]

WILL.

Desire, wish, will, are states of mind which everyone knows, and which

no definition can make plainer. We desire to feel, to have, to do, all

sorts of things which at the moment are not felt, had, or done. If

with the desire there goes a sense that attainment is not possible,

we simply _wish_; but if we believe that the end is in our power, we

_will_ that the desired feeling, having, or doing shall be real; and

real it presently becomes, either immediately upon the willing or after

certain preliminaries have been fulfilled.

The only ends which follow _immediately_ upon our willing seem to be

movements of our own bodies. Whatever _feelings_ and _havings_ we may

will to get, come in as results of preliminary movements which we make

for the purpose. This fact is too familiar to need illustration; so

that we may start with the proposition that the only _direct_ outward

effects of our will are bodily movements. The mechanism of production

of these voluntary movements is what befalls us to study now. The

subject involves a good many separate points which it is difficult

to arrange in any continuous logical order. I will treat of them

successively in the mere order of convenience; trusting that at the end

the reader will gain a clear and connected view.

* * * * *

The movements we have studied hitherto have been automatic and

reflex, and (on the first occasion of their performance, at any rate)

unforeseen by the agent. The movements to the study of which we now

address ourselves, being desired and intended beforehand, are of course

done with full prevision of what they are to be. It follows from this

that _voluntary movements must be secondary, not primary functions

of our organism._ This is the first point to understand in the

psychology of Volition. Reflex, instinctive, and emotional movements

are all primary performances. The nerve-centres are so organized that

certain stimuli pull the trigger of certain explosive parts; and a

creature going through one of these explosions for the first time

undergoes an entirely novel experience. The other day I was standing

at a railroad station with a little child, when an express-train went

thundering by. The child, who was near the edge of the platform,

started, winked, had his breathing convulsed, turned pale, burst out

crying, and ran frantically towards me and hid his face. I have no

doubt that this youngster was almost as much astonished by his own

behavior as he was by the train, and more than I was, who stood by.

Of course if such a reaction has many times occurred we learn what to

expect of ourselves, and can then foresee our conduct, even though it

remain as involuntary and uncontrollable as it was before. But if,

in voluntary action properly so-called, the act must be foreseen, it

follows that no creature not endowed with divinatory power can perform

an act voluntarily for the first time. Well, we are no more endowed

with prophetic vision of what movements lie in our power, than we

are endowed with prophetic vision of what sensations we are capable

of receiving. As we must wait for the sensations to be given us, so

we must wait for the movements to be performed involuntarily,[431]

before we can frame ideas of what either of these things are. We learn

all our possibilities by the way of experience. When a particular

movement, having once occurred in a random, reflex, or involuntary way,

has left an image of itself in the memory, then the movement can be

desired again, proposed as an end, and deliberately willed. But it is

impossible to see how it could be willed before.

_A supply of ideas of the various movements that are possible left in

the memory by experiences of their involuntary performance is thus the

first prerequisite of the voluntary life._

Now the same movement involuntarily performed may leave many different

kinds of ideas of itself in the memory. If performed by another person,

we of course _see_ it, or we _feel_ it if the moving part strikes

another part of our own body. Similarly we have an auditory image of

its effects if it produces sounds, as for example when it is one of the

movements made in vocalization, or in playing on a musical instrument.

All these _remote_ effects of the movement, as we may call them, are

also produced by movements which we ourselves perform; and they leave

innumerable ideas in our mind by which we distinguish each movement

from the rest. It _looks_ distinct; it _feels_ distinct to some distant

part of the body which it strikes; or it _sounds_ distinct. These

remote effects would then, rigorously speaking, suffice to furnish the

mind with the supply of ideas required.

But in addition to these impressions upon remote organs of sense,

we have, whenever we perform a movement ourselves, another set of

impressions, those, namely, which come up from the parts that are

actually moved. These _kinæsthetic_ impressions, as Dr. Bastian has

called them, are so many _resident_ effects of the motion. Not only are

our muscles supplied with afferent as well as with efferent nerves, but

the tendons, the ligaments, the articular surfaces, and the skin about

the joints are all sensitive, and, being stretched and squeezed in ways

characteristic of each particular movement, give us as many distinctive

feelings as there are movements possible to perform.

It is by these resident impressions that we are made conscious of

_passive movements_--movements communicated to our limbs by others.

If you lie with closed eyes, and another person noiselessly places

your arm or leg in any arbitrarily chosen attitude, you receive an

accurate feeling of what attitude it is, and can immediately reproduce

it yourself in the arm or leg of the opposite side. Similarly a man

waked suddenly from sleep in the dark is aware of how he finds himself

lying. At least this is what happens when the nervous apparatus is

normal. But in cases of disease we sometimes find that the resident

impressions do not normally excite the centres, and that then the sense

of attitude is lost. It is only recently that pathologists have begun

to study these anæsthesias with the delicacy which they require; and

we have doubtless yet a great deal to learn about them. The skin may

be anæsthetic, and the muscles may not feel the cramp-like pain which

is produced by faradic currents sent through them, and yet the sense

of passive movement may be retained. It seems, in fact, to persist

more obstinately than the other forms of sensibility, for cases are

comparatively common in which all the other feelings in the limb but

this one of attitude are lost. In Chapter XX I have tried to make

it appear that the articular surfaces are probably the most important

source of the resident kinæsthetic feelings. But the determination of

their special organ is indifferent to our present quest. It is enough

to know that the existence of these feelings cannot be denied.

When the feelings of passive movement as well as all the other feelings

of a limb are lost, we get such results as are given in the following

account by Professor A. Strümpell of his wonderful anæsthetic boy,

whose only sources of feeling were the right eye and the left ear:[432]

"Passive movements could be imprinted on all the extremities to

the greatest extent, without attracting the patient's notice. Only

in violent forced hyperextension of the joints, especially of the

knees, there arose a dull vague feeling of strain, but this was

seldom precisely localized. We have often, after bandaging the eyes

of the patient, carried him about the room, laid him on a table,

given to his arms and legs the most fantastic and apparently the most

inconvenient attitudes, without his having a suspicion of it. The

expression of astonishment in his face, when all at once the removal

of the handkerchief revealed his situation, is indescribable in words.

Only when his head was made to hang away down he immediately spoke

of dizziness, but could not assign its ground. Later he sometimes

inferred from the sounds connected with the manipulation that

something special was being done with him.... He had no feelings of

muscular fatigue. If, with his eyes shut, we told him to raise his

arm and to keep it up, he did so without trouble. After one or two

minutes, however, the arm began to tremble and sink without his being

aware of it. He asserted still his ability to keep it up.... Passively

holding still his fingers did not affect him. He thought constantly

that he opened and shut his hand, whereas it was really fixed."

Or we read of cases like this:

"Voluntary movements cannot be estimated the moment the patient ceases

to take note of them by his eyes. Thus, after having made him close

his eyes, if one asks him to move one of his limbs either wholly or

in part, he does it but cannot tell whether the effected movement

is large or small, strong or weak, or even if it has taken place at

all. And when he opens his eyes after moving his leg from right to

left, for example, he declares that he had a very inexact notion of

the extent of the effected movement.... If, having the intention of

executing a certain movement, _I prevent him,_ he does not perceive

it, and supposes the limb to have taken the position he intended to

give it."[433]

Or this:

"The patient, when his eyes were closed in the middle of an

unpractised movement, remained with the extremity in the position it

had when the eyes closed and did not complete the movement properly.

Then after some oscillations the limb gradually sank by reason of

its weight (the sense of fatigue being absent). Of this the patient

was not aware, and wondered, when he opened his eyes, at the altered

position of his limb."[434]

A similar condition can be readily reproduced experimentally in many

hypnotic subjects. All that is needed is to tell a suitably predisposed

person during the hypnotic trance that he cannot feel his limb, and

he will be quite unaware of the attitudes into which you may throw

it.[435]