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_THE CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE SERIES._
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EDITED BY HAVELOCK ELLIS.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF
THE EMOTIONS
BY
TH. RIBOT
PROFESSOR AT THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE, EDITOR OF THE
“REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.”
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LONDON
WALTER SCOTT, LTD., PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1897
PREFACE.
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The psychology of states of feelings, it is generally recognised, is
still in a confused and backward condition. Although it has benefited in
some measure by the contemporary allurement of psychological research,
it must be acknowledged that it has only exerted a moderate seduction
upon workers; the preference has been given to other studies, such as
those of perception, of memory, of images, of movement, of attention. If
any proof is necessary we may find it in the bibliographies, now
published in Germany, America, and France, which give the psychological
inventory of each year; of the whole number of books, memoirs, and
articles which appear, less than the twentieth part, on an average,
relates to the feelings and emotions. It is a very small part compared
to the part played by the emotions and passions in human life, and this
region of psychology is not deserving of such neglect. It is true that
in recent years W. James and Lange seem to have brought this state of
stagnation to an end. Their thesis, paradoxical in appearance, has
aroused, especially in America, many discussions, criticisms, defences,
and, what is of more value, observations and researches.
It must be acknowledged that for those who have any care for precision
and clearness the study of the feelings and emotions presents great
difficulties. Internal observation, always an uncertain guide which
leads us but a little way, is here especially questionable. Experiment
has given some very useful results, but they are much less important and
numerous than in other regions of psychology. Detailed researches and
monographs are lacking, so that the subject abounds with questions on
which little light has yet been thrown. Finally, the dominant prejudice
which assimilates emotional states to intellectual states, considering
them as analogous, or even treating the former as dependent oh the
latter, can only lead to error.
We have, in fact, in every study of the psychology of feeling to choose
between two radically distinct positions, and this choice involves a
difference in method. Concerning the final and essential nature of
states of feeling there are two contrary opinions. According to one,
they are secondary and derived, the qualities, modes, or functions of
knowledge; they only exist through it; they are “confused intelligence”:
that is the _intellectualist_ thesis. According to the other, they are
primitive, autonomous, not reducible to intelligence, able to exist
outside it and without it; they have a totally different origin: that is
the thesis which under its present form may be called _physiological_.
These two doctrines exhibit variations which I ignore, as I am not
writing their history, but they all come into one or the other of these
two great currents.
The intellectualist theory, which is of considerable age, has found its
most complete expression in Herbart and his school, for whom every state
of feeling only exists through the reciprocal relation of
representations; every emotion results from the co-existence in the mind
of ideas which agree or disagree; it is the immediate consciousness of
the momentary elevation or depression of psychic activity, of a free or
impeded state of tension. But it does not exist by itself; it resembles
musical harmonies and dissonances, which differ from elementary sounds
though only existing through them. Suppress every intellectual state,
and feeling vanishes; it only possesses a borrowed life, that of a
parasite. The influence of Herbart still persists in Germany, and, with
some exceptions (Horwicz, Schneider, etc.), complete or mitigated
intellectualism predominates.
The doctrine which I have called physiological (Bain, Spencer, Maudsley,
James, Lange[1]) connects all states of feeling with biological
conditions, and considers them as the direct and immediate expression of
the vegetative life. It is the thesis which has been adopted, without
any restriction, in this work. From this standpoint feelings and
emotions are no longer a superficial manifestation, a simple
efflorescence; they plunge into the individual’s depths; they have their
roots in the needs and instincts, that is to say, in movements.
Consciousness only delivers up a part of their secrets; it can never
reveal them completely; we must descend beneath it. No doubt it is
awkward to have to invoke an unconscious activity, to call in the
intervention of an obscure and ill-determined factor; but to wish to
reduce emotional states to clear and definite ideas, or to imagine that
by this process we can fix them, is to misunderstand them completely and
to condemn ourselves beforehand to failure.
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Footnote 1:
It may be doubted whether all the English writers here mentioned can
be strictly classed with the physiological school as understood by M.
Ribot. With regard to Mr. Spencer, for instance, this is indicated by
a brief summary of his own position in a private letter to the Rev.
Angus Mackay, who had presented a statement of the “confused
intelligence” theory, “which I conceive to be a part of the truth,”
wrote Mr. Spencer, adding that “joined with the dimly aroused
association of ideas derived from the experiences of the individual, I
hold that the body of the emotion consists more largely of the
inherited associations of experiences and still more vague states of
consciousness which result from excitement of them.” It is clear that
the evolutionary view does not necessarily fall wholly into the
“physiological” group.—ED.
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For the rest, this is neither the place to criticise the intellectualist
thesis, nor to justify the other in passing; the whole work is devoted
to this task.
The book consists of two parts. The first studies the more general
manifestations of feeling: pleasure and pain, the characteristic signs
of this form of psychic life, everywhere diffused under manifold
aspects; then the nature of emotion, a complex state which in the order
of feelings corresponds to perception in the order of knowledge.
The second deals with the special emotions. This detailed study is of
great importance for reasons which will be explained later on,
especially because we must not rest in generalities; it furnishes a
means of control and verification. The nature of the emotional life
cannot be understood unless we follow it in its incessant
transformations—that is to say, in its history. To separate it from
social, moral, and religious institutions, from the æsthetic and
intellectual movements which translate it and incarnate it, is to reduce
it to a dead and empty abstraction. Thus an attempt has been made to
follow all the emotions one after the other in the progress of their
development, noting the successive movements of their evolution or their
retrogression.
The pathology of each emotion has been sketched to complete and throw
light on the study. I have tried to show that beneath an appearance of
confusion, incoherence, and promiscuity, there is, from the morbid to
the normal, from the complex to the simple, a conducting thread which
will always bring us back to the point of origin.
A work which has for its aim to set forth the present situation of the
psychology of feeling and emotion might have been made very long. By
eliminating every digression and all historical exposition, it has been
made as short as possible.
TH. RIBOT.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION—THE EVOLUTION OF THE AFFECTIVE LIFE 1
In all affective manifestations there are two elements:
the motor states or impulses, which are primary; the
agreeable or painful states, which are
secondary—Unconscious (organic or protoplasmic)
sensibility; micro-organisms—Chemical interpretation;
psychological interpretation—Are there pure states of
feeling?—Affirmative facts—The period of needs, the
instinct of conservation-The period of primitive
emotions—How they may be determined; the genetic or
chronological method—Fear, anger, affection, the
self-feeling, sexual emotion—Are joy and grief
emotions?—The abstract emotions and their conditions—The
passions are the equivalent in feeling of an intellectual
obsession.
_Part I._—GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY.
CHAPTER I.
PHYSICAL PAIN 25
Its anatomical and physiological conditions; pain nerves,
transmission to the centres—Modifications of the organism
accompanying physical pain: circulation, respiration,
nutrition, movements—Are they the effects of pain?—Pain is
only a sign—The analgesias: unconsciousness of pain and
intellectual consciousness—Retardation of pain after
sensation—Hyperalgesia—Nature of pain: theory that it is a
sensation; theory that it is a quality of sensation—Pain
may result from the quality or the intensity of the
stimulus—Hypotheses regarding its ultimate cause: it
depends on a form of movement, a chemical modification.
CHAPTER II.
MORAL PAIN 42
Identity of all the forms of pain—Evolution of moral pain:
(1) the pure result of memory; (2) connected with
representations; positive form, negative form; (3)
connected with concepts—Its external study; physical
signs—Therapeutics—Conclusions—A typical case of
hypochondriasis.
CHAPTER III.
PLEASURE 48
Subject little studied—Is Pleasure a sensation or a
quality?—Its physical concomitants: circulation,
respiration, movements—Pleasure, like pain, is separable:
physical and moral anhedonia—Identity of the different
forms of pleasure—The alleged transformation of pleasure
into pain—Common ground of the two states—Hypothesis of a
difference in kind and in degree—Simultaneity of two
opposite processes: what falls under consciousness is the
result of a difference—Physiological facts in support of
the above.
CHAPTER IV.
MORBID PLEASURES AND PAINS 61
Utility of the pathological method—Search for a criterion
of the morbid state; abnormal reaction through excess or
defect; apparent disproportion between cause and effect;
chronicity—I. Morbid pleasures, not peculiar to advanced
civilisation—Different attempts at explanation—This state
cannot be explained by normal psychology: it is the
rudimentary form of the suicidal
tendency—Classification—Semi-pathological pleasures: those
destructive of the individual, those destructive of the
social order—II. Abnormal pains—Melancholic type—Whence
does the painful state arise in its permanent form? from
an organic disposition? or from a fixed idea?—Examples of
the two cases.
CHAPTER V.
THE NEUTRAL STATES 73
Two methods of study—Affirmative thesis founded on
observation, deduction, and psycho-physics—Negative
thesis: the psychological trinity; confusion between
consciousness and introspection—Diversity of temperaments.
CHAPTER VI.
CONCLUSIONS ON PLEASURE AND PAIN 80
The beginning of life—I. Conditions of existence of
pleasure and pain; lowering and heightening of vital
energy—Féré’s experiments—Meynert’s theory—II. Finality of
pleasure and pain—Exceptions: explicable cases;
irreducible cases.
CHAPTER VII.
THE NATURE OF EMOTION 91
Analogy between perception and emotion—Constituent
elements of emotion—Summary of the theory of James and
Lange—Application of this theory to the higher emotions
(religious, moral, æsthetic, intellectual)—Illegitimate
confusion between the quality and intensity of
emotion—Examination of a typical case: musical emotion—The
most emotional of all the arts is the most dependent on
physiological conditions—Proofs: its action on animals, on
primitive man, on civilised man; its therapeutic
action—Why certain sensations, images, and ideas awaken
organic and motor states, and, consequently, emotion—They
are connected either with natural or social conditions of
existence—Differences and resemblances between the two
cases—Antecedents of the physiological theory of
emotion—Dualist position, or that of the relation between
cause and effect—Unitary position; its advantages.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE INTERNAL CONDITIONS OF EMOTION 113
Confused state of this question—Popular _versus_ Medical
Psychology—Part played by the brain, the centre of psychic
life—Hypotheses on the “seat” of the emotions—Part played
by the heart, the centre of vegetative life—Popular
metaphors and their physiological interpretation—Are the
internal sensations reducible to a single process?—Part
played by chemical action in the genesis of emotion—Cases
of the introduction of toxic
substances—Auto-intoxication—Modifications in the course
of mental maladies.
CHAPTER IX.
THE EXTERNAL CONDITIONS OF EMOTION 124
Empiric period—Pre-Darwinian period of scientific
research—Examination of Darwin’s three principles—Wundt
and his explanatory formulas: Innervation directly
modified, Association of analogous sensations, Relations
of motion with sensory representations.
CHAPTER X.
CLASSIFICATIONS 130
Their discrepancies—Reduced to three types: (1)
Classification of pleasures and pains—(2) Classification
of emotions: two forms, empiric and
analytico-comparative—(3) Classification of
representations, intellectualist form—Critical
remarks—Impossibility of any classification.
CHAPTER XI.
THE MEMORY OF FEELINGS 140
Can emotional images be revived, spontaneously or
voluntarily?—Summary of scattered facts relating to this
subject—Inquiry into this question, and method
followed—Emotional and gustative images—Internal
sensations (hunger, thirst, fatigue, disgust,
etc.)—Pleasures and pains; observations—Emotions: three
distinct forms of revivability according to
observations—Reduction of the images to three groups:
revivability, direct and easy, indirect and comparatively
easy, difficult and sometimes direct, sometimes
indirect—The revivability of a representation is in
proportion to its complexity and the motor elements
included in it—Reservations to be made on this last
point—Is there such a thing as a real emotional
memory?—Two cases: false or abstract, and true or concrete
memory—Peculiar characters and differences of each
case—Change of the emotional into an intellectual
recollection—Emotional amnesia: its practical
consequences—There exists a general emotional type and
partial emotional types—Confirmatory
observations—Comparative revivability of agreeable and
disagreeable states—To feel acutely and to recall an acute
impression of the feeling are two different operations.
CHAPTER XII.
THE FEELINGS AND THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS 172
The function of the feelings, as the cause of
association—The law of affective association, conceived as
general, and as local—I. Function of unconscious feeling:
ancestral or hereditary unconsciousness; personal
unconsciousness arising from cœnæsthesia; personal
unconsciousness arising from the events of our life—Law of
transference by contiguity, by resemblance: wide or
narrow—II. Function of the conscious feelings: accidental
cases, permanent cases, exceptional or rare cases.
_Part II._—SPECIAL PSYCHOLOGY.
INTRODUCTION 187
Importance of the study of special feelings—Utility of
historical documents—Causes of the evolution of the
feelings: (1) intellectual development; (2) hereditary
influence, perhaps reducible to influences of
environment—Cases in which the evolution of ideas precedes
that of feelings—Inverse cases—The intellect swayed by the
principle of contradiction; feeling by that of
finality—Classification of primitive tendencies—Method to
be followed—Group I.: physiological (reception,
transformation, restitution)—Group II.:
psychophysiological—Group III.: psychological—Their
enumeration.
CHAPTER I.
THE INSTINCT OF CONSERVATION IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL FORM 199
Hypothesis regarding the relation between the nutritive
organs and the brain—Perversion of the instincts relating
to nutrition—Pathology of hunger and thirst—Proofs
furnished of the priority of these tendencies in relation
to pleasure and pain—Facts in support of this—Negative
tendency; disgust—Its biological value as a protective
instinct.