If, in fact, we take complete observations, it will be seen that the

two personalities (there are sometimes more) do not consist merely

in the alternation of two memories, but also in that of two distinct

and usually opposite affective dispositions. Azam’s celebrated

Félida is, in her first state, gloomy, cold, and reserved; in her

second, cheerful, talkative, lively to the point of coquetry and

boisterousness. In the case of Mary Reynolds, reported by Weir

Mitchell, we have first a melancholy, silent, retiring woman; then,

in her new personality, “her disposition is totally and absolutely

changed,” she is fond of pleasure, noisy, always seeking company,

except when taking long rides and walks through the woods and over

the mountains, delighting in the spectacle of nature and absolutely

unconscious of fear. These alternations lasted for sixteen years,

after which “the emotional opposition between the two states seems

gradually to have effaced itself,” and resolved itself into a medium

state between the two—"a well-balanced temperament," which for a

quarter of a century coincided with her now permanent second state.

We may also recall the well-known case of L. V., who _spontaneously_

showed at the same time two opposite forms of character: at one

time, talkative, arrogant, violent, brutal, insubordinate, a thief,

ready to kill any one who gave him an order; at another, gentle,

polite, silent, sober, of an almost child-like timidity. I say,

spontaneously, for MM. Bourru and Burot have _artificially_ produced

physical modifications in V. which are accompanied by some

modifications in his character; but I am only speaking of natural

changes. For other instances I refer the reader to special works on

the alteration of personality.

I am inclined to believe that alternations of memory, though the

strongest and most disturbing phenomena, result from an alternation

of the affective dispositions (in other words, of the character),

which themselves result from physiological changes, so that, in the

last resort, we arrive at cœnæsthesia as the ultimate cause. When we

see, _e.g._, that in L. V. the violent character always accompanies

hemiplegia and anæsthesia on the right side, and the gentle

character, hemiplegia and anæsthesia on the left side, not to

mention the partial modifications accompanying the paraplegia, total

anæsthesia, etc., artificially produced in the hypnotic state, it is

difficult not to admit that changes in memory, in character, and in

physical habit form an almost indissoluble whole, which is also the

conclusion drawn by Bourru and Burot from their experiments.

In default of positive proofs that the change of cœnæsthesia is

primordial in these alternations of character, we may compare them

with a mental disease, where the alternation, being still simpler,

allows us more easily to detect its physiological conditions. This

is that duplex form of madness, sometimes called _folie circulaire_,

or “alternating insanity,” etc. It consists in the regular

alternation of two periods, that of depression and that of

exaltation. The transition from one to the other is instantaneous,

or takes place by imperceptible gradations, but nothing can be

clearer than the contrast between the two periods.

During the depression, the affective symptoms are: melancholy,

feeling of fatigue, torpor, indifference, vague terror, uneasiness

with regard to everything. Physically, the patient is emaciated,

aged, broken down, the temperature is lowered, and there is an

enormous decrease in the pulse, the secretions and excretions, and

the weight of the body, the latter going down as much as ten pounds

in one week.

During the period of excitement the reverse takes place, point for

point: a feeling of well-being, joy, pride, exuberant activity; the

patient looks younger, grows stout, and his organic functions go on

extensively and regularly. “This contrast,” says an alienist, “is

one of the most curious and interesting peculiarities of mental

medicine.”[252]

-----

Footnote 252:

Régis, _Maladies mentales_, p. 200.

-----

Here the connection between the affective disposition and the

somatic state is quite clear, and seems to be referable to a

tropho-neurosis of the brain (Schüle, Krafft-Ebing). It must be

recognised that this disease, which is the extreme form, and the

alternations of personality, which are modified forms, supply us

with none but pathological examples; but the germs of morbid

manifestations are present in normal life. Unfortunately, these

alternations are only perceptible where strongly marked, and

therefore none but exaggerated cases can be quoted. Compared to the

successive characters, where the second has destroyed the first, the

alternating characters mark a new stage on the road to dissolution,

and form a transition to our second group—the _coexistent_

contradictory characters.

II.

They consist in the coexistence of two opposite tendencies of equal

force and mutually incompatible; there are two characters, two

contradictory springs of action, and, tested by our practical

criterion, there are, in any given circumstances, two possible and

equally probable courses to be foreseen. They differ, both from the

successive characters, in which the second man has eliminated the

first, and from the alternating characters, which occupy the stage,

in turn, _exclusively_, and for some time. They present themselves

under two principal forms.

1. The first form is not a pure or complete type. It is the result

of a contradiction between thought and feeling, between theory and

practice, between principle and tendency. Nothing is less rare, and

I need scarcely adduce examples: the contrast between a man’s

private and public life, between his aspect as a scientific man and

his aspect as a believer. One who, in a question of scientific

proof, is quite intractable, will show, in religion or in love, an

unparalleled simplicity and ingenuousness. As for those who loudly

profess any given doctrine, and contradict it by their actions,

there is no lack of them. Schopenhauer, in theory a pessimist and

misogynist, penetrated with compassion for all living beings, a

professed ascetic, was nothing of the sort in practice. He is an

instance of unreconciled contradiction, to which we may oppose the

perfect unity of a Spinoza.

A man who was, _ex hypothesi_, entirely intellectual, and yet (if

that were possible) capable of acting, would, by his constitution,

escape this contradictory duality. The magistrate, observed by

Esquirol, who, though perfectly lucid in mind, had lost all

sensibility, and was “as indifferent to his family and everything

else as to a theorem of Euclid,” approximates to it. We find

modified forms of the same in the apathetic-intellectual division.

But this contradictory duality is so common that we should not

venture to insist on it were it not that it completely exposes the

inanity of the widespread prejudice that it is sufficient to

inculcate principles, rules, and ideas, in order to make them result

in action. No doubt, authority, education, law, have no other means

of influencing men; but these means, by themselves, are not

efficacious; they may succeed, or they may fail. The question which

the experiment is intended to solve amounts to this: Do the

intellectual character (if there are, as some writers admit, such

things as intellectual characters, properly speaking) and the

emotional keep an even rate of progress?

2. The second form is pure and complete; it involves a deeper

contradiction because subsisting between two ways of feeling, two

tendencies, two modes of action, one of which is the negative of the

other. These characters bring us to our last group, the unstable;

there are incoherent beings who will not or cannot resolve the

contradiction in them. One of the commonest instances is that of

those men who carry to an extreme degree both religious sincerity

and licentiousness of conduct. Popular opinion judges them severely

and considers them hypocrites, thus confounding two very distinct

cases, that of voluntary dissimulation and that of incurable

contradiction. The religious and the sexual sentiment, both deeply

rooted in their natures, act on them, each in its turn; and they

make no attempt to reconcile the two. We may also mention those men

who are divided between the craving for activity and that for

repose, passing incessantly from the one to the other; the lover who

feels for his mistress at the same time an ardent love and a violent

contempt. In towns and countries where the monarchical sentiment is

still deeply rooted we find an analogous state of mind in some

subjects, who feel an unutterable loyalty to the throne and a

profound contempt for the person of the king. In studying the

“composite characters,” Paulhan reminds us that Rubens, calm,

tranquil, and of decent behaviour in practical life, became a prey

to a tragic fermentation as soon as he seized his brush. It has been

said of a celebrated contemporary (Wagner) that he had in him “the

instincts of an ascetic and of a satyr, cravings for love and

hatred, an appetite for enjoyment and a thirst for the ideal, a

haughty dignity and a cringing courtiership, a mixture of devotion

and base treachery.” This portrait might suit many others. It

denotes something more than a contradictory duality, for it cannot

be reduced to two essential points; but it is not yet the genuine

type of the unstable.

If we might trust certain authors, the cause of simultaneous

contradictory characters would be very simple, being due merely to

the dual form of the brain. It is known that the two cerebral

hemispheres, even when normal, are asymmetrical, differing in

weight, in the distribution of the arteries, and in functional

importance, the left having the preponderance; that hallucinations

may be unilateral or bilateral, vary in character, etc. In short,

cerebral dualism is undeniable; but that it should suffice to

explain the duality of character is a hypothesis of such exceeding

_naïveté_ that I am unwilling to waste any time in discussing it.

An explanation drawn from psychology is less simple, but also less

easily overthrown. To understand how characters are constituted, the

following process seems to me the best. Let us take as our

starting-point the well-balanced, “completely unified” characters,

which present a graduated co-ordination of the various tendencies.

The first step towards a break is marked by the predominance of a

single tendency: the character is active, contemplative, sensitive,

etc. It is still a unity; but, instead of a convergent unity which

may be compared to a federation, we have a unity of preponderance

reminding us of an absolute monarchy. A second decisive step is

marked by the appearance of two dominant tendencies, but, to fulfil

the conditions, they must be contradictory. Thus, Miguel Cervantes,

who, after a life of chivalrous adventure, became the great

novelist, gives us an instance of a complex and composite but by no

means contradictory nature. The contradiction is found in cases

analogous to that of the devout libertine, because, while asserting

in words the rule of morals prescribed by his religion, he denies it

by his acts. Hence two un-coordinated tendencies. Yet this is only

the exaggeration of a perfectly normal occurrence. A man of grave

demeanour may have sudden fits of mad spirits; another may be seized

upon by a passion at variance with all his habits. If this

transitory, episodic state becomes stable and permanent, the

contradictory character is established. This transformation may be

assigned to circumstances. I believe that it is still more dependent

on innate tendencies inherent in the individual constitution, which

are only developed by opportunity.

Speaking decisively, we may maintain, without paradox, that these

characters are or are not contradictory, according to the point of

view adopted. They are so for the logic of the intellect, but not

for the logic of the feelings.

When we judge a contradictory character, whether our own or another

person’s, we are apt to proceed _objectively_; we ascertain in the

individual the simultaneous existence of two governing ideas, one of

which negatives the other; we rationally declare this to be

illogical, because the principle of contradiction is the pith of all

our affirmations, and the logic of the intellect rests on it.

The logic of the feelings is _subjective_; it is ruled by the

principle of finality or adaptation. The individual, as a purely

emotional being, aims at one end only, the satisfaction of his

desires; and in him every special tendency makes for its own special

end, its own special good. If, therefore, the scholar, moved by the

love of truth, strives after strict truth, and moved by a strong

religious sentiment, satisfies himself with childish beliefs, there

is not and cannot be any contradiction between these two desires;

the discrepancy exists only objectively, in the region of ideas.

The logic of the feelings also has its illogicalities, but of

another sort, and I can only find two: (1) when an isolated

tendency, in attaining its end, is the cause of injury or ruin to

the whole individual; and (2) when the individual is quite content

with his own destruction, as in the case of the “luxury of grief,”

which we have studied elsewhere, and whose highest term is the

fascination of suicide.

III.

Unstable or polymorphic characters cannot be called “characters”

except by an abuse of that word, for there is neither unity,

stability, nor possibility of prevision. How will they act? Every

fresh moment brings us face to face with another enigma. In fact, we

have here to do with the decay of character, and all the specimens

given in this group are pathological.

It is needless to describe them, for they are self-evident. Their

principal types are to be met with in the hysterical, whose Protean

psychology has so often and so thoroughly been studied that we need

not dwell on it; in the adventurer, whose history, with its

numberless variations, is, in the main, always the same, and may be

summarised thus: precocity, insubordination at home or at school,

frequent flights, inaptitude for all sustained work; he passes

suddenly from enthusiasm to disgust, tries everything in turn and

drops it, drifting at the caprice of impulse or circumstance, till

some final catastrophe lands him in the prisoner’s dock or the

lunatic asylum.

The causes of this instability are either congenital or acquired.

The spasmodic diathesis, as Maudsley calls it, is most usually

innate. It is characterised by the various symptoms comprised under

the name of degeneration, grouped as physical and psychical

stigmata; they are too well known to need enumeration.

The instability acquired in the course of life is left behind by

certain maladies, especially injuries or shocks to the brain, and

above all, lesions of the frontal lobe. Such is the conclusion

resulting from the observations of David Ferrier, Boyer, Lépine, and

others. More recently, Allen Starr,[253] out of forty-six cases, has

ascertained that, in twenty-three, the only symptoms were mental

obtuseness, impossibility of attention, irritability, un-coordinated

and impulsive acts, absence of voluntary control and the loss of

inhibitory power, phenomena specially coinciding with lesions on the

left side of the frontal region.

-----

Footnote 253:

_Brain_, No. 32, p. 570, and _Brain Surgery_ (1863), chap. i.

-----

M. Paulhan, in his book on Characters, when studying those whom

he calls the unquiet, the nervous, and the contradictory

(_contrariants_), gives several instances; among others, Alfred

de Musset, from his own portrait, confirmed by that given by G.

Sand. Let us listen to each of them in turn.

“When these frightful scenes were over, a strange love, an

exaltation carried to excess, made me treat my mistress as a

divinity. A quarter of an hour after I had insulted her I was at her

knees; as soon as I ceased to accuse her I asked her pardon; the

moment I was no longer uttering bitter words I burst into tears”

(Musset). “His reactions were sudden and violent in proportion to

the acuteness of his joys.... One might have thought that two souls

were engaged in a desperate contest as to which should animate his

body.... It was an invariable rule, unheard of, but absolute in this

strange organisation, that, sleep changing all his resolutions, he

would go to rest with his heart full of tenderness, and awaken in

the morning eager for battle and murder; but if he had left in the

evening cursing, he returned next morning to bless” (G. Sand).

Hence, and from analogous cases, Paulhan concludes that “these types

result from the predominance of association by contrast.” It seems

to me impossible to refer the psychology of the unstable, and of the

contradictory characters which come nearest to them, to this single

fact. In the first place, association by contrast is not a primary

fact. Psychologists are right in connecting it indirectly with

association by resemblance, sometimes mixed with elements of

contiguity. Furthermore, contrasts only exist in couples, and in the

“nervous, unquiet, and contradictory” there is not merely a

transition from contrast to contrast, but from difference to

difference—they traverse the whole scale. Lastly, association by

contrast only has a precise form as an _intellectual_ phenomenon,

and it could not be maintained that love, as a representation, would

suggest the _representation_ of violence, or the _i.e._ of jealousy

that of indifference. Here the association of ideas is only an

effect, a result, a rendering to the consciousness of deeper

occurrences belonging to the emotional or even the organic part of

us. If Musset, having represented George Sand to himself as a

divinity, rages at her immediately afterwards, as a brutal planter

might at a slave, his change of attitude is in his feelings, not in

his thoughts. I see rather the effect of a rapid but partial

exhaustion,—a frequent occurrence in unbalanced natures. If we

insist on retaining the word contrast, it will have to be taken, not

in its psychological sense, but in that given to it by physiologists

when they speak of “successive contrast,” and attribute it, rightly

or wrongly, to the fatigue of certain portions of the retina.

The formula which, in my opinion, sums up and explains the unstable

is this: _psychological infantilism_. We might also call it arrest

of development, but this latter expression would not be applicable

to all cases.

If, in fact, we consider the distinctive marks of the character of

children, apart from exceptions, we find, first, mobility. They wish

for one thing, and then another and another; they pass rapidly from

one extreme to the opposite, from eagerness to disgust, from

laughter to tears; the character is an un-coordinated bundle of

appetites and wishes, each of which, in turn, drives out the rest.

Then there is weakness or total absence of will under its higher

inhibitory form, which rules and co-ordinates. Are they impulsive

for want of inhibition, or incapable of controlling themselves

through the excess of their impulses? Both these cases are met with,

and the result is the same. The formula of their character, which we

need not enumerate in detail, is the same as that of the

unstable—_i.e._, there is no constituted character.

The term _infantilism_ is equally applicable to the congenital and

the acquired forms. The former have never left their childhood

behind, the latter return to it; they are on the same level, the

first through not having climbed high enough, the second through

having descended too far. In the one case we have arrested

development, in the other retrogression. It is no objection to say

that this instability has often been met with in minds of a superior

calibre; genius is one thing, character another, and we are here

dealing with character only. The populace, who, struck by the

incoherence of their conduct, call these people “grown-up children,”

have hit on the right expression, without any subtleties of

analysis.

In short, beginning with the _true_ character (_i.e._, the

affirmation of a personality under a stable form consistent with

itself), which is never completely realised, or free from transient

eclipses, there are all possible shades of deviation from unity and

stability, till we reach that stage of uncoordinated multiplicity at

which character has either not come into being or has ceased to

exist.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE DECAY OF THE AFFECTIVE LIFE.

_Law of Decay: its formula, and its general application in

psychology—Difficulties where the affective life is

concerned—Successive disappearance of the disinterested emotions

(the æsthetic and intellectual), of the altruistic (moral and

social), the ego-altruistic (religious feeling, ambition, etc.),

and lastly, the egoistic—Converse proof: cases of arrested

development—Theory of degeneration—Its relation to decay._

At the opening of this work I gave a general survey of the evolution

of the affective life; at its close we have to undertake a task of

an opposite nature: the survey of its decay. Does this take place at

haphazard, varying from one man to another? or does it follow a

regular and ascertainable course? Is it reducible to any formula

which can be referred to a law?

The law of decay, in psychology, consists in a continuous

retrogression, descending from the higher to the lower, from the

complex to the simple, from the unstable to the stable, from the

most to the least organised; in other words, those manifestations

which are the latest in date of evolution are the first to

disappear; while those which were the first to appear are the last

to vanish. Evolution and decay follow opposite courses.

I have already shown that the slow and continuous disappearance of

memory verifies this formula, and, as a converse proof, that, in the

rare cases where this faculty is recovered, the restoration

proceeds, step by step, in the opposite direction, up the path

previously descended. The methodical process of decay is still

better seen in motor psychology. I may perhaps be permitted, by way

of elucidation and preparation, to recapitulate briefly what I have

detailed at greater length elsewhere: motor retrogression in the

well-known case of drunkenness. There is, first, a period of

excitement, even of exuberant spirits, which is the very antithesis

of reflection; that is to say that attention under its highest form,

as the result of a motor convergence, can no longer exist. Next, a

man can no longer control his tongue, he tells all his secrets; the

will, under its higher, inhibitory form, has disappeared. After

this, he becomes incapable of any continuous plan or action: the

will, even under its lower or impulsive form, remains powerless.

Then the most delicate voluntary movements, those of speech and of

the hands, cease to be coordinated. One degree lower, he loses the

semi-automatic movements, those of walking: he staggers and loses

his balance. Still lower, the muscular tonicity is weakened, he

falls from his seat under the table; then the reflex movements are

abolished; and finally, if the condition is continued long enough,

there is cessation of the automatic movements—those of respiration

and of the heart. Here is a well-marked, easily determinable

retrograde process, the psychological function of the movements

being comparatively simple.

The object of this chapter is to prove that the disappearance of

feelings, when it takes place gradually and continuously, in

consequence of age or of some slowly evolved malady (general

paralysis, senile dementia, etc.), conforms to the same law. But, by

reason of the complexity of the affective life, the question

presents some difficulties which we must first of all point out.

The first is this: May not affective retrogression be simply the

consequence of an intellectual retrogression? or must we take it as

primary, independent, and self-determined, not secondary and

consequent upon the decay of intellect? Or else—and this view

appears to me the most probable—do both cases occur? It is

impossible to give a categorical answer; the two elements, the

intellectual and the affective, being closely associated. Yet, as

retrogression is irremediable and results from organic decay or

waste, the presumption is rather in favour of a gradual extinction

of the tendencies.

The second difficulty is at least equally important. We have

admitted that in every normal person all the primary tendencies

exist; but their coexistence does not imply their equality.

Experience proves this. The individual character results from the

preponderance of one or more tendencies: the æsthetic or the sexual,

the moral or the religious; one man is constitutionally timid, and

another choleric. It follows from this that all cases of

retrogression are not strictly comparable with one another; for it

is evident that the dominant tendency is better able than the rest

to withstand shocks and assaults, and to resist destructive action.

This, in my opinion, explains how it is that—as in a case mentioned

below—the æsthetic sentiment, one of the most delicate and latest in

formation, is of very late extinction in an artist. This apparent

exception is, in fact, a confirmation of the law.

The ideal case for illustrating our subject would be this: An

average man, all of whose tendencies are nearly equipollent, is

struck down by a disease involving slow retrogression, so that the

order in which the feelings are weakened and extinguished can be

noted; then the decadence stops short, and is followed by a

restoration of the affective life, which can be followed, step by

step, in its gradual ascent, so as to ascertain whether it is or is

not the repetition, in reversed order, of the period of dissolution.

The search for such a case, however, would be no less than the

pursuit of a chimera. The only practical method would be to collect

a great number of observations on different patients, and thus draw

up a schematic table of decay, analogous to Galton’s composite

photographs—formed by the accumulation of resemblances and the

elimination of individual differences. This is what I shall try to

do, as far as the extreme scarcity of material and the difficulties

of an unexplored subject will permit. I shall first examine

dissolution properly so called; then, by way of converse proof, the

arrest of development.

I.

As the decay of the feelings progresses from the higher to the

lower, from complex adaptation to simple adaptation, gradually

narrowing the area of the affective life, we may, in this decadence,

distinguish four phases, marked by the successive disappearance of

(1) the disinterested emotions, (2) the altruistic emotions, (3) the

ego-altruistic emotions, and (4) the purely egoistic emotions.

(1.) I class under the first head the æsthetic emotions and the

higher forms of intellectual emotions, which aim at no practical or

utilitarian end, but are luxuries, not necessaries of life. Æsthetic

and scientific cravings are so slightly marked, and so far from

imperative in the majority of men, that it is impossible to

demonstrate with certainty that they are the first to disappear; but

it may be indirectly inferred.

It cannot be denied that those who have a passion for art or

science, and for whom these are necessary conditions of life, are

extremely rare compared with those who are moved or possessed by

love, the desire for riches, or ambition. In the mass of men the

æsthetic and intellectual feelings remain in a rudimentary

condition, or attain only a slight, at most a medium development,

and it cannot be said with certainty when they become extinct,

seeing they have never really existed. Compared with the higher

forms, they resemble a case of arrested development, _i.e._, of

retrogression; and this arrest of development is the rule, as it

must be for all tendencies beyond the bounds of the mere necessities

of life.

To this negative proof I may add other positive proofs.

Age and diseases whose effect is retrogressive diminish, if they do

not annihilate, zeal, enthusiasm, the impulse towards creation,

discovery, or the simple enjoyment of art, and the curiosity which

is always on the alert. I omit some very rare exceptions, each of

which would require individual examination. In the majority of men

weakened vitality at once destroys all taste for the superfluous.

We must also note the decided hostility to all innovations—new forms

of art, new discoveries, new ways of stating or treating scientific

questions—which comes on with old age. The fact is so well known as

to make proof unnecessary. As a general thing, in art especially,

every generation rejects that which follows it. The usual

explanation of this “misoneism” is that there is a fixed cerebral

constitution, organised intellectual habits. Yes—but if the proposed

new scientific or artistic ideal caused a true, deep, intense

emotion, it would break down and sweep away the barriers of habit.

There would be a shock, a turning upside down, a conversion. Cases

of a rupture with the artistic or scientific past sometimes occur,

but rarely, as they presuppose the possibility of a violent shock

and the revival of an imperious passion, but turned in another

direction. This repulsion for novelty is rather of emotional than of

intellectual origin; it is a sign of the weakening of the affective

life, and of a tendency towards diminished effort, repose, inertia.

(2.) The altruistic feelings (social and moral emotions) having a

practical value, and being reckoned among the conditions of human

existence, it is much easier to fix the moment of their partial or

total decay. Now, the preceding groups apart, they are the first to

disappear. They may have been altered or extinct for a long period,

while the ego-altruistic, and still more the egoistic tendencies,

are still intact. We have seen, again and again, how quickly persons

become unsociable and ungovernable through dementia, general

paralysis, melancholia, epilepsy, hysteria, shock, and injuries to

the head.

But their retrogression takes place by gradations to be determined

by observation alone.[254]

Case 1. "F—— entered the asylum December 20, 1889, suffering from

general paralysis, which took the form of dementia. He was an

intelligent, well-educated man, capable of filling a brilliant

position in society. Being a gifted musician, he became well known

as a violoncellist and his playing was long an attraction at the

most frequented concerts. What especially struck one in this

patient on his admission was his utter indifference to all about

him—doctors, nurses, and patients alike. When shown an aged

dementia patient who was dying he was neither touched nor

disturbed, but simply remarked, ‘There’s one of ’em going to

croak’ (‘_En voilà un qui va claquer_’). To suggestions that he

should leave the asylum and mingle again in society, he never

returned any other answer than ‘I like my own comfort too well—I

wish people would leave me in peace.’ The more general altruistic

feelings, therefore, would seem at this date to have vanished; but

family affection, especially filial love, is still intact. F——

incessantly speaks of his father, wants to write to him, to see

him. On being shown his picture he burst into tears. The personal

feelings are still intact, the love of liberty, and the instinct

of self-preservation in all its forms.

"Jan. 15, 1891 (a year and a half later). F—— is now in the

_gâteux_ ward. The feelings already ruined or destroyed have not

reappeared. Retrogression has gone on almost uninterruptedly. F——

no longer speaks of his father, and if spoken to about him he

replies with indifference. One day, all his family being assembled

at the foot of his bed, he recognised each of his relations and

spoke to them by name, but showed no emotion whatever; the moment

of separation left him as indifferent as their arrival had found

him.

"Even the egoistic feelings are now impaired; he no longer demands

freedom of movement. Eating is the only thing that interests him;

he devours ravenously, and, after his meals, picks up the crumbs

which have fallen on the bed-clothes. The nutritive instinct is

the last surviving.

"Yet, in this patient, the artistic feeling long remains

unimpaired, for the reason indicated above, viz., that it is the

direct expression of his temperament, and an essential part of his

_ego_: because he is an artist.

"Two months after his admission into the asylum, though devoid of

social tendencies and generous feeling, he was still able to

co-ordinate his movements and play his old tunes on the

violoncello. One day, in the garden, he was found gazing

ecstatically at the blue sky, flecked with small white clouds; he

was saying, ‘How beautiful it is! how beautiful it is!’ Nothing

else, by-the-bye, could be got from him that day. Chance having

brought the famous violinist X—— as a visitor to the asylum about

a month before F.’s death, he was asked to play to the latter. The

patient had been, for some time, in the last stage of insanity and

was past understanding anything, yet he understood this, and when

he heard the familiar airs of old times played on the violin his

eye became clear, and for a minute the mind seemed to have found

itself again under the influence of art."

Case 2. “Ph. R——, aged 70, suffering from senile dementia, was up

to this age an intelligent, peaceable, respectable citizen. At the

last elections he presented himself as a candidate for the

Chamber, and, in spite of the protests of his family, placed

himself at the head of an Anarchist group, and drew up a programme

which we will not inflict on the reader. He claimed to have

received 700 votes. However that may be, it became necessary to

place him in seclusion. His political and social tendencies

perished in the first catastrophe, but his domestic feelings still

remained intact. He spoke of his family with a touching

simplicity. A letter written to his brother-in-law (too long for

reproduction here, but very sensible) furnishes throughout

irrefragable proofs of this. Gradually these feelings became

weaker, the disease progressed rapidly, he became dirty in his

habits, and the only function now remaining is the generative

instinct in its simplest form, as masturbation.”

Footnote 254:

I owe these observations to the kindness of Dr. Dumas, who

collected them with a view to a special study of the decay of

feeling.

In the following cases intellectual retrogression seems to precede

and determine the affective evolution:—

Case 3. "D——, a general paralytic, on his admission into the asylum,

is fond of talking of the 3000 francs he has invested; he is

much occupied with the dividends and coupons now due which he

ought to have received. On inquiries being made all this was

found to be accurate. He had, therefore, a tolerably clear idea

of property, since this idea was suggested by the image of

certain papers representing the values involved. At a later

period, when spoken to about his 3000 francs, he had forgotten

everything and did not understand. When reminded of what he had

himself said, and that he possessed the values guaranteed by the

receipts, he understood no more than before. But D—— carries

money about with him, and knows very well how much he has at the

time. ‘For ten centimes,’ he says, ‘I can have a cup of coffee

every day, and I have three francs.’ The sight of a white,

shining metal is sufficient to awaken in him the idea of

possession represented by the pleasure to be bought with it."

Three months later he no longer understands even this third

degree of possession: possession with him means having something

to eat; the piece of bread which he is holding in his hand and

greedily devouring is the only thing he cannot be induced to

give up.

Case 4. "M——, formerly employed in the _octroi_; paralytic

dementia. During the first few days after his admission he gave

himself up to political divagations, spoke much of universal

suffrage, and especially of liberty. When asked for a definition

of this word he gave the following explanation: ‘Liberty is the

right to do what one wishes.’ A short time after this he ceased

to make speeches and seemed to collapse. He was no longer

capable of giving his definition, or of understanding it; when

pressed with questions he said at last, ‘Liberty is being able

to walk about in the yard.’ The abstract idea is replaced by a

concrete idea indicating an assemblage of movements. Later

still, a few days before his death, he answered the same

question with, ‘Being free is when any one is in bed; I shall be

free when I am in bed.’ The idea of liberty, therefore, was at

last confused in his mind with that of a vague state of

comfort."

These observations show how the group of altruistic sentiments

dissolves piecemeal, and the affective sphere narrows itself more

and more. The first to disappear are the vaguest and weakest of all

the forms of benevolence—those embracing the whole human race; then

the family emotions, which are more stable, more restricted, more

frequently repeated; finally, there is absolute indifference to

every one.[255]

-----

Footnote 255:

“When the mind undergoes degeneration, the moral feeling is the

first to show it, as it is the last to be restored when the

disorder passes away; the latest and highest gain of mental

evolution, it is the first to witness by its impairment to mental

dissolution.... In undoing a mental organisation, nature begins by

unravelling the finest, most delicate, most intricately woven, and

last completed threads of her marvellously complex network. Were

the moral sense as old and firmly fixed an instinct as the

instinct to walk upright, or the more deeply planted instinct of

propagation,—as many people in the presumed interests of morality

have tried to persuade themselves and others that it is,—it would

not be the first to suffer in this way when mental degeneration

begins; its categorical imperative would not take instant flight

at the first assault, but would assert its authority at a later

period of the decline; but, being the last acquired and the least

fixed, it is most likely to vary, not only ... in the pathological

way of degeneracy, but also ... in physiological ways, according

to the diversities of conditions in which it is placed.”

(Maudsley, _Body and Will_, p. 266.)

-----

(3.) The ego-altruistic emotions (to employ H. Spencer’s

terminology) form a group whose limits are vague, floating, and

indecisive. It is even uncertain whether it exists as a distinct

group or simply corresponds to a particular “moment” in the

evolution of complex emotions. Without arguing this point, or

attaching any importance to it, I employ this formula, because it is

a convenient one in following step by step the retrogression from

pure altruism to pure egoism.

Sexual love is a fairly good representative of the group. Need we

say that, appearing later than the other instincts, it disappears

before them, thus being in strict conformity with the law of

retrogression. It does not belong to childhood, but neither does it

to old age. We must eliminate the survivals and _simulacra_, which

are only a factitious product of imagination; we are dealing with

the tendency under its normal and complete form, with _all_ its

physiological and psychological conditions.

The religious sentiment in its medium forms, neither too coarse nor

too subtle, belongs also to this category, plunging its roots deeply

into the individual, but in order to rise beyond him. Of its two

constituent elements, love tends towards the dispossession of the

individual; the other, fear, towards strict egoism; with

retrogression, the latter becomes exclusive. The believer,

especially in the melancholic state, at first complains of being

wanting in pity, fervour, love of God; he no longer finds

consolation in prayer. Thus, as decadence increases, or simply in

consequence of age and the approach of death, the egoistic anxiety

about personal salvation becomes imperious. This was the time of

life when the kings, princes, and lords of the Middle Ages

multiplied pious foundations—monasteries, churches, and hospitals;

and the same thing still takes place, in our own day, in religions

which admit of the efficacy of works in purchasing salvation, and of

prayers for the dead. The religious feeling thus comes back to fear,

its primary form in evolution. We might also note the frequent

survival of observances and rites when the _true_ feeling has

disappeared, _i.e._, the solidity of the organic and automatic

element. In a retrograding religion, dogma dissolves before outward

acts of worship, which, as we have seen, is the inversion of the

evolutionary process.

Ambition is the type of the higher form of egoism; but as it must

take into account the nature of other men and employ them in

carrying out its designs, it is a modified form of egoism. We know

how tenacious and durable is this passion in its numerous forms—the

pursuit of power, honour, renown, riches; in it we have a foretaste

of the stability of egoism after the ruin of all other tendencies.

It disappears when the stage is reached when man sincerely declares

himself disgusted with everything, and speaks like the author of

Ecclesiastes. The greatest of the Cordovan Caliphs, Abderrhaman

III., who noted down the principal events of this life, wrote: “I

have reigned fifty years in peace and in war, loved by my people,

feared by my enemies, respected by my allies, seeing my friendship

sought for by the greatest kings on earth. Nothing have I lacked

that the heart of man could desire—neither glory, nor power, nor

pleasures. Yet, having counted the days in this long life in which I

enjoyed unalloyed happiness, I found that there were fourteen.” But

this contempt for human interests comes late, and springs rather

from weakness than from wisdom. Men renounce the world, not so much

because they have weighed it and estimated it at its true value, as

because they no longer have the courage to conquer or keep it.

Except in the case of philosophers, the disappearance of all

ambition is the first symptom of the decadence of the egoistic

tendencies: it indicates weariness, exhaustion, and a want of faith

in one’s self.

(4.) The last group, that of the strictly egoistic feelings, the

most general and most firmly organised of all, is the last to

disappear. The threefold group formed by the offensive instinct

(anger), the defensive instincts (fear), and the nutritive cravings,

persists in men and animals up to the farthest limit of

consciousness. We know that anger makes its appearance later than

fear; does it vanish earlier? I have no data to enable me to reply

to this question. What is certain is that the affective states

associated with nutrition last to the end, and that all remaining

activity is concentrated in them, as shown by the cases above

quoted. The fact, moreover, is so well known that there is no need

to dwell on it.

II.

We have just seen how the process of decay, beginning at the top of

the building, gradually destroys all its storeys, one after another,

as it descends to the foundations. It would be interesting to

ascertain whether the work of restoration would follow, as it ought,

the inverse order; but, when decay has fully accomplished its task,

all is over, without hope of recovery. We only meet with partial and

fragmentary cases of restoration. In the absence of this converse

proof we may proceed from below upwards, not to retrace the normal

evolution of the affective life, which has already been done, but to

consider the cases in which this evolution remains in a rudimentary

state, or becomes abortive at various stages of its ascending

progress, _i.e._, in idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, human

beings of incomplete development.

In the lowest stage, that of the complete idiot, all instincts are

wanting, even that of nutrition. In infancy idiots only learn to

take the breast with difficulty. At a more advanced age, there are

some who feel neither hunger nor thirst; the sight of food fails to

awaken them from their torpor, and without the help of others they

would perish of inanition. Ordinary cases, on a higher level than

this, show unbounded voracity. Idiots may be capable of feeling

nothing but the nutritive cravings, and giving no signs of pleasure

or pain except inarticulate growls, shrill cries, or strident

laughter.

The complete idiot shows no sign of fear; he cannot fear, because he

feels and comprehends nothing. Those less devoid of sensibility

dread punishment, especially blows.

With regard to anger, there are the apathetic and insensible, and,

above them, in imbeciles, fits of bestial rage, with convulsions,

suffocations, violent impulses, and destructive cravings.

Those who pass the purely egoistic stage and do not remain totally

indifferent to those about them, show a vague and transient

affection for the person who takes care of them. Others, less

destitute, “seem amiable and affectionate, and we may compare these

patients to the dog who fawns on those who caress him” (Schüle). The

highest step attained by them, and that rarely, is a certain sense

of injustice. Itard observed this in his famous “savage of the

Aveyron,” whom he had purposely punished without cause.[256] In

short, the social and moral tendencies are rudimentary or

non-existent.

-----

Footnote 256:

Itard, _Mémoire sur le sauvage de l’Aveyron_, éd. Bourneville, pp.

xlviii. _sqq._

-----

With regard to the sex-instinct, it is either entirely absent or

there are various perversions and unrestrained erethism.

Lastly, there are some who can rise to a rudimentary manifestation

of the superfluous or disinterested feelings. The idiot, as a rule,

does not play; he is self-centred, isolated, and has no surplus

vitality to expend. That activity which seems to live on itself and

costs no effort, but is a source of pleasure without fatigue, is

almost, if not quite, unknown to him. Even when invited and induced

to play, he does so with little enthusiasm. We find, however, a

rudiment of artistic tendency in those who have some taste for

drawing or music. We may note, in passing, that the musical faculty

being, as we know, one of the first to appear, ought also to be one

of the last to disappear.[257] But all this is very poor and reduces

itself to mere imitation, and even this natural and simple tendency

is wanting among the lower grades of the feeble-minded.

-----

Footnote 257:

Ireland (_Journal of Mental Science_, July 1894) has published

some observations which tend to favour the idea of this slow

retrogression in dementia. He gives the case of a patient, sinking

into dementia, who not only retained her musical ability, but

could even pick up new tunes; and mentions cases where the

patient, seated before a piano, could play old melodies though

incapable of anything else. A girl, aged fourteen, became demented

through brain fever and had ceased to speak, save a few words, but

was still fond of music and would play fragments of tunes. Two

lady patients, though incoherent in speech, played with great

accuracy on the piano—one by ear only, the other from musical

notes, although she was quite unable to read a book, etc. (Perhaps

in this last case there was “word-blindness” applying to words

_only_.)

-----

Such, briefly, is the balance-sheet of the affective life in these

disinherited ones. It is generally admitted that, in this abortive

development, there are two main periods: the first lasting from

birth till about the third or fourth year, when, if arrest of

development takes place, the psychic state remains almost _nil_; the

second, from the fourth year onwards, allows of a less scanty, but a

discordant and perverted psychology. In both cases, the evolution,

however incomplete, reproduces in all its stages the contrary order

to that of decay.

It will be necessary, in concluding this study of decay, to say a

few words about a doctrine, much used and abused in these days, and

often alluded to in the course of this work, which stands in direct

relation to the pathology of the feelings, and, in short, permits us

to return some sort of answer to the question put at the beginning

of this chapter: the Theory of Degeneration.

When we review the abnormal or morbid forms of the affective life:

destructive impulses, phobias, incurable melancholy, sexual

perversions, failure of the moral sense, insanity of doubt, etc.,

and seek their causes, we at once find some which are proximate or

immediate. Among the most frequent are physical maladies, injuries

to the head, sudden shocks, as in railway accidents; sorrow,

whatever its origin, whether love, ambition, ruin, separation;

intellectual overwork, and excesses of all sorts. A little

reflection, however, shows us that the alleged causes are not the

_whole_ cause—that, in fact, they are often, rather, accidental and

occasional. One man bears courageously or even cheerfully a loss

under which his neighbour succumbs. Many are able to give themselves

up with impunity to excesses of pleasure or work, physical or

mental. Of the passengers in the same train, at the time of an

accident, the greater number will suffer nothing worse than fright,

while one perhaps may on this account become insane, or permanently

subject to phobias. To explain this difference of results under

identical conditions, we must seek a supplementary cause in the

constitution of the individual himself. When he offers only a slight

resistance, and succumbs to the least shock, we say that he is a

degenerate.

The conception of degenerescence as a fundamental cause is due, as

every one knows, to Morel, and has flourished famously since his

day. Unfortunately, it has been called in to account for occurrences

so numerous and so dissimilar that, in the end, it has brought down

on itself the suspicions of some writers, who have recently

stigmatised it as a “metaphysical,” _i.e._, vague and transcendental

explanation. In fact, different writers seem to understand by this

word totally different things. The original propounder of the

doctrine had a clear if not a correct notion of degenerescence. “The

clearest idea,” says Morel, “which we can form of human

degenerescence is by representing it to ourselves as a morbid

deviation from a primitive type. This deviation, however simple we

may suppose it at its origin, nevertheless contains such elements of

transmissibility that he who carries its germ in himself becomes

more and more incapable of performing his functions as a member of

the human race, and progress, already impaired in his person, is

threatened in those of his descendants.... Degenerescence and morbid

deviation from the normal type of humanity are therefore, in my

idea, one and the same thing.” This is quite clear. Morel, as a

Christian, believed in a typical man, perfect as he came from the

hands of the Creator: such a belief simplifies many things. This

position has been given up. At present, we understand by

degenerescence, a morbid predisposition, having its peculiar signs,

its physical and psychical “stigmata.”

The physical stigmata, which have been enumerated at great length by

specialist writers, consist in anomalies of the skeleton, the

muscular and the digestive system, of the respiratory, circulatory,

and genito-urinary apparatus, of the skin, the special sense-organs,

of speech, and especially of the central and peripheral nervous

system. The detailed lists contain about sixty items.

The psychic stigmata are more vaguely defined. The principal are:

irritability, showing itself in a marked disproportion between

action and reaction; instability of character, absence of unity, of

consent, incessant changes, eccentric conduct, painful haunting by

fixed ideas, irresistible impulses, or extraordinary apathy.

It has been objected to this doctrine that, of a thousand

individuals taken at random, there is perhaps not a single one who

does not show one or more of the stigmata, so that the whole human

race would be included in the alleged class of degenerates. No

stigma, it has been said, is specific by itself; neither is any

group of symptoms, at least in a clear and indisputable form; so

that one can come to no conclusion from them.

This and other difficulties have supplied matter for many

discussions, into which this is not the place to enter.

Degenerescence, whatever its value as an explanation, and the abuse

to which it has been subjected, is not a mere word; it expresses a

reality: it sums up in itself a number of characters. This is

sufficient for us, and allows us to eliminate one hypothesis: that

the decay of the feelings is necessarily dependent on intellectual

decay.

To say truth, the question stated above: Is the retrogression of the

feelings a primary, and that of ideas a secondary fact? or the

contrary? is, under this form, somewhat factitious. It is only by

analytical artifice that we separate thought and feeling, which, by

their nature, are closely connected. The law of retrogression is

generally valid in biology, and probably also in psychology; it does

not act on isolated points, it gradually surrounds and saps the

whole building, no matter on what side it begins. It is clear that

all weakening of the intellect, such as that produced by old age and

disease (difficulty in understanding general ideas, loss of certain

groups of recollections, etc.), involves the disappearance of the

corresponding affective states: one of the observations already

quoted (Case B.) is an instance in point. But we must not thence

conclude that the retrogression of the affective life _is_, _by

right_, always subordinated to that of knowledge. Most cases of

degenerescence prove the contrary; it is essentially an organic

decadence, a state of physiological poverty, showing itself first of

all by alterations in the range of the emotions, tendencies,

actions, and movements. The intellect, for its part, is better able

to stand the shock, and sometimes remains uninjured. More than this,

the adherents of this doctrine have shown that the degenerate are

sometimes endowed with brilliant intellectual faculties; while some

have even maintained that degenerescence is a necessary condition of

high mental originality (“genius a neurosis,” etc).

Apart from all exaggeration, the mass of facts permits us to make

the induction that decadence is primarily (not exclusively) that of

the affective tendencies and manifestations, since it is on them

that degenerescence (taking the word in its least vague sense) first

and principally acts.

CONCLUSION.

_The place of the feelings in psychic life—They come

first—Physiological proofs—Psychological proofs._

Through the multiple aspects of our subject and the diversity of

questions we have dealt with, the fundamental idea of this book has

been to show that the foundation of the affective life is appetite

or its contrary—that is to say, movement or arrest of movement; that

at its root it is an impulse, a tendency, an act in the nascent or

complete state, independent of intelligence, which has nothing to do

with it and may not even be present. It is unnecessary to inflict

upon the reader any new variations on a theme so often repeated. I

only desire, in conclusion, to add some remarks on the place of the

feelings in the total psychic life, and to show that that place is

the _first_.

This statement must be made precise. To compare “sensibility” and

“intelligence,” as some authors have done, to see which of these two

“faculties” is inferior to the other, is an artificial and

unreasonable task, since there is no common measure of the two, and

there can be no solution of the question which is not arbitrary. But

we may proceed objectively, and ask if the one is not primary and

the other secondary, if the one is not grafted on the other, and in

that case which is the stock and which the graft. If the feelings

appear first it is clear that they cannot be derived, and are not a

mode or function of knowledge, since they exist by themselves and

are irreducible.

Thus stated the question is simple and the reply evident.

The physiological evidence in favour of the priority of the feelings

need only be briefly recalled; it all centres in one point: organic

vegetative life always and everywhere appears before animal life;

physiologists constantly repeat that the animal is grafted on the

vegetable which precedes him. Now organic life is directly expressed

by the needs and appetites, which are the stuff of the affective

life; animal life by the sensations, the stuff of the intellectual

life. The primordial part played by organic sensibility has been

shown in the Introduction. We may remember also the myriads of

animals which are only bundles of needs, their psychology consisting

in the search for food, in defence, and in propagation; their senses

(often reduced to touch alone) are only tools, coarse instruments,

teleological weapons in the service of their needs; but closed in as

they may be from the external world, appetite in them is not less

intense. Even in man is not fœtal life, and that of the first months

after birth, much the same, almost wholly made up of satisfied or

unsatisfied needs, and consequently of pleasures and pains? From the

purely physiological point of view, knowledge appears not as a

mistress but as a servant.

The psychological evidence is not difficult to supply, and has

indeed already been presented by Schopenhauer in so brilliant

and complete a manner that it would be a bold task to present

it afresh. The chapter entitled “The Primacy of Will in

Self-Consciousness”[258] is a long argument in favour of the

priority of impulse over knowledge. We need not be duped by

the equivocal use of the word “will,” since for Schopenhauer

“to will is to desire, to aspire, to flee, to hope, to fear,

to love, to hate; in a word, all that directly constitutes our

good and our ill, our pleasure and our pain.” Nor need we

occupy ourselves with his metaphysics nor his antiquated

physiology, nor his personal hatred of intelligence, which he

treats as an enemy and usurper, “because all the philosophers

up to to-day have made it the intimate primitive essence of

their so-called soul;” and having made these eliminations we

may find many of his pages full of penetrating and consummate

psychology. I recall his chief arguments.

-----

Footnote 258:

_Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, Part III., chap. xix.

-----

Will (in the sense above indicated) is universal. The basis of

consciousness in every animal is desire. This fundamental fact is

translated into the impulse to preserve life and well-being, and to

propagate. This foundation is common to the polypus and to man. The

differences among animals are due to a difference in knowledge; as

we descend in the series intelligence becomes weaker and more

imperfect; there is no similar degradation in will (or desire); the

smallest insect wills what it wills as fully as man; will is

everywhere equal to itself. Relatively to intelligence it is the

robust blind man carrying on his shoulders the paralytic who sees

clearly.

It is fundamental. The will to live, with the horror of death which

results from it, is a fact anterior to all intelligence and

independent of it. In it is the basis of identity and of character;

“the man is hidden in the heart and not in the head.” It is the

source and the bond of all stable associations, religious,

political, or professional. It makes the strength of party spirit,

of sects, and of factions. Compare the fragility of friendships

founded on similarity of intelligence with those that spring from

the heart. Thus religions have had every reason to promise eternal

recompense to man’s moral qualities, and not to the gifts of the

mind.

Its power is sovereign. It is not reason which uses passion, it is

passion which uses reason to reach its ends. Under the influence of

intense desire, the intellect sometimes rises to a degree of vigour

of which none would believe it capable. Desire, love, fear render

the most obtuse understanding lucid. And besides, if will and

intelligence were identical in nature, their development would

proceed side by side, whereas nothing is more frequent than a great

intellect united to an inferior character, and “we sometimes find

violent desires, impassioned and impetuous impulses, joined to a

feeble intellect, that is to say a small brain badly enclosed in a

thick skull.”

Memory, which is commonly considered a purely intellectual

phenomenon, often depends—as we have seen—on the state of the

feelings. This had not escaped Schopenhauer. “Even a weak memory

sometimes retains perfectly what concerns the passion dominant at

the moment; the lover never forgets a favourable opportunity, the

ambitious nothing that serves their projects; the miser never

forgets his losses, nor the proud man a wound to his honour; the

vain remember every word of praise and every distinction they

receive.... That is what might be called the heart’s memory, more

intimate than the mind’s.”

How is it that facts of common observation, so clear and so

numerous, requiring for their discovery neither experiment nor

special research, nor even long reflection, have been so generally

misunderstood; and that the contrary opinion has always

predominated, reducing the manifestations of feeling to “qualities

of sensation,” to “confused intelligence,” and other oft-repeated

formulas? The only reason I can find is that during centuries this

subject has been treated philosophically, not psychologically, and

the method of philosophy is necessarily intellectualist. Only the

adult and complex forms of the affective life were considered,

without regard to their evolution, which alone brings us to their

origin. The parts played by movements as psychological factors, and

by unconscious activity, were forgotten or misunderstood. Pleasures

and pains in their manifold forms were regarded as the essential

phenomena in place of the hidden springs which give rise to them.

To sum up, the psychology of the emotions has its point of departure

in those complex feelings which daily life brings beneath our eyes

every moment. Their complexity is the work of our intellectual

nature, which associates and dissociates, mixing and combining

perceptions, images, ideas, each of which, in so far as it relates

to the individual or social conditions of existence, to the

physiological needs, to the offensive and defensive instinct of

conservation, to the social, moral, religious, æsthetic, and

scientific tendencies, produces in the organism variable effects

which, translated into consciousness, impart an affective tone to

intellectual states. Analysis shows that these complex forms are

reducible to a few simple emotions. The simple emotion itself is a

complexus made up of impulses, that is of motor elements, and

agreeable, painful, or mixed states of consciousness; these two

factors form a whole apparently indissoluble. Finally, the

fundamental motor or dynamic element manifests itself under two

forms: conscious impulses or desires, unconscious impulses or

appetites; there is identity of nature, the first possessing

consciousness in addition. Hence for the desires (the psychological

form), thanks to consciousness, there is the possibility of manifold

adaptations and indefinite plasticity. Hence for the appetites (the

physiological form) there is stability, fixity, automatism, the

absence of invention, and of that state of indecision arising

simultaneously with consciousness.

If we include all the primitive conscious impulses beneath the name

of _desire_ (or its opposite, _aversion_), we find two apparently

contradictory theses concerning its origin. According to one, desire

is a primitive phenomenon, anterior on the one hand to all

knowledge, and on the other to all experience of pleasure or pain.

According to the other, desire is a secondary phenomenon, the

anticipation of a known pleasure to seek for, a known pain to avoid;

the latter counts most partisans, and is also condensed into

well-known axiomatic sayings and formulas: “We cannot desire what we

do not know,” “We can only desire what seems to be for our

advantage,” “Desire is founded on a proved pleasure.” Both theses

are true, each for a separate moment, and the first alone relates to

the question of origin.

At the first moment desire is anterior to all experience, to every

consideration of pleasure or of pain; it acts as a blind force; it

is a _vis a tergo_, a propulsion only explicable by the physical and

mental organism. It must necessarily act at once without knowing

whither it goes, else it would act too late or not at all.

At the second moment, it is guided by experience and rests on proved

pleasure or pain, seeking one and avoiding the other. It is to this

moment that the sayings above quoted apply. That is the final form,

and it embraces the immense majority of cases. Even in the adult,

however, we have noted examples of vague desire, without object or

determined aim.

Blind impulse, when it reaches its end, finds its satisfaction

there, and seeks it anew because it is pleasant. But the pleasant

and the unpleasant are relative qualities, varying in individuals,

and at different moments in the same individual. If the physical and

mental organisation changes, the impulses, the position of pleasure

and pain change also; pathology furnishes us with unquestionable

proof.

Impulse, therefore, is the primordial fact in the life of the

feelings, and I cannot better conclude than by borrowing from

Spinoza a passage which sums up the whole spirit of this book:

“Appetite is the very essence of man, from which necessarily flow

all those things which seem to preserve him.... Between appetite and

desire there is no difference, save that desire is self-conscious

appetite. It follows from all this that we desire and follow after

nothing because we deem it to be good, but on the contrary deem that

to be good which we desire and follow after.”[259]

-----

Footnote 259:

_Ethica_, iii. prop. 9, schol.

-----

INDEX.

Abderrhaman III., 431

Abnormal characters, 404 _et seq._

Aboulia, 70

Abstraction, faculty of, 18, 313

Acquired pleasures, 56

Active characters, 388, 395-397

Activity accompanied by risk, pleasures of, 270

Actynophrys, 4

Admiration, 369

Æsthetic emotion, 101

” sentiment, 328 _et seq._; pathology of, 357 _et seq._; decay

of, 426; survival of, 428; rudimentary in idiots, 433

” superiority incompatible with health, 360

Affective type of memory, 166

Affinity, 6

Aggression, real, 220

” simulated, 221

” deferred, 222

_Agnatio_, 288

Aïssaouas, 33

Alexander, 400

Alfieri, 395

Algebra, Franklin’s moral, 398

Alternating characters, 413

Althaus, 53

Altruism, 237; its genesis, 281

Altruistic feelings, 292; decay of, 427

” (or sympathetic) pain, 44

Ambition, 431

Amnesia, 165, 166

Amorphous characters, 386

Anæsthesia, 36, 53, 54, 95, 96

Analgesia, 32 _et seq._

” artificial, 34

Analysts, 395

Anencephalic monsters, 32

Anger, 14, 218 _et seq._; its symptoms, 219; its pathology, 223

Animism, 308, 309

Ants, 263

Anthropomorphism, 309, 349

Apathetic characters, 389, 397, 398

Apathetic-active characters, 400

” sensitive ” 401

Appetite, 438

Approbation, desire of, 242

Architecture, 341

Ariosto, 364

Aristotle, 72, 299

Arrest of development, 264 _et seq._, 432 _et seq._

Art, 330 (and Chap. X., _passim_)

” influenced by environment, 339

” for art’s sake, 342

” set free from anthropomorphism, 343

” animals in, 344

” wild nature in, 345-347

Asceticism, 319, 325

Assimilation, 6

Association of ideas, 172 _et seq._

_Ataraxia_, 360

Atony, 389

Attraction and repulsion, 6

_Audition colorée_, 181

Augustine, 411, 412

Augustus, 409

Auto-intoxication, 40, 224

Avarice, 264

Aveyron, savage of the, 433

Azam, 412, 414

Aztecs, 191, 296, 321, 341

Bachofen, 286, 287, 288

Bacon, Francis, 216, 391

Bacteria, 5

Bain, 74, 78, 82, 130, 134, 141, 162, 190, 208, 210, 212, 218, 221,

230, 231, 235, 238, 241, 242, 280, 349, 353, 369, 384, 395, 396,

398

Balbiani, 251

Baldwin, 231

Barth, 315

Bastian, 6

Basutos, 296, 371

Beard, 214

Beau, 35

Beaunis, 26, 39, 49, 60, 119, 120, 133

Beauquier, 103, 105

Bell, Ch., 113, 115, 124, 219

Belmondo, 202

Benedictines, 374

Beneficence, 292

Benevolence, rise of, 293

Bennett, 143

Berkeley, 96

Bernard, Claude, 4, 62, 116, 117, 118

Bert, 92

Bhâghavad-Gita, 318

Bichat, 114, 219

Biran, Maine de, 395

Blanville, 138

Blind impulse, 422

Blood, syncope at sight of, 217

” taste for, 68, 228, 365

Blushing, 114, 271

Borgia, Francisco, 412

Boudet de Paris, 106

Bougainville, 190

Bouillier, 63, 64, 73, 77, 80

Bourdon, 51

Bourru, 414, 415

Boyer, 420

Boyle, 216

Brahmanism, 318

Braid, 182

Brain, function of, in transmitting sensation, 28

Brain as seat of emotion, 115 _et seq._

” separate action of hemispheres, 418

” change of character through lesions of, 302, 412, 420

Briquet, 201

Broca, 92

Brown-Séquard, 27, 28, 32, 53, 200

Brugia, 200

Bryozoa, 277

Buccola, 106

Buckle, 192

Bucknill, 68

Buddha, 296

Budge, 249

Bull-fights, 68, 228

Burckhardt, 35

Burot, 414, 415

Byron, 366, 400

Cabanis, 383

Cæsar, 264, 298, 346, 397, 409

Calculators, 398

Campbell, 202

Cannibalism, 295, 296

Cardan, 64

Carus, 115

Casalis, 371

Cause and effect, 112

Cellini, Benvenuto, 400

Cerebral dualism, 418

Cervantes, 418

Chambard, 182

Characters, classification of, 383 _et seq._

” true, 379, 384

” consistent, 385

” invariable, _ib._

” amorphous, 386

” unstable, _ib._

” partial, 387, 402, 403

” sensitive, 388, 393-395; humble, 394; contemplative, _ib._;

emotional, 395

” active, 388, 395-397; (mediocre, 396; great, 397)

” apathetic, 389, 397, 398; pure, 397; intellectual, 398

” temperate, 389, 390, 401

” mixed, 379 _et seq._; sensitive-active, 400;

apathetic-active, _ib._; apathetic-sensitive, 401; temperate,

_ib._

” Seeland’s classification of, 406, 407

” abnormal, 408 _et seq._

” contradictory, 409 _et seq._

” contradictory (apparently), 409, 410

” ” successive, 410 _et seq._

” ” ” co-existent, 416-419

” alternating, 413-415

” unstable or polymorphic, 419 _et seq._

Chateaubriand, 170

Chemical action, 40, 120 _et seq._

Chloroform, 37

Clan, social unit, 288, 289

Classification of feelings, 130 _et seq._

Cloquet, 142

Clouston, 46, 85, 376

Cocaine, 37

Cœnæsthesia, 8, 9, 176, 200, 411, 415

Coleridge, 174

Coloured hearing, 181

” taste, smell, etc., 182

Combination, 269

Complex emotions, 260 _et seq._

Composition of feelings, 267 _et seq._

Condottieri, 396

Confucius, 296

Conquistadores, 205, 397

Contact, element in maternal love, 280

Contemplatives, 394

Contiguity, 177 _et seq._

Contradiction, principle of, 193

Conversions, 410 _et seq._

Correggio, 393

Cortez, 397

Corti’s organ, 26, 358

Corybantes, 320

Cosmic order, 311, 312

Creation-play, 334

Creative imagination, 331 _et seq._

Criminals, 300

Cromwell, 409

Cros, 53

Culture, morbid love of, 378 _note_

Curiosity, 368

” disinterested, 371

Cuvier, 192

” F., 252

Cyon, 117, 118

Dagonet, 244, 325

D’Alembert, 391

Dallemagne, 259

Danger, fascination of, 270

Danton, 400

Danville, 256

Darwin, 13, 14, 16, 44, 82, 113, 124 _et seq._, 190, 207, 209, 218,

219, 231, 234, 235, 240, 271, 279, 282, 336, 351, 354, 355, 369

Dauriac, 104

Davy, Sir H., 52, 101

Decay of feelings, 423 _et seq._

” of the æsthetic emotions, 426

” of the altruistic emotions, 427 _et seq._

” of the ego-altruistic emotions, 430

” of the religious sentiment, 430, 431

” of ambition, 431

” of the egoistic feelings, 32

Degenerescence, 302, 357 _et seq._, 434 _et seq._

Dehumanisation of art, 345-347

Delbœuf, 251

Depravation of appetite, 201

Depression, 319

Descartes, 12, 51, 80, 110, 111, 261, 268, 369

Descuret, 373

Desire, 442

Despine, 301

Development, arrested, 264, 432 _et seq._

Dewey, 378

Diocletian, 411

Dipsomania, 203

Direct evolution of emotion, 193

Discoverers in morals, 295

Discord between character and intellect, 391

Disgust, 204 _et seq._

Disinterested curiosity, 371

Disinterested emotions, decay of, 426

Domestic life _v._ social solidarity, 284, 285

Domination, instinct of, 221

Doubt, 375 _et seq._

Dreams, 142

Drobisch, 137

Dualist view, 111

Du Chaillu, 296

Duchenne, 124, 125

Dumas, G., 52, 71, 72, 93, 427

Dumont, L., 82, 83, 126, 131-133, 351, 352, 356

Dynamogeny, 53

Dynamometric experiments, 83, 407

Dyaks, 338

Dynamic form of intellectual emotion, 372

Ecclesiastes, 431

Ecstasy, 325, 326

Ego, 238 _et seq._

Ego-altruistic emotions, decay of, 430

Egoistic feelings, decay of, 432

Egoistic pain, 44

Elmira, 301

Emotion, 12

” simple, 13

” sexual, 15

” higher, 17

” ” development of, 18

” intellectual, 19, 101, 368 _et seq._

” James and Lange’s theory of, 93 _et seq_.

” coarse, 97

” subtle, _id._ _ib._

” moral, 100

” relations of, with physical environment, 107

” internal conditions of, 113 _et seq._

” expression of, 124 _et seq._

” revival of, 152 _et seq._

” tender, 230 _et seq._

” complex, 260 _et seq._

” evolution of, 262, 263

” produced by movements, 392

Emotional memory, 161, 162

” type, 167

” type of sensitives, 395

Endogamy, 289

Epilepsy, 9, 223

Espinas, 276, 279 _et seq._

Esquirol, 54, 224, 416

Ethology, 384

Euphoria, 67, 88

Exaltation, 320

Exogamy, 289

Expression of emotions, 124 _et seq._

Falret, 213

Family, 284; evolution of, 286 _et seq._

Fatigue, 147

Fear, 10, 13, 207 _et seq._

” definition of, 207

” psychology of, 209 _et seq._

” hereditary, 210

” morbid, 212 _et seq._

” an element in the religious sentiment, 309, 431

Fechner, 55, 102

Feeling, law of, 173

Feelings, priority of, 438

Félida, case of, 414

Ferrero, 366

Ferri, 179

Ferrier, 28, 29, 420

Fetichism, 308

Fétis, 103

Finality of pleasure and pain, 86

Fischer, 357

Fixed ideas, 226

Flaubert, 364

Flourens’ vital knot, 28

Flournoy, 181

_Folie circulaire_, 415

Fonsagrives, 53

Fouillée, 78, 126, 141, 151, 162, 172, 173, 183, 384, 405

Francis of Assisi, 400

François-Franck, 32, 142, 200

Franklin, 398

Frey, 27, 51

Friedmann, 293

Fuegians, 191, 297, 343

Gall, 115, 228

Galton, 146, 167, 425

Gauss, 391

Gautier (Th.), 343

Gélineau, 214, 215, 217

Generalising process in religious ideas, 312-314

Genius, 360, 363, 364, 437

Georget, 47

Germ-plasm, 256

Gevaert, 105

Girard-Teulon, 287

Gley, 92, 142

Goblet d’Alviella, 307, 311, 312, 314

Godfernaux, 326

Goethe, 164, 369, 402

Goldscheider, 27, 47

Goltz, 200, 250

Grant Allen, 83, 87, 88, 102, 331, 342, 343, 347, 349, 352, 358

Gratiolet, 7, 128, 143, 210

Greeks, limitations of their humanity, 192

Gregarious life, 281 _et seq._

Grétry, 103, 105

Griesinger, 62, 68, 376

Grief, 15, 45

Groos, 330

Guislain, 68

Gurney, 106, 111, 352

Guyau, 292, 331, 339, 351

Habeneck, 141

Hack Tuke, 28, 30, 68, 114, 144, 324, 376

Hadrian, 366

Hahnemann, 47, 133

Hall, Stanley, 211, 305

Hallucinations, 143

Hamilton, 64

Hamlet, 394

Hartmann, 42, 255

Haschisch, 8, 9

Hatred, 266

Hecker, 351, 356

Heidenhain, 30

Helmholtz, 377

Henle, 412

Hennequin, 339

Henotheism, 306

Herbart, 137, 372

Heredity, 175, 190, 191, 217, 246, 279, 336

Hering, 3

Hermann, 142

Hobbes, 353

Höffding, 19, 141, 172, 192, 239, 269, 271

Home, 330

Homer, 63, 316, 342

Homicidal mania, 225 _et seq._

Horwicz, 75, 172, 183

Houssay, 283

Humble, the, 394

Humour, sense of, 271, 351 _et seq._

Hunger and thirst, 147, 158, 202

Hunter, 115

Hydractinia, 277

Hydroid polypes, 277

Hyperæsthesia, 36

Hyperalgesia, 36

Hypertrophy of intellect, 391

Hypochondria, 46, 361, 394

Hysteria, 36, 47, 116

Ideas, fixed, 226

Ideal, search for, 254

Idiots, 323, 369, 432 _et seq._

Images of taste and smell, 145

Imitative instinct, 231, 232

Incongruity, 352

Indifferent state, 57

Inertia, 389

Infantilism, 300, 422

Infinite, 306, 307

Inhibitory forces, 265

Injury connected with pain, 87

Instinct of preservation, 11, 199 _et seq._

” nutritive, 200 _et seq._

” of domination, 221, 222

” imitative, 231, 232

” sexual, 248 _et seq._

Instincts, 194 _et seq._

Intellectual development of the race, 189

” memory, 152

” sentiment, 368 _et seq._

Intellectualised emotion, 101, 267

Intellectualists, 28, 35, 75, 137, 172, 390

Intensity of stimulation as a cause of pain, 39

Internal sensations, 119, 143, 147

Interrogation, 370

Ipecacuanha, 95

Ireland, 243, 434

Irons, 111

Irony, 271

Itard, 433

Jacoby, 243

James, W., 11, 93, 95 _et seq._, 101, 106, 110, 111, 141, 162, 172,

174, 194, 231, 241, 249, 271, 273

James I., 216

Janet, 33, 201, 249

Jealousy, 268

Jessen, 3

Joy, 15

Julian the Apostate, 411

Justice, 297

Kaffirs, 337

Kant, 19, 81, 290, 299, 330, 348, 360, 379, 384, 391

Kepler, 373

Kinæsthetic sense, 27

” sensations, 50

Kraepelin, 351

Krafft-Ebing, 65, 67, 72, 224, 300, 302, 325, 415’

Kröner, 7, 119, 120

Külpe, 76, 102

Kurella, 93

Ladd, 188, 379

Landscape-painting, 345

Lange, 15, 52, 93 _et seq._, 110, 111, 114, 208, 219, 235, 249

Laughter, 351 _et seq._

Lavater, 124

Laycock, 3, 175

Lazarus, 331

Le Bon, 100, 391

Lehmann 7, 28, 30, 35, 52, 75, 137, 141, 176, 178, 269

Leibnitz, 234

Lépine, 420

Lessing, 372

Letourneau, 20, 297, 340, 374

Leuba, 305

Leuret, 105

Lewes, G. H., 54

Littré, 153, 162, 297

Lloyd Morgan, 237

Löb, 6

Lombard, 92

Lombroso, 300, 386

Longet, 32

Lotze, 383

Louis XI., 398

Love, 249 _et seq._

Loyola, 412

Lubbock, Sir J., 233

Lucan, 397

Luckey, 37

Lucretius, 63

Ludwig, 142

Ludwig II. of Bavaria, 366

Lulli, Raymond, 410, 412

Luther, 400, 410, 412

Lymphatic temperament, 397

Mabillon, 374

MacLennan, 286, 287

Magic, 310

Maine de Biran, 345

Malarial regions, their influence, 72

Malebranche, 110, 111

Malherbe, 362

Manes, 296

Mania, 67, 224

Mantegazza, 29, 30, 31, 36, 50, 63, 67, 125, 127, 128, 208, 209,

219, 222, 235, 240, 271, 355

Maraña, 412

Marie, 320

Marie Antoinette, 45

Marshall, 111

Marshall, Rutgers, 37, 39, 59

Maspero, 314, 316

Mass, sublimity of, 350

Maternal love, 279, 280

Matriarchate, 287

Matter and form, 112

Maudsley, 92, 111, 301, 420, 430

Maupas, 6, 252

Maury, A., 142

Medium activity the cause of pleasure, 54

Medulla, 28

Megalomania, 243, 244, 362, 364

Melancholia, 65

” attonita, 69

” passive, 71

” religious, 324

” demoniac, 325

Melancholy, 270

Memory of feelings, 140 _et seq._

” pain, 43, 149 _et seq._

” sorrow, 153 _et seq._

” taste, smell, etc., 157 _et seq._

” emotional—false, or abstract, 160, 161

” emotional—true, or concrete, 162 _et seq._

” affective type of, 166

” influenced by unconscious feelings, 174 _et seq._

Mendoza, Suarez de, 182

Mentelli, case of, 373

Mercier, 135

Meynert, 84, 85

Michelangelo, 43, 349, 366, 400

Micro-organisms, 251

Mill, James, 211

” J. S., 340, 384

_Mind_ quoted, 74, 93, 102, 106, 111, 342, 343, 358

Misoneism, 386

Mitchell, Weir, 33, 36, 39, 414

Mixed states, 10

Mixed temperaments, 399

Mixture, 268

Modesty, 271 _et seq._

Monkeys, 219, 279, 355

Moore, Mrs. K. C., 14

Moral pain, 42 _et seq._

” emotion, 100; complexity of, 299

” influence of ideas, 192

” sentiment, 289 _et seq._

” evolution, 292 _et seq._

” insanity, 300

” insensibility, 54, 302, 391, 417

Morbid state, its criteria, 62

” pleasures, 63 _et seq._

” pains, 69

” fears (phobias), 213

” tenderness, 238

” self-esteem, 242

” religious feelings, 324, etc.

” characteristics of genius, 360 _et seq._

” characters, 405 _et seq._

Moreau (de Tours), 8, 255

Morel, 33, 216, 229, 238, 435

Morgan, Lloyd, 237

Morselli, 106, 245

Mortimer, Granville, 106

Moses, 296

Moshesh, 296

Mosso, 30, 92, 118, 208, 216, 272

Motor manifestations of feeling, 2

” functions affected by pain, 30

” reflexes, 84

” elements in emotion, 92; revived in memory, 152, 158, 159

” disturbances, 203; as symptoms of mania, 224

” retrogression, 434

Movements, 183

Müller, J., 124, 142, 377

Müller, Max, 233, 306, 307

Münsterberg’s experiments, 52, 53, 183

Music, 103 _et seq._, 335, 431, 434

Musset, A. de, 420, 421

Mysticism in science, 377

Mystics, 319, 320, 326, 394, 400

Nahlowsky, 137, 138

Napoleon, 264, 349, 400, 409

Natal, cannibalism in, 296 _note_

Nature, sympathy with, 343 _et seq._

Naunyn, 35

Needs, 10, 11, 196, 439

Negative form of self-feeling, 241

Nero, 366

Nerval, Gérard de, 365

Nerves, painful impressions transmitted by, 26

Nerves, special, for pain, 27

Nervous temperament, 407

Neutral states, 57, 73 _et seq._

Newton, 21, 391

Nichols, 37, 38, 51

Nietzsche, 344

Nirvana, 316

Noiré, 232

_Nomina_, _numina_, 306

Nordau, 357, 360

Normal characters, 380 _et seq._

Note-deafness, 358

Nutrition, societies founded on, 278

Nutritive functions and instincts, 199 _et seq._

Objective representations of emotions, 156

Obsession, 20, 21, 256, 325

Occipital lobes, 29

Odours, memory of, 158

” Galton’s experiments on, 146

Oppenheimer, 40

Orators, 395

Organic sensibility, 3

” origin of melancholia, 72

” Correlation, law of, 265

Ornaments, 338, 344

Pain, 8, 16;

(physical), 25 _et seq._;

(moral), 42 _et seq._;

” definition of, 25; its influence on the heart and the

respiration, 29; on the digestion and motor functions, 30

” lower races less sensitive to, 36 a quality of sensation, 39

” depends on quality and intensity of stimulus, 39

” caused by chemical modifications, 40

” connected with injury, 87

Pain-bearing nerves, 27, 37

Painful state, 10

Pain-phenomenon, independence of, 35

Pain-points (Sachs’s), 27

Panphobia, 214

Pantheistic tendencies, 347

Pantomime-dance, 334

Paramæcids, 251

Partial characters, 387, 402, 403

Pascal, 33, 215, 331, 412

Passion, definition of, 20, 21

” of love, 256, 257

” ruling, 403

Passions, 12, 19, 92, 261, 369

Paternal love, 281

Pathological method, 60, 61

Pathology of pleasure and pain, 63 _et seq._

” fear, 212 _et seq._

” anger, 223

” nutritive instinct, 201-204

” tender emotion, 238

” self-feeling, 242 _et seq._ (see Megalomania)

” sexual instinct, 256 _et seq._

” social and moral feelings, 300

” religious sentiment, 324

” æsthetic sentiment, 357

” creative imagination, 364

” intellectual sentiment, 375

Patriarchate, rise of, 288

Paul, St., 410, 412

Paul, St. Vincent de, 297, 400

Paulhan, 384, 405, 407, 417, 420

Perez, 13, 14, 207, 218, 234, 384, 405

Perrier, 276

Persecution, 322

Personal unconsciousness, 176

Personality, alteration of, 413 _et seq._

Pessimism, 361, 362, 366

Peter the Great, 215

Peter the Hermit, 400

Pfeffer, 252

Phagocytosis, 5

Philip II. of Spain, 398

Phlegmatic temperament, 397

Phobias, 10, 213 _et seq._

Physiological conditions of religious sentiment, 99, 319

Physiological conditions of feeling, 16

” ” of music, 103 _et seq._

” ” theory of character, 383

Physiology of pleasure, very little known, 50

Piderit, 127, 129, 351, 356

Piesse, 158

Pitres, 36, 116, 182

Pizarro, 397

Plato, 114, 299, 341

Platonic love, 19, 267

Play-instinct, 198, 329 _et seq._

” absent in idiots, 433

Pleasant states, revival of, 152

Pleasure, 8, 16, 48 _et seq._

” a sensation? 50

” due to medium activity, 54

” connected with utility, 87

” in suffering of others (anger), 221

Pleasure and pain only symptoms, 2, 3

” ” general conditions of, 16

” ” common basis of, 57 _et seq._

” ” result of difference between receipt and expenditure,

57, 58

Plethysmograph, 30, 119

Poetry, 335, 340

Poets, peculiar habits of, 363

Polymorphic characters, 386, 419-422

Possession, 325

Predatory tendencies, survival of, 87

Preservation, instinct of, 11, 198 _et seq._, 207 _et seq._, 218

_et seq._

Preyer, 8, 13, 14, 16, 17, 44, 81, 207, 209, 210, 218, 231, 369

Prichard, 300, 301

Primitive emotions, 12

” man, 188, 189, 242, 309, 311

” tendencies and instincts, 194 _et seq._

Primitive religious belief, 308 _et seq._

” art, 340, 341

Promiscuity, primitive, 287

Proselytising, 323

Pruner Bey, 36

Pseudophobia, 214

Psychological theory of character, 383, 384

Psycho-physicists, 75

Ptomaine increased in quantity by anger, 219

Pure states of feeling, 7

Pyromania, 225

Pyrrhonians, 376

Pythagoras, 377

Reciprocity, 277

Reflection, 265

Régis, 213, 415

Regiomontanus, 301

Religious sentiment, 99, 263, 305 _et seq._; decay of, 431

” philosophy, 317

” ideas, 324

” belief, absence of, 323

” psychoses, 320

” melancholia, 324

” exaltation (theomania), 326

Renan, 307

Renaudin, 47

Representation as a source of pain, 85

Reproduction, societies founded on, 278 _et seq._

Resemblance, 178

Resignation, 266

Retrogression, 227, 424 _et seq._

Revivability of impressions, 140 _et seq._

Revenge, 297, 298

Réville, 323

Richelieu, 409

Reynolds, Mary, case of, 414 (see Weir Mitchell)

Richet, 25, 34, 35, 53, 204, 205

Richter, J. P., 395

Ritual, 320-322

Romanes, 237, 279, 370

Rosenkranz, 359

Rosseuw St.-Hilaire, 79

Rousseau, J. J., 164, 188, 346, 395

Rubens, 417

Rudel, Geoffroi, 255

Ruling passion, 403

Rutgers Marshall, 37, 39, 59

_Sacer horror_, 99, 319

Sachs, 6

Sacrifices, 310

Saint-Simon, 110

Salsotto, 301

Sand, George, 420, 421

Saponine, effects of, 37

Scaliger, 216

Schelling, 362

Schiff, 59, 200

Schiller, 329, 366

Schlegel, 271, 362

Schneider, 87, 90, 175, 330, 346, 387

Schopenhauer, 255, 256, 290, 293, 330, 390, 391, 398, 404, 416, 439

_et seq._

Schüle, 70, 71, 223, 228, 300, 415, 433

Science, personification of, 379

Scientific emotion, 371

Seeland, 406, 412

Self-feeling, 239 _et seq._

” its symptoms, 240

” in animals, _ib._

” becomes anti-social, 242

” its pathology, 242 _et seq._ (see Megalomania)

Seneca, 63, 219

Sensibility, unconscious (vital, organic, or protoplasmic), 3, 4, 6

Sensibility, general, 37

Sensitives, 388

Sensitive-actives, 400

Sergi, 11, 28, 74, 271, 272, 273, 334, 346

Sexual attraction, 6, 278

” emotion, 15, 248 _et seq._; instinctive stage, 250; emotional

stage, 253; intellectual stage, 254

” ” ascending evolution of, 255

” ” its pathology, 256 _et seq._

” connected with religious emotion, 320

” decay of, 430

Sforza, Ludovico, 45

Shadworth-Hodgson, 137, 172, 174

Shaftesbury, 290

Sibbern, 269

Siphonophora, 277

Smell, 145, 146, 158, 182, 202; no art based on, 351

Societies, animal, 276

” ” founded on nutrition, 277

” ” founded on reproduction, 278 (_a_, sexual approach, 278;

_b_, maternal love, 279; _c_, paternal love, 281)

” ” gregarious, 281 _et seq._

” ” highest forms of (ants, bees, etc.), 284, 285

” ” human, 285 _et seq._

Social character of religion, 310

” environment, emotion adapted to, 109

” feelings, 275 _et seq._

” group, morality confined to, 298

” instinct, 277

” life, development of, 288

” solidarity, 277; opposed to family tendencies, 285

Socrates, 299

Solger, 271

Solidarity, 277

Sollier, 96

Sommer, 183

Spalding, 210

Spasmodic diathesis, 420

Spencer, Herbert, 49, 54, 63, 64, 82, 87, 88, 107, 126, 127, 134,

141, 175, 176, 190, 233, 237, 253, 256, 268, 271, 272, 280, 283,

288, 290, 307 _et seq._, 330, 342, 351, 352, 355 _et seq._, 370,

430

Spinoza, 111, 261, 373, 390, 416, 442

Spiritism, 308, 309

Stability, 385, 393-395

Stanley, Hiram M., 111

Stanley Hall, 211, 305

Staniland Wake, 296

Starbuck, 305

Starcke, 286, 289

Starr, Allen, 420

States of feeling, 7;

four types of, 10

Static form of intellectual emotion, 373

Stewart, Dugald, 163

_Stigmata diaboli_, 32

Stoics, 299, 379

Strength, feeling of, 240

Stricker, 231

Strong, 33, 37, 38

Strümpell, 96

Stumpf, 104

Suarez de Mendoza, 182

Sublime, feeling for the, 270, 348 _et seq._

Sufis, 394

Suicide, 244 _et seq._; the supreme negation of self-feeling, 245

” deliberate or voluntary, 245

” impulsive, 246

” hereditary, 246

Sully, 19, 74, 78, 102, 130, 172, 176, 180, 208, 211, 231, 236,

237, 241, 346, 348, 350, 354, 369, 371

Sully-Prudhomme, 154, 162, 381

Sumner Maine, 286

Superiority, feeling of, 354

Surprise, 369

Symbolism, 322, 365

Sympathy, 230 _et seq._, 292

Synæsthesia, 231

Synergia, 231

Syringomyelia, 38

_Tabes dorsalis_, 35

_Tabula rasa_ theory, 403

Taine, 162, 167, 336, 364

Tamburini, 202, 226

Tanzi, 59, 92

Tarchanoff, 106

Tasso, 365, 366

Taste, 142, 145, 146, 351

Tattooing, 335

Tears, 235, 236

Temperaments, 383 _et seq._ (see Characters)

” Seeland’s classification of, 406

_Temperamentum temperatum_, 390

Temperate characters, 389, 401

Tendency, 365

Tenderness, 234 _et seq._

Terror, 209

Thales, 377

Theomania, 326

Therapeutæ, 394

Tickling, 355

Tiele, 314

Time, sublimity of, 350

Titchener, 171

Tissues, exchange of, 407

Todd, 28

Touch suppressed by saponine, 87

” sympathy connected with, 235

Toulouse, 170

Toxin, 40

Toxic changes in organism, 121

” secretions in anger, 219

Transference of feelings, 176 _et seq._

Trousseau, 219

Tuke, Hack, 28, 30, 68, 114, 144, 324, 376

_Tunicata_, 277

Tylor, 286, 323

Unconscious, the, 3, 174-176, 216, 254, 363, 441

Unity of character, 385

Unstable characters, 386, 419-422 (see Polymorphic)

Utility connected with pleasure, 87

” connected with art, 342

V., L., case of, 414 (see Personality, Alteration of)

Valentin, 142

Vallon, 320

Van Swieten, 219

Vascular reflexes, 84

Vaso-motor modifications, 94

Vaso-motor apparatus, affected by fear, 208

Verworn, 6, 252

Vignoli, 371

Vigouroux, 106

Vincent de Paul, St., 297, 400

Vintschgau, Von, 142

Visceral theory, 114

Vulpian, 32

Wagner, Richard, 418

Waitz, 137

Wake, Staniland, 296

Wallace, 190, 336, 355

Wallaschek, 104, 337

Warner, 127

Weir Mitchell, 33, 36, 39, 414

Weismann, 190, 256, 336, 337

Welfare of the individual and of the race, 88

Westermarck, 286

Westphal, 213

Wigan, 164, 302

Will to live, 439, 440

William the Silent, 398

Witch-marks, 32 (see _Stigmata diaboli_)

Wonder, 369

Worcester, 111

Wundt, 49, 75, 102, 111, 127, 128, 129, 137, 180, 272, 383

Yogis, 394

Zola, 170

_Zones idéogènes_, 182

PRINTED BY WALTER SCOTT, LIMITED, NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Transcriber’s Note

The Index topics beginning with 'Su' preceded those 'St'. They have

been moved to their proper position to avoid unnecessary confusion.

Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected,

and are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the

original.

20.14 [“]it is a violent and sustained desire Added.

49.13 sometimes in the other.[’/”] Replaced.

106.7 The resea[r]ches of Boudet de Paris Inserted.

117.36 (accord[ing] to Claude Bernard) Added.

147.32 [“]general lassitude, of a diffused kind Added.

167.3 revival of affective impressions[.] Added.

170.n2.7 Emile Zola: Enquête M[e/é]dico-psychologique Replaced.

196.26 consequent in[s]terstitial exchanges Removed.

236.2 organs assuag[e]ing assuaging pain Removed.

278.3 question of the point of view[.] Added.

336.23 exercised on this point[.] Added.

384.n2.1 Fou[i]llée Inserted.

434.n1.9 play fragments of tunes[.] Added.