INSTINCT AND EMOTION
Ie considere que, dés le premier moment que nostre ame a esté
iointe au corps, il est vray-semblable qu’elle a senty de la ioye,
& incontinent aprés de l’amour, puis peut-estre aussi de la haine,
& de la tristesse; & que les mesmes dispositions du corps, qui out
pour lors causé en elles ces passions, en out naturellement par aprés
acompagné les pensées.—RENÉ DESCARTES
§ 46. =The Nature of Instinct.=—We left the sense-feelings a long
time ago (§ 18), though we have made occasional reference to them and
to emotion in recent paragraphs. Now we return to the feeling-side of
mind; but we must begin with an account of =instinct=, which is related
both to emotion and to action.
Instinct and reason are familiar catch-words of popular psychology.
Animals are said to act ‘on instinct,’ while man, at any rate in his
specifically human capacity, acts ‘by reason.’ The terms, as thus used,
are not descriptive but explanatory. Just as a mental connection is
supposed to be explained by similarity or contiguity of ideas (p. 146),
so a particular activity or performance is supposed to be explained
when we have labelled it ‘instinctive’ or ‘rational.’ But what is
instinct?
_If we observe the behaviour of the lower animals, we find two sorts of
response to stimulation: the one points to the working of an inherited
nervous mechanism, the other depends upon nervous connections formed
during the life-time of the individual._ The second year’s bird builds
the nest of its species, though it has never built a nest before; the
cage-reared migrant beats its wings against the bars at the approach
of winter, though it has never taken flight to the southward. Here
is behaviour that we must refer to innate nervous tendencies, to the
working of an inherited nervous mechanism. If, on the other hand, the
parent birds come to the window-sill and take crumbs from our hand, we
are in presence of behaviour of the second type. The difference, in the
broad, is clear enough; only we must not press it too far. The second
year’s bird, we say, builds the nest of its species; but one nest is
never quite like another; something will depend upon the situation.
Contrariwise, the birds would not come to the window if they had not an
innate attraction to food, or a natural boldness of disposition, or a
native tendency to flock with their fellows. The two sorts of behaviour
can be distinguished; but they are likely to enter together, though in
unequal degree, into one and the same performance.
=Instinct=, _now, is the general name for these innate tendencies to
behaviour_. The word explains nothing; it is the business of science to
find out what the inherited nervous mechanisms are, and how they work;
but though nothing is explained, we are helped by the term toward a
_classification_ of the facts of behaviour. All of man’s conduct will
be instinctive, for example, that can be shown to issue from innate
nervous tendencies; and further, all of man’s conduct will be _in so
far_ instinctive as innate nervous tendencies can be shown to have a
share in producing it. _How large a part, then, does instinct, in this
sense, play in the life of man?_ Not a question that can be answered
offhand! For you might argue, as has been argued, that because man is
the most flexible and adaptable and teachable of all animals, because
he lives in all climates and thrives in the most varied conditions of
life, therefore he has but few instincts. Or you might argue that,
since man has undergone more change and has progressed further than
any other animal; since his evolutionary history, though not longer in
time, is richer in biological incident than that of the other animals;
therefore he must have a great variety of instincts, or at any rate a
great variety of inherited nervous mechanisms that help to guide and
shape his conduct. What are the facts?
If we try to work out a rough list of human instincts, we find, at the
lower end of the scale, a number of _definite modes of response to
particular stimuli_; such things as coughing, sneezing, swallowing,
smiling, threading our way in the street, beating time to music; or, in
the baby, such things as sucking, clasping, biting, turning the head
aside, standing, creeping, walking, crying, vocalising. At the upper
end of the scale, we find _gross general tendencies_: the tendency
to take the world of perception as a world of real things in outside
space (p. 115); the empathic tendency to humanise and personalise our
surroundings (p. 198); the social tendency that makes us imitative
and credulous; the tendency to classify everything in pairs; the
tendency to try things out, which is always at war with the tendency
to let things be. These tendencies, and others of the same character,
represent directive pressures laid upon the organism, more strongly
upon some individuals and more weakly upon others, but in some measure
upon all; they are realised or expressed on very various occasions, and
with wide differences of mental accompaniment. We have spoken of some
of them already; and instances may be found for the looking. Take the
empathic tendency: what lover of books has not shifted the place of
certain volumes on a shelf, because he could not bear to put good and
bad, sound and trivial, side by side,—as if the _books_ would feel the
incongruity? Take the social tendency: we all tend to pay respect to
fashion, even the silliest; we all tend to believe what we see printed
in large headlines; we are all gullible, if only the cheat speaks to
us in good English and appeals to our habitual standards of living.
The tendency to classify by pairs shows not only in the dogmatism of
uneducated persons—an action must be positively right or wrong, a
man must be positively innocent or guilty—but also in the structure
of systems of philosophy, in the distinctions of active-passive,
subject-object, body-mind, thing-attribute, appearance-reality, and so
on. The tendency to try things out is largely responsible both for the
play of the child and the research of the man of science; read Andrew
Lang’s story of the first radical! The tendency to let things be, the
conservative tendency, is on its side largely responsible for the
laziness of a life of routine.
Between these extremes lie _the instincts that are so called in our
ordinary speech_, and that you would probably have thought of, if you
had been asked to give examples of human instincts: such things as
fear, love, rivalry, jealousy, pugnacity, bashfulness, self-assertion,
various lines of ‘interest.’ All these names, and many like them, stand
for inherited nervous dispositions which are realised or expressed
in emotion. They too are differently combined, and exist in varying
degree, in different individuals; and they too are common, in some
measure, to all humanity.
_Can we now say how man compares, in the matter of instinct, with
the lower animals?_ James commits himself so far as to declare that
“no other mammal, not even the monkey, shows so large an array.” The
statement is probably true, if we mean by instinct, not a fixed and
unchanging mode of response to the given stimulus or situation, but
rather an equipment of innate tendencies that may form the basis of all
sorts of response; an all-round readiness of behaviour, as it were,
such that no stimulus or situation finds us wholly unprepared, while
yet the preparation is not so narrow and definite as to force us into
special and invariable response. Civilised man ‘reasons’ always on the
basis of his instinctive tendencies; his ‘instincts,’ on the other
hand, are in general less absorbingly possessive and less close-knit
than those of lower forms of life.
§ 47. =The Two Sides of Instinct.=—If instinct is the general name for
the innate nervous tendencies to behaviour, then the detailed study of
instinct belongs to physiology and general biology. The psychologist
is concerned with it only in so far as the innate tendencies guide
and form the stream of thought. There is, however, another side to
instinct, which makes it a matter of direct psychological observation;
the touching-off of an instinctive response may be accompanied by
mental processes, by sensations and feeling. We must say something
of instinct in both relations; and we look at it, first, from the
=biological= point of view.
The list of instincts given on pp. 205 ff. includes tendencies of very
different kinds, simple and complex, variable and constant. Sweeping
statements are therefore dangerous; we must be careful to guard our
generalisations by giving instances. That premised, we note, to begin
with, that _the innate tendencies are rarely perfect_, completely ready
for action, at birth; they ripen as the organism developes. The child
does not learn to walk, or the bird to fly, in any strict sense of
the word ‘learn’; the innate tendencies settle to their perfect work
as time goes on. We note, secondly, that the tendencies may _ripen
at very different levels of individual development_; the culmination
of sex-interest at adolescence, the appearance of bashfulness in the
child of three or four years, the lack of fear in the new-born babe,
are cases in point. Thirdly, they are extraordinarily _persistent_.
Our instincts, no doubt, wax and wane; but they change far less than
their outward expression would indicate. The boy, we say, goes through
the collecting stage, and therewith an end; but do not grown men too
collect, if they have time and money? The little girl with her doll is
the later mother with her child; and the play of the child persists
in the technical play of the gambler and the experimental essays of
the man of science. Fourthly, they are _by no means harmonious among
themselves_. In many animals the instinct to crouch motionless
conflicts with the instinct to flee from the object of fear, and you
may see them obeying now the one and now the other. Curiosity conflicts
with alarm: watch a young child on its first introduction to a dog
or a beetle! The sparrow is at once audacious and cautious, bold and
timid; and every human adult—despite the song in _Iolanthe_—is both
conservative and radical. Fifthly, they are looser, have (so to say)
_a greater freedom of play_, than is commonly supposed; and this in
two directions; the same response may be touched off by situations
that have only a general resemblance; and, conversely, situations that
seem to be identical may touch off responses that show a good deal
of difference. In briefer statement, like stimuli may call out the
same response: we smile from happiness or from superiority; and the
same stimulus repeated may call out responses that are hardly even
like: the extreme case is, perhaps, our crying or laughing for joy.
Sixthly, they are _liable to be checked, turned aside, inhibited, by
acquired nervous tendencies_; habit is not only second nature, but may
also overcome nature. A chick pecks at an humble-bee, and pays the
penalty; thereafter it rejects yolk of egg. A pike in an aquarium,
separated from minnows by a glass screen, struck repeatedly at its
natural prey and bumped its head; when the screen was removed, the
minnows were left undisturbed. If a sheet of glass is placed before
the eyes, and a rubber-tipped hammer springs up and hits it, you wink,
perhaps, for the first hundred times; but you can presently inhibit
the wink. This liability to inhibition is, of course, more obvious in
the case of the more complex tendencies. Seventhly, they are _liable
to specialisation_. A bird builds its nest in a certain suitable
place; and then, though the site may become increasingly dangerous and
exposed, persists in building there again, year after year. The routes
that various birds follow in their migratory flight south and north
show the same kind of specialised set. Eighthly and lastly, the more
complicated tendencies may, especially in the case of man, be _broken
up into partial tendencies_; and these partial tendencies may then form
connections of the most varied sort with acquired tendencies. A father
strikes a blow in defence of his child: love and hate and possibly fear
are involved; if the deed is done in public, such social instincts
as love of approbation and fear of ridicule may come in; all these
instincts are concerned, and yet the father would give you his reasons
for the blow! Civilised man, we said, always ‘reasons’ on the basis of
his instinctive tendencies; we had better have said that he reasons on
the basis of various fragments of instinctive tendency, disjoined from
their original connections and recombined for an immediate purpose.
So much for the biological side of instinct. We have no space for
a longer treatment; though, indeed, if you go to the larger works,
you will find little more that is definite and firmly established;
the detailed study of the innate tendencies has hardly begun. If we
turn now to the =mental accompaniments= of instinctive response, we
find ourselves in even worse case; we know practically nothing. It is
clear that _some of the more limited responses have a characteristic
mental correlate_—think of coughing, sneezing, smiling—which may,
however, according to circumstances, be either vivid or so obscure as
to escape notice. It is clear, again, that _the empathic tendencies
are likely to be characterised by more or less massive complexes of
organic sensation_; and it is perhaps true that this =organic surge=
represents the mental aspect of the instincts proper, those that pass
over into emotions; for they are responses or reactions of the whole
organism, and not of some particular organ or member. _Most of the
large directive pressures_, that we placed at the upper end of the
scale, _show themselves rather in the volume and trend of the mental
stream_ than in the addition of new processes, though it is quite
possible that they imply specific bodily attitudes, and arouse specific
patterns of kinæsthesis in head or eyes, from breathing or from the
muscular set of the trunk. We all know how it feels to be critically
on guard against deception; but is there not, sometimes at any rate,
a felt attitude of acceptance, of credulity? could we not, sometimes,
after the serious-faced jester has played his trick upon us, _feel_
ourselves back into our credulous attitude? We all know, again, how
disconcerting it is to be faced by a third possibility when we have
comfortably reduced things to a choice of alternatives; but can we not,
now and then, catch ourselves in a _felt_ attitude of dividing by two?
Let the reader keep an eye on his own experiences! Lastly, a response
that is often repeated will illustrate the psychological law of growth
and decay (p. 183); the organic and kinæsthetic sensations will be
supplemented by _images_, which will increase up to a certain point,
and thereafter fall away. Fear of the dark is one instance; the use
and disuse of terms of endearment offer another.
As regards =feeling=, we can only say that all six types of
sense-feeling—the agreeable and disagreeable, the exciting and
subduing, the straining and relaxing—may appear in connection with
instinctive responses, and especially with those that we have placed
in the middle portion of the scale. Such words as fear, pugnacity,
rivalry, carry the stamp of feeling upon them.
§ 48. =Determining Tendencies.=—The reader must have felt for some
time past that we sorely need a technical term for all the directive
nerve-forces, brain-habits, instinctive tendencies, and so forth,
that figure in psychological discussion. There is such a term, formed
on the analogy of ‘associative tendencies’; psychologists are coming
more and more to speak of =determining tendencies=. Any nervous set
or disposition that turns our attention in a certain direction, that
casts our perceptions into a certain form, that places a definite
meaning upon an equivocal word, that governs our response to a
particular situation, may be called a determining tendency. Some of
these tendencies are simple, and some are extremely complex; some are
inherited, and some are acquired in the life-time of the individual.
All alike _lay down a path of least resistance for the psychoneural
processes_ (p. 164) _to follow_, and thus determine the flow of the
mental stream.
Why, then, has not the term been introduced before? would not its use
have simplified things, have brought the different topics together,
have saved a good deal of roundabout phrasing? No doubt. But _there
are two dangers in the use of such a technical term_. The one is that
you think merely the words themselves, and do not carry your thought
back to the nervous system. A determining tendency is an affair not of
mind but of body; and if we had used the words from the outset, you
might easily have slipped into the belief that there are determining
tendencies in the mind, and might thus have left the nervous system out
of account. Have you not—to be honest!—thought and spoken of your
‘bodily sensations’ ever since you studied the chapter on sensation?
Yet there are no physical or bodily sensations, any more than there are
mental determining tendencies; the bodily processes correlated with
sensation are not the sensation, and the mental flow correlated with
a nervous tendency is not that tendency. The second danger is that
you look upon the technical term as self-explanatory; so that, just
as popular psychology explains the conduct of the lower animals by
‘instinct,’ without ever asking what instinct is or how it explains,
you too explain certain mental phenomena by ‘determining tendency,’
forgetting that the work of correlation is still all to do. New terms
bring these risks, that you put the word in place of the facts and
confuse a label with an explanation; but they are also inevitable, when
new observations accumulate; and this particular term should now be as
harmless as it is necessary.
We shall meet the determining tendencies again, when we come to deal
with action and thought. Meantime let us note that they furnish a
definition of that rather obscure word ‘suggestion.’ A =suggestion=
is something that comes to us with more or less of the force of
a command; but what does this ‘force of a command’ mean? Our new
technical term helps us: a suggestion is _any stimulus to nervous
activity, external or internal, with or without mental accompaniment,
that touches off a determining tendency_. The determining tendency
may be realised, or may be inhibited, as circumstances decide; the
essence of a suggestion is, always and everywhere, that it releases
such a tendency. Thus, the psychological observer of whom we spoke
on p. 96 received from the experimenter certain instructions; these
instructions were obeyed, that is, they were effective suggestions.
What, now, set up the determining tendency to follow instructions? A
foregone suggestion: the student came into the laboratory to observe,
to be taught, to put himself under direction. What brought him into
the laboratory? Another foregone suggestion: the wish to learn
psychology at first hand, the example of his friends. What led him to
choose at the university the course that includes psychology? What
led him to choose this particular university? What led him to enter
any university? All these results are due to suggestions, which grow
in number and complexity the farther back we go; and the force of the
suggestions, in every case, is their appeal to determining tendencies.
A nervous system that lacked these tendencies would furnish its
possessor with connections that were all, so to speak, on the same
plane; the organism could neither lead nor follow, neither choose nor
reject, neither work nor play; it would not be suggestible.
From this digression we pass to the study of emotion, which, as we
have seen, is closely related to the instincts of the middle part of
our scale.
§ 49. =The Nature of Emotion.=—Suppose that you are sitting at your
desk, busy in your regular way; and suppose that a street-car passes
by the house. The familiar rumble does not distract you; it slips in
among the obscure processes of the margin. Suddenly you hear a shrill
scream; and now the noise of the car shoots to the focus of attention,
becomes the context of the scream. You leap up, as if the scream were a
personal signal that you had been expecting; you dash out of doors, as
if your presence on the street were imperatively necessary. As you run,
you have fragmentary ideas: ‘a child,’ perhaps, in internal speech; a
visual flash of some previous accident; a momentary kinæsthetic set,
the stiffening of protest, that represents your whole attitude to
the city car-system. But you have, also, a mass of insistent organic
sensation: you choke, you draw your breath in gasps, for all the hurry
you are in a cold sweat, you have a horrible nausea; and yet, in spite
of the intense discomfort that floods you, you have no choice but to
go on. In describing the experience later, you would say that you were
horrified by hearing a child scream; the mental processes that we have
just named make up the =emotion= of horror.
An emotion is thus a _temporal_ experience, a course of connected
processes; it begins, in our illustration, with the empathic perception
of the scream, and lasts through and beyond the events that we have
described; indeed, the last traces of the horror may not wear off for
days. It is also, characteristically, a _suddenly aroused_ experience;
it begins abruptly, though it dies down gradually; the accident
comes upon you all at once, and drives everything else out of mind.
It is highly _complex_, since its stimulus is not a single object,
a perceptive stimulus, but a total situation or predicament, which
may arouse all sorts of ideas. It is coloured through and through by
_feeling_, since both the situation itself and the organic sensations
of the emotive response are definitely pleasant or unpleasant. It
is, at any rate in its more intense phases, insistently _organic_;
we took the testimony of language on p. 65, and you can easily add
to the instances there cited; though it must be said also that the
proportion of organic sensations to ideas varies greatly from emotion
to emotion and from individual to individual. Finally, it is always a
_predetermined_ experience, issuing from determining tendencies and
moving forward, in the given case, to a natural end; though here, too,
there is great variability, since the determining tendencies to which
the situation makes appeal may be almost wholly instinctive, or may (as
in the illustration we have chosen) be partly instinctive and partly
acquired.
The older books on psychology devote a great deal of space to the
=classification= of emotions; modern psychology has rather been
concerned to bring emotion into the laboratory, and to trace the
emotive pattern under experimental control. It was natural to begin
with the simpler modes of feeling, and to proceed from them to the more
complex; and experiments were therefore made on the sense-feelings. We
have seen that the results are not yet definitely assured (pp. 83 f.),
so that it is still too early to write an adequate psychology of the
emotions. On the whole, however, it seems that _the three dimensions of
sense-feeling will serve for a classification of emotion_: joy and fear
are agreeable and disagreeable emotions, anger and grief are exciting
and subduing, hope and relief are straining and relaxing. It is not
difficult to carry this classification further; to find, for instance,
agreeable-exciting, disagreeable-exciting, agreeable-subduing,
disagreeable-subduing, even agreeable-exciting-straining,
agreeable-subduing-relaxing forms, and so on and so forth; but nothing
is gained, at present, by drawing such distinctions. We shall therefore
leave the classification thus in the rough. One point only calls for
comment. We said that _emotion is a suddenly aroused experience_,
beginning abruptly and dying down slowly; yet the straining and
relaxing emotions—hope, anxiety, disappointment, relief—seem, on the
contrary, to arise slowly and gradually. It is difficult to be sure
of the facts; but we must be careful not to confuse the starting of
an emotion with what occurs after it has started. It may very likely
grow in strength; and it will follow, as we have said, a characteristic
course in time, until it reaches its natural end. Either of these
things—the growth in intensity or the development in time—may give
the illusion of a gradual beginning. If we abstract from them, then it
appears that these straining-relaxing emotions really come suddenly;
they occupy the mind all at once; we shift directly from grief to
hope, from satisfaction to anxiety, from fear to relief; the emotions
may alternate in our experience, but they set in abruptly. We say of
a sick friend ‘The doctor says that we may begin to hope,’ or ‘The
relatives are beginning to be a little anxious’; but as a matter of
psychological fact the hope and the anxiety appear to come and go, as
mental patterns, quite suddenly; the situation touches off, actualises,
now the one set of tendencies, and now the other. So our general
description of emotion may stand.
§ 50. =The James-Lange Theory of Emotion.=—We saw that emotion, at
any rate in its intenser phases, is insistently organic; the organic
sensations readily blend both with one another and with feeling; and
the resultant massive fusion is as characteristic of emotion as the
organic surge (p. 211) is characteristic of instinct. Everyone can
distinguish, even in imagination, the rushing, swelling ‘feel’ of anger
from the sinking, shrinking ‘feel’ of fear. Psychology has always had
an open eye for the organic constituent of emotion; Aristotle and many
later writers refer to it; and in France emphasis upon the organic stir
in emotion became almost a matter of psychological orthodoxy. The whole
subject was, however, set in a new light when the late Professor James
propounded in 1884 his famous ‘theory of emotion.’ “My thesis is,”
James wrote, “that the bodily changes follow directly the _perception_
of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as
they occur _is_ the emotion;” “The more rational statement is that we
feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we
tremble, and not that we cry, strike or tremble, because we are sorry,
angry, or fearful, as the case may be.” The view thus paradoxically
stated aroused much discussion; and it gained further impetus by the
publication in 1885 of an essay on emotion by Carl Lange, professor
of medicine in Copenhagen; Lange independently comes to a conclusion
which, in principle, is the same as that of James.
James’ position is, evidently, twofold. He affirms, in the first place,
that _emotions have an instinctive basis_. A situation is presented;
the organism perceives it; and immediately, directly, because the
situation appeals to instinctive tendencies in the nervous system, the
emotive response is evoked. With that statement we have no quarrel.
James also affirms, however, that _the ‘feel’ of what we have called
the emotive response is itself the experience of emotion_; having the
organic sensations, you have the emotion; if you had not the organic
sensations, there would be no emotion. In a later essay he modified
or amplified his position: he grants the presence in emotion of ideas
and of pleasant and unpleasant feelings, but still maintains that
the one thing characteristic of the emotions is a general seizure of
excitement, a churning-up of the interior of the organism; and this
rank excitement is a matter of the organic sensations.
So there arise two questions of fact: _is emotion possible if
the organic sensations are lacking?_ and _is the organic fusion
sufficiently differentiated, in the various emotions, to give them
their distinctive ‘feels’ in experience?_
To answer the _first_ question we have observations both upon dogs
and upon human beings. Emotive responses “occur in dogs in which
practically all the main viscera and the great bulk of skeletal muscle
have been removed from subjection to, and from influence upon, the
brain by severance of the vagus nerves and the spinal cord. In these
animals no alteration whatever was noticed in the occurrence, under
appropriate circumstances, of characteristic expressions of voice
and features, indicating anger, delight or fear.” So far, then, the
evidence tells against the necessity of organic sensations. As regards
human beings, we cannot, of course, produce a visceral anæsthesia at
will, by operating upon the living nervous system; we must wait until
cases turn up in the hospitals. Some such cases have been examined;
and while the observations made upon them are not conclusive, still,
they lend themselves more readily to the same than to the opposite
interpretation; if emotion is lacking, the lack seems due rather to a
general impairment of nervous function, including that of the brain,
than to the specific loss of the organic sensations. The evidence as a
whole is thus unfavourable to James.
To answer the _second_ question we may refer to the results of
experiments recently conducted by Professor W. B. Cannon in the
physiological laboratory of Harvard University. “If various strong
emotions can thus be expressed in the diffused activities of [a certain
division of the nervous system]—the division which accelerates
the heart, inhibits the movements of the stomach and intestines,
contracts the blood vessels, erects the hairs, liberates sugar, and
discharges adrenin—it would appear that the bodily conditions which
have been assumed, by some psychologists, to distinguish emotions
from one another must be sought for elsewhere than in the viscera. We
do not ‘feel sorry because we cry,’ as James contended, but we cry
because, when we are sorry or overjoyed or violently angry or full
of tender affection,—when any one of these diverse emotional states
is present,—there are nervous discharges by sympathetic channels to
various viscera, including the lachrymal glands. In terror and rage and
intense elation, for example, the responses in the viscera seem too
uniform to offer a satisfactory means of distinguishing states which,
in man at least, are very different in subjective quality.... The
viscera are relatively unimportant in an emotional complex, especially
in contributing differential features.” The technicalities of this
quotation do not here concern us; you will understand them if you read
Dr. Cannon’s book; but it is clear that, again, the evidence is against
James’ view.
We must conclude, then, that _the emotive pattern is a more complicated
affair_ than the James-Lange theory represented it to be. All
the component processes—perception, ideas, kinæsthesis, organic
sensations, feeling—play their part in the total experience. We must
conclude, too, that _the pattern varies, at least in the matter of
emphasis, from one individual to another_; that the processes which
‘mean’ anger or fear to _A_ may differ from those which ‘mean’ the same
emotion to _B_; the ideas, the kinæsthetic set, the organic sensations,
may be more or less vivid, more or less extended, more or less stable
features of the mental pattern. In fine, we agree with James that all
emotions have an instinctive basis; and we agree with him, further,
that the organic commotion, always present in some measure and degree,
is characteristic of the experience; but _we cannot regard this organic
commotion either as_ =constitutive=, _as the one thing necessary
to emotion, or as_ =differential=, _the one thing that marks of any
particular emotion from all the rest_. From an æsthetic point of view
we may regret this conclusion; it is always more satisfactory to end up
a discussion with some positive, clean-cut statement than to leave the
subject with a ‘safe’ generalisation and a balanced judgement; but when
we are seeking scientific truth, we may not outrun the facts we have;
and when a science is in the making, the facts will not often round off
prettily into a comprehensive theory.
§ 51. =The Expression of Emotion.=—If the classification of emotions
is a pleasant exercise for authors of a logical turn, the outward
show of emotion in =gesture= and =facial expression= has always been
attractive to those who pondered the relations of mind and body. It may
even be true that observation of these expressive movements lies at the
very root of psychology; for in emotion a man is changed, transformed;
he is unlike himself, out of himself, beside himself; and what could
suggest, more plainly than such transformation, the activity of an
indwelling mind? However that may be, there is a long list, stretching
down the centuries, of works that deal with emotive expression. We must
ourselves pass over everything that appeared before the time of Charles
Darwin.
Darwin, who was naturally anxious to bring the facts of expression
under his formula of evolution, began to collect data as early as
1838; and with characteristic thoroughness he went to all available
sources,—to animals, to the human infant, to the insane, to works of
art, to the play of the facial muscles under the electric current, to
the different races of mankind. In his book of 1872 he distinguishes
three main principles of expression; the titles will be understood from
the examples. The first principle is that of _serviceable associated
habits_. We all jump when we are startled, and wince when we are
threatened; and the jump and wince of man are weakened survivals
of the frightened animal’s leap out of danger, and of its cowering
self-effacement in presence of a stronger enemy. The face of scorn,
“curving a contumelious lip,” lays bare the canine teeth, as if for
actual attack; the sneer of man is but a weakened survival of the snarl
by which our stronger-jawed ancestors unfleshed their teeth for the
combat. The second principle is that of _antithesis_. If indignation
shows itself (according to the first principle) by squared shoulders
and out-thrown chest, the opposite of this aggressive indignation,
humiliation or self-abasement, shows itself in the opposed attitude
of raised shoulders and indrawn chest, Shylock’s “patient shrug.” The
third principle, lastly, is that of the _direct action of the nervous
system_. Thus we all tremble from fear; and trembling is of no service,
often of much disservice, and cannot have been at first acquired
through the will, and then rendered habitual in association with any
emotion; it must be directly due to the constitution of the nervous
system.
_Darwin’s principles have been much criticised_; in particular, the
purely negative principle of antithesis has received short shrift
from later writers. One of the things that he fails to account for is
the imitative play of the lips. The disgusted man looks as if he were
about to retch; the injured man looks bitter; the disappointed, sour;
the satisfied, sweet; the mouth, in these latter cases, is set as it
is when we have a bitter, sour, or sweet taste. What is the reason?
We may remind ourselves that primitive language was concrete, and not
abstract; that it abounded in what we should nowadays call metaphor. We
may remember also that the one thing necessary in a primitive society
is food, and that primitive metaphors would naturally be, to a large
extent, metaphors drawn from the preparing and obtaining of food, from
cooking and hunting. So we may imagine that the successful hunter,
returning to camp, licked his lips, seemed already to be sucking the
sweet morsel; while the unsuccessful drew his lips out sideways, as
if he were trying to taste as little as possible of his sour draught.
In course of time the metaphor will lapse; or, more strictly, the old
concrete way of speech will give place to an abstract phrasing, and
will hold its own only _as_ metaphor, as a bit of picturesque imagery;
we still talk to-day of the sweets of love and revenge, of tasting
success, of tainted money, of a soured disposition, of the bitter end.
Meanwhile the original gesture, if only it is fitted for communication,
will persist unchanged; gesture is far more conservative than language;
and the look of a bitter taste will thus express the emotion of a man
who is suffering, perhaps, under an unjust accusation.
We may say of all such attempts at explanation what we said of the
biological theory of feeling: it would be foolish to reject them
outright, and yet _they are too general, too open to criticism, to
satisfy the requirements of science_. We need detailed work, both
upon the physiological and upon the psychological side. Consider, for
example, the erection of the hair in fear and rage. This is a result
of the diffused activity of the ‘sympathetic’ nervous system, the
total effect of which is to _energise_ the organism; when two boys are
wrestling, the friends of the weaker or less skilful shout to him to
‘get angry’; and terrified men achieve wonderful feats of leaping and
running. But how precisely does the contraction of the muscles beneath
the skin subserve this energising? Is it an accident, so to speak, due
merely to the diffusion of the nervous activity? or has it a special
physiological function? and has it, further, anything of the biological
significance that Darwin attached to it? Until such questions are
answered in detail, we cannot formulate general principles of the
expression of emotion.
§ 52. =Mood, Passion, Temperament.=—The weaker emotive states, which
persist for some time together, are called _moods_; the stronger,
which exhaust the organism in a comparatively short time, are called
_passions_. No sharp line of distinction, however, can be drawn, either
as regards intensity or as regards duration, between these various
experiences.
We have special names for the =moods= which correspond with most of
the emotions; thus, cheerfulness is the mood of joy, and depression
the mood of grief. As a rule, the mood appears suddenly, rises slowly
to a relative maximum, and then slowly dies down. You wake in the
morning, feeling irritable; you proceed to take everything irritably,
and so become more irritable still; and after a while the incidents
that prompt to irritability seem to grow rarer, and the mood gradually
disappears. There are times, however, when some intercurrent event
brings about a quick and total change of mood; and there are times
when the mood passes off abruptly, without assignable reason; you are
surprised to find yourself suddenly cheerful. It is a commonplace that
mood depends, in large measure, upon bodily health; but the correlation
has not been worked out.
Language also has many words for the =passions=: fury is the passion
of anger, terror the passion of fear. These states imply a severe
shock to the nervous system; and though their first effect is to
energise the organism, they must soon exhaust its reserve powers; we
notice, in fact, that very violent emotions are likely to give way to
lassitude or even to unconsciousness. The name of passion is further
given, in ordinary speech, to any abiding interest, natural (p. 207)
or acquired,—to any mode of emotive response that is specific and
lasting. We say that a man has a passion for success, for science,
for gambling; and we mean that a situation which shows any sort
of reference to these things will appeal to him, dominatingly and
one-sidedly, through that reference.
The word ‘temperament’ comes to us from popular psychology, which
classifies mental phenomena under the headings of intellect, feeling
and will, and places individual endowment under the corresponding
headings of talent, temperament and character. =Temperament=, so far
as the term can be employed in a strictly psychological sense, is thus
_a very general term for the innate susceptibility of the individual
to emotive situations and for the typical character of his emotive
responses_. The doctrine of temperaments was first systematised by
the Greek physician Galen in the second century of our era, though
the germs of the current fourfold classification—into choleric,
melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic—go back much further in the history
of thought. This classification takes account of _the strength and
the duration_ of the emotive response: the choleric person responds
quickly and strongly, the melancholic slowly and strongly, the sanguine
quickly and weakly, the phlegmatic slowly and weakly, to the situation
which evokes emotion. Crude to the last degree! we say: and yet it is
astonishing to see what a master can do with such crudity. Thackeray,
in _The Newcomes_, has drawn almost pure types of temperament; Madame
de Florac is melancholic, Fred Bayham is choleric, Mrs. Hobson Newcome
is sanguine, and Rosey is phlegmatic; and the minor characters in a
great many of our best novels tend in the same way to personify the
four temperaments.
But has not psychology advanced beyond this fourfold classification?
Not appreciably. There are books, written by psychologists, on
temperament and character; but the resulting classifications, though
more elaborate and more ingenious, are also individually coloured;
nothing like finality has been reached. _A good deal might be done,
in this field, by the roughest kind of observation, provided it were
long enough continued._ If you kept a diary for a couple of years,
putting down the nature and occasion of your emotions, and the nature
and duration and occasion and course of your moods, you would be
gathering material which psychology still lacks, and which might serve
as starting-point for detailed analytical study.
Questions and Exercises
(1) In the passage which heads this chapter, Descartes expresses the
opinion that joy, sorrow, love and hate are the primary emotions. Do
you agree with him? Why? How would you set to work to discover the
primary emotions?
(2) Do you think that there is an instinct of imitation? Give reasons
for your answer; then consult the books.
(3) Write a paragraph, as if for insertion in this chapter, on the
psychology of surprise.
(4) Give instances of emotive expression, from your own observation,
that seem to illustrate Darwin’s three principles.
(5) Define, without looking at the book, instinct, emotion, determining
tendency, suggestion.
[Illustration]
(6) The figure below shows the facial expression of two opposite
emotions, as suggested by the natural philosopher and artist Leonardo
da Vinci (1452-1519; see A Treatise on Painting, 1877, 65). What are
the emotions? Can you offer any explanation of their expressions?
(7) Suppose that an actor is to play an emotional part on the stage.
Will he do better if he himself feels the part, or if he remains cold
and merely simulates the expression of emotion?
(8) Can you give instances, from your own experience, of the
modification or suppression of movements which naturally express
emotion? Does this inhibition of movement affect the emotion itself? Do
not generalise hastily; gather a number of cases.
(9) Recall some specific emotion that you have experienced. What
processes are imaginal or ‘reproduced,’ and what are set up anew or
‘produced,’ in the recall? Write fully and carefully.
(10) You have already been asked to discuss the possibility of ‘mixed
feelings’ (p. 88). Are there ‘mixed’ or ‘mingled emotions’? If so, in
what sense?
(11) It is said in the text that no sharp line of division can be drawn
between emotion, passion and mood. Illustrate this statement from your
own experience.
(12) Give instances, from poetry or fiction, of the delineation of
practically pure temperaments.
References
A. Bain, The Emotions and the Will, [1859] 1880; C. Darwin, The
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872; W. James,
Principles of Psychology, ii., 1890, chs. xxiv., xxv.; T. Ribot, The
Psychology of the Emotions, 1897; J. Sully, An Essay on Laughter,
1902; W. Wundt, Outlines of Psychology, 1907, § 13; W. McDougall, An
Introduction to Social Psychology, 1908; E. B. Titchener, Text-book
of Psychology, 1910, 462 ff., 471 ff.; H. Bergson, Laughter, 1911; E.
L. Thorndike, The Original Nature of Man, 1913; W. B. Cannon, Bodily
Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage, 1915.