EMOTION.
=Emotions compared with Instincts.=--An emotion is a tendency to feel, and
an instinct is a tendency to act, characteristically, when in presence
of a certain object in the environment. But the emotions also have their
bodily 'expression,' which may involve strong muscular activity (as in
fear or anger, for example); and it becomes a little hard in many cases
to separate the description of the 'emotional' condition from that of
the 'instinctive' reaction which one and the same object may provoke.
Shall _fear_ be described in the chapter on Instincts or in that on
Emotions? Where shall one describe _curiosity_, _emulation_, and the
like? The answer is quite arbitrary from the scientific point of view,
and practical convenience may decide. As inner mental conditions,
emotions are quite indescribable. Description, moreover, would be
superfluous, for the reader knows already how they feel. Their relations
to the objects which prompt them and to the reactions which they provoke
are all that one can put down in a book.
Every object that excites an instinct excites an emotion as well. The
only distinction one may draw is that the reaction called emotional
terminates in the subject's own body, whilst the reaction called
instinctive is apt to go farther and enter into practical relations with
the exciting object. In both instinct and emotion the mere memory or
imagination of the object may suffice to liberate the excitement. One
may even get angrier in thinking over one's insult than one was in
receiving it; and melt more over a mother who is dead than one ever did
when she was living. In the rest of the chapter I shall use the word
_object_ of emotion indifferently to mean one which is physically
present or one which is merely thought of.
=The varieties of emotion are innumerable.= _Anger_, _fear_, _love_,
_hate_, _joy_, _grief_, _shame_, _pride_, and their varieties, may be
called the _coarser_ emotions, being coupled as they are with relatively
strong bodily reverberations. The _subtler_ emotions are the moral,
intellectual, and æsthetic feelings, and their bodily reaction is
usually much less strong. The mere description of the objects,
circumstances, and varieties of the different species of emotion may go
to any length. Their internal shadings merge endlessly into each other,
and have been partly commemorated in language, as, for example, by such
synonyms as hatred, antipathy, animosity, resentment, dislike, aversion,
malice, spite, revenge, abhorrence, etc., etc. Dictionaries of synonyms
have discriminated them, as well as text-books of psychology--in fact,
many German psychological text-books _are_ nothing but dictionaries of
synonyms when it comes to the chapter on Emotion. But there are limits
to the profitable elaboration of the obvious, and the result of all this
flux is that the merely descriptive literature of the subject, from
Descartes downwards, is one of the most tedious parts of psychology. And
not only is it tedious, but you feel that its subdivisions are to a
great extent either fictitious or unimportant, and that its pretences to
accuracy are a sham. But unfortunately there is little psychological
writing about the emotions which is not merely descriptive. As emotions
are described in novels, they interest us, for we are made to share
them. We have grown acquainted with the concrete objects and emergencies
which call them forth, and any knowing touch of introspection which may
grace the page meets with a quick and feeling response. Confessedly
literary works of aphoristic philosophy also flash lights into our
emotional life, and give us a fitful delight. But as far as the
'scientific psychology' of the emotions goes, I may have been surfeited
by too much reading of classic works on the subject, but I should as
lief read verbal descriptions of the shapes of the rocks on a New
Hampshire farm as toil through them again. They give one nowhere a
central point of view, or a deductive or generative principle. They
distinguish and refine and specify _in infinitum_ without ever getting
on to another logical level. Whereas the beauty of all truly scientific
work is to get to ever deeper levels. Is there no way out from this
level of individual description in the case of the emotions? I believe
there is a way out, if one will only take it.
=The Cause of their Varieties.=--The trouble with the emotions in
psychology is that they are regarded too much as absolutely individual
things. So long as they are set down as so many eternal and sacred
psychic entities, like the old immutable species in natural history, so
long all that _can_ be done with them is reverently to catalogue their
separate characters, points, and effects. But if we regard them as
products of more general causes (as 'species' are now regarded as
products of heredity and variation), the mere distinguishing and
cataloguing becomes of subsidiary importance. Having the goose which
lays the golden eggs, the description of each egg already laid is a
minor matter. I will devote the next few pages to setting forth one very
general cause of our emotional feeling, limiting myself in the first
instance to what may be called the _coarser_ emotions.
=The feeling, in the coarser emotions, results from the bodily
expression.= Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions is
that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection
called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the
bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that _the bodily
changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that
our feeling of the same changes as they occur_ IS _the emotion_.
Common-sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a
bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and
strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of
sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately
induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be
interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel
sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we
tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry,
angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states
following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in
form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see
the bear and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right
to strike, but we should not actually _feel_ afraid or angry.
Stated in this crude way, the hypothesis is pretty sure to meet with
immediate disbelief. And yet neither many nor far-fetched considerations
are required to mitigate its paradoxical character, and possibly to
produce conviction of its truth.
To begin with, _particular perceptions certainly do produce wide-spread
bodily effects by a sort of immediate physical influence, antecedent to
the arousal of an emotion or emotional idea_. In listening to poetry,
drama, or heroic narrative we are often surprised at the cutaneous
shiver which like a sudden wave flows over us, and at the heart-swelling
and the lachrymal effusion that unexpectedly catch us at intervals. In
hearing music the same is even more strikingly true. If we abruptly see
a dark moving form in the woods, our heart stops beating, and we catch
our breath instantly and before any articulate idea of danger can arise.
If our friend goes near to the edge of a precipice, we get the
well-known feeling of 'all-overishness,' and we shrink back, although we
positively _know_ him to be safe, and have no distinct imagination of
his fall. The writer well remembers his astonishment, when a boy of
seven or eight, at fainting when he saw a horse bled. The blood was in a
bucket, with a stick in it, and, if memory does not deceive him, he
stirred it round and saw it drip from the stick with no feeling save
that of childish curiosity. Suddenly the world grew black before his
eyes, his ears began to buzz, and he knew no more. He had never heard of
the sight of blood producing faintness or sickness, and he had so little
repugnance to it, and so little apprehension of any other sort of danger
from it, that even at that tender age, as he well remembers, he could
not help wondering how the mere physical presence of a pailful of
crimson fluid could occasion in him such formidable bodily effects.
The best proof that the immediate cause of emotion is a physical effect
on the nerves is furnished by _those pathological cases in which the
emotion is objectless_. One of the chief merits, in fact, of the view
which I propose seems to be that we can so easily formulate by its means
pathological cases and normal cases under a common scheme. In every
asylum we find examples of absolutely unmotived fear, anger, melancholy,
or conceit; and others of an equally unmotived apathy which persists in
spite of the best of outward reasons why it should give way. In the
former cases we must suppose the nervous machinery to be so 'labile' in
some one emotional direction that almost every stimulus (however
inappropriate) causes it to upset in that way, and to engender the
particular complex of feelings of which the psychic body of the emotion
consists. Thus, to take one special instance, if inability to draw deep
breath, fluttering of the heart, and that peculiar epigastric change
felt as 'precordial anxiety,' with an irresistible tendency to take a
somewhat crouching attitude and to sit still, and with perhaps other
visceral processes not now known, all spontaneously occur together in a
certain person, his feeling of their combination _is_ the emotion of
dread, and he is the victim of what is known as morbid fear. A friend
who has had occasional attacks of this most distressing of all maladies
tells me that in his case the whole drama seems to centre about the
region of the heart and respiratory apparatus, that his main effort
during the attacks is to get control of his inspirations and to slow
his heart, and that the moment he attains to breathing deeply and to
holding himself erect, the dread, _ipso facto_, seems to depart.
The emotion here is nothing but the feeling of a bodily state, and it
has a purely bodily cause.
The next thing to be noticed is this, that _every one of the bodily
changes, whatsoever it be, is_ FELT, _acutely or obscurely, the moment
it occurs_. If the reader has never paid attention to this matter, he
will be both interested and astonished to learn how many different local
bodily feelings he can detect in himself as characteristic of his
various emotional moods. It would be perhaps too much to expect him to
arrest the tide of any strong gust of passion for the sake of any such
curious analysis as this; but he can observe more tranquil states, and
that may be assumed here to be true of the greater which is shown to be
true of the less. Our whole cubic capacity is sensibly alive; and each
morsel of it contributes its pulsations of feeling, dim or sharp,
pleasant, painful, or dubious, to that sense of personality that every
one of us unfailingly carries with him. It is surprising what little
items give accent to these complexes of sensibility. When worried by any
slight trouble, one may find that the focus of one's bodily
consciousness is the contraction, often quite inconsiderable, of the
eyes and brows. When momentarily embarrassed, it is something in the
pharynx that compels either a swallow, a clearing of the throat, or a
slight cough; and so on for as many more instances as might be named.
The various permutations of which these organic changes are susceptible
make it abstractly possible that no shade of emotion should be without a
bodily reverberation as unique, when taken in its totality, as is the
mental mood itself. The immense number of parts modified is what makes
it so difficult for us to reproduce in cold blood the total and integral
expression of any one emotion. We may catch the trick with the voluntary
muscles, but fail with the skin, glands, heart, and other viscera. Just
as an artificially imitated sneeze lacks something of the reality, so
the attempt to imitate grief or enthusiasm in the absence of its normal
instigating cause is apt to be rather 'hollow.'
I now proceed to urge the vital point of my whole theory, which is this:
_If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our
consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we
have nothing left behind_, no 'mind-stuff' out of which the emotion can
be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual
perception is all that remains. It is true that, although most people,
when asked, say that their introspection verifies this statement, some
persist in saying theirs does not. Many cannot be made to understand the
question. When you beg them to imagine away every feeling of laughter
and of tendency to laugh from their consciousness of the ludicrousness
of an object, and then to tell you what the feeling of its ludicrousness
would be like, whether it be anything more than the perception that the
object belongs to the class 'funny,' they persist in replying that the
thing proposed is a physical impossibility, and that they always _must_
laugh if they see a funny object. Of course the task proposed is not the
practical one of seeing a ludicrous object and annihilating one's
tendency to laugh. It is the purely speculative one of subtracting
certain elements of feeling from an emotional state supposed to exist in
its fulness, and saying what the residual elements are. I cannot help
thinking that all who rightly apprehend this problem will agree with the
proposition above laid down. What kind of an emotion of fear would be
left if the feeling neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow
breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of
goose-flesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite
impossible for me to think. Can one fancy the state of rage and picture
no ebullition in the chest, no flushing of the face, no dilatation of
the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action,
but in their stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face? The
present writer, for one, certainly cannot. The rage is as completely
evaporated as the sensation of its so-called manifestations, and the
only thing that can possibly be supposed to take its place is some
cold-blooded and dispassionate judicial sentence, confined entirely to
the intellectual realm, to the effect that a certain person or persons
merit chastisement for their sins. In like manner of grief: what would
it be without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its
pang in the breast-bone? A feelingless cognition that certain
circumstances are deplorable, and nothing more. Every passion in turn
tells the same story. A disembodied human emotion is a sheer nonentity.
I do not say that it is a contradiction in the nature of things, or that
pure spirits are necessarily condemned to cold intellectual lives; but I
say that for _us_ emotion dissociated from all bodily feeling is
inconceivable. The more closely I scrutinize my states, the more
persuaded I become that whatever 'coarse' affections and passions I have
are in very truth constituted by, and made up of, those bodily changes
which we ordinarily call their expression or consequence; and the more
it seems to me that, if I were to become corporeally anæsthetic, I
should be excluded from the life of the affections, harsh and tender
alike, and drag out an existence of merely cognitive or intellectual
form. Such an existence, although it seems to have been the ideal of
ancient sages, is too apathetic to be keenly sought after by those born
after the revival of the worship of sensibility, a few generations ago.
=Let not this view be called materialistic.= It is neither more nor less
materialistic than any other view which says that our emotions are
conditioned by nervous processes. No reader of this hook is likely to
rebel against such a saying so long as it is expressed in general terms;
and if any one still finds materialism in the thesis now defended, that
must be because of the special processes invoked. They are
_sensational_ processes, processes due to inward currents set up by
physical happenings. Such processes have, it is true, always been
regarded by the platonizers in psychology as having something peculiarly
base about them. But our emotions must always be _inwardly_ what they
are, whatever be the physiological ground of their apparition. If they
are deep, pure, worthy, spiritual facts on any conceivable theory of
their physiological source, they remain no less deep, pure, spiritual,
and worthy of regard on this present sensational theory. They carry
their own inner measure of worth with them; and it is just as logical to
use the present theory of the emotions for proving that sensational
processes need not be vile and material, as to use their vileness and
materiality as a proof that such a theory cannot be true.
=This view explains the great variability of emotion.= If such a theory is
true, then each emotion is the resultant of a sum of elements, and each
element is caused by a physiological process of a sort already well
known. The elements are all organic changes, and each of them is the
reflex effect of the exciting object. Definite questions now immediately
arise--questions very different from those which were the only possible
ones without this view. Those were questions of classification: "Which
are the proper genera of emotion, and which the species under each?"--or
of description: "By what expression is each emotion characterized?" The
questions now are _causal_: "Just what changes does this object and what
changes does that object excite?" and "How come they to excite these
particular changes and not others?" We step from a superficial to a deep
order of inquiry. Classification and description are the lowest stage of
science. They sink into the background the moment questions of causation
are formulated, and remain important only so far as they facilitate our
answering these. Now the moment an emotion is causally accounted for, as
the arousal by an object of a lot of reflex acts which are forthwith
felt, _we immediately see why there is no limit to the number of
possible different emotions which may exist, and why the emotions of
different individuals may vary indefinitely_, both as to their
constitution and as to the objects which call them forth. For there is
nothing sacramental or eternally fixed in reflex action. Any sort of
reflex effect is possible, and reflexes actually vary indefinitely, as
we know.
In short, _any classification of the emotions is seen to be as true and
as 'natural' as any other_, if it only serves some purpose; and such a
question as "What is the 'real' or 'typical' expression of anger, or
fear?" is seen to have no objective meaning at all. Instead of it we now
have the question as to how any given 'expression' of anger or fear may
have come to exist; and that is a real question of physiological
mechanics on the one hand, and of history on the other, which (like all
real questions) is in essence answerable, although the answer may be
hard to find. On a later page I shall mention the attempts to answer it
which have been made.
=A Corollary verified.=--If our theory be true, a necessary corollary of
it ought to be this: that any voluntary and cold-blooded arousal of the
so-called manifestations of a special emotion should give us the emotion
itself. Now within the limits in which it can be verified, experience
corroborates rather than disproves this inference. Everyone knows how
panic is increased by flight, and how the giving way to the symptoms of
grief or anger increases those passions themselves. Each fit of sobbing
makes the sorrow more acute, and calls forth another fit stronger still,
until at last repose only ensues with lassitude and with the apparent
exhaustion of the machinery. In rage, it is notorious how we 'work
ourselves up' to a climax by repeated outbreaks of expression. Refuse to
express a passion, and it dies. Count ten before venting your anger, and
its occasion seems ridiculous. Whistling to keep up courage is no mere
figure of speech. On the other hand, sit all day in a moping posture,
sigh, and reply to everything with a dismal voice, and your melancholy
lingers. There is no more valuable precept in moral education than this,
as all who have experience know: if we wish to conquer undesirable
emotional tendencies in ourselves, we must assiduously, and in the first
instance cold-bloodedly, go through the _outward movements_ of those
contrary dispositions which we prefer to cultivate. The reward of
persistency will infallibly come, in the fading out of the sullenness or
depression, and the advent of real cheerfulness and kindliness in their
stead. Smooth the brow, brighten the eye, contract the dorsal rather
than the ventral aspect of the frame, and speak in a major key, pass the
genial compliment, and your heart must be frigid indeed if it do not
gradually thaw!
Against this it is to be said that many actors who perfectly mimic the
outward appearances of emotion in face, gait, and voice declare that
they feel no emotion at all. Others, however, according to Mr. Wm.
Archer, who has made a very instructive statistical inquiry among them,
say that the emotion of the part masters them whenever they play it
well. The explanation for the discrepancy amongst actors is probably
simple. The _visceral and organic_ part of the expression can be
suppressed in some men, but not in others, and on this it must be that
the chief part of the felt emotion depends. Those actors who feel the
emotion are probably unable, those who are inwardly cold are probably
able, to affect the dissociation in a complete way.
=An Objection replied to.=--It may be objected to the general theory which
I maintain that stopping the expression of an emotion often makes it
worse. The funniness becomes quite excruciating when we are forbidden by
the situation to laugh, and anger pent in by fear turns into tenfold
hate. Expressing either emotion freely, however, gives relief.
This objection is more specious than real. _During_ the expression the
emotion is always felt. _After_ it, the centres having normally
discharged themselves, we feel it no more. But where the facial part of
the discharge is suppressed the thoracic and visceral may be all the
more violent and persistent, as in suppressed laughter; or the original
emotion may be changed, by the combination of the provoking object with
the restraining pressure, into _another emotion altogether_, in which
different and possibly profounder organic disturbance occurs. If I would
kill my enemy but dare not, my emotion is surely altogether other than
that which would possess me if I let my anger explode.--On the whole,
therefore this objection has no weight.
=The Subtler Emotions.=--In the æsthetic emotions the bodily reverberation
and the feeling may both be faint. A connoisseur is apt to judge a work
of art dryly and intellectually, and with no bodily thrill. On the other
hand, works of art may arouse intense emotion; and whenever they do so,
the experience is completely covered by the terms of our theory. Our
theory requires that _incoming currents_ be the basis of emotion. But,
whether secondary organic reverberations be or be not aroused by it, the
perception of a work of art (music, decoration, etc.) is always in the
first instance at any rate an affair of incoming currents. The work
itself is an object of sensation; and, the perception of an object of
sensation being a 'coarse' or vivid experience, what pleasure goes with
it will partake of the 'coarse' or vivid form.
That there may be subtle pleasure too, I do not deny. In other words,
there may be purely cerebral emotion, independent of all currents from
outside. Such feelings as moral satisfaction, thankfulness, curiosity,
relief at getting a problem solved, may be of this sort. But the
thinness and paleness of these feelings, when unmixed with bodily
effects, is in very striking contrast to the coarser emotions. In all
sentimental and impressionable people the bodily effects mix in: the
voice breaks and the eyes moisten when the moral truth is felt, etc.
Wherever there is anything like _rapture_, however intellectual its
ground, we find these secondary processes ensue. Unless we actually
laugh at the neatness of the demonstration or witticism; unless we
thrill at the case of justice, or tingle at the act of magnanimity, our
state of mind can hardly be called emotional at all. It is in fact a
mere intellectual perception of how certain things are to be
called--neat, right, witty, generous, and the like. Such a judicial
state of mind as this is to be classed among cognitive rather than among
emotional acts.
=Description of Fear.=--For the reasons given on p. 374, I will append no
inventory or classification of emotions or description of their
symptoms. The reader has practically almost all the facts in his own
hand. As an example, however, of the best sort of descriptive work on
the symptoms, I will quote Darwin's account of them in fear.
"Fear is often preceded by astonishment, and is so far akin to it that
both lead to the senses of sight and hearing being instantly aroused. In
both cases the eyes and mouth are widely opened and the eyebrows raised.
The frightened man at first stands like a statue, motionless and
breathless, or crouches down as if instinctively to escape observation.
The heart beats quickly and violently, so that it palpitates or knocks
against the ribs; but it is very doubtful if it then works more
efficiently than usual, so as to send a greater supply of blood to all
parts of the body; for the skin instantly becomes pale as during
incipient faintness. This paleness of the surface, however, is probably
in large part, or is exclusively, due to the vaso-motor centre being
affected in such a manner as to cause the contraction of the small
arteries of the skin. That the skin is much affected under the sense of
great fear, we see in the marvellous manner in which perspiration
immediately exudes from it. This exudation is all the more remarkable,
as the surface is then cold, and hence the term, a cold sweat; whereas
the sudorific glands are properly excited into action when the surface
is heated. The hairs also on the skin stand erect, and the superficial
muscles shiver. In connection with the disturbed action of the heart
the breathing is hurried. The salivary glands act imperfectly; the mouth
becomes dry and is often opened and shut. I have also noticed that under
slight fear there is strong tendency to yawn. One of the best marked
symptoms is the trembling of all the muscles of the body; and this is
often first seen in the lips. From this cause, and from the dryness of
the mouth, the voice becomes husky or indistinct or may altogether fail.
'_Obstupui steteruntque comæ, et vox faucibus hæsit._'... As fear
increases into an agony of terror, we behold, as under all violent
emotions, diversified results. The heart beats wildly or must fail to
act and faintness ensue; there is a death-like pallor; the breathing is
labored; the wings of the nostrils are widely dilated; there is a
gasping and convulsive motion of the lips, a tremor on the hollow cheek,
a gulping and catching of the throat; the uncovered and protruding
eyeballs are fixed on the object of terror; or they may roll restlessly
from side to side, _huc illuc volens oculos totumque pererrat_. The
pupils are said to be enormously dilated. All the muscles of the body
may become rigid or may be thrown into convulsive movements. The hands
are alternately clenched and opened, often with a twitching movement.
The arms may be protruded as if to avert some dreadful danger, or may be
thrown wildly over the head. The Rev. Mr. Hagenauer has seen this latter
action in a terrified Australian. In other cases there is a sudden and
uncontrollable tendency to headlong flight; and so strong is this that
the boldest soldiers may be seized with a sudden panic."[48]
=Genesis of the Emotional Reactions.=--How come the various objects which
excite emotion to produce such special and different bodily effects?
This question was not asked till quite recently, but already some
interesting suggestions towards answering it have been made.
Some movements of expression can be accounted for as _weakened
repetitions of movements which formerly_ (when they were stronger) _were
of utility to the subject_. Others are similarly weakened repetitions of
movements which under other conditions were _physiologically necessary
concomitants of the useful movements_. Of the latter reactions the
respiratory disturbances in anger and fear might be taken as
examples--organic reminiscences, as it were, reverberations in
imagination of the blowings of the man making a series of combative
efforts, of the pantings of one in precipitate flight. Such at least is
a suggestion made by Mr. Spencer which has found approval. And he also
was the first, so far as I know, to suggest that other movements in
anger and fear could be explained by the nascent excitation of formerly
useful acts.
"To have in a slight degree," he says, "such psychical states as
accompany the reception of wounds, and are experienced during flight, is
to be in a state of what we call fear. And to have in a slight degree
such psychical states as the processes of catching, killing, and eating
imply, is to have the desires to catch, kill, and eat. That the
propensities to the acts are nothing else than nascent excitations of
the psychical state involved in the acts, is proved by the natural
language of the propensities. Fear, when strong, expresses itself in
cries, in efforts to escape, in palpitations, in tremblings; and these
are just the manifestations that go along with an actual suffering of
the evil feared. The destructive passion is shown in a general tension
of the muscular system, in gnashing of teeth and protrusion of the
claws, in dilated eyes and nostrils in growls; and these are weaker
forms of the actions that accompany the killing of prey. To such
objective evidences every one can add subjective evidences. Everyone can
testify that the psychical state called fear consists of mental
representations of certain painful results; and that the one called
anger consists of mental representations of the actions and impressions
which would occur while inflicting some kind of pain."
The principle of _revival, in weakened form, of reactions useful in more
violent dealings with the object inspiring the emotion_, has found many
applications. So slight a symptom as the snarl or sneer, the one-sided
uncovering of the upper teeth, is accounted for by Darwin as a survival
from the time when our ancestors had large canines, and unfleshed them
(as dogs now do) for attack. Similarly the raising of the eyebrows in
outward attention, the opening of the mouth in astonishment, come,
according to the same author, from the utility of these movements in
extreme cases. The raising of the eyebrows goes with the opening of the
eye for better vision; the opening of the mouth with the intensest
listening, and with the rapid catching of the breath which precedes
muscular effort. The distention of the nostrils in anger is interpreted
by Spencer as an echo of the way in which our ancestors had to breathe
when, during combat, their "mouth was filled up by a part of an
antagonist's body that had been seized" (!). The trembling of fear is
supposed by Mantegazza to be for the sake of warming the blood (!). The
reddening of the face and neck is called by Wundt a compensatory
arrangement for relieving the brain of the blood-pressure which the
simultaneous excitement of the heart brings with it. The effusion of
tears is explained both by this author and by Darwin to be a
blood-withdrawing agency of a similar sort. The contraction of the
muscles around the eyes, of which the primitive use is to protect those
organs from being too much gorged with blood during the screaming fits
of infancy, survives in adult life in the shape of the frown, which
instantly comes over the brow when anything difficult or displeasing
presents itself either to thought or action.
"As the habit of contracting the brows has been followed by infants
during innumerable generations, at the commencement of every crying or
screaming fit," says Darwin, "it has become firmly associated with the
incipient sense of something distressing or disagreeable. Hence, under
similar circumstances, it would be apt to be continued during maturity,
although never then developed, into a crying fit. Screaming or weeping
begins to be voluntarily restrained at an early period of life, whereas
frowning is hardly ever restrained at any age."
* * * * *
Another principle, to which Darwin perhaps hardly does sufficient
justice, may be called the principle of _reacting similarly to
analogous-feeling stimuli_. There is a whole vocabulary of descriptive
adjectives common to impressions belonging to different sensible
spheres--experiences of all classes are _sweet_, impressions of all
classes _rich_ or _solid_, sensations of all classes _sharp_. Wundt and
Piderit accordingly explain many of our most expressive reactions upon
moral causes as symbolic gustatory movements. As soon as any experience
arises which has an affinity with the feeling of sweet, or bitter, or
sour, the same movements are executed which would result from the taste
in point. "All the states of mind which language designates by the
metaphors bitter, harsh, sweet, combine themselves, therefore, with the
corresponding mimetic movements of the mouth." Certainly the emotions of
disgust and satisfaction do express themselves in this mimetic way.
Disgust is an incipent regurgitation or retching, limiting its
expression often to the grimace of the lips and nose; satisfaction goes
with a sucking smile, or tasting motion of the lips. The ordinary
gesture of negation--among us, moving the head about its axis from side
to side--is a reaction originally used by babies to keep disagreeables
from getting into their mouth, and may be observed in perfection in any
nursery. It is now evoked where the stimulus is only an unwelcome idea.
Similarly the nod forward in affirmation is after the analogy of taking
food into the mouth. The connection of the expression of moral or social
disdain or dislike, especially in women, with movements having a
perfectly definite original olfactory function, is too obvious for
comment. Winking is the effect of any threatening surprise, not only of
what puts the eyes in danger; and a momentary aversion of the eyes is
very apt to be one's first symptom of response to an unexpectedly
unwelcome proposition.--These may suffice as examples of movements
expressive from analogy.
But if certain of our emotional reactions can be explained by the two
principles invoked--and the reader will himself have felt how
conjectural and fallible in some of the instances the explanation
is--there remain many reactions which cannot so be explained at all, and
these we must write down for the present as purely idiopathic effects of
the stimulus. Amongst them are the effects on the viscera and internal
glands, the dryness of the mouth and diarrhœa and nausea of fear, the
liver-disturbances which sometimes produce jaundice after excessive
rage, the urinary secretion of sanguine excitement, and the
bladder-contraction of apprehension, the gaping of expectancy, the 'lump
in the throat' of grief, the tickling there and the swallowing of
embarrassment, the 'precordial anxiety' of dread, the changes in the
pupil, the various sweatings of the skin, cold or hot, local or general,
and its flushings, together with other symptoms which probably exist but
are too hidden to have been noticed or named. Trembling, which is found
in many excitements besides that of terror, is, _pace_ Mr. Spencer and
Sig. Mantegazza, quite pathological. So are terror's other strong
symptoms: they are harmful to the creature who presents them. In an
organism as complex as the nervous system there must be many
_incidental_ reactions which would never themselves have been evolved
independently, for any utility they might possess. Sea-sickness,
ticklishness, shyness, the love of music, of the various intoxicants,
nay, the entire æsthetic life of man, must be traced to this accidental
origin. It would be foolish to suppose that none of the reactions called
emotional could have arisen in this _quasi_-accidental way.