Chapter XXV: 395 (2)

"There is nothing more implied than the fact that an emotion may be too strong to be resisted, and we only waste our strength in the endeavor. If we are really able to stem the torrent, there is no more reason for refraining from the attempt than in the case of weaker feelings. And undoubtedly the _habitual_ control of the emotions is not to be attained without a systematic restraint, extended to weak and strong."

When we teach children to repress their emotional talk and display, it is not that they may _feel_ more--quite the reverse. It is that they may _think_ more; for, to a certain extent, whatever currents are diverted from the regions below, must swell the activity of the thought-tracts of the brain. In apoplexies and other brain injuries we get the opposite condition--an obstruction, namely, to the passage of currents among the thought-tracts, and with this an increased tendency of objects to start downward currents into the organs of the body. The consequence is tears, laughter, and temper-fits, on the most insignificant provocation, accompanying a proportional feebleness in logical thought and the power of volitional attention and decision,--just the sort of thing from which we try to wean our child. It is true that we say of certain persons that "they would feel more if they expressed less." And in another class of persons the explosive energy with which passion manifests itself on critical occasions seems correlated with the way in which they bottle it up during the intervals. But these are only eccentric types of character, and within each type the law of the last paragraph prevails. The sentimentalist is so constructed that 'gushing' is his or her normal mode of expression. Putting a stopper on the 'gush' will only to a limited extent cause more 'real' activities to take its place; in the main it will simply produce listlessness. On the other hand, the ponderous and bilious 'slumbering volcano,' let him repress the expression of his passions as he will, will find them expire if they get no vent at all; whilst if the rare occasions multiply which he deems worthy of their outbreak, he will find them grow in intensity as life proceeds. On the whole, I cannot see that this third objection carries any weight.

* * * * *

If our hypothesis is true, it makes us realize more deeply than ever how much our mental life is knit up with our corporeal frame, in the strictest sense of the term. Rapture, love, ambition, indignation, and pride, considered as feelings, are fruits of the same soil with the grossest bodily sensations of pleasure and of pain. But the reader will remember that we agreed at the outset to affirm this only of what we then called the 'coarser' emotions, and that those inward states of emotional sensibility which appeared devoid at first sight of bodily results should be left out of our account. We must now say a word or two about these latter feelings, the 'subtler' emotions, as we then agreed to call them.

THE SUBTLER EMOTIONS.

These are the moral, intellectual, and æsthetic feelings. Concords of sounds, of colors, of lines, logical consistencies, teleological fitnesses, affect us with a pleasure that seems ingrained in the very form of the representation itself, and to borrow nothing from any reverberation surging up from the parts below the brain. The Herbartian psychologists have distinguished feelings due to the _form_ in which ideas may be arranged. A mathematical demonstration may be as 'pretty,' and an act of justice as 'neat,' as a drawing or a tune, although the prettiness and neatness seem to have nothing to do with sensation. We have, then, or some of us seem to have, genuinely _cerebral_ forms of pleasure and displeasure, apparently not agreeing in their mode of production with the 'coarser' emotions we have been analyzing. And it is certain that readers whom our reasons have hitherto failed to convince will now start up at this admission, and consider that by it we give up our whole case. Since musical perceptions, since logical ideas, can immediately arouse a form of emotional feeling, they will say, is it not more natural to suppose that in the case of the so-called 'coarser' emotions, prompted by other kinds of objects, the emotional feeling is equally immediate, and the bodily expression something that comes later and is added on?

* * * * *

In reply to this we must immediately insist that æsthetic emotion, _pure and simple,_ the pleasure given us by certain lines and masses, and combinations of colors and sounds, is an absolutely sensational experience, an optical or auricular feeling that is primary, and not due to the repercussion backwards of other sensations elsewhere consecutively aroused. To this simple primary and immediate pleasure in certain pure sensations and harmonious combinations of them, there may, it is true, be _added_ secondary pleasures; and in the practical enjoyment of works of art by the masses of mankind these secondary pleasures play a great part. The more _classic_ one's taste is, however, the less relatively important are the secondary pleasures felt to be in comparison with those of the primary sensation as it comes in.[416] Classicism and romanticism have their battles over this point. Complex suggestiveness, the awakening of vistas of memory and association, and the stirring of our flesh with picturesque mystery and gloom, make a work of art _romantic_. The classic taste brands these effects as coarse and tawdry, and prefers the naked beauty of the optical and auditory sensations, unadorned with frippery or foliage. To the romantic mind, on the contrary, the immediate beauty of these sensations seems dry and thin. I am of course not discussing which view is right, but only showing that the discrimination between the primary feeling of beauty, as a pure incoming sensible quality, and the secondary emotions which are grafted thereupon, is one that must be made.

These secondary emotions themselves are assuredly for the most part constituted of other incoming sensations aroused by the diffusive wave of reflex effects which the beautiful object sets up. A glow, a pang in the breast, a shudder, a fulness of the breathing, a flutter of the heart, a shiver down the back, a moistening of the eyes, a stirring in the hypogastrium, and a thousand unnamable symptoms besides, may be felt the moment the beauty _excites_ us. And these symptoms also result when we are excited by moral perceptions, as of pathos, magnanimity, or courage. The voice breaks and the sob rises in the struggling chest, or the nostril dilates and the fingers tighten, whilst the heart beats, etc., etc.

As far as _these ingredients_ of the subtler emotions go, then, the latter form no exception to our account, but rather an additional illustration thereof. In all cases of intellectual or moral rapture we find that, unless there be coupled a bodily reverberation of some kind with the mere thought of the object and cognition of its quality; unless we actually laugh at the neatness of the demonstration or witticism; unless we thrill at the case of justice, or tingle at the act of magnanimity; our state of mind can hardly be called emotional at all. It is in fact a mere intellectual perception of how certain things are to be called--neat, right, witty, generous, and the like. Such a judicial state of mind as this is to be classed among awarenesses of truth; it is a _cognitive_ act. As a matter of fact, however, the moral and intellectual cognitions hardly ever do exist thus unaccompanied. The bodily sounding-board is at work, as careful introspection will show, far more than we usually suppose. Still, where long familiarity with a certain class of effects, even æsthetic ones, has blunted mere emotional excitability as much as it has sharpened taste and judgment, we do get the intellectual emotion, if such it can be called, pure and undefiled. And the dryness of it, the paleness, the absence of all glow, as it may exist in a thoroughly expert critic's mind, not only shows us what an altogether different thing it is from the 'coarser' emotions we considered first, but makes us suspect that almost the entire difference lies in the fact that the bodily sounding-board, vibrating in the one case, is in the other mute. "Not so very bad" is, in a person of consummate taste, apt to be the highest limit of approving expression. "_Rien ne me choque_" is said to have been Chopin's superlative of praise of new music. A sentimental layman would feel, and ought to feel, horrified, on being admitted into such a critic's mind, to see how cold, how thin, how void of human significance, are the motives for favor or disfavor that there prevail. The capacity to make a nice spot on the wall will outweigh a picture's whole content; a foolish trick of words will preserve a poem; an utterly meaningless fitness of sequence in one musical composition set at naught any amount of 'expressiveness' in another.

I remember seeing an English couple sit for more than an hour on a piercing February day in the Academy at Venice before the celebrated 'Assumption' by Titian; and when I, after being chased from room to room by the cold, concluded to get into the sunshine as fast as possible and let the pictures go, but before leaving drew reverently near to them to learn with what superior forms of susceptibility they might be endowed, all I overheard was the woman's voice murmuring: "What a _deprecatory_ expression her face wears! What self-abneg_ation!_ How _unworthy_ she feels of the honor she is receiving!" Their honest hearts had been kept warm all the time by a glow of spurious sentiment that would have fairly made old Titian sick. Mr. Ruskin somewhere makes the (for him terrible) admission that religious people as a rule care little for pictures, and that when they do care for them they generally prefer the worst ones to the best. Yes! in every art, in every science, there is the keen perception of certain relations being _right_ or not, and there is the emotional flush and thrill consequent thereupon. And these are two things, not one. In the former of them it is that experts and masters are at home. The latter accompaniments are bodily commotions that they may hardly feel, but that may be experienced in their fulness by _crétins_ and philistines in whom the critical judgment is at its lowest ebb. The 'marvels' of Science, about which so much edifying popular literature is written, are apt to be 'caviare' to the men in the laboratories. And even divine Philosophy itself, which common mortals consider so 'sublime' an occupation, on account of the vastness of its data and outlook, is too apt to the practical philosopher himself to be but a sharpening and tightening business, a matter of 'points,' of screwing down things, of splitting hairs, and of the 'intent' rather than the 'extent' of conceptions. Very little emotion here!--except the effort of setting the attention fine, and the feeling of ease and relief (mainly in the breathing apparatus) when the inconsistencies are overcome and the thoughts run smoothly for a while. Emotion and cognition seem then parted even in this last retreat; and cerebral processes are almost feelingless, so far as we can judge, until they summon help from parts below.

NO SPECIAL BRAIN-CENTRES FOR EMOTION.

If the neural process underlying emotional consciousness be what I have now sought to prove it, the physiology of the brain becomes a simpler matter than has been hitherto supposed. Sensational, associational, and motor elements are all that the organ need contain. The physiologists who, during the past few years, have been so industriously exploring the brain's functions, have limited their explanations to its cognitive and volitional performances. Dividing the brain into sensory and motor centres, they have found their division to be exactly paralleled by the analysis made by empirical psychology of the perceptive and volitional parts of the mind into their simplest elements. But the emotions have been so ignored in all these researches that one is tempted to suppose that if these investigators were asked for a theory of them in brain-terms, they would have to reply, either that they had as yet bestowed no thought upon the subject, or that they had found it so difficult to make distinct hypotheses that the matter lay among the problems of the future, only to be taken up after the simpler ones of the present should have been definitively solved.

And yet it is even now certain that of two things concerning the emotions, one must be true. Either separate and special centres, affected to them alone, are their brain-seat, or else they correspond to processes occurring in the motor and sensory centres already assigned, or in others like them, not yet known. If the former be the case, we must deny the view that is current, and hold the cortex to be something more than the surface of 'projection' for every sensitive spot and every muscle in the body. If the latter be the case, we must ask whether the emotional _process_ in the sensory or motor centre be an altogether peculiar one, or whether it resembles the ordinary perceptive processes of which those centres are already recognized to be the seat. Now if the theory I have defended be true, the latter alternative is all that it demands. Supposing the cortex to contain parts, liable to be excited by changes in each special sense-organ, in each portion of the skin, in each muscle, each joint, and each viscus, and to contain absolutely nothing else, we still have a scheme capable of representing the process of the emotions. An object falls on a sense-organ, affects a cortical part, and is perceived; or else the latter, excited inwardly, gives rise to an idea of the same object. Quick as a flash, the reflex currents pass down through their preordained channels, alter the condition of muscle, skin, and viscus; and these alterations, perceived, like the original object, in as many portions of the cortex, combine with it in consciousness and transform it from an object-simply-apprehended into an object-emotionally-felt. No new principles have to be invoked, nothing postulated beyond the ordinary reflex circuits, and the local centres admitted in one shape or another by all to exist.

EMOTIONAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS.

_The revivability in memory of the emotions,_ like that of all the feelings of the lower senses, is very small. We can remember that we underwent grief or rapture, but not just how the grief or rapture felt. This difficult _ideal_ revivability is, however, more than compensated in the case of the emotions by a very easy _actual_ revivability. That is, we can produce, not remembrances of the old grief or rapture, but new griefs and raptures, by summoning up a lively thought of their exciting cause. The cause is now only an idea, but this idea produces the same organic irradiations, or almost the same, which were produced by its original, so that the emotion is again a reality. We have 'recaptured' it. Shame, love, and anger are particularly liable to be thus revived by ideas of their object. Professor Bain admits[417] that "in their strict character of emotion proper, they [the emotions] have the minimum of revivability; but being always incorporated with the sensations of the higher senses, they share in the superior revivability of sights and sounds." But he fails to point out that the revived sights and sounds may be _ideal_ without ceasing to be distinct; whilst the emotion, to be distinct, must become real again. Prof. Bain seems to forget that an 'ideal emotion' and a real emotion prompted by an ideal object are two very different things.

_An emotional temperament on the one hand, and a lively imagination for objects and circumstances on the other, are thus the conditions, necessary and sufficient, for an abundant emotional life._ No matter how emotional the temperament may be, if the imagination be poor, the occasions for touching off the emotional trains will fail to be realized, and the life will be _pro tanto_ cold and dry. This is perhaps a reason why it may be better that a man of thought should not have too strong a visualizing power. He is less likely to have his trains of meditation disturbed by emotional interruptions. It will be remembered that Mr. Galton found the members of the Royal Society and of the French Academy of Sciences to be below par in visualizing power. If I may speak of myself, I am far less able to visualize now, at the age of 46, than in my earlier years; and I am strongly inclined to believe that the relative sluggishness of my emotional life at present is quite as much connected with this fact as it is with the invading torpor of hoary eld, or with the omnibus-horse routine of settled professional and domestic life. I say this because I occasionally have a flash of the old stronger visual imagery, and I notice that the emotional commentary, so to call it, is then liable to become much more acute than is its present wont. Charcot's patient, whose case is given above on p. 58 ff., complained of his incapacity for emotional feeling after his optical images were gone. His mother's death, which in former times would have wrung his heart, left him quite cold; largely, as he himself suggests, because he could form no definite visual image of the event, and of the effect of the loss on the rest of the family at home.

One final generality about the emotions remains to be noted: _They blunt themselves by repetition more rapidly than any other sort of feeling._ This is due not only to the general law of 'accommodation' to their stimulus which we saw to obtain of all feelings whatever, but to the peculiar fact that the 'diffusive wave' of reflex effects tends always to become more narrow. It seems as if it were essentially meant to be a provisional arrangement, on the basis of which precise and determinate reactions might arise. The more we exercise ourselves at anything, the fewer muscles we employ; and just so, the oftener we meet an object, the more definitely we think and behave about it; and the less is the organic perturbation to which it gives rise. The first time we saw it we could perhaps neither act nor think at all, and had no reaction but organic perturbation. The emotions of startled surprise, wonder, or curiosity were the result. Now we look on with absolutely no emotion.[418] This tendency to economy in the nerve-paths through which our sensations and ideas discharge, is the basis of all growth in efficiency, readiness, and skill. Where would the general, the surgeon, the presiding chairman, be, if their nerve-currents kept running down into their viscera, instead of keeping up amid their convolutions? But what they gain for practice by this law, they lose, it must be confessed, for feeling. For the world-worn and experienced man, the sense of pleasure which he gets from the free and powerful flow of thoughts, overcoming obstacles as they arise, is the only compensation for that freshness of the heart which he once enjoyed. This free and powerful flow means that brain-paths of association and memory have more and more organized themselves in him, and that through them the stimulus is drafted off into nerves which lead merely to the writing finger or the speaking tongue.[419] The trains of _intellectual_ association, the memories, the logical relations, may, however, be voluminous in the extreme. Past emotions may be among the things remembered. The more of all these trains an object can set going in us, the richer our cognitive intimacy with it is. This cerebral sense of richness seems itself to be a source of pleasure, possibly even apart from the _euphoria_ which from time to time comes up from respiratory organs. If there _be_ such a thing as a purely spiritual emotion, I should be inclined to restrict it to this cerebral sense of abundance and ease, this feeling, as Sir W. Hamilton would call it, of unimpeded and not overstrained activity of thought. Under ordinary conditions, it is a fine and serene but not an excited state of consciousness. In certain intoxications it becomes exciting, and it may be intensely exciting. I can hardly imagine a more frenzied excitement than that which goes with the consciousness of seeing absolute truth, which characterizes the coming to from nitrous-oxide drunkenness. Chloroform, ether, and alcohol all produce this deepening sense of insight into truth; and with all of them it may be a 'strong' emotion; but then there also come with it all sorts of strange bodily feelings and changes in the incoming sensibilities. I cannot see my way to affirming that the emotion is independent of these. I will concede, however, that if its independence is anywhere to be maintained, these theoretic raptures seem the place at which to begin the defence.

THE GENESIS OF THE VARIOUS EMOTIONS.

On a former page (pp. 453-4) I said that two questions, and only two, are important, if we regard the emotions as constituted by feelings due to the diffusive wave.

(1) _What special diffusive effects do the various special objective and subjective experiences excite?_ and

(2) _How come they to excite them?_

The works on physiognomy and expression are all of them attempts to answer question 1. As is but natural, the effects upon the face have received the most careful attention. The reader who wishes details additional to those given above on pp. 443-7 is referred to the works mentioned in the note below.[420]

As regards question 2, some little progress has of recent years been made in answering it. Two things are certain:

_a._ The facial muscles of expression are not given us simply for expression's sake;[421]

_b._ Each muscle is not affected to some one emotion exclusively, as certain writers have thought.

Some movements of expression can be accounted for as _weakened repetitions of movements which formerly_ (when they were stronger) _were of utility to the subject._ Others are similarly weakened repetitions of movements which under other conditions were _physiologically necessary effects._ Of the latter reactions the respiratory disturbances in anger and fear might be taken as examples--organic reminiscences, as it were, reverberations in imagination of the blowings of the man making a series of combative efforts, of the pantings of one in precipitate flight. Such at least is a suggestion made by Mr. Spencer which has found approval. And he also was the first, so far as I know, to suggest that other movements in anger and fear could be explained by the nascent excitation of formerly useful acts.

"To have in a slight degree," he says, "such psychical states as accompany the reception of wounds, and are experienced during flight, is to be in a state of what we call fear. And to have in a slight degree such psychical states as the processes of catching, killing, and eating imply, is to have the desires to catch, kill, and eat. That the propensities to the acts are nothing else than nascent excitations of the psychical state involved in the acts, is proved by the natural language of the propensities. Fear, when strong, expresses itself in cries, in efforts to escape, in palpitations, in tremblings; and these are just the manifestations that go along with an actual suffering of the evil feared. The destructive passion is shown in a general tension of the muscular system, in gnashing of teeth and protrusion of the claws, in dilated eyes and nostrils, in growls; and these are weaker forms of the actions that accompany the killing of prey. To such objective evidences every one can add subjective evidences. Every one can testify that the psychical state called fear consists of mental representations of certain painful results; and that the one called anger consists of mental representations of the actions and impressions which would occur while inflicting some kind of pain."[422]

About fear I shall have more to say presently. Meanwhile the principle of _revival in weakened form of reactions useful in more violent dealings with the object inspiring the emotion,_ has found many applications. So slight a symptom as the snarl or sneer, the one-sided uncovering of the upper teeth, is accounted for by Darwin as a survival from the time when our ancestors had large canines, and unfleshed them (as dogs now do) for attack. Similarly the raising of the eyebrows in outward attention, the opening of the mouth in astonishment, come, according to the same author, from the utility of these movements in extreme cases. The raising of the eyebrows goes with the opening of the eye for better vision; the opening of the mouth with the intensest listening, and with the rapid catching of the breath which precedes muscular effort. The distention of the nostrils in anger is interpreted by Spencer as an echo of the way in which our ancestors had to breathe when, during combat, their "mouth was filled up by a part of an antagonist's body that had been seized(!)." The trembling of fear is supposed by Mantegazza to be for the sake of warming the blood(!). The reddening of the face and neck is called by Wundt a compensatory arrangement for relieving the brain of the blood-pressure which the simultaneous excitement of the heart brings with it. The effusion of tears is explained both by this author and by Darwin to be a blood-withdrawing agency of a similar sort. The contraction of the muscles around the eyes, of which the primitive use is to protect those organs from being too much gorged with blood during the screaming fits of infancy, survives in adult life in the shape of the frown, which instantly comes over the brow when anything difficult or displeasing presents itself either to thought or action.

"As the habit of contracting the brows has been followed by infants during innumerable generations, at the commencement of every crying or screaming fit," says Darwin, "it has become firmly associated with the incipient sense of something distressing or disagreeable. Hence, under similar circumstances, it would be apt to be continued during maturity, although never then developed, into a crying fit. Screaming or weeping begins to be voluntarily restrained at an early period of life, whereas frowning is hardly ever restrained at any age."[423]

The intermittent expirations which constitute laughter have, according to Dr. Hecker, the purpose of counteracting the anæmia of the brain, which he supposes to be brought about by the action of the joyous or comic stimulus upon the vaso-motor nerves.[424] A smile is the weak vestige of a laugh. The tight closure of the mouth in all effort is useful for retaining the air in the lungs so as to fix the chest and give a firm basis of insertion for the muscles of the flanks. Accordingly, we see the lips compress themselves upon every slight occasion of resolve. The blood-pressure has to be high during the sexual embrace; hence the palpitations, and hence also the tendency to caressing action, which accompanies tender emotion in its fainter forms. Other examples might be given; but these are quite enough to show the scope of the principle of revival of useful action in weaker form.

* * * * *

Another principle, to which Darwin perhaps hardly does sufficient justice, may be called the principle of _reacting similarly to analogous-feeling stimuli_. There is a whole vocabulary of descriptive adjectives common to impressions belonging to different sensible spheres--experiences of all classes are _sweet_, impressions of all classes _rich_ or _solid_, sensations of all classes _sharp_. Wundt and Piderit accordingly explain many of our most expressive reactions upon moral causes as symbolic gustatory movements. As soon as any experience arises which has an affinity with the feeling of sweet, or bitter, or sour, the same movements are executed which would result from the taste in point.[425] "All the states of mind which language designates by the metaphors bitter, harsh, sweet, combine themselves, therefore, with the corresponding mimetic movements of the mouth." Certainly the emotions of disgust and satisfaction do express themselves in this mimetic way. Disgust is an incipient regurgitation or retching, limiting its expression often to the grimace of the lips and nose; satisfaction goes with a sucking smile, or tasting motion of the lips. In Mantegazza's loose if learned work, the attempt is made, much less successfully, to bring in the eye and ear as additional sources of symbolically expressive reaction. The ordinary gesture of negation--among us, moving the head about its axis from side to side--is a reaction originally used by babies to keep disagreeables from getting into their mouth, and may be observed in perfection in any nursery.[426] It is now evoked where the stimulus is only an unwelcome idea. Similarly the nod forward in affirmation is after the analogy of taking food into the mouth. The connection of the expression of moral or social disdain or dislike, especially in women, with movements having a perfectly definite original olfactory function, is too obvious for comment. Winking is the effect of any threatening surprise, not only of what puts the eyes in danger; and a momentary aversion of the eyes is very apt to be one's first symptom of response to an unexpectedly unwelcome proposition.--These may suffice as examples of movements expressive from analogy.

But if certain of our emotional reactions can be explained by the two principles invoked--and the reader will himself have felt how conjectural and fallible in some of the instances the explanation is--there remain many reactions which cannot so be explained at all, and these we must write down for the present as purely idiopathic effects of the stimulus. Amongst them are the effects on the viscera and internal glands, the dryness of the mouth and diarrhœa and nausea of fear, the liver-disturbances which sometimes produce jaundice after excessive rage, the urinary secretion of sanguine excitement, and the bladder-contraction of apprehension, the gaping of expectancy, the 'lump in the throat' of grief, the tickling there and the swallowing of embarrassment, the 'precordial anxiety' of dread, the changes in the pupil, the various sweatings of the skin, cold or hot, local or general, and its flushings, together with other symptoms which probably exist but are too hidden to have been noticed or named. It seems as if even the changes of blood-pressure and heart-beat during emotional excitement might, instead of being teleologically determined, prove to be purely mechanical or physiological outpourings through the easiest drainage-channels--the pneumogastrics and sympathetic nerves happening under ordinary circumstances to be such channels.

Mr. Spencer argues that the _smallest_ muscles must be such channels; and instances the tail in dogs, cats, and birds, the ears in horses, the crest in parrots, the face and fingers in man, as the first organs to be moved by emotional stimuli.[427] This principle (if it be one) would apply still more easily to the muscles of the smaller arteries (though not exactly to the heart); whilst the great variability of the circulatory symptoms would also suggest that they are determined by causes into which utility does not enter. The quickening of the heart lends itself, it is true, rather easily to explanation by inherited habit, organic memory of more violent excitement; and Darwin speaks in favor of this view (see his Expression, etc., pp. 74-5). But, on the other hand, we have so many cases of reaction which are indisputably pathological, as we may say, and which could never be serviceable or derived from what was serviceable, that I think we should be cautious about pushing our explanations of the varied heart-beat too far in the teleological direction. Trembling, which is found in many excitements besides that of terror, is, _pace_ Mr. Spencer and Sig. Mantegazza, quite pathological. So are terror's other strong symptoms. Professor Mosso, as the total result of his study, writes as follows:

"We have seen that the graver the peril becomes, the more do the reactions which are positively harmful to the animal prevail in number and in efficacy. We already saw that the trembling and the palsy make it incapable of flight or defence; we have also convinced ourselves that in the most decisive moments of danger we are less able to see [or to think] than when we are tranquil. In face of such facts we must admit that the phenomena of fear cannot all be accounted for by 'selection.' Their extreme degrees are morbid phenomena which show an imperfection in the organism. We might almost say that Nature had not been able to frame a substance which should be excitable enough to compose the brain and spinal marrow, and yet which should not be so excited by exceptional stimulation as to overstep in its reactions those physiological bounds which are useful to the conservation of the creature."[428]

Professor Bain, if I mistake not, had long previously commented upon fear in a similar way.

Mr. Darwin accounts for many emotional expressions by what he calls the principle of antithesis. In virtue of this principle, if a certain stimulus prompted a certain set of movements, then a contrary-feeling stimulus would prompt exactly the opposite movements, although these might otherwise have neither utility nor significance. It is in this wise that Darwin explains the expression of impotence, raised eyebrows, and shrugged shoulders, dropped arms and open palms, as being the antithesis of the frowning brow, the thrown-back shoulders, and clenched fists of rage, which is the emotion of power. No doubt a certain number of movements can be formulated under this law; but whether it expresses a _causal_ principle is more than doubtful. It has been by most critics considered the least successful of Darwin's speculations on this subject.

To sum up, we see the reason for a few emotional reactions; for others a possible species of reason may be guessed; but others remain for which no plausible reason can even be conceived. These may be reactions which are purely mechanical results of the way in which our nervous centres are framed, reactions which, although permanent in us now, may be called accidental as far as their origin goes. In fact, in an organism as complex as the nervous system there _must_ be many such reactions, incidental to others evolved for utility's sake, but which would never themselves have been evolved independently, for any utility they might possess. Sea-sickness, the love of music, of the various intoxicants, nay, the entire æsthetic life of man, shall have to trace to this accidental origin.[429] It would be foolish to suppose that none of the reactions called emotional could have arisen in this _quasi_-accidental way.

This is all I have to say about the emotions. If one should seek to name each particular one of them of which the human heart is the seat, it is plain that the limit to their number would lie in the introspective vocabulary of the seeker, each race of men having found names for some shade of feeling which other races have left undiscriminated. If then we should seek to break the emotions, thus enumerated, into groups, according to their affinities, it is again plain that all sorts of groupings would be possible, according as we chose this character or that as a basis, and that all groupings would be equally real and true. The only question would be, does this grouping or that suit our purpose best? The reader may then class the emotions as he will, as sad or joyous, sthenic or asthenic, natural or acquired, inspired by animate or inanimate things, formal or material, sensuous or ideal, direct or reflective, egoistic or non-egoistic, retrospective, prospective or immediate, organismally or environmentally initiated, or what more besides. All these are divisions which have been actually proposed. Each of them has its merits, and each one brings together some emotions which the others keep apart. For a fuller account, and for other classificatory schemes, I refer to the Appendix to Bain's Emotions and the Will, and to Mercier's, Stanley's, and Read's articles on the Emotions, in Mind, vols. ix, x, and xi. In vol. ix. p. 421 there is also an article by the lamented Edmund Gurney in criticism of the view which in this chapter I continue to defend.

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[395] Parts of this chapter have already appeared in an article published in 1884 in Mind.

[396] Ueber Gemüthsbewegungen, uebersetzt von H. Kurella (Leipzig, 1887).

[397] The bronchial tubes may be contracted as well as the ramifications of the pulmonary artery. Professor J. Henle has, amongst his Anthropologische Vorträge, an exquisite one on the 'Natural History of the Sigh,' in which he represents our inspirations as the result of a battle between the red muscles of our skeleton, ribs, and diaphragm, and the white ones of the lungs, which seek to narrow the calibre of the air-tubes. "In the normal state the former easily conquer, but under other conditions they either conquer with difficulty or are defeated.... The contrasted emotions express themselves in similarly contrasted wise, by spasm and paralysis of the unstriped muscles, and for the most part alike in all the organs which are provided with them, as arteries, skin, and bronchial tubes. The contrast among the emotions is generally expressed by dividing them into exciting and depressing ones. It is a remarkable fact that the depressing emotions, like fear, horror, disgust, increase the contraction of these smooth muscles, whilst the exciting emotions, like joy, anger, etc., make them relax. Contrasts of temperature act similarly, cold like the depressing, and warmth like the exciting, emotions. Cold produces pallor and goose-flesh, warmth smooths out the skin and widens the vessels. If one notices the uncomfortable mood brought about by strained expectation, anxiety before a public address, vexation at an unmerited affront, etc., one finds that the suffering part of it concentrates itself principally in the chest, and that it consists in a soreness, hardly to be called pain, felt in the middle of the breast and due to an unpleasant resistance which is offered to the movements of inspiration, and sets a limit to their extent. The insufficiency of the diaphragm is obtruded upon consciousness, and we try by the aid of the external voluntary chest-muscles to draw a deeper breath. [This is the sigh.] If we fail, the unpleasantness of the situation is increased, for then to our mental distress is added the corporeally repugnant feeling of lack of air, a slight degree of suffocation. If, on the contrary, the outer muscles overcome the resistance of the inner ones, the oppressed breast is lightened. We think we speak symbolically when we speak of a stone weighing on our heart, or of a burden rolled from off our breast. But really we only express the exact fact, for we should have to raise the entire weight of the atmosphere (about 820 kilog.) at each inspiration, if the air did not balance it by streaming into our lungs." (P. 55.) It must not be forgotten that an inhibition of the inspiratory centre similar to that produced by exciting the superior laryngeal nerve may possibly play a part in these phenomena. For a very interesting discussion of the respiratory difficulty and its connection with anxiety and fear, see 'A Case of Hydrophobia' by the lamented Thos. B. Curtis in the Boston Med. and Surg. Journal, Nov. 7 and 14, 1878, and remarks thereon by James J. Putnam, _ibid._ Nov. 21.

[398] Origin of the Emotions, Darwin, pp. 290-2.

[399] La Physionomie et l'Expression des Sentiments (Paris, 1885), p. 140.

[400] Lange, _op. cit._ p. 75.

[401] Professor Höffding, in his excellent treatise on Psychology, admits (p. 342) the mixture of bodily sensation with purely spiritual affection in the emotions. He does not, however, discuss the difficulties of discerning the spiritual affection (nor even show that he has fairly considered them) in his contention that it exists.

[402] Ein Fall von allgemeiner Anæsthesie (Heidelberg, 1882).

[403] Ziemssen's Deutsches Archiv für klinische Medicin, xxii. 321.

[404] The not very uncommon cases of hysterical hemianæsthesia are not complete enough to be utilized in this inquiry. Moreover, the recent researches, of which some account was given in Chapter IV, tend to show that hysterical anæsthesia is not a real absence of sensibility, but a 'dissociation,' as M. Pierre Janet calls it, or splitting-off of certain sensations from the rest of the person's consciousness, this _rest_ forming the self which remains connected with the ordinary organs of expression. The split-off consciousness forms a secondary self; and M. Janet writes me that he sees no reason why sensations whose 'dissociation' from the body of consciousness makes the patient practically anæsthetic, might not, nevertheless, contribute to the emotional life of the patient. They do still contribute to the function of locomotion; for in his patient L. there was no ataxia in spite of the anæsthesia. M. Janet writes me, apropos of his anæsthetic patient L., that she seemed to 'suffer by hallucination.' "I have often pricked or burned her without warning, and when she did not see me. She never moved, and evidently perceived nothing. But if afterwards in her movements she caught sight of her wounded arm, and _saw_ on her skin a little drop of blood resulting from a slight cut, she would begin to cry out and lament as if she suffered a great deal. 'My blood flows,' she said one day; 'I _must be_ suffering a great deal!' She suffered by hallucination. This sort of suffering is very general in hysterics. It is enough for them to receive the slightest hint of a modification in their body, when their imagination fills up the rest and invents changes that were not felt." See the remarks published at a later date in Janet's Automatisme Psychologique, pp. 214-15.

[405] _Op. cit._ p. 63.

[406] It must be confessed that there are cases of morbid fear in which objectively the heart is not much perturbed. These, however, fail to prove anything against our theory, for it is of course possible that the cortical centres normally percipient of dread as a complex of cardiac and other organic sensations due to real bodily change, should become _primarily_ excited in brain-disease, and give rise to an hallucination of the changes being there,--an hallucination of dread, consequently, coexistent with a comparatively calm pulse, etc. I say it is possible, for I am ignorant of observations which might test the fact. Trance, ecstasy, etc., offer analogous examples,--not to speak of ordinary dreaming. Under all these conditions one may have the liveliest subjective feelings, either of eye or ear, or of the more visceral and emotional sort, as a result of pure nerve-central activity, and yet, as I believe, with complete peripheral repose.

[407] R. M. Bucke: Man's Moral Nature (N. Y., 1879), p. 97.

[408] Lange, _op. cit._ p. 61.

[409] I am inclined to think that in some hysteriform conditions of grief, rage, etc., the visceral disturbances are less strong than those which go to outward expression. We have then a tremendous verbal display with a hollow inside. Whilst the bystanders are wrung with compassion, or pale with alarm, the subject all the while lets himself go, but feels his insincerity, and wonders how long he can keep up the performance. The attacks are often surprisingly sudden in their onset. The treatment here is to intimidate the patient by a stronger will. Take out your temper, if he takes out his--"Nay, if thou'lt mouth, I'll rant as well as thou." These are the cases of apparently great bodily manifestation with comparatively little real subjective emotion, which may be used to throw discredit on the theory advanced in the text.--It is probable that the _visceral_ manifestations in these cases are quite disproportionately slight, compared with those of the vocal organs. The subject's state is somewhat similar to that of an actor who does not feel his part.

[410] _Op. cit._ p. 73.--Lange lays great stress on the neurotic drugs, as parts of his proof that influences of a physical nature upon the body are the first thing in order in the production of emotions.

[411] Emotions and Will, pp. 361-2.

[412] Quoted by Dugald Stewart, Elements, etc. (Hamilton's ed.), iii. 140. Fechner (Vorschule der Aesthetik, 156) says almost the same thing of himself: "One may find by one's own observation that the _imitation_ of the bodily expression of a mental condition makes us understand it much better than the merely looking on.... When I walk behind some one whom I do not know, and imitate as accurately as possible his gait and carriage, I get the most curious impression of feeling as the person himself must feel. To go tripping and mincing after the fashion of a young woman puts one, so to speak, in a feminine mood of mind."

[413] 'The Anatomy of Acting,' in Longman's Magazine, vol. xi. pp. 266, 375, 498 (1888), since republished in book form.

[414] P. 394.

[415] P. 496.

[416] Even the feelings of the lower senses may have this secondary escort, due to the arousing of associational trains which reverberate. A flavor may fairly shake us by the ghosts of 'banquet halls deserted,' which it suddenly calls up; or a smell may make us feel almost sick with the waft it brings over our memory of 'gardens that are ruins, and pleasure-houses that are dust.' "In the Pyrenees," says M. Guyau, "after a summer-day's tramp carried to the extreme of fatigue, I met a shepherd and asked him for some milk. He went to fetch from his hut, under which a brook ran, a jar of milk plunged in the water and kept at a coldness which was almost icy. In drinking this fresh milk _into which all the mountain had put its perfume_, and of which each savory swallow seemed to give new life, I certainly experienced a series of feelings which the word _agreeable_ is insufficient to designate. It was like a pastoral symphony, apprehended by the taste instead of by the ear" (quoted by F. Paulhan from 'Les Problèmes de l'Æsthétique Contemporaine,' p. 63).--Compare the dithyrambic about whiskey of Col. R. Ingersoll, to which the presidential campaign of 1888 gave such notoriety: "I send you some of the most wonderful whiskey that ever drove the skeleton from a feast or painted landscapes in the brain of man. It is the mingled souls of wheat and corn. In it you will find the sunshine and shadow that chase each other over the billowy fields, the breath of June, the carol of the lark, the dews of the night, the wealth of summer, and autumn's rich content--all golden with imprisoned light. Drink it, and you will hear the voice of men and maidens singing the 'Harvest Home,' mingled with the laughter of children. Drink it, and you will feel within your blood the star-lit dawns, the dreamy, tawny dusks of many perfect days. For forty years this liquid joy has been within the happy staves of oak, longing to touch the lips of man."--It is in this way that I should reply to Mr. Gurney's criticism on my theory. My "view," this writer says (Mind, ix. 425), "goes far to confound the two things which in my opinion it is the prime necessity of musical psychology to distinguish--the effect chiefly sensuous of mere streams or masses of finely colored sound, and the distinctive musical emotion to which _the form_ of a sequence of sound, its melodic and harmonic individuality, even realized in complete silence, is the vital and essential object. It is with the former of these two very different things that the physical reactions, the stirring of the hair--the tingling and the shiver--are by far most markedly connected.... If I may speak of myself, there is plenty of music from which I have received as much emotion in silent representation as when presented by the finest orchestra; but it is with the latter condition that I almost exclusively associate the cutaneous tingling and hair-stirring. But to call my enjoyment of the _form_, of the _note-after-note_ness of a melody a mere critical 'judgment of right' [see below, p. 473] would really be to deny to me the power of expressing a fact of simple and intimate expression in English. It is quintessentially emotion.... Now there are hundreds of other bits of music ... which I judge to be _right_ without receiving an iota of the emotion. For purposes of emotion they are to me like geometrical demonstrations or like acts of integrity performed in Peru." The Beethoven-rightness of which Gurney then goes on to speak, as something different from the Clementi-rightness (even when the respective pieces are only heard in idea), is probably a purely _auditory-sensational_ thing. The Clementi-rightness also; only, for reasons impossible to assign, the Clementi form does not give the same sort of purely auditory satisfaction as the Beethoven form, and might better be described perhaps negatively as _non-wrong_, i.e., free from positively unpleasant acoustic quality. In organizations as musical as Mr. Gurney's, purely acoustic form gives so intense a degree of sensible pleasure that the lower bodily reverberation is of no account. But I repeat that I see nothing in the facts which Mr. Gurney cites, to lead one to believe in an emotion divorced from _sensational processes_ of any kind.

[417] In his chapter on 'Ideal Emotion,' to which the reader is referred for farther details on this subject.

[418] Those feelings which Prof. Bain calls 'emotions of relativity,' excitement of novelty, wonder, rapture of freedom, sense of power, hardly survive any repetition of the experience. But as the text goes on to explain, and as Goethe as quoted by Prof. Höffding says, this is because "the soul is inwardly grown larger without knowing it, and can no longer be filled by that first sensation. The man thinks that he has lost, but really he has gained. What he has lost in rapture, he has gained in inward growth." "It is," as Prof. Höffding himself adds, in a beautiful figure of speech, "with our virgin feelings, as with the first breath drawn by the new-born child, in which the lung expands itself so that it can never be emptied to the same degree again. No later breath can feel just like that first one." On this whole subject of emotional blunting, compare Höffding's Psychologie, vi. E., and Bain's Emotions and Will, chapter iv. of the first part.

[419] M. Fr. Paulhan, in a little work full of accurate observations of detail (Les Phénomènes Affectifs et les Lois de leur Apparition), seems to me rather to turn the truth upside down by his formula that emotions are due to an inhibition of impulsive tendencies. _One_ kind of emotion, namely, uneasiness, annoyance, distress, does occur when any definite impulsive tendency is checked, and all of M. P.'s illustrations are drawn from this sort. The other emotions are themselves primary impulsive tendencies, of a diffusive sort (involving, as M. P. rightly says, a _multiplicité des phénomènes_); and just in proportion as more and more of these multiple tendencies are checked, and replaced by some few narrow forms of discharge, does the original emotion tend to disappear.

[420] A list of the older writings on the subject is given in Mantegazza's work, La Physionomie et l'Expression, chap. I; others in Darwin's first chapter. Bell's Anatomy of Expression, Mosso's La Paura, Piderit's Wissenschaftliches System der Mimik und Physiognomik, Duchenne's Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine, are, besides Lange and Darwin, the most useful works with which I am acquainted. Compare also Sully: Sensation and Intuition, chap. ii.

[421] One must remember, however, that just in so far forth as sexual selection may have played a part in determining the human organism, selection of expressive faces must have increased the average mobility of the human countenance.

[422] Psychol., § 213.

[423] Weeping in childhood is almost as regular a symptom of anger as it is of grief, which would account (on Darwin's principles) for the frown of anger. Mr. Spencer has an account of the angry frown as having arisen through the survival of the fittest, by its utility in keeping the sun out of one's eyes when engaged in mortal combat(!). (Principles of Psychology, ii. 546.) Professor Mosso objects to any explanation of the frown by its utility for vision, that it is coupled, during emotional excitement, with a dilatation of the pupil which is very unfavorable for distinct vision, and that this ought to have been weeded out by natural selection, if natural selection had the power to fix the frown (see La Paura, chap. ix. § vi). Unfortunately this very able author speaks as if all the emotions affected the pupil in the same way. Fear certainly does make it dilate. But Gratiolet is quoted by Darwin and others as saying that the pupils _contract_ in anger. I have made no observations of my own on the point, and Mosso's earlier paper on the pupil (Turin, 1875) I have not seen. I must repeat, with Darwin, that we need more minute observations on this subject.

[424] Physiologie u. Psychologie des Lachens und des Komischen (Berlin, 1873), pp. 13, 15.

[425] These movements are explained teleologically, in the first instance, by the efforts which the tongue is forced to make to adapt itself to the better perception or avoidance of the sapid body. (Cf. Physiol. Psych., ii. 423.)