will enable us to answer the questions of cause that Professor James propounds.
The experimental investigations of Mosso, Féré, Lehmann, and others have shown that the vaso-motor and such like bodily changes as are prominent in emotional excitement are present also to some extent in all forms of conscious activity. The more unwonted and interesting the situation, the more diffused movements predominate over movements that are purposive; the further assimilation, both on the cognitive and the reactive side, has advanced, the more diffusion is replaced by restriction and adaptation. But we are not warranted in separating these factors of voluntary activity into distinct processes, as the physiologist, for example, separates the functions of striped and unstriped muscle. Unless we are prepared to treat all activity as reflex—as the physiologist may quite well do, if he keep strictly to his own point of view—it does not seem possible to regard emotional expression as so much organic sensation with which purposive movement has nothing to do. No doubt this connexion of vegetal and animal functions remains one of the obscurest in all psycho-biology, though its teleological fitness, is obvious enough.
Nevertheless, Professor James's main position is that an emotion is but a sum of organic sensations; and in order to establish this he is led to the second and very different statement which we have now to examine. Here, so far from suggesting inquiries as to the “objects” that excite emotion, his point is to maintain that in so far as the bodily cause is set up, be the means what they may, in so far the emotion is present.[1] And here, at length, the contention is explicit: Emotions are a certain complex of organic sensations, and such complexes are emotions: the two are not merely coexistent, they are identical. The exciting object is thus, after all, physiological; that is to say, it is whatever stimulus sets up the sensations. It cannot be psychological, “the total situation for the reacting subject,” for in this sense the emotion, it is maintained, may be “objectless.” In support of his position Professor James first of all cites pathological cases of such objectless emotion. He next follows up these with accounts of other cases in which emotional apathy seemed to keep pace with sensory anaesthesia, arguing that, according to his theory, a subject absolutely anaesthetic should also be incapable of emotion, although “emotion-inspiring objects might evoke the usual bodily expression from him.” Whether any testimony from lunatics, hypnotics and other minds diseased could suffice to establish this novel doctrine is questionable: that the evidence so far adduced is insufficient, Professor James himself seems to allow. There are some four or five of the apathetic cases altogether: three of them are regarded by the mental pathologists who describe them as adverse to Professor James's theory.[2] Of the fourth case, reported by a pathologist on Professor James's side, the latter himself candidly observes, “We must remember that the patient's inemotivity may have been a co-ordinate result with the anaesthesia of his neural lesions, and not the anaesthesia's mere effect.” This missing link in the argument is supplied by the experiments of Professor Sherrington,[3] and these show conclusively that normal emotional states are possible along with complete visceral anaesthesia. As to emotional excitement induced by intoxication or disease, and so far groundless, the most that can safely be said is that the object may be vague, ill-defined and shifting, but not that it is absent altogether. States of physical exaltation, depression or irritability readily arouse by association appropriate troupes of imagery; only when they fail of this are we entitled to say that there is no object, and then we must add that there is also no emotion.
Emotional and Conative Action.
35. As in dealing with the causes of feeling, so we may now in like manner proceed to inquire whether in its manifestations or effects there is any contrast corresponding to the opposing extremes of pleasure and pain. We have already seen reasons for dismissing reflex movements or movements not determined by feeling as psychologically secondary, the effects of habit and heredity, and for regarding those diffusive movements that are immediately expressive of feeling as primordial-such movements as are strictly purposive being gradually selected or elaborated from them. But some distinction is called for among the various movements expressive of emotion; for there is more in these than the direct effect of feeling regarded as merely pleasure or pain. It has been usual with psychologists to confound emotions with feeling, because intense feeling is essential to emotion. But, strictly speaking, a state of emotion is a complete state of mind, a psychosis, and not a psychical element, if we may so say. Thus in anger we have over and above pain a more or less definite object as its cause, and a certain characteristic reactive display—frowns, compressed lips, erect head, clenched fists, in a word, the combative attitude—as its effect, and similarly of other emotions; so that generally in the particular movements indicative of particular emotions the primary and primitive effects of feeling are overlaid by what Darwin has called serviceable associated habits. The purposive actions of an earlier stage of development become, though somewhat atrophied as it were, the emotive outlet of a later stage: in the circumstances in which our ancestors worried their enemies we only show our teeth. We must, therefore, leave aside the more complex emotional manifestations and look only to the simplest effects of pleasure and of pain, if we are to discover any fundamental contrast between them.[4]
Joy finds expression in dancing, clapping the hands and meaningless laughter, and these actions are not only pleasurable Emotional Expression. in themselves but such as increase the existing pleasure. Attention is not drafted off or diverted; but rather the available resources seem reinforced, so that the old expenditure is supported as well as the new. To the pleasure on the receptive side is added pleasure on the active side. The violent contortions due to pain, on the other hand, are painful in themselves, though less intense than the pains from which they withdraw attention; they are but counter-irritants that arrest or inhibit still more painful thoughts or sensations. Thus, according to Darwin, “sailors who are to be flogged sometimes take a piece of lead into their mouths in order to bite it with their utmost force, and thus to bear the pain.” When in this way we take account of the immediate effects as well as of the causes of feeling, we find it still more strikingly true that only in pleasurable states is there an efficient expenditure of attention. It is needless now to dwell upon this point, although any earlier mention of it would hardly have been in place. But we should fail to realize the contrast between the motor effects of pleasure and of pain if we merely regarded them as cases of diffusion. The intenser the feeling the intenser the reaction, no doubt, whether it be smiles or tears, jumping for joy, or writhing in agony; but in the movements consequent on pleasure the diffusion is the result of mere exuberance, an overflow of good spirits, as we sometimes say, and these movements, as already remarked, are always comparatively purposeless or playful. Even the earliest expressions of pain, on the contrary, seem but so many efforts to escape from the cause of it; in them there is at least the blind purpose to flee from a definite ill, but in pleasure only the enjoyment of present fortune.
From Plato downwards psychologists and moralists have been fond of discussing the relation of pleasure and pain. It has been maintained that pain is the first and more fundamental fact, and pleasure nothing but relief from pain; and, again, on the other side, that pleasure is prior and positive, and pain only the negation of pleasure. So far as the mere change goes, it is obviously true that the diminution of pain is pro tanto pleasant, and the diminution of pleasure pro tanto unpleasant; and if relativity had the unlimited range sometimes assigned to it this would be all we could say. But we must sooner or later recognize the existence of a comparatively fixed neutral state, deviations from which, of comparatively short duration and of sufficient intensity, constitute distinct states of pleasure or pain. Such states, if not of liminal intensity, may then be further diminished without reversing
- ↑ Text-Book of Psychology (1890), p. 383.
- ↑ G. H. J. Berkley, “Two Cases of General Cutaneous and Sensory Anaesthesia without marked Psychical Implications,” Brain (1891), xxv. 441 sqq.
- ↑ “Experiments on the Value of Vascular and Visceral Factors for the Genesis of Emotion,” Proc. Roy. Soc. (1900), lxvi. 390 sqq.; and Nature, lxii. 328 sqq.
- ↑ Of the three principles Darwin advances in explanation of emotional expression that which he places last—perhaps because it admits of less definite illustration—seems both psychologically and physiologically more fundamental than the more striking principle of serviceable associated habits which he places first; indeed the following, which is his statement of it, implies as much: “Certain actions which we recognize as expressive of certain states of mind are the direct result of the constitution of the nervous system, and have been from the first independent of the will, and to a large extent of habit” (Expression of the Emotions, p. 66). It is in illustration of this principle too that Darwin describes the movements expressive of joy and grief, emotions which in some form or other are surely the most primitive of any.
