to be carefully distinguished from complex emotions, are organizations of our instincts about the various objects and classes of objects that excite them, so as to become enduring tendencies to experience an established set of emotions. Love, for instance, is an enduring tendency to experience certain emotions whenever the loved object (which may be concrete—another person—or abstract—justice, beauty, one's fatherland) comes to mind, to feel tender emotion in its presence, anger when it is in danger, fear when it is threatened, etc. Sentiments, and modifications of afferent and efferent channels to instincts, appear throughout life, and are subject to intelligent control. They represent, if I understand McDougall correctly, the modifications in our native disposition usually classed as due to habit and intelligence, while the unchanging central dispositions, or capacities to experience emotions, represent the permanent nuclei within the instincts, about which all modifications grow.[1]
The list of primary instincts and emotions, while open to criticism, can, I believe, be regarded as roughly correct. The instincts are: flight with the emotion of fear; pugnacity with the emotion of anger; repulsion with the emotion of disgust; curiosity with the emotion of wonder; self-abasement with the emotion of subjection; self-assertion with the emotion of elation; the parental instinct with the tender emotion; and the reproductive, gregarious, acquisitive, and food-seeking instincts, whose emotions have not received names. Sympathy, suggestion, and imitation are innate tendencies by which one gregarious creature feels the same emotion, adopts irrationally the same idea, and acts in the same manner as another.
In this doctrine we have, it will be the endeavor of this paper to show, the requisite basis for an objective ethics that will rest upon purely psychological grounds, and can therefore claim to be scientific and empirical.
As the instincts are innate, and unmodifiable in their central,
- ↑ It should be explained that I am here applying Professor McDougall's doctrine to a different topic from those discussed in his Social Psychology, and I wish to apologize if I have misinterpreted him in details. The statements here made at any rate represent the doctrine in the form that I accept it, and believe it to be utilizable for the problem of this paper.
