DISCUSSIONS.
DESIDERATA IN PSYCHOLOGY.
There is much confusion in recent discussions about Emotion which might be avoided if there were better agreement about the classification of mental phenomena. Nor is the question wholly a matter of formal definition. It is rather an indefinite and indecisive opinion regarding the phenomena which have been so vaguely denominated Emotion. The chief difficulty seems to be that the tripartite division of mental phenomena is tacitly accepted, while at the same time Emotion is used, now to denote pleasure and pain, and again to denote the motor excitement issuing in muscular expression. What is required here, to reach an understanding, is some agreement as to mental classification, and we can then discuss theories.
Hamilton and Kant use Emotion to cover the passions as well as pleasure and pain, and they have been quietly followed by most of the English psychologists. An exhaustive account of the school is not needed at present. Professor Dewey uses "feeling" for this term in his psychology and includes in it pleasure and pain and the springs to action, though placing "desire" under the will. But in a recent article he uses "emotion" to denote a sort of dynamic aspect of consciousness giving rise to muscular expression, apparently making it distinct from pleasure and pain on the one hand and from desire on the other. Professor James limits Emotion to the same phenomena, and says nothing about the pleasure-pain question. Mr. Marshall also adopts this conception, and is among the very few, if he is not the only person, who insists upon a radical distinction between this dynamic aspect of consciousness and the static nature of pleasure and pain.
I do not intend, however, to catalogue the various conceptions of Emotion. A few of them suffice to indicate the type of confusion which exists in a discussion that does not start with a frank and conscious abandonment of the traditional classification and the associated conceptions connected with it. An illustration of this confusion can be found by alluding to the doctrine of Professor James which immediately gave so much offense to psychologists, and which he has recently abandoned.[1] He had maintained that Emotion was the con-
- ↑ Psychological Review, vol. I.
