Anger, hatred, fear, terror, attraction, love, hunger, eagerness, massive enjoyment, are feelings and emotions closely entwined with the primitive functioning of ‘retreat from’ and of ‘expansion towards.’ They arise in the higher organism as states due to a vivid apprehension that some such primitive mode of functioning is dominating the organism. But ‘retreat from’ and ‘expansion towards,’ divested of any detailed spatial discrimination, are merely reactions to the way externality is impressing on us its own character. You cannot retreat from mere subjectivity; for subjectivity is what we carry with us. Normally, we have almost negligible sense-presentations of the interior organs of our own bodies.
These primitive emotions are accompanied by the clearest recognition of other actual things reacting upon ourselves. The vulgar obviousness of such recognition is equal to the vulgar obviousness produced by the functioning of any one of our five senses. When we hate, it is a man that we hate and not a collection of sense-data—a causal, efficacious man. This primitive obviousness of the perception of ‘conformation’ is illustrated by the emphasis on the pragmatic aspect of occurrences, which is so prominent in modern philosophical
