What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible for me to think.Can one fancy the state of rage end picture no ebullition in the chest, no flushing of the face, no dilatation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face? The present writer, for one, certainly cannot.The rage is as completely evaporated as the sensation of its so-called manifestations, and the only thing that can possibly be supposed to take its place is some cold-blooded and dispassionate judicial sentence, confined entirely to the intellectual realm, to the effect that a certain person or persons merit chastisement for their sins.In like manner of grief: what would it be without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breast-bone? A feelingless cognition that certain circumstances are deplorable, and nothing more.Every passion in turn tells the same story.A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.I do not say that it is a contradiction in the nature of things, or that pure spirits are necessarily condemned to cold intellectual lives; but I say that for us , emotion dissociated from all bodily feeling is inconceivable.
The more closely I scrutinize my states, the more persuaded I become that whatever moods, affections, and passions I have are in very truth constituted by, and made up of, those bodily changes which we ordinarily call their expression or consequence; and the more it seems to me that if I were to become corporeally anæsthetic, I should be ex- cluded from the life of the affections, harsh and tender alike, and drag out an existence of merely cognitive or intellectual form.Such an existence, although it seems to have been the ideal of ancient sages, is too apathetic to be keenly sought after by those born after the revival of the worship of sensibility, a few generations ago.
Let not this view be called materialistic.It is neither more nor less materialistic than any other view which says that our emotions are conditioned by nervous processes.No reader of this book is likely to rebel against such a saying so long as it is expressed in general terms; and if any one still finds materialism in the thesis now defended, that must be because of the special processes invoked.They are sensational processes, processes due to inward currents set up by physical happenings.Such processes have, it is true, always been regarded by the platonizers in psychology as having something peculiarly base about them.But our emotions must always be inwardly what they are, whatever be the physiological ground of their apparition.If they are deep, pure, worthy, spiritual facts on any conceivable theory of their physiological source, they remain no less deep, pure, spiritual, and worthy of regard on this present sensational theory.They carry their own inner measure of worth with them; and it is just as logical to use the present theory of the emotions for proving that sensational processes need not be vile and material, as to use their vileness and materiality as a proof that such a theory cannot be true.
If such a theory is true, then each emotion is the resultant of a sum of elements, and each element is caused by a physiological process of a sort already well known.The elements are all organic changes, and each of them is the reflex effect of the exciting object.Definite questions now immediately arise -- questions very different from those which were the only possible ones without this view.Those were questions of classification:
"Which are the proper genera of emotion, and which the species under each?"
or of description: "By what expression is each emotion characterized?"
The questions now are causal : Just what changes does this object and what changes does that object excite?" and "How come they to excite these particular changes and not others?" We step from a superficial to a deep order of inquiry.Classification and description are the lowest stage of science.They sink into the background the moment questions of genesis are formulated, and remain important only so far as they facilitate our answering these.Now the moment the genesis of an emotion is accounted for, as the arousal by an object of a lot of reflex acts which are forthwith felt, we immediately see why there is no limit to the number of possible different emotions which may exist, and why the emotions of different individuals may vary indefinitely , both as to their constitution and as to objects which call them forth.For there is nothing sacramental or eternally fixed in reflex action.Any sort of reflex effect is possible, and reflexes actually vary indefinitely, as we know.
"We have all seen men dumb, instead of talkative, with joy; we have seen fright drive the blood into the head of its victim, instead of ****** him pale; we have seen grief run restlessly about lamenting, instead of sitting bowed down and mute; etc., etc., and this naturally enough, for one and the same cause can work differently on different men's blood-vessels (since these do not always react alike), whilst moreover the impulse on its way through the brain to the vaso-motor centre is differently influenced by different earlier impressions in the form of recollections or associations of ideas."
