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Title: The Psychology of the Emotions
Author: Ribot, Th. (Théodule)
Language: English
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EMOTIONS ***
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_THE CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE SERIES._
---------------------------------------------------------
EDITED BY HAVELOCK ELLIS.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF
THE EMOTIONS
BY
TH. RIBOT
PROFESSOR AT THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE, EDITOR OF THE
“REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.”
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LONDON
WALTER SCOTT, LTD., PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1897
PREFACE.
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The psychology of states of feelings, it is generally recognised, is
still in a confused and backward condition. Although it has benefited in
some measure by the contemporary allurement of psychological research,
it must be acknowledged that it has only exerted a moderate seduction
upon workers; the preference has been given to other studies, such as
those of perception, of memory, of images, of movement, of attention. If
any proof is necessary we may find it in the bibliographies, now
published in Germany, America, and France, which give the psychological
inventory of each year; of the whole number of books, memoirs, and
articles which appear, less than the twentieth part, on an average,
relates to the feelings and emotions. It is a very small part compared
to the part played by the emotions and passions in human life, and this
region of psychology is not deserving of such neglect. It is true that
in recent years W. James and Lange seem to have brought this state of
stagnation to an end. Their thesis, paradoxical in appearance, has
aroused, especially in America, many discussions, criticisms, defences,
and, what is of more value, observations and researches.
It must be acknowledged that for those who have any care for precision
and clearness the study of the feelings and emotions presents great
difficulties. Internal observation, always an uncertain guide which
leads us but a little way, is here especially questionable. Experiment
has given some very useful results, but they are much less important and
numerous than in other regions of psychology. Detailed researches and
monographs are lacking, so that the subject abounds with questions on
which little light has yet been thrown. Finally, the dominant prejudice
which assimilates emotional states to intellectual states, considering
them as analogous, or even treating the former as dependent oh the
latter, can only lead to error.
We have, in fact, in every study of the psychology of feeling to choose
between two radically distinct positions, and this choice involves a
difference in method. Concerning the final and essential nature of
states of feeling there are two contrary opinions. According to one,
they are secondary and derived, the qualities, modes, or functions of
knowledge; they only exist through it; they are “confused intelligence”:
that is the _intellectualist_ thesis. According to the other, they are
primitive, autonomous, not reducible to intelligence, able to exist
outside it and without it; they have a totally different origin: that is
the thesis which under its present form may be called _physiological_.
These two doctrines exhibit variations which I ignore, as I am not
writing their history, but they all come into one or the other of these
two great currents.
The intellectualist theory, which is of considerable age, has found its
most complete expression in Herbart and his school, for whom every state
of feeling only exists through the reciprocal relation of
representations; every emotion results from the co-existence in the mind
of ideas which agree or disagree; it is the immediate consciousness of
the momentary elevation or depression of psychic activity, of a free or
impeded state of tension. But it does not exist by itself; it resembles
musical harmonies and dissonances, which differ from elementary sounds
though only existing through them. Suppress every intellectual state,
and feeling vanishes; it only possesses a borrowed life, that of a
parasite. The influence of Herbart still persists in Germany, and, with
some exceptions (Horwicz, Schneider, etc.), complete or mitigated
intellectualism predominates.
The doctrine which I have called physiological (Bain, Spencer, Maudsley,
James, Lange[1]) connects all states of feeling with biological
conditions, and considers them as the direct and immediate expression of
the vegetative life. It is the thesis which has been adopted, without
any restriction, in this work. From this standpoint feelings and
emotions are no longer a superficial manifestation, a simple
efflorescence; they plunge into the individual’s depths; they have their
roots in the needs and instincts, that is to say, in movements.
Consciousness only delivers up a part of their secrets; it can never
reveal them completely; we must descend beneath it. No doubt it is
awkward to have to invoke an unconscious activity, to call in the
intervention of an obscure and ill-determined factor; but to wish to
reduce emotional states to clear and definite ideas, or to imagine that
by this process we can fix them, is to misunderstand them completely and
to condemn ourselves beforehand to failure.
-----
Footnote 1:
It may be doubted whether all the English writers here mentioned can
be strictly classed with the physiological school as understood by M.
Ribot. With regard to Mr. Spencer, for instance, this is indicated by
a brief summary of his own position in a private letter to the Rev.
Angus Mackay, who had presented a statement of the “confused
intelligence” theory, “which I conceive to be a part of the truth,”
wrote Mr. Spencer, adding that “joined with the dimly aroused
association of ideas derived from the experiences of the individual, I
hold that the body of the emotion consists more largely of the
inherited associations of experiences and still more vague states of
consciousness which result from excitement of them.” It is clear that
the evolutionary view does not necessarily fall wholly into the
“physiological” group.—ED.
-----
For the rest, this is neither the place to criticise the intellectualist
thesis, nor to justify the other in passing; the whole work is devoted
to this task.
The book consists of two parts. The first studies the more general
manifestations of feeling: pleasure and pain, the characteristic signs
of this form of psychic life, everywhere diffused under manifold
aspects; then the nature of emotion, a complex state which in the order
of feelings corresponds to perception in the order of knowledge.
The second deals with the special emotions. This detailed study is of
great importance for reasons which will be explained later on,
especially because we must not rest in generalities; it furnishes a
means of control and verification. The nature of the emotional life
cannot be understood unless we follow it in its incessant
transformations—that is to say, in its history. To separate it from
social, moral, and religious institutions, from the æsthetic and
intellectual movements which translate it and incarnate it, is to reduce
it to a dead and empty abstraction. Thus an attempt has been made to
follow all the emotions one after the other in the progress of their
development, noting the successive movements of their evolution or their
retrogression.
The pathology of each emotion has been sketched to complete and throw
light on the study. I have tried to show that beneath an appearance of
confusion, incoherence, and promiscuity, there is, from the morbid to
the normal, from the complex to the simple, a conducting thread which
will always bring us back to the point of origin.
A work which has for its aim to set forth the present situation of the
psychology of feeling and emotion might have been made very long. By
eliminating every digression and all historical exposition, it has been
made as short as possible.
TH. RIBOT.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION—THE EVOLUTION OF THE AFFECTIVE LIFE 1
In all affective manifestations there are two elements:
the motor states or impulses, which are primary; the
agreeable or painful states, which are
secondary—Unconscious (organic or protoplasmic)
sensibility; micro-organisms—Chemical interpretation;
psychological interpretation—Are there pure states of
feeling?—Affirmative facts—The period of needs, the
instinct of conservation-The period of primitive
emotions—How they may be determined; the genetic or
chronological method—Fear, anger, affection, the
self-feeling, sexual emotion—Are joy and grief
emotions?—The abstract emotions and their conditions—The
passions are the equivalent in feeling of an intellectual
obsession.
_Part I._—GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY.
CHAPTER I.
PHYSICAL PAIN 25
Its anatomical and physiological conditions; pain nerves,
transmission to the centres—Modifications of the organism
accompanying physical pain: circulation, respiration,
nutrition, movements—Are they the effects of pain?—Pain is
only a sign—The analgesias: unconsciousness of pain and
intellectual consciousness—Retardation of pain after
sensation—Hyperalgesia—Nature of pain: theory that it is a
sensation; theory that it is a quality of sensation—Pain
may result from the quality or the intensity of the
stimulus—Hypotheses regarding its ultimate cause: it
depends on a form of movement, a chemical modification.
CHAPTER II.
MORAL PAIN 42
Identity of all the forms of pain—Evolution of moral pain:
(1) the pure result of memory; (2) connected with
representations; positive form, negative form; (3)
connected with concepts—Its external study; physical
signs—Therapeutics—Conclusions—A typical case of
hypochondriasis.
CHAPTER III.
PLEASURE 48
Subject little studied—Is Pleasure a sensation or a
quality?—Its physical concomitants: circulation,
respiration, movements—Pleasure, like pain, is separable:
physical and moral anhedonia—Identity of the different
forms of pleasure—The alleged transformation of pleasure
into pain—Common ground of the two states—Hypothesis of a
difference in kind and in degree—Simultaneity of two
opposite processes: what falls under consciousness is the
result of a difference—Physiological facts in support of
the above.
CHAPTER IV.
MORBID PLEASURES AND PAINS 61
Utility of the pathological method—Search for a criterion
of the morbid state; abnormal reaction through excess or
defect; apparent disproportion between cause and effect;
chronicity—I. Morbid pleasures, not peculiar to advanced
civilisation—Different attempts at explanation—This state
cannot be explained by normal psychology: it is the
rudimentary form of the suicidal
tendency—Classification—Semi-pathological pleasures: those
destructive of the individual, those destructive of the
social order—II. Abnormal pains—Melancholic type—Whence
does the painful state arise in its permanent form? from
an organic disposition? or from a fixed idea?—Examples of
the two cases.
CHAPTER V.
THE NEUTRAL STATES 73
Two methods of study—Affirmative thesis founded on
observation, deduction, and psycho-physics—Negative
thesis: the psychological trinity; confusion between
consciousness and introspection—Diversity of temperaments.
CHAPTER VI.
CONCLUSIONS ON PLEASURE AND PAIN 80
The beginning of life—I. Conditions of existence of
pleasure and pain; lowering and heightening of vital
energy—Féré’s experiments—Meynert’s theory—II. Finality of
pleasure and pain—Exceptions: explicable cases;
irreducible cases.
CHAPTER VII.
THE NATURE OF EMOTION 91
Analogy between perception and emotion—Constituent
elements of emotion—Summary of the theory of James and
Lange—Application of this theory to the higher emotions
(religious, moral, æsthetic, intellectual)—Illegitimate
confusion between the quality and intensity of
emotion—Examination of a typical case: musical emotion—The
most emotional of all the arts is the most dependent on
physiological conditions—Proofs: its action on animals, on
primitive man, on civilised man; its therapeutic
action—Why certain sensations, images, and ideas awaken
organic and motor states, and, consequently, emotion—They
are connected either with natural or social conditions of
existence—Differences and resemblances between the two
cases—Antecedents of the physiological theory of
emotion—Dualist position, or that of the relation between
cause and effect—Unitary position; its advantages.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE INTERNAL CONDITIONS OF EMOTION 113
Confused state of this question—Popular _versus_ Medical
Psychology—Part played by the brain, the centre of psychic
life—Hypotheses on the “seat” of the emotions—Part played
by the heart, the centre of vegetative life—Popular
metaphors and their physiological interpretation—Are the
internal sensations reducible to a single process?—Part
played by chemical action in the genesis of emotion—Cases
of the introduction of toxic
substances—Auto-intoxication—Modifications in the course
of mental maladies.
CHAPTER IX.
THE EXTERNAL CONDITIONS OF EMOTION 124
Empiric period—Pre-Darwinian period of scientific
research—Examination of Darwin’s three principles—Wundt
and his explanatory formulas: Innervation directly
modified, Association of analogous sensations, Relations
of motion with sensory representations.
CHAPTER X.
CLASSIFICATIONS 130
Their discrepancies—Reduced to three types: (1)
Classification of pleasures and pains—(2) Classification
of emotions: two forms, empiric and
analytico-comparative—(3) Classification of
representations, intellectualist form—Critical
remarks—Impossibility of any classification.
CHAPTER XI.
THE MEMORY OF FEELINGS 140
Can emotional images be revived, spontaneously or
voluntarily?—Summary of scattered facts relating to this
subject—Inquiry into this question, and method
followed—Emotional and gustative images—Internal
sensations (hunger, thirst, fatigue, disgust,
etc.)—Pleasures and pains; observations—Emotions: three
distinct forms of revivability according to
observations—Reduction of the images to three groups:
revivability, direct and easy, indirect and comparatively
easy, difficult and sometimes direct, sometimes
indirect—The revivability of a representation is in
proportion to its complexity and the motor elements
included in it—Reservations to be made on this last
point—Is there such a thing as a real emotional
memory?—Two cases: false or abstract, and true or concrete
memory—Peculiar characters and differences of each
case—Change of the emotional into an intellectual
recollection—Emotional amnesia: its practical
consequences—There exists a general emotional type and
partial emotional types—Confirmatory
observations—Comparative revivability of agreeable and
disagreeable states—To feel acutely and to recall an acute
impression of the feeling are two different operations.
CHAPTER XII.
THE FEELINGS AND THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS 172
The function of the feelings, as the cause of
association—The law of affective association, conceived as
general, and as local—I. Function of unconscious feeling:
ancestral or hereditary unconsciousness; personal
unconsciousness arising from cœnæsthesia; personal
unconsciousness arising from the events of our life—Law of
transference by contiguity, by resemblance: wide or
narrow—II. Function of the conscious feelings: accidental
cases, permanent cases, exceptional or rare cases.
_Part II._—SPECIAL PSYCHOLOGY.
INTRODUCTION 187
Importance of the study of special feelings—Utility of
historical documents—Causes of the evolution of the
feelings: (1) intellectual development; (2) hereditary
influence, perhaps reducible to influences of
environment—Cases in which the evolution of ideas precedes
that of feelings—Inverse cases—The intellect swayed by the
principle of contradiction; feeling by that of
finality—Classification of primitive tendencies—Method to
be followed—Group I.: physiological (reception,
transformation, restitution)—Group II.:
psychophysiological—Group III.: psychological—Their
enumeration.
CHAPTER I.
THE INSTINCT OF CONSERVATION IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL FORM 199
Hypothesis regarding the relation between the nutritive
organs and the brain—Perversion of the instincts relating
to nutrition—Pathology of hunger and thirst—Proofs
furnished of the priority of these tendencies in relation
to pleasure and pain—Facts in support of this—Negative
tendency; disgust—Its biological value as a protective
instinct.
CHAPTER II.
FEAR 207
Fear the conservative instinct under its defensive
form—Physiology—Psychology—First stage: Instinctive
fear—Hypothesis of heredity—Second stage: Fear founded on
experience—Pathology—Morbid or pathological fears—Two
periods in their study—Attempts at classification—How are
they derived from normal fear? Two groups, connected
respectively with fear and disgust—Inquiry into the
immediate causes: events in life of which a recollection
has been retained; of which no recollection has been
retained—Occasional transformation of a vague state into a
precise form.
CHAPTER III.
ANGER 218
Anger the conservative instinct in its offensive
form—Physiology—Psychology—Anger passes through two
stages, one simple, the other mixed—Its evolution—Animal
form, or that of actual aggression—Emotional form, or that
of simulated aggression—Appearance of a pleasurable
element—Intellectualised form, or that of deferred
aggression—Pathology: Epileptic insanity, corresponding to
the animal form; the maniacal state, corresponding to the
affective form—Disintegrated forms of anger—Overpowering
tendencies to destructiveness—How do they arise and take a
definite direction?—Return to the reflex state—Essential
cause: temperament—Accidental causes.
CHAPTER IV.
SYMPATHY AND THE TENDER EMOTIONS 230
Sympathy is not an instinct, but a highly generalised
psycho-physiological property—Complete sense and
restricted sense—Physiological phase:
imitation—Psychological phase: first stage, psychological
unison; second stage, addition of tender emotion—Tender
emotion—Its physiological expression—Its relations with
touch—The smile—Tears: hypotheses as to their
causes—Tender emotion indecomposable.
CHAPTER V.
THE EGO AND ITS EMOTIONAL MANIFESTATIONS 239
Reducible to one primary fact: the feeling of strength or
weakness—Positive form: type, pride. Its physiological and
psychological characteristics. Its relation to joy and
anger. Its evolution—Negative form: humility. Its
semi-social character—Pathology, positive form: monomania
of power, megalomania—Extreme negative form: suicidal
tendency—Psychological problem of this practical negation
of the fundamental instinct.
CHAPTER VI.
THE SEXUAL INSTINCT 248
Its physiology—Its evolution: Instinctive period—Emotional
period (Individual choice)—Intellectual period (Platonic
love)—Its pathology—How can sexual instinct deviate from
the normal course?—Anatomical and social
causes—Psychological causes: (_a_) unconscious, (_b_)
conscious.
CHAPTER VII.
TRANSITION FROM THE SIMPLE TO THE COMPLEX EMOTIONS 260
The complex emotions are derived from the simple (1) by
way of complete evolution; in a homogeneous form:
Examples—In a heterogeneous form: Examples—(2) by arrest
of development—(3) by composition; two forms—Composition
by mixture; with convergent elements; with divergent
elements—Composition by combination (sublimity,
humour)—Modesty—Is it an instinct?—Hypotheses as to its
origin.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE SOCIAL AND MORAL FEELINGS 275
Origin of the Social Feelings—Animal societies—Nutritive
societies—The individual and society—Domestic
societies—Social instinct has its source neither in sexual
nor in maternal love—Gregarious societies—Attraction of
like for like—Origin of social tendencies—Accidental and
transitory unions, of variable duration, and voluntary—The
social tendencies arise from the conditions of
existence—Social life does not spring from domestic
life—The higher societies among animals: they exclude
family relations—Human societies—Two opposite theories of
their origin: the family, the horde—Evolution of the
family-Evolution of social life—The family and the clan
not similar institutions—The moral sense. Two views of its
origin: (_a_) the intellectual, (_b_) the emotional—They
correspond to two stages in its development—Its innateness
and its necessity belong to the motor, not the
intellectual order—Genesis of the benevolent feeling.
Psychological analysis of its generative elements. Facts
in support of this—Discoverers in morality—Genesis of the
sense of justice—Phases of its development—Conclusion:
complexity of the moral sense—Pathology. Elimination of
the questions of criminal anthropology. Moral
insensibility.
CHAPTER IX.
THE RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 304
Importance of the subject—Its Divisions. First Period:
origin of the religious feeling—Primitive notions of the
Infinite (Max Müller); Ancestor-worship (H.
Spencer)—Fetichism, animism; Predominance of
fear—Practical, utilitarian, social, but not moral
character—Second period: (1) Intellectual evolution;
Conception of a Cosmic Order first physical, then
moral—Function of increasing generalisation; its stages;
(2) Emotional evolution; Predominance of love; addition of
the moral sentiment—Third Period: Supremacy of the
rational element; Transformation into religious
philosophy; Effacement of the emotional element—Religious
emotion is a complete emotion—Manifold physiological
states accompanying it; ritual, a special form of the
expression of emotion—The religious sentiment as a
passion—Pathology—Depressive forms: religious melancholy,
demonomania—Exalted forms: ecstasy, theomania.
CHAPTER X.
THE ÆSTHETIC SENTIMENT 328
Its origin: the theory of play, and its variants—Æsthetic
activity is the play of the creative imagination in its
disinterested form. Its instinctive nature—Transition from
simple play to aesthetic play: primitive art of pantomimic
dancing—Derivation of the arts in motion; of the arts at
rest—Why was æsthetic activity evolved?—Art had, in the
beginning, a social utility—Evolution of the æsthetic
sentiment—Its sociological aspect: progression from the
strictly social character towards individualism in the
different arts—Its anthropological aspect: progress from
strictly human character towards beings and things as a
whole—The feeling for nature—The feeling for the sublime
only partially belongs to æsthetics—Its evolution: it is
not æsthetic in its origin, but becomes so—Why there are
not two æsthetic senses—The sense of the comic—Psychology
of laughter—It has more than one cause—Theory of
superiority. Theory of discord—These correspond to two
distinct stages, one of which is foreign to
æsthetics—Physiology of laughter. Theory of nervous
derivation—Theory of tickling—Pathology. Are there cases
of complete æsthetic insensibility? Difficulties and
transpositions of the subject—Pathological function of
emotion: pessimistic tendencies, megalomania, influence of
unconscious activity—Pathological aspects of the creative
imagination; its degrees—Reason why the intense image, in
artists, does not pass into action; ways in which it is
modified—Cause of this deviation; its advantages.
CHAPTER XI.
THE INTELLECTUAL SENTIMENT 368
Its origin: the craving for knowledge—Its
evolution—Utilitarian period: surprise, astonishment,
interrogation—Disinterested period: transition
forms—Classification according to intellectual
states—Classification according to emotional states:
dynamic forms, static forms—Period of passion: its
rarity—Pathology—Simple doubt—Dramatic doubt—_Folie du
doute_—Mysticism in science: deviation comes, not from the
object, but from the method of research.
CHAPTER XII.
NORMAL CHARACTERS 380
Necessity of the synthetic point of view in
psychology—Historical summary of theories of character:
physiological direction, psychological direction—Two marks
of the real character: unity, stability—Elimination of
acquired characters—Classificatory procedure: four
degrees—Genera: the sensitive, the active, the
apathetic—Species—Secondary function of the intellect: its
mode of action—Sensitives: the humble, the contemplative,
the analytical, the purely emotional—Active type: the
medium, the superior—Apathetic type: pure type,
intelligent type, calculators—Varieties: the
sensitive-active, the apathetic-active, the
apathetic-sensitive, the temperate—Substitutes for
character: partial characters; (_a_) intellectual form,
(_b_) emotional form.
CHAPTER XIII.
ABNORMAL AND MORBID CHARACTERS 405
Are all normal characters mutually equivalent?—Attempt at
classification according to their value-Marks of abnormal
character: absence of unity, impossibility of
prevision—Class I. Successive contradictory characters:
anomalies, conversions; their psychological mechanism.
Alternating characters—Second class: Contradictory
coexistent characters. Incomplete form: contradiction
between principles and tendencies. Complete form.
Contradiction between one tendency and another—Third
class: Unstable characters. Their physiological and
psychological characters—Psychological infantilism.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE DECAY OF THE AFFECTIVE LIFE 423
Law of Decay: its formula, and its general application in
psychology—Difficulties where the affective life is
concerned—Successive disappearance of the disinterested
emotions (the æsthetic and intellectual), of the
altruistic (moral and social), the ego-altruistic
(religious feeling, ambition, etc.), and lastly, the
egoistic—Converse proof: cases of arrested
development—Theory of degeneration—Its relation to decay.
CONCLUSION 438
The place of the feelings in psychic life—They come
first—Physiological proofs—Psychological proofs.
INTRODUCTION.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE AFFECTIVE LIFE.
_In all affective manifestations there are two elements: the motor
states or impulses, which are primary; the agreeable or painful
states, which are secondary—Unconscious organic protoplasmic
sensibility; microorganisms—Chemical interpretation;
psychological interpretation—Are there pure states of
feeling?—Affirmative facts—The period of needs, the instinct of
conservation—The period of primitive emotions—How they may be
determined; the genetic or chronological method—Fear, anger,
affection, the self-feeling, sexual emotion—Are joy and grief
emotions?—The abstract emotions and their conditions—The
passions are the equivalent in feeling of an intellectual
obsession._
At the outset it may be useful to sketch in rough outline the
general evolution of the life of feeling from its humble origin in
organic sensibility to its highest and most complex forms.
Afterwards we shall present the corresponding and inverse picture,
that of its dissolution.
If we take at random, in the form in which daily experience gives
them to us, the states known under the vague names of “sentiments,”
“emotions,” “passions”: joy and sorrow, a toothache, a pleasurable
perfume, love or anger, fear or ambition, æsthetic enjoyment or
religious emotion, the rage of gambling or benevolence, the shudder
of the sublime or the discomfort of disgust, and so on, for they are
innumerable, one first observation is obvious even on a superficial
examination: all these states, whatever they may be, offer a double
aspect, objective or external, subjective or internal.
We note in the first place the _motor_ manifestations: movements,
gestures, and attitude of the body, a modification in the voice,
blushing or pallor, tremors, changes in the secretions or
excretions, and other bodily phenomena, varying in different cases.
We may observe them in ourselves, in our fellows, and in animals.
Although they may not always be motor in the strict sense, we may so
call them, since they are all the result of a centrifugal action.
We note also, in ourselves directly and by the evidence of
consciousness, in others indirectly and by induction, the existence
of certain states which are agreeable, painful, or mixed, with their
modes or shades, extremely variable in quality and in intensity.
Of these two groups—the motor manifestations on one side, the
pleasures, pains, and their compounds on the other side—which is
fundamental? Can we put them on the same level, and if we cannot,
which is that which supports the other?
My reply to this question is clear: it is the motor manifestations
which are essential. In other words, what are called agreeable or
painful states only constitute the superficial part of the life of
feeling, of which the deep element consists in tendencies,
appetites, needs, desires, translated into movements. Most classical
treatises (and even some others) say that sensibility is the faculty
of experiencing pleasure and pain. I should say, using the same
terminology, that sensibility is the faculty of tending or desiring,
and _consequently_ of experiencing pleasure and pain. There is
nothing mysterious in the tendency; it is a movement or an arrest of
movement in the nascent stage. I employ this word “tendency” as
synonymous with needs, appetites, instincts, inclinations, desires;
it is the generic term of which the others are varieties; it has the
advantage over them of embracing at the same time both the
psychological and physiological aspects of the phenomenon. All the
tendencies suppose a motor innervation; they translate the needs of
the individual, whatever they may be, physical or mental; the basis,
the root of the affective life is in them, not in the consciousness
of pleasure and pain which accompanies them according as they are
satisfied or opposed. These agreeable or painful states are only
signs and indications; and just as symptoms reveal to us the
existence of a disease, and not its essential nature, which must be
sought in the hidden lesions of the tissues, organs, and functions,
so pleasure and pain are only _effects_ which must guide us in the
search and determination of causes hidden in the region of the
instincts. If the contrary opinion has generally prevailed, and
priority been accorded to the study of agreeable and painful
manifestations considered as the essential element in the emotional
life and serving to define it, that is the result of a bad method,
of an exclusive faith in the evidence of consciousness, of a common
illusion which consists in believing that the conscious portion of
an event is its principal portion, but especially the consequence of
the radically false idea that the bodily phenomena which accompany
all states of feeling are factors that are negligible and external,
foreign to psychology, and without interest for it.
For the present what has just been said is only an affirmation; the
proofs will come later, and will occupy the whole of this book; at
the outset it is only necessary to indicate clearly the position
taken up. We may now follow the evolution of the life of feeling in
its chief stages, which are—pre-conscious sensibility, the
appearance of the primitive emotions, their transformation either
into complex and abstract emotions or into that stable and chronic
state which constitutes the passions.
I.
The first period is that of protoplasmic, vital, organic
pre-conscious sensibility. We know that the organism has its memory;
it preserves certain impressions, certain normal or morbid
modifications; it is capable of adaptation: this point has been well
established by Bering (who had been preceded by Laycock and Jessen).
It is the outline of the superior form of psychic conscious memory.
In the same way there exists an inferior unconscious form—organic
sensibility—which is the preparation and the outline of superior
conscious emotional life. Vital sensibility is to conscious feeling
what organic memory is to memory in the ordinary sense of the word.
This vital sensibility is the capacity to receive stimuli and to
re-act to them. In a well-known memoir, now of ancient date,[2]
Claude Bernard wrote: “Philosophers generally only know and admit
conscious sensibility, that which their ego bears witness to. It is
for them the psychic modification, pleasure or pain, determined by
external modifications.... Physiologists necessarily place
themselves at another point of view. They have to study the
phenomenon objectively, under all the forms which it puts on. They
observe that at the moment when a modifying agent acts on man, it
not only provokes pleasure and pain, it not only affects the soul:
it affects the body, it determines other re-actions besides the
psychic re-actions, and these automatic re-actions, far from being
an accessory part of the phenomenon, are on the contrary its
essential element.” Then he showed experimentally that the
employment of anæsthetics, pushed to an extreme, first abolished
conscious sensibility, then the unconscious sensibility of the
intestines and glands, then muscular irritability, finally the
lively movements of the epithelial tissue. In the same way among
plants: under the influence of ether the sensitive plant loses its
singular properties, seeds cease to germinate, yeast to ferment,
etc. Whence follows the conclusion that sensibility resides, not in
the organs or tissues, but in their anatomical elements.
-----
Footnote 2:
“La sensibilité dans le règne animal et le règne végétal”, (1876,
in _Science expérimentale_, pp. 218 _et seq._).
-----
Since then these investigations into protoplasmic sensibility have
been pursued with much ardour among micro-organisms. These beings,
sometimes animal, sometimes vegetable, are simple masses of
protoplasm, generally monocellular, appearing homogeneous, without
differentiation of tissues. Now very varied _tendencies_ have been
found among these organisms. Some seek light, others flee from it
persistently. The protoplasmic mass of myxomycetes which live in the
bark of the oak, if placed in a watch-glass full of water, remain
there in repose; but if sawdust is placed around them they
immediately emigrate towards it as if seized by home-sickness. The
actynophrys acts in the same way with regard to starch. Bacteria can
discover even the trillionth part of a milligram of oxygen in a
neighbouring body. Certain sedentary ciliated creatures appear to
choose their food. Some also have thought that they detected an
elective tendency in the movement which draws the male ovule towards
the female ovule. I have only recalled a few of the many facts which
have been enumerated.
If it is necessary to mention other examples, I may refer to the
case studied in our own days under the name of “phagocytosis.” The
struggle for life goes on, not only among individuals, but also
among the anatomical elements which constitute the individual. Every
tissue—muscular, connective, adipose, etc.—possesses phagocytes
(devouring cells), of which the duty consists in devouring and
destroying old or enfeebled cells of the same kind. Besides these
special phagocytes there are general phagocytes, such as the white
corpuscles of the blood, which come to the help of the others when
they are not equal to their task. They stand against the pathogenic
microbes, waging upon them an internal struggle, and opposing the
invasion of infectious germs. This apparently teleological property
seems at first very surprising. Later investigations have shown that
the phagocytes are endowed with a sensibility (called chemiotaxic),
owing to which they are able to distinguish the chemical composition
of their environment and to approach it or leave it accordingly;
deteriorated tissues attract certain of them which incorporate the
feeble or dead cells, while the healthy and vigorous elements are
perhaps able to defend themselves by secreting some substance which
preserves them from phagocytosis.
These facts, taken from among many others to which I shall again
have to refer when dealing with the sexual instinct, have been
interpreted in two very different ways: one psychological, the other
chemical.
For some there is in all these phenomena a rudiment of
consciousness. Since the movements are adapted and appropriate,
varying according to circumstances, there must be choice they say,
and choice involves a psychic element; the mobility is the
revelation of an obscure “psyche” endowed with attractive and
repulsive tendencies.
For the others (whose opinion I adopt), the whole may be explained
on physico-chemical grounds. No doubt there is affinity, attraction
and repulsion, but only in the scientific sense; these words are
metaphors derived from the language of consciousness which should be
purged of all anthropomorphic elements. Several authors have shown
by numerous observations and experiments the chemical conditions
which determine or prevent this pretended choice (Sachs, Verworn,
Löb, Maupas, Bastian, etc.).
On this point, as on all questions of origin, we must decide
according to probabilities, and the probabilities appear to be all
in favour of the chemical hypothesis. In any case, this matter has
only a secondary interest for us here. If we admit conscious
tendencies, then the origin of the emotional life coincides with the
very origin of physiological life. If we eliminate all psychology,
there still remains the physiological tendency, that is to say the
motor element, which in some degree, from the lowest to the highest,
is never quite wanting.
This excursion into the pre-conscious period—since we so regard
it—puts us in possession of one result. At the end of this
investigation we find two well-defined tendencies, physico-chemical
and organic—the one of attraction, the other of repulsion; these are
the two poles of the life of feeling. What is attraction in this
sense? Simply assimilation; it blends with nutrition. With sexual
attraction, however, we must note that we already reach a higher
grade; the phenomenon is more complex, the monocellular being no
longer acts to preserve itself but to maintain the species. As to
repulsion, we may remark that it is manifested in two ways. On one
side it is the opposite of assimilation: the cell or the tissue
rejects what does not suit it. On another side, at a somewhat
superior stage, it is in some degree already defensive.
We have thus gained a basis for our subject by finding that beneath
the conscious life of feeling there exists a very low and obscure
region, that of vital or organic sensibility, which is an embryonic
form of conscious sensibility and supports it.
II.
We now pass from darkness to light, from the vital to the psychic.
But before entering into the conscious period of the life of feeling
and following it in the progress of its evolution, this is perhaps
the place to examine a sufficiently important question which has
usually been wrongly answered in the negative: Are there _pure_
states of feeling—that is to say, states empty of any intellectual
element, of every representative content, not connected either with
perceptions or images or concepts, simply subjective, agreeable,
disagreeable, or mixed? If we reply in the negative, it follows that
without exception no kind of feeling can ever exist by itself; it
always requires a support; it is never more than an accompaniment.
This proposition is held by the majority; it has naturally been
adopted by the intellectualists, and Lehmann has recently maintained
it in its most radical form; a state of emotional consciousness is
never met with; pleasure and pain are always connected with
intellectual states.[3] If we reply in the affirmative, then the
state of feeling is considered as having at least sometimes an
independent existence of its own and not as condemned to play for
ever the part of acolyte or parasite.
-----
Footnote 3:
“Ein rein emotionneller Bewusstseinszustand kommt nicht vor; Lust
und Unlust sind stets an intellektuelle Zustände geknüpft,” _Die
Hauptgesetze der menschlichen Gefühlslebens_ (1892), p. 16.
-----
This is a question of fact, and observation alone can settle it.
Although there are other reasons to give in favour of the autonomous
and even primordial character of the life of feeling, I reserve them
for the conclusion of this book, to remain at present in the region
of pure and simple experience. There can be no doubt that, as a
rule, emotional states accompany intellectual states, but I deny
that it can never be otherwise, and that perceptions and
representations are the necessary condition of existence, absolutely
and without exception, of every manifestation of feeling.
There is a first class of facts which I only refer to in order not
to ignore them. Although they have been invoked they seem to me to
carry little weight. I refer to the emotions which suddenly break
out in animals and are not explicable by any anterior experience.
Gratiolet having presented to a very young puppy a fragment of
wolf’s skin so worn that it resembled parchment, the animal on
smelling it was seized with extreme fright. Kröner, in his book on
cœnæsthesia,[4] has collected similar facts. It is, however, so
difficult to know what passes in the consciousness of an animal, and
to ascertain the part of instinct and of hereditary transmission,
that I do not insist. Moreover, in all these cases the emotion is
excited by an _external_ sensation which touches a spring and sets
the mechanism of instinct at work; so that it might be argued that
we are not here concerned with a pure and independent state of
feeling. To remove all doubt, we require cases in which the state of
feeling precedes the intellectual state, not being provoked by, but,
on the contrary, provoking it.
-----
Footnote 4:
_Das Körperliche Gefühl_ (1887), pp. 80, 81.
-----
The child at the beginning can only possess a purely affective life.
During the intra-uterine period he neither hears nor sees nor
touches; even after birth it is some weeks before he learns to
localise his sensations. His psychic life, however rudimentary it
may be, must consist in a vague state of pleasure and pain analogous
to ours. He cannot connect them with perceptions, because he is
still unable to perceive. It is a widely accredited opinion that the
infant enters into life by pain; Preyer has questioned this; we
shall see later on what grounds. At present we need not insist upon
these facts, since we cannot interpret them except by induction.
Adults will furnish us with unquestionable and abundant evidence.
As a general rule, every deep change in the _internal_ sensations is
translated in an equivalent fashion into the cœnæsthesia and
modifies the tone of feeling. Now the internal sensations are not
representative, and this factor, of capital importance, has been
forgotten by the intellectualists. Of this purely organic state,
which afterwards becomes a state of feeling, and then an
intellectual state, we shall later on find numerous examples in
studying the genesis of the emotions; it is enough for the moment to
note a few of them. Under the influence of haschisch, says Moreau
(de Tours), who has studied it so well, “the feeling which is
experienced is one of happiness. I mean by this a state which has
nothing in common with purely sensual pleasure. It is not the
pleasure of the glutton or the drunkard, but is much more comparable
to the joy of the miser or that caused by good news.” I once knew
well a man who for ten years constantly took haschisch in large
doses; he withstood the drug better than might be expected, and
finally died insane. I received his oral and written confidences,
often to a greater extent than I desired. During this long period I
have often noted his feeling of inexhaustible satisfaction,
translated now and again into strange inventions or commonplace
reflections, but in his opinion invaluable. At the epoch of puberty,
when it follows its normal development, we know that there is a
profound metamorphosis. Certain conditions, known or unknown, act on
the organism and modify its state (first moment); translated into
consciousness, these organic conditions give birth to a particular
tone of feeling (second moment); this state of feeling produces
corresponding representations (third moment). The representative
element appears in the last place. Similar phenomena are produced
under other conditions, in which the cœnæsthesia is modified by the
state of the sexual organs (menstruation, pregnancy). The emotional
state is produced first, the intellectual state afterwards. But the
most abundant source from which we may draw examples at will is
certainly the period of incubation which precedes the appearance of
mental diseases. In most cases it is a state of vague sadness.
Sadness without a cause, it is commonly said, and rightly, if by
that is meant that it is produced neither by an accident nor by bad
news nor by ordinary causes; but not causeless, if we take into
consideration the internal sensations which in such a case play a
part which is unperceived but not the less effective. This
inclination to melancholy is also the rule in the neuroses.
Sometimes it happens that the state of feeling, instead of being a
slow incubation, is an _aura_ of emotional character and short
duration (a few minutes to at most a few hours). Some patients, by
repeated experience, are aware of this; they know by the change that
the attack is approaching. Féré (_Les Epilepsies_) gives several
examples; among others, that of a young man who under these
circumstances became totally changed in character, which he
expressed in an original manner by saying, “I feel that my heart
changes.” That is because _in the last stage_ this state of feeling
takes form and becomes fixed in an idea, as may best be seen in
persecutional insanity.
Without insisting, as would be easy, on any further enumeration of
facts, we may reduce these pure states of feeling to four principal
types:
1. Agreeable state (pleasure, joy): that of haschisch and similar
drugs, certain stages of general paralysis of the insane, the sense
of well-being experienced by the consumptive and the dying; many
people who have escaped a death which they considered certain have
felt themselves overwhelmed on its approach by a feeling of
beatitude, without further definition, which is perhaps only the
absence of all suffering.[5]
-----
Footnote 5:
For observations relative to this point see _Revue Philosophique_,
March 1896.
-----
2. Painful state (sadness, annoyance): the incubation period of most
diseases, the melancholy of menstrual periods.
3. State of fear: without reason, without apparent causes, without
justification, without object; fear of everything and of nothing: a
fairly frequent state, which we shall examine in detail when we come
to the _phobias_.
4. State of excitability: connected with anger, frequent in
neurosis; it is an unstable and explosive state of being which, at
first vague and undetermined, ends by taking form, attaching itself
to a representation, and discharging itself on an object.
Finally, there are mixed states, formed by the co-existence or
alternation of simple states.
From all which goes before it results that there is a pure and
autonomous life of feeling, independent of the intellectual life and
having its cause below, in the variations of the cœnæsthesia, which
is itself the resultant and concert of vital actions. In the
psychology of feeling the part played by external sensations is very
scanty compared to that played by internal sensations, and certainly
one must be unable to see beyond the first to set up as a rule “that
there is no emotional state unconnected with an intellectual state.”
Having made this point clear, we may return to our general picture
of the evolution.
1. Above organic sensibility we find the stage of needs—that is to
say, of purely vital or physiological tendencies with consciousness
added. In man this period only exists at the beginning of life, and
is translated by internal sensations (hunger, thirst, need of sleep,
fatigue, etc.). It is constituted by a bundle of tendencies
essentially physiological in character, and these tendencies have
nothing added or external; they are life in action. Each anatomical
element, each tissue, each organ has but one end, to exercise its
activity; and the physiological individual is nothing but the
convergent expression of all these tendencies. They may present
themselves under a double form. In the one case they express a lack,
a deficiency; the anatomical element, the tissue, the organism has
need of something. In this form the tendency is imperious and
irresistible; such is the hunger of the carnivorous animal, which
swallows its prey alive. In the other case they translate an excess,
a superfluity: such are, a gland which needs to secrete, a
well-nourished animal which needs to move: this is the embryonic
form of the luxurious emotions.
All these needs have a point of convergence—the preservation of the
individual; to use the current expression, we see in them the
exercise of the _instinct of preservation_. On the subject of this
instinct there have recently been discussions which seem to me
sufficiently idle. Is the instinct of preservation primitive? is it
derived? Some authors are for the first hypothesis; others
(especially James and Sergi) lean towards the second. According to
the point of view each of these two solutions is admissible and
true. From the synthetic point of view the instinct of preservation
is primordial, since it is nothing else but the resultant and sum of
all the particular tendencies of each essential organ; it is only a
collective formula. From the analytic point of view, it is
secondary, since it presupposes all the particular tendencies into
which it is dissolved, since each of its elements is simple, and
since it adds nothing and is nothing but their translation into
consciousness. One might ask in the same way if a sensation of sound
is simple or compound, and here also, according to the point of
view, the answer would vary. For consciousness the event is one,
simple and irreducible; for objective analysis the event is
compound, reducible to a definite number of vibrations. In the
various regions of psychology we might find many problems of the
same kind. The important point is to understand that the instinct of
preservation is not an entity, but an abbreviated expression
indicating a group of tendencies.
2. Emerging from the period of needs, which are thus reducible to
tendencies of physiological order accompanied by physical pleasures
or pains, we now enter the period of _primitive emotions_.
We cannot at the present point determine rigorously and in detail
what is meant by an emotion (see Part I., Chap. vii.); it is enough
to give a rough but comprehensible definition. From our standpoint,
_emotion is in the order of feeling the equivalent of perception in
the intellectual order_, a complex synthetic state essentially made
up of produced or arrested movements, of organic modifications (in
circulation, respiration, etc.), of an agreeable or painful or mixed
state of consciousness peculiar to each emotion. It is a phenomenon
of sudden appearance and limited duration; it is always related to
the preservation of the individual or the species—directly as
regards primitive emotions, indirectly as regards derived emotions.
Emotion then, even while we keep to its primitive forms, introduces
us into a higher region of the affective life in which its
manifestations become complex. But how can we determine these
primitive forms—the simple irreducible emotions—for this is our
principal aim? Many neglect this determination, or leave it to
arbitrary chance. The old authors seem at this point to have
followed a method of abstraction and generalisation which could only
lead them to entities. It was an accredited doctrine among them that
all the “passions” can finally be reduced to love and hate; we meet
this thesis throughout. To reach this conclusion they seem to have
brought together and compared the different passions, disengaged the
resemblances, eliminated the differences, and by continued
reductions abstracted from this multiplicity its most general
characters.[6]
-----
Footnote 6:
Descartes is a brilliant exception to this method of procedure;
later on we shall have to consider his method (Part II., Chapter
vii.).
-----
If by love and hate we are to understand the movements of attraction
or repulsion which lie at the bottom of the emotions, there is
nothing to be said; but we are only given abstractions and
theoretical concepts; such a determination is illusory and without
practical utility. If we understand love (what love? for nothing is
vaguer than this word) and hate in a more concrete sense, and
pretend to consider them as the primitive source from which to
derive all the other emotions, that is a purely mental opinion, an
assertion which nothing justifies.
The determination of the primitive emotions must be made not by
abstraction and generalisation, but by _verification_. To attain
this I can see but one method to follow—the method of observation,
which teaches us the order and the date of appearance of the various
emotions, and gives us their genealogical and chronological list. We
may count as primitive all those which cannot be reduced to previous
manifestations, all those which appear as a new manifestation, and
those alone; all the others are secondary and derived.
The materials for this investigation can only be sought in the
psychology of animals and in that of children. The first will give
us but little help. No doubt special and authoritative treatises
enumerate the emotions of animals, but without any distinction
between the simple and the compound, and with no precise indication
as to the order of their appearance. It is not the same with
infantile psychology; the numerous studies published on this subject
during the last thirty years have rendered possible an attempt which
could not be made before.
The question is then to determine in accordance with facts the order
in which the emotions appear, only taking into account those which
seem primitive—that is to say, not reducible to other emotions. I
limit myself to their simple enumeration, with an indication of
their chief characters; each of them will be the object of a special
study in the second part of this book.
1. Fear is the first in date, according to unanimous observations.
Preyer finds that it is manifested from the second day. At the same
time the fact which he records seems to me to agree with surprise
rather than with fear properly so called. In any case, according to
the same author, it is easy to note it after twenty-four hours.
Darwin thought he could only observe it at the end of four months,
Perez at two months. The last is inclined to believe that this
emotion is first aroused by auditory sensations, and then by visual
sensations. The precocity of its appearance has been attributed to
hereditary transmission, an assertion which we shall have to
examine.
2. After the defensive emotion, the offensive emotion appears in the
form of anger. Perez notes it between two and three months; Preyer
and Darwin at ten months; they mean real anger, marked by the
contraction of the eyebrows and other clear symptoms (to throw
itself about, crying, etc.). Naturally the dates indicated for each
emotion are not rigorously fixed; they must vary according to the
child’s temperament and circumstances.
3. Then comes affection. Some authors use the word sympathy, which
seems to me too vague. It shows itself by its fundamental method of
expression, the movement of attraction, the seeking for contact.
Darwin, who has well described it, remarks that it probably appears
very early in life, judging by the infant’s smile, in the second
month, but that he had no clear proof that the child recognised any
one before the fourth month; at the fifth month he showed a wish to
go towards his nurse, but only at twelve months did he show
affection spontaneously and by plain gestures. Darwin adds that
sympathy (?) was manifested exactly at ten months, eleven days, when
the child’s nurse pretended to cry.[7] According to Perez, it
appears towards ten months.[8] It is from this source that complex
forms of great importance must later on be derived—the social and
moral emotions.
-----
Footnote 7:
Darwin, “Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” _Mind_, ii. p. 285.
Footnote 8:
It is probable that the dates assigned for the first appearance
of emotional manifestations by Darwin, Preyer, Perez, etc., are
mostly too late, as they were not the outcome of continuous
observation. Mrs. Kathleen Carter Moore, in her recent elaborate
monograph dealing with the early mental development of her own
baby, whom she regards as an average infant, observed the tear
secretion first on the tenth day, though it was not fully
established until the sixteenth week; a smile when comfortable
was seen on the sixth day; the child smiled several times
consecutively at his father on the seventh day with movements of
excitement, and by the twentieth day smiling at persons had
become more frequent and more intelligent. (See K. C. Moore,
“The Mental Development of a Child,” Monograph Supplement to the
_Psychological Review_, 1896).—ED.
-----
With fear, anger, and affection we remain in the region of the
emotions which man shares with animals; for even affection is met
with very low in the animal series, at all events in the form of
maternal love. These three emotions have therefore a very clear
character of universality. We now make a step which introduces us
into a purely human region.
4. This stage is marked by the appearance of emotions connected with
the personality, the ego. Hitherto we have had an individual, a
living being with more or less vague consciousness of his life; but
the child, usually towards the age of at least three years, becomes
conscious of himself as a person. Then appear new emotional
manifestations, of which the source may be called for lack of a
better term the self-feeling or egoistic emotion (_selbstgefühl_,
_amour propre_), and which may translate itself in two forms: in a
negative form as a feeling of powerlessness and debility, and in a
positive form as a feeling of strength and audacity. This feeling of
plenitude and exuberance is the source from which later numerous
emotional forms are derived (pride, vanity, ambition). Perhaps also
we must connect with it all those which express a superfluity of
life: the need of physical exercise, play in all its forms,
curiosity or the desire for knowledge, the need of creation by
imagination or action.
5. There remains the sexual emotion; it is the last in chronological
order and the moment of its appearance is easy to fix, since it has
objective physiological marks. It is an error to suppose that it can
be derived from affection, or that affection can be derived from it,
as has sometimes been maintained. The observation of facts
completely condemns this thesis, and shows that they cannot be
reduced one to the other. Later on we shall meet with evident
proofs.
Now we meet with one of those embarrassing questions with which our
subject is full. Must we here conclude our list of primitive
emotions, or must we add two others: joy and grief? It is possible
to incline to the latter view. Thus Lange has included joy and grief
among the four or five simple “emotions” which he has chosen as
types of his descriptions. The following reasons, in my opinion, are
against this solution. No doubt joy and grief present all the
characters which constitute an emotion: movements or arrest of
movements, changes in the organic life, and a state of consciousness
_sui generis_. But in that case physical pleasure and physical pain
must also be included among the emotions, for they both present the
characters above enumerated; moreover, there is an identity of
nature between physical pleasure and joy on one side, physical pain
and grief on the other side, as I hope to prove later on; the only
difference is that the physical form is preceded by a state of the
organism, the moral form (joy, grief) by a representation. In other
words, we should have to class pleasure and pain (without
qualification or restriction) among the primitive emotions. Now
these two alleged emotions present, with reference to the five
already named, an evident and capital difference: their character of
generality. Fear is quite distinct from anger, affection from
self-feeling, and sexual emotion from the other four by its specific
mark. Each of them is a complex state, distinct and impenetrable;
just as vision is in relation to hearing, or touch to smell. Each
expresses a particular tendency (defensive, offensive, attraction to
the like, etc.), and is adapted to a particular end. Pleasure and
pain, on the contrary, express general conditions of being; they are
diffused everywhere and penetrate everywhere. There is pain in fear,
in certain moments of anger and of the self-feeling; there is
pleasure in sexual emotion, in certain moments of anger and of the
self-feeling. These two states have no domain of their own. Emotion,
by its nature, particularises; pleasure and pain by their nature
universalise; they are the general marks of the affective life, and
if they coincide like the emotions with motor, vaso-motor, and other
phenomena, that is because no form of feeling can exist without its
physiological conditions.
Such are the reasons for which I refuse to class the agreeable and
painful states among primitive emotions, and to consider them as of
the same nature. As to the moment of their appearance, physical pain
is held to co-exist with the very beginning of extra-uterine life;
physical pleasure resulting from satisfied appetite, the sensation
of warmth, etc., must begin almost at the same period. Joy and grief
are later. According to Preyer, the smile and brightness of the eyes
indicate joy; “from the second month an infant takes pleasure in
hearing singing and the piano.” I am not sure that this example is
very decisive; I prefer to see here the pleasure that is mostly
physical. Darwin observed it towards the fourth month, perhaps
before, but very clearly towards twelve months on the return of an
absent person. Grief may manifest itself, according to Preyer,
towards the fourth month (tears before the fourth week). Darwin, in
the observation already quoted, makes the first appearance at six
months. On the whole, the observations are few and wanting in
harmony, because of the great difficulty at this moment of life in
distinguishing with certainty between the two forms of pleasure and
the two forms of pain.
At the root of each of the primitive emotions there is a tendency,
an instinct; but I do not claim that this list exhausts the human
instincts; later on we shall have to return to this point (Part II.,
Introduction). Let us admit as a provisional hypothesis that these
five emotions alone are irreducible, and all the others derived from
them. In the sequel I shall try to indicate how these secondary
emotions are the result of a complete evolution, of an arrest of
development, or of a mixture and combination (Part II., Chapter
vii.).
III.
Above these emotions, which, though composed of several elements,
are simple as emotions, and may be called innate since they are
furnished by the organism itself, there are numerous forms of
feeling manifested in the course of life, aroused by representations
of the past or the future, by the construction of images, by
concepts, by an ideal. As each primitive emotion will be studied in
its total development, from its lower to its most highly
intellectualised forms, it is useless now to attempt a sketch of
this ascending march, which, when reduced to generalities, would be
vague and confused. It reaches its last stage in the loftiest
regions of science, art, religion, and morals.
One may assert without risk that these higher forms are unattainable
by the great majority of men. Perhaps scarcely one person in a
hundred thousand or a million reaches them; the others know them
not, or only suspect them approximately and by hearsay. They are a
promised land only entered by a few of the elect.
To reach the higher sentiments, in fact, two conditions are needed:
(1) one must be capable of conceiving and understanding general
ideas; (2) these ideas must not remain simple intellectual forms,
but must be able to arouse certain feelings, certain approximate
tendencies. If one or other condition is wanting, the emotion is not
produced.
The formula of the evolution during this period is very simple; the
order of development of the emotions depends strictly on the order
of development of general ideas; it is the evolution of ideas which
rules that of feelings. Here we are in perfect agreement with the
intellectualist theory.
The faculty of abstraction and generalisation is very unequally
apportioned. It depends on the race, the age, the individual. Some
never pass the level of generic images which are only concrete
images simplified and condensed. Some reach those medium forms of
abstraction in which the word plays the part of substitute for the
reality, but requires, in order to be understood, that the
qualities of the thing which it represents should be figured by a
vague scheme, the concomitant of the word. Some reach the stage of
complete substitution, in which the word takes the place of the
whole, and has need of no auxiliary to insure the mental
operation. Each of these degrees (which include sub-divisions I do
not indicate) has its possible echo in feeling. Thus every one,
according to the range of his intelligence, may reach some or all
these stages, and according to his temperament experience or not
experience at each of them an emotional state. The emotions which
are susceptible of a complete evolution will furnish the proofs. A
very simple example may be found in the sexual impulse, which may
in turn be physiological, psycho-physiological, chiefly
psychological, and finally intellectual. At its lowest stage (in
the micro-organisms and similar beings) we find facts of a purely
vital and organic order, in my opinion unconscious; then
consciousness appears, but the sexual emotion manifests itself in
a purely specific shape without individual choice; it is simply an
instinct, “the genius of the race making use of the individual to
reach its own ends.” Later on individuality becomes marked; we
find choice; the tender emotions, not found in the early stage,
are superadded. Then comes the moment of equilibrium between the
organic elements and the psychic elements, as usually found in the
normal average man. This state is very complex, resulting from the
fusion or convergence of numerous tendencies, hence its power of
attraction. Then comes a rupture of equilibrium, a period of
interversion; the physiological element is slowly effaced, the
psychic element gains in intensity; it is a repetition of the
primitive period, but in the opposite direction. This is the
intellectual phase of love; the idea appears first, the
physiological phenomena come afterwards. At a more elevated stage
of refinement the concrete personal image is replaced by a vague
impersonal representation, an ideal, a concept; this is pure
platonic mystical love, the organic accompaniment of which is so
feeble that it is usually denied.
These subtle and refined forms which the intellectualists regard as
superior are really only an impoverishment of feeling. They are
besides rare, and except in a few cases ineffective; for it is a
rule that every feeling loses its strength in the measure that it
becomes intellectualised. The blind faith in “the power of ideas” is
in practice an inexhaustible source of illusions and errors. An idea
which is only an idea, a simple fact of knowledge, produces nothing
and does nothing; it only acts if it is _felt_, if it is accompanied
by an affective state, if it awakes tendencies, that is to say,
motor elements. One may have thoroughly studied Kant’s _Practical
Reason_, have penetrated all its depths, covered it with glosses and
luminous commentaries, without adding one iota to one’s practical
morality; that comes from another source, and it is one of the most
unfortunate results of intellectualist influence in the psychology
of the feelings that it has led us to ignore so evident a truth.
IV.
It may be remarked that in contemporary treatises the word
_passion_ has almost entirely disappeared, or is only met with
incidentally.[9] Yet it has a long past which would be interesting
to trace, if I had not forbidden myself all historical digressions.
At present the term emotion is preferred to designate the chief
manifestations of the affective life; it is a generic expression;
passion is only a mode of it. Ordinary language rightly preserves
the word, since it answers to a reality; and passion is an event of
too much practical importance for us to dispense with speaking of
it, explaining how it differs from emotion, what its nature is, and
under what conditions it appears.
-----
Footnote 9:
Höffding, _Psychologie_, pp. 392-394, second German edition. J.
Sully, _The Human Mind_, vol. ii. p. 56, considers emotion as a
genus of which affection and passion are the species: affection is
a fixed emotional disposition; passion is the violent form of the
emotion. Nothing can be vaguer and more uncertain than the
terminology of our subject, and yet, as Wundt says in his
_Essays_, it has made a very appreciable progress when compared to
the confusion which existed at the beginning of the century.
-----
There is a fairly general agreement as to its definition; and
beneath different formulas, according as they emanate from a
moralist, a theologian, a philosopher, or a biologist, we always
find the same essential characters: “it is an intemperate want;” “it
is an inclination or liking carried to excess;” “it is a violent and
sustained desire which dominates the whole cerebral being,” etc.;
the terminology alone varies.[10]
-----
Footnote 10:
Letourneau, _Physiologie des Passions_, liv. i. Chap. I.
-----
If we seek the special mark of passion and its characteristics among
the phenomena of the affective life, we must distinguish it from
emotion on one side and insanity on the other; for it is situated
midway between the two.
It is difficult to express with clearness and precision the
difference between emotion and passion. Is it a difference of
nature? No, for emotion is the source whence passion flows. Is it a
difference of degree? This distinction is precarious, for while
there are calm emotions and violent passions, the contrary may also
be met with. A third difference remains, duration. It is generally
said that passion is an enduring state; emotion is the acute form,
passion the chronic form. Violence and duration are the characters
usually assigned to it; but we may further define its essential
nature. _Passion is in the affective order what an imperative idea
(idée fixe) is in the intellectual order_; we might add what a
contraction is in the motor order. It is the affective equivalent of
the imperative idea. This needs some explanation.
The normal intellectual state is a plurality of states of
consciousness determined by the mechanism of association. If at a
given moment a perception or representation arises and occupies
alone the chief field of consciousness, ruling as a sovereign,
making a space around it, and only permitting associations which are
in direct relation with itself, we have a state of attention. This
“monoideïsm” is by its nature exceptional and transitory. If it does
not change its object, persisting or repeating itself constantly, we
have the fixed idea, which may be called permanent attention. It is
not necessarily morbid, as Newton’s celebrated phrase and other
evidence show; but the latent or actual sovereignty of the fixed
idea is absolute and tyrannical.
In the same way the normal state of feeling is the succession of
pleasures, troubles, desires, whims, etc., which in their temperate
form, and often dulled by repetition, constitute the prosaic round
of ordinary life. At a given moment some circumstance causes a
shock; that is emotion. Some tendency annihilates all the others,
momentarily confiscating the whole activity to its profit; that is
the equivalent of attention. Usually this passage of movements in a
single direction is not enduring; but if, instead of disappearing,
the emotion remains fixed, or repeats itself incessantly, always the
same, with the slight modifications involved in passing from the
acute to the chronic stage—that is passion, which is permanent
emotion. In spite of apparent eclipses, it is always ready to
appear, absolute and tyrannical.
Concerning the origin of passion, moralists and novelists have
remarked that it comes into being in two different ways—by a
thunderbolt or by “crystallisation,” by sudden action or by slow
actions. This double origin denotes predominance either of the
affective life or of the intellectual life. When passion is born
suddenly it issues directly from emotion itself and retains a
certain violence of nature, so much at least as its metamorphosis
into a permanent disposition admits. In the other case the
initiative is taken by the intellectual states (images, ideas), and
the passion is slowly constituted as the result of association which
itself is only an _effect_, for it obeys a latent influence, a
hidden factor, an unconscious activity only revealed by its work.
Representations only attract each other and associate by reason of
their affective similitude, of the emotional tone which is common to
them, and by successive additions these little streams form a river.
This form of passion, on account of its origin, has less ardour and
more tenacity.
After distinguishing passion from emotion, it is still necessary to
separate it from insanity, its other neighbour. Certain authors have
at once classed all passions with insanity; I cannot accept this
proposition. It may suit the moralist, by no means the psychologist.
But the task of separation is very delicate, and cannot be attempted
in this Introduction. The distinction between the normal and the
morbid, always difficult, is especially so in the case of the
psychology of the feelings. I shall endeavour elsewhere (Part I.,
Chap. iv.) to find the indications which enable us to establish this
separation legitimately, and the task which we now put aside in its
general form will come before us later on in the case of each
particular emotion.
PART I.
GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY.
CHAPTER I.
PHYSICAL PAIN.
_Its anatomical and physiological conditions; pain nerves,
transmission to the centres—Modifications of the organism
accompanying physical pain: circulation, respiration,
nutrition, movements—Are they the effects of paint?—Pain
is only a sign—The analgesias: unconsciousness of pain and
intellectual consciousness—Retardation of pain after
sensation—Hyperalgesia—Nature of pain: theory that it is a
sensation; theory that it is a quality of sensation—Pain
may result from the quality or the intensity of the
stimulus—Hypotheses regarding its ultimate cause: it
depends on a form of movement, a chemical modification._
Many definitions of pain have, very unnecessarily, been offered.
Some are even tautological, others imply a hypothesis as to its
nature by relating it to strong stimulations.[11] Let us regard it
as an internal state which every one knows by experience, and of
which consciousness reveals innumerable modes, but which by its
generality and its multiplicity of aspect escapes definition.
-----
Footnote 11:
“Pain is a powerful and prolonged vibration of the conscious
nervous centres, resulting from a strong peripheral excitation,
and consequently of a sudden change of condition in the nervous
centres” (Richet). “It is the most violent stimulation of certain
sensorial regions—a stimulation to which contribute the more
extended stimulations of other regions” (Wundt).
-----
In its primitive form pain is always physical, that is to say,
connected with external or internal sensations. Sufficiently precise
as regards superficial parts of the body, especially the skin, its
localisation is vaguer when it is seated in the deeper parts, the
viscera, the instruments of organic life. In the last case, when the
pain is of internal and non-peripheral origin, coming from the great
sympathetic or the related vagus nerve, it is accompanied by a state
of anxiety, of depression, or of anguish, which we shall often
encounter, and which frequently causes it to be said that “it seems
to the patient that the workings of nature within him are
suspended.” For the present, without distinguishing between these
two origins, external and internal, we will study the _objective_
characters of physical pain taken in general: first its anatomical
and physiological conditions, then the bodily modifications which
accompany it and in popular language are called its effects.
I.
The transmission of painful impressions from the periphery to the
cortical centres is far from being determined in all the stages of
its course.
The nerve terminations, from their outpost position, receive the
first shock; but what part do they play? It is known that the nerves
of the deep organs and the filaments of the great sympathetic have
no specially constructed terminations. The nerves of special sense,
on the contrary,—vision, hearing, smell, and taste,—possess special
peripheral apparatus (retina, organ of Corti, etc.) of very complex
anatomy; it is known that their _rôle_ is specially sensorial; they
are above all instruments of knowledge, seldom directly of pain or
pleasure. So that the question of nerve terminations in relation to
pain may chiefly be confined to the nerves of the tactile apparatus,
taking the word in its largest sense. The extreme difficulty of
isolating the purely peripheral impression from that which reaches
the nerve itself renders almost insoluble the question as to the
part played by these peripheral apparatus. Beaunis,[12] relying on
the cases of localised anæsthesia in which the patient no longer
feels pain but still perceives contact, thinks that analgesia would
reach the nerves before acting on their terminations, shut up in
more or less resistant capsules.
-----
Footnote 12:
_Sensations internes_, Chap. xx., may be read for details on this
point.
-----
Are there special nerves for the transmission of pain? Goldscheider,
well known for his researches on cold and heat points on the skin,
at first maintained that there are.[13] According to him, the
pain-bearing nerve filaments are interlaced with the sensorial
nerves, more numerously with the nerves of general sensation (touch,
heat, cold), less numerously with those of special sense. If the
existence of these special pain nerves were well established, it
would have as great an importance for our subject as the discoveries
of Sachs and others, on the nervous filaments peculiar to the
muscles, have had for the study of the kinæsthetic sense. But this
physiologist has since repudiated his first assertion, and
maintained that it was misunderstood; he admits pain points (points
sensible to pain), but not a specific organ for pain nor special
nerves to transmit it.[14] Frey, on the other hand, professes to
have proved experimentally both pain nerves and appropriate terminal
organs. His observations have been rejected as inaccurate. At the
present time there is nothing to establish the existence of pain
nerves, and most authors have given strong reasons against the
probability of such a discovery. Rejecting this hypothesis, we may
admit that an impression of pain, like any other impression, is
transmitted by the nerves of general or special sensibility. When it
has entered the spinal cord at the posterior roots, the road it
follows to reach the higher centres has given rise to much
investigation and discussion. According to Schiff, transmission
takes place through the grey substance, tactile impressions passing
by the posterior fibres; there would thus be two distinct paths, one
for the feeling, the other for the sensation properly so-called.
Brown-Séquard also admits distinct paths, but through the grey
substance alone; the anterior region is devoted to touch, the median
to temperature, the posterior to pain. According to Wundt,
impressions of touch and temperature have a primary path through the
white substance when stimulation is moderate, a secondary path
through the grey substance acting as a surplus channel when
stimulation is violent. The hypothesis of separate paths, whatever
they may be, has the advantage of harmonising with the well-known
fact, to which we shall return, that the transmission of pain is
slower than sensorial transmission. Lehmann, who takes up a rigidly
intellectualist position, cannot admit that the element of feeling
has a certain independence in relation to the element of sensation,
existing by itself. He believes that the delay is explained by the
fact that “pain requires a stronger excitation in the sensorial
region than sensation without pain, and that consequently pain is
only produced after sensation, as the excitation increases in
intensity.”[15] This explanation may be accepted, but it assumes
that pain always depends on intensity of stimulus, which is not
proved.
-----
Footnote 13:
_Archiv für Anatomie und Physiol._, 1885.
Footnote 14:
Goldscheider, _Ueber den Schmerz_, Berlin, 1894.
-----
From the spinal cord we reach the medulla, to which some authors
assign the chief part. The latest, Sergi, in his book _Dolore e
Piacere_ (Milan, 1894), makes it the seat of the affective phenomena
in general (pains, pleasures, emotions). What in his opinion
testifies to the importance of the medulla in the affective life is
the number and nature of the nervous centres situated between the
protuberance and the floor of the small ventricle, centres which act
on the heart, the vessels, the lungs, the secretions, the intestinal
movements. “The vital knot of Flourens is the vital centre and must
also be the centre of pleasure and pain, which are merely
alterations in the functions of organic life.”[16] In his opinion
(which is mine also) the part played by the brain in the genesis of
states of feeling has been exaggerated; it only acts in two ways—by
rendering the disturbances of organic life, the physical basis of
the feelings, apparent to consciousness, and as a cause of
stimulation by means of ideas.
-----
Footnote 15:
Lehmann, _Die Hauptgesetze des menschlichen Gefühlslebens_, pp. 46
_et seq._
Footnote 16:
In his preface Sergi briefly indicates the “antecedents of his
theory.” He finds it in the English anatomist Todd, in Hack Tuke,
Laycock, Herbert Spencer, Brown-Séquard, etc. I may point out that
Vulpian, relying on experiments of doubtful interpretation,
localised the emotions exclusively in the medulla, _Leçons sur
l’Anatomie du système nerveux_, xxiv.
-----
However disposed we may be to restrict the part played by the
brain—that is to say the cortical layer—it remains a predominant
factor and the final terminus in the process of transmission. Here
we plunge into darkness. Researches into cerebral localisation teach
us on this subject nothing which is generally admitted. During the
first period of such studies, which may be called that of
circumscribed localisation _à outrance_, Ferrier placed the seat of
the emotions in the occipital lobes, because, in his opinion, that
region of the cortex receives the visceral sensations, because the
sexual instinct is dependent upon them, and finally, because these
lobes are more developed in women than in men. It is needless to
bring forward the numerous criticisms of this thesis. During the
second and present period of localisation, which may be called that
of disseminated localisation, functional rather than anatomical,
authors are little inclined to admit a particular centre for the
affective life in general, and still less for pain. All the sensory
centres, and even all the motor centres (perhaps there are
fundamentally only sensori-motor centres with preponderance of one
or the other element), may under certain conditions of activity
produce in consciousness a feeling of pleasure or pain.
The hypothesis of a cortical centre is not, therefore, probable; I
shall return to this point in discussing the emotions.
II.
The modifications of the organism which accompany physical pain have
been so often described that it is enough to trace a slight outline
of them. They may be reduced to a single formula: pain is associated
with diminution and disorganisation of the vital functions.
1. It acts on the movements of the heart, generally decreasing its
frequency; in extreme cases the slackening may go so far as to
produce syncope. In animals submitted for experiment in the
laboratory, even after removal of the encephalon, painful
impressions diminish the cardiac contractions. In man, though the
frequency of the pulse is sometimes increased in one form or
another, there is always a modification of the rhythm appreciable by
the sphygmograph. Bichat was right when he said: “If you wish to
know whether pain is real, examine the pulse.”
2. The influence on respiration is more irregular and more unstable;
the rhythm becomes abnormal, sometimes rapid, sometimes slow; the
inspirations are successively short and deep. But the final result
is a notable diminution in the carbonic acid exhaled—that is to say
a real slackening of combustion. The temperature is lowered. “I had
imagined,” says Mantegazza, “that pain would be accompanied by an
increase of heat, muscular action being very intense under the
influence of great suffering. Experiment on animals and on myself
proved the contrary.”[17] Heidenhain and Mantegazza have in fact
noted an average diminution of two degrees centigrade, which,
according to the latter, may last an hour and a half or more; it
would be due to the contraction of the peripheral blood-vessels.
-----
Footnote 17:
Mantegazza, _Fisiologia del Dolore_, chap. iii.
-----
3. The action of pain on digestion is well known, and shows itself
by retardation or disturbance: loss of appetite, arrest of
secretions, indigestion, vomiting, diarrhœa, etc. If permanent it
acts on the general nutrition, and shows itself in modifications of
the urinary secretion, and lasting discoloration of the skin or
hair. It is not infrequent to find blanching of the hair, the beard
or eyebrows in a few days under the influence of great pain.[18]
-----
Footnote 18:
For historical and other cases, see Hack Tuke, _Influence of the
Mind upon the Body_, chap. iii.
-----
4. The motor functions translate pain in two opposite ways: the
passive form of depression, arrest, or total suppression of
movements, in which the patient seems overcome; the active form,
marked by agitation, contortions, convulsions, and cries. The latter
case seems to contradict the general formula connecting pain with
diminished activity, and seems to me to have been misinterpreted by
some authors. This violent excitement, indeed, is an expenditure
which quickly makes itself felt and soon leaves the individual
enfeebled. It does not flow, as in joy or play, from a surplus of
activity; it is weakening, irregular and spasmodic. It seems to me
to originate in the instinctive expression of the emotions. The
wounded animal shakes the painful part of his body, his paw or his
head, as if trying to expel the suffering. All these disorderly and
violent motor reactions are a defence of the organism, a useless and
often hurtful defence, but resulting from acts which, formerly or
under other circumstances, were adapted to their end.
Lehmann experimented on five persons, submitting them in turn to
agreeable and disagreeable impressions, in both cases registering
the changes in respiration and in the volume of the arm with the
help of Mosso’s plethysmograph.[19] His experiments led him to the
following conclusions:—
-----
Footnote 19:
For details of the experiments see _Hauptgesetze_, etc., pp. 77
_et seq._, with the accompanying graphic traces.
-----
Every agreeable impression produces an increase in the volume of the
arm and in the height of the pulse, with increased depth of the
respiratory cavity.
A disagreeable impression, when weak, immediately produces a
diminution in the volume of the arm and the height of the pulse; but
almost at once the volume begins to increase, notwithstanding the
diminished pulse, and usually passes beyond its normal state, even
when the pulse has returned to its first condition. If the
impression is strong but not painful these changes are accentuated,
and from the first are accompanied by deep inspirations. Finally, if
the impression is painful, not only considerable changes of volume,
but powerful respiratory movements and disturbance of the voluntary
muscles are produced.
Disagreeable stimulation produces at first a spasm of the
superficial vessels, relaxation of the deep vessels, and decreased
fulness of the heart’s contractions. The first two factors together
produce a sudden and strong diminution in the volume of the limbs.
The last two factors together produce a diminished height of pulse,
and in consequence of the enfeebled cardiac contractions there is a
stasis of the venous blood showing itself in the increased volume of
the limb.
These bodily modifications, of which I have summarised the chief
features, are commonly regarded as the effects of pain, and this
opinion seems even to be accepted in many works on psychology. The
opinion cannot, however, be accepted. Pain considered as a psychic
event, an internal fact, a pure state of consciousness, is not a
cause but a symptom. The cause is the stimulation (of whatever
nature) which, coming from the exterior environment, acts on the
external senses, or coming from the interior environment, acts on
the organic life. It is shown in two ways: on the one hand in the
state of consciousness which we call pain, on the other by the
physical phenomena above enumerated. The consciousness expresses in
one way what the organism expresses in another way. This is not a
mere opinion, for experiment shows that circulatory, respiratory,
and motor modifications are produced when consciousness is probably
defective. Mantegazza has shown that if an intact animal is
subjected to pricks, cuts, and burns, cardiac troubles follow; but
that the same phenomena are produced after the removal of the
encephalon. François-Franck, investigating the effects of painful
stimulation on the heart, found that the anæsthesia of chloroform
suppresses troubles of the heart, while, on the contrary, removal of
the cerebral hemispheres fails to abolish them. Formerly, Longet and
Vulpian maintained that in animals reduced to the medulla and lower
parts of the cerebro-spinal axis the cries and movements that occur
when they are pinched are purely reflex; this interpretation has
been contested by Brown-Séquard. In human anencephalic (or headless)
monsters, cries, movements of suction and the like have been
observed during the few days they are able to live. We must then
admit either that the state of consciousness we call pain can be
produced in the absence of the brain, or else that the physical
phenomena can exist alone without their psychic concomitant.
Pain (as a state of consciousness) is only a sign, an index, an
internal event revealing to the individual his own disorganisation.
The only case in which pain is a cause is when, being firmly fixed
in consciousness and completely filling it, it becomes an agent of
destruction, but then it is only a secondary cause. That is one of
those cases, so frequent in the sciences of life, in which what is
primarily an effect becomes in turn a cause. It is therefore an
error, though common to most psychologists, to consider pain and
pleasure as fundamental elements of the affective life; they are
only marks, the foundation is elsewhere. What would be said of a
doctor who confused the symptoms of a disease with its essential
nature?
We touch here a point so important that it needs emphasis. The
thesis that pain is only a symptom, and altogether, in spite of the
sovereign part it plays in human life, a superficial phenomenon in
relation to the tendencies which lie at the basis of the affective
life, finds support in the facts of _analgesia_, the disappearance
of capacity to feel pain. This insensibility presents itself under
two forms: spontaneous and artificial.
Spontaneous analgesia is the rule in hysteria; it may vary in
degree, position, and extent. The demonologists of the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance knew these migrations of insensibility to
various parts of the body, and they sought with care for the
_stigmata diaboli_, that is, the regions insensible to pain. Some
authors assign to it a purely psychic cause: painful impressions
cannot be felt because they are outside the field of consciousness,
which in these patients is in an almost permanently disassociated,
scattered, and destroyed state.[20] It is, on the contrary, certain
that an intense fixed idea, profound concentration of attention,
fanatical exaltation, can produce temporary or permanent analgesia.
Many soldiers, in the heat of battle, have not felt their wounds.
Pascal, plunged in his problems, escaped his neuralgias. The
Aïssaouas, the fakirs, certain Lamas of Thibet tear and cut
themselves, secured against pain by delirium, and one may well
believe that many martyrs, in the midst of their torture, have only
experienced a sense of rapture. In certain forms of insanity
(maniacal excitement, melancholia, idiocy, etc.) this spontaneous
analgesia is frequent, and takes on extraordinary forms. Numerous
examples may be found in special treatises.[21] One crushes glass in
his mouth for half-an-hour without feeling any pain. Another breaks
his leg in a struggle, and a fragment of the tibia projects through
the torn skin, yet he continues to pursue the object of his rage,
and then sits down to eat without the least sign of pain on his
face. There are many who, intentionally or by accident, plunge their
arms into boiling water or place them on a red-hot stove, until the
skin falls off in shreds, without appearing to be disturbed. An
endless series of such facts might be narrated.[22]
-----
Footnote 20:
Pierre Janet, _État Mental des Hystériques_.
Footnote 21:
See especially Morel, _Traité des Maladies Mentales_ (pp. 324 _et
seq._), for a summary of many curious facts.
Footnote 22:
Weir Mitchell (_Medical Record_, 24th December 1892, quoted by
Strong, _Psychological Review_, 1895, vol. ii. p. 332) reports the
following extraordinary case of natural analgesia: Man who died at
age of fifty-six, cheerful and corpulent, weighing some 250
pounds; intelligent, and vigorous both in body and mind, with a
considerable reputation as a lawyer and politician. Having a
finger wounded in a crush during a political campaign, he removed
it himself by biting it off and spitting it on to the ground. He
had an ulcer on the toe which resisted treatment for three years
without ever causing him the slightest pain. He also had an
abscess in the hand which spread to the fore-arm and arm, causing
enormous swelling and endangering his life; the lancet was used
without precaution, and throughout he felt no pain. It was the
same with an operation for cataract on both eyes; he remained
motionless as a statue. It was only during his last illness that
he complained of some pain, but that quickly passed away, and he
had returned to his state of natural insensibility before he died.
-----
The artificial analgesias, produced by chloroform and the various
anæsthetics employed in surgical operations, are more instructive.
It has been asked if the movements, objurgations, and cries of some
patients do not prove that the analgesia is not complete, even when
it seems so. Richet has expressed the opinion that it is not
consciousness but recollection which is defective; he regards the
pain as so rapid that it is only a mathematical movement and leaves
no echo behind it, there being a series of evanescent states of
consciousness. It is quite possible to maintain this hypothesis; but
the most important fact recorded by this author seems to me to be
that, when pain has disappeared, a certain degree of knowledge of it
remains. In other words, there is a process of scission: the feeling
man has disappeared, the _intellectual_ man remains. In many simple
operations the contact of the instrument is often felt, but not the
pain. But there are more complex cases. "In an operation for fissure
of the anus with fistula, the patient felt the contact of the
scissors and easily distinguished four incisions; she could not
speak, but felt no suffering. In the course of a similar operation I
asked the patient, ‘How old are you?’ She replied that she was
forty-one, but when restored to consciousness she could recall no
sensation of wound or burn and complained that the operation had not
taken place. I asked another during the operation, ‘How are you
getting on?’ the reply was, ‘Not badly.’ At the same moment I
pricked her vigorously; she felt nothing. Again, in another case
when I introduced a forceps into the mouth to hold the tongue the
patient said, ‘Take away that cigarette.’ On awaking he could
remember nothing. Another when a quill was passed beneath his nose
said, ‘Do not tickle me’ at the moment when the large arteries were
being tied, the most painful part of the operation. Finally, a man
under chloroform, while his spermatic cord was being tied, heard the
clock strike and tranquilly remarked, ‘Half-past eleven,’ recalling
nothing when he awoke."[23]
-----
Footnote 23:
Richet, _Recherches expérimentales et cliniques sur la
Sensibilité_, pp. 258, 259.
-----
I have quoted these facts to show the extent to which pain, as a
state of consciousness, is _separable_, how it can be added or cast
off, and to what extent it presents the character of an
epiphenomenon.
This relative independence of the pain-phenomenon, against which the
intellectualists have always rebelled,[24] seems to me corroborated
by the retardation which I have already noted in passing. If we
strike a corn while walking, we feel the shock before the pain; the
cold of the knife is felt before the pain of the incision. Beau
estimates that pain is delayed seven-tenths of a second behind the
tactile impression. Burckhardt, by precise investigation, fixes the
rapidity of transmission in the cord at 12 m. 9 per second for
painful impressions, and 43 m. 3 for the others. In certain diseases
like tabes dorsalis the pain may be separated from the needle-prick
which causes it by from one to two seconds. Many other facts may be
quoted. If a fold of the skin is seized in a pressure forceps,
stopping at the moment when the pressure is sufficient, pain, not
felt at first, gradually appears, coming in waves, and being at last
unbearable. A man whose thumb was seized in a machine only knew of
his injury by feeling his arm drawn, and only began to suffer a
quarter of an hour afterwards. It has also been remarked that the
syncope produced by violent shocks and traumatism does not appear at
once; between the accident and the fainting several minutes may
elapse.[25]
-----
Footnote 24:
See on this point Lehmann’s embarrassed explanation,
_Hauptgesetze_, etc., pp. 51 _et seq._
Footnote 25:
Richet (_op. cit._, pp. 289, 290 and 315, 316) gives many
illustrations.
-----
Pain is the result of a sum of impulses. Naunyn has shown that, in
tabes, a mechanical stimulus (like a hair on the cutaneous surface
of the foot), which is below the threshold of consciousness both as
contact and as pain, if repeated from 60 to 600 times a second, is
perceived at the end of from six to twenty seconds, and soon becomes
an intolerable pain to the patient.
Although excessive sensibility to pain (hyperalgesia) belongs to the
pathology of our subject, which will be dealt with in a later
chapter, it is necessary to say a few words about it in contrasting
it with analgesia, especially in view of the conclusions here
reached. This condition is more difficult to observe than
insensibility, because here there is only a difference of degree,
not the difference between being and not being. But in some cases
there is so great a disproportion between the stimulus and the
subject’s reaction that we may say without hesitation that
sensibility is no longer normal.
It has been observed, in a general manner, that the lower races are
not very sensitive to pain. Thus Negroes in Egypt endure, almost
without suffering, the most extensive surgical operations (Pruner
Bey), and Mantegazza (_op. cit._, chap. xxvi.) reports a large
number of examples. In the peasant sensibility is usually less keen
than in the town-dweller, and it may be admitted without hesitation
that susceptibility to pain increases with civilisation; what is
called stoicism should often be called a feeble degree of
sensibility. Hyperalgesia is best seen in cases of extreme nervous
over-excitement. In some it is generalised, constituting the
“supplicium neuricum,” and the patient says that he is the prey of
unspeakable torments. It is less frequent in the case of the special
nerves, but is sometimes met. One suffers from the slightest noise,
and cannot tolerate the least smell. Pitres quotes the case of a
person who shut herself up in a dark room, only coming out at night
with a thick shade against the rays of the stars. Those who entered
her dark room during the day had to wear sombre clothes, completely
concealing the shirt-collar, of which the white reflection was
horribly disagreeable to her.[26] Cutaneous hyperalgesia is very
common, sometimes extending over the whole body, sometimes
disseminated in patches. Weir Mitchell, in his book on injuries of
the nerves, reports numerous examples; among others, a wounded
soldier to whom the mere crumpling of paper caused atrocious pain.
Opium-smokers, when they interrupt their habits, feel the least
breath of air as icy cold, and complain of intolerable pains in all
parts of the body. Hyperalgesia of the deep tissues is also frequent
among the hysterical and hypochondriacal.
-----
Footnote 26:
Pitres, _Leçons Cliniques sur l’Hystérie_, i. p. 182.
-----
It must be remarked in passing that just as insensibility to pain
(analgesia) is independent of incapacity to receive sensorial
impressions (anæsthesia), so hyperalgesia is distinct from
hyperæsthesia. The latter is a power of perception much surpassing
the average; it is known that certain races and individuals possess
extraordinary visual, auditory, or olfactive acuteness; the tactile
hyperæsthesia of the blind is also known, and in hypnotised subjects
the delicacy of the senses has sometimes seemed miraculous.
Hyperalgesia then, like analgesia, shows that pain is relatively
independent of the sensations which arouse it.
III.
We may conclude, from what goes before, that though physical pain
(of which alone I am speaking at present) is always bound to an
internal or external sensation, and forms part of a psychic
complexus, it may be separated and disjoined. It has then its own
conditions of existence, and we may, in advance, say as much for
pleasure.
What are these conditions of existence? or, more simply, what is
pain in its nature? At the present time there are two distinct
doctrines on this point: one, which counts few adherents, regards
physical pain as properly a _sensation_; the other, more generally
admitted, regards it as a _quality_ of sensation, or more correctly,
as an accompaniment, a concomitant.[27]
-----
Footnote 27:
The debates on this subject have chiefly been carried on by
American psychologists. See Rutgers Marshall, _Pain, Pleasure, and
Æsthetics_ (1895); Nichols, “Origin of Pleasure and of Pain”
(_Philosophical Review_, i. pp. 403 and 518); Strong, “Psychology
of Pain” (_Psychological Review_, July 1895, and for criticisms
and replies, Sept. and Nov. 1895, Jan. 1896); Luckey, “Some Recent
Studies of Pain” (_Am. Journal of Psychology_, Oct. 1895).
-----
The first, though recent in its complete form, is not without
antecedents. It found a momentary support in the supposed
discovery of pain-bearing nerves. Nichols, one of the promoters of
this hypothesis, has developed it in this direction; but the
attempt has proved futile. Strong, one of its warmest partisans,
supported himself on other grounds. In his opinion the difficulty
arises from the ambiguity of the word pain, which may mean two
things—displeasure (_Unlust_), or physical pain in the positive
sense. He reduces the latter to cuts, pricks, burns—in short, to
those pains that affect the skin. It is, in his opinion, strictly
a sensation like blue or red—not an attribute, but a substantive.
The pain of a burn, for instance, is a mixture of two sensations,
heat and pain. General sensibility is composed of four kinds of
sensibility: touch, heat, cold, and pain. Each can be abolished
separately. Cocaine and chloroform suppress pain, not touch;
saponine suppresses touch, not pain; syringomyelia destroys
sensibility to pain and heat, not touch; in some forms of neuritis
there is suppression of touch without analgesia. These various
facts are invoked as the chief arguments in favour of the
hypothesis of pain-sensation, though they may all be explained
also by the other doctrine.
This hypothesis is full of difficulties. First, there is the absence
of anatomical basis, of special organs and nerves. It will be
necessary to return to this important point when dealing with
pleasure (Chap. iii.). Nichols tells us that there is nothing to
prove that nerves of pain do not exist, though they have not been
experimentally established—which is indeed something; that
histological research could not determine in the peripheral
apparatus what belongs to touch and what belongs to pain; and that
proof must be deduced from cases of tactile sensation without pain
and _vice versâ_—which fails to constitute any degree of proof.
Moreover, the distinction set up between displeasure (moral pain?)
and physical pain is arbitrary, factitious, wholly unjustified.
There is, however, a still less admissible distinction. Strong
expressly declares that he limits himself to pains localised on the
cutaneous surface. Now by what right can we cut off the group of
physical—strictly physical—pains, the states of torture originating
in the internal organs, the multiple neuralgias as intolerable as
any external pain, without speaking of discomfort, prostration,
exhaustion? Are these also sensations, or something else? We are not
told. Finally—and Strong himself has stated the objection—it must be
acknowledged that we should here have a strange kind of sensations
which do not externalise themselves. While other impressions,
visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, olfactive, are referred to
causes which provoke them, the pains of a prick, a cut, a burn
remain strictly subjective and are not located in the needle, the
knife, the burning coal, as we locate a sound in the bell, a bitter
taste in absinth. The only possible reply (which the partisans of
pain-sensation have not made) would be that this phenomenon has a
character of its own; it always remains a sensation, and never
becomes a perception, whence the absence of externalisation. But
then why assimilate it to blue or red? Moreover, pain-sensation, as
it exists in the adult, approaches so closely to the affective
state, that what is essential in the doctrine of pain-sensation
vanishes. Whatever may be thought of the probability of some future
discovery of terminal organs for physical pain, as Rutgers Marshall
remarks, it must be agreed that there is no proof of the existence
in the environment of a special stimulus to which physical pain
specially corresponds, and for that reason also it would be a great
mistake to place in the well-determined class “sensation,” a mental
state which lacks one of the most marked characteristics of
sensation in general. That conclusion is mine also.
The opposite doctrine, which has of late been called the
_quale_-theory, is often maintained in an unsatisfactory form,
because in fact it reduces itself to an affirmation of _quantity_.
The pain which accompanies sensation may depend either on its
intensity or on its quality alone.
It is needless to insist on the first case, since many old authors
never cease repeating that the painful impression is the result of a
stimulation which is strong, intense, violent, prolonged.
On the contrary, it is necessary to remark that this exclusive
affirmation cannot be applied everywhere and always. This evidently
appears in the cases of hyperalgesia, which is the reason why I
brought them forward. The very disagreeable sensation which is
caused by a knife against the skin certainly comes from the nature
rather than the intensity of the stimulus. Beaunis remarks that
certain odours, tastes, and contacts are painful at once, and do not
need to be intense. Did the contact of the quill which threw Weir
Mitchell’s patient into a state of anguish act by its intensity? No
doubt we must recognise that hyperalgesias constitute a group apart,
not strictly comparable with ordinary cases; they are pathological
forms, variable in degree; but the pathological is merely an
exaggeration of the normal. The error of those who refer pain solely
to intensity of stimulation is in considering _objective_ conditions
only; they forget the part played by the sentient subjects. Pains
which depend on the quality of the stimulus are especially of
_subjective_ origin, because the degree of excitability in the
patient’s nervous elements is the essential ruling factor.
If we admit that these two conditions—intensity and quality—act one
upon the other, what afterwards happens? What is the intimate nature
of the pain-producing process? The hypothesis which is most natural
and simple, and in agreement with the mechanical conceptions
predominant in the biological sciences, would be founded on the
admission that pain corresponds to a particular form of movement. On
this supposition, the affective nervous road, from the periphery to
the centres, would be traversed by three different kinds of movement
or of molecular disturbance: the first giving birth to pure
sensation, that is to say a state of knowledge, an intellectual
state; the second, which may or may not be present, giving birth to
pain; the third, also either present or absent, giving birth to
pleasure.
There is another possible hypothesis, quite different from the
others, which I should be willing to accept, but which cannot be
presented as more than a theory. It would consist in attributing the
genesis of pain to _chemical modifications_ in the tissues and
nerves, especially the production of local or general toxins in the
organism. Pain would thus be one of the forms of auto-intoxication.
Oppenheimer alone seems to me to have worked in this direction.[28]
In his opinion, as regards the origin of pain, “the real cause, in
any sensorial or other organ, resides in a change in the tissues,
especially a chemical change, by which either the products of
destruction rise above the normal average, or else modifications
result from the presence of a foreign body in the organism.” The
connection between the peripheral tissues and the centres would be
by the vaso-motor nerves (constrictor or dilator). The tissues would
be the terminal organs of pain, the vaso-motors the paths of
conduction. In organs which only undergo slight changes when active
(tendons, ligaments, bones, etc.) conscious sensibility is almost
absent. “Pain is not, as many believe, the highest degree of
sensation produced in the organs of special sense; it is the most
intense sensation produced in the vaso-motor nerves under the
influence of violent stimulation.”
-----
Footnote 28:
_Schmerz. und Temperaturempfindung_, Berlin, 1893.
-----
This hypothesis will perhaps be justified by the future. I shall
return to it when studying the emotions. We shall then see that
these are accompanied by deep and well-established chemical
modifications in the organism.
Physical pain is a large subject, which, as may be seen, has not
been neglected of late, and concerning which there is still much to
say. It is not possible, however, to deal further with it here,
since it only occupies a limited area in the psychology of the
emotions.
CHAPTER II.
MORAL PAIN.
_Identity of all the forms of pain—Evolution of moral pain: (1) the
pure result of memory; (2) connected with representations;
positive form, negative form; (3) connected with concepts—Its
external study; physical signs—Therapeutics—Conclusions—A
typical case of hypochondriasis._
In passing from physical pain to moral pain we by no means change
our subject, or enter another world. Languages with their special
terms—“tristesse,” “chagrin,” “sorrow,” “Kummer,” etc.—create an
illusion by which psychologists for the most part seem to have been
duped—the illusion that between these two forms of pain there is a
difference of nature. In any case they do not explain themselves
clearly on the point, and seem to share the common opinion.[29] It
is the object of this chapter to establish that, on the contrary,
there is a fundamental _identity_ between physical and moral pain,
and that they only differ from each other in the point of departure,
the first being connected with a sensation, the second with some
form of representation, an image or an idea.
-----
Footnote 29:
Hartmann alone, so far as I am aware, has dealt with this point,
incidentally but very clearly: “When I have pain in my teeth or my
finger or my stomach; when I lose my wife, my friend, or my
situation, if in all these cases we distinguish what is pain and
pain alone, and not to be confounded with perception, idea, or
thought, we shall recognise that this special element is identical
in all the cases.”—_Philosophie des Unbewussten_, vol. i., Part
II., chap. iii.
-----
I.
At first sight it seems paradoxical, and to many even revolting, to
maintain that the pain caused by a corn or a boil, that expressed by
Michelangelo in his sonnets concerning his inability to reach his
ideal, or that felt by a delicate conscience at the sight of crime,
are identical in their nature. I purposely bring together these
extreme cases. Yet there is no call for indignation if we remember
that we are concerned with the pain alone, not with the events which
provoke it, these latter being extra-affective phenomena. The best
method of justifying our thesis, however, is to follow the evolution
of moral pain in its ascending march from its lowest to its highest
point. It will suffice to note the chief stages.
_First Period._—Moral pain is at first connected with an extremely
simple representation, a concrete image—that is to say, the
immediate copy of a perception. It may be defined as the ideal
reproduction of physical pain. It only presupposes a single
condition, memory. The child who has had to swallow an unpleasant
remedy, or who has had a tooth extracted, experiences when the next
occasion approaches a pain which may be called physical, since it is
connected with a simple image, of which it is the weakened copy and
echo. It may be said in the language of mathematicians, that in this
case the moral pain is to the physical pain as the image is to the
perception. This form is so simple as to be found in many animals
not reckoned among the highest. It is not yet moral pain—grief or
sorrow—in the complete and rigorous sense, but it must be noted,
because it corresponds to what naturalists call a transitional form.
_Second Period._—It is connected with complex representations and
forms a very large class, the manifestations of which are the only
ones met with in average human beings. At this stage moral pain
presupposes reflection, or, more explicitly, first the faculty of
reasoning (deductive or inductive), and secondly constructive
imagination. It would be possible to quote a crowd of examples,
taken at random: the news of a death, of an illness, of ruin, of
frustrated ambition, etc. The point of departure is a dry and simple
fact, but the pain attaches itself to all the _perceived_ results
which flow from it. Thus ruin means a series of privations,
wretchednesses, labours begun over again, fatigues, and exhaustions.
It is in this detailed translation, varying according to individuals
and cases, that moral pain lies. It is clear, and is proved by
observation, that the man endowed with an ardent and constructive
imagination will feel intense pain when another, with a poor and
cold imagination, remains indifferent, seeing nothing in his
misfortune but the present actual fact—that is to say, a very little
thing; the sum of pains evoked is proportional to the sum of
representations evoked. The child remains insensible at the news of
death or ruin; if he is moved it is through imitation; there is
nothing in his experience enabling him to deduce what these fatal
words contain, and to represent the future.
Moral pain presents itself under various forms—positive, negative,
or mixed.
In the positive form it is an expenditure of movement, the
representation of an exhaustive labour, of an incessant effort to
begin again what is already felt in consciousness by anticipation.
Such is the case of the candidate who fails at an examination to
which he must go up again.
In the negative form it is an arrest of movement, a lessening, the
consciousness of a deficit, a privation, cravings ceaselessly
arising and ceaselessly disappointed. The death of a beloved person
is the most perfect example.
In the mixed form we may see it in the ruined millionaire, the
dethroned king, who set to work again to reconstruct the past. On
the one hand the representation of the long labour of a new
conquest; on the other, tendencies of all sorts which were formerly
satisfied, and are now inexorably brought to a stop.
A complete study of the second group of moral pains would include
two moments: the egoistic form, the first in date, and the
sympathetic or altruistic form. The latter seems to appear early,
since Darwin noted it at the age of six months and eleven days in
one of his children, who was much affected when his nurse pretended
to be unhappy and cry. Preyer even alleges, as we have seen, that
grief appears at the age of four months. This sympathetic form of
pain is found in certain animals, especially those living in
society. In certain monogamous couples the death of one of the
partners may cause the other to perish. I will not pause here at
present to describe these two great forms of the affective life
which will occupy us so often in the course of this study.
_Third Period._—Grief in this case is connected with pure concepts
or with ideal representations. This is intellectual pain, which is
much rarer, and produces little effect, at all events for any length
of time, on the ordinary man. Such is the pain of the religious
person who feels he is not sufficiently devout, of the metaphysician
tormented by doubt, of the poet and the artist, conscious of an
abortive creation, of the man of science who unsuccessfully pursues
the solution of a problem.
These forms of pain are chiefly negative and secondarily positive.
They consist, first, in unsatisfied needs, privations, lacunæ in
existence; afterwards in effort, expenditure of force, fatigue,
achieving nothing.
II.
Having shown that the pain-phenomenon, in the course of evolution,
attaches itself to representations more and more elevated and
finally to superior conceptions, we will examine moral pain
objectively, _from without_, to show afresh its identity with
physical pain, or, more exactly, to prove that pain is invariable in
its nature, under whatever form it manifests itself.
1. Grief is accompanied by the same modifications in the organism as
physical pain. It is needless to repeat the description: circulatory
disturbance, constriction of the vaso-motors, syncope; decrease of
respiration or constant changes in its rhythm, sudden or prolonged
reverberation on nutrition, loss of appetite, indigestion, arrest or
diminution of secretions, vomiting. I may remark that rapid change
of colour in the hair, already noted, is specially met with in
violent moral shocks (Marie-Antoinette, Ludovico Sforza, etc.). The
voluntary muscles of the larynx, the face, the whole body, undergo
the same influences and express them in the same ways. For moral as
for physical pain, there are silent forms and agitated forms.
2. If we admit the old maxim: “Naturam morborum medicationes
ostendunt,” as we see every day the same general therapeutics
applied to both forms of pain, we have here evidence in favour of
their identity: no doubt there are curative methods proper to each;
for moral pain, consolations, distractions, travel; but are not
opium, sedatives, and tonics employed to relieve both?
3. I brought together at the beginning of this chapter the grossest
forms of physical pain and the most refined forms of moral pain; but
there are composite forms in which sensations and representations
seem to form an equilibrium, so that such painful states might be
entered under either head. This is the case with certain
melancholics of whom I shall have to speak later, but we may take as
a type the hypochondriacal person in whom we find the point of
junction of the two pains. The physical troubles of hypochondriasis
have often been described. There are localised pains, but in
addition a large number of simply represented pains, enlarged as by
a lens, and referred to the lungs, the heart, the liver, the spleen,
the kidneys, the stomach, the intestines. The joints are cracking;
there are conjectures concerning the appearance of the face, the
tongue, the urine, and above all what perpetual anxiety! One of them
said: “I feel better to-day, and that makes me anxious; it is not
natural.” Is this physical pain or moral pain? Sometimes one,
sometimes the other predominates, according to the individual and
the moment. Clouston has observed that in melancholics sadness often
diminishes when physical pain increases. They are so intimately
intertwined that no point of departure can be established between
them. This morbid state is worthy of mention because it also is a
transitional form. We need have no hesitation in generalising, and
saying that there is no physical (that is to say, localised) pain,
however slight, unaccompanied by some fugitive mental irritation,
and no mental irritation unaccompanied by some slight physical
troubles.
The foregoing does not imply that grief is a very refined physical
pain, or that it arises therefrom, as—according to the well-known
formula: _Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu_—it
is supposed that the superior forms of knowledge arise from
sensation alone. That would be a misconstruction. Physical pain is
not a genus of which moral pain is a species. The thesis which I
maintain is that pain is always identical with itself, that it has
its own conditions of existence, that the innumerable modes which it
presents to us in the physical order and in the moral order are
related to the sensorial or intellectual elements which excite and
envelop it.[30]
-----
Footnote 30:
Hahnemann distinguished 73 kinds of physical pain, Georget 38,
Renaudin 12, etc. I give these numbers as curiosities. More
recently Goldscheider (_Ueber den Schmerz_) establishes three
stages in physical pain: (1) true, real (_echte_) pains; they
depend on the nerves of special sensibility, and are caused by
mechanical, thermal, or chemical stimulations, by inflammation and
poisons; (2) indirect pains, pseudo-pains, which consist
especially in a state of discomfort (_Schmerzweh_); in the case of
the head, stomach, etc., they may be as oppressive and cause as
much torture as “real” pains; (3) psychic or ideal (_ideel_)
pains, which are a hyperæsthesia of the sensitive activity; they
are met with in neuroses (neurasthenia, hysteria, hypochondria),
in hallucinations, the hypnotic state, etc. This classification is
perhaps acceptable in physiology. For psychology, every pain, in
virtue of being a fact of consciousness, is “true” and “real.”
-----
The question still remains why certain representations have the
unfortunate privilege of arousing pain. This is a question which I
can only touch on, because it belongs to another part of the
subject. For the moment I simply reply that it is because they are
the beginning of mental disorganisation, just as physical pain is
the beginning of physical disorganisation. The sentient being, man
or animal, is a bundle of needs, of appetites, of physical or
psychic tendencies; everything that suppresses or impedes them is
translated into pain. Physical suffering is the blind and
unconscious reaction of the organism to every hurtful action. Grief
is the conscious reaction to every decrease of psychic life. The man
shut in by narrow and commonplace surroundings would certainly feel
no æsthetic pain, because having no need of æsthetic satisfaction he
could not be impoverished or impeded by its absence.
In short, pain under all its forms reveals an identical nature. The
distinction between physical pain and moral pain is practical, not
scientific.
CHAPTER III.
PLEASURE.
_Subject little studied—Is Pleasure a sensation or a quality?—Its
physical concomitants: circulation, respiration,
movements—Pleasure, like pain, is separable: physical and moral
anhedonia—Identity of the different forms of pleasure—The
alleged transformation of pleasure into pain—Common ground of
the two states—Hypothesis of a difference in kind and in
degree—Simultaneity of two opposite processes: what falls under
consciousness is the result of a difference—Physiological facts
in support of the above._
In treating of grief, one is apt to be embarrassed by the abundance
of documents, and the difficulty of being brief; in dealing with
pleasure the contrary is the case. Are we to conclude that this is
because, for centuries past, physicians have been collecting
observations on pain, while there exists no profession having for
its object the observation of pleasure? Or is it because humanity is
so constituted as to suffer more from pain than it can enjoy from
pleasure, and therefore studies everything relating to pain in order
to find deliverance therefrom, while accepting everything agreeable
naturally and without reflection? We cannot, however, accuse
psychologists of having neglected this study, although the
bibliography of Pleasure is very scanty compared with that of Pain.
In general, they have considered these two subjects as complementary
to one another, pleasure and pain being opposed to each other as
contraries, so that the knowledge of the one implies the knowledge
of the other. But this is only a hypothesis—perhaps true, perhaps
false—resting in great part only on the testimony of consciousness,
which is always open to question and never above suspicion. “It may
be,” says Beaunis, very justly, “that pleasure and pain, which seem
to us two opposite and mutually contradictory phenomena, may in the
end be nothing but phenomena of the same nature, only differing in
degree. It is possible that they may be phenomena of different
orders, but incapable of such comparison with one another as would
enable us to declare one contrary to the other. It is possible that
they may depend simply on a difference of excitability in the
nervous centres. Again, it is possible that they may be included,
sometimes in one category, sometimes in the other.”[31]
-----
Footnote 31:
Beaunis, _Sensations internes_, chap. xxiii.
-----
I.
The formulas universally made use of in characterising pleasure
indicate this vague position of the problem: “Agreeable states are
the correlatives of actions which conduce to the well-being or
preservation of the individual.” “Generally speaking, pleasures are
the concomitants of medium activities, where the activities are of
kinds liable to be in excess or in defect” (Herbert Spencer).
“Experience attests that, in all the sensory regions, sensations of
moderate energy are specially accompanied by a feeling of pleasure.
Thus this feeling connects itself with the sensations of tickling
due to cutaneous excitations of slight energy” (Wundt). According to
this writer, the gamut of pleasure is less rich and extensive than
that of pain, and he finds the proof of this assertion in the
language expressive of universal experience. “Language,” he says,
“has created numerous expressions for disagreeable feelings,
emotions, and inclinations, while the joyful moods of the mind are
dismissed with a brief general designation. This phenomenon arises
less from the fact that man observes with especial care and
minuteness his disagreeable or troublesome states, than from the
greater uniformity which pleasurable feelings in reality possess.
This is particularly evident in the case of the sensory feelings
[those connected with the sensations]. Pain has not only numerous
degrees of energy, but numberless gradations according to its seat.”
Mantegazza, when determining the synonyms of pleasure, appears to
uphold the contrary view.[32] For my own part, I am of Wundt’s
opinion.
-----
Footnote 32:
_Fisiologia del piacere_, Part II., chap. ii. He enumerates the
following expressions:—_Gusto_, _diletto_, _compiacenza_,
_soddisfazione_, _conforto_, _contentezza_, _allegria_, _buon
umore_, _gioia_, _giubilo_, _tripudio_, _delizia_, _voluttà_,
_felicità_, _solletico_, _rapimento_, _trasporto_, _ebbrezza_,
_delirio_. Perhaps the Italian language is in this point richer
than the German.
-----
The anatomical and physiological conditions of the genesis and
transmission of pleasure are a _terra incognita_. In cases of
physical pleasure, what takes place at the peripheral terminations,
in the nerves, in the cerebro-spinal axis? Most authors do not even
propound these questions. The physiology of pain, in spite of its
uncertainties, is rich and instructive compared with that of
pleasure.
In recent times it has been maintained that pleasure, as well as
grief, ought to be regarded as a _sensation_, not as the concomitant
of various psychic states; that both are fundamental senses having
their own proper nervous energies distinct from other sensations. In
other words, the expression, “sensations of pleasure and pain,”
ought to be taken in the strict sense borne by the word sensation. I
have already touched on this point in treating of pain, but it may
not be out of place to return to it here; for, apart from its
hypothetical character, I cannot think this assertion a happy one.
In fact, if there is any psychological state clearly delimited and
differentiated from all others, it is sensation.
Sensation is determined and circumscribed by a special organ serving
for this purpose only, as in the case of sight, hearing, etc., or at
least by special nerves and special peripheral terminations, as in
the case of touch, and temperature. Internal sensations, in spite of
the nervous apparatus proper to them, have a vaguer character; hence
some psychologists call them indifferently sensations or feelings.
The kinæsthetic sensations, or those of movement, long included
under the designation of muscular sense (an improper term, gradually
falling out of use), have, though diffused through the organism,
nerves peculiar to themselves; those of the muscular tissue, the
articulations (the periosteum, the ligaments, the synovial
membranes, the tendons). But pleasure and pain have neither special
nerves nor special organs. We have seen the opinion admitted with
regard to the pain-bringing nerves; as for the nerves of pleasure, I
know no author who has hazarded such a hypothesis, however
tentatively. It is true that one of those who admit the existence of
nerves of pain (Frey) gets out of the difficulty very easily by
saying that pleasure, consisting only in the absence of pain,
requires no special nerves. May we not say, then, that it is a
complete falsification of the meaning of words to class among
sensations psychical phenomena answering to none of the required
anatomical or physiological conditions?[33]
-----
Footnote 33:
This thesis has been principally maintained in America by H.
Nichols (_Philosophical Review_, July 1892), and in France by
Bourdon (_Revue Philosophique_, September 1893). The former
applies it to pleasure and pain, considering them fundamental
sensations as distinct from one another as they are from other
sensations. This article contains some ingenious considerations on
the part played by the association of ideas. Bourdon applies it
only to pleasure, and considers pain irreducible. He regards
pleasure as a special sensation, not a common one or an attribute
of all sensations; it is “of the same nature as the special
sensation of tickling.” By adducing the pleasure of tickling (in
which he follows Descartes and others), Bourdon partially escapes
the criticism already advanced. It must be remarked, however, that
tickling is itself a sensation of which the organic conditions are
very vaguely determined. Besides the cutaneous impression, there
are certainly also diffused reflex actions which connect it quite
as much with internal sensibility as with the sense of touch.
-----
The manifestations taking place within the organism are better known
when we are in a condition of pleasure. Let us take as typical the
constant pleasures, putting aside those which, by their exuberance,
as we shall see later on, border on pathological forms. Whether the
point of departure is a physical excitation, a representation, or a
concept, two distinct events take place, as in the case of grief: on
the one hand an internal state of consciousness, which we describe
as agreeable; on the other a bodily external condition, of which the
following are the principal characteristics.
Taken as a whole, they may be opposed, almost point for point, to
the description already given of the physical manifestations of
grief, and betray a heightening of the vital functions. This
contrast is not without importance in favour of the common thesis
which regards pleasure and pain as a pair of opposites.
1. The circulation increases, especially in the brain, as shown by
various symptoms, in particular the increased lustre of the eyes.
The experiments of Lehmann, already quoted (Chapter I.), prove that
physical, as well as æsthetic pleasure, is accompanied by dilatation
of the vessels and an increase of the heart’s contractions.[34]
-----
Footnote 34:
Dr. G. Dumas has made experiments on the condition of the
circulation in states of joy and of sadness. He has attempted an
experimental verification of Lange’s theory by showing that a
definite condition of the circulation always accompanies various
agreeable and painful emotions, and that “joy and sadness may
thus be regarded as the mental reverberation of these
circulatory conditions and their organic consequences.” See
“Recherches expérimentales sur la Joie et la Tristesse,” _Revue
Philosophique_, June-August 1896.—ED.
-----
2. The same thing is to be observed with regard to the respiration,
which becomes more active; in consequence, the temperature of the
body rises, and the nutritive exchanges, becoming more rapid, result
in a rich alimentation of the organs and tissues. “In joy, all parts
of the body receive advantage, and are likely to last longer; the
cheerful and contented man is well nourished and remains young. It
is a truism that people in good health are contented” (Lange). Joy
also tends to make the secretions (lacteal, spermatic, etc.) more
abundant.
3. The innervation of the voluntary muscles expresses itself by
exuberance of movements, by joyful exclamations, laughter, and
singing. Certain cases of extreme and sudden joy have been known to
produce all the effects of alcoholic intoxication. Sir H. Davy
danced in his laboratory after making the discovery of potassium. At
the London International Congress of Psychology (1892), Münsterberg
communicated the following experiments under the title of “The
Psychological Foundation of the Feelings.” A line ten centimetres in
length is drawn with the right hand. When this movement has been
thoroughly practised, it should be repeated with closed eyes,
passing the hand first from right to left, with a movement of
centripetal flexion, then from left to right, with a movement of
centrifugal extension. In such a case mistakes will be made,
sometimes in the one direction, sometimes in the other. Let us
repeat the same experiments under the influence of certain affective
states (sadness, gaiety, anger, etc.), noting all errors and their
direction. Münsterberg has discovered them to be determined by a
very exact law. In vexation, the extensor movements (centrifugal)
are too short (average error, 10 mm.), and the flexor movements
(centripetal) too long, the average excess being 12 mm. In joy, on
the other hand, the centrifugal movements are in excess by (on an
average) 10 mm., and the centripetal movements too short by an
average of 20 mm. From this he concludes that, in pleasure, motion
tends to increase; in pain, to diminish.
The manifestations of joy may be summed up in a single
word—dynamogeny. Joy produces energy.
It is superfluous to say that we consider pleasure, for the same
reasons as pain, to be an additional phenomenon, a symptom, a sign,
a mark, denoting the satisfaction of certain tendencies; and that it
cannot be regarded as a fundamental element of the life of the
feelings. Like pain, pleasure is separable from the complex of which
it forms part, and under certain abnormal conditions may totally
disappear. _Anhedonia_ (if I may coin a counter-designation to
analgesia) has been very little studied, but it exists. I need not
say that the employment of anæsthetics suppresses at the same time
pain and its contrary; but there are cases of an insensibility
relating to pleasure alone. “The sensation of sexual pleasure is, in
very rare cases, subject to lesions affecting no other part of the
organism. Brown-Séquard saw two cases of special sexual anæsthesia,
all other kinds of sensibility, those of the urethral mucous
membrane and the skin, still persisting. Althaus quotes another
case. It would no doubt be possible to find such cases in larger
numbers were it not for the false modesty which prevents patients
from speaking of the subject. Fonssagrives cites a very remarkable
example observed in a woman.”[35] This insensibility exists not only
for physical but also for moral pleasure (joy, high spirits, etc.).
Apart from the cases of profound melancholy, which will occupy us
later on, where the individual is untouched by the slightest impulse
of joy, there are cases of anhedonia which seem simpler and clearer.
“Antoine Cros mentions the case of a patient, a young girl,
suffering from congested liver and spleen, which of course altered
the state of her blood, and thus, for a time, modified her
constitution. Her moral character was greatly altered by it. She
ceased to feel any affection for father or mother; would play with
her doll, but could not be brought to show any delight in it; could
not be drawn out of her apathetic sadness. Things which previously
had made her shriek with laughter now left her uninterested. Her
temper changed, became capricious and violent.”[36] Esquirol has
recorded the case of a magistrate, a very intelligent man, suffering
from a liver complaint. “Every affection seemed to be dead in him.
He showed neither perversion nor violence, but there was complete
absence of emotive reaction. If he went to the theatre (as he
continued to do from force of habit) he could find no pleasure
there. Thoughts of his house, his home, his wife, his absent
children, affected him no more, he said, than a theorem of Euclid.”
We have here a specimen of what we may call a purely intellectual
existence—that of the Wise Man of the Stoics.
Footnote 35:
Richet, _Recherches_, etc., p. 212.
Footnote 36:
Lewes, _Physical Basis of Mind_, p. 327.
These facts—and we shall find analogous ones in other chapters,
under other headings—show that, as we have seen in the case of pain,
pleasure does not depend simply on the _quantity_ of excitement. To
attribute all pleasures to excitements of medium energy is
equivalent to the formula: “Pain is due to an intense and prolonged
excitement.” In both cases intensity alone is emphasised; but there
are pleasures irreducible to medium energy and depending on the
_quality_ of the excitement and the nature of the sentient subject.
Will it be said that sexual pleasures are the concomitants of a
medium activity? The pleasure produced by harmonious chords is, for
a musical ear, a matter of quality, not of intensity. We find it
impossible, therefore, to reduce the objective conditions of
pleasure to a single formula.
Although general opinion has established a distinction between
sensory and spiritual pleasures, this distinction is purely
theoretical. Pleasure, as an affective state, always remains
identical with itself; its numerous varieties are determined only by
the intellectual condition originating it—sensation, image, concept.
It would be tedious to repeat in detail the analysis already given
of pain in order to apply it to pleasure; it will be sufficient to
indicate the principal points.
All forms of pleasure are accompanied by the organic modifications
previously enumerated. Primarily, it can only be physical—_i.e._,
combined with a sensation, such as the pleasure of a soft, warm
contact, the satisfaction of hunger and thirst in children and
animals. Then pleasure becomes an anticipation, as in the case of a
dog when his food is being brought to him; to employ the term used
by Herbert Spencer, it is a presentative-representative state. Then,
in this ascending evolution, pleasure appears attached to pure
representations. This—as in the case of pain—is the main group, that
of the varied and numerous joys which console humanity for its
sufferings; these, too, are divided into egoistic and sympathetic
pleasures. There remain the highest and rarest manifestations
attached to pure concepts—the pleasures of æsthetic creation, those
of the metaphysician or the man of science. We might further show
how the transition from pleasure, considered as strictly physical
(that of the thirsty man drinking a cool beverage in long draughts),
to the subtlest, most ethereal intellectual pleasures, may in fact
be gradually traced step by step; that the two elements—sensory and
representative—are always coexistent, and that we qualify any given
pleasure solely according to the preponderance of one or the other.
Finally, if we have found in hypochondriasis a composite form, which
might be classed with equal justice as a physical or moral pain, in
the domain of pleasure it is not difficult to discover analogous
forms. The æsthetic pleasure called forth by forms, by colours, and
especially by sounds, affords us an example. It is incontestable
that these three kinds of sensation can, unassisted, in and by
themselves, produce a sensory pleasure. Certain colours, certain
qualities of sound, certain chords, produce at once an agreeable
impression. Then the representations evoked by memory excite, in
their turn, a degree of pleasure quite distinct from the original
sensations. Fechner, in his _Vorschule der Æsthetik_, distinguishes,
in his analysis of the elements of the Beautiful, the direct factor,
_i.e._ sensation, and the indirect or associative factor, that is to
say, the associated ideas evoked. These two coexistent factors are
only separable by psychological analysis, and the position
established by Fechner for the intellectual elements has its
equivalent for the emotional states.[37]
Footnote 37:
For further details on this point see Chapter VII.
II.
The generally accepted formula connecting pleasure with medium
activities is supported by a commonly observed fact—viz., that
pleasure carried to excess or continued too long often transforms
itself into its opposite. The pleasures of eating may lead to
nausea, tickling soon becomes a torture, as well as heat and cold,
and one cannot endure even a favourite melody when played for two
consecutive hours. In a word, a sensation or representation at first
agreeable may, either gradually or suddenly, be found to have its
opposite associated with it. While the sensory or intellectual
element remains the same—at least in appearance—the affective state
is changed.
So familiar an occurrence, well known from the remotest antiquity,
from which various consequences have been deduced by philosophers,
would not in itself possess sufficient importance to arrest our
attention, did it not, for all its insignificant appearance, afford
us the opportunity of penetrating the depths of our subject.
We may remark that the same transformation takes place inversely—a
state in itself disagreeable may become agreeable. This
transmutation is to be found at the root of nearly all the pleasures
which we call _acquired_: a taste or smell at first repugnant may
become delightful.
The same thing happens with regard to certain physical exercises
connected with touch and the muscular sense. The use of alcoholic
drinks, of tobacco, of all sorts of narcotics, would furnish us with
abundance of examples. Pleasure is found in certain forms of
literature which were at first found revolting; the same thing may
be said of painting; and the history of music is one long piece of
evidence in favour of this transformation of tastes.
In the first place, we have to note that the hackneyed expression,
“transformation” of pleasure into pain, and _vice versâ_, is
inaccurate. Pain cannot be changed into pleasure or pleasure into
pain, any more than black can be changed into white. What is meant
is that the conditions of existence of the one disappear to give
place to the conditions of existence of the other. There is
succession, but not transformation; a symptom does not transform
itself into its opposite.
This succession, abrupt or gradual, leads us to ask whether there
might not be a common basis, a certain identity of nature, between
the two antagonistic phenomena. The question thus put may be
answered by one of two alternative hypotheses.
1. The admission that the difference is fundamental and irreducible,
that pain is as clearly to be distinguished from pleasure as the
visual sensation is from the auditory sensation: that these feelings
constitute an antinomy—an irreconcilable antagonism. The clearest
affirmation of this thesis is found in those writers who make
pleasure and pain “sensations” comparable to other sensations, and
having their own specific character.
2. The admission that the difference is one of degree, not of
nature; that the two contrary manifestations are only two _moments_
of the same process; that they differ from each other only as sound
differs from noise, or a very acute sound from a very deep one, both
resulting from the same cause—the number of vibrations in any given
space of time. I am myself inclined to maintain this second
hypothesis.
Let us take as an example a simple case where the process is
manifested in its totality. We have a person in a so-called
indifferent, neutral, or medium state, that is to say, one which
cannot be described as agreeable or painful; the individual is
simply alive, that is all. He is sensitive to the perfume of
flowers; some are placed in his room—pleasure is the result. At the
end of an hour all is changed; the subject is incommoded by the
smell of the flowers, and avoids them. Hence we have three
successive moments: indifference, pleasure, pain.
But these three moments in consciousness have their correlatives in
the modifications of the organism: circulation, respiration, motion,
the various phases of nutrition. The first answers to the average
vital formula of the individual; the second to an increase in the
vital functions, and, according to the usual formula (which we shall
examine later on), to an augmentation of energy; the third to a
lowering of the vital functions and a diminution of energy. Such are
the data of observation and experience. Féré’s researches on the
olfactory sensations (to mention no others) have shown that the
feelings accompanying them, pleasant or otherwise, show themselves
in an augmented or diminished pressure on the dynamometer. In a
subject whose dynamometric force is normally 50-55, a disagreeable
odour lowers the index to 45, an agreeable one raises it to 65. In
another (a hysterical patient) the odour of musk, at first very
pleasant, raises the dynamometer from 23 to 46; in three minutes it
becomes disagreeable, and the pressure sinks to 19.[38] We find,
therefore, that the organism is subject to perpetual fluctuations,
indicated in the consciousness by agreeable or disagreeable
feelings: the two opposites are connected with one and the same
cause, the vital functions forming their common basis; and I should
be inclined to propound the following hypothesis:—
Footnote 38:
Féré, _Sensation et Mouvement_, pp. 62, 63.
In most cases, if not in all, two contrary processes are going on
simultaneously—one of increase, the other of diminution; _what comes
into the consciousness is only the result of a difference_.
A difference between what? Between receipt and expenditure. Let us,
in order to show this clearly, take a point at which the destructive
and constructive activities exactly balance one another, a condition
corresponding to the neutral or indifferent state of psychologists,
and let us represent the same by the numerical formula 50 = 50. At a
subsequent point of time the destructive activities predominate; let
us suppose them equal to 60, while the value of the constructive
falls to 40. On comparing the second moment with the first, we find
a negative difference of -20, whose psychic equivalent is a painful
state of consciousness. Let us then suppose a third moment, when the
constructive activities are in the ascendent and equal 60, while the
destructive fall to 40; there will be a positive difference of +20,
whose psychic equivalent is a pleasant state of consciousness. I
must beg the reader to take all this only by way of illustration.
Thus understood, the “transformation” of pleasure into pain, and
pain into pleasure, is only the translation into the order of
affective psychology of the fundamental rhythm of life. The latter
reduces itself to the ultimate fact of nutrition, consisting of two
mutually interdependent processes, one of which implies the other,
assimilation and dissimilation. Except in extreme cases, such as
inanition and exhaustion on the one hand, and plethora on the other,
in which one of the two processes prevails almost without
counterpoise, they usually oscillate on either side of a medium, as
pleasure and pain do on either side of an alleged neutral state. In
physiology it happens that a very clear and easily verified
phenomenon covers and hides a contrary phenomenon, so that the
principal part of the occurrence is erroneously taken for the whole.
Thus one knows that a muscle is heated by exercise, which seems to
contravene the law of the transformation of energy, as the
mechanical work done ought to consume a part of that mode of motion
which we call heat. Béclard and several others after him have shown
that there is a real lowering of temperature at the beginning of
positive work, and that two opposite phenomena appear in the muscle
when in action: one physical, absorbing heat and determining a
cooling of the active muscle; the other chemical, producing a
heating of the muscle. The latter masks the former. In the same way,
the well-known experiments of Schiff have shown that the brain is
heated when it receives impressions and elaborates them; it ought to
grow cold, since it is doing work; but Tanzi’s experiments seem to
establish the existence of alternating oscillations of cold and heat
while the brain is at work. We recall these facts, though not in
direct relation to our subject, to show that the coexistence of two
opposite processes, the most apparent of which conceals the other,
is not a chimera. There are frequently two simultaneous phenomena,
of which the one is seen and not the other.
According to this hypothesis, then, the conditions of existence of
pleasure and pain are implied the one by the other, and always
coexistent. What is expressed by consciousness is a _surplus_, and
what is called their transformation is only a difference in favour
of one or the other.[39]
Footnote 39:
This also seems to be the view adopted by Rutgers Marshall (_op.
cit._). In the first place, he always considers “pleasure-pains”
as connected states, pleasure being experienced “whenever the
physical activity coincident with the psychic state to which the
pleasure is attached involves the use of surplus stored force—the
resolution of surplus potential into actual energy; or, in other
words, whenever the energy involved in the reaction to a stimulus
is greater in amount than the energy which the stimulus habitually
calls forth.”—P. 204.
I add some final remarks on the so-called transformation of pain
into pleasure. Being rarer than its opposite, it presents some
peculiarities to be noted.
Very acute pleasures exhaust quickly—a condition very favourable to
the rapid appearance of pain; I do not see that acute pain ever
changes into pleasure, except perhaps in a few cases to be examined
in the following chapter.
The “transformation” does not take place abruptly, but always by a
gradual transition.
Some have attempted to explain it by habit; but this is so general a
term as to require fresh definition in each individual case. It has
also been said that the painful sensation, being accompanied by
disorganisation and lowering of the vital power, produces, _ipso
facto_, an organic repair, a vital increase, which is the essential
condition of pleasure. But this does not prove that the period of
reintegration coexists with the first impression and imparts to it a
contrary affective sign. The novice in the use of tobacco is at
first incommoded by headache, nausea, etc.; then there follows a
period of repair, but it is not directly connected with the act of
smoking.
It seems to me preferable to admit, with Beaunis, that the agreeable
states we speak of are not simple but complex, consisting of a
certain number of elements. “It may happen that, among the elements
which compose sensation, some are agreeable and some painful; with
habit and exercise the painful element gradually disappears from the
consciousness, and only the agreeable elements of the sensation
remain. In this case there would not really be a transformation of
the pain into pleasure, but an extinction, a disappearance of the
disagreeable elements of the sensation, and a predominance of the
agreeable ones.”[40]
Footnote 40:
Beaunis, _Sensations internes_, pp. 246, 247.
The cause of this change seems to me to lie in the biological
function called adaptation, of whose true nature very little
is known, and which appears to reduce itself to nutritive
modifications. Experiment shows that its efficacy cannot be
depended on: it succeeds in some persons, but fails in others.
CHAPTER IV.
MORBID PLEASURES AND PAINS.
_Utility of the pathological method—Search for a criterion of
the morbid state; abnormal reaction through excess or
defect; apparent disproportion between cause and effect;
chronicity—I. Morbid pleasures, not peculiar to advanced
civilisation—Different attempts at explanation—This state cannot
be explained by normal psychology: it is the rudimentary form of
the suicidal tendency—Classification—Semi-pathological
pleasures: those destructive of the individual, those
destructive of the social order—II. Abnormal pains—Melancholic
type—Whence does the painful state arise in its permanent form?
from an organic disposition? or from a fixed idea?—Examples of
the two cases._
The title of this chapter may seem paradoxical, pleasure being as a
rule the expression of health, and even of exuberant life, and pain,
by its very definition, a diseased state. It must be admitted that,
for the latter, the expression _abnormal_ would be preferable.
However, the facts we are about to study are not rare, and deserve
separate examination, because the deviations and anomalies of
pleasure and pain serve to make the nature of each better
understood.
Taking our subject, for the first time, on the pathological side, a
proceeding to be applied later on to each of the simple or complex
emotions in turn, certain preliminary remarks are indispensable.
The application of the pathological method to psychology needs no
justification; its efficacy has been proved. The results obtained
are too numerous and too well known to need enumeration. This
method, in fact, has two principal advantages—(1) it is a magnifying
instrument, amplifying the normal phenomenon; hallucination explains
the part played by the image, and hypnotic suggestion throws light
on the suggestion met with in ordinary life; (2) it is a valuable
instrument of analysis. Pathology, it has justly been remarked, is
only physiology out of order, and nothing leads better to the
understanding of a machine than the elimination or the deviation of
one of its wheels. Aphasia produces a decomposition of memory and
its different signs, which the subtlest psychological analysis could
not attempt or even suspect.
The principal difficulty of this method lies in determining the
precise moment when it can be applied. The distinction between the
healthy and the morbid is often extremely difficult to establish. No
doubt there are cases where no hesitation is possible; but there are
also debatable zones lying between the territories of health and
disease. Claude Bernard ventured to write, “What is called the
normal state is purely a conception of the mind, a typical ideal
form entirely disengaged from the thousand divergences among which
the organism is incessantly floating, amid its alternating and
intermittent functions.” If this is the case with regard to bodily
health, we may expect to find it still more so with regard to
mental. The dilemma: Either this man is mad or he is not, is, in
many cases, says Griesinger, meaningless. The psychical organism,
being more complex and less stable than the physical, makes it still
more difficult to fix a norm. Finally, this difficulty attains its
maximum in our subject, because the emotional—the most mobile among
all the forms of psychic life—oscillates incessantly around one
point of equilibrium, always ready to sink too low or rise too high.
As, however, it is necessary to adopt some definite characteristics
which may serve as pathological signs, as criteria for
distinguishing the healthy from the morbid in the emotional order,
we shall accept those proposed by Féré. According to him, an emotion
may be considered as morbid—
1. When its physiological concomitants present themselves with
extraordinary intensity (I think we should add, or an extraordinary
depression).
2. When it takes place without sufficient determining cause.
3. When its effects are unreasonably prolonged.[41]
Footnote 41:
Féré, _Pathologie des Émotions_, p. 223.
These three signs, which I shall call respectively abnormal reaction
by excess or defect, disproportion (apparent) between cause and
effect, and chronicity, will frequently be of service to us in the
study of the emotions. For the moment we are only treating of
pleasure and pain.
I.
Beginning with pleasure, I shall first examine a typical case
studied by several physiologists, who have not furnished any, to me,
satisfactory explanation. I mean the special state which has been
called “the luxury of pity” (Spencer), pleasure in pain (Bouillier),
and which it would be more accurate to call “the pleasure of pain.”
It consists in being pleased with one’s own suffering and tasting it
like a pleasure.
This disposition of the mind is not, as one might think, peculiar to
_blasé_ persons and to epochs of refined civilisation; it seems
inherent in humanity the moment it emerges from barbarism.
Bouillier[42] has quoted from the ancient writers passages referring
to it, not only in Lucretius, Seneca, and other moralists, but in
the Homeric poems, which reflect a very primitive civilisation, yet
in which a man “rejoices in his tears.” Parallel passages might have
been found in the Bible, and also, I suppose, in the epics of
ancient India. We have not, therefore, to deal with a rare
phenomenon, though it becomes more frequent as we advance in
civilisation.
Footnote 42:
Bouillier, _Du plaisir et de la douleur_, chap. vii.
A few examples will be of greater value than any opinions I could
cite. They may be found of all sorts—pleasure in physical pain, and
pleasure in moral pain. Certain patients find intense enjoyment in
irritating their sores. Mantegazza[43] says: “I knew an old man who
acknowledged to me that he found an extraordinary pleasure, and one
which seemed to him equal to any other, in scratching the inflamed
surfaces surrounding a senile sore in his leg from which he had
suffered for some years.”
Footnote 43:
Mantegazza, _Fisiologia del piacere_, p. 26.
A celebrated man of the Renaissance, Cardan, says in his
autobiography that “he could not do without suffering, and when this
happened to him, he felt such an impulse arise in him, that every
other pain seemed a relief.” When in this state, he was in the habit
of torturing his own body till forced to shed tears by the pain.[44]
I might enumerate a long series of these pleasures of physical pain.
Of the pleasures of moral pain I will give but one example:
melancholy in the ordinary, non-medical sense-the melancholy of
lovers, poets, artists, etc. This state may be considered as typical
of the deliberate enjoyment of sadness. Any one may be sad, but
melancholy is not to be attained by every one. I may mention also,
in passing, the pleasures of ugliness in æsthetics, and the taste
for sanguinary spectacles and tortures which we shall have to
consider in another place.
Footnote 44:
A curious study of pathological psychology might be founded on the
_De Vila Propria_ of Cardan, who was evidently what would now be
called a neuropath and a _déséquilibré_.
If we leave the facts and come to the explanations proposed, we
shall find that they are not numerous. Bouillier (_op. cit._) seems
to adopt the opinion of a Cartesian, who said, “If the soul, in all
movements of the passions, even the most painful, is in some measure
tickled by a secret feeling of pleasure, if it takes pleasure in
pain, and does not wish to be consoled, it is because of a
consciousness that the state in which it finds itself is the state
of heart and mind best suited to its situation.” I fail to
understand this pretended explanation. I prefer that of Hamilton,
who places the principal cause in the increased activity imparted to
our whole being by the sense of our own sufferings. This, at least,
is logical, since pleasure is connected with its habitual
correlative—an increase of activity. Spencer has examined the
problem at greater length.[45] "Here I will draw attention only to
another egoistic sentiment, and I do this because of its mysterious
nature. It is a pleasurably painful sentiment, of which it is
difficult to identify the nature, and still more difficult to trace
the genesis. I refer to what is sometimes called ‘the luxury of
grief.’... It seems possible that this sentiment, which makes a
sufferer wish to be alone with his grief, and makes him resist all
distraction from it, may arise from dwelling on the contrast between
his own worth, as he estimates it, and the treatment he has
received—either from his fellow-beings or from a power which he is
prone to think of anthropomorphically. If he feels that he has
deserved much while he has received little, and still more if
instead of good there has come evil, the consciousness of this evil
is qualified by the consciousness of worth, made pleasurably
dominant by the contrast.... There is an idea of much withheld, and
a feeling of implied superiority to those who withhold it.... That
this explanation is the true one I feel by no means clear. I throw
it out simply as a suggestion, confessing that this peculiar emotion
is one which neither analysis nor synthesis enables me clearly to
understand."
Footnote 45:
_Principles of Psychology_, ii., § 518.
This explanation seems to me only a partial one, and not applicable
to all cases. In my opinion, no efforts of this kind can be
successful, because the authors remain on the ground of normal
psychology. This class of facts ought to be treated by the
pathological method. It may be said that this is only the
substitution of one word for another. By no means, as we shall see
by the result.
The mistake lies in attacking, in the first instance, phenomena of
too delicate a nature, and considering them as isolated facts. We
must proceed, not by synthesis or analysis, but by the cumulative
method—_i.e._, we must establish a chain of facts, of which the last
links, being of overwhelming importance, shall throw light on the
first. I indicate the principal stages of this gradation
thus—Æsthetic melancholy (transitory and intermittent); spleen,
melancholia (in the medical sense);[46] then, advancing a step
further, suicidal tendencies, and finally, suicide. This last term
makes all the others comprehensible. The first stages are only
embryonic, abortive, or modified forms of the tendency to
self-destruction, of the desire which makes it seem agreeable. The
weaker forms—checked in an immense majority of cases—approximate
more or less to destruction, and can only be explained if compared
with the extreme case.
Footnote 46:
Krafft-Ebing remarks: “An abnormal mode of feeling on the part of
melancholic patients is found in the enjoyment of pain
(_Leidseligkeit_). In these individuals, ideas which, in a healthy
slate, would be provocative of pain, awaken in the diseased
consciousness a faint feeling of satisfaction which represents the
corresponding affective tone.”
The evolutionists have stated the hypothesis that there must have
existed certain animals so constituted that, in them, pleasure was
connected with destructive acts, pain with useful ones, and that, as
every animal seeks pleasure and shuns pain, they must have perished
in virtue of their very constitution, since they sought the
destructive and shunned the preservative influences. There is
nothing chimerical in this supposition, for we see men find pleasure
in acts which, as they very well know, will speedily result in their
deaths. A being thus constituted is abnormal, illogical; he contains
within himself a contradiction of which he will perish.
But, one may say, if pain and hurtful acts on the one hand, pleasure
and serviceable acts on the other, form indissoluble pairs, of such
a kind that the painful state in consciousness is the equivalent of
destructive acts in the organism, and inversely, we should here have
an interversion—pleasure would express disorganisation; pain,
reorganisation. This hypothesis is not a very probable one, and
scarcely seems necessary. If we admit, as has been said in the
preceding chapter, that there always exist two simultaneous and
opposite processes whose difference is all that is perceptible to
the consciousness, it is sufficient for one of the processes to be
accelerated or the other retarded, in an abnormal manner, in order
to change the difference in favour of one or the other. No doubt the
final result contradicts the rule, since in the above cases the
surplus which ought to be negative (pain) is positive (pleasure).
But this is a new proof that we are confronted with a deviation, an
anomaly, a pathological case to be treated as such.
I have taken by itself and studied a typical case; it now remains,
not to enumerate, but to classify pathological pleasures in order to
show their frequency. Taking as a guide the excellent definition of
Mantegazza, “Morbid pleasure is that which is either the cause or
the effect of an evil,” I divide them into three classes.
1. Semi-pathological pleasures, which form the transition from the
healthy to the frankly morbid. These require an excessive or
prolonged expenditure of vital energy. We know that the pleasures of
taste, smell, sight, hearing, touch, muscular exercise, the sexual
relations, produce fatigue and exhaustion, or even suddenly become
painful. The pleasures of affection, of self-love, of possession,
when they become passions—that is to say, when they increase in
intensity and stability—cease to be pure pleasures; a painful
element is added to them. This phenomenon is natural and logical,
since every increase in activity entails losses, and consequently
conditions of pain. This class is scarcely morbid, since pain here
_succeeds_ pleasure. This is not the case with the other two, in
which pleasure rises from the midst of destruction, and dominates
the consciousness.
2. Pleasures destructive of the individual. I do not stop to discuss
certain anomalies of taste and smell which will be described
elsewhere; but the pleasures due to intoxication and narcotics are
so widespread that they seem inherent in humanity. At all times, in
all places, even in the savage state, man has found artificial means
of living—if only for a moment—in an enchanted world. He has himself
created this pleasure for his own destruction. But there are still
clearer cases—of tendencies not acquired or invented—when pleasure
makes and dominates the process of disorganisation. Thus, during a
certain period of the general paralysis of the insane, the patient
believes himself to possess the supreme degree of strength, health,
riches, and power; satisfaction and happiness are expressed in his
whole bearing. Thus in certain forms of acute mania, on one side
(which we shall pass over for the present) it shows itself in anger;
on another, in exuberant spirits, abounding joy—a feeling of energy
and vigour. Some patients say, after their recovery, that they never
felt so happy as during their illness (Krafft-Ebing). We may also
mention the case of consumptive patients, many of whom are never so
rich in hopes or so fertile in projects as when at the point of
death. Finally, we have the sense of well-being (“euphoria”) of the
dying. It has been attempted to explain this by analgesia, as if the
suppression of pain were identical with the appearance of joy. Féré,
who has examined the question in his _Pathologie des Emotions_,[47]
concludes that this exaltation is due to momentary but positive
conditions of the cerebral circulation.
Footnote 47:
Pp. 170 _et seq._
Must we admit that, in these cases, by an inconceivable derogation
from natural determinism, pleasure becomes the translation into
consciousness of a deep and incurable disorganisation? There is no
need of this. It is more rational to admit that this pleasure is
here, as elsewhere, connected with its natural cause, a
superabundance of vital activity. Every pathological pleasure is
accompanied by excitability; but the latter is not a normal
activity, or the fever-patient and the neuropath would enjoy an
excess of health. In reality, we are confronted with a complex case;
on the one hand, a perpetual and enormous loss, which goes on
rapidly, without becoming perceptible to the consciousness; on the
other, a superficial excitement, which is momentary and conscious.
The anomaly is in this psychic disproportion, or rather in the
short-sighted consciousness, which cannot pass its narrow limits and
penetrate into the region of the unconscious.
3. Destructive pleasures of a social character, which are connected,
not with the suffering of the individual himself, but with that of
others. Such is the pleasure felt in killing and seeing killed—in
sanguinary spectacles, bull-fights, fights between animals, and, in
a much feebler degree, in hearing or reading tales of bloodshed.
These pleasures can be explained; they denote the satisfaction of
tendencies to violence and destruction, which, strong or weak,
conscious or unconscious, exist in all men. They may be studied
under the heading of the pathology of tendencies, which I shall
treat later on; let me only remark in passing that these tendencies
involve a certain display of energy, which is one of the conditions
of active pleasure.
One question in conclusion. Can pleasure, and joy in particular, be
the cause of a grave catastrophe, such as madness or death? Some
alienists—Bucknill, Tuke, Guislain, etc.—quote cases of madness
which they attribute to sudden joy, such as an unforeseen
inheritance, or success in obtaining a long-wished-for situation.
The same thesis has been maintained in the case of death[48]
occurring suddenly, or after syncope. Griesinger maintains that it
is extremely rare—if it ever happens—for excessive joy _by itself_
to produce madness. Others absolutely deny the fact.[49] It is
certain that joy is seldom seen figuring in any enumeration of the
causes of madness. Joy, as a state of consciousness, could not have
such effects. The catastrophe can only be explained by sudden and
violent organic troubles, which cannot have this effect unless there
already exists a predisposition. It is not joy which maddens or
kills, but the shock received by a being in an abnormal state. It
would be more correct to say that an event which, in the generality
of men, _ought_ to cause joy, here produces a peculiar pathological
state ending in madness or death.
Footnote 48:
For some facts, which may or may not be well authenticated, see
Féré, _op. cit._, p. 234.
Footnote 49:
Féré, _Pathologie des Emotions_, pp. 293, 294.
II.
The other side of the subject may be briefly disposed of. We
occasionally, though rarely, meet with people who grieve over good
fortune when it comes to them; these have the pain of pleasure. I do
not think that any psychologist has dwelt on them, and it seems to
me useless to make a study of these cases. Though in form the
reverse of the pleasure of pain, it fundamentally resembles it. This
disposition of mind, found in certain pessimists, is rightly called
eccentric or bizarre—_i.e._, general opinion instinctively looks on
it as a deviation, an anomaly. This, moreover, is only a special
instance of a general state of mind—morbid or pathologic
sadness—which we are about to study. I have remarked above that, as
pain and sadness always involve a morbid element, the expression
_abnormal_ would be more accurate and less open to criticism.
In order to affirm that a physical or moral pain is outside the
usual law, and may be described as abnormal, we shall have recourse
to the three distinctive marks given at the opening of this chapter,
and we can take, as our one type, that of melancholia in the medical
sense. It presents the required characteristics: the long duration,
disproportion between the cause and effect experienced, and
excessive or insufficient reaction.
It is needless to give a description of the melancholic state; it
may be found in all treatises on mental disease. This affection
assumes many clinical forms, varying from _melancholia attonita_,
which simulates a stupid apathy, to the agitated form accompanied by
incessant groans, from the slight to the profound and incurable
forms. It will be sufficient to enumerate the most general features.
In comparing melancholy with ordinary sadness, we may follow the
cumulative method, because the morbid state is nothing but the
normal condition thrown into high relief.
1. We know that the physiological characteristics of normal sadness
are reducible to a single formula: lowering of the vital functions.
The same is the case with melancholia, where, however, the organic
depression is much more accentuated. Constriction of the vaso-motor
nerves, resulting in a diminished calibre of the arteries, anæmia,
and lowered temperature of the extremities; lowering of the cardiac
pressure, which may descend from an average of 800 grammes to 650
and even 600 grammes; a progressive slackening of nutrition, with
various resultant manifestations, such as digestive troubles,
checked secretions, etc.; slow and rare movements; a dislike of all
muscular effort, all work, all physical exercise, unless there are
(as sometimes happens in cases of agitated melancholia) moments of
disordered reflex movements and attacks of fury. Such is the general
condition. It is obvious that this represents pain carried to an
extreme degree, and that we find, here too, as well as in normal
melancholy, passive and active pains.
2. The psychic characteristics consist, in the first place, of an
emotional state varying from apathetic resignation to despair; some
patients are so crushed as to think themselves dead. It has been
noted that, in general, persons of a gloomy disposition are inclined
to melancholia, while those of a cheerful one rather tend towards
mania. In both cases there is an exaggeration of the normal
condition. The intellectual disposition consists in the slackening
of the association of ideas, in indolence of the mind. Ordinarily, a
fixed idea predominates, excluding from the consciousness all that
has no relation to it; thus the hypochondriac thinks only of his
health; the nostalgic, of his country; the religious melancholiac,
of his salvation. Voluntary activity is almost _nil_; aboulia, “the
consciousness of not willing, is the very essence of this disease”
(Schüle). Sometimes there are violent and unexpected reflex
impulses, which are a new proof of the annihilation of the will. To
sum up: while normal sadness has its moments of intermission, the
melancholiac is shut up in his grief as if by an impenetrable wall,
without the slightest fissure through which a ray of joy might reach
him.
Here arises a question we cannot neglect, because it is connected
with one of the principal theses of this work, the fundamental part
played by the feelings. Passive melancholia, being taken as the type
of the painful state under its extreme and permanent form, what is
its origin? There are two possible answers. We may admit that a
physical pain, or a certain representation, engenders a melancholic
disposition, and poisons the affective life. Or we may admit that a
vague and general state of depression and disorganisation becomes
concrete and fixes itself in an idea. On the first supposition the
intellectual state is primary, and the affective state resultant. On
the second the affective state is the first moment, and the
intellectual state results from it.
This problem, rather psychical than practical, has only occupied a
very small number of alienists. Schüle admits the twofold
origin.[50] Sometimes the patient, suffering from a painful and
causeless depression, which he cannot shake off, inquires no
further; but, most frequently, he connects the painful feeling with
some incident in his previous or present life. Sometimes, _much more
rarely_, the haunting idea is the first to appear, and forms the
pivot of the melancholic state and its consequences. Dr. Dumas,[51]
who has devoted a special work to this question, founded on his own
observation, comes to the same conclusions as Schüle. One of his
patients attributed her incurable sadness, in turn, and without
sufficient reason, to her husband, to her son, to expected loss of
work. In others, the melancholy is of intellectual origin: the loss
of fortune, the idea of irrevocable damnation, etc. He is thus led
to admit that a melancholia of organic origin is the most frequent,
one of intellectual origin the rarest.
Footnote 50:
Schüle, _Traité clinique des maladies mentales_, Art. “Mélancolie”
(French edition), pp. 21, 28.
Footnote 51:
G. Dumas, _Les états intellectuels dans la mélancolie_, where may
be found several detailed observations.
Can we trace back these two modes of manifestation to a common and
deeper cause? This is Krafft-Ebing’s[52] solution: “We must consider
psychic pain and the arrest of ideas as co-ordinate phenomena; and
there is reason to think of a common cause, of a nutritive trouble
of the brain (anæmia?), leading to a diminished expenditure of
nervous activity. Taken comprehensively, melancholia may be
considered as a morbid condition of the psychic organism founded on
nutritive troubles, and characterised on the one hand by the feeling
of pain and a particular mode of reaction on the part of the whole
consciousness (psychic neuralgia), on the other by the difficulty of
psychic movements (instinct, ideas), and finally, by their arrest.”
Footnote 52:
Krafft-Ebing, _op. cit._, vol. ii., sec. 1, chap. i.
I am unwilling to incur the reproach of inferring more from facts
than they contain, and of insisting on unity at any price; but it
follows from the preceding that if the element of feeling is not
everywhere and always primary, at least it is so in the majority of
cases. Besides, it is closely connected with fundamental trophic
troubles, so that we arrive at the same conclusion by another road.
Dumas (_op. cit._, pp. 133 _et seq._) has insisted on the depressing
influences of marshy soil, on the stagnation, the physical and moral
apathy of the inhabitants of Sologne, the Dombes, the Maremma, and
other regions infested by _malaria_, a condition which may be summed
up in two words, sadness and resignation. These facts are quite in
favour of the organic origin of melancholia.
The special study of the anomalies of pleasure and pain is not
important for itself alone. The formula generally admitted since
Aristotle, which couples pleasure with utility, pain with what is
injurious, admits of many exceptions in practice. Perhaps the
constitution of a pathological group in the study of pleasure and
pain may permit us to solve some difficulties, to prevent the rule
and the exceptions being placed on the same plane, and unduly
assimilated to one another. We shall see that this is so in one of
the following chapters.
CHAPTER V.
THE NEUTRAL STATES.
_Two methods of study—Affirmative thesis founded on observation,
deduction, and psycho-physics—Negative thesis: the
psychological trinity; confusion between consciousness and
introspection—Diversity of temperaments._
Up to the present, pleasure and pain have been studied first
separately, as two perfectly distinct states, pure, by hypothesis,
from every admixture. We then examined those singular cases where
pain becomes the material or occasion of pleasure, and _vice
versâ_. We have still to speak of those cases where the agreeable
and the painful _coexist_ in varying proportions in the
consciousness—_e.g._, in the mountain-climber who feels at the
same time fatigue, the fear of the precipices, the beauty of the
landscape, and the pleasure of difficulty vanquished. Nothing is
more frequent than these mixed forms; they would even be the rule
if one could admit, with certain authors, that there are no
unmixed pleasures or pains; but by their complex and composite
nature they are, in fact, emotions, and we shall come to them
again later on.
The subject of this chapter is quite different. It is the
much-discussed, still unsolved, and perhaps insoluble problem of
neutral states, states of indifference, free from any accompaniment,
either pleasurable or painful. Do such exist? Both the affirmative
and negative are maintained by good authorities; there is even a
psychologist who seems to me to have adopted each thesis in
turn.[53]
Footnote 53:
For a short historical summary of the question up to the middle of
the nineteenth century, see Bouillier, _Du plaisir et de la
douleur_, chap. xi.
The question can only be entered on in two ways—by observation and
by argument. Let us examine the results of these two methods.
1. Does the state of indifference exist as an _observable fact_?
Bain is, among contemporary writers, the principal champion of this
thesis, which has excited a lengthy discussion.[54] He does not
pretend to affirm that there is a single state of feeling free from
every agreeable or disagreeable element; but if these elements only
exist as infinitesimal quantities, psychology need take no account
of them. Pleasure and pain are clearly defined generic states; yet
there is a practical interest in knowing whether any neutral
conditions exist. Bain finds the type of these in cases of simple
excitement, which may be accompanied either by pleasure or by pain,
but remain distinct from either. The sensation of burning, the smell
of asafœtida, the taste of aloes, these are modes of excitement
which we call pain, because in them pain predominates. The noise of
a mill, the confused murmur of a great city, are modes of excitement
which may be called agreeable or disagreeable; but the excitement is
the essential fact, the pleasure and pain are accidental.
Footnote 54:
See _Mind_, Oct. 1887, Jan. and April 1888, Jan. 1889; and J.
Sully, _The Human Mind_, vol. ii. pp. 4, 5.
Bain does not appear to me happy in most of the examples he has
chosen. I quote some of them. The shock produced by surprise—but
surprise is only a mitigated form of fear, and in nearly all cases
instantaneously assumes a painful or pleasurable character. The
state of expectation: “The intense objectivity of one’s looks when
following a race, or a great surgical operation, is not, strictly
speaking, unconsciousness, but a maximum of energy with a minimum of
consciousness. It is rather a mode of indifference—more of an
excitement than an affective state.” Here we may make the same
comment; moreover, there is in expectation a feeling of effort which
soon becomes fatigue, and, in most instances, expectation involves
the anticipation of some event either desired or dreaded.
Those who do not attempt to prove the existence of neutral states by
direct observation deduce them from general principles. Thus Sergi
considers them as the necessary effect of determinate biological
conditions. Pleasure and pain being the two fundamental forms—the
two poles of the life of feeling, there must exist between them a
neutral zone corresponding to a state of perfect adaptation. Pain is
a state of consciousness revealing a conflict of the organism with
exterior forces—a want of adaptation of one to the other; whence a
loss of energy. Pleasure is a state of consciousness which makes it
evident that the reaction of the organism is connected with external
excitations, whence arises, by synergy, a heightening of vital
activity. Indifference is the neutral state of consciousness showing
a perfect adaptation of the organism to constant and variable
intensities—in other words, excitations which neither increase nor
diminish vital activity, but preserve it, produce a state of
equilibrium and appeal to the consciousness neither as pleasure nor
pain.[55] This hypothesis—viz., that at certain moments the sentient
being neither loses nor gains, and that such is the substratum of
the psychic state called neutral, seems to me extremely probable,
but remains no more than a hypothesis.
Footnote 55:
_Psychologie physiologique_, iv., ch. i., pp. 309 _et seq._
(French edition.)
Now let us question the psycho-physicists who have treated this
subject according to their own special method, while coming to
different conclusions. It is difficult to adopt a procedure more
theoretical than theirs, or one better adapted to show the
insufficiency of the intellectualist method in this domain of
psychology. In truth, the subject treated by them is a special
aspect of the problem, not its totality; they are inquiring whether,
in the “transformation” of pleasure into pain, and _vice versâ_,
there is, in the passage from one contrary to the other, a point of
neutrality or indifference. Wundt graphically represents the
phenomenon by a curve: the portion of this curve above the line of
the abscissa has a positive value, and corresponds to the
development of pleasure; the portion below corresponds to the
development of pain, and has a negative value; the precise point
where the curve cuts the line of the abscissa (to rise in the
direction of pleasure or descend in that of pain) corresponds to
neutrality or indifference. Lehmann, who, however, admits that weak
sensations are neutral states, gives a curve rather different from
that of Wundt. From an observation first made by Horwicz, and
experiments conducted by Lehmann himself, it appears that, if one
dips one’s finger into water whose temperature gradually rises from
35° to 50° Centigrade during a space of 2 minutes and 20 seconds,
one feels first an agreeable warmth, then some slight, unpleasant
prickings, then oscillations of intense prickings with moments of
rest, and lastly, pain. His conclusion is contrary to Wundt’s, for
he finds that the passage from pleasure to pain does not take place
in a neutral state.[56]
Footnote 56:
Wundt, _Grundzüge der physiol. Psychologie_ (4th German ed.), vol.
i. pp. 557 _et seq._; Lehmann, _Hauptgesetze_, etc., §§ 236-241.
One of Wundt’s most distinguished pupils, Külpe, in his _Umriss
der Psychologie_ (1895), considers the existence of a state of
indifference “can hardly be doubted in the face of a long series
of observations which support it.” (English edition, p. 242.)
Experiments are not to be despised; but as for the figure supposed
to illustrate the phenomenon, it is merely misleading; this
mathematical conception explains nothing. The assimilation of
pleasure to a positive, and pain to a negative value, is quite
arbitrary. Moreover, the passage from _plus_ to _minus_ quantities
through zero is an operation which has its base in our faculty of
abstraction, and for its materials abstract and homogeneous
quantities. The different degrees of pleasure and pain are nothing
of this sort. We do not even know if these two phenomena have a
common foundation, if there is a common measure between the two, if
they are not both irreducible, and we have no right to place,
theoretically, a _Nullpunkt_ at the point of transition from one to
the other. The problem is one of a concrete order; it is a question
of fact, whether soluble or not, which is put before us.
2. Let us now listen to those who refuse to admit states of
indifference.
Every state of consciousness is a trinity in the theological sense:
it is the knowledge of some exterior or interior event; it includes
motor elements; it has a certain tone of feeling. We describe it as
intellectual, motor, or emotional, according to the preponderance of
one of these elements, not its exclusive existence. It is a
well-known fact that the clearer a perception, the weaker is its
tone of feeling, and the more intense an emotion, the more
attenuated the intellectual element which has evoked it; but
diminution is not equivalent to disappearance. If neutral states
existed, one of the fundamental elements of psychic life would exist
only in an intermittent form, and at some moments even cease to be.
Besides this, let us observe ourselves and interrogate our own
consciousness. “Let us consider ourselves at one of those moments of
calm and apparent indifference, when it seems as if nothing could
move us, and our numbed sensibility remains, as it were, suspended
between pleasure and pain. This deceptive appearance of
insensibility and aridity always masks some more or less feeble
sensations of ease or uneasiness, some more or less slight and
confused sentiments of joy or grief which are none the less real for
being in nowise vivid or exciting. Moreover, how could our
sensibility fail to be, constantly, more or less impressed by so
many general causes which, independent of particular causes, so
constantly act upon us, at every instant of our life, and which, so
to speak, ceaselessly besiege us, from within and from without?”
Bouillier, the author of this passage (_op. cit._, chap. xi.),
supports his assertions by citing the innumerable impressions which
come from the internal organs, from the state of the air and sky,
from light, from the most trivial incidents of common life.
It is certain that the domain of the indifferent states, if existent
at all, is very scanty. Yet, however skilfully Bouillier may support
his thesis, there is one irrefragable objection to be urged against
it: the testimony of the consciousness, always doubtful, is here
more so than elsewhere. What he proposes to us is, in fact, to
_observe_ ourselves. From the moment when we begin to do this, we no
longer have to deal with the natural consciousness, in its raw
state, but with that somewhat artificial consciousness which is
created by attention. We look, not with our eyes, but through a
microscope; we amplify, we enlarge the phenomenon; and here the
method of enlargement is not to be trusted. It causes certain
subconscious states to cross the threshold of the consciousness; it
makes them pass out of the penumbra into full light, and disposes us
to believe that such is their normal condition. We know that some
individuals, by fixing the attention firmly on some particular part
of the body, can bring about in it a sensation of weight, of
irritation, of arterial pulsation, etc. Do these modifications
always exist, unperceived only so long as the attention is not
directed to them? or does attention produce them by means of an
increased vascular activity, increasing, but not creating? The
latter supposition is the more probable. The hypochondriac who
obstinately and patiently watches the details of his organic life
feels within himself the motion of the vital mechanism which escapes
most men. It would be easy to give other examples, proving that we
must distinguish between consciousness pure and simple and internal
observation, and that it is the less allowable to argue from one to
the other, since in practice the problem is reduced to a difference
of intensity.
This question well deserves to be called, as it has been by J.
Sully, “one of the _cruces_ of psychology.” Those who wish to take
sides in it can only guide their decision by probabilities and
preferences. I am inclined to favour the thesis of indifferent
states. I find it difficult to admit that certain perceptions or
representations, incessantly repeated, imply anything more than the
fact of knowledge. The sight of my furniture, arranged in its usual
order, causes me no appreciable degree of pleasure or displeasure;
or if these exist as infinitesimal quantities, psychology, as Bain
justly says, has no concern with them. Fouillée also points out that
the feeling of indifference is not primary, but due to an
effacement.[57]
Footnote 57:
Fouillée, _Psychologie des idées-forces_, i. 68.
The repugnance of certain psychologists to admit indifferent states
arises from the fact that this thesis appears to them to introduce
discontinuity into the affective life. The mobile and incessantly
alternating series of pleasurable or painful modifications would, in
that case, have moments of interruption, gaps, and vacant spaces. I
yield to no one in asserting the continuity of the affective life;
but it must be sought elsewhere. It is in the appetites, the
tendencies—conscious or unconscious—the desires and aversions,
which, for their part, are always at work, permanent and
indestructible. Here, again, we find the mistake of considering
pleasure and pain, which are only symptoms, as essential and
fundamental elements.
I find it strange, moreover, that, in a subject so much studied and
discussed, no one should have contributed an observation which seems
to me of some importance. Each author supposes the formula adopted
by himself to be applicable to all men. This is to state the
question in a philosophical, not in a psychological form—_i.e._,
without taking into account individual variations of temperament and
character, an element by no means to be neglected. It is to suppose,
without the least proof, that all cases are reducible to unity. On
the contrary, there are presumptions that the solution adopted,
whatever it is, may be true for some men and false for others. A
nervous, excitable temperament, in a perpetual state of vibration,
constantly kept on the alert by the workings of passion or thought,
may, by its very constitution, leave no moment accessible to an
intermission of the incessantly renewed states of pain and pleasure.
A lymphatic temperament, on the other hand, a cold disposition, a
limited intelligence, poor in ideas, constitute a soil perfectly
suited to the frequent appearance and long continuance of
indifferent states.[58]
Footnote 58:
I give an instance of a similar character, narrated by a
historian, from Arabic sources. "The Emir Mohammed (at Granada, in
1408), finding himself dying, and anxious to secure the throne to
his son, sent orders for his brother Yussuf, whom he was keeping
in captivity at Salobreña, to be put to death. The alcalde, when
he received this order, was playing at chess with his prisoner,
whose gentleness had gained the heart of his gaolers. On reading
the fatal despatch he was troubled, and did not dare to
communicate its contents to the prince. But Yussuf guessed from
his confusion what was the matter, and said to the alcalde, ‘Is it
my head that is asked of thee?’ The latter, for all answer, handed
to him his brother’s letter. Yussuf asked only for a few hours’
delay, in order to take leave of his wife; but the messenger of
death declared that the execution must take place at once, the
hour of his return being fixed beforehand. ‘Well,’ replied Yussuf,
‘let us at least finish the game.’ But the alcalde was so
distressed that he advanced his pawns at random, and Yussuf was
obliged to inform him of his mistakes. However, the game was never
finished. Some knights, riding from Granada at full gallop,
saluted Yussuf as Emir, and announced to him the death of his
brother. When thus passing from the scaffold to the throne the
Mussulman prince remained master of himself, as he had been in the
face of death. Still doubting his good fortune, he set out for
Granada, where he was received by the people with cries of joy."
(Rosseuw St.-Hilaire, _Histoire d’Espagne_, vol. v., p. 227.)
Analogous traits are recorded of various historic personages.
These differences, which are matter of common observation, show the
necessity of distrusting an over-simple solution.
CHAPTER VI.
CONCLUSIONS ON PLEASURE AND PAIN.
_The beginning of life—I. Conditions of existence of pleasure and
pain; lowering and heightening of vital energy—Féré’s
experiments—Meynert’s theory—II. Finality of pleasure and
pain—Exceptions: explicable cases; irreducible cases._
I shall not delay long over the question, as much debated as the one
we have just quitted and still less accessible: Which first makes
its appearance in consciousness, pleasure or pain? In our own day,
especially, optimists and pessimists have contested this point at
great length, although, in my opinion, they have no concern with it.
Their doctrines are two antithetical conceptions of the world,
depending solely on temperament and character, which could neither
be confirmed nor invalidated by the solution of this problem. It is
clear that it is a question of origin, of psychogenesis, foreign to
experimental psychology, and admitting only of probable solutions.
Descartes expressed the singular opinion that “joy was the first
passion of the soul, since it is not credible that the soul should
have been placed in the body, except when the latter was well
disposed; hence the natural result would be joy.” Others, following
theoretic views less strange in character, maintain that, pleasure
having for its cause the free play of our activity, pain is
connected with the arrest of pleasure, and hence is posterior to
it.[59] The majority of writers appear to me to favour the contrary
hypothesis; the impressions of cold, of contact, the beginning of
pulmonary respiration, etc., are cited as proving the priority of
pain; still more so, the cries of infants and of the new-born young
of animals. Yet Preyer, in two passages which have not excited much
remark, refuses all significance to the cry, and sees in it nothing
but a reflex action.[60] It does not seem doubtful that psychic
life, in its first or intra-uterine and earlier extra-uterine phases
may almost be reduced to a series of pleasurable and painful
impressions. Do they resemble those of the adult? It is probable
that they do; but it must not be forgotten that to assimilate the
plastic forms of the primitive epoch to the fixed and rigid ones of
adult life is a mode of reasoning conducive to numerous errors.
Footnote 59:
For the historical summary, see Bouillier, _op. cit._, chap. xii.
Footnote 60:
"The first cry of the new-born infant was formerly considered
anything rather than a reflex action. It is, however, very
probable that this first vocal manifestation, accompanying an
expiration, is a reflex pure and simple. Kant wrote (without,
indeed, having himself observed new-born children or animals):
‘The cry uttered by the child just after birth has not the
intonation of fear, but that of irritation or anger. It is not
because it is suffering, but because something displeases it. No
doubt it would like to move and feels its impotence, as it might
feel a chain restricting its liberty. What could have been the
object of Nature in making the infant born into the world utter
cries which are in the highest degree dangerous? Yet no animal
save man announces its existence, at the time of birth, by similar
cries.’
"This remarkable conception has been much commented on, and widely
adopted. At the present time many people still think that the
crying of new-born infants has considerable psychic significance.
But all comments of this kind are met by the objection that a
totally anencephalous infant cries at birth, and that many healthy
infants do not cry, but sneeze, on their entry into the world, as
noted by Darwin....
"The reflexes of pains which, in later life, show themselves in
the acutest manner, are those best developed in early life.
Gunzmer’s observations on about sixty infants showed him that,
during the first few days, they are almost insensible, and during
the first week, very slightly sensitive, to the pricking of a
needle.
“New-born infants have been, in the course of their first day,
pricked with fine needles, on the nose, the upper lip, and the
hand, deeply enough to draw a drop of blood; yet the child
manifested no symptom of consciousness, and did not start
once.”—Preyer, _Seele des Kindes_, pp. 177, 193.
Leaving aside this question of origin, it is impossible to close the
study of pleasure and pain without a summary recapitulation of the
general theories forming the philosophy of our subject. These may be
classified under two heads: the _how_ and the _why_; what are the
conditions of existence of pleasure and pain? and what is their
utility?
I.
On the first point there has been, from antiquity to the present
day, an almost universal and very rare agreement between different
schools: pleasure has, as its condition, an increased, pain a
diminished activity. I employ this vague formula designedly, because
it covers all special formulas. Of these it would be idle to
enumerate even the chief. At bottom, in language varying according
to the era and the doctrine, all authors say the same thing,
employing, according to their cast of intellect, a metaphysical,
physical (Léon Dumont), physiological, or psychological formula. The
intellectualists themselves agree with the others; considering
sensibility as a confused form of intelligence, they say that
pleasure is a confused judgment of perfection, and pain a confused
judgment of imperfection. In short, if each formula is stripped of
the variations adapting it to the particular philosophy of each
author, there is a common residue, which, in all alike, is the
essential.
The history of these variations on the same theme would be
monotonous and unprofitable; it is as well, however, to note that,
as our own century advances, the theoretic conception of the
ancients tends to grow more precise, to rely more on the support of
experience and be justified thereby. We have already seen the two
formulas—augmentation, diminution—taking definite shape, showing
themselves in the objective and observable changes of nutrition, of
the secretions, the movements, the circulation, and the breathing.
Féré’s experiments, he says, “agree perfectly, in showing that
pleasurable sensations are accompanied by an increase of energy, and
disagreeable ones by a diminution. The sensation of pleasure
resolves itself, therefore, into a feeling of power, that of
displeasure into a feeling of impotence. We have thus reached the
material demonstration of the theoretic ideas propounded by Bain,
Darwin, Spencer, Dumont, and others.”[61] I may remind the reader
that Féré has applied his dynamometric researches to all kinds of
sensations: to smell, to taste, to vision modified by glasses of the
principal colours of the spectrum, red giving a dynamometric
pressure of 42, which progressively descends to 20-17 for violet.
For auditory sensations, he finds that the dynamic equivalent is in
proportion to the amplitude and number of the vibrations. The same
results are found to follow motion, the movements of the upper or
lower limb exercising a dynamogenic influence on the corresponding
member. Still further: an excitation _imperceptible to the
consciousness_, a latent perception, determines a dynamic effect
just as much as a conscious impression. Suggested hallucinations,
agreeable or the reverse, are equally accompanied by an increase or
diminution of pressure on the dynamometer.
Footnote 61:
Féré, _Sensation et Mouvement_, p. 64. This work is to be
consulted for the details of the experiments about to be
summarised.
If the formula, “diminution of vital energy,” of which we have
found that melancholia is an extreme instance, can give rise to no
ambiguity, this is not the case with the opposite formula; and
certain authors have, for this reason, thought—and rightly so—that
it ought to be stated in precise terms. Pleasure corresponds to an
increase of activity; but if we understand by this expression a
large quantity of work done, the pleasure would result from a
_diminution_ of the potential energy of the organism, as Léon
Dumont has pointed out—_i.e._, from an impoverishment, which is
contradicted by experience. We must therefore understand this
increase of activity in the sense that the work done does not
expend more energy than the nutritive actions; or, to employ Grant
Allen’s formula, “Pleasure is the concomitant of the healthy
action of any or all of the organs or members supplied with
afferent cerebro-spinal nerves, to an extent not exceeding the
ordinary powers of reparation possessed by the system.”[62]
Footnote 62:
_Physiological Æsthetics_, p. 21. This point has been well
discussed by Lehmann (_op. cit._, pp. 205-208).
Finally, we must remark that, if every external or internal
sensation, whatever its nature, is a transmission of movements
coming from without, a new acquisition for the nervous system and
the brain, _every_ sensation ought at first to produce at least a
momentary increase of energy. Féré, who has foreseen the possibility
of this objection, admits in all cases a primary excitement. “If
there appear to be cases in which phenomena of depression arise
suddenly and subsist by themselves, it is only because they have
been insufficiently observed.”[63] There would then be a very short
phase of increase, immediately masked, according to him, by the
phase of diminution. The physiologists, as we have seen, are always
inclined to explain pain by intensity of sensation; but, if we take
into account its nature, its quality, and the susceptibility of the
nervous system to certain modes of motion received, nothing prevents
the loss being immediate.
Footnote 63:
_Pathologie des émotions_, p. 226.
Meynert, in his _Psychiatrie_, is the only writer who has attempted
to advance any nearer to an explanation, and to determine the
_mechanism_ which produces pleasure and pain. His hypothesis, in its
principal points, is as follows:—
As far as pain is concerned, his theory may be summed up as an
arrestive action of two categories of reflex movements, motor and
vascular. The painful state is the translation into consciousness of
this physiological mechanism.
1. _Motor reflexes._—Let us suppose the head of a sleeping child to
be slightly tickled. As the child’s sleep is sound, and there is no
pain, nothing takes place but a slight withdrawal of the hand. If we
suppose a slight prick, there will be few movements, and these
limited to a small part of the body. But if we suppose some severe
pain, such as the extraction of a tooth, or a burn extending over a
large portion of the skin, the result will be prolonged and terrible
reflex movements in _all_ parts of the body, which (in our opinion)
may be considered as defensive. So much for external facts; what is
taking place internally?
We know that vibrations are conducted slowly in the grey matter
(twelve times as slowly, according to Helmholtz, as in the white).
When an excitation increases, as we have seen, the number of
muscular groups set in motion, resistance to transmission increases
in the same proportion. “The sensation of pain presupposes a reflex
movement and an arrest of nervous conduction in the grey substance
of the spinal marrow.” It is this process of inhibition, in varying
degrees, which is felt by the consciousness as pain.
2. _Vascular reflexes._—Peripheral excitation also has reflex
effects on the vaso-motor system; it produces contraction of the
spinal arteries, of the carotids, and of the cerebral arteries.
Hence the syncope which frequently accompanies acute pain, and the
sleep (the result of anæmia) which has more than once been recorded
in the case of prisoners undergoing torture. This constriction of
the arteries produces a chemical change, a deficit of oxygen and
nutritive elements in the cells of the cortex; the respiration of
the tissues is interfered with, and the distressed state of the
organism is psychologically rendered by pain.
Conversely, the excitations contributing to the wellbeing of the
individual are accompanied by a free transmission of nervous force,
by vaso-motor dilatation, by hyperæmia of the nervous centres, and,
in the motor series, by “aggressive movements,” such as the singing
of birds, the joyous barking of dogs, and other analogous
manifestations in the human subject.
Meynert—vaguely enough, and relying for support on the association
of ideas—has applied his explanation to the case of moral pain. It
would not be difficult to adapt this hypothesis to the different
forms of vexation and sadness; but with a more complicated
mechanism. The point of departure is no longer a perception, but a
representation. The phenomenon is no longer of peripheral, but of
central origin; so that it starts from the brain and returns to it,
or, in psychological terms, begins in a purely intellectual state of
consciousness and ends in a state that is primarily one of feeling.
If, reading by chance a list of deaths in a newspaper, I find, with
no possible opening for doubt, the name of a friend, what takes
place in me is this: the other unknown names pass through my
consciousness like empty words, or a simple visual percept; suddenly
everything is changed; the reflex and vascular movements above
described are produced, then the arrest of the medullary and
cerebral centres, whose expression in consciousness will be grief.
But these reflex actions are only possible if the word read suggests
the recollection of former deaths, that is to say, of a sum of
privations, negations, and checked desires, the result of a mass of
accumulated experiences rising up together and acting, whether
consciously, subconsciously, or unconsciously.
An English alienist, Clouston, who has published a critical analysis
of this hypothesis of Meynert’s, considers it as the best in the
present state of the science of nervous physiology, although full of
lacunæ, and, after all, rather theoretical than experimental. It is
not in accordance with several facts; _e.g._, in anger, which is a
painful state, there is an afflux of blood, combined with aggressive
movements.[64] On the other hand, it harmonises with a great number
of manifestations observed in mental disease; thus, at the third
stage of general paralysis, a puncture causes a painless reflex
action, because the grey substance, being disorganised, no longer
has any inhibitive power. In the evolution of melancholia, the
patients sometimes at first suffer from purely physical pains
(neuralgia, headache, etc.), which disappear to make way for the
melancholic state, which, in its turn, disappears with the return of
the physical pain. Everyday experience shows that physical and moral
pain cannot coexist in any degree of intensity; a burn may for a
time arrest the progress of melancholy, and we all know what happens
to many persons as soon as they arrive at the dentist’s. It seems as
though the organism had but a limited capacity for either pleasure
or pain, and that neither feeling can exist at the same time in its
double (physical and moral) form.
-----
Footnote 64:
_British Medical Journal_, August 14, 1886, pp. 319 _et seq._ We
shall see, later on, that the mechanism of anger is not so simple
as Clouston seems to admit.
-----
II.
Much has been written on the finality of pleasure and pain, though
two entirely distinct methods of procedure have been adopted.
The first, that of theologians and moralists, is an extrinsic
explanation; pleasure is an attraction, the charm of life; pain is a
vigilant monitor warning us of our disorganisation. They exist in us
by the beneficent grace of Providence or Nature; they have a
transcendental cause.
The second, which has only found complete expression in the
evolutionist school, is an intrinsic explanation. It keeps to the
analysis of facts, and shows that pleasure and pain have their _why_
in the animal’s conditions of existence, and that consequently their
causality is immanent. Thus understood, the problem of _why_ is
pretty nearly identical with that of _how_, mechanism and finality
being very nearly confounded.
Herbert Spencer (followed by Grant Allen, Schneider, and others) has
clearly shown that the connection between pleasure and utility, pain
and injury, is an almost necessary relation, having its root in the
nature of things, and that it has been an important factor in the
survival of the fittest. Every animal as a rule persists in actions
which cause it pleasure—that is, in a mode of activity which tends
to its preservation; while it usually avoids what causes it pain,
that being the correlative of injurious actions. The animal has thus
two useful guides in the course of its life, to enable it to survive
and perpetuate its species.
If this rule were without exception,—if pleasure universally
accompanied utility, and _vice versâ_,—it would be sufficient to
state the law of the conditions of existence and nothing more. But
the exceptions to the rule are numerous, and require critical study.
Some can be explained, others seem to me irreducible to any law.
1. Herbert Spencer relieves us of a large number of exceptions,
which are, in fact, only the result of civilisation. Prehistoric
man, according to this author, was well adapted to his environment
and to a predatory life; but when, under pressure of want, the
transition to a sedentary and civilised existence took place, the
human being found itself ill-adapted to its surroundings. The
conditions of social existence have been superposed on those of
natural existence, constituting a new _milieu_, and requiring other
forms of activity. In consequence of this, frequent discordances
have arisen which he has enumerated at great length: the survival of
predatory tendencies difficult to satisfy, the necessity of
repugnant and monotonous labour, excess of labour compensated for by
excess of pleasure, as so frequently happens in great cities,
etc.[65] All these interversions are the work of man, the result of
his irrational struggle against nature, of his will, of his
artificial activities. “In the case of mankind, there has arisen,
and must long continue, a deep and involved derangement of the
natural connections between pleasures and beneficial actions, and
between pains and detrimental actions—a derangement which so
obscures their natural connections that even the reverse connections
are supposed to obtain.” Spencer thinks that a readjustment will
take place in the long run; I leave this consolation—without sharing
it—to the optimists.
-----
Footnote 65:
_Principles of Psychology_, vol. i., §§ 125, 126.
-----
2. Besides these exceptions, due to the intercurrence of social
causes, there are others of an individual character, which also can
be explained. Certain poisons are agreeable to the taste, and cause
death; a surgical operation is painful, but beneficial; many persons
intensely enjoy a _far niente_ which leads them to ruin; it is
pleasant to live in the world of pure fancy, but the reaction leaves
one enervated and unable to fulfil one’s daily task. Many other
cases of this kind may be met with in ordinary life. All these
exceptions to the rule are only apparent ones. Consciousness reveals
only the _momentary_ phenomenon, and, within these limits, its
verdict is accurate; it expresses the processes actually going on in
the organism at the moment, as we have seen in the euphoria of the
dying; it cannot tell us what will follow. The explanation reduces
itself to Grant Allen’s saying, “Neither pleasure nor pain is
prophetic.”[66]
-----
Footnote 66:
See Lehmann, _op. cit._, § 201; Höffding, _Psychologie in
Umrissen_ (2nd ed.), p. 380.
-----
3. There are other facts which the partisans of final causes
prudently pass over in silence, and which certain evolutionists have
attempted to explain.
Spencer remarks (_loc. cit._, § 127) that, “while the individual is
young and not yet fertile, its welfare and the welfare of the race
go together; but when the reproductive age is reached, the welfare
of the individual and of the race cease to be the same, and may be
diametrically opposed.... Very frequently, among invertebrate
animals, the death of the parents is a normal result of propagation.
In the great class Insects, the species of which outnumber all other
animal species, the rule is that the male lives only until a new
generation has been begotten, and that the female dies as soon as
the eggs are deposited.” There is, therefore, says the English
author, a qualification to be made.
Schneider, in his interesting work _Freud und Leid_, inspired by the
transformist hypothesis and the ideas of Spencer, gets rid of the
difficulty by connecting pleasure and pain with the conditions of
existence, not of the _individual_, but of the _species_: pleasure
corresponding to specific utility and pain to specific injury. This
statement of the problem is ingenious, but arbitrary. Pleasure and
pain are essentially subjective, individual states. They can only
assume a specific character by means of generalisation—_i.e._, as a
conception of our minds, which has no reality or value, except so
far as abstracted from particular cases.
Restricting our attention to man, and not occupying ourselves with
the antagonism between the individual and the race, we shall find
that there are cases very difficult to bring under the law. A grain
of sand in the eye, an attack of dental neuralgia cause a degree of
pain enormously out of proportion with the amount of organic injury
sustained. On the other hand, the dissolution of certain organs
essential to life is frequently almost painless. The brain may be
cut and cauterised almost without suffering; a cavity may be formed
in the lung, a cancer in the liver, without the slightest warning of
danger. Pain, that “vigilant sentinel” of the advocates of final
causes, remains dumb, or only warns us when the evil is already of
long standing and irremediable. Nay, more, it often misleads us as
to the actual seat of the disease. Examples of false localisation
abound; an irritation in the nose is due to intestinal worms, a
headache to a morbid condition of the stomach, a pain in the right
shoulder to liver complaint. Many other instances of this kind have
been studied by physicians under the names of painful synæsthesia,
or synalgia.
Schneider is, I believe, the only one who has attempted to explain
these deviations from the generally admitted formula,[67] by
reducing the problem to the two following questions:—First, whether
the development of an acute sensibility of the internal
organs—_i.e._, a relation of causality between their lesions and the
feeling of pain—is, in general, possible; secondly, whether, such
development having taken place, this faculty of feeling, as pain,
any lesion of the internal organs could be a means of protection, as
it is found to be in the case of the skin. The internal organs are
only in contact with an interior surface, which is tolerably
uniform; if an opposite state of things arises, _i.e._, if they are
laid bare by some profound lesion, death ordinarily ensues, at least
in animals and in primitive man. Only the slow progress of surgery
has made it possible to remedy such accidents. If, through
spontaneous variation, a case of sensibility of the internal organs
had ever occurred, it would be useless; it could neither become
permanent nor be transmitted to descendants, since the lesion,
resulting in death, would render the further evolution of this
quality impossible. Besides, had this sensitive faculty of the
internal organs existed, it must have remained useless, since it
could only become efficacious when combined with protective and
retractile movements of the organs, which, by the very constitution
of the animal, cannot take place. In fact, the whole of the
sensibility has been concentrated in the exterior parts of the body,
which, by protecting themselves, also protect, in the degree to
which this is possible, the internal organs.
-----
Footnote 67:
_Freud und Leid des Menschengeschlechts_ (1883), pp. 35 _et seq._
-----
I have insisted on the exceptions (certainly they are not without a
cause, whether we accept that alleged by Schneider, or prefer those
of other authorities), because they are only too readily forgotten.
The connection of pleasure and utility, pain and injury, is a
formula which originated with the philosophers—that is, with
intellects which always, and before all things, demand unity.
Psychology must proceed otherwise, must incessantly confront the
formula with facts, check it by experience, note the exceptions; it
is content with empirical laws, embracing the generality, but never
the totality of cases.
CHAPTER VII.
THE NATURE OF EMOTION.
_Analogy between perception and emotion—Constituent elements of
emotion—Summary of the theory of James and Lange—Application of
this theory to the higher emotions (religious, moral, æsthetic,
intellectual)—Illegitimate confusion between the quality and
intensity of emotion—Examination of a typical case: musical
emotion—The most emotional of all the arts is the most dependent
on physiological conditions—Proofs: its action on animals, on
primitive man, on civilised man; its therapeutic action—Why
certain sensations, images, and ideas awaken organic and motor
states, and, consequently, emotion—They are connected either
with natural or social conditions of existence—Differences and
resemblances between the two cases—Antecedents of the
physiological theory of emotion—Dualist position, or that of the
relation between cause and effect—Unitary position; its
advantages._
I.
In entering on the subject indicated by the title of this chapter,
we pass from the general manifestations of feeling (pleasures and
pains) to its special manifestations; we descend from the surface to
the deeper strata, in order to arrive at the fundamental and
irreducible fact at the root of all emotion: attraction or
repulsion, desire or aversion, in short, motion, or arrest of
motion.
Already, in the Introduction, we have marked the place of emotion in
the development of the life of the feelings, and, later on, in the
second part of this book, we shall examine separately each of the
primitive emotions, with its special determining characters. For the
moment, we have only to do with the general characters common to all
emotions.
This term, in the language of contemporary psychology, has replaced
the words “passions,” “affections of the soul” (_passiones_,
_affectus animi_), in use during the seventeenth century. Besides
being consecrated by use, it has the advantage of emphasising the
motor element included in every emotion (_motus_, _Gemütsbewegung_).
Maudsley says that this word is an induction, summing up the
experience of the human race, and the term “commotion,” formerly
used to designate the same phenomena, expresses the fact still more
clearly.
At first sight, and without entering into any analysis, every
emotion, even of slight intensity, appears to us as affecting the
entire individual, and expressing, in its complete form, what Bain
has called the law of diffusion. Its external symptoms are movements
of the face, the trunk, and the limbs; its internal, numerous
organic modifications caused and dominated by the circulation—the
organic function _par excellence_. The experiments of Lombard,
Broca, Bert, Gley, Mosso, Tanzi, etc., have shown that any and every
form of mental activity is connected with an increase in the
circulation; but the latter is always above the average when an
emotion is manifested. Emotional activity of a given kind, says
Lombard, produces an increase of temperature in all parts of the
body; it is, in general, more rapid and stronger than that which
comes from intellectual activity. Mosso, who, by some well-known
experiments, has been enabled to study even the slightest
modifications of the circulation, concludes that “the action of the
emotions on the cerebral circulation is much more evident than that
of intellectual work, whatever its energy.” Emotion not only
presents these vague and different characteristics, but every
separate emotion is a complexus. Let us take the simplest and
commonest—fear, anger, tenderness, sexual love; each one of them is
a complete state in itself, a psycho-physiological fascicule
constituted by a grouping of simple elements, differing with each
emotion, but always comprising a particular state of consciousness,
particular modifications of the functions of organic life, movements
or tendencies to movement, arrest or tendencies to the arrest of
particular movements. Every primary emotion is an innate complexus
expressing directly the constitution of the individual; the emotions
are _organised_ manifestations of the life of the feelings; they are
the reactions of the individual on everything which touches the
course of his life, or his amelioration, his being, or his better
being. In a certain manner, the primary emotions are analogous to
the perceptions, which require a psycho-physiological organism
adapted to a special function in relation to the external world;
with this difference, that sight, hearing, smell, etc., have their
own special and inalienable organs, while fear, anger, etc., have a
diffused organism, the elements of which, combined in another
manner, become the organism of another emotion.
It follows that the study of the emotions, from the point of view of
pure psychology, can come to no definite conclusion. Internal
observation, however subtle, can only describe the internal fact and
note its gradations; regarding the conditions and the genesis of
emotion, it can give no answer; it can only seize a bodiless
emotion, an abstraction. There is no manifestation of psychic life,
not excepting the perceptions, which depends more immediately on
biological conditions. The great merit of James and Lange is that
both of them, simultaneously and independently, have demonstrated
the capital importance of physiological factors in emotion.
It is not my intention to explain at length the thesis of these two
authors, though it is the most important contribution made to the
psychology of the emotions for some time. It is becoming very well
known, and, in any case, is easily accessible.[68] Reduced to its
essence, it may be summed up in two principal propositions:—
1. Emotion is only the consciousness of all the organic phenomena
(external and internal) which accompany it, and are usually
considered as its effects; in other words, that which common sense
treats as the effect of emotion is its cause.
2. One emotion differs from another according to the quantity and
quality of these organic states and their various combinations,
being only the subjective expression of these different modes of
grouping.
Footnote 68:
Lange’s book _On the Emotions_ first appeared in Danish, and has
been translated into German (1887) by Dr. Kurella, and into French
(1895) by Dr. G. Dumas. W. James first explained his theory in an
article in _Mind_ (1884), and subsequently in his _Principles of
Psychology_ (1890), vol. ii. chap. xxv.
In order to treat a subject scientifically, says Lange, we must fix
our attention on objective marks; the study of colours only became
scientific on the day when Newton discovered an objective
character—the difference of refrangibility in coloured rays. Let us
do the same with the emotions, for we shall find it possible. Each
one of them shows itself by gestures, attitudes, organic phenomena,
which are often, though very erroneously, considered secondary,
accessory, consecutive. Let us study them, and so substitute for
introspection an objective process of research. As it is best to
begin with simple things, the author has confined himself “to some
of the most definite and best characterised emotions: joy, fear,
sorrow, anger, timidity, expectation,” and abstained from
considering “those in which the physical facts were not very marked,
and not easily accessible.”
This is followed by a minute description of the emotions already
enumerated, and their physical symptoms, for which I refer the
reader to the work itself. If we generalise, we shall see that the
phenomena described can be classed in two groups—(1) modifications
of muscular innervation: it diminishes in fear or sorrow, but
increases in joy, anger, impatience; (2) vaso-motor modifications:
constriction in fear and sadness, dilatation in joy and anger. Are
these two groups of equal importance?—are they both primary? or is
one subordinated to the other? As far as the actual state of our
knowledge permits us to answer the question, says Lange, the
vascular changes must be assumed as primary, since the slightest
circulatory variations profoundly modify the functions of the brain
and spinal marrow.
What is the significance of all this as regards the emotions?
According to the current psychology, an emotional state subjected to
analysis yields the following result:—(1) an intellectual state,
perception, or idea, as a starting-point (_e.g._, a piece of bad
news, a terrifying apparition, an injury received); (2) a state of
feeling—the emotion: sorrow, anger, fear; (3) the organic states and
movements resulting from this emotion. But the second point—the
emotion conceived as such—is only an abstract entity, a mere
hypothesis. Now, to be admissible, a hypothesis ought to explain all
the facts and be necessary to their explanation. This is not the
case here. We find, both in normal and in pathological life,
emotions which are derived from no ideas, but, on the contrary,
engender them: wine gives rise to joy, alcohol to courage;
ipecacuanha causes a depression akin to fear, haschisch produces
exaltation, and shower-baths calm it. Asylums are full of patients
whose irritability, melancholy, and anguish are “causeless”—_i.e._,
result from no perception or image. Here, we seize the true cause at
its source; it lies in the physical influences. Let us therefore get
rid of the useless hypothesis of a psychic entity called emotion,
supposed to be intercalated between the perception or idea, and the
physiological occurrences. Reversing the order admitted by common
sense, we say: First an intellectual state, then organic and motor
disturbances, and then the consciousness of these disturbances,
which is the psychic state we call emotion.
W. James, in another way, and with other arguments, maintains the
same thesis: “The bodily changes follow directly the _perception_ of
the exciting fact, and our feeling of the same changes as they occur
_is_ the emotion.” Reversing what is usually accepted as common
sense, we must say that it is because we weep that we are sad,
because we strike that we feel anger, because we tremble that we are
afraid. In fear, suppress the palpitation of the heart, the hurrying
breath, the trembling of the limbs, the widening of the muscles, the
peculiar state of the viscera; in anger, the heaving of the chest,
the congestion of the face, the dilatation of the nostrils, the
clenching of the teeth, the _staccato_ voice, the impulsive
tendencies; in sorrow, get rid of tears, sighs, sobs, suffocation,
anguish—what will remain?—a purely intellectual state, pale,
colourless, cold. A disembodied emotion is a non-existent one.
This, no doubt, is a hypothesis without decisive proof. The
_crucial_ experiment could only be furnished by a man affected by
total anæsthesia, external and internal, but without paralysis.
Could such an one still experience any emotion? The case is
absolutely unrealisable; James has only been able to find three
individuals at all approaching it—one of whom (Strümpell’s case) is
well known: the subjects are apathetic, but the emotional life is
not entirely absent; Strümpell had on several occasions noted
surprise, fear, and anger.[69]
-----
Footnote 69:
Since the publication of James’s book, Dr. Berkeley has reported,
in _Brain_ (iv. 1892), two cases of general anæsthesia, cutaneous
and sensory: the subjects are apathetic, but the presence of
shame, sorrow, surprise, fear, and repulsion (the last-named as a
substitute for anger) has been observed. Dr. Sollier, in an
article in the _Revue Philosophique_ (March, 1894), has reported
some experiments made on subjects in a profoundly hypnotic state,
in whom the peripheral and visceral sensibility had been abolished
by suggestion. He comes to the same conclusions as James and
Lange.
-----
We shall have to give up all hope of a positive and decisive
experiment. The thesis in itself has so paradoxical a character that
many objections may be raised against it.
1. Are there any real proofs that certain perceptions produce, by
immediate physical influence, corporeal effects preceding the
appearance of emotion? Assuredly. The reading of a poem—the recital
of heroic deeds—music—may instantaneously cause a shudder of the
whole body, cardiac palpitations, tears. If you scrape one piece of
steel against another the whole nervous system is exasperated. Is it
not well known that the mere sight of blood will cause syncope in
certain persons? Finally, James alleges the pathological cases
mentioned above by Lange, where “emotion is without object”—_i.e._,
evidently dependent on a purely physical cause.
2. If the theory is true, we ought to be able to awaken the emotion
itself, by voluntarily producing the manifestations of a special
emotion. In the majority of cases, this criterion is inapplicable,
for the majority of the organic phenomena manifesting emotion cannot
be produced at will; the experiment therefore remains a partial one.
However, so far as it is possible, it rather corroborates than
invalidates the hypothesis. If you remain seated for a long time in
a melancholy attitude, you will be overcome by sadness. If you are
sad assume a cheerful attitude, join a merry company, and you will
gradually leave your sadness behind. It is objected that many
actors, while playing their parts, present the perfect appearance of
an emotion which they do not feel. James gives the results of a
remarkable census taken in America on this point; the answers do not
all agree, some saying that they act with the brain, others with the
heart; some feel the emotions of the character, others do not. I
think that James might have mentioned what takes place with certain
hypnotised subjects; if their limbs are placed in the attitude of
prayer, anger, menace, or affection (which amounts to a suggestion
conveyed by the muscular sense), the corresponding emotion is
produced.
3. The manifestation of an emotion, instead of increasing, causes it
to disappear; thus, a violent burst of tears relieves sorrow. This
objection does not discriminate between the feelings _during_ the
manifestation and those _after_ it. Emotion is always experienced
while the manifestation persists; but, when the nervous centres are
exhausted, calm naturally follows. Is it not said of certain men
that they would feel more if they were less “demonstrative”? This is
because the exuberance of their mode of expression rapidly exhausts
them, and does not permit the emotion to be a lasting one, while a
bilious temperament, which does not spend itself, remains like a
quiescent volcano.
I have only quoted from James and Lange what was strictly necessary
in order to understand their theory. I declare my acceptance of it
in the main, but without admitting the dualist position which they
seem to have adopted. I shall explain myself on this point in
subsequent parts of this chapter; for the moment, we have to show
that the physiological theory applies to the whole region of the
emotions.
II.
We have seen, in fact, that Lange expressly confines himself to some
simple emotions, and refuses to venture further. W. James
concentrates his efforts on the “coarse emotions,” the others (“the
subtler emotions”) he only refers to in passing, limiting himself to
some remarks on æsthetic emotion. However, I think it necessary to
treat this subject otherwise than by merely passing it by. Indeed,
the very numerous advocates of the opposite view have maintained
that the physiological theory, while it may be accepted, for want of
a better, for the inferior forms of emotion, becomes insufficient as
we rise to the higher, and that every attempt to apply it to the
superior forms would result in failure.
We must first come to a clear understanding of the value of the
terms inferior and superior, coarse and subtle; they can only denote
degrees in evolution. The inferior or coarse emotions have also been
called “animal,” because common to man and the greater number of
animals. The superior or subtle emotions are properly “human,”
though their germs are to be found in the higher animals.
The first are connected with sensations and perceptions, or with
their immediate representations; they are in close and direct
relation with the preservation of the individual or the species. The
second are connected with images of a less and less concrete
character, or with concepts; they are related in a more vague and
indirect manner to the conditions of existence of the individual or
the species.
We may also say that “inferior” is synonymous with “primary,
simple”; “superior” with “derivative, complex.” How is the
transition from inferior to superior forms produced? For the moment,
it is of no importance to know—it is sufficient to observe that it
has taken place.[70]
-----
Footnote 70:
_Vide infra_, part ii. chap. vii.
-----
Thus, just as, in the intellectual order, there is an ascending
scale, leading from the concrete, successively, to the lower,
medium, and higher forms of abstraction, so in the affective order
there is a scale ascending from fear or anger to the most ideal
emotions. And in the same way as the highest conception retains the
characteristics of the concrete whence it sprang, on pain of being
merely an empty word, so the most ethereal sentiments cannot
entirely lose the characters which constitute them emotions, on pain
of disappearing as such.
I shall not insist on these theoretic remarks; the direct
observation of facts is preferable, and gives a clearer answer.
The superior and truly human forms of emotion are reducible to four
principal groups: the religious, moral, æsthetic, and intellectual
sentiments. Although the somatic characters accompanying each of
these will be noted with the greatest care in the second part of
this work, it will be necessary, even at present, to enumerate the
principal in advance. We must more especially be on our guard
against the common error which insists in seeking emotion where
nothing remains of it save a mere survival and shadow. If, _e.g._,
we take the most intellectualised forms of the religious or the
æsthetic sentiment, we shall have much trouble in recovering the
physiological conditions of its existence. There is nothing
surprising in this, all we have in this case being an abstract or
extract of emotion, a simple mark, an emotional scheme, an affective
substitute equivalent to those intellectual substitutes which take
the place of the concrete. What we must study is true emotion, felt
and expressed, not inadequately recalled to memory, a pale remnant
of what once was an emotion.
1. The religious sentiment is attached—perhaps more than any
other—to physiological conditions, because closely connected with
the instinct of self-preservation, with the saving of the soul,
under whatever form the believer may conceive it. The _intensity_ of
the emotion alone is what concerns us; its quality is a matter for
critical appreciation. We take the observable fact in the rough,
whether legitimate or not. Now, does not the believer, whatever his
degree of culture, whatever his religion, at the moment when he
feels the emotion, tremble, turn pale, exhibit the _sacer horror_,
the overwhelming awe which may end in unconsciousness, the prostrate
attitude? Have not the mystics over and over again described the
violent disturbances which agitate them, the internal tempest which
ravages them, till, calm being re-established, they express
themselves in language frequently recalling that of sexual love? The
designation “hysterical,” bestowed, rightly or wrongly, on many of
them, is based on the physical symptoms described by themselves. And
have not the methods employed to excite, revive, or strengthen
religious emotion, from the wine of the ancient Bacchanals to the
noisy concerts of the Salvation Army, a direct physiological
influence on the organs? What of the action of the rites which are
only the fixed expression of a particular form of belief? and the
miracles which happen in all religions to those who have “the faith
which saves”—do they not take place in the organism? We might fill
many pages with the mere enumeration of the material conditions
surrounding, sustaining, evoking the religious sentiment, as we find
it _in fact_ in contemporary life, or in history. Nothing is more
chimerical than to conceive religious emotion as an unmixed act, a
psychological entity existing in and by itself, independently of its
physiological concomitants. Suppress all these, and what remains?—a
pure idea, cold and colourless. It is very evident that the
physiological factors which show themselves so vividly in intense
emotion, are attenuated by the effect of temperament, of repetition,
and of custom; but in the same measure also, emotion is enfeebled
and attenuated; a lofty religious _conception_ and a profound
religious _emotion_ are two exceedingly different psychical
phenomena. We shall come back to this point later on.
2. Moral emotion, also, must not be confounded with the moral idea.
The abstract notion of justice, duty, categoric imperative, acts on
some, and is without influence on others. Moral emotion, not
factitious and conventional, but really felt and experienced, is a
shock and an impulse that carries one away; it always shows itself
by internal and external movements; it acts like an instinct.
Sympathy, which places us in unison with others, making us feel
their happiness and misery, is (as we shall see later) a property of
animal life which imperatively requires physiological conditions,
and cannot exist without them; now the part played by sympathy in
the genesis of the moral emotions is quite clear. Is not the man who
runs to arrest a thief or a murderer, being merely a witness, and
not himself robbed or assaulted, subjected to a disturbance which is
really physiological? In explosions of maternal love, in acts of
sudden self-devotion, is there not a _raptus_ which shakes the whole
individual from head to foot? If these facts, among so many others,
are not sufficient, let us consider what takes place in masses of
people under strong excitement, in certain cases of the psychology
of crowds. “If into the term morality we import the momentary
appearance of certain qualities, such as abnegation, devotion,
disinterestedness, self-sacrifice, the sense of justice, we may say
that crowds are sometimes accessible to a very lofty morality ... a
much loftier one, indeed, than that of which the isolated individual
is capable. Only collectively is humanity capable of great acts of
disinterestedness and devotion.”[71] But in this state of enormously
magnified moral emotion, is it conceivable that the physiological
factors are negligible? Are they not the natural and necessary
vehicles of moral contagion?
-----
Footnote 71:
G. Le Bon, _Psychologie des foules_, pp. 46 _et seq._
-----
3. I shall be very brief in treating of intellectual emotion, since
it is rare, and usually temperate in character; however, when it
springs up with the true characteristics of intense emotion, it does
not deviate from the rule. Most human beings are not passionately
eager for the search after or the discovery of pure truth, any more
than they are afflicted by privation of it; but those possessed by
this demon are given up to him, body and soul. Their emotion is no
more independent of physiological conditions than any other. The
biographies of learned men furnish us with innumerable examples: the
perpetual physical sufferings of Pascal, Malebranche nearly
suffocated by the palpitations of his heart when reading Descartes,
Humphrey Davy dancing in his laboratory after having made the
discovery of potassium, Hamilton suddenly feeling something “like
the closing of a galvanic circuit” at the moment of discovering the
method of quaternions, etc. There is no need to extend our search so
far; everyday life provides us moment by moment with examples which,
though prosaic, are none the less valuable as proofs. The instinct
of curiosity is at the root of all intellectual emotion, whether
lofty or commonplace. Does not the man who perpetually watches his
neighbour’s conduct and the thousand petty details of his life, feel
when his puerile curiosity is baffled, all the physical anguish of
unsatisfied desire?
4. If we are to believe certain over-subtle critics, æsthetic
emotion would have the privilege of moving in the region of pure
contemplation. This assertion is founded on the error pointed out
above, which consists in taking into account only the _quality_ of
the emotion, not its intensity. They put a critical emotion,
purified, sublimated, stripped as far as possible of its somatic
resonance, in the place of the true, primitive emotion, whence all
the others have issued, and which they, like the rest of men, have
begun by experiencing; for even the most refined cannot begin at the
end. It is an abstract mode of feeling substituted for the concrete.
W. James makes, on this point, some excellent remarks, to which we
refer the reader (_op. cit._, pp. 428 _et seq._). Complete æsthetic
emotion, without regard to its quality, does not always require
advanced culture. The savage who, along with his companions, excites
himself over his dance and song, becomes intoxicated with sound and
motion; the naïve spectator quite carried away by the interest of a
crude melodrama; the Spanish peasant, contemplating his church
crammed with _rococo_ ornaments and strangely-dressed saints: all
these experience the concrete emotion which shakes the frame, makes
the heart beat, produces tears, laughter, or gestures.
Besides, it is enough to recall the researches inaugurated by
Fechner in his _Vorschule der Æsthetik_, and since continued,
especially in Germany, under the name of elementary æsthetics,[72]
which so greatly emphasise the part played by the sensory element
in the genesis of æsthetic pleasure and pain. We may thus briefly
summarise them: There are two constituent factors in the æsthetic
sentiment—one direct, connected with sensations and perceptions;
the other indirect, connected with representations (images and
associations of ideas). One or the other predominates, according
to the particular art: the direct factor in music and the plastic
arts, the indirect in poetry. The direct factor, by its very
definition, depends on the organism. The colours are not simple
sensations, they have an affective tone proper to themselves.
According to Wundt, white suggests gaiety; green, a quiet joy;
while red corresponds to energy, strength, etc. We may or may not
admit these correspondences; Scripture gives others, and they
probably vary from one individual to another; but the principle is
unassailable. Féré’s previously quoted experiments, on exciting
and depressing colours, tend in the same direction. It is the same
with sounds:—according as they are high, deep, or medium, they
induce a special mood. If from simple sensation we pass to
perceptions, direct physical action is not doubtful; we find it in
the arrangement of colours, in the phenomena of contrasts, in the
outlines and forms of certain lines, in the innate pleasure of
symmetry and regularity, in rhythm, measure, cadence, in the
perception of harmony and dissonance, etc. In truth, the authors
cited, have insisted rather on the sensory action than on the
organic and motor modifications accompanying it. But it always
remains indisputable that the æsthetic sentiment is necessarily
connected with physiological conditions.
-----
Footnote 72:
Wundt, _Physiologische Psychologie_, 4th (German) ed., chap. xx.;
Külpe, _Grundriss der Psychologie_, p. 250 (English edition), §
38; Sully, _Sensation and Intuition_, Part II.; Grant Allen,
_Mind_, July 1879 (“The Origin of the Sense of Symmetry”).
-----
Since we are maintaining the proposition that the intensity of even
the superior emotions is in direct ratio to the quantity of the
physiological occurrences accompanying them, I propose in the
following paragraphs to examine a single one separately, and in some
detail.
Which is the most emotional of all arts? Music. There is no possible
doubt as to the answer—eliminating, of course, those persons on whom
it has no effect, and who must be rejected for the purposes of this
argument. No art has a deeper power of penetration, no other can
render shades of feeling so delicate as to escape every other medium
of expression. So much is unanimously admitted.
Is the most emotional art also—as required by our thesis—the most
dependent on physiological conditions? Yes, and if we wish to
demonstrate this, facts are so numerous that the only difficulty is
to choose between them. Let us leave aside every intellectual
element, all representations, either vague or distinct, evoked by
music; let us, further, avoid all metaphysical dissertations on its
nature and its revelation of the Infinite, or its origin in the
human species, in order to confine ourselves to its physical and
affective aspect, and to grasp the connection.
In the first place, we shall find that music has an effect on many
animals. Although on this point many nursery tales and marvellous
anecdotes have been handed down from antiquity, yet—having made
deduction of all apocryphal stories—we find a large number of
observations and experiments which must be considered accurate. They
are to be found in the writings of various musicians or historians
of music (Grétry, Fétis, etc.). Dogs, cats, horses, lizards,
serpents, spiders, not to mention many birds, are the examples most
frequently quoted. Experiments made at the Jardin des Plantes,
Paris, particularly on the elephants, at the beginning of this
century, have been many times referred to, and are both varied and
conclusive.[73] Are we to conclude from them that these animals are
melomaniacs? Some authors appear to have no doubt on this point,
having a natural inclination to neglect the physical side of the
phenomenon, and to interpret it in a quasi-human sense. It is much
more probable that the sensations of sound and movement (animals
being very sensitive to rhythm) act directly on the organism, and
indirectly on the vital functions, and produce a physical state of
pleasure or pain; perhaps in the highest, such as the elephant, a
certain affective state approximating to emotion. In short, music
acts like a burn, like heat, cold, or a caressing contact. I have on
this point consulted writers of recognised competence in musical
psychology. M. Dauriac writes to me: “Relative consonances and
dissonances, composed of major or minor thirds, produce pleasurable
or painful effects on the organism, independently of any impression
or æsthetic judgment.” M. Stumpf has been kind enough to reply by a
long letter, amply furnished with quotations from original
authorities, whence he concludes that “der Grund hiervon dürfte ein
rein physiologischer sein.”
-----
Footnote 73:
They will be found in Beauquier, _Philosophie de la musique_, p.
65.
-----
Let us turn to primitive man. The question becomes less simple; but
the physical element still preponderates. Music consists only of
rhythm, marked by clumsy and noisy instruments, whose principal
effect is to increase the vibration of the nervous system. The
aborigines of America are able, during four consecutive hours, to
intoxicate themselves with rhythmic sounds having no melodic
significance. Among certain tribes, diviners and sorcerers employ
the drum in order to produce in themselves a sort of ecstasy;[74] it
is a true intoxication through sound, and especially through
motion—_i.e._, an affective state excited directly by external and
internal sensations. We have here before us the genesis of emotion.
-----
Footnote 74:
For details on this point, Wallaschek’s interesting work on
_Primitive Music_ should be consulted.
-----
Civilised man, exceptions apart, is sensitive to music in different
degrees, from the peasant or artisan, who, like the savage, prefers
tunes with a well-marked rhythm, to the most cultivated amateur. But
for all states the primary effect is a physical one. “Musical
vibration is only one particular mode of perceiving that universal
vibration—that music of life which animates all beings and all
bodies, from the lowest to the highest. From this point of view,
musical art may be called the art of sensibility _par excellence_,
since it regulates the great phenomenon of vibration, into which all
external perceptions resolve themselves, and transfers it from the
region of the unconscious, in which it was hidden, to that of
consciousness.”[75] Music acts on the muscular system, on the
circulation, the respiration, and the parts dependent on them.
Intense sounds (the big drum, kettledrum, etc.) give the whole body
a shock, over-acute sounds cause muscular contractions. I know a
musician who is thrown into convulsions by too marked a discord. Let
us add to these the well-known effects of horripilation, of thrills
passing down the back or over the scalp, of sudden sweats, of
tickling, of epigastric constriction. Grétry had already noted that
the pulse is sensitive to rhythm; and he has recorded several
observations made on himself, showing that the pulsations are
accelerated or retarded according to the rhythm of a chant heard
internally. It would be an interminable task to enumerate the purely
physical effects of the musical impression. The conclusion to be
drawn is, that while certain arts at once awaken ideas which give a
determination to the feelings, this of music acts inversely. It
creates dispositions depending on the organic state and on nervous
activity, which we translate by the vague terms—joy, sadness,
tenderness, serenity, tranquillity, uneasiness. On this canvas the
intellect embroiders its designs at pleasure, varying according to
individual peculiarities.
-----
Footnote 75:
Beauquier, _op. cit._, p. 56.
-----
We might go further, and pass from the general to the particular. If
music, by its effect on the organism, creates dispositions,
momentary affective situations, the differences in voice,
instrument, _timbre_, must produce different and special
dispositions, which is indisputable. The tonality of a piece must
act in the same way, which is also admitted by many composers. It is
true that they are not agreed on the definition and the significance
of every tone, and that many amusing discrepancies might be selected
from their writings. (So the key of E flat minor, which, for
Gevaert, is powerful and majestic, indicates, according to Grétry,
an imminent catastrophe.) Here, more than elsewhere, over-precise
definition is injurious.
Let me add a remark on the therapeutic action of music. We have
abundant evidence that this was known in the most ancient times.
From the Greek physicians to Leuret, who employed it in his moral
treatment of insanity, a long series of cures have been attributed
to it. A well-known Russian physiologist, Tarchanoff, has recently
lauded and recommended its rational employment in disorders of the
nervous system; but it does not act through occult, mysterious,
spiritual influences; it acts physically, as a kind of vibratory
medicine. The researches of Boudet de Paris, Mortimer Granville,
Buccola, Morselli, Vigouroux, furnish proofs of this.
Although we might say much more on this subject, the above will be
sufficient to show that the most emotional of the arts is also that
most intimately dependent on the modifications of the organism. This
has seemed to me an argument not to be neglected in favour of the
physiological theory of emotion.[76]
-----
Footnote 76:
Gurney, in a criticism of James’s hypothesis (_Mind_, ix. 425),
says: “There is plenty of music from which I have received as much
emotion in silent representation” [_i.e._, by purely internal
audition, or merely reading the notes] “as when presented by the
finest orchestra; but it is with the latter condition that I
almost exclusively associate the cutaneous tingling and
hair-stirring.” Professor James has, in my opinion, answered this
objection (_Psychology_, ii. pp. 469, 470), which I should be
inclined to refer to the problem of the “revivability of
impressions,” to be examined later on.
-----
III.
We have just shown that the so-called higher forms of emotion do not
escape from the necessity of physiological conditions; but there is
yet another question, still in obscurity and suspense, which, by
reason of its importance, ought to be elucidated. It is this: Why
have certain internal or external states, certain images, certain
ideas, the privilege of exciting certain organic and motor states,
and, in consequence, emotion? How is this connection, this _nexus_,
established? for experience teaches us that it is not necessary: in
the same individual the same perception or idea may awaken an
emotion, whereas in another case it may produce nothing. In other
words, there are perceptions, images, and concepts which remain
purely intellectual states without affective accompaniment, at least
with none accessible to consciousness. There are others which are
immediately enveloped and, as it were, submerged in the emotion
which they produce. Let us note that the question comes before us,
whatever opinion we may adopt as to the genesis of emotion. As
usually accepted, the order is this: intellectual state, affective
state, organic states. According to the physiological hypothesis,
the order is as follows: intellectual state, organic states,
affective state. Passing from one thesis to the other, the problem
is subject to but one variation: Why is a certain intellectual state
sometimes coupled with an intellectual state, and sometimes not?
This is on the first hypothesis. Why is a certain intellectual state
sometimes accompanied by organic and motor modifications, sometimes
not? This is on the second hypothesis.
The answer is the same in both cases: the intellectual state is
accompanied by an affective state whenever there is a direct
relation with the conditions of existence, natural or social, of the
individual. In order to justify this proposition we must examine in
succession these two forms of the conditions of existence.
1st Period.—_Sensations or images connected with the natural
conditions of existence._
We have here to do with a question of genesis; we must therefore
begin with the humblest phenomena. The primordial sense, the only
one in certain animals, is touch combined with internal sensations.
Let us remark that, in its origin, the “knowledge” which we take in
its lowest degree has only a _practical_ value; sensation is a
monitor, an aid, an instrument, a weapon with only one aim—the
preservation of the individual,—and completely subordinated to that
end; otherwise, it is nothing but a useless manifestation, a luxury.
The _nexus_ between the sensations and the organic and motor
reactions is therefore innate—_i.e._, it results from the very
constitution of the animal. If it fails, the conditions of existence
are at fault. The primordial tissue, says Spencer, must be
differently affected, according as it is in contact with nutritive
matter (ordinarily soluble) or with innutritive matter (ordinarily
insoluble). The contraction by which the tactual surface of a
rhizopod absorbs a fragment of assimilable matter is caused by a
commencing absorption of this matter, _i.e._, contact and absorption
are the same thing. The action of certain agents is followed by a
retractile movement, or, on the contrary, by movements of a
character to assure the continuance of the impression. These two
kinds of movement are, in this writer’s view, respectively the
phenomena and the signs of pleasure and pain. The tissue, therefore,
acts in such a manner as to assure pleasure and avoid pain, by a law
as physical and natural as that by which a magnet turns towards the
pole, or a tree to the light. Without inquiring whether pleasure and
pain exist in this case—a purely hypothetical assumption—there are,
at least, objective phenomena denoting a _nexus_ of utility between
the sensation and the expansive or retractile movements.
Passing from these inferior organisms to those provided with several
senses, we find no change. Each order of sensation acts in the same
way. The animal is better informed, and consequently better
protected and armed—that is all. Finally, when certain images
(_i.e._, recollections of pleasures and pains experienced) excite an
emotional state, the mechanism remains the same, and tends towards
the same end. It is therefore not without reason that we have above
assimilated every form of primary emotion to a psycho-physiological
organism adapted to a particular end.
It is needless to review the primary emotions and to show that the
sensation, the perception, or the image only produces organic or
motor troubles when the preservation of the individual or the
species is at stake. The intellectual state (sensation,
perception, or image) can instinctively—_i.e._, through an innate
mechanism—produce immobility, oppression, withdrawing into one’s
self, flight (fear); or, on the contrary, aggressive movements,
attack (anger), or movements of attraction, accompanied by
phenomena peculiar to each species (sexual love).
To sum up, every event of this kind, reduced to its simplest
expression, consists in (1) an intellectual fact, analogous to a
spring moving the whole machine, (2) an unconscious, half-conscious,
or conscious reaction of the instinct of self-preservation; this
being by no means an entity, as we have already said, but the
organism itself under its dynamic aspect.
2nd Period.—_Perceptions, images, or ideas connected with social
conditions of existence._
Up to the present, we have only considered emotional reaction in its
relations with nature—_i.e._, with the physical environment. Its
domain is much more extensive; in man, and in many animals, it is
adapted to the social environment. At bottom, the mechanism remains
the same. A perception, an image, or an idea excites an emotion,
because related, directly or indirectly (in the latter case the
relation is conceived, inductively or deductively), to the social
conditions of the individual. The natural _ego_ has its needs and
tendencies; the same is true of the social _ego_, grafted on the
other, or rather, one with it; consequently, the mechanism comes
very frequently into play; the circumference is extended, but the
centre remains the same.
Let us note the differences between the two periods. In the latter
we have (1) a preponderance of representations and concepts—_i.e._,
the superior forms of knowledge; (2) instead of a natural, innate
association between certain perceptions and certain emotional
reactions—associations which may be called anatomical, because fixed
in the individual organism—there are secondary, acquired
associations, less solidly fixed, sometimes entirely artificial,
which result from experience, from education, from habit, from
imitation. I give some examples, by way of elucidation, and in order
to avoid repetition.
The feeling of property is derived from a natural condition of
existence—nutrition. It is first manifested—in the form of a
prevision—in some animals who store up a reserve of food for the
future. In primitive man this instinct extends to clothes, weapons,
the cave or hut which he inhabits; later on, with the nomadic life,
to herds and flocks; then to agricultural products, silver, gold,
paper money; finally to that impalpable thing called credit, which
has merely an imaginary existence. Thus it gradually takes on a
social character. The knowledge of any loss or any gain, actual or
possible, produces an emotion in the individual, because it shows
him that his adaptation to social conditions is diminished or
augmented.
The sentiment of “self-feeling” is innate, primary. Let us imagine
ourselves in a society where the questions of rank, precedence,
etiquette, are of capital importance—in an aristocratic monarchy
like that of Louis XIV.—and we shall see what a ferment of emotions
may be raised by an occurrence which, to our eyes, seems futile and
irrelevant. If we read Saint-Simon’s _Mémoires_, we see him boiling
over with indignation when a courtier is unduly accorded the
privileges of a duke and peer, and his wife is granted a stool in
the Queen’s presence. He spends his time in incessant visits, forms
coalitions, does all in his power to move the ministers or the
Parliament, and finally exults in his victory. However factitious
and puerile this agitation may seem, it results from the same
physiological mechanism as the simplest emotions: from the instinct
of personal preservation—not of his natural _ego_, but of his _ego
qua_ courtier of the Grand Monarque. If he fails, he is injured,
depreciated, lessened in his conditions of social existence.
The case already cited, of Malebranche, to whom Descartes’ _Traité
de l’homme_ “caused such violent palpitations of the heart that he
was obliged continually to leave his book in order to breathe,”
called forth Fontenelle’s remark that “Truth, which is invisible and
of no practical utility, is not wont to find so much sensibility
among men.” No doubt; but to the true man of science the pursuit of
truth is one of the necessary conditions of existence. For others it
is a mere luxury, to the loss of which they are quite indifferent.
I think we have thus replied to the question previously put—why
certain sensations, images, ideas, have the privilege of producing
organic and motor changes which, translated into the language of
consciousness, constitute the emotional state—and justified our
answer. The sensation, the image, the idea, are only occasional
causes, incapable by themselves of producing any emotion: it
springs from the inmost personality of the individual—from his
_organisation_—expresses it directly, and participates in its
stability and its instability.
IV.
The hypothesis of James and Lange—considered, at first, as a
paradox—has suggested so many remarks, criticisms, objections,
answers, and arguments for and against, that I find it impossible to
give a summary of them.[77] Yet it is not without precedent. Lange,
in his _Addenda_, mentions as his precursors, Malebranche, Spinoza,
and some other less celebrated authors. The legitimate claims of
Descartes, in his treatise _Sur les Passions de l’Âme_, have also
since been vindicated.[78] The physiologists, too, ought not to be
forgotten: Maudsley indicated the same view, without insisting on
it.[79] The superiority of James and Lange consists in having put it
clearly and endeavoured to support it by experimental proofs. I have
already said that it seems to me the most probable explanation for
those who do not represent the emotions to themselves as
psychological entities. The only point in which I differ from these
authors relates to their way of putting the proposition, not to its
substance.
-----
Footnote 77:
I may indicate, somewhat at random, the principal documents for
this controversy: Wundt, _Philosophische Studien_, vi. 3, p. 349
(he criticises Lange only); Gurney, _Mind_, July 1884; Marshall,
_ib._, October 1884; Stanley, _ib._, January 1886; Worcester,
_Monist_, January 1893; _Psychological Review_, September and
November 1894, January 1895, etc.
Footnote 78:
“Though written in the earliest days of modern science, this work
will bear comparison with anything that has been produced in
recent years. It will be difficult, indeed, to find any treatment
of the emotions much superior to it in originality, thoroughness,
and suggestiveness. The position maintained is similar to that now
held by Professor James, but Descartes does not content himself
with defending in a general way the assertion that emotion is
caused by physical change. After coming to the conclusion that
there are six passions from which all the others are derived, he
attempts to show that a special set of organic effects is
concerned in the production of each of these primary states.”—D.
Irons in _Philosophical Review_, May 1895, p. 291.
Footnote 79:
“When any great passion causes all the physical and moral
troubles which it will cause, what I conceive to happen is that
a physical impression made on the sense of sight or of hearing
is propagated along a physical path to the brain, and arouses a
physical commotion in its molecules; that from this centre of
commotion the liberated energy is propagated by physical paths
to other parts of the brain; and that it is finally discharged
outwardly through proper physical paths, either in movements or
in modifications of secretion and nutrition. The passion that is
felt is the subjective side of the cerebral commotion—its
_motion_ out from the physical basis, as it were (_e-motion_),
into consciousness.”—_Pathology of Mind_, 1879, p. 222.
-----
It is evident that our two authors, whether consciously or not,
share the dualist point of view with the common opinion which they
are combating; the only difference being in the interversion of
cause and effect. Emotion is a cause of which the physical
manifestations are the effect, says one party; the physical
manifestations are the cause of which emotion is the effect, says
the other. In my view, there would be a great advantage in
eliminating from the question every notion of cause and effect,
every relation of causality, and in substituting for the dualistic
position a unitary or monistic one. The Aristotelian formula of
matter and form seems to me to meet the case better, if we
understand by “matter” the corporeal facts, and by “form” the
corresponding psychical state: the two terms, by-the-bye, only
existing in connection with each other and being inseparable except
as abstract conceptions. It was traditional in ancient psychology to
study the relations of “the soul and the body”—the new psychology
does not speak of them. In fact, if the question takes a
metaphysical form, it is no longer psychology; if it takes an
experimental form, there is no reason to treat it separately,
because it is treated in connection with everything. No state of
consciousness can be dissociated from its physical conditions: they
constitute a natural whole, which must be studied as such. Every
kind of emotion ought to be considered in this way: all that is
objectively expressed by movements of the face and body, by
vaso-motor, respiratory, and secretory disturbances, is expressed
subjectively by correlative states of consciousness, classed by
external observation according to their qualities. It is a single
occurrence expressed in two languages. We have previously
assimilated the emotions to psycho-physiological organisms; this
unitary point of view, being more conformable to the nature of
things and to the present tendencies of psychology, seems to me, in
practice, to eliminate many objections and difficulties.
Whether we adopt this theory or not, we have in any case acquired
the certainty that the organic and motor manifestations are not
accessories, that the study of them is part of the study of emotion.
We shall therefore have to speak of them in some detail.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE INTERNAL CONDITIONS OF EMOTION.
_Confused state of this question—Popular versus Medical
Psychology—Part played by the brain, the centre of psychic
life—Hypotheses on the “seat” of the emotions—Part played by the
heart, the centre of vegetative life—Popular metaphors and their
physiological interpretation—Are the internal sensations
reducible to a single process?—Part played by chemical action in
the genesis of emotion—Cases of the introduction of toxic
substances—Auto-intoxication—Modifications in the course of
mental maladies._
As the physiological substratum of emotion, or its material (the
reader may use which expression he prefers), comprises the organic
or internal functions, and the motor functions showing themselves
outwardly, we shall follow this division. Although it may seem
artificial, it is not altogether so; the internal manifestations
are, for the most part, outside the action of the will; the external
manifestations are, in many cases, subject to that action. In any
case, this somewhat arbitrary distinction is desirable for the sake
of clearness in exposition.
I.
The relation of different emotions to the internal functions is a
subject yet in its infancy. Our knowledge of it is still in a vague
and confused state. It is at the same point where the problem of the
expression of the emotions was before Charles Bell and Darwin;
_i.e._, we have before us a purely empiric set of observed facts
without suggested explanation. No doubt it is well known that
vaso-motor and respiratory disturbances vary according to the
emotions, but the reasons for the differences between one case and
another are often unknown and even unexplored. Although Lange has
done much in this direction, we cannot congratulate ourselves on
having a complete presentation of all the organic and functional
manifestations which accompany the simple emotions, not to speak of
the complex forms. Still less do we know, clearly and positively,
why these and not other manifestations are produced. Thus Hack Tuke
asserts it to be a matter of common observation that while the blush
of shame begins in the cheeks and the ears, that of anger begins
with the eyes, and that of love with the forehead. Supposing this
fact to be firmly established, we should still have to find out why,
in each case, that particular vascular region should be affected by
preference. In short, the study of the external conditions of
emotion remains at the present time fragmentary and descriptive.
The part played by the viscera in the emotions and passions is so
evident that in all ages it has arrested the attention of mankind.
On this point, for a period of several centuries, we find, on the
one hand, a popular psychology,—which in all languages has become
fixed in the form of metaphors,—full of errors and prejudices, but
also of very sound observations; on the other hand, scientific
attempts at explanation, varying with the physiology of the period,
and expressed in terms of the current medical doctrine. During this
long period we can distinguish two principal directions of thought:
one tending to localise the passions exclusively in the viscera,
especially the heart, the other to place them in the brain. Without
distorting facts, we might find in these two tendencies the
incomplete and unconscious form of the two reigning theories in
affective psychology, the organic and the intellectualist.
It would be of no interest to retrace this long history, to remind
the reader that Plato placed courage in the breast and the sensual
appetites in the abdomen, that the School of Salerno attributed
anger to the gall, joy to the spleen, love to the liver. The organic
or visceral theory long had an overwhelming preponderance, and
Bichat, at the beginning of the century (1800), did not hesitate to
write, “The brain is not affected by the passions which have for
their _exclusive_ seat the organs of internal life—the liver, lungs,
heart, spleen, etc.” From the seventeenth century downwards, the
cerebral theory becomes more accentuated; with Gall and Charles Bell
the heart is quite dispossessed, and, by way of reaction, the part
played by the viscera was almost forgotten.
At the present day no one maintains that the heart or any other
organ is the seat of an emotion in the sense of feeling it; the
consciousness of the affective life only exists through the brain,
in which the internal sensations coming from the viscera are
represented as external sensations; it is an echo. The brain, says
Hunter, knows perfectly well that the body has a liver and a
stomach, or, as Carus expressed it, each organ has its _psychische
Signatur_. The ideal would be to determine, by means of a complete
and well-conducted elementary analysis, the part contributed by each
internal organ and function to the constitution of a particular
emotion. Nothing of this sort can be attempted: there exist, on this
point, only scattered materials and conjectures supported chiefly by
the phenomena of morbid states. We shall return to this later on.
(See Part II.) Let us at this moment confine our attention to the
two predominant organs—the brain, the centre of psychic life; the
heart, the centre of vegetative life.
1. The brain is not merely the echo of internal sensations; it
receives and reacts according to its disposition; it centralises,
but while taking its own part in the concert; it puts its mark on
the impressions it receives. Already (Chap. I., § 1) we have seen
the theories propounded as to the “seat” or “centre” of pain or
pleasure: bulb, protuberance, temporal lobe, occipital lobe, etc.
Naturally, each author has extended his hypothesis to the emotions
properly so called. However, the search for “emotional centres”
appears still more chimerical. A particular emotion has no
determinate centre, is not localised in a restricted area of the
encephalon. Not only does neither observation nor experience
indicate anything of the sort, but if we consider the complexity of
any emotion whatever, we shall understand that it requires the
activity of several cerebral and infra-cerebral centres: (1) the
sensory centres of sight, hearing, smell, etc.; (2) the centres
scattered through the motor zone and regulating the movements of
different parts of the body; (3) and lastly, the centres
corresponding to the phenomena of organic life. These constitute
several stages: in the spinal cord, the respiratory centre, that
which accelerates the movements of the heart, the genito-spinal, the
vesico-spinal (it is well known that the bladder is as good an
æsthesiometer as the iris), etc.; in the bulb, the respiratory and
vaso-motor centres, and those of cardiac and thermic inhibition. As
regards the cortical layer, there are many open questions as to the
position of the vascular, thermic, trophic, glandular centres, of
the organic movements which determine the contraction of the
intestines, the bladder, the spleen, etc. This very incomplete and
confused enumeration is sufficient for our purpose—viz., to show
that we must speak, not of a centre, but of the synergic action of
several centres, differently grouped according to the cases.[80]
Footnote 80:
In his lectures on Hysteria (Vol. i., Lecture 21), Pitres
incidentally inquires into the existence of encephalic centres of
the affective states, and concludes that “the molecular changes
corresponding to the activity of the cellular elements shaken by
the passions, radiate in every direction, stimulate or depress the
excitability of adjacent elements, rebound on the motor and
sensitive centres, and on the originatory nuclei of the visceral
nerves, and finally determine the state of emotion, _i.e._, the
psycho-physiological state which is the special expression of the
reaction of the nervous centres to psychic excitations.”
It is well known that the vaso-motor nerves of the head, the upper
limbs, the lower limbs, the viscera, are furnished in part by the
nerve-reticulations of the sympathetic system, in part by the
rachidian nerves issuing from different parts of the spinal cord.
Now, an experiment of Claude Bernard’s, made as far back as 1852,
shows that the section of the great sympathetic in the neck produces
on the same side an expansion of the vessels, and an increase in the
temperature, nutrition, muscular tonicity, and sensibility. On the
contrary, galvanism applied to the same nerve produces constriction
of the vessels and the contrary phenomena to the preceding. Féré
points out that the manifestations of the first case are, in
general, those of the sthenic emotions, as those of the second are
of the asthenic emotions.[81]
Footnote 81:
_Op. cit._, pp. 490, 491.
Whatever we may think of this comparison, the incontestable and so
often recorded characteristic of emotion—diffusion—shows us that it
is everywhere; that, if we could see with our eyes the cerebral
mechanism supporting it, we should be spectators of the co-ordinated
work of the multiple centres; that, consequently, the hypothesis of
a localisation, of a seat in the limited sense, is in no way
justified.
2. It is needless to remind the reader that the majority of idioms
make the heart the incarnation of affective life, and that the
antithesis of reason and passion is, in current speech, that of the
brain and the heart. This opinion is not entirely a prejudice, as
contemporary physiologists have shown.
Why is the heart, an unconscious muscle, promoted to the position of
an essential and central organ of the emotions and the passions? It
is so in accordance with the well-known physiological law which
makes us transfer our psychic states to the peripheral organ which
communicates them to our consciousness. It feels the rebound of all
the impulses which strike us; it reflects the most fugitive
impressions; in the order of the sentiments, no manifestation takes
place outside it, nothing escapes it; it vibrates incessantly,
though in different manners.
Claude Bernard, and after him, Cyon, have undertaken to justify the
popular expressions regarding the heart, to show that they are not
mere metaphors, but the result of accurate observation, and that
they can be translated into physiological language. I here summarise
their principal remarks.
The heart, the centre of organic life, and the brain, the centre of
animal life, the two culminating organs of the living machine, are
in an incessant relation of action and reaction which shows itself
in two principal states,—syncope and emotion; the first due to the
momentary cessation of the cerebral functions through intermission
in the arrival of the arterial blood; the second due to the
transmission to the heart of a circulatory modification. There is
always an initial impression which slightly arrests this organ
(according to Claude Bernard), whence a passing paleness, then a
reaction which the heart, by reason of its extreme sensibility, is
the first to feel; for, as the brain is the most delicate of the
organs of the animal life, the heart is the most sensitive of the
vegetative vital organs.
When it is said that the heart is _broken_ by grief, this expression
corresponds to actual phenomena. The heart has been arrested by a
sudden impression, whence, sometimes, syncope and nervous attacks.
The heart’s being “big,” answers to a prolongation of the diastole,
which causes a feeling of fulness and oppression in the præcordial
region. The “palpitation” of the heart is not merely a poetic
formula, but a physiological reality; the beats being rapid and
without intensity. The facility with which the heart is emptied, the
regularity of the circulation being kept up by slight pressure,
corresponds to the “light” heart. Two hearts beat “in unison,” under
the influence of the same impressions. In the “cold heart” the beats
are slow and quiet, as if under the influence of cold; in the “warm”
heart, the contrary is the case. When we tell a person that we love
him “with all our heart,” this expression signifies, physiologically
speaking, that his presence, or the recollection of him, awakens in
us a nervous impression, which, transmitted to the heart by the
pneumogastric nerve, causes in our heart a reaction of such a kind
as to produce in the brain a sentiment or an emotion. In man, the
brain, in order to express its feelings, is obliged to take the
heart into its service.[82]
Footnote 82:
For further details see Claude Bernard, _La science expérimentale,
Étude sur la physiologie du cœur_, 1865, and Cyon’s Address to the
Academy of St. Petersburg, “The Heart and the Brain,” translated
in the _Revue Scientifique_, November 22nd, 1873. Also, Mosso,
_Sulla circolazione del sangue nel cervello_ (1880), and _La
Paura_ (Fear, English translation, 1896).
Let us further recall the well-known observations of Mosso, who was
able directly to study the circulation of the blood in the brain in
three patients, in whom the cranium had been destroyed by various
accidents. He ascertained that the mere fact of looking attentively
at one of his patients, the entrance of a stranger, or any other
occurrence of slight importance, immediately quickened the cerebral
pulse. In one, a woman, the height of the pulsations suddenly
increased, without apparent cause; she had just perceived in the
room a death’s-head, which somewhat frightened her. The same thing
took place with another patient when he heard the clock strike
twelve; this was because he did not feel able to say his noon
prayers. I do not dwell on his researches by means of the
plethysmograph, which have special relation to intellectual work.
It will therefore be understood how popular opinion has come to look
upon the heart as the seat, or the generator, of emotions. This is
the instinctive expression of a quite correct view: the supreme
importance to the affective life of the visceral action summed up in
a fundamental organ.
II.
Since, for the moment, we are eliminating movements in order to
confine our attention to the _internal_ conditions of emotion, it is
easy to see that these conditions reduce themselves to that which we
designate by the name of internal, organic, vital sensations. This
is not the place to enumerate the modifications of each in the case
of each special emotion (for which the reader is referred to Part
II.); the question, taken for the present in its generality, is put
thus: Are the internal sensations reducible to a single and
fundamental process? If the answer is in the affirmative, the
internal conditions of emotion would find themselves simultaneously
determined under their most general form. We can, at any rate, try.
The first difficulty consists in our not having a complete
enumeration, on which all authors are agreed, of the internal
sensations, as we have in the case of the special sensations.
Beaunis gives a very detailed classification in eight groups; Kröner
adopts a somewhat different one; both include pleasure, pain, and
the emotions. Let us eliminate this last group (the affective
manifestations) and confine ourselves to the vital sensations
properly so called, connected with purely physiological needs, with
the organs and functions indispensable to life: the different
sensations of the alimentary canal (hunger, thirst, _malaise_,
nausea, etc.); those of the respiratory apparatus (the need of fresh
air, dyspnœa, asphyxia), of the circulatory apparatus, of the
excretions and secretions; of the sexual organs in the normal state
or in transitory phases (puberty, menstruation, pregnancy,
menopause); the need of muscular movement, of rest, of sleep; the
sensation of fatigue;—we have nearly all, if not all, the elements
of cœnæsthesia, _i.e._, the consciousness of the body as living and
acting.
Have these multiplied sensations a common cause? Are they different
modes of one and the same process? Do they imply, at their origin,
the same stimulus, the same kind of excitement, as all the varieties
of visual sensations suppose luminous vibrations, and the varieties
of auditive sensations, sonorous vibrations? Kröner maintains that,
for all internal sensations, the initial excitation is of a
_chemical_ nature. “Every organic sensation is based on a chemical
process, and arises according to the laws of diffusion and
osmosis.”[83] The author justifies his assertion by the enumeration
of a large number of facts, for which I refer the reader to his
book. Chemical action, according to him, either takes place under
the gaseous form (a person passes from the open air into a room full
of deleterious miasma) or under the liquid (alcohol, toxic
substances in solution in the fluids of the organism and introduced
into the circulatory current).
-----
Footnote 83:
Kröner, _Das körperliche Gefühl_ (Breslau, 1887), pp. 102-112.
-----
It is not very certain, _pace_ Kröner, that _all_ internal
sensations are caused by chemical action, under one or other of the
forms we have mentioned, and that their vague localisation is due to
this cause alone, and not, as generally admitted, by their arising
in organs incapable of movement. Thus tickling, giddiness, the
muscular sensations (which Kröner and Beaunis include in this group)
appear to depend on mechanical excitations rather than on chemical
causes. At any rate, one cannot deny that the internal fundamental
sensations—connected with nutrition and its immediate conditions,
with fatigue and sleep, both of which result from a poisoning of the
muscles and the nervous centres, with sexual life—are due to
chemically caused excitations. This granted, we may go one step
further in the track of James and Lange, and say that the emotions
depend not only on physiological conditions, but still more
intimately on the chemical action going on in the tissues and fluids
of the organism.
In support of this extreme condition of the genesis of the emotions,
we can only offer some fragmentary remarks, which, however, show how
closely they depend on the variations of the intra-organic
environment.
1. We have, in the first place, the group of exciting, tonic,
depressing, toxic substances: wine and the various alcoholic
beverages, haschisch, opium, coca, the aphrodisiacs, etc. Although
they are artificial products, introduced from without, not
engendered in and by the organism, we know how far they modify the
interior environment, and consequently the temper, character,
intensity, and direction of the passions.
2. But there are also the substances which the living body compounds
or modifies for itself. It has been said that the organism is the
receptacle and laboratory of poisons; in the state of emotion, the
only one with which we are concerned at present, the function of
this chemical process is manifested at every instant. We are always
speaking of the weakening or the increase of the circulation of the
blood; yet the emotional dispositions or modifications are
connected, not only with variations of quantity, but also with those
of _quality_ in the blood (anæmia, aglobulia, malarial poisoning,
etc.). The popular expression regarding the emotions which “curdle
the blood” is not so ridiculous as it might seem. Anger, fear,
fatigue are often accompanied by changes in the intimate
constitution of the sanguinary fluid. We may incidentally note the
ascertained relations between certain cardiac affections and
affective dispositions: in aortic affections, anæmia, excitement,
irritability; in cases of mitral insufficiency, congestion, and a
taciturn and melancholy humour. We shall elsewhere have occasion to
enumerate the facts which show the correlation of certain emotions
with toxic changes in the saliva and the lacteal secretion.
Perspiration may, in certain affective states, be coloured red,
yellow, green, or blue, not to mention the varieties of odour, which
are assuredly of chemical origin. Even apart from mental disease,
the urinary secretion could furnish a long list of chemical changes
(azoturia, oxaluria, phosphaturia) coinciding with variations of the
affective order, such as apprehension, melancholy, irritability. In
gouty and rheumatic patients, the modifications of temper, depending
much more on general nutrition than on active suffering, have often
been pointed out. We know the relations between the secretion of the
gastric juice and pleasurable or painful states; dyspeptics have a
well-established reputation for being neither cheerful nor
comfortable to live with. Beaumont ascertained, in the case of his
famous Canadian, that under the influence of anger or other very
strong emotions, the lining of the stomach was irritated, became
red, dry, and very sensitive, and an attack of indigestion was the
result. The rutting time (that of sexual excitement) is, in many
animals, accompanied by deep-seated chemical changes, showing
themselves externally by modifications of colour and odour, and,
internally, not limited to the sexual organs, but extending to the
whole of the body. It is known that the flesh of game is uneatable
during this period, and that many fish, at spawning-time, become
poisonous. It should not be forgotten that, during the same period,
the animal becomes vicious, violent, aggressive, and dangerous. It
would be easy to develop this point further, even as regards man
(puberty, gestation, lactation, menstruation).
3. It has long been observed that, in the great majority of cases,
mental disease begins by affective disturbances and that the
intellectual aberrations only make their appearance later. Much more
recently, a doctrine has been propounded which tends to
seek the primary cause of these affective disturbances in a
self-intoxication—_i.e._, in “the disorders produced in the interior
of the organism by the excessive formation or the morbid retention
of normal poisons; in particular, by those originating in the
digestive canal and the urine.” Nutritive troubles through
acceleration, retardation, or perversion, are assigned as the most
general cause. In support of this, we are referred to the relations
between melancholia, hypochondria, a pessimistic disposition, with
hyperchlorhydria of the stomach, and the good results of purgative
medicines; the numerous mental modifications coinciding with organic
chemical modifications—_e.g._, certain attacks of mania in arthritic
subjects. “One characteristic of the mental state of diabetic
patients is the way in which the fluctuations of the mental state
correspond with those of the sugar, and the barometric (if one may
so call it) influence of the composition of the urine on the moral
disposition.” This liquid, in mania, loses, to a great extent, its
toxic character, in consequence of the morbid retention of normal
poisons which are no longer eliminated.[84]
-----
Footnote 84:
Bouchard, _Leçons sur les auto-intoxications_; _Leçons sur les
maladies par ralentissement de nutrition_. Régis, _Traité des
maladies mentales_, pp. 112, 415, 423, etc. Féré, _Pathologie des
émotions_, pp. 264, 495 _et seq._
-----
A long enumeration of facts bearing on this as yet insufficiently
studied question would be here out of place. Besides, it could only
be of real value if systematic—_i.e._, if under the heading of each
emotion were grouped the physiological facts invariably accompanying
it, and all the chemical modifications exclusively peculiar to it.
We have only included the chemical conditions in our study, in order
to penetrate as far as possible into the most general conditions of
affective life, and show once more why it betrays the inmost
constitution of the individual.
When treating of pleasure and pain, we remarked that they were too
exclusively attributed to intensity of excitation (excessive, it was
said, for pain; moderate, for pleasure), and that its _quality_ was
forgotten. Since we have to do with hypotheses as to the part played
by chemical conditions in affective life, since they are the most
general, and since pleasure and pain also have this character of
generality, it may be permitted to hazard a conjecture. This would
consist in admitting that pleasure arises either when excitement
increases chemical activity in the organism, without producing
toxines, or when this augmentation of activity brings about the
disintegration of the normal poisons; and that pain arises either
when excitement creates an environment appropriate to the formation
of toxines, or when, directly and at once, it promotes their
formation, either generally or locally. But I would not insist on a
simple _obiter dictum_, for which I can offer no proof, thrown out
merely as a suggestion with regard to a question not as yet fully
examined.
We have spoken throughout of the chemical modifications as
coinciding with emotional changes. Are they effects or causes, or
both, according to circumstances? It is clear that this question is
not new to us. It is the antithesis between the psychological and
physiological theories of emotion, presenting itself under another
aspect; there is no occasion for discussing it a second time.
CHAPTER IX.
THE EXTERNAL CONDITIONS OF EMOTION
_Empiric period—Pre-Darwinian period of scientific
research—Examination of Darwin’s three principles—Wundt and his
explanatory formulas: Innervation directly modified, Association
of analogous sensations, Relations of motion with sensory
representations._
The movements of the eyes, mouth, face, the upper and lower limbs
and trunk, and the modifications of the voice constitute the
external expression of emotion which is principally reducible to
muscular action. For the last half-century this subject has been
studied in works so well known that it behoves us to be very brief.
I shall confine myself to indicating the actual state of the
question.
For some thousands of years this question remained in the stage of
pure empiricism, or of so-called scientific speculations which had
scarcely a better reputation than alchemy, astrology, or chiromancy.
J. Müller, in the name of physiology, declared the expression of the
emotions completely inexplicable. However, the researches were
already beginning which were to prove him mistaken—those of Lavater
with his rare talent of personal observation, and those of Charles
Bell by a more objective method. After this, Duchenne, of Boulogne,
went still further, substituting experiment for mere observation. It
is well known that, in the case of an old man suffering from facial
anæsthesia, he caused the contraction of an isolated muscle, by the
aid of electricity, and thus produced certain modes of expression in
the countenance. He concluded from this that the contraction of a
single muscle often suffices to express a passion; and that every
emotion has, so to speak, its accurate, precise, and unique note,
produced by a unique local modification. Thus, the frontal is for
him the muscle of attention, the upper orbicular of the lips the
muscle of reflection, the pyramidal (inter-superciliary) expresses
threats; the great zygomatic, laughter; the lesser zygomatic,
weeping; the triangular muscle of the lips, disdain, etc. In spite
of the somewhat artificial nature of the experiments, and the too
sweeping character of the conclusions, this was a great step in
advance.[85]
Footnote 85:
Lavater (1741-1801), _Essai sur la physionomie destiné à
faire connaître l’homme et à le faire aimer_; Charles Bell
(1806), _Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression_; Duchenne
(1862), _Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou analyse
électro-physiologique de l’expression des passions_. For
ancient works on physiognomy, consult Mantegazza’s book on
_Physiognomy and Expression_ (Contemporary Science Series).
At last appeared Darwin’s epoch-making work. Supported by the
results of a long series of experiments on adults, children,
lunatics, animals, members of the different human races, Darwin was
the first to put, and to attempt to answer, the fundamental and only
question—Why and how is such and such an emotion connected with such
and such a movement and not with another? He stated the problem
under its scientific form.[86]
Footnote 86:
Duchenne has the following curious passage:—"The Creator, not
being obliged to study mechanical requirements, was able,
according to His wisdom or (if I may be pardoned for using this
form of expression) by a Divine fantasy, to put in action this or
that muscle—a single one, or several at once, when it was His will
that the signs of the passions, even the most evanescent, should
be temporarily inscribed on the human countenance. This
physiognomic language once created, it was sufficient, in order to
render it universal and immutable, to give to every human being
the instinctive faculty of always expressing his feelings by the
contraction of the same muscles." Thus, for this writer, the
question remains within the region of first causes. He has
ascertained a relation of coexistence between a determinate
emotion and certain movements of the muscles, but without seeking
the reason and the natural explanation of this _nexus_. We know
that certain philosophers hold the theory of the Divine
institution of language; this is its equivalent, being a theory of
a divinely instituted gesture-language.
In Darwin’s works we find two elements: a detailed and complete
description of each individual emotion or affective state—by which
we shall profit later on—and the exposition of the general laws of
expression, as reduced to three well-known principles. What remains
of these three principles after the criticism to which they have
been subjected? This is the only point we have, for the moment, to
examine.
1. The principle of the association of serviceable habits remains
the most firmly established. It consists in admitting that movements
which are of service in satisfying a desire, or getting rid of a
disagreeable sensation, become habitual, and continue to take place,
even when their utility becomes _nil_, or at any rate doubtful. In
other words, there are attitudes, gestures, movements, which can be
directly explained, because they are nothing but emotions
actualised, objectivised, or embodied, such as the movements of
contact in tenderness, of aggression in anger, of erection and
swelling in pride. But there are others, of which the explanation is
less direct and obvious. How are the contraction of the eyebrows in
perplexity, tears in sorrow, the showing of the teeth in anger, to
be explained as serviceable to us? According to Darwin, these acts,
formerly serviceable, have continued to exist as survivals. Here
Darwin’s successors have rightly reproached him with not being
enough of a psychologist, and have found a better explanation: the
important fact is not the survival of serviceable movements, but the
transference of a primitive mode of expression to an analogous
emotion.
2. The principle of antithesis has been definitively abandoned; it
is purely hypothetical, and explains nothing. According to Darwin,
there is a primitive and general tendency to associate with feelings
the contrary gestures to those expressing the opposite feeling. Léon
Dumont has subjected this assertion to a very close and cogent
criticism. Taking, one by one, the facts quoted by Darwin, which,
besides, are not very numerous, he has shown that they may be quite
otherwise explained.[87]
Footnote 87:
L. Dumont, _Théorie scientifique de la sensibilité_, chap. vi. p.
236. Fouillée, _Psychologie des idées-forces_, i. 467, admits
Darwin’s principle, but interprets it in another way.
3. The principle of the direct action of the nervous system cannot
be placed in line with the other two, because it far surpasses them
in generality, and, in relation to it, they are subordinate and not
co-ordinate. Before Darwin, Spencer (_Principles of Psychology_, ii.
§§ 495, 502) had stated an analogous principle, to which he reduced
the expression of the emotions. He calls it the Law of Nervous
Discharge. It may show itself in two forms—the diffused and the
restricted. The former depends on the quantity or intensity of the
emotion, and serves as its measure. It follows, in its propagation,
an invariable course: it affects the muscles in an inverse ratio to
their mass and to the weight of the parts they have to move. In man,
it acts first on the delicate muscles of the voice and the small
facial muscles; then it invades, in succession, the arms, the legs,
the trunk. The movements of the tail in dogs and cats, of the ear in
horses, and many analogous ones in other animals, are illustrations
of this law. The restricted discharge depends on the quality or the
nature of the emotion; it is due “to the relations established in
the course of evolution between particular feelings and particular
sets of muscles habitually brought into play for the satisfaction of
them.”[88] This scarcely seems to me to differ from Darwin’s
principle of “useful habits.”
Footnote 88:
_Principles of Psychology_, vol. ii. p. 545.
The _Expression of the Emotions_ gave rise to other publications of
the same kind, those of Piderit, Mantegazza, and Warner, who, in his
_Physical Expression_ (1885), has attempted a purely objective, and
consequently extra-psychological study of the subject. But among all
the attempts to trace back expression to its fundamental principles,
and find a substitute for Darwin’s (already greatly shaken) theory,
that of Wundt seems to me the best.[89] Like his predecessor, he
admits three principles (though different from Darwin’s) which can
act simultaneously and concur in the production of an isolated
movement.
Footnote 89:
_Physiologische Psychologie_, vol. ii. chap. xxii. He has also
treated the question in a special collection of articles entitled
_Essays_.
1. The principle of direct modification of innervation—that is to
say, that the intensity of the muscular and vasomotor movements
depends on the intensity of the emotions; the movements which most
escape the control of the will more especially depend on this
principle. This is the equivalent to Darwin’s third principle,
placed first, which is, in fact, its right position.
2. The principle of the association of analogous sensations consists
in those dispositions of the mind which are analogous to certain
sensory impressions, manifesting themselves in the same manner. At
the outset, we have only pleasures, pains, and needs of the physical
order, whose mode of expression is innate, and, so to speak,
anatomical. Later on come the pleasures, pains, and desires of the
moral order, which make use of the pre-existent modes of expression
in order to show themselves outwardly. It is a language turned aside
from its primary signification, which in the order of gestures is
the equivalent of a metaphor. This principle explains much more
easily than Darwin’s a number of apparently very perplexing modes of
expression. If a man, when puzzled, scratches his head, coughs, rubs
his eyes, it is because a slight _malaise_ of physical origin and a
slight embarrassment of psychical origin have a deep-seated analogy,
betraying themselves by the same expressive movements. Wundt has
well described the mimicry of the mouth in the tasting of sweet,
acid, or bitter substances; as soon as an emotion arises which has
some affinity with these gustatory sensations (sweet joy, bitter
grief, sharp reproaches), the expression of the mouth, the nose, the
face reappears. This is because, in both cases, the state of the
feelings, the emotional tone are the same, the expressive movements
identical. As Mantegazza has rightly said, there are such things as
mimic synonyms.
3. The principle of the relation between movements and sensory
representations lies in the fact that the muscular movements of
expression relate to imaginary objects. Wundt considers as chiefly
amenable to this principle the mimicry of the eyes, the arms, and
the hands. We represent something large by raising the hand, a small
object by lowering it; the future by a forward movement, the past by
a backward one. It might be objected that these gestures indicate
intellectual rather than affective states; but it is certain that
many emotions have a mimicry addressed to absent objects. Gratiolet
(1857) collected a tolerably large number. The indignant man, even
if alone, clenches his fist against an absent adversary. We shut our
eyes, or turn aside our face, to escape the sight of a disagreeable
object; we do the same when disapproving of an opinion. When we
approve, we incline the head forward, as if in contemplation. In
negation, we turn the head to right and left, exactly as is done by
children and animals, when an unattractive object is placed in front
of the mouth. The expression of disdain, contempt, disgust,
reproduces the physiognomy of a man rejecting nauseating food.
I am not quite sure that Wundt’s third principle is of the same
importance as the other two, or that it cannot be reduced to a still
simpler form. But the theory I have just summarised, with a few
examples borrowed elsewhere, presents itself as the one most
calculated to bring out the importance of the physiological factors,
unduly neglected by the pioneers of the science.
All the work relating to this question, whatever may be its _lacunæ_
at present, has demonstrated that the expression of the emotions is
not an adventitious, purely external, extra-physiological fact,
whose study is only incumbent, as science, on the physiologist, and,
as art, on the physiognomist, but emotion itself objectivised, its
inseparable embodiment. In my opinion, we have to distinguish two
strata in the very numerous modes of muscular movement which express
the emotions. One is primary, depending on the anatomical and
physiological constitution; the other, secondary, depending on the
psychological constitution. The relation between them is that which
in every developed language exists between the primary and the
derived sense of words. Analogy is the great artisan of intellectual
language; its action is more restricted as regards emotional
language. But when, to the emotion of the first hour, having already
its fixed mode of expression, there succeeds a new emotion, which
the consciousness, rightly or wrongly, has felt as analogous, the
pre-established expressive mechanism has served a new purpose, like
an old word whose meaning is extended and modified. In both cases
the mind proceeds in the same way, obeying the guidance of one and
the same unconscious law.
CHAPTER X.
CLASSIFICATIONS.
_Their discrepancies—Reduced to three types: (1) Classification
of pleasures and pains—(2) Classification of emotions: two
forms, empiric and analytico-comparative—(3) Classification
of representations, intellectualist form—Critical
remarks—Impossibility of any classification._
The confusion of that department of psychology which deals with the
feelings and the vagueness of its terminology appear in all their
fulness with the problem of classification. Although, for reasons
which will be given at the end of the chapter, a complete and
satisfactory classification seems to me impossible, there has been
no lack of attempts, and it must be admitted that they are not
illegitimate, at any rate as approximative efforts towards a
provisional order.
Within the last fifty years, in spite of the very moderate amount of
zeal with which psychologists have studied the feelings, we find
about twenty treatises signed by well-known names, not to mention
minor variants.[90] They are far from being in agreement, except on
some few points, and when they are compared, in order, if possible,
to reconcile them, the first impression is one of inextricable
confusion and hopeless divergence. If we examine them a little more
carefully, we begin to see light. We see that the differences are
only in the objects classed and the methods followed; in one word,
it is possible to attempt a classification of these classifications;
and when this is done, we find, if I am not mistaken, that they can
all be reduced to three types. (1) Some writers, virtually, classify
only pleasures and pains, tracing back the whole of affective life
to their modalities. (2) Others classify the emotions properly so
called; and here we must distinguish two groups, according as the
method employed is purely empiric, and founded on current
observation, or has recourse to analysis and genetic research, after
the manner of the so-called natural classifications. (3) Lastly,
others classify intellectual states pure and simple, and,
conversely, the affective states which accompany them: this is the
intellectualist method.
Footnote 90:
For a historical summary of these classifications, consult
especially Sully, _The Human Mind_, vol. ii., Appendix F, p. 357,
and Bain, _Emotions_, Appendix B.
In order to justify our distinction, we shall successively examine
these three types. This excursion on an ungrateful soil will not be
altogether without, at least, a negative utility.
I.
As many writers show a common tendency to reduce the whole of the
affective life to pleasures and pains, considered as essential and
fundamental phenomena, it is natural that one category of
classifications should have been based upon these.
“In the science of pleasure and pain,” says Léon Dumont, “we no
longer find ourselves, as in other sciences, in presence of separate
organs and functions; for pleasure, like pain, belongs to all organs
and all functions. Thus, we think that to recapitulate in this
science the classification of the perceptive and intelligent
faculties, and of the will, is to give way to a psychological
tautology, which, though it causes no serious inconvenience, in any
case throws little light on the analysis” (_op. cit._, Pt. II., p.
1). No more could be said than this. Yet, to classify, we require a
directing principle, and where shall we find it? “This basis is
supplied to us by our own definition of pleasure and pain: pleasure
being the augmentation of force in the whole of the conscious
individuality, pain its diminution.” Thence, Dumont deduces the
divisions found in many authors: pain is positive when it results
from an increased expenditure, negative when it depends on absence
of excitement; pleasure is positive when there is increased
excitement, negative when the expenditure is diminished. In other
terms, if we compare the total “force” to a continually renewed
capital, we have, in the one case, either more expenditure or less
receipts, in the other either more receipts or less expenditure.
But Dumont does not stop there; he passes on to details; he insists
on classifying the species under those four generic headings, and
thus we have—Positive pains: effort, fatigue, the ugly, the hideous,
the immoral, the false. Negative pains: weakness, exhaustion,
inanition, physical pain properly so called, _ennui_, perplexity,
doubt, impatience, expectation, sorrow, fear, sadness, pity.
Negative pleasures: rest, cheerfulness. Positive pleasures: those of
the senses, those of activity, such as games, dreaming, amusements,
æsthetic and intellectual pleasures, sublimity, admiration, beauty,
and their varieties.
I have transcribed this classification as Dumont gives it. I shall
raise no objection, either to a division so arbitrary as to include
physical pains among the negative pains, or to the abuse of a vague
word, “force,” which he shows a marked inclination to take in a
transcendental sense. I will only consider one point, the transition
which is _surreptitiously_ made from a classification of pleasures
and pains to a classification of the emotions or something
analogous. The writer does not keep his promise of not classing “the
perceptive and intelligent faculties, and the will;” and it is not
in his power to keep it. In fact, what he has followed is the old
classic division (pleasures and pains of the senses, the heart, the
mind), which may possibly serve for a didactic exposition, but for
no other purpose.
Beaunis has proposed a classification of pleasures and pains which
also has as its basis a single principle: the various modes of
motion. He discriminates three classes of pains: the nervous centres
may be inactive through insufficiency of motion; their activity may
be in excess through exaggerated motion; or their activity may be
suddenly checked by arrest of motion. The same classification is
adopted for pleasures: inaction, activity, arrest. I am inclined to
think this division preferable to the other. He has also attempted a
detailed classification of physical (p. 176) and moral (p. 235)
pains; but he gives none for pleasures.[91]
Footnote 91:
Beaunis, _Sensations internes_, chap. xxi.
For my part, I am inclined to believe that a classification (in the
exact sense of the word) of pleasures and pains is an impossible
task. As these characters are very general, one can only establish
exceedingly general divisions. As soon as we go beyond this, we are,
in reality, classing internal or external sensations, percepts,
images, concepts, modes of action, accompanied by a pleasurable or
painful state, positive or negative, due to activity, overactivity,
or arrest; but the modalities of the pleasurable and painful, which,
besides, are infinite, are not classed in and for themselves. The
varieties of physical pain, the simplest, commonest, and best
studied kind, the easiest to isolate, and the most free from
concomitant representation, have never yet been subject to a fixed
classification, from Hahnemann, who reckoned them as 73 in number,
to Beaunis, who enumerates 83.
In short, the “science of pleasure and pain,” as L. Dumont somewhat
emphatically calls it, belongs to the category of sciences which do
not proceed by way of classification, since they do not as yet
possess the material. We can only lay down extremely general
divisions, and then proceed by _incomplete enumeration_.
II.
The emotions, at least the simplest and best defined, present
themselves as psychic states having their own specific
characteristics. They differ among themselves, not as one mode of
pleasure or pain differs from another mode, but as one thing differs
from another thing; in this way, they appear as _objects_
susceptible to classification. We have already said that two methods
have been adopted.
(1) The first strongly resembles the so-called artificial
classifications, which might also be called concrete or synthetic.
It takes the emotions as realities and places itself before them as
the zoologist and the botanist place themselves before the varieties
of animals and plants. It is empirical—_i.e._, it has no guiding
principle; it classifies according to observation only, following
external resemblances and differences.
Bain may be cited as one of the principal representatives of this
method. I will not insist on a piece of work unworthy of such a
psychologist; yet he has done it twice over, without arriving at an
agreement with himself.
His earlier classification gives as fundamental the emotion of
relativity (surprise, astonishment), terror, tenderness,
self-esteem, anger, the sense of power, of activity, of mental
exercise, æsthetic emotion, moral emotion.
The later includes eleven groups: love, anger, fear, the sentiment
of property, the pleasure of power and its correlative pain of
subjection, pride, vanity, activity (“plot-interest”), knowledge
(the intellectual feeling), æsthetic emotion (beauty), moral
sentiment. Three of these are “simple”—anger, love, and fear; but we
find, a little later on, that love and anger are called “the giants
of the group, the commanding and indispensable members of the
emotional scheme;” so that fear would seem to be eliminated.
The incoherence and inconsistency of this attempt are sufficiently
obvious, and I need not insist on them. (It should be noted that, in
both cases, the religious sentiment is omitted.) I can find only one
valuable remark—viz., that “pleasures and pains are contained in
every one of the classes to be described, just as the natural orders
of plants may each contain food and poison, sweet aromas and
nauseating stinks.”[92] I have only referred to this classification
in order to show how, by its very nature, it is condemned to
failure. Floating at haphazard, without fixed principle, when not
contradictory, it can only be arbitrary.
Footnote 92:
Bain, _The Emotions and the Will_, p. 76.
Herbert Spencer has criticised it in a well-known passage, which I
will briefly recapitulate, since it serves as a transition to the
second form of classification, and throws some light on the
latter.[93] Bain has overlooked the fact that in confining his
attention to the most obvious characteristics of the emotions, he is
following the method of the ancient naturalists, who classed the
cetacea among fishes. Every classification should be preceded by a
rigorous analysis. For this purpose it would be necessary, as a
preliminary, to study the ascending evolution of the emotions
through the animal kingdom, to find out which of them are the first
to appear, coexisting with the lowest forms of organisation and
intelligence, and to note the existing differences, as regards
emotion, between the higher and lower human races. Those common to
all may be considered as simple, and those peculiar to the civilised
races as ulterior and derivative.
-----
Footnote 93:
H. Spencer, _Essays_, vol. i. (Library Ed., 1891), pp. 241-264.
-----
2. Inspired by the above observations, Dr. Mercier has worked out a
classification which I shall give as an example of the analytic and
comparative method. It is in any case the most recent and the most
detailed.[94] Proceeding after the manner of zoologists and
botanists, he divides into classes, sub-classes, genera, and
species, forming seventeen tables. We gather from these that there
are 6 classes and 23 genera, under which may be ranged (after
deducting all repetitions and duplicate entries) 128 manifestations
of feeling, such as are to be found in common experience and
rendered in current language. It is not possible, nor would it serve
any useful purpose, to present this classification here in detail; I
shall only indicate the 6 great classes with some sub-divisions,
which will enable us to understand their nature.
Footnote 94:
_The Nervous System and the Mind_ (1888), pp. 279-364.
The first class includes the feelings primarily affecting the
conservation of the physical or mental organism. It comprises 2
sub-classes (according as the primary excitation is initiated by the
environment, or within the organism itself), 2 orders, and 9 genera.
The second is that of the feelings primarily affecting the
perpetuation of the race, considered as simple wants. Two
sub-classes: primary (sexual emotion and its varieties) and
secondary (paternal, maternal, filial, etc., feelings).
With the third class we leave behind the region of the primitive and
fundamental feelings. It includes those which relate to the common
welfare (community, family, etc.). It comprises 2 orders, each of
which is further divided into several genera—viz., the patriotic and
the ethical emotions.
The fourth class (only vaguely differentiated from the preceding) is
that of the feelings relating to the welfare of others: sympathy,
benevolence, pity, and their opposites.
The fifth class comprises the feelings which are neither
conservative nor destructive, so that here we pass beyond the region
of pure utility, whether individual or social. It is divided into 2
orders and 5 genera—viz., admiration, surprise, the æsthetic
feeling, the religious feeling, and the “feeling of recreation.”
The sixth and last class is that of the feelings which correspond to
abstract relations (in ordinary nomenclature designated as
intellectual feelings)—conviction, belief, doubt, perplexity,
scepticism. It has no sub-divisions.
Even when all details are omitted, the general drift of this work
must be sufficiently apparent to the reader. Although conducted
according to a fixed method, it does not escape the difficulties
inherent in _every_ classification of the emotions. In the first
place, the order of filiation is not always very well marked. The
author himself recognises that an arrangement in series is not
possible, but this difficulty has also presented itself in zoology
and botany. We meet with repetitions, _i.e._, forms of sentiment
figuring several times over in different categories. This, too, is
inevitable. The complex emotions (or some of them, at least) are
formed by anastomoses: they are rivers formed by converging streams
coming from various sources lying in different directions. One may
legitimately refer them to one or other of these origins; but the
attribution will be partial and arbitrary. The religious sentiment,
for instance, is included in the class of intellectual emotions. But
its social character is undeniable (a point we shall return to in
the proper place); let us recall, in passing, the worship of
ancestors and deified heroes, and the strictly national religions of
antiquity, the communities, orders, confraternities, corporations,
the missionary work carried on in modern times, and, above all, the
contagious character of religious emotion in general. It is false,
moreover, to say that this emotion “tends neither to the
preservation nor the destruction of the individual.” It might
therefore be just as well—or just as ill—placed in the third class.
As soon as we pass from simple to complex emotions, it is of more
importance to determine their composition than their filiation. Now,
this procedure belongs rather to chemical than to zoological
classification.
III.
A third type of classification, peculiar to the intellectualists,
consists in classing according to the intellectual states, in so far
as these are accompanied by affective elements. This system sprang
from the psychology of Herbart, is based on it, and is met with in
the works of the principal representatives of his school, Waitz,
Drobisch, and especially Nahlowsky in _Das Gefühlsleben_ (pp. 44 _et
seq._). This method is peculiar to Germany, and its influence is
still perceptible even in Wundt, and more recently in Lehmann’s book
(_op. cit._, pp. 338 _et seq._). In England, Shadworth Hodgson
approaches this type.
Apart from the procedure common to all, these classifications agree
still less in detail than those of the first two types. Taken
broadly, they have an academic aspect; they are frittered away in
divisions, sub-divisions, distinctions, whence there arises more
darkness than light. There is, however, a dichotomy peculiar to them
corresponding to a reality which is not met with in the two
previously-mentioned types, and, on this account, deserves notice.
This kind of classification, in the first place, establishes two
great categories of emotions—those depending on the _contents_ of
the representations, and those depending on the _course_ of the
representations. Let us compare the flux of the states of
consciousness to that of a river, which, according to the nature of
the soil and the state of the sky, runs, sometimes clear, sometimes
muddy, sometimes blue or green, sometimes greyish. Besides these
various aspects, there is yet another kind, depending on the
movement of the water, sometimes slow, sometimes rapid, here
stagnant, there broken by the abrupt windings of the banks. One of
these corresponds to the course, the other to the contents of the
representations on which the affective states are based.
The first class (the contents) comprises the qualitative emotions,
which are generally divided into inferior or sensory, and superior,
which are intellectual, æsthetic, moral, or religious, according as
the ideas exciting their feelings are those of the true, the
beautiful, the good, or the absolute.
The second class (the course of the representations) comprises the
_formal_ emotions—_i.e._, those depending on the different forms of
the course of ideas, on the relations existing between them.
Nahlowsky distinguishes four species—(1) the feeling of expectation
and impatience; (2) that of hope, anxiety, surprise, doubt; (3) of
_ennui_; (4) of refreshment and work.
The only merit of this classification is its showing that there are
affective manifestations depending only on relations—transitions
from one intellectual state to another. This merit, however, depends
on the essential defect of the system, which consists in dealing
with perceptions, representations, and ideas only—not with affective
states taken in themselves, and directly. As this method of
procedure is, definitively, an intellectual classification, it ought
not to omit any form of knowledge, not even those blurred and
evanescent states—the relations—which unite, disjoin, exclude, draw
together, eliminate, subordinate, in short, indicate the _movements_
of thought, and which students have often made the mistake of
forgetting. It remains to be known whether many relations are not
states of an affective rather than an intellectual nature; this is a
point which I shall examine later on.
We may console ourselves for this multiplicity and divergence of
classifications by saying that the naturalists have not been more
successful. It will be granted without difficulty that it is easier
to classify animals than affective states; yet, to take our own
century only, how many systems!—from Lamarck, Cuvier, Oken, to
Blanville, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, Siebold, Ehrenberg, Richard Owen,
Von Baer, Vogt, Agassiz, and finally to Häckel—if we cite only the
principal names!
I have indicated in passing why a true classification of the
emotions—_i.e._, a distribution into orders, genera, species,
according to the dominant and subordinate characters—is impossible.
Every classification, if not purely empirical, expresses a general
theory of affective life, a “system,” and, consequently, a
hypothesis. More than this, it can never congratulate itself on
having exhausted its matter, for every emotion, simple or compound,
admits of innumerable varieties determined by the individual, the
race, the epoch, and the course of civilisation; some are extinct,
others, again, of recent origin. Lastly, the existence of mixed
emotions—which are numerous—is a fatal objection to every attempt at
distribution into a linear series. The only track to follow is that
of genetic filiation—viz., to state first the simple, primary
emotions, then to find out by what mental processes, conscious or
unconscious, the composite and derived emotions have arisen from
them. We shall attempt to define these in a future chapter.[95] But
this work is no longer a classification.
Footnote 95:
See Part II., chap. vii.
CHAPTER XI.
THE MEMORY OF FEELINGS.
_Can emotional images be revived, spontaneously or
voluntarily?—Summary of scattered facts relating to this
subject—Inquiry into this question, and method
followed—Emotional and gustative images—Internal sensations
(hunger, thirst, fatigue, disgust, etc.)—Pleasures and pains;
observations—Emotions: three distinct forms of revivability
according to observations—Reduction of the images to three
groups: revivability direct and easy, indirect and comparatively
easy, difficult and sometimes direct, sometimes indirect.—The
revivability of a representation is in proportion to its
complexity and the motor elements included in it.—Reservations
to be made on this last point—Is there such a thing as a real
emotional memory?—Two cases: false or abstract, and true or
concrete memory—Peculiar characters and differences of each
case—Change of the emotional into an intellectual
recollection—Emotional amnesia: its practical consequences—There
exists a general emotional type and partial emotional
types—Confirmatory observations—Comparative revivability of
agreeable and disagreeable states—To feel acutely and to recall
an acute impression of the feeling are two different
operations._
I.
After the numerous researches made, during the last twenty years,
into the nature and the revivability of visual, auditory,
tactile-motor, and verbal images, it seems paradoxical to maintain
that there is still an unexplored region in the domain of memory. As
a matter of fact, however, we find at most a few scattered remarks
on the images derived from smell, taste, internal sensations,
pleasure, pain, and emotion in general. The question of the
emotional memory remains nearly, if not quite, untouched.[96] The
object of this chapter is to begin its study.
-----
Footnote 96:
I see no reason for mentioning any authorities except H. Spencer,
_Principles of Psychology_, i., §§ 69 and 96; Bain, _Emotions_,
ch. v.; W. James, _Psychology_, ii. pp. 474, 475; Fouillée,
_Psychologie des Idées-forces_; Höffding, _Psychologie_ (3rd
German edition), vi., B. 3; Lehmann, _Hauptgesetze_, pp. 261-263.
-----
The impressions of smell and taste, our visceral sensations, our
pleasant or painful states, our emotions and passions, like the
perceptions of sight and hearing, can leave memories behind them.
This is a matter of common experience on which it is needless to
insist. These residua, fixed in an organisation, may return into the
consciousness; and it is known that images may be revived in two
ways—by provocation, or spontaneously.
Revivability on provocation is the simplest of all. It consists in
an actual occurrence awakening the images of similar occurrences at
some former time, and takes place, beyond possibility of doubt, in
the class of images which occupies us just now. The actual sensation
of fatigue, of the smell of a lily, of the taste of pepper, of pain
in a certain tooth, appear to me as the repetition of sensations
formerly experienced, similar to the present one, or at least
apparently identical, so that, consequently, it revives them.
But can the images of olfactory and gustatory sensations, of
internal sensations, of past pains and pleasures, of emotions
formerly experienced, be revived in the consciousness spontaneously,
or at will, independently of any actual occurrence which might
provoke them? We know that, in some painters, the inner vision is so
clear that they can draw a portrait from memory; that, in some
musicians, the inner hearing is so perfect that they can, like
Habeneck, ideally hear a symphony just played, recalling all the
details of the execution, and the slightest variations in the time.
Are there in the order of emotional representations any cases
analogous to these? Such is, in its precise form, the question which
we shall examine in detail. We shall subsequently see that it has a
practical bearing, and is not a mere psychological curiosity.
Before entering on the subject, I will summarise the principal facts
relating to this question to be found scattered through the works of
various authors. I divide them into four groups:—
1. We may take taste and smell together. This last sense is much
more extensive, much richer and more varied than the other; common
speech often confounds them, enriching taste at the expense of
smell. Although unscientific, this confusion does not greatly
concern us.
Every one knows that professional tasters, cooks, certain chemists
and perfumers, can distinguish the most delicate gradations and
correctly identify them with previous sensations; but this is a
provoked recollection. Does a spontaneous or voluntary relation
exist between these two groups of images? Examining the fullest
monographs drawn up by physiologists[97] we find scarcely any
information on this point. Cloquet, Müller, Valentin have reported
cases of subjective sensations attributed by them to internal
causes; but other physiologists, such as Ludwig, without denying
these, are of opinion that sapid particles in the mouth, and
odoriferous molecules on the mucous membrane of the nose, may act in
a similar manner; so that the alleged images would, in fact, be
sensations.
-----
Footnote 97:
See Von Vintschgau, art. “Geruch” and “Geschmack” in Hermann’s
_Handbuch der Physiologie_, vol. iii.; Gley, art. “Gustation”;
François-Franck, art. “Olfaction” in the _Dictionnaire
encyclopédique des sciences médicales_.
-----
Dreams may afford us a better starting-point. Among the numerous
writers who have treated of this subject, some resolutely deny the
existence of representations of taste and smell. It is impossible to
accept this opinion. Though they are comparatively rare, examples
may be found which are proof against all criticism. A person who,
for hygienic reasons, has abstained from wine for several years,
assures us that he has had a very clear impression of its taste in
the course of a dream. We may recall the hypnagogic hallucinations
so well described by A. Maury, who was subject to them; he mentions
the taste of rancid oil, and the smell of burning as occurring apart
from any objective cause.
Among hallucinations properly so called, it is known that those of
smell are of very frequent occurrence. Many authorities hesitate to
admit those of taste, which they reduce to the status of mere
illusions; but we know that the distinction formerly maintained
between these two pathological manifestations has been, in our day,
much disputed.
2. Internal sensations play a prominent part in the emotional life.
Are these susceptible, in the normal condition, of spontaneous or
voluntary revival? I have not been able to find any precise
information on this point. In the pathological condition we can find
numerous examples in hypochondriacs, hysterics, and neuropaths, in
insane patients who complain of the suppression of some of their
organs, of inversion of the stomach. In any case it would be
necessary to determine the part played by the organ itself, and its
actual state in the majority of these cases of revival, which is
extremely difficult.
3. As for pleasures and pains, under their double (physical and
mental) form, there is no doubt. The recollection of a blinding
light, of a discord or a strident sound, of the extraction of a
tooth, or some more serious operation; the prospect of a good dinner
to an epicure, of the approaching holidays to a schoolboy—all the
states of psychic life generally included under the designation of
imaginary pleasures and pains, show how frequent is the revival of
impressions on the feelings. And, in fact, the difficulty is not to
establish their existence, but to determine their nature.
We may also recall the facility with which, in hypnotised subjects,
pleasant or painful conditions of all sorts may be induced by
suggestion.
Finally, in certain cases, the impression may even become
completely hallucinatory—_i.e._, equal in intensity to the reality
itself. “A student,” says Gratiolet, “playfully struck his
companion’s out-stretched finger with the handle of a scalpel. The
latter felt a pain so acute that he thought the instrument had
pierced his finger to the bone.” During a popular tumult in the
reign of Louis-Philippe, a combatant received a slight contusion
from a spent bullet on his shoulder. The skin was not even
scratched, but “he felt a torrent of blood flowing from the wound
over his breast.” Bennett relates that a butcher remained hanging
by one arm from a hook. He was taken down by the terrified
bystanders, uttered frightful cries, and complained that he was
suffering cruelly, while all the time the hook had only penetrated
his clothes, and the arm was uninjured.[98] This condition might
be termed a _hallucination of the feelings_.
-----
Footnote 98:
Hack Tuke, _Influence of Mind upon the Body_, p. 181, where other
facts of the same kind may be found.
-----
4. The supply of observations and documents relating to the
revivability of the emotions and passions is a very scanty one. In
fact, we may admit that what has already been said as to pleasures
and pains is also applicable to this last group. But it is not on
the question of fact that the attention of psychologists has been
concentrated. They are occupied entirely with theory, and in
determining the nature of emotional memory. The majority consider
the recollection to be merely that of the accompanying circumstances
of emotion. Others hold it to be a recollection of the emotion
itself, as such. As this is the principal point of my subject, and
will have subsequently to be discussed in detail, I must limit
myself, for the moment, to the mere indication of the two opinions.
In short,—confining ourselves to the normal, and setting aside the
pathological states,—the facts collected seem to me utterly
inadequate for answering the question stated above.
II.
It was for this reason that I proposed to myself the task of
collecting fresh documents, and of inquiring whether there are not
great differences between one individual and another as regards the
memory of impressions. This would explain the want of harmony among
authorities on this point.
Having eliminated all vague and doubtful answers, and those which
are not to the point, I have collected about sixty _dossiers_. Each
person (all being adults, of both sexes, and various stages of
culture) was directly questioned by myself, and the answers
immediately noted. Besides these, I have received several long
written communications, which I reckon among my best material. The
nature of the questions asked will be sufficiently evident from the
following summary, which contains the principal results of my
inquiry. I shall confine myself to a bare statement of the facts;
the interpretation will come later.
1. _Images of taste and smell._—I was disposed to admit that they
are not subject to any spontaneous revivability, and still less to a
voluntary one, being, for my own part, quite incapable of recalling
a single one, even in the faintest degree. The answers have put me
completely in the wrong—the negatives being 40 per cent., the
positives 60 per cent. More accurately, 40 per cent. persons revive
no image, 48 per cent. revive some, 12 per cent. declare themselves
capable of reviving all, or nearly all, at pleasure.
The majority of cases, therefore, allows of the spontaneous revival
of some odours only. Those most frequently mentioned are pinks,
musk, violets, heliotrope, carbolic acid, the smell of the country,
of grass, etc. The conditions under which the image appears are
various. For some persons this is unaccompanied by any visual,
tactile, or other representation. With the majority, the imaginary
odour ultimately excites the corresponding visual image (that of a
flower, a bottle of scent, etc.). Many have first to evoke the
visual image, and, in time, succeed in exciting the olfactory one.
Two individuals affirm that, on reading the description of a
landscape, they immediately perceive the characteristic odours. Here
the sign is sufficient. One of them, a novelist, is sometimes
conscious of thirst under the same conditions.
In the two following cases the “olfactory image” only exists in a
single instance, and appears to be produced by the combined
operation of concomitant circumstances.
Case 1. “I had been to the hospital, to see my friend B., who was
suffering from a cancer in the face.... When he spoke it was
necessary to come quite close in order to hear what he said, and
thus, in spite of the antiseptic dressings, an acrid, fetid odour
forced itself on one’s nostrils.... I was to go again to see him—I
had promised to do so; but this prospect was intensely repugnant
to me. While walking in a part of Paris, where neither space nor
fresh air was wanting, I reproached myself silently for not having
gone to see the poor patient.... At this very moment I perceived,
as though I had been close to him, the same acrid odour,
recognisable as that of a cancerous tumour—so suddenly that I
instinctively held my sleeve to my nose in order to see whether I
had not brought away the smell in my clothes. This, however, was
immediately succeeded by the reflection that I had not been to the
hospital for five days, and that, moreover, I was not wearing the
same overcoat as on the occasion of my visit.”
Case 2. "I can only recall two odours: one inextricably connected
with the memory of a sick-room—a stale smell of drugs and vitiated
air, truly disagreeable when it recurs, as at the present
moment....
“It has happened to me to discover a very peculiar and indefinable
odour in the presence of a hypnotiser (M. R——) when he was putting
me to sleep, and I had not quite reached the lethargic state. I
have since noticed that very often (not always) the memory of this
curious odour accompanies the recollection of the hypnotiser. This
seems to me all the more convincing, because, the odour being very
subtle when M. R—— is near me, the revival must be absolute to
allow of the return of the sensation, in however slight a degree.”
I should hesitate to admit the spontaneous or voluntary revival of
almost all odours, if this fact had not been affirmed to me, in
perfect good faith, by educated and competent witnesses. I give some
extracts from these declarations: “I can perceive nearly all
characteristic odours, and can call them up at will; at this moment
I am thinking of the country of the Rhine, and am fully conscious of
its odour.” “I can recall the greater number of odours (but not all)
either spontaneously or voluntarily. (In the latter case time is
required.)—Can you perceive, _here_ and _now_, the scent of roses,
and, if so, of what kind?—I perceive it _in genere_; but, on further
persevering, I find it to be the scent of withered roses. The visual
representation occurs afterwards.” The only person who has told me
that he finds all odours perceptible at will always finds a
preliminary visual representation necessary.[99]
-----
Footnote 99:
Galton, in a note entitled “Arithmetic by Smell,” has described an
arrangement by means of which he convinced himself that some
arithmetical operations can be carried out by the help of
olfactory images, as is done by means of visual and auditory
representations. He trains himself to regard two whiffs of
peppermint as equivalent to one of camphor, and three of
peppermint with one of carbolic acid; he performs small additions,
and, later on, operates with images only (visual and auditory
representations being excluded). For details, see _Psychological
Review_, January 1894.
-----
As to the recollections of tastes, by themselves, the answers are
very vague. One remembers “easily, and at will, the taste of salt,
with a very clear visual impression,” but less easily the other
three fundamental tastes. Another, who uses for his throat three
different kinds of lozenges, “feels the taste of them beforehand, as
soon as he needs them, on either seeing or touching them.” In
general, the revivability of tastes appears to me especially
connected with that of ordinary food, and with the state of the
alimentary canal (hunger).
2. _Internal sensations._—My inquiry does not include the whole of
these, but only the commonest and most easily observed.[100]
-----
Footnote 100:
The memory of internal sensations, though distinct from that of
states of feeling properly so called, approximates so closely to
it that the two subjects appear to me inseparable.
-----
As regards hunger, I have received 51 definite answers, 24 persons
saying they can distinctly recall it, 27 that they cannot. (The
question has always been put at an hour when the real sensation did
not exist, and some have told me that in their normal condition they
never feel either hunger or thirst.) It is usually described as a
tactile sensation in the œsophagus, or a twitching pain in the
stomach, etc. One person only affirms that he can, “at will, feel
hunger and thirst, even after having eaten and drunk.”
Thirst is imagined much more frequently than hunger, and, as it
seems, more clearly (36 affirmative to 15 negative answers). It is
described as dryness in the throat, heat, etc.
As regards the representation of fatigue, the answers have without
exception been affirmative. The modes of representation are various.
Some feel it (ideally) in the muscles; others under a cerebral form.
Here are some examples: “muscular twitchings in the calves of the
legs, the back, and the shoulders; the eyes feeling swollen, but no
heaviness in the head;” “a feeling of relaxation, of a weight,
localised in the shoulders, because, in a normal state, I find
stooping very difficult;” “slowness of movement, with a feeling of
weight in the head;” “general lassitude, of a diffused kind,
especially a feeling of weight in the head, and mental weariness;”
“pains in the joints, and a heavy feeling in the brain.” Although
all my correspondents can revive the feeling of fatigue, three or
four can only succeed in doing so “with difficulty and to a slight
extent.”
We find the same results with regard to the representation of
disgust. I find only three negative answers, all accompanied by the
remark, “I have a good digestion.” One of these cases is the more
singular because the subject has suffered from sea-sickness. In its
acute form the representation is described as “like the beginning of
nausea.” For others, it is “a pain in the stomach, with a retractile
movement, connected with the idea of cod-liver oil, or of tainted
meat.” Among those who have experienced the sensation of
sea-sickness, I have not met with one who cannot easily revive it
(giddiness, feelings of a rocking motion, which disinclines them to
persist in reviving the impression). M. X—— (a very competent
observer in psychological questions) says: “I have a pretty good
visual memory, but no auditive, either musical or linguistic; I
cannot spell a foreign language. Except for muscular memory, which
in me is _nil_ (so that I have never succeeded in acquiring any
physical exercise, or playing on any instrument), I can revive all
internal sensations: hunger, thirst, disgust, fatigue, giddiness,
difficulty in breathing; I prefer not to insist upon this last
state, as were I to think of it any longer I should actually bring
it on.”[101]
-----
Footnote 101:
A great swimmer has had feelings of suffocation which he can
recall with much vividness.
-----
3. _Pains and Pleasures._—To the question, “Can you revive in
yourself the memory of a given physical pain, a sorrow, a pleasure,
or a pity?” the answer is nearly always in the affirmative. But, put
in this bald way, it teaches us nothing. We require more detailed
information. We here return to the main point of our subject, and I
am obliged slightly to anticipate my conclusions. The observations,
carefully taken, show that there are two distinct forms of emotional
memory, one _abstract_, the other _concrete_. Later on, I shall
insist on their differences; for the moment, I shall confine myself
to the enumeration of facts.
_Painful States._—Toothache, being very common, has supplied me with
many answers. I note in nearly all of these the predominance of the
motor elements: shooting and throbbing pains, contortions of the
jaw, etc. When the extraction of a tooth is recalled there is a
jarring of the whole head, a feeling of twisting, snapping, noises,
etc. In many cases the painful element seems to be scarcely revived,
or not at all; in many others it reappears with the utmost
clearness.
Case 3. “I send you a personal observation made during the last
few days. I had suffered from toothache, which was very acute, and
certainly intenser than the unpleasant feeling experienced when
the dentist operates on your teeth with his revolving machine. Yet
when I think of it now, and try to recall, on the one hand the
pain, on the other the rubbing of the teeth by the machine, it is
the latter which seems to me, in my recollection, the most
disagreeable. I explain this by the fact that this rubbing is
accompanied by a noise which I can recall most vividly, and this
auditive representation is by itself sufficient to evoke a
disagreeable feeling. The pain in the teeth is also connected with
different accessories: inclination of the head, closing of the eye
on the side affected, movement of the hand to the corresponding
cheek, etc., but these accessories have no great influence on me;
they are not so characteristic of toothache as the peculiar noise
of the machine. This last representation is very vivid; when I
think of it I feel a chill run down my back and a slight trembling
in the arms. The representation of the actual pain is, in my case,
much more vague; it is diffused, I have to eke it out with verbal
descriptions, and it does not act on me so disagreeably as the
first.”
Cuts, burns, etc., are remembered tolerably well. “In my youth I was
wounded by a pistol-shot; I have a perfect recollection of the
shock, which first produced a tactile sensation radiating from a
centre, and afterwards pain, but I have a difficulty in recalling
the painful element in the sensation.” Another can well remember the
vesical contractions of a cystitis; but not without the help of the
motor elements, as in the case of toothache. M. B——, who appears to
belong to the affective type (I shall explain later on what I mean
by this), feels the beginnings of a lancinating neuralgia in the
eye, a cramp in the stomach, a smarting of the anus, a bite on the
tongue. Another (same type) says, “If I were to try, I could recall
the feeling of neuralgia, but I cannot represent to myself the pain
of a boil.” Another: “There are some pains which I can feel at will;
I either feel nothing at all, or the representation is so vivid that
it almost amounts to actual pain. This is true especially of cardiac
pains.”
It was my intention to question those who had undergone important
operations; but, from the very general use of anæsthetics, there was
little to be hoped for from such an experiment. There remains a case
of frequent occurrence—the pains of childbirth. The answers are
contradictory. One woman, who has had five confinements, declares
that “as soon as it is over, there is nothing more.” This is a woman
of vigorous health and unshaken optimism. Another says, “As soon as
the pain is over, I can forget it at once.” The physician of a
lying-in hospital told me that “nearly all, during their
confinement, say that nothing would induce them to undergo such
suffering again; yet nearly all return to the hospital.” Others say
that they have, afterwards, a very clear and precise recollection of
the labour-pains. Though these answers are so contradictory, we
shall see, further on, how they are to be reconciled with one
another.
Case 4. No revivability of the impression of labour-pains. Nervous
subject. Good visual memory; no auditive memory; cannot recall
either a taste or a smell; has made observations on herself in view
of the subject in hand, and has sent me the following notes:—
"The first acute pains appeared about every fifteen or twenty
minutes; during these intervals of repose they vanished, leaving
no trace. During the intervals between the crises, the patient
tried to represent to herself the pain she had just passed
through, and found it absolutely impossible to do so. She could
describe the pain in words,—pains in the back, the side, etc.,—and
it was this verbal description which came back to her whenever she
tried to recall her feelings at the time. Afterwards the pains
became more and more frequent, and she could make no more
observations. When they were extremely acute, she screamed and
talked the whole time. It is curious to note that she did not
pronounce her words as usual, but uttered each syllable several
times, as thus: ‘_ça, ça, ça, ça, fait, fait, fait, fait, très,
très, maaaaal_.’ She entreated her husband to kill her, to cut her
into small pieces, to tear her asunder, if only there might be an
end of it. After five hours of suffering, the doctor declared that
all these pains had in nowise advanced the situation—that
everything was as at the beginning. This declaration produced an
acute feeling of despair, added to the pain. Five hours later all
was over. Next day, when she tried to represent the pain to
herself, there came into her mind only the verbal description, and
afterwards the sum of her utterances during labour; she remembered
that she had been unable to contain herself, that she understood
the absurdity of what she had been saying to her husband, but
thought, at the same time, ‘People sometimes do absurd things—why
should he not do what I ask him?’ She remembered clearly that,
after the doctor’s declaration, she had a feeling of despair; but
she recalled it in words, not as a feeling."
In conclusion, I will quote from Fouillée, in connection with
physical pain, an interesting observation made on himself:—
“If I want to recall any given attack of toothache, I must form a
mental image of the teeth where the pain was localised, and then
of the word _pain_ which serves as a sign; but how am I to form an
image of the pain _in itself_? Some philosophers declare the thing
impossible, and allege that we only reproduce perceptions,
intellectual states, and words. This is, in fact, what usually
happens; but one can also, in my opinion, reproduce in the
consciousness (though incompletely) the _painful_ element of
toothache. To this end we must employ an indirect method. This
procedure consists in directly calling up the images and motor
reactions which accompany or follow toothache. I make the
experiment, localising my thoughts in one of the molars on the
right side; then I wait. The first thing to revive is a vague and
general state, common to all painful sensations. Then this
reaction grows more precise, as I concentrate my attention more
and more on the tooth. At last I feel a greater afflux of blood
into the gum, and even throbbings. Then I represent to myself a
certain movement passing from one point of the tooth or gum to
another; this is the passage of the pain. Thus I also revive the
motor reaction caused by the pain, the convulsion of the jaw, etc.
Finally, by thinking fixedly of all these circumstances, I end by
feeling in a more or less dull way the rudiments of shooting
pains. In an experiment just made, I have brought on real
toothache in a molar, which, however, is subject to it.... The
experiment leaves behind it a general irritability of the teeth,
and an inclination to pass the tongue over the gums.”[102]
-----
Footnote 102:
Fouillée, _op. cit._, vol. i. pp. 200, 201.
-----
Except for a few exceedingly clear observations, which I shall give
later on, I have only vague replies regarding the revivability of
sorrow, or moral pain, after the elimination of the conditions in
which it had its origin. One person represents to himself “a general
inertia and a febrile condition.” Another, who, during his time of
military service, underwent periods of depression and _ennui_, “a
year later, when the recollection comes back to him, sees everything
of a grey hue.” We shall see presently that in some individuals the
revival of moral pain is as acute as the initial state.
_Pleasant States._—The same results are obtained, _mutatis
mutandis_, as with the preceding group. I note a very marked
predominance of the motor elements. The pleasures most frequently
mentioned are those of skating, swimming, the trot or gallop of a
horse, and various physical exercises. Those who _really_ revive
agreeable recollections, describe a general state of excitement, a
dilatation of the chest, a lighting up of the countenance, a
tendency towards childish gestures. One, in thinking of his rides,
feels the pleasure of rapid motion, the wind playing over his
cheeks, etc. Musicians can easily revive their pleasure by means of
inner hearing alone. We find one who cannot think of the
_Walkürenritt_ without feeling himself lifted as if by motor
impulses.
4. _Emotions._—The phenomena of this group, though more complex,
are, in fact, only a prolongation of our third group. But, in order
to obtain a correct notion of their revivability, we must not
proceed by way of generalities. To ask any given individual whether
he is capable of reviving past emotions would be a useless question.
I have always asked persons to try and recall a _particular_ case of
a particular emotion (fear, anger, love, etc.). The answers are
reducible to three categories, which I shall enumerate in the order
of their frequency.
In the greater number of cases, only the conditions, circumstances,
and accessories of the emotion can be recalled; there is only an
_intellectual_ memory. The past event comes back to them with a
certain emotional colouring (and sometimes even this is absent), a
vague affective trace of what has once been but cannot be recalled.
In the affective order these subjects are analogous to those of
moderately good visual and auditory memory in the intellectual
order. C——, who, when standing on a rock, narrowly escaped being
surrounded by the tide, sees the waves rising, and recalls his
desperate rush for the shore, which he reached in safety; but the
emotion as such does not return to him. At Constantine, some years
ago, I nearly fell into the gorge of the Rummel. When I think of the
incident I can see before me quite clearly the landscape, the state
of the sky, all the details of the spot; but the only return of
feeling is a slight shiver in the back and legs.
Others (far less numerous) recall the circumstances _plus_ the
revived condition of feeling. It is these who have the true
“affective memory”; they correspond to those who have good visual or
good auditory memories. This is the case with the majority of
emotional temperaments. As we here touch on the most obscure and
disputed part of our subject, it will be convenient to give some
examples.
Irascible subjects, on hearing the name of their enemy, at the mere
thought can revive the rising feelings of anger. The timid person
shudders and turns pale when recalling the danger once incurred. The
lover, thinking of his mistress, completely revives the state of
love. If we compare the recollection of an extinct passion with the
occurrence to the mind of a passion still existing, we shall clearly
perceive the difference between intellectual and affective memory,
between the mere recollection of the circumstances and the
recollection of the emotion as such. It is a serious error to assert
that only the conditions of the emotion can be revived, not the
emotional state itself. I now only touch on this question, to which
I shall return.
Several of my correspondents affirm that the memory of an emotion
affects them as strongly as the emotion itself, which I have no
difficulty in believing. Does not the recollection of a foolish
action make one blush? One asserts that “her representation of
emotions is more acute than the emotions themselves, and that she
can recall them much better than visual, auditive, and other
sensations.” But a few detailed observations will make the nature of
true affective memory clearer.
Littré relates that, at the age of ten, he lost a young sister under
very painful circumstances. He felt acute grief at the time; “but a
boy’s sorrow does not last long.” At an advanced age this grief
suddenly returned, without apparent cause. “Suddenly, without wish
or effort on my part, by some phenomenon of affective automnesia,
this same event reproduced itself with feelings no less painful,
certainly, than those I had experienced at the moment of its
occurrence, and which went so far as to bring tears into my eyes.”
It was several times repeated in the course of the following days;
then it ceased and gave place to the habitual recollection, _i.e._,
to the purely intellectual form of memory.[103]
-----
Footnote 103:
_Revue positive_, 1877, p. 660.
-----
It is natural to suppose that emotional revival must be of frequent
occurrence in poets and artists. M. Sully-Prudhomme, whose
philosophical aptitudes are well known, has favoured me with a
written communication on this subject, from which I extract some
passages, with his permission.
"... It is my habit to separate myself from the verses I have
written before finishing them, and to leave them for some time in
the drawers of my writing-table. I even forget them sometimes,
when the piece has seemed to me a failure, and it may happen to me
to find them again several years after. I then re-write them; and
I have the power of calling up again, with great clearness, the
feeling which had suggested them. This feeling I pose, so to
speak, in my inner consciousness, like a model which I am copying
by means of the palette and brush of language. This is the exact
opposite of improvisation. It seems to me that at such times I am
working on the recollection of an affective state.
"When I remember the emotions aroused in me by the entry of the
Germans into Paris after our last defeats, I find it impossible
not to _experience this same emotion afresh_, simultaneously and
indivisibly; while the mnemonic image of the Paris of that day
remains in my memory very distinct from any actual perception.
When I remember the kind of affection which, in my childhood, I
felt for my mother, I find it impossible not to become, in some
sort, a child again, at the very moment when I call up this
memory—not to allow my heart of to-day to participate in the
former tenderness due to recollection. I am almost inclined to ask
myself if every _recollection of feeling does not take on the
character of a hallucination_.
“When a student, I formed a connection in which I was grossly
deceived; so everyday an occurrence that the correctness of my
observations can probably be tested by most men from their own
recollections. There was nothing very deep in my love,
imagination being the principal factor, and I have long ago
forgiven the injury, which, after all, chiefly concerned my
vanity. Both rancour and affection vanished long ago. Under
these circumstances, if I call up the recollection, I recognise
at the outset that I am now a stranger to the feelings which I
can remember; but I soon notice that I only remain a stranger to
them so long as the memories are vague and confused. As soon as,
by an effort of recollection, I make them more precise, they
cease _ipso facto_ to be memories only, and _I am quite
surprised to feel the movements of youthful passion and angry
jealousy renewed in me_. It is indeed only this revival which
could enable me to retouch the verses which this little
adventure of long-past years induced me to perpetrate, and to
allow the expression of my former feelings to benefit by the
experience acquired in my art.”
Case 5. H—— (20 years). On the _memory_ of the feeling of _ennui_
experienced on the first day in barracks.—"In order to _represent_
to myself thoroughly this feeling of _ennui_, which was very
intense, and lasted a whole afternoon, I shut my eyes and abstract
my thoughts. I feel, first, a slight shiver down my back, a
certain _malaise_, a feeling of something unpleasant which I
should prefer not to feel over again. After this first moment
comes a certain uncomfortable state, a slight oppression of the
throat; this feeling is connected with vague representations which
do not fix themselves. In the experiment here described, I first
picture to myself the barrack-yard, where I used to walk; then
this picture of the yard is replaced by that of the dormitory on
the third floor. I see myself seated at a window, looking at the
view, of which I can see all the details. This, however, does not
last; the picture soon disappears; there remains only a vague idea
of being seated at a window, and then a feeling of oppression,
weariness, dejection, and a certain heaviness in the shoulders. At
this point I break off the experiment and open my eyes, still
experiencing a general sense of uneasiness, which soon passes
off."
The whole experiment lasts a little more than ten minutes. To sum
up, we have, first, a feeling of weight and oppression, a shudder
in the back, but no clear representation of surrounding objects;
then a feeling of discomfort becoming more and more intense,
visual representations varying either in their nature or their
intensity; and finally, the total disappearance of these visual
representations, the feeling of _ennui_ being persistent
throughout.
Case 6. A woman, aged 28. “Three years ago, I used to go and see a
relative who was undergoing treatment at an establishment in the
neighbourhood of P——. My visits were very frequent, and always
began with a long wait in a room overlooking the garden. If I wish
to repeat the impressions of this time of waiting, which was
always disagreeable to me, all I have to do is to sit down in a
chair, as I was then seated, to close my eyes and put myself in
the same frame of mind, which I can do quite easily. Not half a
minute passes between the evocation and the clear and absolute
reconstruction of the scene. First, I feel the carpet under my
feet, then I _see_ its pattern of red and brown roses; then the
table with the books lying on it, their colour and style of
binding; then the windows, and through them the branches of the
trees, of which I hear the sound as they beat against the glass;
lastly, the peculiar atmosphere of the room, its unmistakable
smell. After this, I feel over again all the weariness of waiting,
complicated by an intense dread of the doctor’s arrival, a state
of apprehension ending in a violent palpitation of the heart,
which I find it impossible to escape. When once I have entered on
this train of thought, I have to follow it out to the end, passing
through the whole series of states which I passed through at the
time. If I wished to eliminate any of them I am sure that I could
not do so, as when, in a dream, one tries, without ever
succeeding, to avoid an unpleasant fall which one foresees.”
Here nothing is wanting, either the circumstances, or the repetition
of the emotion itself; and this case shows that the complete revival
of an emotion is the beginning of the emotion itself.
Lastly, there remains a third category of answers, of which I have
only four cases. I mention these merely as a curiosity, and in order
to omit nothing. These persons represent the emotion _objectively_
to themselves, by localising it in another. One can only represent
anger to himself under the force of some particular angry man.
Another incarnates fear and hatred in a certain person whose
countenance or attitude expresses fear or hatred. The emotional
state is, for these, only represented under its bodily form.
Is this because they have, personally, little experience of these
different emotions?
III.
This series of facts, with their multiform and often contradictory
manifestations, may perhaps leave the reader in perplexity, which
would be still greater were I to enumerate all. Let us try to bring
them into some sort of order, and understand their significance.
If—placing ourselves at the point of view of the question stated
above, the possibility of a revival not produced by an actual
occurrence—we propose to ourselves to classify all images
whatsoever, we shall see that they fall into these groups, viz.:—
Those of direct and easy revivability (visual, auditory,
tactile-motor, with some reservations for the last named).
Those of indirect and comparatively easy revivability: pleasures and
pains, emotions. They are indirect, because the emotional state is
only induced through the intermediary of the intellectual states
with which it is associated.[104]
-----
Footnote 104:
A characteristic peculiar to emotional affective revivability is
the slowness with which it develops and the time required. While
the visual or auditory image may be called up instantaneously and
at command, the emotional representation arises slowly. This is
because it passes through two stages. The first (intellectual)
consists in the evocation of conditions and circumstances—a
toothache, a burn, a passion. Many do not get beyond this stage,
and the concomitant emotional tone, accordingly, is faint, or even
_nil_. The second or emotional stage adds to this the rise of
states of excitement and exultation, or of dejection and lowered
vitality. The latter requires organic conditions, a difference in
the organism, an excitement of the motor, vascular, respiratory,
secretory, and other centres.
-----
Those of difficult revivability, either direct or indirect. This
heterogeneous and difficult group includes tastes, odours, and
internal sensations.
What are the reasons for these differences? I reduce them to two
principal ones, which I may briefly state thus—
The revivability of an impression is in direct ratio to its
complexity, and consequently in inverse ratio to its simplicity.
The revivability of an impression (with certain exceptions to be
mentioned afterwards) is in direct ratio to the motor elements
included in it.
1. It is an incontestable fact that an isolated state of
consciousness, with no relation to what precedes, accompanies, or
follows it, has small chance of fixing itself in the memory. I hear
a word of an unknown language, it immediately vanishes; but if I
read and write it, if I associate it with some object or with
various circumstances, it is fixed. It is easier to remember a group
or a series than an isolated and unrelated term. Now, by their very
nature, the visual images arrange themselves in complex aggregates,
and the auditive in sequences (or even, in the case of harmony, in
simultaneities), while the motor images are associated in series,
every term of which awakens and brings with it the last. They
accordingly fulfil the conditions of immediate and easy
revivability. It is the same with pleasures, pains, emotions. Always
connected with intellectual states (perceptions, representations, or
ideas), they form part of an aggregate, and are involved in its
resurgent movement.
The case is different with the images of our third group. They are
not associated with one another; they have an isolated and
individual character; they contract no relations, either of space or
time, among themselves.
Let us take the case of odours. One excludes another; they are not
associated in the imagination as visual images are in the
recollection of a beautiful landscape. One of my correspondents is
able to recall at will the scent of pinks; she tried to do so while
walking in a wood full of decaying leaves and their smell, but
without success; one odour excluded the other. Neither can they be
arranged in sequences. I am aware that an English chemist, Piesse,
has claimed the ability to class scents in a continuous series, like
notes, patchouli corresponding to lower _c_ in the key of F, and
civet to the upper _f_ in the key of G—the whole in tones and
semitones; but no one, so far as I know, has taken this fancy
seriously.
In the same way, tastes may be associated with other images, as of
hunger (I have collected several cases of this), which makes their
revival more difficult. Among themselves they do not form
associations, but combinations. If associations ever occur they are
extremely rare and limited in character.
Hunger and thirst are special, indecomposable states. Disgust and
fatigue are revived easily enough, and, as we have seen, by almost
every one; but it must be remembered that these states are composed
of somewhat heterogeneous—sensory and motor—elements, and that they
approach the character of aggregates.
This antithesis between the first two groups and that of odours,
tastes, and internal sensations, depends, no doubt, on certain
physiological conditions. As we can do nothing but hazard
conjectures on this point, it is better to abstain.
2. The second theory stated above—viz., that the revivability is in
direct ratio to the motor elements included in the image—is more
open to question. I only give it as a _partial_, secondary,
subsidiary explanation, applicable to many cases but not to all, and
allowing of numerous exceptions. Since we have to do with an
empirical law—a pure generalisation from experience—we must test it
by facts, in order to fix its bearing and value. This rapid
examination will justify my restrictions and reservations.
Among all our impressions, those of sight and hearing are those most
easily revived. Now, though the visual faculty has at its disposal a
very rich, varied, and delicate motor apparatus, this is not the
case with the auditory. Considering the superior position of the
latter among the senses, it is very poor in motor elements;
movements of the head, accommodatory movements of the tympanal
membrane, in extreme cases movements of the vocal organs, and,
according to the latest hypotheses, a certain function of the
semi-circular canals. The difference between the two senses in
respect of motor elements is very striking.
The sense of smell is much more varied and of greater extent than
that of taste. It is far superior as a means of information, yet
inferior as regards the sum of the movements at its disposal for
exercising itself.
Pleasures, pains, and pleasurable or painful emotions, all include
motor elements. So much is evident, yet let us remark what follows:
if we divide the affective states—roughly, yet sufficiently for our
purpose—into two groups, on one side pains and painful emotions, on
the other pleasures and pleasurable emotions, a difficulty presents
itself. The first group, that of the “asthenic” states, manifests
itself by a diminution of movements, circulation, respiration, etc.
The second group, that of the “sthenic” states, manifests itself by
the reverse phenomena, increased movement, circulation, etc. Shall
we say that the second group, which contains more motor elements, is
revived more easily and more frequently than the first? The
conclusion would be logical, but contrary to experience. We should
even find, I believe, that the contrary opinion has more
supporters.[105]
-----
Footnote 105:
This opinion will be discussed later on.
-----
Organic sensations appear to depend principally on the chemical
action taking place in the organism; it is thus with hunger, thirst,
suffocation, disgust, fatigue, etc. Here the part played by the
motor element is but trifling. As this revival is vague, this group
seems to conform to the law stated above.
To sum up: when examined in detail our formula is only a partial
explanation, a generalisation of limited application.
IV.
We have now arrived at the principal question, for which all that
has hitherto been said was only a preparation: Is there such a thing
as a real revival of impressions? Although most psychologists do not
put this question at all, or only treat it in a cursory manner, the
majority of answers are certainly in the negative. It is maintained
that we remember the conditions and circumstances of an emotional
occurrence, but not the emotional state itself.
I feel obliged completely to reject this theory, which would never
have been maintained if the subject had not been treated _a priori_,
in an offhand manner, without sufficient observations. A closer
study, supported by the facts which I have adduced, and others which
will follow, shows that there are two quite distinct cases. Some
people have a _false_ or _abstract_ memory for feelings, others a
_true_ or _concrete_ one. In the former the image is scarcely
revived, or not at all; in others it is revived in great part, or
totally. In order the better to explain the difference between these
two forms of memory, let us examine the constituent elements and the
mechanism of each separately.
1. The _false_ or _abstract_ memory of feeling consists in
the representation of an occurrence, _plus_ an affective
characteristic—I do not say an affective state. This is certainly
the most frequent form. What remains of the small incidents of a
long journey but the recollection of the places where they happened,
the details, and the fact that they _were once_ disagreeable. What
remains of a vanished love-affair but the impression of a person, of
attentions paid to her, of adventures, and, besides, the
recollection that this _was once_ happiness? How much does the adult
retain of the memory of his childish games? How much of his former
religious or political belief remains to a person who has become
totally indifferent? In all cases of this kind, and there are
thousands, the remembered emotional characteristic is _known_, not
felt or experienced; this is only an additional intellectual
character. It is added to the rest as an accessory; pretty much as,
in picturing to ourselves a town, a monument, a landscape visited
long ago, we add the recollection of a bright or cloudy sky, of rain
or fog which surrounded it.
I call an emotional memory “abstract,” and I justify this term.
Emotional states are just as susceptible of abstraction and
generalisation as intellectual states. One who has seen many men,
who has heard many dogs bark or frogs croak, forms to himself a
generic image of the human figure, of the barking of dogs, or the
croaking of frogs. This is a schematic, half-abstract, half-concrete
representation, formed through the accumulation of rough
resemblances and the elimination of differences. In the same way, a
person who has several times suffered from toothache, colic, or
headache, who has had paroxysms of anger or fear, hate or love,
forms to himself a generic impression of these different states by
means of the same procedure. This is the first step. It would be
beside the point to follow here in detail the ascending progress of
the mind to higher and ever higher generalisations. In their highest
degree, concepts like force, movement, quantity, etc., suppose two
things: a word which fixes and represents them, and a potential or
latent knowledge, hidden under the word and preventing it from being
a mere _flatus vocis_. He who does not possess this potential
knowledge, who is incapable of resolving the superior abstractions,
first into medium, then into inferior ones, then into concrete
_data_, possesses only an empty concept. So for the affective states
the terms emotion, passion, sensibility, etc., are nothing but
abstractions, and in order to verify these terms and give them a
real significance, we must have experiences in the region of
feeling, concrete data. People who speak of a state of feeling which
they have never experienced, which they know only by hearsay, have
an empty concept. States of feeling are a material susceptible of
all degrees of abstraction, like sensory material.
The false or abstract memory of feeling is only a sign,
a simulacrum, a substitute for the real occurrence, an
intellectualised state added to the purely intellectual elements of
the impression, and nothing more.
2. The true or concrete memory of impressions consists in the
_actual_ reproduction of a former state of feeling, with all its
characteristics. This is necessary—at least in theory—if it is to
be complete. The nearer it approaches to totality, the more
accurate it is. Here the recollection does not consist merely in
the representation of conditions and circumstances, in short, of
intellectual states, but in the revival of the state of feeling
itself as such, _i.e._, as _felt_. I have already given instances
of this: Fouillée’s experiment, the cases of Littré and
Sully-Prudhomme; those numbered III. and IV., so clear and
precise, show that a true memory of impressions, independent of
its intellectual accompaniment, is no chimera.
Bain says that the emotions, “in their strict character of emotions
proper, have the minimum of revivability; but being always
incorporated with the sensations of the higher senses, they share in
the superior revivability of sights and sounds.” On which Professor
W. James makes the following comment: "But he fails to point out
that the revival of sights and sounds may be _ideal_ without ceasing
to be distinct; whilst the emotion, to be distinct, must become real
again. Professor Bain seems to forget that an ‘ideal emotion,’ and a
real emotion prompted by an ideal object, are two very different
things."[106]
-----
Footnote 106:
_Psychology_, ii. 474.
-----
I maintain, on the contrary, that we have here only two different
stages of the same thing; the first ineffectual and abortive, the
second complete; and the subject which now occupies us must either
have been in a very confused state, or very negligently treated, for
a clear mind like that of W. James not to have seen that affective
memories, like others, aim at becoming actual states of feeling. We
ought not, however, to forget the indisputable fact that our
consciousness only exists in the present. For a recollection,
however distant, to exist, as far as I am concerned, it must
re-enter the narrow area of _present_ consciousness; otherwise it is
buried in the depths of the unconscious and equivalent to the
non-existent. We have thus (not to speak of the present-future) a
present-present and a present-past—viz., that of memory; and this is
only distinguished from the other by certain additional marks which
it is needless to enumerate, but which consist principally in its
appearing like an initial state, though, in general, less intense.
Now these indispensable conditions of memory are the same for both
intellectual and emotional states. If, with my eyes shut, I can call
up the vision of St. Peter’s at Rome (if I were an architect, with a
good visual memory, I should see it in all its details), my
impression is an _actual_ one, and only becomes a memory by the
addition of secondary characteristics, such as repetition and a
lower degree of intensity. The two cases are similar; in both, the
revived impression, according to the law formulated by Dugald
Stewart and Taine, is accompanied by a momentary belief which places
it in the position of an actual reality. But the recollection of a
feeling, it will be said, has this special property, that it is
associated with organic and physiological states which make of it a
real emotion. I reply that it _must_ be so, for an emotion which
does not vibrate through the whole body is nothing but a purely
intellectual state. To expect that we should actually revive a state
of feeling without reviving also its organic conditions, is to
expect the impossible, to state the problem in contradictory terms.
We should, in that case, simply have its substitute, its
abstraction, _i.e._, the false affective memory which is a variety
of intellectual memory; the emotion will be _re_cognised, not
_re_vived.
Finally, the ideal of every recollection is that, while keeping its
character of being already experienced, it should be adequate in
such measure as was possible for the original impression. The
revival of impressions is an internal operation, whose extreme form
is hallucination. For the two forms of memory, intellectual and
emotional, the ideal is the same, only each has its special
mechanism for realising it.
There are all possible degrees of transition from the simple bald
representation of the words pleasure or pain, love or fear, to the
acute, fully and entirely felt representation of these states. In a
crowd of people taken at random, one might, with the help of
adequate information, determine all the intermediate degrees, from
the abstract to the concrete. Still more, these may be met with in
the same individual. When the poet says that “Sadness departs upon
the wings of Time,” his meaning, in psychological language, is that
the affective memory is gradually transformed into an intellectual
memory. We know that certain artists, in order to get rid of the
memory of a sorrow or a passion, have fixed it in a work of art.
This was Goethe’s method; every one knows the story of _Werther_, to
quote but one example. One of my correspondents employs the same
procedure with success; _i.e._, in the case we are dealing with, the
question is how to transfer emotion to the region of the
imagination, and, consequently, intellectualise it.
I have said that in certain persons the revival of emotional states
seems to be complete. Is it so in fact? I believe that it is
impossible to give a precise answer to this question; and here we
have a point where the emotional memory differs from the
intellectual memory.
A given recollection is considered accurate; but in the majority of
cases this is only an illusion. Nearly always, in revived
impressions, there are deductions and losses, sometimes additions;
sometimes they include _plus_, sometimes _minus_ factors. At any
rate, in the intellectual order, there are certain cases where one
can say that the recollection is perfect, without the least gap or
error; and this affirmation is legitimate because verifiable. It is
quite sufficient to compare the copy with the original. If I enter a
hall of the Alhambra with my eyes closed, I can ascertain whether
the inner vision which I have retained from a former visit is
adequate to the reality. I can check my recollection of a passage of
music by the actual hearing of the same. The painter mentioned by
Wigan who executed his portraits from memory, Mozart reconstructing
Allegri’s _Miserere_, are the classic examples of perfect cases
where the impression is revived with irreproachable exactitude.
But in the region of the feelings this comparison is impossible,
because two subjective states, of which one is the original and one
the copy, cannot co-exist in the same individual, and because the
primary impression cannot be objectivised. I see but one way of
getting over the difficulty so as to arrive at an approximately
correct answer. This would consist in comparing the revived
emotional state with a written document dating from the moment of
the first impression; and even this impression is open to doubt. J.
J. Rousseau, speaking of the enthusiasm aroused by the love-letters
of the _Nouvelle Héloïse_, tells us that they were inspired by his
own love for Madame d’Houdetot, and adds, “What would they have said
could they have read the originals!” It is possible that Rousseau
was more or less mistaken; but this is a comparison of the kind I am
suggesting. A correspondent, well equipped for psychological
observations, and accustomed to note down the day’s impressions, had
promised me to attempt such a comparison between the actual
recollection and the written document; but various causes have
prevented the accomplishment of this purpose. One might possibly,
without much trouble, chance to recover a letter written under the
impression of the moment, and compare it with the present emotional
recollection which, rightly or wrongly, we consider most correct.
For my part, I am inclined to doubt whether, in the case of
feelings, there is ever a complete correspondence between the
original and the copy; but this is merely a hypothetical view.
It still remains to say a few words on forgetfulness in the region
of the emotions. Affective amnesia is found in two forms—one
pathological, the other normal.
I pass over in silence the morbid manifestations, whose study would
be both extensive and curious, but would lead me away from my
principal aim, which is a practical one. We find numerous examples
of the loss of altruistic, moral, or religious feelings, of partial
or total indifference to the past, of complete insensibility—the
_Gemütslosigkeit_ of the German alienists.
I confine myself to the consideration of affective amnesia under its
simplest and most widely-known form. Nothing is more frequently met
with. In the first place, the single fact that most psychologists
either neglect or deny the phenomenon of emotional memory,
constitutes a presumption that its function is not a very obvious
one. Moreover, that emotional memory which I have designated the
false or abstract one, may, without prejudice, be considered as a
mitigated form of forgetfulness. Finally, eliminating the
non-emotional temperaments as irrelevant to our subject, we may
find, even among the emotional, many who feel acutely, but do not
retain their emotions. Every one knows people whose whole nature is
shaken by sorrow, joy, love, indignation; they seem for a long time
as if possessed; a few weeks later, not a trace remains. Emotions
glide off their minds as a thunder-shower does off the roofs. Now
this affective amnesia has a great influence on conduct.
Here, in fact, are two general truths derived from experience, and
in my opinion incontestable:—
On the one hand, pleasant and painful sensations are the most
powerful, if not the only motive forces of human activity.
On the other, there are people in whom emotions are revived
strongly, weakly, or not at all.
The conclusion is that the portion of individual experience
resulting from the pleasures and pains experienced, will show
itself, as to its efficacy, strongly, feebly, or not at all,
according to the individual. The prodigal who has ruined himself and
is restored to opulence by an unexpected chance, if he has not
preserved a lively recollection of his privations, will begin his
extravagant career over again; if his painful recollections are of a
stable character, they will act on his natural tendencies as a
restraining or inhibitory force. The drunkard and the glutton will
not repeat their excesses as long as the impression of the
after-effects remains vivid. The educator, as every one knows, has
no hold over a child on whom the recollection of rewards and
punishments has no effect. I have already mentioned the state of
mind which frequently succeeds dangerous confinements; this, again,
is a case of affective amnesia. The absence of sympathy, in many
men, is only an incapacity for reviving the recollection of the ills
they have suffered themselves, and consequently for feeling them in
others. These are well-known facts, of which it is needless to
lengthen the list; but however well known they may be, their
psychological reason is, in my opinion, not always apprehended,
because the importance of the emotional memory has not been
recognised.
Affective amnesia, therefore, plays a much more important part in
human life than we are apt to think. It often lets us into the
secret of strange modes of action, though I would not assert that it
_alone_ is sufficient to explain these everywhere and always.
V.
The study just made seems to me to lead to the following
conclusions:—
1. There exists an AFFECTIVE TYPE as clear and well-defined as the
visual, the auditory, and the motor types. It consists in the easy,
complete, and preponderant revival of affective impressions.
I have simply applied to an almost unexplored region of memory the
methods of research inaugurated for objective sensations by Taine
and Galton, continued by many others, and successful in their hands.
It will, perhaps, be objected that the complete emotional type is
rarely found; but neither is it certain that the visual, auditory,
and motor types are of very frequent occurrence in a pure state.
This, however, is of little consequence, the essential point being
to determine its existence. Those who belong to this type will
easily recognise it. I foresee that those whose memories are of the
opposite type will refuse to admit it; but the members of the Royal
Society and the Académie des Sciences,—being for the most part
possessed of non-visual memories,—when questioned by Galton, failed
to understand his queries, and would probably have rejected his
conclusions. Many men have an incurable tendency to wish that every
one were constituted like themselves, and to refuse to admit the
existence of any departures from their type. Yet in psychology, even
more than elsewhere, we must be distrustful of too extensive
generalisations.
2. There exists not only a general emotional type; it admits of
varieties, and it is even probable that _partial_ types are the most
frequent. Here I note a resemblance between my researches and those
made with regard to impressions of objective origin. It is known
that some persons have an excellent memory for faces, figures,
concrete objects, but not for colours or visual signs, such as
printing and writing. Others have an excellent memory for languages
but none for music, or inversely. Moreover, have not numerous
pathological phenomena demonstrated the fact that, in a determinate
category of images, a whole group may disappear, without appreciable
injury to the rest?
I have not at present a sufficient supply of documents to enter on
the study of the varieties of the affective type; but it is certain
that they exist; that, for some, a clear and frequent revival only
takes place in the case of pleasurable impressions; in others, of
gloomy or of erotic images. I have obtained conclusive affirmative
answers on this point, but will only transcribe a case which deals
with fear.
Case 7. "I am not what would be called a general emotional type,
but I have a special emotional memory—that of fear, which in me is
very pronounced.... I have had in my life, like every one else,
many joyful moments; I will frankly say that, when I remember
those incidents in my life which have caused me great joy, I feel
no joy whatever. Besides, it is very difficult to recall the
moments in which I felt joyful, or even the incidents which
produced my joy—probably because the representative memory has not
been reinforced by the emotional memory. I do not know how this
may be, and do not attempt to draw any inferences from my own
case. I am only speaking of myself.
"I have tried to recall one of the moments in my life when I had
the acutest sense of joy—it was in April 1888. [Here follows a
long description of honours obtained by the author at the age of
twenty, and the applause—unexpected at his age—of a numerous
public assembly.] I have a clear and very accurate recollection of
the incidents I have just been describing; I can remember the
cause to which, rightly or wrongly, I attributed my success; I
could repeat nearly every word I said on that occasion; I could
remember (though not so easily) the hall and the faces of the
audience; but I find, to-day, no joy whatever in thinking of all
this.
"As regards my capacity for reviving sad recollections the same
may be said as in the case of joyfulness.
"To return to fear. I have two very conclusive examples of special
emotional memory. When a boarder at the S—— _lycée_ at Bucharest,
I dreaded all the staff of the institution on account of a
punishment they were in the habit of inflicting on me—that of
confinement to the schoolroom on holidays. I remember having such
a fear of this imprisonment that, once I had left the building, it
was with great difficulty I could bring myself to pass the
gateway, for fear of being stopped. In later years, having
finished my studies, and kept up friendly relations with all
persons concerned, I used sometimes to return on a visit to the
Lycée, but never without feeling a kind of terrified shudder on my
entrance.
"More than this: having remained three years at Paris, without
visiting my own country, I returned to Bucharest, and went to see
a new director, with whom I was on friendly terms. Even then, when
approaching the door of the institution, I felt a sort of
uneasiness which was nothing else but my old dread in an
attenuated form.
"In the first year of my stay at Paris I entered my name for the
more advanced lectures of the Lycée L——. I only attended them for
a week. In the class-room I was conscious of an uneasy feeling; I
feared something without knowing what it was; I felt a horror of
all the staff, though they were full of consideration for me, and
at my age (twenty-two) I was no longer on the footing of a
schoolboy. What could I have been afraid of? for I might have left
whenever I wished it. Though accustomed to work for many hours
together in libraries, I could do nothing in this class-room. I
believe this state to have been a reminiscence of my old fear—that
of the Bucharest _lycée_.... Long afterwards, when a student
attending the lectures of the Faculté de Droit, I had every day to
pass the Lycée L——. I would hurry past it as quickly as I could,
feeling the same dread as at the time when I used to pass the
gateway of the Bucharest _lycée_.
“I have a good motor, no visual, and a very slight auditory
memory.”
It might be said that in this case the revival is often artificially
produced, and associated with special circumstances; but it seemed
to me of too clear and definite a character to be omitted.
I need not point out that these individual differences in the
revivability of emotional states certainly play a great part in the
constitution of different types of character. Moreover, the
existence of variations of the emotional type cuts short the
question, acrimoniously debated by some writers, whether pains can
be more easily remembered than pleasures. Optimists and pessimists
have fought fiercely over this phantasmal problem; but it is a vain
and factitious question so long as we suppose that it admits of but
one solution. There is not, and cannot be, a general answer.
Certain individuals revive joyful images with astonishing facility;
sad memories, when they arise, are immediately and easily trodden
down. I know an inveterate optimist, successful in all his
undertakings, who has much difficulty in picturing to himself the
few reverses that he has experienced. “I remember joys much more
easily than painful states” is an answer I frequently meet with in
my notes.
On the other hand, there are many who say, “I remember sorrows much
more easily than pleasurable states.” In the course of my inquiries
I have found that the latter are the most numerous; but I do not see
my way to draw any conclusion from this fact. One says, “I find it
much easier to revive unpleasant feelings, whence my tendency to
pessimism. Joyous impressions are evanescent. A painful recollection
makes me sad at a joyful moment; a joyful recollection does not
cheer me at a sad one.”
These are straightforward cases. Outside them the question above
stated can only be solved at haphazard, and by a merely mental view.
3. Revivability depends on cerebral and internal conditions
(whatever these may be, known or unknown) rather than on the primary
impression itself. To feel emotions acutely and revive them acutely
are two widely different operations; one does not imply the other.
We have seen that, in many cases, revivability even seems to be in
inverse ratio to the intensity of the initial phenomenon. This
brings us back to the question of characters. It does not matter
whether the impression is a vivid one; what is wanted is that it
should be fixed. Often it is heightened by a process of latent
incubation depending on individual temperament. Chateaubriand,
speaking of a gamekeeper to whom he was much attached, and who was
killed by a poacher, says, “My imagination (at sixteen) pictured to
me Raulx holding his entrails in his hands, and dragging himself to
the hut where he died. I conceived the idea of revenge; I wished to
fight the murderer. In this respect I am singularly constituted; at
the moment of a blow I scarcely feel it, but it engraves itself on
my memory; _the recollection, instead of being weakened, grows
stronger with time_; it sleeps in my heart for years together, then
the most trivial circumstance awakens it with renewed force, and my
wound becomes more painful than on the first day.”[107] Here we have
another analogy with what takes place in the order of objective
impressions. It is not sufficient to have good eyes in order to have
a good visual memory, and I know short-sighted persons whose inner
vision is excellent.[108]
-----
Footnote 107:
_Mémoires_, vol. i. p. 77. The italics are not in the original.
Footnote 108:
This has recently been experimentally demonstrated; the
observations made by Dr. Toulouse (with the assistance of
specialists) on M. Zola may be specially mentioned. In this case
the coincidence of a somewhat low degree of sensory acuteness with
a very high degree of delicacy and precision in revived sensory
impression was found not only in the case of vision, but
especially in that of smell. (Toulouse, _Emile Zola: Enquête
Médico-psychologique_, 1896, pp. 164, 173, 179, 206.)—ED.
-----
I may terminate this inquiry, which is a sketch rather than a study
of the subject, by reminding the reader that the facts ascertained
for the other, the intellectual part of memory, have not been the
work of one man or of one day.[109]
-----
Footnote 109:
This chapter was first published in the _Revue Philosophique_ for
October 1894. It called forth some new communications, two only of
which have been added to the original text. The affirmation of a
type of affective memory has, as I expected, provoked both
criticism and denial. My principal opponent, Prof. Titchener, has
published on this subject a somewhat extensive article in the
_Philosophical Review_ (November 1895), in which he reproaches me
with not having cited a single case of pure emotional memory—i.e.,
memory from which all sensory and ideational elements are absent,
and where there is a revival of feeling _as such_. An example of
this kind, which should be quite conclusive, seems to me almost
impossible to produce. A pleasure, a pain, an emotion, are always
associated with a sensation, a representation, or an act; revival
necessarily bringing back the intellectual state which forms part
of the complexus and supports it. But the real question is
elsewhere: Is revival, in certain persons at least, a dry record,
or a _felt_ state? In this last case—and it does occur—there is
the recollection of the emotional state as such.
There is another objection: Can it be said that an emotion is the
reproduction of an antecedent emotion, and not a new emotion? The
reproduction of an emotion can itself be nothing other than an
emotion, but it bears the marks of repetition. Without returning
to what has been said above, I remark that those contemporary
psychologists, who study with admirable patience the mechanism of
memory, neglect that of its most general conditions. Now the chief
of these is that every recollection must be a _reversion_, by
virtue of which, the past once more becoming a present, we live at
present in the past. The recollection of an emotion as such does
not escape the action of this law; it must become actual once
more—must _be_ a real emotion, whether acute or obtuse.
Taking account of the criticisms, and of the new material supplied
to me, I may once again sum up my inquiry thus—
1. The emotional memory is _nil_ in the majority of people.
2. In others there is a half intellectual, half emotional memory,
_i.e._, the emotional elements are only revived partially and with
difficulty, by the help of the intellectual states associated with
them.
3. Others, and these the least numerous, have a true—_i.e._,
complete—emotional memory; the intellectual element being only a
means of revival which is rapidly effaced.
-----
CHAPTER XII.
THE FEELINGS AND THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS.
_The function of the feelings, as the cause of association—The law
of affective association, conceived as general, and as local—I.
Function of unconscious feeling: ancestral or hereditary
unconsciousness; personal unconsciousness arising from
cœnæsthesia; personal unconsciousness arising from the events of
our life—Law of transference by contiguity, by resemblance: wide
or narrow—II. Function of the conscious feelings: accidental
cases, permanent cases, exceptional or rare cases._
In this chapter we have still to deal with the relation between the
feelings and the memory, but under quite another form, seeing that
we have to study the feelings as a _cause_. Instead of establishing,
as we have hitherto done, that there is such a thing as a real
memory of the feelings, our present aim is to determine the function
of states of feeling in the recalling of recollections and the
association of ideas. Their importance as a hidden factor of
revivability has been recognised by several contemporary
writers,[110] some even having a tendency to exaggerate it.
-----
Footnote 110:
I may specially mention Horwicz, _Psychologische Analysen_, vol.
i. pp. 160 _et seq._, 265-331, 369 _et seq._; Fouillée,
_Psychologie des idées-forces_, vol. i. pp. 221 _et seq._; J.
Sully, _The Human Mind_, vol. ii. pp. 76-80; Shadworth Hodgson,
_Time and Space_, p. 266; W. James, _Psychology_, i. 571;
Höffding, _Psychologie_ (2nd ed.), p. 331.
-----
We know that the theory of the association of ideas has been reduced
to two fundamental laws—that of contiguity and that of resemblance.
I may remark, without insisting on the fact, that they are not of
the same nature; the first, being purely mechanical, the result of
experience, while the second supposes, in addition to this, a
certain degree of mental labour, for a complete correspondence
between two states is rarely met with, and can only be grasped in
consequence of a dissociation or abstraction operating on the raw
materials. These two laws are purely intellectual; they are
regulative principles deduced from facts, nothing more. They are
rather descriptive than explanatory. They reveal the mechanism, but
not the motive force. They suppose something beyond, unless we admit
that ideas are psychic atoms endowed with some mysterious attraction
or affinity. With regard to the determining reasons, they are dumb.
Now it cannot be doubted that in many cases (not all) the cause of
the association is to be found in a permanent or momentary state of
the feelings.
The writers who have pointed out this influence (often efficacious
though latent) have conceived this superior law, which might be
called the Law of Feeling, in two different ways, some as absolute
and universal, others as partial and local. I take my stand among
the latter.
1. Fouillée (as also, it seems, Horwicz) has maintained the former
thesis. “The association of ideas presupposes that of the emotions,
and, with the latter, that of the impulses. The dominant impulse
awakens, by association, the secondary impulses tending in the same
direction. The tie which unites them is the unity of an aim in
relation to which the impulses are medium, the unity of an effect in
relation to which they are co-operating forces.... The laws of
association and contrast are what dominate the association of the
feelings” (_loc. cit._, p. 221). I shall not be suspected of
hostility to the essential spirit of this thesis, since the present
work is only one long vindication of the primordial nature of
tendencies. But unless we are led astray by the mirage of unity at
any price, it is impossible to admit that _every_ association
supposes an emotional factor as a determining reason. Not to speak
of the numerous cases resulting from contiguity, in which the part
played by the feelings is very doubtful, I find an important
category of purely intellectual associations, where the intervention
of the feelings appears to me impossible to verify. Is it likely
that the mathematician and the metaphysician who connect together a
long series of abstractions have an emotional state as the support
and vehicle of their thought, whether the latter be discursive or
constructive? I do not see, in theory or in fact, any reason for
admitting this, unless we wish to involve the love of truth; and in
any case this would only be a _primum movens_, not the direct and
immediate cause of the associations.
2. The influence of emotional states must be stated as a principal,
but not an exclusive cause. It is summed up in what Shadworth
Hodgson has called the “Law of Interest.” In a past event,
everything is not equally interesting; in its revival, all the
elements are not equally active, the most emotional bringing the
others with them. “Two processes are constantly going on in
redintegrations. The one a process of corrosion, melting, decay; the
other a process of renewing, arising, becoming.... Those parts of
the object, however, which possess an interest, resist this tendency
to gradual decay of the whole object.”[111] Coleridge rightly says
that “The true practical general law of association is this: that
whatever makes certain parts of a total impression more vivid or
distinct than the rest will determine the mind to recall these, in
preference to others equally linked together by the common condition
of contemporaneity or continuity. But the will itself, by confining
and intensifying the attention, may arbitrarily give vividness or
distinctness to any object whatsoever.”[112] The power attributed by
Coleridge to the attention and the will finally resolves itself into
an emotional state as ultimate cause, and from it alone can an
increase of intensity be derived.
-----
Footnote 111:
Shadworth Hodgson, _Time and Space_, p. 266; quoted by W. James,
i. 572.
Footnote 112:
_Biographia Litteraria_, chap. vii. p. 61 (Bohn’s ed.); quoted by
James, i. 572.
-----
I shall insist no further on these generalities, as it will be more
instructive to determine by means of a few details the influence of
the emotional life on the memory. To this end I shall divide our
study into two parts, the function of unconscious feeling, and that
of the conscious feelings.
I.
It is not always easy to determine positively the degree in which
unconscious feeling influences the memory in order to awaken it, or
to connect ideas with one another. I have purposely employed the
vague term “unconscious feeling” as prejudging nothing with regard
to its nature. We may form any conception we like of it, either
considering it as purely physiological or assigning to it a
psychological character—that of a consciousness diminishing to
infinity. Both these opinions have their partisans, but this does
not matter as regards the following considerations. In this
unconscious feeling I distinguish three strata, passing from the
deepest upwards, from the more obscure to the less obscure.
1. Hereditary or ancestral unconsciousness. I mention this merely
for the sake of completeness. It would consist in the influence of
certain modes of feeling, inherited and fixed in a race, which
might, without our knowing it, exercise some sway over our
associations. Under this form, at least, it appears to me extremely
hypothetical. Laycock[113] (1844), one of the founders of the
physiology of the unconscious, attempts to explain by this means
certain national and individual tastes; the Hungarians are supposed
to like plains because these appeal to the ancestral recollection of
the Mongolian steppes, their primæval home. Herbert Spencer, who,
however, has not occupied himself much with the influence of
sentiments on the association of ideas, says incidentally that, in
the impression produced by a landscape, “along with the immediate
sensations, there are partially excited the myriads of sensations
that have been in time past received from objects such as those
presented; further, there are also excited certain deeper, but now
vague combinations of states which were organised in the race during
barbarous times, when its pleasurable activities were chiefly among
the woods and waters.”[114] Schneider assumes this ancestral
revivification in every æsthetic perception. We shall return to this
subject in Part II. The predatory tastes of primitive man would
explain certain agreeable associations (_e.g._, the pleasure of
constructing a bloodthirsty drama) which contrast with the habits of
civilised man.
-----
Footnote 113:
_A Chapter on some Organic Laws of Personal and Ancestral Memory_,
1875.
Footnote 114:
_Principles of Psychology_, i., § 214.
-----
These facts seem to me reducible to a single explanation. There are
in every man latent tendencies, which may remain latent throughout
his life, but may also be awakened and revealed by some accidental
occurrence. They might be called hereditary, since they are found in
an inherited organism; but it would be quite as correct to call them
innate. In any case, it is very difficult to prove that they are a
survival, and above all a resurrection of once existing tendencies.
2. Personal unconsciousness arising from cœnæsthesia, _i.e._, from
the internal sensations collectively. This imperceptibly brings us
down to consciousness, from the moment when the affective state can
be verified without induction. A certain disposition, a certain
manner of feeling, is the direct and immediate cause of association.
It is permanent or transitory. If permanent, it answers to the
temperament or disposition. As the subject is cheerful, melancholy,
erotic, or ambitious, an unconscious selection is exercised on the
ideas arising in consciousness; an artist and a practical man, in
face of the same object, have two totally distinct modes of
association. If transitory, it corresponds, in the same individual,
to states of health and sickness, to changes of age; each one of
these distinct states produces a distinct selection. The unity of
certain dreams, in spite of the apparent difference of associations,
has its easily discovered cause in an organic or affective
disposition—fatigue, depression, oppression, circulatory or
digestive troubles, sexual excitement. The simplicity and frequency
of these facts will permit us to dispense with insisting upon them.
3. Personal unconsciousness, a residuum of affective states
connected with anterior perceptions, or with events of our life.
This emotional residuum, although latent, is no less active, and can
be recovered by analysis. This case, one of the most important
connected with our subject, has recently been studied by
Lehmann[115] under the name of displacement (_Verschiebung_) of the
sentiments, and by Sully under the name of _transference_ of
feelings; this second denomination seems to me the clearer and more
accurate of the two.
-----
Footnote 115:
_Hauptgesetze_, etc., pp. 268, 250-357; Sully, _The Human Mind_,
ii. 78; cf. _Outlines of Psychology_, p. 349.
-----
Under its most general form—for its mechanism is not always the
same—the law of transference consists in _directly_ attributing a
sentiment to an object which does not itself cause it. There is no
transference in the sense that the feeling is detached from the
primary event in order to be connected with another; but there is a
moment of generalisation or extension of the sentiment, which
spreads like a drop of oil. This transference can be symbolically
represented. Let us represent an intellectual state by A, and by _s_
the affective state which accompanies it; A by association excites
B, C, D, E, etc., while _s_ is successively transferred to B, C, D,
E, etc. Thus we have, first, (A)/_s_, B, C, D, E, etc., then
(A,B,C,D,E, etc.)/_s_, so that C, D, or E can directly produce _s_
quite as A can, and even without the assistance of A. “The feeling
is excited without the mediacy of the particular presentative
element of which it was originally a concomitant” (Sully).[116] This
law of transfer is of sufficient importance to delay us a little,
because it plays a somewhat important part in the formation of
complex emotions, and we shall need to recall it more than once.
Besides, it does not always operate in the same manner. I
distinguish two principal cases, according as the transfer is the
result of contiguity, or of resemblance.
-----
Footnote 116:
_The Human Mind_, ii. 79.
-----
_Transference by Contiguity._—When intellectual states have
co-existed and formed a complex by contiguity, and one of them has
been accompanied by a special sentiment, any one of these states has
a tendency to excite the same sentiment.
We can find numerous and simple examples in common life. The lover
transfers the sentiment at first called forth by the person of his
mistress to her clothes, her furniture, her house. For the same
reason, hatred and jealousy vent their rage on inanimate objects
belonging to the enemy. In absolute monarchies the reverence in
which the king’s person is held is transferred to the throne, to the
emblems of his power, to everything directly or indirectly connected
with his person. The following charming passage from Herbert Spencer
relates to a less simple case of the same nature: “The cawing of
rooks is not in itself an agreeable sound; musically considered, it
is very much the contrary. Yet the cawing of rooks usually produces
pleasurable feelings—feelings which many suppose to result from the
quality of the sound itself. Only the few who are given to
self-analysis are aware that the cawing of rooks is agreeable to
them because it has been connected with countless of their greatest
gratifications—with the gathering of wild flowers in childhood; with
Saturday afternoon excursions in schoolboy days; with midsummer
holidays in the country, when books were thrown aside and lessons
were replaced by games and adventures in the field; with fresh,
sunny mornings, in after years, when a walking excursion was an
immense relief from toil. As it is, this sound, though not causally
related to all these multitudinous and varied past delights, but
only often associated with them, rouses a dim consciousness of these
delights; just as the voice of an old friend, unexpectedly coming
into the house, suddenly raises a wave of that feeling which has
resulted from the pleasures of past companionship.” We must remark
that in the transfer by contiguity, which, by its very nature is
automatic, the intellectual states act as _causes_, since the
extension of the sentiment is subordinated to them.
_Transference by Resemblance._—When an intellectual state has been
accompanied by a vivid sentiment, every similar or analogous state
tends to excite the same feeling.
In this psychological fact lies the secret of the emotion of love,
tenderness, antipathy, respect, which we feel towards a person at
first sight, without apparent reason, and which we are apt to put
down to the account of instinct. But those who devote themselves to
the analysis of their own consciousness will discover, in many
cases, a more or less close resemblance to a person who inspires, or
has inspired, us with love, tenderness, antipathy, or respect. A
mother may feel a sudden sympathy for a young man who is like her
dead son, or even merely of the same age. The explanation of many of
these cases lies in an unconscious state which is not easy to seize,
but which, if it returns to consciousness (a process in which the
will is only very indistinctly concerned), elucidates everything.
There are also so-called instinctive fears, without conscious
motives, which, by going a little below the surface, can be referred
to the same explanation.[117]
-----
Footnote 117:
This point has been well treated by Lehmann, _op. cit._, p. 244.
-----
This transfer can take place in two ways, one narrow, the other
broad. The narrow method rests on resemblance only: B resembles A,
the perception or representation of whom is or was accompanied by a
certain feeling; the transfer goes no further. The broader method
rests on analogy, and has a much wider scope; it passes from one
individual to several—to a class or classes. “A friend of mine,”
says Lehmann, “hated dogs; circumstances forced him to keep one; he
attached himself to this animal, and gradually his feeling of
sympathy spread to the whole canine race” (_loc. cit._). This
possibility of a limited transfer has been a social and moral factor
of the first importance; it has allowed of the extension of the
sympathetic sentiments from the small exclusive clan to more and
more distant groups—the tribe, the nation, the human race. The wider
transfer has been the great agent of the transition from
particularism to universalism.[118]
-----
Footnote 118:
The mechanism of the suppression of the presentative intermediary
between the initial state A and the distant states O, II, I, etc.,
has been studied by J. Sully (ii. 79). I do not insist on this
point, which belongs rather to the psychology of association than
to that of the emotions.
-----
II.
From the unconscious states to the affective states, of which the
subject is fully conscious, the transition is made gradually and
through doubtful forms; but whether obscure, semi-obscure, or clear,
their influence remains the same. Among the numerous cases in which
the association of ideas depends on a conscious affective
disposition we may distinguish three groups:—
1. Individual, accidental, ephemeral cases. These can be reduced to
a single formula: when two or more states of consciousness have been
accompanied by the same emotional state, they tend to be associated
with one another. Emotional resemblance unites and intertwines
disparate impressions. It is a case of association by resemblance,
_but not intellectual_; impressions are associated because they
resemble one another in a common emotional colouring, not _qua_
impressions. Examples of this are abundant. L. Ferri (in his
_Psychologie de l’Association_, where, by-the-bye, he does not note
this emotional law) tells us that one day, being stung by a fly, he
suddenly remembered a child seen by him, long ago, when himself very
young, on its death-bed. Whence this sudden vision? “In the first
place, I was lying on my bed, then I had been stung by a fly, and
lastly, the sight of the corpse had caused in me a deep sadness,
while, at this same moment, I also happened to be very sad.”
Association through emotional identity or resemblance is of frequent
occurrence in dreams, as has been already said. I remember, among
many others, a dream whose unity, in spite of the apparent
incoherence of the association, was due to a general sense of
fatigue. A road without milestones stretched before me, of which I
was about to complete the last stage; steep mountains kept rising
one behind another; my eyes were wearied with trying to catch sight
of the longed-for town on the horizon; and every time I wished to
inquire the way I had to speak a foreign language which I understand
but imperfectly, and in which it is very difficult for me to express
myself. I awoke, feeling a general aching and heaviness of all the
limbs. Sully relates a dream whose unity consisted in a sense of
anxiety and vexation. He was suddenly called upon to give a lecture
on Herder; he began by stammering out some generalities; then he was
addressed by one of his audience, who suggested difficulties to him;
then the entire assembly broke up tumultuously. One of his children,
who had seen, for the first time, the great clock at Strasburg, and,
after an interval of two days, the Swiss glaciers, dreamed on the
following night that the figures of the clock were walking about on
the snow. In this case the groundwork of the dream is a feeling of
admiration or surprise.
2. Permanent and stable cases; to be met with everywhere, because
involved in the structure of the human mind. They are fixed in
language. When dealing with the expression of the emotions (Chap.
IX.) we met with “the principle of association of analogous
sensations,” formulated by Wundt. Adapting it to our present
subject, we may say that sensations imbued with a similar emotional
colouring are easily associated, and strengthen each other. Nothing
can differ more in nature than our external sensations (except smell
and taste), and the qualities which they make known to us; the data
of sight and hearing have no resemblance to one another as
cognitions of the external world, yet we speak of sombre voices,
clear voices, screaming colours, coloured music. We associate sight
with thermal sensations, as when we speak of warm or cold colours.
Taste also has its share—bitter reproaches, subacid criticism.
Finally, touch, as Sully-Prudhomme has remarked, is perhaps the most
abundant source of associations between the idea of the physical
sensation and an emotional state; compare the terms touching, hard,
tender, heavy, firm, solid, harsh, penetrating, poignant, piquant,
etc. At the bottom of all these associations there is a common
emotional colouring which both causes and supports them. Perhaps it
would be more accurate to class them among the cases of
semi-conscious emotional influence; but we have already said that
our division into conscious and unconscious factors is superficial
and of no great importance.
3. Exceptional and rare cases. Flournoy, in his important work on
“coloured hearing,” rightly explains this anomaly by “emotional
association.” We know that several hypotheses on the origin and
cause of this phenomenon have been constructed. On the embryological
one, it would be the result of an incomplete differentiation between
the sense of sight and that of hearing; a survival, we are told,
from a primitive epoch when this state was the rule. On the
anatomical theory, we suppose anastomoses between the cerebral
centres of the visual and auditory sensations. Besides these we have
the physiological theory, or that of nervous irradiation, and the
psychological, or that of association. I do not inquire if all cases
may be reduced to a single explanation; certainly most seem
reducible to association. We are not, however, dealing with any and
every form of association—it must be a psychological one, as
Flournoy was the first to remark. “By emotional association, I mean
that which establishes itself between two impressions, not on
account of a qualitative resemblance (for the two may be as
disparate as sound and colour), nor in virtue of their regular and
frequent concurrence in the consciousness, but in consequence of the
analogy between their emotional characteristics. Each sensation or
perception possesses, in fact, along with its objective quality or
its intellectual content, a sort of subjective coefficient,
springing from the roots which it sends down into our being, and
from the peculiar way in which it impresses, pleases or displeases,
excites or subdues us, in a word, makes our whole nature vibrate. We
can conceive how two absolutely heterogeneous sensations,
incommensurable as far as their objective content is concerned, such
as a colour and the sound _i_, may be comparable with one another
and resemble each other more or less, by virtue of vibrations
produced by them in the organism; and by the same process of thought
it is conceivable that this emotional factor might become a link
between the two, an associative bond by means of which one awakens
the other.”[119]
-----
Footnote 119:
Th. Flournoy, _Des phénomènes de Synopsie_ (1893), p. 20.
-----
Let us add that we meet, though much more rarely, with cases of
coloured smell and taste, and even, it appears, of coloured
pain.[120] This abnormal association between determinate colours and
determinate tastes, odours, pains, may be explained in the same
manner.
-----
Footnote 120:
Suarez de Mendoza, _L’audition colorée_ (1890), pp. 58, 59.
-----
Shall we attribute to the same cause a fact, ascertained
(exceptionally, however) in the case of certain hysterical subjects
in the hypnotic state, which may be described as follows? The
excitation of certain circumscribed regions of the body immediately
causes to arise in the mind either ideas or feelings which are
imperiously imposed on the consciousness and last as long as the
excitement which provoked them. Pitres, who has made an extended
study of these “_zones idéogènes_,”[121] has discovered about twenty
scattered over various parts of the body in the same subject. The
effect of excitation (by friction or compression) is always the same
in the same individual, but varies from one individual to another,
which excludes the hypothesis of a previously existing mechanism.
Among the feelings aroused by this procedure I note sadness,
cheerfulness, anger, fear, eroticism, piety, ecstasy.
-----
Footnote 121:
_Leçons cliniques sur l’hystérie et l’hypnotisme_, vol. ii.,
lecture 39. Here will be found the historical part of the subject
(Braid, Chambard, Féré) and the personal observations of the
author.
-----
Most writers have limited themselves to the statement of the fact,
without attempting to explain it. Pitres alone proposes the
hypothesis of auto-suggestion, which is not far from an association
of ideas. Must we admit an original fortuitous coincidence between a
local bodily modification and a certain emotional state (or idea),
whence an association through contiguity fixed and strengthened by
repetition, so as to become indissoluble? Or can it be that friction
and compression produce in certain subjects peculiar organic
reactions, capable of exciting a special emotional state? We can
only hazard conjectures.
In conclusion: the influence of emotional dispositions on the memory
is great, and continually active; it contributes to the revival and
association of ideas. Now, the emotional states are not entities,
but modes of consciousness, the psychical equivalents of certain
organic reactions—visual, vaso-motor, or muscular; so that the
emotional influence reduces itself to all this. And is all this to
be reduced to movements? A marked tendency towards this opinion is
visible in several of our contemporaries. Fouillée, as we saw a
little while ago, refers all association to that of impulses;
Horwicz does the same under another form (_loc. cit._). He places in
the feelings the basis of all conservative memory, and the basis of
all feelings in motion. “We recall our emotional state in proportion
as we can reproduce the movements implied in it.” By a different
road—that of experiment—Münsterberg has attempted to show that
so-called successive association is reducible to a rapid
simultaneity, and that, if we suppress all movements during the
reception of impressions, memory is much diminished and reproduction
difficult.[122] It is true that his experiments were limited to
articulatory movements.
-----
Footnote 122:
Sommer (_Zeitschrift für Psychologie_, vol. ii.) reports an
observation on an aphasic patient, which admits of an analogous
interpretation.
-----
I merely indicate in passing this general hypothesis. Whether
admitted or not, the relation between the feelings and the
association of ideas, though often misunderstood, has been
indubitably proved by a mass of facts which, in spite of their
heterogeneous character, all point to the same conclusion.
PART II.
SPECIAL PSYCHOLOGY.
INTRODUCTION.
_Importance of the study of special feelings—Utility of historical
documents—Causes of the evolution of the feelings: (1)
intellectual development; (2) hereditary influence, perhaps
reducible to influences of environment—Cases in which the
evolution of ideas precedes that of feelings—Inverse cases—The
intellect swayed by the principle of contradiction;
feeling by that of finality—Classification of primitive
tendencies—Method to be followed—Group I.: physiological
(reception, transformation, restitution)—Group II.:
psycho-physiological—Group III.: psychological—Their
enumeration._
I.
The special study of the various manifestations of the emotional
life enables us to penetrate much further into psychology than do
the preceding generalities. This study is not a merely supplementary
or elucidatory one to be abbreviated, treated cursorily, or even
omitted altogether, as is done by some representatives of the
intellectualist theory. As long as we have not considered,
_seriatim_ and in detail, every feeling, whether simple or compound,
we have no idea of their rich multiplicity of aspects, of which
general formulas are only meagre abridgments.
Some say or imply, contemptuously, that this is a purely descriptive
study. But so long as we have found no other method of treating the
question, it will always be better than silence. Hitherto,
experimentation applied to the feelings has been kept within very
narrow limits, and has done scarcely anything beyond corroborating
the data furnished by observation. We must therefore modify our
point of view and seek elsewhere; anthropology, the history of
customs, of arts, religions and sciences, will often be more useful
to us than the contributions of physiology. The experiments of the
laboratory inspire some with a faith not to be shaken; but the
evolution of the feelings in time and space, through centuries and
races, is a laboratory, operating, for thousands of years, on
millions of men; and its documentary value is a high one. It would
be a great loss to psychology if these documents were neglected.
Having been long confined to introspective observation, it has
deliberately cut itself off from the biological sciences,
considering them alien or useless to its work. It would not be
desirable to fall into a similar error with regard to the concrete
development of human life, and, after mutilating the study from
below, to do so from above. If the intellectual life has its roots
in biology, it is only in social facts that it can find its full
development. A science never gains by excessive restriction of its
scope; it is better to err in the opposite direction.[123]
-----
Footnote 123:
Among the causes which have given some impulse to the psychology
of the feelings during the last half of this century, Ladd
(_Psychology, Descriptive and Explanatory_, pp. 163, 164)
mentions: (1) the theory of evolution, because the affective
phenomena are fundamental and permanent, and men differ from one
another far less in their appetites, emotions, and passions than
in their ideas and thoughts; and because this doctrine affirms
that, underlying the highest forms of feeling, there is always
some instinctive tendency; and (2) the literary and artistic
movement which began with J. J. Rousseau, and asserts itself more
and more in the Wagnerian music and the modern novel, and which
should invite psychologists to attempt its analysis. It would be
well to add the contemporary sociological studies which have shown
the important part played by emotional elements, simple or
complex, deliberately eliminated by the economists from their
theories of social organisation.
-----
Since, therefore, we have to pass in review all the forms of
feeling, lower and higher, primary and derived, to note the
successive moments of their development, and to follow them in their
transformations, one question dominates our whole subject: what
causes determine the evolution of the feelings?
In order to give to this question a clear and concrete form, let
us take primitive man, as reconstructed by the anthropologists,
not without much hypothesis and conjecture. Whether he were the
ferocious wild beast described by some, or a puny, feeble, naked
being, chipping his first weapons among the rolled flints of a
river-bed, keeping up with difficulty his famished life from day
to day, and finding a precarious shelter from incessant dangers in
the hollows of the rocks, it is in any case certain that he made
originally but a poor figure on the surface of the globe. How has
he progressed from primitive cannibalism to his present moral and
social culture? from the bestial sexual act to chivalrous love?
from coarse fetichism to religious metaphysics or mysticism? from
the rude drawings of the Neolithic age to the refinements of the
æsthetic sentiment? from a narrow and limited curiosity to a
disinterested enthusiasm for science? How has the passage been
accomplished from one extreme to the other? It is clear that a new
form of feeling cannot arise by spontaneous generation; it can
only be the work of a transformation, of a physiological
development. How has this happened? What causes have brought about
this metamorphosis?
The principal, essential, fundamental cause is intellectual
development.
Another cause, adduced by many writers, but more doubtful and more
limited in its action, is transmission by heredity.
1. In spite of its importance, the first cause need not detain us
long, since it can only be presented, for the moment, under the form
of vague generalities. Its action consists in the ascending
progression which rises from the inferior forms of knowledge
(sensations and perceptions) to concrete representations, then to
abstract representations (generic images), then to the medium and
superior forms of abstraction, and involves in its movement
concomitant modifications of affective life produced by reaction.
Primitive man, like the child and the animal, is at first only a
bundle of wants, tendencies, instincts which, when not simply
unconscious, are connected with external or internal tendencies. The
instinct of self-preservation, a synthetic formula expressing a
group of subordinate and convergent instincts, adjusts itself
differently according to circumstances—sometimes defensive,
sometimes offensive. It is only determined by the successive ends
which it has to attain, just as the muscular force of my arm may be
equally well employed in raising a weight, in firing a gun, in
striking a blow, or in caressing. The intellectual element, whatever
it may be, is always the determining principle; never, alone and by
itself, the spring of action. The process always follows the same
course, and remains identical from start to finish; it passes from
the simple into the complex, as we shall see in discussing each
separate emotion. The child who feels acutely the possession of a
toy, or the deprivation of it, is not affected by the beauty of a
landscape, by reason of his limited intellectual power. We know that
(in spite of common opinion) a savage, even a barbarian, is not
moved by the splendours of civilised life, but only by its petty and
puerile sides. Its greater aspects inspire him neither with desire,
admiration, nor jealousy, because he does not understand them.
Bougainville, in the last century, had already remarked this fact,
which has frequently been confirmed since. Speaking of the profound
indifference of the Pacific Islanders to the skilled construction of
his ships and the instruments belonging to them, he says, “They
treat the masterpieces of human industry as laws and phenomena of
nature.”
2. Must we admit heredity as a special and independent cause of
emotional evolution? This problem has been hotly debated. Darwin,
Spencer, and many others following them, admit that certain acquired
variations or modifications in the range of the feelings may be
hereditarily transmitted, then fixed and organised in a race. They
give as examples, fear, the benevolent feelings, the love of nature,
the musical sense, etc.; the sudden return of so-called civilised
individuals to savage or nomad life, for want of a hereditary
tendency fixed by the habit of several generations; while the
co-existence of predatory tendencies with the highest culture is for
them a case of atavism or reversion.[124] On the other hand, the
dominant opinion for the last twenty years (I think it shows
symptoms of declining) is radically opposed to the inheritance of
acquired modifications. Weismann and Wallace, who, more than others,
have touched on the psychological parts of this subject, are
decidedly for the negative. The question is therefore an open one,
and I accept it as such, in order to escape the accusation of a bias
in favour of heredity. But even while admitting that there is no
fact strictly conclusive in favour of the transmission of psychic
peculiarities, it nevertheless remains true that some occurrences of
this sort are probable enough, especially in the pathological order.
These belong to the category of appetites, tendencies, and passions,
much more than to the group of intellectual states. This might have
been foreseen, physiological heredity being more stable than
psychological, and physiological conditions affecting the emotional
life much more immediately than the intellectual.
-----
Footnote 124:
For further details, see my _Hérédité psychologique_, Bk. I. chap.
v. and Bk. III. chap. iii. Bain has discussed the question at
great length from the strictly psychological point of view (_The
Emotions_, chap. ii.). He inclines to a “probability” of
transmission in certain cases.
-----
If then, by a reserve which is perhaps superfluous, we eliminate
heredity as a factor in the evolution of the feelings, the functions
of conservation and consolidation ordinarily attributed to it ought
to be assigned to other causes—the influences of environment,
imitation, tradition, education, with its multitudinous influences.
It is clear that a new mode of emotion, arising in an isolated human
consciousness, cannot last, increase, or become contagious, in
totally different and uncongenial surroundings. Religious mysticism
was irreconcilable with the bloodthirsty cult of the Aztecs; and
what could a native St. Vincent de Paul have done among a tribe of
cannibals, or a Mozart among the Fuegians?
But these influences of environment bring us back, indirectly, to
our original cause; for manners, customs, traditions, institutions,
all these are _ideas_ which, with their accompanying feelings, have
fixed and incarnated themselves in certain acts serving as
starting-points for a new stage in evolution.
Nevertheless, the preceding statements cannot be admitted without
qualification. We have stated it as a law that the intellectual
development involves the evolution of the feelings; but this rule is
not absolute, and should be taken with important reservations. In
the first place, these two forms of evolution rarely advance _pari
passu_. Not to mention the cases in which ideas remain completely
ineffectual and abortive, and produce no movement, their action, in
general, is only felt in the long run, and emotional evolution is
retarded. In the second place, there are certain cases where the
evolution of feelings is _direct_, and precedes that of ideas.
The philosophical historian, Buckle, in his study of the factors of
civilisation, points out two as essential—intellectual progress and
moral progress; after which he puts to himself what he calls a very
grave question: which of these two is the more important, and
dominant over the other? He is decisive in choosing the first.
Buckle’s question is in great part ours; for, though not
comprehending all the manifestations of the emotional life, the
moral sentiments form at least a very important fraction of it. His
answer seems to me a legitimate one; but he was too much imbued with
the notion that it is sufficient for an idea to be true and clearly
conceived to make it an incentive to action; and he seems never to
suspect that an idea can only supplant a feeling on condition of
becoming a feeling itself.[125]
-----
Footnote 125:
The discussion is to be found in his _Civilisation in England_
(vol. i., chap. iv.). It may be summed up in the very questionable
sentence quoted by him from Cuvier, “Le bien qu’on fait aux
hommes, quelque grand qu’il soit, est toujours passager; les
vérités qu’on leur laisse sont éternelles.” He thus counts for
nothing the institutions which have arisen from an original
effort, a new growth of moral sentiment. The saying is a purely
academic aphorism.
-----
The intellect is capable of instantaneously finding out a new truth,
or recognising an idea as just and conformable to the nature of
things; but all this remains in a theoretic condition—_i.e._,
without emotional colouring or tendency to realise itself. That
which is discovered so rapidly by means of logic, takes years, or
even centuries, to become a motive for action. “If the Greeks were
unable to extend their feelings of humanity so as to include the
barbarians, the cause lay, not in intellectual insufficiency, but in
the arrestive power of their national feeling. Christianity
overthrew these barriers, not by means of intellectual reflection,
but by the effect of an acute and deeply-seated feeling. Afterwards,
within the limits of Christianity, intolerance raised new barriers,
and fettered the natural development of religion.”[126] We might
find in history numerous examples of this inertia of the feelings,
as in the case of slavery, etc. We imagine the emotions as in a
state of perpetual motion and instability, whilst a habitual manner
of feeling, in fact, possesses a formidable arrestive power, only
gradually lost under the influence of time. It is a common saying
that an argument has never changed a conviction; but this is only
the case if we regard the present; it can act by incubation and at a
great distance of time.
-----
Footnote 126:
Höffding, _Psychologie_ (4th edit., German translation, 1893), pp.
411-412, where this point is briefly but ably treated.
-----
Another reason for disagreement between the two modes of
development, the intellectual and the emotional, may be expressed
under a form which, though rather pedantic, is clear and precise.
Intellectual evolution is subject to the principle of contradiction,
emotional evolution is not; it is, indeed, subject to a logical
principle to be determined later, but the principle is another. Let
us suppose a purely intellectual being: affirmations and negations
regarding the same object cannot co-exist in his brain; one
eliminates the other. If we suppose a purely emotional being it will
be found that two opposite tendencies can be simultaneously active
in him, each working towards its own end, provided that they do not
bring about the destruction of the individual. In every individual
who contradicts himself there is, at the moment when he contradicts
himself, an emotional element at work. We shall see later on that
this is the key to all contradictory characters, which are quite
natural from the emotional point of view, though they are the
stumbling-blocks of the intellect.
Finally, in certain cases the emotional development is completely
detached from the other, and even in advance of it; this is direct
evolution. Feeling, as has been said, is the pioneer of
knowledge—_i.e._, it sometimes involves a confused knowledge; it is
the anticipation of an ideal. In this case it is not an idea which
excites a feeling, but the development of a feeling which ends by
taking concrete form in an idea; its source is in the temperament
and the character. The theory of evolution has familiarised us with
the notion of spontaneous variations in animals and plants. This
phenomenon is also found in psychology—in the intellectual order, in
the emotional order, in the order of action. We are too much
inclined to believe that inventors, revealers, initiators, exist
only in the region of knowledge or activity; but in the region of
feeling, too, there are spontaneous variations, both serviceable and
injurious. If there are original ways of thinking, there are also
original ways of feeling, which impose themselves on others, create
a contagion. We shall find examples of this in abundance, for these
“variations” have played a great part, especially in the evolution
of the moral sentiment.
These remarks are of too general a character, but will be
supplemented later on, when we come to study each form of emotion in
its turn. Such is the object of our second part. It will consist of
a series of monographs of varying length. Except for a general
survey of the law which seems to govern the dissolution of the
feelings, their pathology will not be treated in a special section,
but will be distributed throughout the work, terminating the study
of each normal form, but only in such measure as will serve to
render their nature more comprehensible, in which case it partakes
of the character of psychology.
II.
Before setting out on our journey we must map out our route. At the
beginning of this work I presented the reader with a general survey
of the emotional life; it will be necessary to return to this
subject in a briefer, more precise, and more limited manner. Since
complex emotions are derived from simple emotions, and the latter
from needs and instincts, whether satisfied or thwarted, from
tendencies which are the direct and immediate expression of our
physical and mental constitution; since the irreducible element is a
motor phenomenon, actual or virtual, realised or in a nascent
condition, it is indispensable to draw up a list of those primitive
tendencies or instincts which are the roots of emotion.
On this point we have very little clear knowledge. Some writers do
not notice it at all; others content themselves with a haphazard
enumeration. W. James, who has seriously occupied himself with the
question, lays down the principle that man has as many instincts as
the animals, and even more, which seems to me indisputable. But his
list, which he closes by saying that some will find it too long and
others too short, contains very heterogeneous elements: instincts
which are certainly primitive, derived instincts (as the love of
possession), instincts whose existence as such is disputed (as
imitation), pathological instincts (as the phobias or pathological
fears, kleptomania, etc.), which last can only be considered
anomalous, and, therefore, very different from simple and
indecomposable instincts.[127]
-----
Footnote 127:
James, _Psychology_, ii. pp. 403-440.
-----
Although it is rash to engage in a campaign in which some have fled
and others failed, we must nevertheless attempt to draw up a list of
primitive instincts (or tendencies), since these are the sources of
all pleasures, pains, emotions, and passions. I can see but one
method of attaining this end—a method long employed in animal
psychology: that of admitting to the list of human instincts only
those which present the following characteristics:—(1) They are
innate. This does not imply that they appear at the very hour of
birth, but that they are anterior to experience, not acquired; that
they appear ready made, as soon as the fitting conditions exist.
Those which are called _deferred_ instincts, which make their
appearance late, such as the sexual instinct in man and many
animals, are none the less innate. (2) They are specific. They exist
in the entire race, except for some individuals, who by reason of
their exemption are, on the point in question, abnormal; so various
instincts are wanting in the idiot. (3) They are fixed, in a
relative sense; for no one now maintains the theory of the absolute
invariability of instinct; and in man its plasticity is extreme,
because a superior power, that of intelligence, moulds and adapts it
to its designs.
These characteristics being determined, it remains to apply them in
chronological order, and, starting with the birth of the individual,
to draw up the catalogue of actual, strictly innate instincts. We
shall then follow the course of life, noting the appearance of every
new and indecomposable instinct, and thus continue till we have
exhausted the list.
I propose to divide the instincts into three groups: the earliest in
date being essentially physiological in its nature, the second
psycho-physiological, the third essentially psychological. We shall
not need to study them all, because some are outside the domain of
general psychology, and others unconnected with the psychology of
the emotions. The enumeration will be made, for the moment, in a
very bald form, like a table of contents.
Group I. These belong to the life which biologists call organic or
vegetative, as opposed to the life of relation. All these converge
towards a single end, the fundamental act of life—nutrition. To
simplify the matter as much as possible, let us divide this act into
three stages: reception, transformation, and restitution.
(1) The first only has any psychological interest, showing itself in
consciousness by two very energetic needs—hunger and thirst. It is
almost superfluous to say that these instincts pass beyond the
bounds of psychology into the domain of sociology, where their
function is a very important one, as is seen by the phenomena of
dearth, famine, theft, crimes, cannibalism, deadly combats for the
possession of a little water, etc. Their pathology is thus more
instructive than one would think, because it states and resolves, as
we shall see, in a simple form, the problem of whether the tendency
is anterior to pleasure and pain.
(2) The stage of transformation is purely physiological. It, too,
shows itself in needs, of which the most pressing is that of
breathing, an indispensable condition of the combustion of matter
and the consequent interstitial exchanges. If air had to be acquired
and conquered, like food, this instinct would show itself in
consciousness, as do hunger and thirst; but this rarely happens
(dyspnœa, asphyxia). Its pathology is not instructive, and only
comprises individual peculiarities, such as always breathing either
hot or cold air, sleeping with open windows, etc.
(3) The stage of restitution outwards (secretions, excretions,
etc.), though showing itself by instinctive movements, is only very
indirectly connected with our subject; and though, in fact,
_nothing_ which takes place in the organism is quite unconnected
with psychology, we may pass this over in silence.
Group II. These instincts belong to the so called relative life, and
correspond to two stages—those of reception and restitution. The
first stage is represented by all the forms of external perception,
and comprises the tendencies connected with the exercise of each of
our senses, the tendency of each sensory organ to fulfil its
function: the eye tends to see, the hand to grasp and feel. These
tendencies, if satisfied, are agreeable; if obstructed, unpleasant.
Hence result pleasure and pain, but not emotions properly so called.
The second stage is represented by all the forms of muscular
movement, tendencies to action, to the production of noises, as in
certain animals, to cries, vocalisation, gestures, and bodily
attitudes. We have seen that all these things, in popular opinion,
serve to express emotions, while, in our view, they are integral
parts of them.
Group III. This group of tendencies no longer has for its end
reception or restitution, but the conservation and development of
the individual as a conscious being. They express not his physical,
but his psychical constitution, his mental organisation under its
different aspects; they embody his needs as a spiritual being; as
breathing, hunger, thirst, etc. embody his needs as a living being.
They all therefore have a psychological character, and are the
source of that complexus of pleasant, painful, or mixed movements
and states which we call emotions.
Let us recall the chronological order of their appearance already
indicated elsewhere: (1) The instinct of conservation under its
defensive form expressed by fear, with its varieties and morbid
forms (_phobias_). (2) The instinct of conservation under its
aggressive form—_i.e._, anger and its derivatives, and (in a morbid
form) the destructive impulses. (3) The sympathetic tendencies and
the tender (non-sexual) emotions. It may, however, be questioned
whether sympathy can be called a tendency in the strict sense; it
seems to me to be rather a general property of sentient beings, a
point which will be examined later. The same thing may be said of
the imitative instinct or tendency to imitation, which does not
appear to be indecomposable.
These three primitive tendencies and emotions, with their
derivatives, form the first storey of the building. Fear and anger
especially have an extremely general character; we can descend very
low in the animal scale before we find them absent. The tender
emotions, based on sympathy (the source of social and moral
emotions), cover a much narrower area; they are, however, to be
found among the lower animals under the form of temporary or
permanent associations.
The other tendencies are slower in appearing, and their circle is
more restricted: (4) The play-instinct, if we use this word to
designate the tendency to expend superfluous activity. This is a
stock which puts forth several branches: (_a_) the need of physical
exercise; (_b_) the taste for a life of adventure; (_c_) the passion
for gambling, which so soon becomes morbid; (_d_) æsthetic activity.
(5) The tendency towards knowledge (curiosity) only appears with a
certain degree of intelligence and attention; at first connected
with the exercise of the senses (looking at an object, touching it,
etc.), it is strictly practical, though at a later stage producing
all the varieties of the intellectual sentiment. (6) At a later
epoch, and perhaps in man alone, are manifested the egotistic
tendencies (self-feeling, _Selbstgefühl_, _amor proprius_), which
express the _ego_, the personality as conscious of itself, and show
themselves in the emotion of pride, or its opposite, and their
varieties. (7) There remains the latest in date (at least in man),
the sex-instinct, of which the exceedingly general character is well
known.
Such are the tendencies which, in my opinion, are the roots of all
simple or compound emotions, present, past, or future. This
assertion will be justified or invalidated by the following studies.
CHAPTER I
THE INSTINCT OF CONSERVATION IN ITS
PHYSIOLOGICAL FORM.
_Hypothesis regarding the relation between the nutritive organs
and the brain—Perversion of the instincts relating to
nutrition—Pathology of hunger and thirst—Proofs furnished of
the priority of these tendencies in relation to pleasure and
pain—Facts in support of this—Negative tendency; disgust—Its
biological value as a protective instinct._
The above title may seem quite unconnected with psychology, or at
least of a nature to throw little light on our subject. This is not
the case. This group of tendencies—for we have seen that the
conservative instinct is a sum, a total—represents the principal
factors in what is called cœnæsthesia, the very soil on which
emotional life grows and bears fruit. Moreover, the nutritive
instincts have their pathology, which enables us to watch, not the
genesis (which would be impossible) of new tendencies, but a radical
transformation, a complete change of orientation, whose effects are
easily observable and instructive. In a normal state the instincts
are presented to us as ready made and in action; we cannot, either
in ourselves or in others, go back to that distant and obscure
period when the unconscious impulse, the blind tendency, showed
itself for the first time, without antecedent experience of the
pleasant or unpleasant consequences. So that our affirmation that
tendency is antecedent to pleasure and pain may be stigmatised as
merely theoretical so long as we are unable to cite indubitable
facts in demonstration of it. These facts we are about to furnish.
I.
The nutritive acts take place in the inmost recesses of the tissues
and organs. By what channels are they connected with the cortex,
either when undergoing its influence or transmitting the echoes of
their slackening, accelerative, and other modifications? On this
point physiologists know little. According to some (Schiff,
Brown-Séquard), there are relations between the digestive tube and
the optic layer, the striated body, the cerebral peduncles; the
psychic actions which modify respiration being transmitted through
the third ventricle and the anterior corpora quadrigemina. The
experiments of Pitres and François-Franck on the sensori-motor zone
of the cortex show that excitement, at any given point, results in:
augmentation, retardation, or even arrest of breathing; acceleration
of the cardiac rhythm, and, if powerful, inhibition or even syncope;
vaso-motor effects, a contraction or relaxation of the bladder; an
influence on uterine contractions; on the secretion of the saliva
and the pancreatic juice, and on trophic action in general.
According to Goltz, the destruction of the anterior lobes produces
atrophy, that of the posterior the contrary effect. These
discrepancies and uncertainties are to us of small importance; but
it remains certain that the nutritive functions especially depend on
the pneumogastric and the great sympathetic nerves, that they are in
some manner represented in the cerebral cortex and form the
principal contents of cœnæsthesia. Though in the adult they play
only a latent and intermittent part by reason of the preponderance
of external sensations, images, and ideas, it is probable that in
animals, particularly in voracious ones, the functions are inverted,
and that cœnæsthesia, as a synthesis of the organic functions,
passes to the front rank. This has even been asserted to be the case
in children and savages, the argument being based on the fact that
they have, in proportion, larger stomachs and longer intestines, and
on various other characteristics.[128] However this may be, when
deep-seated disturbances take place in the organism, cœnæsthesia is
modified; which involves modification of the tendencies, and,
consequently, of the position of pleasure and pain.
Footnote 128:
Brugia, _Patologia della cenestesia_ (1893).
The facts I am about to enumerate relate to nutritive needs only;
but we shall find their equivalents or analogies in the other
manifestations of emotional life. We can, therefore, already
generalise so far as to say that when abnormal or morbid tendencies,
however absurd or violent, show themselves, their satisfaction
involves pleasure, their non-satisfaction, pain. Where the normal
man, with normal tendencies, places pleasure, the abnormal man, with
abnormal tendencies, places pain. Conversely, that which the man
with normal tendencies feels to be agreeable, the man with abnormal
tendencies feels to be unpleasant. Pleasure and pain follow the
changes of tendency, as the shadow follows the movements of the
body.
Let us look at the facts. We have at this moment to do only with the
perversion of instincts relative to nutrition.
Pregnancy produces during the first few months digestive,
circulatory, secretory disturbances, incomplete nutrition, and at
the same time those grotesque aberrations of appetite, those
depraved tastes, which every one knows, and of which the catalogue
would be endless. Not to digress from the subject of this chapter, I
say nothing of those morbid tendencies of another kind which show
themselves at the same time in some women—homicidal or suicidal
tendencies, aversion to husband, kleptomania, etc.
In anæmic, chlorotic, hysteric, and other subjects, if badly
nourished, we sometimes find an acute pleasure in earth, straw,
tobacco, chalk, sand, charcoal, etc., and an aversion to the most
savoury foods.[129]
Footnote 129:
I must here repeat Briquet’s remark on this point: “However
strange these appetites may appear, their origin can frequently be
discovered. Thus a young woman, who would greedily devour the
embers of her foot-warmer, told me that she had, from the
beginning, been fond of the crust of bread; from this she came to
like the crust of toasted bread, then charred bread, and so
gradually acquired the taste for small pieces of charcoal. I am
inclined to think that, were we to inquire into the origin of many
of these strange tastes, we should find it as simple as the
above.” Pierre Janet (_État mental des hystériques_, ii. p. 71)
transcribes this passage, and adds, “I have often followed this
advice and been in a position to appreciate its value.” This
psychological inquiry is very ingenious, but only removes the
difficulty a stage further back. It shows us through what series
of associations the final result is attained; but association
alone is not sufficient to arrive at this result, still less to
render it permanent. It is only the external mechanism which
explains, at the utmost, why the deviation should have taken this
particular direction. Many persons are fond of crust, even of
burnt crust, who will never come to have the slightest appetite
for charcoal. Many have eaten charcoal out of curiosity, or by
accident, but without acquiring a taste for it. It is some deeper
and more powerful cause than association which lies at the root of
these feelings and renders them active.
There are many instances of hypochondriacs searching for and
devouring with enjoyment worms, toads, spiders, caterpillars, etc.;
and the beginning of insanity is often marked by an eccentric and
disordered dietary.
Again, at a still lower stage, we have coprophagy and scatophagy
(the swallowing of excrements, urine, the contents of spittoons,
etc.), which are rarely, if ever, found in any but idiots and those
suffering from dementia, _i.e._, in beings whose simplest instincts
have been abolished or perverted. The voracity of certain idiots has
been attributed to paralysis of the gastric branch of the vagus
nerve.[130]
-----
Footnote 130:
For details, see Campbell “On the Appetite in Insanity,” in the
_Journal of Mental Science_, July 1886, pp. 193 _et seq._, and
Belmondo, “Pervertimenti dell’istinto di nutrizione,” in
Tamburini’s _Rivista_, 1888, pp. 1 _et seq._, where is cited the
case of an insane patient in whose stomach were found 1841
objects, such as nails, bits of lead, and the like, weighing in
all eleven (English) pounds, ten ounces.
-----
The same would apply to the sense of smell, so intimately associated
with that of taste that it has justly been called “tasting at a
distance.” (We must not, moreover, forget its close connection with
the sex-instinct.) Certain persons, who cannot endure the most
delicate aromas, enjoy the odour of valerian, of asafœtida, and of
still more repulsive substances.
To sum up, we may say that, in a given race, at a given moment of
its development, there is a certain average of alimentary tastes,
whose satisfaction is pleasurable; but on the appearance of
deep-seated disturbances in the organism everything is changed,
tendencies, desires, and aversions; the pleasurable and painful
states, _which are merely effects_, vary with and in the same manner
as their cause.
The physiological acts, which have for their aim the maintenance of
nutrition, scarcely enter into the consciousness, except under the
guise of hunger and thirst, whose psychology cannot be studied here,
because it forms part of another department—that of the sensations.
All the phenomena previously enumerated are reducible to anomalies
or deviations of hunger. The pathology of thirst is simpler, for it
may be summed up as dipsomania, a condition whose modalities and
clinical varieties have no interest as regards the psychology of
instinct; but so far as this need is concerned, the transformation
of the normal and natural tendency into a morbid one does not differ
in its mechanism and results from what we have already stated in the
case of hunger.
There exist, in general and special treatises, many descriptions of
dipsomania to which we may refer the reader. Leaving aside all
hallucinations, motor disturbances, intellectual and moral
decadence, we shall only consider the genesis, the development, and
the consolidation of this morbid tendency.
“It is not every one who can be a dipsomaniac.” To drink too much,
whether voluntarily or by accident, is a thing which may happen to
any one; but such an occurrence does not necessarily bear the fatal
and inexorable character of an insatiable instinct. The period of
incubation—_i.e._, of gradual action tending towards complete
metamorphosis—presents clearly-marked psychological characteristics,
showing a disturbed state of cœnæsthesia and belonging to the region
of the emotions: _malaise_, sadness, lack of energy and courage,
apathy, moral insensibility, vague presentiments of danger. After
this the eruption takes place in the form of an intense, devouring
thirst. Many try to react on this and cheat themselves by the aid of
water or mucilaginous substances, which shows, as several writers on
the subject have remarked, that alcoholism properly so called is
only a paroxysm: under the pressure of a progressively intensified
craving the decisive step is taken. We shall find a great variety in
the numerous observations published on this subject, a struggle at
the beginning only, a struggle preceding every attack, indignation
of the patient against himself, under the influence of which he
calls himself names, and forces himself to swallow strange and
repugnant beverages; all these phenomena are found in various cases.
To sum up, the history of this psychological metamorphosis is
briefly this: incubation, formation of a fixed idea, obsession,
final fall.
It is scarcely necessary to point out once more that the primary
fact is the transformation of a natural tendency, in consequence of
changes in the organism, and that satisfaction and appeasement only
come _afterwards_.
II.
Nutrition—_i.e._, the essential act of physiological life—is
safeguarded by two distinct kinds of tendencies. (I am still
speaking of those only which come within the bounds of
consciousness, and therefore have a psychological character.) On the
one hand, we have the positive tendencies, consisting in an
attraction towards and attack on the external world (in this case,
food and drink)—viz., hunger and thirst. On the other hand, the
negative tendencies consisting in aversion, refusal, flight, and
summed up in the state known as disgust.
Disgust is due to excitement of the pneumogastric nerve, producing
vomiting, nausea, or mere _malaise_. This repulsive instinct is
connected (1) directly and immediately with taste and smell, two
senses which can scarcely be isolated, and whose function is to
watch over all substances entering the organism; (2) indirectly and
through association of ideas with visual and tactile sensations
(sticky, slimy bodies, etc.), by analogy and metaphorically with
certain objects which have nothing in common with the nutritive
functions—the ugly, the immoral, etc. In virtue of that law of
transference or association of analogous sensations, of which we
have spoken, the tendency departs more and more from its primary
form; but in all cases there is a common groundwork of repulsion,
refusal, desire to escape, etc.
Disgust under its primary form (the only one now occupying us) has
not been much studied. Writers have contented themselves with
classing it among organic sensations, while neglecting its emotional
side, _i.e._, its function in the conservation of the individual.
The only work I know on this subject is the excellent monograph of
Ch. Richet,[131] of which I here give a summary.
-----
Footnote 131:
“On the Causes of Disgust,” in _L’Homme et l’Intelligence_, pp.
41-84.
-----
Disgust is connected with conservation; it is “an instinctive
feeling of protection.” In order to justify this statement, the
author passes in review the various objects in nature, noting those
which inspire us with disgust, and inquiring into the cause of this.
The inorganic kingdom, in general, leaves us indifferent; yet
sulphuretted hydrogen, ammonia, and various other gases cause a
marked repulsion. This is the effect of an association of ideas; the
smell recalls that of decomposition, of a corpse. As regards the
vegetable kingdom, the herbivora, by reason of their diet, are the
best subjects for observation; their instinct scarcely ever deceives
them in the choice of food. We are reminded that, on their arrival
in the New World, the Spaniards, hesitating before an unknown flora,
whose properties were unknown to them, trusted the judgment of their
horses. In man, Richet attributes the repellent influence exerted by
bitter aromas to the fact that they frequently co-exist with toxic
properties; he takes as types the vegetable alkaloids (quinine,
nicotine, etc.), whose power as poisons is in some degree
proportioned to their bitterness. So that we have always, at bottom,
“the love of life and the horror of death.” In the animal kingdom
disgust is aroused by putrescent matter, which indicates or suggests
cadaveric decomposition and toxic substances; by parasites, by
animals really venomous, or so reputed; for instinct, which sees
everything in mass, confounds in the same repugnance the toad and
the frog, the venomous serpent and the harmless snake.
In its general bearing, the thesis of the finality of disgust is
incontestable. There are, no doubt, many exceptions, many facts
difficult to explain (some have been pointed out by Richet); but if
we take into account the complexity of the question, all objections
fall to the ground.
That tastes are not to be argued about is a platitude which has
been worn threadbare for centuries past. Taken literally, it would
reduce disgust to a purely intellectual manifestation, with no
biological bearing; it would deprive it of all specific character,
and utterly eliminate it as an instinct. This, however, is a
merely superficial position. Contradictions in taste may be
compared with contradictions in morality. Variations in manners
and customs, according to race, epoch, country, and even caste, do
not exclude the existence of a law which has this characteristic
common to all cases—that it is derived from the conditions of
existence of each group, and is by that right imposed on it. In
the same way, disgust exists everywhere, under one form or
another, as a protective instinct. The question is complicated, in
man, by his intellectual development, and the consequent
modification, transformation, or even suppression of this
instinct. Between reasoned knowledge and instinctive tendency a
battle has been fought, in which the victory inclined sometimes to
one side, sometimes to the other. We know the repugnance of
animals towards a change of food. The same thing is seen in
children, and in the inferior races, when not pressed by
necessity. Plasticity grows with civilisation.
We may add to this the necessity for new adaptations; thus, in a
besieged town, people devour unclean food; the instinct of
physiological conservation is a “divided house,” where the positive
form struggles against the negative with results, varying in
different individuals. To this antagonism between primitive instinct
and more complex rational motives let us add the influence of
imitation and of fashion, and there will remain few or no
unexplained exceptions.
As for the _origin_ of this instinct, if we accept the hypothesis of
acquired modifications, we may say that the animals and men best
fitted for abstaining from hurtful substances, have _ipso facto_
better chances of survival, and that they have been able to transmit
to their descendants certain qualities which became fixed and
organised as an innate tendency. Whether or not we admit this
hypothesis does not matter, our only aim being to remind the reader
that disgust is not a capricious and irrelevant phenomenon, but has
its roots in the unconscious depths of our organisation.
CHAPTER II.
FEAR.
_Fear the conservative instinct under its defensive
form—Physiology—Psychology—First stage: Instinctive
fear—Hypothesis of heredity—Second stage: Fear founded on
experience—Pathology—Morbid or pathological fears—Two periods in
their study—Attempts at classification—How are they derived from
normal fear? Two groups, connected respectively with fear and
disgust—Inquiry into the immediate causes: events in life of
which a recollection has been retained; of which no recollection
has been retained—Occasional transformation of a vague state
into a precise form._
The instinct of individual conservation, under its defensive form,
is the origin of the emotion called fear, and its varieties. We have
already said, more than once, that it is the first in chronological
order of appearance, showing itself, according to Preyer, at
twenty-three days; according to Perez, at two months; while Darwin
puts it as late as the fourth month. It is the first manifestation
in the consciousness of emotion properly so called, as a
psycho-physiological complexus. Following the method which will be
invariably applied to every emotion, simple or composite, we shall
examine in turn its psychology and its pathology.
I.
It has been defined as “the particular emotive reaction which takes
place through a sufficiently vivid and persistent representation of
possible pain or evil.”[132] This formula, though good in the
majority of cases, does not seem applicable to the first stage of
fear, as we shall see presently.
Footnote 132:
J. Sully, _The Human Mind_, vol. ii. p. 91. The reader should also
consult Mosso’s well-known monograph on _Fear_ (English tr.), and
Bain, _The Emotions_, ch. viii. Fear has been tolerably well
studied. The absence of monographs concerned with the other
emotions is another proof that emotional psychology is yet in its
infancy, whereas for the memory, perceptions, images, etc., we
find, on the contrary, a large number of special studies on
special points.
The physiology of fear has been worked out by Darwin, Mantegazza,
Mosso, and Lange. I prefer the last writer’s description, as being
more systematic; it is not a collection of isolated facts, but a
logically arranged synopsis. We know already the importance attached
by him to the physiological conditions of each emotion. The
characteristic marks of fear are:—
1. As regards the innervation of the voluntary muscles: a greater
weakening than in the case of sorrow, a convulsive tremor; in
extreme cases, suppression of all movement, one is fixed to the
spot; voice hoarse and broken, or complete dumbness; in short, a
more or less accentuated paralysis of the whole voluntary motor
apparatus.
2. As regards the muscles of organic life: arrest of the lacteal
secretion, of menstruation, of the salivary secretion; the mouth
dry, the tongue adhering to the palate; cold sweats, “goose-flesh,”
bristling of the hair, arrest of respiration, oppression,
constriction of the throat. Fear also, as is well known, influences
the intestinal secretions.
3. As regards the vaso-motor apparatus: a spasmodic constriction of
the vessels, shiverings, violent spasm of the heart; and if the
impression is of excessive violence, paralysis, which may end in
death; pallor, and peripheral anæmia.
These manifestations collectively express a lowering of the vital
tone which in no other emotion is so complete and so clearly marked.
It has been maintained with reason that fear has a teleological
character, that it is adapted to an end—that of withdrawing,
escaping, exposing one’s self as little as possible to attack, and
remaining on the defensive in view of possible approaching evil.
However, the case is not so simple as it appears. The slight or
moderate forms of fear, through the feeling of weakness produced by
them in the consciousness, are a protection against hurtful actions
by inducing withdrawal or flight. But the grave forms, such as
terror and fright, accompanied by trembling and motor annihilation,
place us face to face with a great difficulty. When existence is
menaced, at the most decisive moment, when attack, defence, or
flight is urgently demanded, we see men and animals, paralysed with
agitation, fall victims, unable to make any use of what strength
they have. Darwin confines himself to remarking that the problem is
very obscure (ch. xiii.). Mantegazza (_op. cit._, ch. vii.) alleges
that trembling is extremely useful, because it tends to produce heat
and warm the blood, which, under the influence of terror, would soon
grow cold. Mosso has very good reasons to oppose to his compatriot’s
thesis. He considers the “cataplexy” which accompanies the extreme
forms of fear as a grave imperfection of the organism. “One would
think that nature, in making the brain and spinal cord, was unable
to devise a substance of extreme excitability which should at the
same time, under the influence of exceptionally strong stimuli, be
capable of never passing in its reactions beyond the limits needful
for the preservation of the animal.” In short, terror and fright
appear to him in the light of morbid phenomena. From the
naturalistic point of view this extra-teleological position is
perfectly admissible. A finalist conception of the world admits of
no exceptions, and has to explain everything according to its own
principle; but if we content ourselves with saying that the
conditions of existence of a living being are sometimes given,
sometimes absent, we have no more to do but verify the cases in
which they are wanting and the occurrences logically following
therefrom.
The psychology of fear includes two stages, to be studied quite
distinctly. There is a primary, instinctive, unreasoning fear
preceding all individual experience, and a secondary, conscious,
reasoned fear posterior to experience. They are generally confounded
with one another, and as the second is by far the most frequent, it
serves as the typical form in descriptions.
_First Stage._—Numerous observations prove the existence of an
innate fear, not attributable to any individual experience. In
children, Preyer[133] maintains the existence of “a hereditary fear
manifesting itself on occasion.” Many are afraid of dogs and cats,
though they have never been bitten or scratched; thunder makes them
cry out—why? The fear of falling, says the same author, during first
attempts at walking, is as strange as the fear shown towards
animals. At fourteen months, this writer’s son could not venture to
take a step without support, and was full of terror if the person
holding him let go; yet he had never experienced a fall. He
concludes, very justly, that “it is quite erroneous to think that
the child who has not been taught to fear things does not know fear.
The courage or fearfulness of the mother certainly exercises a great
influence; but there are in children so many cases of motiveless
fear that we must admit some hereditary influence.” The same fact
has been observed in young animals: Spalding’s experiments on
newly-hatched chickens and their instinctive terror of the hawk are
well known. Preyer repeated this experiment, with like results.
Gratiolet, as I have already said, relates that a little dog, who
had never seen a wolf, on smelling a piece of the skin of that
animal, was seized with indescribable terror. Adult man, though his
fears are in general based on experience, sometimes manifests (at
least this is the case with ignorant and primitive people) vague,
unconscious fears of the unknown, of darkness, of mysterious powers,
witchcraft, sorcery, magic, etc. Ignorance is a great source of
terror; and Bain has said, not without reason, that knowledge is the
great remedy against fear.
Footnote 133:
_Die Seele des Kindes_, chap. vii.
How shall we explain the apprehension of an evil which has never
been experienced? Even if we admit that fear may sometimes, and from
the very beginning of life onward, start from analogies,
resemblances, associations of ideas, there remain many cases which
can be reduced to no simple form. We have seen that Preyer,
following Darwin, Spencer, and other evolutionists, admits the
influence of heredity. It is a well-known fact that birds on
uninhabited islands show no fear when they see man for the first
time; they are taught by hard experience to distrust him, and the
acquired fear is, on this theory, transmitted to their descendants.
According to this hypothesis, fear would be, always and everywhere,
the result of experience, whether individual or ancestral, and what
we have called the second stage would be the first, and indeed the
only one.
This explanation is naturally rejected by those who refuse to
believe in the inheritance of acquired qualities, though they have
nothing satisfactory to propose in its place. Besides, this is a
question of origin, on which experimental psychology may well
recognise its incompetence. Not to remain on debatable ground, we
must admit—since individual experience cannot be appealed to—that
the bases of fear exist in the organism, form part of the
constitution of animals and men, and help them to live by a
defensive adaptation, which in most cases proves useful. As for the
obscure mechanism of this instinctive fear, we may suppose that
certain sensations produce a painful shock which excites the
organic, motor, and vaso-motor relations constituting emotion, and
that the conservative instinct, in order to escape _actual_ pain,
reacts blindly, with or without profit. This makes it impossible to
explain certain innate fears by reason.
For my own part, I consider the hypothesis of a hereditary
disposition to certain fears as extremely probable.[134]
Footnote 134:
Since the above was written the same conclusion has been reached
by Professor Stanley Hall in a report founded on a statistical
inquiry into the fears (some 6500 in number) of 1700 children and
young persons. He concludes that “we must assume the capacity to
fear or to anticipate pain, and to associate it with certain
objects and experiences, as an inherited _Anlage_, often of a far
higher antiquity than we are wont to appeal to in psychology.” He
considers that such fears are analogous to rudimentary physical
organs, though they still retain a certain use. (“A Study of
Fears,” _American Journal of Psychology_, vol. viii., No. 2,
1897.)—ED.
_Second Stage._—The definition given above may be unrestrictedly
applied to conscious and reasoned fear posterior to experience. It
is based, not on the intellectual, but on the emotional memory. The
attempts of the earlier associationists to account for fear as a
mere product of association, as in James Mill’s doctrine that it is
the idea of a painful sensation associated with the idea of its
being future, were wholly inadequate through ignoring the essential
factor, the emotional element, the organic disturbance.[135] If I am
to be afraid of the extraction of a tooth, it is necessary that, in
the memory of a former operation, its painful colouring should be
revived, at any rate in a modified form; if I have only a dry
recollection, with no physiological vibration, fear will not arise.
There is no need to insist on a point already fully treated of in
the First Part.
Footnote 135:
J. Sully, _op. cit._, ii. 91.
It results from this that we are accessible to fear in proportion as
the representation of future evil is intense, _i.e._, emotional and
not intellectual, felt and not understood. In many persons the
absence of fear only amounts to the absence of imagination. This
explains how it is that every lowering of vitality, whether
permanent or temporary, predisposes to this emotion; the
physiological conditions which engender (or accompany it) are all
ready; in a weakened organism fear is always in a nascent condition.
The emotion which now occupies us exists in all degrees, from such
feeble forms as suspicion and apprehension to the extreme ones of
panic and terror. These gradations, fixed by language, cannot have a
distinct psychological description made of each of them.
Nevertheless, Bain has attempted to enumerate the different kinds of
fear, and some experiments of Féré’s indicate the different
physiological effects following each degree of fear.[136] When an
owl, a serpent, or a spectre was caused to appear, by suggestion,
the muscular reaction, shown in graphic tracings, was different in
every case.
Footnote 136:
_Dégénérescence et Criminalité_, pp. 28 _sqq._, with the
illustrative figures.
II.
To draw a distinction between the normal and morbid forms of fear is
a task which, at first sight, might appear tolerably difficult. We
have, however, a criterion to guide us. Every form of fear which,
instead of being useful, becomes hurtful, which, ceasing to be a
means of protection, becomes a means of destruction, is
pathological. We have already (Part I., chap. iv.) indicated the
marks which enable us to discriminate between the healthy and the
morbid; I recall them once more.
Morbid emotion presents one or more of the following
characteristics: it is apparently disproportionate to its cause; it
is chronic; its physical accompaniments are of extraordinary
intensity.
On the question of morbid fears, now known by the name of _phobias_,
there exists a great mass of observations, notes, and papers, which
is increasing day by day, and contains far more enumerations and
descriptions than attempts at explanation. J. Falret and Westphal
(in his essay on agoraphobia, 1872) seem to be the first who have
entered on this path. To Westphal’s fear of open spaces and Falret’s
fear of contact may be added many others; and we pass through a
first period, where we find a veritable deluge of _phobias_, each
having its special name; one person fears needles, another glass,
one low places, another high places, one water, another fire, etc.
Every morbid manifestation of fear is immediately fitted
with a Greek designation, or one so reputed, and we have
aïcmophobia, belenophobia, thalassophobia, potamophobia, etc., even
siderodromophobia (the fear of railways) and triakaidekaphobia (fear
of the number 13!). The list of these _phobias_ would fill pages,
and it is clear that there is no reason why it should ever stop; all
the objects in creation might be included in it, if clothed in
pseudo-Greek garb.
Accordingly, a reaction has taken place. Instead of, as was at first
done, considering each phobia separately, naming it after its
object, and so losing one’s self in endless varieties, the tendency
now is to regard them only as individual cases of a general morbid
disposition, whose essential psychological characteristics are a
fixed idea or obsession, and symptoms of fear sometimes reaching the
dimensions of a paroxysm, and expressing themselves in convulsions
and hysterical attacks.
Several classifications have been proposed, with a view to
introducing some order into this multiplicity. Some proceed
subjectively, classifying according to the sensations, perceptions,
images, ideas, or feelings which form the basis of the fear. Thus
the fear of contact is connected with touch, agoraphobia with sight,
and so on. Others proceed objectively; Régis proposes five groups:
(1) the fear of inanimate objects; (2) of living beings (fear of
crowds, solitude, inoffensive animals); (3) of spaces (agoraphobia,
claustrophobia); (4) of meteorological phenomena; (5) of illness
(nosophobia, with its very numerous varieties). To be accurate,
these classifications, though they may be useful to the clinical
lecturer, are of no great advantage to the psychology of fear; the
interesting problem lies elsewhere.
Before reaching this, let us remark that, apart from any particular
fears, there exist some observations on a vague but permanent state
of anxiety or terror, which has been called panphobia, or
pantophobia (Beard). This is a state in which the patient fears
everything or nothing, where anxiety, instead of being riveted on
one object, floats as in a dream, and only becomes fixed for an
instant at a time, passing from one object to another, as
circumstances may determine.
If, leaving aside the endless enumeration of the kinds of fear and
their description, we seek—for this is the task incumbent on
psychology—to determine their derivation from normal fear, and the
causes which excite them, we enter an almost unexplored region and
pass from riches to indigence.
As far as concerns their psychological origin, _i.e._, the
determination of the normal type from which they are deviations, I
propose reducing them to two groups.
The first is directly connected with fear, and includes all
manifestations implying in any degree whatever the fear of pain,
from that of a fall or the prick of a needle to that of illness or
death. The second is directly connected with disgust, and seems to
me to include the forms which have sometimes been called
_pseudophobia_ (Gélineau). Such are the fear of contact, the horror
of blood, and of innocuous animals, and many strange and causeless
aversions.
Let us remark, furthermore, that fear and disgust have a common
basis, being both instruments of protection or defence. The first is
the defensive-conservative instinct of the relative life, the second
the defensive-conservative instinct of the organic life. As both
have a common basis of aversion, they show themselves in equivalent
ways: fear by withdrawal, departure, flight; disgust by vomiting or
nausea. The reflexes of disgust are the succedanea of flight; the
organism cannot escape by movement in space from the repugnant body
which it has taken into itself, and goes through a movement of
expulsion instead.
After having traced back all morbid fears to two sources—which may
indeed be reduced to one—we have to seek for their causes. One very
general cause, with which most authors content themselves, is
degeneracy. I shall speak of this elsewhere (see Conclusion); but as
it is constantly brought in to explain the most dissimilar
manifestations, it assumes such a general character that it becomes
necessary to supplement it. Let us then, if any importance is
attached to this, assume degeneracy as the soil on which morbid
fears spring up and multiply; then let us seek the complementary
causes, which are less vague and nearer to the facts. I would
propose three such.
1. The cause is in some event of a man’s previous life _of which he
retains the recollection_. For example: A man walking on a terrace
on the top of his house failed to perceive that the balustrade was
missing at one spot; he was walking backwards, and would have fallen
over the edge had he not been stopped; he contracted permanent
agoraphobia.[137] A morbid fear of railways is frequently found in
overworked engineers, and especially in men who have narrowly
escaped with their lives in a railway accident. The well-known case
of Pascal seeing an abyss at his left side, which prevented him from
walking forward unless some one held him by the hand, or a chair was
placed for him to lean on, was a consequence of his accident at the
bridge of Neuilly. It is also said that Peter the Great, having been
nearly drowned when a child, felt, on passing a bridge, a fear which
he had some difficulty in overcoming.
-----
Footnote 137:
Gélineau, _Des peurs maladives_, p. 34; see also pp. 18, 109, 126,
169, etc.
-----
We can easily see that many _phobias_ come under this category. Now,
the cause here is only the exaggeration of a normal fact. Every
serious accident leaves behind it a recollection, which, for some,
is merely a bald record of the event and the circumstances
(intellectual memory), for others, a revival in some degree of the
fear formerly experienced (emotional memory); for “phobic” subjects
it is (at least potentially) a permanent state, ready to arise when
suggested by some association.[138]
-----
Footnote 138:
Many “phobias” seem to me fresh proofs in favour of the existence
of a true emotional memory.
-----
2. Some morbid fears have their origin in occurrences of childhood
_of which no recollection has been retained_. When appealing to the
unconscious memory, we place ourselves in a fatally unfavourable
position; we enter the domain of the obscure and hypothetical, and
lay ourselves open to criticism of all sorts, all the more so as
some writers have made an excessive use of the explanation by the
unconscious. A minute inquiry into each particular case would be
needed. If, however, this hypothesis is difficult to justify by
means of positive proof, the part played by the unconscious in
psychic life, and particularly with regard to the memory, is so
incontestable that we may legitimately admit its sure though secret
action. Perhaps those who are seized by strange fears might, if they
questioned themselves, discover the cause in some past occurrence.
Here, at least, is a case which I give as typical of this group.
Mosso asked a soldier, aged seventy, what he had been most afraid of
in his life, and the man’s reply was, “I have been face to face with
death in many battles; but I am never so frightened as when I come
across a lonely chapel in a remote part of the mountains; because,
when quite a child, I once saw in such a place the corpse of a
murdered man, and a maidservant wished to shut me up with it as a
punishment.”[139] Supposing the conscious recollection to be
gradually effaced with years, the impression might well remain
indelible, though latent, becoming active under given circumstances.
Is it rash to say that there are many cases of this kind, with this
difference, that the traces leading back to the original cause have
vanished?
-----
Footnote 139:
_Fear_, chap. xi.
-----
Cases of strange and insurmountable fear or antipathy have been
noticed in some celebrated men: Scaliger was seized with nervous
trembling at the sight of water-cress, Bacon fainted during
eclipses, Bayle at the sound of running water, James I. at the sight
of a naked sword (Morel). Among average human beings many like cases
occur, but never become known, for lack of biographers to record
them. I am inclined to think that there lies at the root of them
some impression of early childhood, embedded in the constitution of
the individual, and originating a repulsive tendency which acts as
though it were natural.
3. The morbid fear may be the result of the _occasional_ passage of
a vague and indeterminate state into a precise form. Panphobia,
mentioned above, might be a preparatory stage, an undifferentiated
period, to which chance, a sudden shock, for instance, may give a
direction and fix it, as in the fear of epidemics, of microbes, of
hydrophobia, etc. This is the passage from a diffused emotional
state to the intellectualised state, _i.e._, one concentrated and
embodied in a fixed idea: an analogous process to that of the
“delusions of persecution,” in which the suspicion, at first vague,
attaches itself to an individual and will not be diverted from him.
The cases, much less frequent than others, in which several distinct
fears coexist, seem to me to be distinguished from this group. In
short, the true cause is a general state (an emotive condition of
fear), but chance plays a great part in it.
I do not pretend to explain everything by means of these three kinds
of causes. When we come to examine the legion of morbid fears we are
often greatly embarrassed by cases which refuse to come under any of
the rules. Here is a well-known and very trite one: the sight of
blood producing _malaise_ or even syncope. This is inexplicable by
reason, since the blood is the life; but reason has nothing to do
with the matter. Let us seek elsewhere. It might be said that blood
recalls violent pain, destruction, slaughter; but its sight affects
children who can have no such recollections. Some have tried to
explain it by constitutional weakness or nervousness, but syncope
sometimes takes place in very vigorous subjects,[140] while
neuropaths remain unaffected. Heredity has been called in, but I
fail to see what it explains, for, going back from generation to
generation, we must come at last to the primitive men, fighters who
were not afraid of blood. Many other explanations might be proposed,
which might be met by other criticisms.
-----
Footnote 140:
See a curious case in Gélineau, _op. cit._, p. 99.
-----
I have cited this single fact in order to show that, so soon as we
pass beyond the enumeration and description of morbid fears, and try
to trace their origin, we enter on a part of the subject which is
almost untouched.
CHAPTER III.
ANGER.
_Anger the conservative instinct in its offensive
form—Physiology—Psychology—Anger passes through two stages, one
simple, the other mixed—Its evolution—Animal form, or that of
actual aggression—Emotional form, or that of simulated
aggression—Appearance of a pleasurable element—Intellectualised
form, or that of deferred aggression—Pathology: Epileptic
insanity, corresponding to the animal form; the maniacal state,
corresponding to the affective form—Disintegrated forms of
anger—Overpowering tendencies to destructiveness—How do they
arise and take a definite direction?—Return to the reflex
state—Essential cause: temperament—Accidental causes._
I.
The instinct of individual conservation, under its offensive form,
is the origin of anger—the type of violent and destructive
tendencies. This emotion is the second in chronological order,
appearing at two months, according to Perez, and, definitely, at ten
months, according to Darwin and Preyer.
Bain defines it as “a conscious impulse which drives one to inflict
suffering and to draw a positive enjoyment from the fact.” This
definition does not seem to me strictly applicable to the inferior
or animal forms of anger, as we shall see presently.
Considered objectively, or from without, anger presents itself with
very clearly defined characters as regards its physiology and its
mode of expression.[141]
-----
Footnote 141:
For detailed descriptions see Darwin, chap. x.; Lange, _op. cit._;
Mantegazza, _op. cit._, chap. xiii. The latter transcribes the
picture drawn by Seneca in his _De Ira_, and is of opinion—in
which I agree with him—that it is traced by a master hand.
-----
1. Dilatation of the blood-vessels, augmentation of the cutaneous
circulation, redness and swelling. This is also found in joy, but,
remarks Lange, with less intensity. Besides, anger has a special
manifestation of its own—_i.e._, the distention of the greater
veins, especially on the face and forehead. In its extreme form
(rage) it may cause nasal or pulmonary hæmorrhage, the rupture of
vessels, and death.
2. The innervation of the voluntary muscles is increased, but in an
un-coordinated and spasmodic form; the voice is broken and harsh,
the body leans forward in the attitude of aggression, the movements
are violent and destructive; “one strikes blindly,” the breath comes
in gasps with the well-known symptom of the dilated nostrils, the
object of which, according to Piderit, is that of taking a full
breath while the mouth is shut and the teeth clenched. According to
Charles Bell, it is due to the habitual co-action of all the
respiratory muscles, as the nostrils of an angry man may be seen to
become dilated, although his mouth is open.
3. According to Lange, and in spite of popular opinion, there is no
increase in the biliary secretion; but this is not the case with the
saliva, as is proved by the phrase, “foaming with wrath.” It is
important to note that anger sometimes gives the secretions a toxic
character. Van Swieten, Bichat, Trousseau, and others have verified
this in the case of the saliva, when the quantity of ptomaine is
augmented; and it has long been known that the bite of furious
animals is dangerous, while analogous facts have been ascertained in
the case of one human being bitten by another in a fit of rage. The
lacteal secretion may also become toxic, and produce on the nursling
the effect of poison. These facts once more show the close relations
between emotion and physiological or even chemical phenomena.
In short, the organism in general, and the active organs in
particular, being excited, we may say with Spencer, “that what we
call the natural language of anger is due to a partial constriction
of the muscles which actual combat would call into full activity,
all signs of irritation, beginning with the rapid shadow which
passes over the brow when some slight cause of irritation occurs,
being different degrees of the same contractions.”
Anger and fear form an antithesis, but the former has, both
physiologically and psychologically, a more complex character. In
fact, fear, in all its degrees and throughout its whole duration,
invariably remains within the category of painful emotions, while
anger passes through two stages. The first, or asthenic, corresponds
to the cause, the external occurrence, the immediate shock, and
consists in a short depression, which is an entirely painful state;
the second, or sthenic, corresponds to the offensive reaction, and,
by its symptoms, approaches much more closely to pleasure than to
pain. We need only remember the sardonic laughter which accompanies
not merely the outbreak of anger, but some of its mitigated forms,
and expresses the joy of seeing others suffer. Anger is therefore a
mixed emotion; it does not belong altogether to the category of
painful states of consciousness, though the painful side is
predominant.
Considered as an internal and purely psychical phenomenon, it eludes
description, like every state which defies further analysis, and, in
its acute forms, cannot be seized by internal observation. It
scarcely admits of retrospective examination. Its psychology is the
history of its evolution, comprising three principal periods:—
1. The _animal_ form, or that of real aggression. It is primitive
and general. In animals it is seen in a pure state, because there
are no antagonistic, alterative, or restraining tendencies. Those
which live by prey, the voracious carnivora, present the complete
type. Besides the physiological phenomena already described there is
the actual attack, each species using its natural weapons—teeth,
claws, poisonous liquids. The feeling has the violence of a
hurricane, of an unchained force of nature. This is because it is
connected with extremely powerful instincts; that of nutrition,
which requires its prey, the struggle for life under its most
implacable form, that of attack—the necessity of destroying or being
destroyed. At this stage the element of pleasure is _nil_, or very
slight, because the destruction has a blind and unconscious
character. Bain thinks that monkeys are almost capable of enjoying
the agonies of their victims, and perhaps elephants also. If this is
correct, the fact is only met with in the case of the higher
animals. It is needless to add that this animal form of anger is
seen not merely in savage, but also in civilised man.
2. The emotional form properly so called, or that of simulated
aggression. Much less general than the preceding, this is peculiarly
human. Through the preponderance of the psychic element, or at
least, the relative effacement of the destructive impulses, it
appears to me the typical stage of anger as an emotion. It is
frequently seen in the higher animals; the dog, meeting his enemy,
stops, growls, erects his hair, and offers all the symptoms of
aggression in the nascent stage. Man most usually confines himself
to threats, with some degree of violence, unaccompanied by
destructiveness. The affinity of this form with the first is
evident, and evolutionists have drawn from it a psychological
argument in favour of descent from animals; those beings nearest to
nature—_i.e._, the lowest in evolution—are continually exercising
their anger: children on animals and weak people; savages,
coarse-natured people, idiots and imbeciles on any one who does not
resist them.
But the important point to note at this stage of evolution is the
definite appearance of a new element—the pleasure of seeing
suffering. With this, anger begins to grow refined. “There seems
little doubt,” says Bain, “that the primary fact in the pleasure of
anger is the _fascination for the sight of bodily affliction and
suffering_. Singular and horrible as the fact may appear, the
evidence is incontestable” (_The Emotions_, p. 178). The author goes
on to give instances which need not be repeated.
In my opinion, the fact is not so “singular” as the author supposes,
it can be explained if we notice that, at this juncture, _another
instinct_ makes its appearance—one we have not yet studied, that of
domination. We find here the first germ of a more slowly evolved
emotion, that of triumphant power, of strength, superiority, pride.
Henceforth, so far as psychological analysis is concerned, anger is
no longer in a perfectly pure state. We have the destructive
instinct _plus_ a variable dose of the satisfied instinct of
domination.
3. The intellectualised form, or that of deferred aggression. We may
also say that this is the civilised form of anger. The principal
representatives of this group are hatred, envy, resentment, rancour,
etc. We have here two antagonistic forces confronting one another:
on one side the aggressive instinct which urges forward, on the
other, reason and calculation, which obstruct and restrain the
tendency to attack. The result is an _arrest of development_. I do
not wish to insist on a point which will be freely treated later on,
in studying the transition from simple to composite emotions; a few
brief remarks will suffice. In biology, the arrest of development
modifies the organ in its function and structure, and often acts by
rebound on other organs; in psychology the same thing happens, and,
in addition, the arrested development of a tendency modifies its
nature and its reaction on cognate phenomena. Mantegazza (_op.
cit._, chap. xiii.) has drawn up a good synoptic table of the
mimicry of hatred. Those who will take the trouble to study it in
detail, comparing it with the expression of outspoken anger, will
understand, better than by means of any dissertation, what
constitutes an arrest of development in the psychological order, and
the modifications which it involves. I note, among others, one
accurately observed point: the suffering which one inflicts on one’s
self, such as biting one’s hands or gnawing one’s nails; the
destructive tendency when repressed, expends itself internally, at
the cost of the envious man.
In this intellectualised form of anger, the feeling of the pleasure
of destruction, realised, or merely imagined, becomes acute, as
proved by the expressions, “tasting his hatred,” “enjoying his
revenge,” etc.
Such are the three stages in this ascending evolution, and their
identity of nature and common basis are clearly shown by the fact
that hatred, if the power of arrest ceases, becomes outspoken anger;
and the latter, if it increases, assumes the form of actual
aggression, thus coming back to the primitive type.
II.
The ancients defined anger as a short madness, which would relegate
it at once and entirely to the region of pathology. Without
qualification, this formula cannot be accepted. So long as anger is
not injurious either to the individual himself, or to others, it is
normal, and even useful; for an animal or man devoid of any instinct
for active defence and reprisals, would be very poorly provided.
However, it must be recognised that the area of normal anger is
exceedingly restricted, and that no emotion more quickly assumes a
morbid character. Of the three tests which permit us to judge
whether it does so or not, one—that of violent reaction on the
organism—is of no use, because it gives too much scope to personal
estimates and conjecture. There remain two others: the absence of
rational motives, and chronicity, or excessive duration, normal
anger being only a passing affection. Now, we find among mental
diseases two derivatives of anger, two heightenings of this
condition in paroxysmal form, and we have to establish between them
a psychological difference which is the repetition of the normal
state.
Epileptic madness corresponds to the blind, animal, often bestial
form of anger, composed entirely of violent movements and painful
feelings.
The maniacal state corresponds to the violent and conscious form of
anger, mingled with a pleasurable element.
1. I have nothing to say of the numerous varieties of epilepsy, its
concomitant hallucinations, and its intellectual and moral
consequences; I confine myself to those aspects which assimilate it
to anger.
Even in periods of calm, the universally noted psychological traits
reveal a sombre, morose, irritable, but above all, irascible
disposition—the “choleric” character _par excellence_. In the
paroxysmal period, we find the symptoms of anger carried to
extremity: “The patient” (I borrow Schüle’s description) “throws
himself on his surroundings with a blind rage, a bestial fury; he
spits, strikes, bites, breaks everything he can reach, shouts and
storms. His face is congested, his pupils are sometimes contracted,
sometimes—and more frequently—dilated, the conjunctivæ are much
injected, the look is fixed; there is abundant salivation, pulsation
of the carotid, acceleration of the pulse.” Where is the
starting-point of these discharges of fury, and by what mechanism
are they produced? The authorities are not at one on this question,
some attributing the principal share in this activity to the bulb,
others to the brain. Recently an auto-intoxication of the nervous
centres has been admitted. However, all this is only indirectly
concerned with psychology. In the ensuing period of stupor, the acts
of blind violence usually leave no trace in the memory; for it is a
sort of psychological law that the intensity of consciousness should
vary inversely as the intensity of the movements produced.
2. Mania presents many varieties. Let us take the typical form,
acute mania, the nearest to anger. After a period of incubation,
during which melancholia prevails, a violent reaction takes place,
in sudden paroxysms. The maniacal state may pass through all
degrees, from simple excitement to fury. Externally, it shows
itself, in its milder form, by continual goings and comings, by an
incessant craving for motion, a possibility of performing active
exercise without feeling fatigue; in the intense form, we have the
symptoms of rage already described: congestion of the vaso-motor
system, redness of the face, violent palpitations of the heart,
foaming at the mouth, furious and destructive impulses, etc.
Internally the case is analogous; it is “chaos in motion”
(Esquirol): and as the principal external symptom consists of motor
disturbances, the principal internal symptom consists in an
intellectual exuberance, a flux of ideas so disorderly and rapid
that they succeed each other by no fixed rule, and the laws of
association seem to be suspended, and speech, in its impetuous
course, betrays the swiftness and discontinuity of thought. But
there is besides, though not always, an expansive humour, a state of
satisfaction, a feeling of pleasure scarcely in accordance with the
rest. Many, after recovery, declare that they never felt so happy as
during their illness.
The cause of this unexpected tendency to joy has been much
discussed. Some attribute it to the superabundance of ideas, and
consequently assign to it an intellectual origin. This is a fresh
example of intellectualist prejudice which sees but a single effect
in the modifications of the emotional life. Besides, as Krafft-Ebing
remarks (vol. ii., sec. 1, chap. 2), in delirious fever-patients
there is a flow of ideas without accompanying joyousness, and,
inversely, alcohol may produce gaiety without accelerating the
course of thought; and, accordingly, this author admits—and rightly,
as it seems to me—that these two phenomena, viz., increased
intellectual activity and pleasurable feeling, are subordinated to a
deeper cause; they have their functional basis in an easier
expenditure, and a deceptive sense of power and vigour, depending on
pathological over-activity.
These two morbid forms, which have their psychological prototype in
anger, suggest one remark. They are not evoked by any external
excitement, such as the sight of an enemy, injury, or disobedience.
Their cause, whatever it may be, is internal; it sets going a
pre-established mechanism identical with that of anger (violent and
disordered movements, vaso-motor phenomena, etc.), and the psychic
state which follows is anger, or an analogous emotional form, with
or without a concomitant state of pleasure. This seems to me a new
argument in favour of James’s and Lange’s theory.
Epileptic and maniac rages are not the only ones to be entered under
the heading of anger; there is besides these a group of irresistible
impulses of a destructive character which ought, psychologically, to
be included in the same class. With a difference, however: in the
epileptic and maniac, the physical and psychical symptoms constitute
a complexus similar or analogous to the normal form, and only to be
reckoned as pathological on account of the want of adaptation and
rational motives, while the irresistible impulses are only partial
manifestations—_disaggregated forms of anger_.
Among overpowering tendencies we can only examine at present those
which concern the offensive instinct. I therefore eliminate those
grafted on another stem (dipsomania, erotomania, kleptomania, etc.)
and those which, by their nature, are inoffensive, ridiculous, or
puerile (the incessant craving for travelling, for counting, for
discovering the names of men and things), and confine myself to
those which have the violent and destructive character of anger,
such as the impulses to wound, kill, destroy, or set on fire
(pyromania). The fatal impulse to suicide will be studied under
another heading (Chap. V.). It is needless to describe these violent
impulses separately, or to recapitulate observations which may be
found almost anywhere; a sketch of the characteristics common to all
will be sufficient.
1. They pass through a physiological period of incubation, marked by
palpitations and vaso-motor disturbances, rushes of heat to the
head, headaches, præcordial anxiety, insomnia, agitation, fatigue,
_malaise_, and undefined suffering. 2. The entrance into the
psychological period is marked by the appearance of a fixed idea.
Why one rather than another? This question will be examined later.
The fixed idea, reigning as a tyrant in the consciousness, gives an
aim to the tendency, determines its orientation. Some maintain that
there are such things as purely intellectual fixed ideas, with no
emotional accompaniment. Others think that the fixed idea always
includes in some degree an emotional state. I share this second
opinion, since every fixed idea is the beginning of an impulse. 3.
The third period is that when it passes into action, sometimes
sudden, more often preceded by a violent struggle between the
overmastering impulse and the arrestive power of the will.[142]
There are some cases where the fixed idea never passes beyond the
second stage; these are abortive forms, of incomplete development.
The passage into action is the rule, it being a psychological law
that every intense representation of a movement or an act is the
beginning of a movement. The act, whatever it may be, is
accomplished, and there results a feeling of satisfaction, peace,
and relief.
-----
Footnote 142:
Tamburini distinguishes three kinds of fixed ideas: simple,
emotive, and impulsive, according as the obsession determines
forced attention, a state of anguish, or an action.
-----
As regards those destructive tendencies which are to anger what
phobias are to fear, a problem presents itself, the only
psychological problem: that of their origin or cause. This question
I divide into two: How do they arise? How do they take a determinate
direction?
I. To explain the origin and appearance of irresistible impulses,
most writers have recourse to the hypothesis of degeneration. As it
is also called in to explain the converse phenomenon of phobias, it
becomes necessary to be a little more precise. Without entering for
the moment on the discussion of the different interpretations of
this vague word, degeneration, let us take it as synonymous with
dissolution or regression.
The ideal of heredity, as a conservative principle, is to transmit
under a healthy form a healthy organisation, _i.e._ (so far as our
subject is concerned), one with harmonious and convergent
tendencies. If dissolution is total, we have the idiot, or the
dementia patient. If it is partial, we have a breach of equilibrium
in favour of one or more tendencies. This disaggregation is not
fortuitous; it has a retrogressive character, it is a return to the
reflex movements. It approaches the character of the animal, the
idiot, or the imbecile; it goes back to that stage of psychic life
when the will under its higher form, the arrestive power, was not
yet constituted.
II. In any case, there remains the principal question: Why was such
a tendency predominant? What causes determined the particular
direction taken by retrogression—homicide in one case, suicide or
erotomania in another? Attempts have been made to explain this by
alleging that every irresistible impulse results from the excessive
irritation of an _isolated_ group of brain-cells. Besides being
purely hypothetical, this explanation is, in spite of its apparent
precision, extremely vague. Is there an isolated group of homicidal,
or one of kleptomaniac cells? This explanation is really too simple.
As far as we can penetrate the very obscure psychological genesis of
the destructive impulses (and this may be held to apply to the whole
group of irresistible tendencies), we find two sorts of causes at
work, the essential and the accidental.
1. The essential, principal, fundamental cause which, after the
period of physiological incubation, gives a determinate direction to
the tendency is constitution, temperament, character. It may be
admitted, at least theoretically, that _all_ tendencies exist,
actually or potentially, in every one of us. In ordinary cases, one
or more predominate. Contemporary research has familiarised us with
the fact of the varieties of memory. Such and such a person has an
excellent one for figures, or music, or colour, or form, but only
moderate for everything else. This is a natural gift singularly
capable of being developed by exercise. This fact has its equivalent
in the motor order, or that of tendencies: there exist natural
dispositions only wanting an opportunity to become preponderant, and
morbid conditions are the culture-medium which favours their
development. The most violent tendency has its source in normal
life. “There is,” says Gall, “an inclination gradually rising from
the pleasure of seeing anything killed to the most overpowering
desire to kill.” This is not put strongly enough; it is possible to
pass, by imperceptible gradations, from the extreme case to the
normal state in the following order: the pleasure of killing, the
overpowering desire to kill, the pleasure of looking on at killing
(the sight of a murder, gladiatorial combats, etc.), the pleasure of
seeing the blood of animals shed (bull-fights, cock-fights, etc.),
the pleasure due to the representation of violent and bloodthirsty
melodramas (this is only in appearance, but the stage always
presents a momentary illusion of reality); lastly, the pleasure of
reading bloodthirsty novels, or hearing accounts of murders, which
is purely an affair of the imagination. We thus pass from the act to
the perception, the simulacrum, the mere image suggested by signs
read or heard. I do not wish to assert, assuredly, that the
spectators of the drama or readers of the novel are all potential
murderers; but, as there are other men to whom such sights and such
reading are abhorrent, we must recognise certain differences of
natural disposition. Now the peculiarity of retrogression (or
degeneration) is to act on the line of the strongest attraction or
the least resistance, which is a characteristic of reflex action and
the opposite of the inhibitive will, which acts on the lines of
weakest attraction and strongest resistance.
2. The accidental causes which determine the direction of a tendency
cannot be enumerated, because they vary for every individual case:
we may note sex, social position, degree of culture, various
maladies, etc. Tendencies to homicide and suicide are apt to spring
up in a melancholic nature; alcoholism favours the incendiary
impulse (pyromania); the epileptic and the general paralytic are
more inclined to theft, and so on. Still more: the same impulse is
variously modified, according to the soil in which it germinates;
“the epileptic kills in a different way from the hypochondriac, the
latter otherwise than the alcoholic or paralytic” (Schüle).
This shows the part played by accidental and consequently
unassignable causes, and is still better shown in the abrupt
substitution of one irresistible tendency for another in the same
individual. Ordinarily, each shows his own special peculiarity; one
constantly repeats his attempts at suicide, another at theft. But in
cases of deep-seated dissolution, the direction is uncertain. The
author of the theory of degeneration gives an excellent example of
this: a hypochondriac possessed in turn by irresistible impulses to
suicide, homicide, sexual excesses, dipsomania, and pyromania, and
who finally gave himself up to justice, saying that he was “happy,
because his sufferings were about to end.”[143] We may say of all
these overmastering impulses, _in radice conveniunt_; and thus the
study of those which tend to destruction has led us, more than once,
to speak of the other kinds.
-----
Footnote 143:
Morel, _Maladies mentales_, pp. 420 _et seq._
-----
CHAPTER IV.
SYMPATHY AND THE TENDER EMOTIONS.
_Sympathy is not an instinct, but a highly generalised
psycho-physiological property—Complete sense and restricted
sense—Physiological phase: imitation—Psychological phase: first
stage, psychological unison; second stage, addition of tender
emotion—Tender emotion—Its physiological expression—Its
relations with touch—The smile—Tears: hypotheses as to their
causes—Tender emotion indecomposable._
Sympathy is not an instinct or a tendency, _i.e._, a group of
co-ordinated movements adapted to a particular end, and showing
itself in consciousness as an emotion, such as fear, anger,
sex-attraction; it is, on the contrary, a highly generalised
psycho-physiological property. To the specialised character of each
emotion, it opposes a character of almost unlimited plasticity. We
have not to consider it under all its aspects, but as one of the
most important manifestations of emotional life, as the basis of the
tender emotions, and one of the foundations of social and moral
existence.
I.
Sympathy, in the etymological sense (σῦν, πάθος), which is also the
complete one, consists in the existence of identical conditions in
two or more individuals of the same or a different species; or,
according to Bain, the tendency of an individual to enter into the
active or emotional states of others, these states being revealed by
certain media of expression. In its general and original form it is
that and nothing else. We must therefore begin by getting rid of a
prejudice, consecrated by usage in various languages, which
identifies sympathy with pity, tenderness, benevolence, and the
feelings which establish a tie of concord and a state of reciprocity
between two beings. Thus understood, in its restricted sense, the
term sympathy is neither accurate nor sufficient; for in all
benevolent inclinations there are, besides the general fact of
sympathy, other emotional elements, which will be determined in
their proper place.
Before it becomes moral, before even it becomes psychological, it is
biological. At bottom, it is a property of life, and its complete
study would be a chapter of general psychology. If, limiting
ourselves to what is strictly necessary, we try to follow the
evolution of sympathy, from its most rudimentary to its highest
forms, we distinguish three principal phases. The first, or
physiological, consists in an agreement of motor tendencies, a
_synergia_; the second, or psychological, consists in an agreement
of the emotional states, a _synæsthesia_; the third, or
intellectual, results from a community of representations or ideas,
connected with feelings and movements.
_First Phase._—In its primitive form sympathy is reflex, automatic,
unconscious, or very slightly conscious; it is, according to Bain,
the tendency to produce in ourselves an attitude, a state, a bodily
movement which we perceive in another person. This is imitation in
its most rudimentary form. Between sympathy and imitation, at any
rate in this primitive period, I see only one difference of aspect:
sympathy everywhere marks the passive, receptive side of the
phenomenon—imitation, its active and motor side.[144]
Footnote 144:
The psychology of imitation does not form part of our subject.
Baldwin has made an excellent study of it (_Mental Development in
the Child and Race_, pp. 263-366). He defines it as "a
sensori-motor reaction, which finds its differentia in the single
fact that it imitates; that is, its peculiarity is found in the
locus of its muscular discharge. It is what I have called a
‘circular activity’ on the bodily side,—brain-state due to
stimulating conditions, muscular reaction which reproduces or
retains the stimulating conditions,—same brain-state again, due to
same stimulating conditions, and so on." Imitation appears early
in the child, at fifteen weeks (Preyer) or four months (Darwin).
Are we to consider it as an instinct? Popular opinion is inclined
to do so, as are also several psychologists—Stricker, James, and
others. The contrary is maintained by Preyer, Bain, Sully, and
Baldwin—a view I am myself inclined to take. Imitation does not
present the true characteristics of an instinct; it is not adapted
at the first attempt; it gropes its way, it is tentative, it fails
again after success, it retrogrades, or progresses but slowly. It
is an ideo-motor reflex; it takes its place above instinct (a
blind and innate tendency inferior to the voluntary activity for
which it prepares the way), because it is the first attempt at
convergence towards an end.
It manifests itself in animals forming aggregates (not societies),
such as a flock of sheep, or a pack of dogs who run, stop, bark all
at the same time, through a purely physical impulse of imitation: in
man, infectious laughter or yawning, walking in step, imitating the
movements of a rope-walker while watching him, feeling a shock in
one’s legs when one sees a man falling, and a hundred other
occurrences of this kind are cases of physiological sympathy. It
plays a great part in the psychology of crowds, with their rapid
attacks and sudden panics. In nervous diseases, there is a
superfluity of examples: epidemics of hysteric fits, convulsive
barking, hiccup, etc. I omit the mental maladies (epidemics of
suicide, double or triple madness) since we are only considering the
purely physiological stage.
To sum up, sympathy is originally a property of living matter: as
there is an organic memory and an organic sensitiveness, being those
of the tissues and ultimate elements which compose them, there is an
organic sympathy, made up of receptivity and imitative movements.
The _second phase_ is that of sympathy in the psychological sense,
necessarily accompanied by consciousness; it creates, in two or more
individuals, analogous emotional states. Such are the cases in which
we say that fear, indignation, joy or sorrow are communicated. It
consists in feeling an emotion existing in another, and is revealed
to us by its physiological expression. This phase consists of two
stages.
1. The first might be defined as psychological unison. If, during
this period of unison, we could read the minds of those who
sympathise, we should see a single emotional fact reflected in the
consciousness of several individuals. L. Noiré, in his book,
_Ursprung der Sprache_, has proposed the theory that language
originated in community of action among the earliest human beings.
When working, marching, dancing, rowing, they uttered (according to
this writer) sounds which became the appellatives of these different
actions, or of various objects; and these sounds, being uttered by
all, must have been understood by all. Whether this theory be
correct or not (it has been accepted as such by Max Müller), it will
serve as an illustration. But this state of sympathy does not, by
itself, constitute a tie of affection or tenderness between those
who feel it: it only prepares the way for such an emotion. It may be
the basis of a certain social solidarity, because the same internal
states excite the same acts, of a mechanical, exterior, non-moral
solidarity.
2. The second stage is that of sympathy, in the restricted and
popular sense of the word. This consists of psychological
unison, _plus_ a new element: there is added another emotional
manifestation, tender emotion (benevolence, sympathy, pity,
etc.). It is no longer sympathy pure and simple, it is a
_binary_ compound. The common habit of considering phenomena
only under their higher and complete forms often misleads us as
to their origin and constitution. Moreover, in order to
understand that this is a case of duality—the fusion of two
distinct elements—and that our analysis is not a factitious one,
it is sufficient to point out that sympathy (in the etymological
sense) may exist without any tender emotion—nay, that it may
exclude instead of exciting it. According to Lubbock, while ants
carry away their wounded, bees—though forming a society—are
indifferent towards each other. It is well known that gregarious
animals nearly always shun and desert a wounded member of the
herd. Among men, how many there are who when they see suffering
hasten to withdraw themselves from the spectacle, in order to
escape the pain which it sympathetically awakens in them. This
impulse may go the length of aversion, as typified by Dives in
the Gospel. It is therefore a complete psychological error to
consider sympathy as capable, unaided, of delivering men from
egoism; it only takes the first step, and not always that.
_Third Phase._—Under its intellectual form, sympathy is an agreement
in feelings and actions, founded on unity of representation. The law
of development is summed up in Spencer’s formula, “The degree and
range of sympathy depend on the clearness and extent of
representation.”[145] I should, however, add: on condition of being
based on an emotional temperament. This last is the source _par
excellence_ of sympathy, because it vibrates like an echo; the
active temperament lends itself less to such impulses, because it
has so much to do in manifesting its own individuality that it can
scarcely manifest those of others; finally, the phlegmatic
temperament does so least of all, because it presents a minimum of
emotional life; like Leibnitz’s monads, it has no windows.
Footnote 145:
_Principles of Psychology_, vol. iv. p. 565.
In passing from the emotional to the intellectual phase, sympathy
gains in extent and stability. In fact, emotional sympathy requires
some analogy in temperament or nature; it can scarcely be
established between the timid and the daring, between the cheerful
and the melancholic; it may be extended to all human beings and to
the animals nearest us, but not beyond them. On the contrary, it is
the special attribute of intelligence to seek resemblances or
analogies everywhere, to unify; it embraces the whole of nature. By
the law of transfer (which we have already studied) sympathy follows
this invading march, and comprehends even inanimate objects, as in
the case of the poet, who feels himself in communion with the sea,
the woods, the lakes, or the mountains. Besides, intellectual
sympathy participates in the relative fixity of representation: we
find a simple instance of this in animal societies, such as those of
the bees, where unity, or sympathy among the members, is only
maintained by the perception or representation of the queen.
II.
Tender emotion marks an important stage in the evolution of
affective life; with it we pass beyond the period of the purely
egoistic emotions. The date of its appearance, as I have said, is
not fixed with certainty; it may be at two months, according to
Darwin, who noted at this age one of his characteristic modes of
expression, the smile; more probably about nine months (Darwin) or
twelve months (Perez), according to definite observations.
The physiological expression of tenderness, as far as movements are
concerned, is reducible to a single formula—attraction. It shows
itself either by elementary movements of approach, or by contact, or
by the embrace which is its ultimate end, of which all the rest are
but mitigated and arrested forms. It therefore stands in relation to
the primordial sense, touch, of which Bain says, “Touch is both the
alpha and the omega of affection.”[146] The movements have a general
character of relaxation, contrasting greatly with that of anger. One
mode of expression which is specially, if not exclusively,
appropriated to it is the smile. Is this the initial stage of
laughter? or is it, on the contrary, only a weakened form of it, an
arrest of development? This question has been discussed without much
advantage. Darwin adopts the former view, which scarcely seems
reconcilable with the general law of evolution; the child smiles
before it laughs, whereas we should expect to meet with the inverse
order of phenomena. Tender emotion approximates to joy; and its
circulatory and respiratory modifications are analogous. There is
acceleration, as in the case of pleasure, but to a less degree;
tenderness suiting better with moderate and reposeful sensations.
Footnote 146:
The point has been very well treated by this author (_The
Emotions_, chap. vii. p. 127). See also Mantegazza, chap. xi.
Lange does not mention it.
It is also accompanied by an increase in the secretions, especially
in that of the mammary glands in the woman. In the case of the
lachrymal glands this symptom is more difficult to explain. It is
known that tenderness often moistens the eyes; but tears are
produced under conditions so varied, and sometimes so contradictory,
that, even after all the recent work which has appeared on the
expression of the emotions, the question of the causes seems to me
very far from being exhausted. The pressure of the blood has a
direct influence on this secretion, which is always accompanied by
an increase in the circulation; but the simplicity of the mechanism
is not incompatible with a diversity of causes. Tears may be
provoked by mechanical or physiological acts: irritation of the
conjunctiva, coughing, effort, vomiting; and by totally distinct
psychic states, sorrow, joy, tenderness. In fact, all attempts at
explanation relate to the painful states only; cases of this kind
being, though not of exclusive occurrence, more frequent than
others. Darwin admits that screaming, in infants, causes the vessels
of the eye to become gorged with blood, and this produces a
contraction of the orbicular muscles as a means of protection,
whence a reflex action on the lachrymal glands; the shedding of
tears continuing even after the suppression of the screams. Wundt
rejects this explanation, seeing in the lachrymal glands
_derivative_ organs assuaging pain; this secretion, which is
permanent, cleanses the eye from foreign bodies, such as dust and
insects, etc. As the visual images are the most important of all,
the shedding of tears would be an unconscious effort to drive away
sad representations, having for its foundation an analogy between
the painful sensations and the images. Whatever one may think of
these hypotheses, they consider tears as signs of pain exclusively.
The augmentation of the lachrymal secretion depends on the increase
in the pressure of the blood; now, the circulation is accelerated by
joy and tenderness, as is proved by the shining of the eyes. The
appearance of tears—not very abundant, however, in such cases—would
be the natural consequence. Sorrow, on the contrary, is accompanied
by a lowering of the circulation, and very often, in the early
stage, tears are entirely wanting. The shedding of tears produces
relief, it is a safety-valve; it would answer to a second stage—that
of slackened tension—in which the return of vitality has begun. In
other words, the tears of joy and tenderness would correspond to the
stage of action, the tears of sadness to the stage of reaction.
The psychology of tender emotion seems to me reducible to a single
question—that of its origin. The description of its varieties is
without interest, and may be found elsewhere. We have stated it as
simple and primary. Being the source of all altruistic, social, and
moral manifestations, it will be worth our while to consider its
nature at the period of its appearance.
In children, and the higher animals, the first manifestation of
tenderness is towards the mother or the nurse.
"The relation involved in the sustenance of the child, a relation
only a degree less close than that of the fœtus to the maternal
organism, constitutes in itself the chief source of the feeling.
Along with the supply of nutriment there goes that of warmth,
support, or propping, which again is a continuation of the fœtal
dependence. This first instinctive or sensuous attachment of the
child grows into what we call fondness by the complication of this
instinctive feeling with numerous “ideal” or transferred feelings,
the product of the many pleasurable sensations, including those of
the eye and of the ear, of which the mother is the source."[147] The
primary tendency, therefore, is directed, in children and animals,
to those who have been pleasant to them, or who have done them good,
and from whom they hope to receive it again. This is an emotion
which, in Herbert Spencer’s nomenclature, might legitimately be
called ego-altruistic, or even one with a marked preponderance of
egoism. It must be so, for altruism cannot be innate.
-----
Footnote 147:
Sully, _The Human Mind_, ii. pp. 104, 105.
-----
The faculty of knowledge begins with an undifferentiated period, in
which there is neither subject nor object, but only the
consciousness of something without qualification. The separation of
the ego and the non-ego in the order of cognition is the stage
corresponding to the division, in the emotional order, between
conscious egoism and altruism. How does this partial alienation from
ourselves come about? How can it arise and be consolidated? These
questions will be discussed later, when treating of moral emotion
(Chap. VIII.). For the moment, I confine myself to a single
question: Are we confronted with a veritable instinct—with an innate
tendency incapable of being analysed, showing itself in the
consciousness by the tender emotion or its varieties?
We know all the efforts made (especially in the eighteenth century)
to reduce altruism by analysis to an extremely refined egoism, to a
calculation; thus the tenderness of parents for their children was
explained by the expectation of services to be rendered by them in
the future. I think it needless to insist on this point.
In favour of inneity, the best argument that can be alleged, because
founded on fact, is, that affection and attachment are met with even
among animals, to whom we cannot attribute calculation or interested
foresight. Apart from maternal love, which manifests itself
energetically in very low stages of the animal kingdom, we find
examples of benevolent and active sympathy between animals of the
same species, and even (though this is rarer) of different
species,[148] apart from any sexual attraction. Let us add, if
necessary, in the case of human beings: “the instantaneous,
unreflecting impulses of pity to creatures in distress, although
strangers, enemies, criminals, noxious beasts, the absence of all
balancings of immediate loss with ultimate gain.... Long-sighted
selfishness does not explain the conduct of the Good Samaritan.
Again, the hosts of human beings that in all ages have voluntarily
given up their lives for their country, could not be influenced by
their own advantage. For, although many of these have been taught
the hopes of a future existence, this has been by no means
universal; and there could be little certainty in the mass of minds
that the surrender of this life would receive a full compensation in
another.”[149]
-----
Footnote 148:
For these facts see Romanes, _Mental Evolution_, chap, xx., and
Lloyd Morgan, _Animal Life_, pp. 397, 398.
Footnote 149:
Bain, _Emotions_, chap. vi. p. 111.
-----
The inneity of the altruistic instinct, therefore, seems to me
proved beyond the possibility of reply. It may be very energetic in
some individuals, or very weak in others; in this it only resembles
all instinctive tendencies. As a genus, this instinct comprises
several varieties, of a general character, such as benevolence,
affection, pity, etc. Finally, it is one of the elements which make
up several composite emotions—veneration, admiration, sexual love,
etc.
It remains only to inquire in what form it first made its entry into
the world, what was its earliest manifestation. With regard to this
matter, there are only three possible hypotheses: those of maternal
love, gregarious instinct, and the very improbable one of sexual
instinct. The value of these hypotheses will be discussed later on,
in the chapter on moral emotion, which is the natural complement to
the present one.[150]
-----
Footnote 150:
The pathology of tender emotion does not offer sufficient interest
to detain us. The altruistic tendency may be totally wanting in
certain hypochondriac and demented patients, who, entrenched in an
impenetrable egoism, have undergone a real “moral ossification.”
Tenderness may become _sentimentality_ towards persons, animals
(zoophily), and things (nostalgia), etc. Morel (_Études
cliniques_, vol. ii. sec. 4) quotes the case of a man of high
intellectual capacity, in whom the most futile and ridiculous
causes excited absurd _accès de sensibilité_. “The loss of
domestic animals which he had reared threw him into a state of
bewilderment and convulsions of tears, as if it had been the death
of his best friends. I saw him one day almost delirious with grief
at the death of one of the numerous frogs which he kept in his
garden.” This morbid emotivity, coinciding with congenital or
acquired weakness, and with convalescence or other adynamic
states, throws into relief, by its exaggerated character, that
state of relaxation which is, as we have seen, one of the
principal marks of the tender emotion.
-----
CHAPTER V.
THE EGO AND ITS EMOTIONAL MANIFESTATIONS.
_Reducible to one primary fact: the feeling of strength or
weakness—Positive form: type, pride. Its physiological
and psychological characteristics. Its relation to joy
and anger. Its evolution—Negative form: humility. Its
semi-social character—Pathology, positive form: monomania
of power, megalomania—Extreme negative form: suicidal
tendency—Psychological problem of this practical negation of the
fundamental instinct._
I.
The English designate by the term of _self-feeling_, and the Germans
by that of _Selbstgefühl_, a group of sentiments directly derived
from the _ego_. I scarcely know what to call them: “personal” would
be too vague a term, “egoistic” too ambiguous (“egotistic” would be
better). To identify them with pride and its opposite would be to
restrict them too far, for they have other forms. We might, for want
of a better, include them under the term _amour-propre_ (in its
etymological meaning, _amor proprius_), _i.e._, satisfaction or
dissatisfaction with one’s self, with its different varieties.
Whatever name we may give them, these emotional forms are reducible
to one primary fact of which they are the embodiment in
consciousness—viz., the feeling (well-founded, or not) of personal
strength or weakness, with the tendency to action or arrest of
action which is its motor manifestation. We can also, but in a less
direct manner, connect them with the instinct of conservation, and
say, with Höffding, that they result from that instinct “arrived at
the full consciousness of itself and incarnated in the idea of the
Ego.”
This group has its peculiar characteristics. It is almost, if not
quite, exclusively human, while the emotions hitherto studied have
been as much animal as human. It is late in making its appearance
(about the end of the third year), and is the last in chronological
order, except the sex-instinct. This is because it soon assumes a
reflective character, and because it implies that the _ego_ is
constituted and that the individual is conscious of himself as such.
The _self-feeling_ has two forms, one positive, the other negative,
of which pride and humility may respectively be taken as the types.
Under its positive form, it has a well-known physiological
expression,[151] which consists of a series of movements tending to
two ends—(1) Increase in size: the respiration is deep, the thorax
greatly dilated, the gestures eccentric, and, as it were,
aggressive, whence the popular expressions “puffed up” or “swollen”
with pride. (2) Increase in height: the body and head are held more
erect, the gait is assured, the mouth firmly closed, the teeth
clenched; in megalomaniacs, who present, so to speak, the caricature
of pride, these traits are still further emphasised. Some writers
note, besides, as a specific character, the action of the _musculus
superbus_, which everts the lower lip.
Footnote 151:
See Darwin (chap. xi.) and Mantegazza (chap. xiv.).
Psychologically, the feeling of strength is _sui generis_ and
irreducible. It is related on one side to joy, being the sthenic
emotion _par excellence_, on the other to anger, because the feeling
of superiority soon leads to contempt, insolence, brutality, and the
exercise of strength under its aggressive form. Let us remember that
we have, on a previous occasion, connected with this feeling the
pleasure which frequently accompanies satisfied anger. As it
depends, more than any other primary emotion, on reflection, its
development is determined by intellectual conditions.
Is there any equivalent to it among animals? Certain facts allow us
to suppose that there is. The courteous contests of pretended
battle, the song, the dances by which the males attempt to captivate
the females, the triumph of some and the defeat of others, must
produce some states analogous to pride and humiliation. The arrogant
attitudes of the cock and the turkey-cock, the ostentatious display
of the peacock, are taken as symbols of _naïf_ pride; and if the
expression of an emotion is that emotion objectivised, we can easily
suppose that it exists in some manner. In children, the personal
feeling is at first connected with the exercise of physical strength
expended in struggling with each other and in games; later on, with
personal appearance, clothes and ornaments, especially in girls. In
consequence of an increasing irradiation, the self-feeling envelops
everything entering into its sphere of action which may help to
swell its importance—house, furniture, relations. Later on comes the
consciousness of intellectual force, and the advantages procured by
it—fame, power, riches, etc.
As derivative, or different aspects of egotistic emotion, under its
positive form, we find pride, vanity, contempt, love of glory,
ambition, emulation, courage, daring, boldness, etc. The special
study of each of these feelings belongs rather to the moralist than
the psychologist.[152]
Footnote 152:
Consult James, _Psychology_, ii. 305, 329; Bain, _Emotions_, chap.
x., xi.; J. Sully, _Psychology_, ii. 97 _et seq._
Under its negative form, personal emotion cannot detain us long, as
it would only be a repetition of what we have previously studied
under the converse aspect. It has for its basis a feeling of
weakness and impotence. It shows itself by diminution or arrest of
movement; its gestures are concentric, and it consists in belittling
instead of aggrandising, of lowering instead of raising. It is
related on one side to sadness, and on the other to fear; in short,
it is the complete antithesis to the positive form.
From this source flow, with different adaptations, humility,
timidity, modesty, resignation, patience, meanness, cowardice, want
of self-confidence, etc. Most of these manifestations are not
simple, but result from the combined action of several causes, as we
shall see later on.
II.
The positive or negative feeling of personal strength is a normal
and healthy emotion when it remains within the limits of adaptation;
for it has an individual and even social utility.
For the individual, it is the instinct of conservation become
reflective, and by the consciousness of his strength or weakness, it
permits him to measure his pretensions by his degree of power.
Socially, it makes us in a certain measure dependent on others.
Although strictly egoistic in its origin, _self-feeling_ cannot
develop unless it becomes ego-altruistic, or semi-social. According
to Bain, self-esteem is a reflective sentiment which consists in
judging ourselves as we judge others. This opinion has been
criticised and scarcely seems tenable, in so far, at least, as it
takes away from _amour propre_ its instinctive and self-generated
character and considers it as a return action. However, it is
certain that the desire of approbation and the fear of blame are the
_external_ elements which count in the constitution and
consolidation of the feeling of self-complacency; praise gives it
extension, criticism impairs and mutilates it. This does not imply
any great amount of reflection or culture. The child is extremely
sensitive to the judgment of his equals. Primitive man is imprisoned
in a network of custom, tradition, and prejudice which he cannot
break without incurring excommunication; and those people are very
rare who content themselves with their own approbation only.
But from a semi-social feeling, the love of ourselves can easily
become an anti-social feeling. There is no emotion which passes so
simply and definitely from the normal form to passion, and from
passion to madness. At the bottom of the tendency of the _ego_ to
affirm itself there is a potentiality of limitless expansion and
indefinite radiation. A man whose self-feeling is vigorous resembles
those species of animals and vegetables which—prolific and of
tenacious vitality—would, if left to themselves, cover the whole
surface of the globe; his expansion is only kept in check by that of
others.
Our path towards the pathology of the subject is already marked out.
We have, first, the semi-morbid forms which have been called the
monomania of power. Place a man in conditions where this tendency to
unlimited expansion meets with no obstacle, and it will go to any
extreme. This is the case with absolute power. No doubt this unique
and, so to speak, superhuman position is not of itself sufficient.
The madness of power (_folie du pouvoir_) is the resultant of two
factors: first, the character, _i.e._, the violence of the egoistic
appetites, which, continually satisfied, continually increase; while
the will, the antagonistic, inhibitive force, keeps on diminishing;
and next, external circumstances—the absence of all restraint, of
any equal power which might overawe by threats. A religious
sanction, or the fear of a political catastrophe, has restrained
more than one, and limited that unbridled tendency which is only the
_ego’s_ feeling of its own power carried to the acute stage. It is
needless to give examples from history, for they are known to every
one.[153]
Footnote 153:
For details on this point the reader should consult Ireland, _The
Blot on the Brain_, p. 88 (where he will find a study of the
Cæsars, the Hindoo Sultans, Ivan the Terrible, etc.), and Jacoby,
_Études sur la sélection et l’hérédité_.
Self-feeling, under its positive form, has its ultimate incarnation
in a well-known pathological manifestation—the delusion of
greatness, or megalomania. Perhaps, indeed, in this case, the
exaggeration produced by disease shows itself most clearly and
without altering the original.
Megalomania is met with in general paralysis of the insane as a
transitory phase; but especially in systematised chronic delusions
(_paranoia_). We may pass over the period of incubation, which is
often melancholic; thus, in a case of persecution-delusions, the
patient is at first tormented by vague suspicions; he accuses no one
in particular, he has as yet no accredited enemies; but one day he
discovers them, and nothing will ever divert his thoughts from them
again. Then, in some cases, the disease passing through another
evolutionary stage, he arrives, by logical deduction, at the
conclusion that it is his great merit, his high position, which are
exciting jealousy. Thenceforth megalomania is fully developed; the
subject thinks himself a millionaire, an unrecognised genius, a
great inventor, a king, the pope, or even the Deity.
There is nothing more characteristic than such a description as the
following, which has often been drawn up, and is yet another proof
that emotion, its expressive and its physiological bases, are but
parts of the same phenomenon. “He walks with head erect, with
assurance; his speech is laconic and imperious, he seeks solitude,
and is full of contempt for the society which surrounds him. His
style of dress is in accordance with the tendency of his aberration.
Like the maniac, he is restlessly active; but, in him, no movement
is fortuitous or without a motive; his will is always active, his
actions have a definite aim; if he shows violence, it is in order to
ensure the execution of his commands, to show that he has strength
sufficient to annihilate everything; it is not a destructive spirit
which animates him, but the necessity for showing his power. The
functions of the assimilative life have undergone no alteration;
they take place, as a rule, with perfect regularity. It seems as if
the expansive form of their feelings, their contentment with
themselves, the extreme and unbroken satisfaction surrounding their
life, imparted to the organic vital apparatus a surplus of activity,
resulting, in a manner, in an excess of health.” Frequent cases of
longevity among megalomaniacs have been noted. Finally, the
following observation has its value, on account of the change—at
once organic and psychic—there recorded:—"We have watched a patient
who, after having suffered from melancholia for several years,
suddenly became megalomaniac. His constitution had undergone great
alterations, and his health was much weakened, so that he became a
chronic melancholic; but so soon as his mental affection took on the
character of megalomania he was not long in acquiring new
vigour."[154]
Footnote 154:
Dagonet, _Traité des maladies mentales_, pp. 360 _et seq._
We might add that the tendency of men is rather to pride, of women
to vanity, which favours the views of those who maintain that
madness is often only the exaggeration of the habitual character: it
is sufficient to have shown that the feeling (though illusory) of
personal strength in an extreme degree is only the normal state
amplified, but not changed.
III.
It may seem strange to close this chapter by some remarks on a
phenomenon which, both by its internal and external characteristics,
belongs to the class of irresistible tendencies—the fatal impulse to
suicide. Its affinity with homicidal obsession is undeniable, as is
proved by the persons who are tormented, in turn, by the craving to
kill others and to kill themselves. However, if self-love, in its
positive form, reaches its culminating point in megalomania, it
seems to me quite legitimate to maintain that self-feeling, under
its negative form, attains its supreme negation in suicide.
Without insisting on a merely accessory point, it is certain that
suicide, as a manifestation of emotional life, brings us face to
face with a psychological problem as yet insufficiently noticed. If
there is an incontestable fact—one which, even among the ancients,
was familiar to triteness—it is that in every animal the
fundamental, ineradicable instinct is that of self-preservation, of
existing, and persisting in existence. Now, suicide, whether
voluntary or unreflecting, deliberate or impulsive, is the negation
of the fundamental tendency, not a theoretic or partial negation, or
one in word only, but in deed and absolute. And the sacrifice of
life is not subordinated to some other end which acts by superior
attraction, such as devotion to a belief, to friends, to humanity,
to one’s country, it is a suppression pure and simple, a liberation
desired in and for itself.
The ethnological, moral, and social study of suicide does not form
part of our subject, having already been fully worked out.[155] Our
aim is merely the psychological problem, which we must now define
with more precision.
Footnote 155:
Among the very copious existing literature on suicide I must
mention Morselli’s monograph, _Il Suicidio_, in which the various
causes—cosmic, ethnic, social, biological, and psychological—are
studied in great detail. His principal theoretical conclusions
are—(1) Among all civilised nations suicide increases more rapidly
than the geometrical ratio of the population and the general
mortality; (2) suicides are in inverse proportion to homicides at
any given time or in any given country. This last “law” has been
strongly contested by Tarde and others.
The act of suicide results from two very different mental states,
that of reflection and that of impulsion.
In deliberate, reflective, voluntary suicide there is a struggle
between two factors: the instinct of conservation and the
insupportable state caused by pain (incurable disease, ruin, misery,
grief, frustrated ambition, dishonour). Reflection decides, and as
pain is always a beginning of destruction, it prefers a total and
rapid destruction to a partial and slow one. The act is rational,
since it tends towards the lesser evil, or at least what is judged
to be such.
Impulsive suicide is harder to explain. A man throws himself
suddenly out of a window, poisons himself, cuts his throat. In some
cases death has been premeditated, but always appears as a
compelling, inevitable force, inexorably claiming its victim; the
epithet “irresistible” says everything. To the outside spectator the
act appears motiveless, without reason, without cause. It is all the
more surprising that the struggle, in this case, is no longer
between instinct and reflection, but between two instincts, the
conservative and the destructive, of which the one which usually is
the strongest succumbs, and the individual turns against himself the
destructive tendency originally destined to act on others.
Yet the psychology of deliberate suicide gives us the key to that of
the impulsive variety. What in the first case results from
conscious, clear, reasoned motives, results in the second from
blind, obscure, unconscious states: it is an act of organic life,
and its cause is found in cœnæsthesia. Impulsive suicide is the
expression of the destructive process, slow, permanent, dimly felt,
going on in the depths of the organism. Any one who presses in rage
on an aching tooth, who rolls on the ground, strikes his head
against the wall, or mutilates himself, is attempting an instinctive
though absurd reaction in order to get rid of his pain. These are
modified forms, it is true, but they will serve to show that the man
who yields to an overmastering impulse to strangle or drown himself
seeks a deliverance of the same kind.
Leaving degeneration (which is perpetually being dragged into this
question) out of account, observation shows us that the difference
between the two forms of suicide is reduced to that between psychic
and purely organic causes. Impulsive suicide flourishes best on the
soil of melancholia and hypochondria—_i.e._, in states which involve
deep dejection and a disorganisation of vital action. We may also
notice the part played (as was long ago pointed out) by heredity,
the descendants of suicidal ancestors often killing themselves at
the same age and in the same manner as the latter;[156] now,
psychological heredity is based on organic. Finally, the automatic
character of these impulses approximates them to the class of reflex
actions, attempts at suicide being repeated in the same form during
a recurrence of the same circumstances—_e.g._, somnambulism,
intoxication, the menstrual period. All these characteristics assign
to irresistible suicide an organic origin, which is equivalent to
saying that its ultimate cause lies in temperament. The conservative
instinct exists in all men, but it may exist in any degree. In some
there is an innate joy of life capable of resisting all disasters;
in others, a constitutional melancholy, or (which comes to the same
thing) _the conservative instinct is very weak_ and yields to the
least shock. Impulsive suicide represents self-feeling at its last
stage of regression, or, in other words, at its negative extreme.
Footnote 156:
For further details see my _Hérédité psychologique_, Part I.,
chap. viii.
CHAPTER VI.
THE SEXUAL INSTINCT.
_Its physiology—Its evolution: Instinctive period—Emotional period
(Individual choice)—Intellectual period (Platonic love)—Its
pathology—How can sexual instinct deviate from the normal
course?—Anatomical and social causes—Psychological causes: (a)
unconscious, (b) conscious._
I.
The sex-instinct, the last in chronological order with man and the
higher animals, gives rise to the emotion of love with its numerous
individual varieties. Most psychologists have been very sparing of
details where it is concerned, and one might mention certain
voluminous treatises which contain no mention of it. Is this through
exaggerated delicacy? Or is it because the authors think that their
place has been usurped by the novelists who have so obstinately
confined themselves to the study of this passion? But the novelist’s
mode of analysis is different from the psychological mode, and does
not exclude it.
Sexual love being an emotion whose evolution is complete, it is
impossible to determine the physiological and psychical signs
suiting all cases, from the blind instinct to the most refined and
intellectualised forms. Nevertheless, there are certain specific
characters which it always preserves, one special mark which is
never effaced throughout its various metamorphoses, and that is, its
origin. For the moment, let us take as typical the common and
average forms which, as we shall see later on, are met with
half-way, as we follow the evolution of sexual love from the lowest
to the highest.
1. Though neither James nor Lange has cited it among his typical
cases, love is certainly one of the emotions which express most
clearly the state of the organism, and offer the clearest proof in
favour of their theory. Let the reader suppress, in imagination, all
the physiological manifestations which accompany it. What remains?
not even the consciousness of a vague attraction, for that supposes
an actual or nascent movement.
Love, as a sthenic emotion, presents physical characteristics which
connect it on the one hand with joy, on the other with tenderness,
which have already been described. The circulation is accelerated,
sometimes to an extreme degree, the respiration likewise, and they
react on the organic functions. (We have already seen how, in many
animals, the period of love corresponds to deeply-seated chemical
modifications—usually of a toxic character—in the organism.) We
find, further, movements of mutual repulsion, or of mutual
attraction, the dominant part played by touch resumed in its
essential organ, the hand, caresses, embraces, fusion; the movements
of attraction being all the more noisy and violent, in proportion as
the instinct predominates. Finally, as the specific mark, we find a
particular state of the sexual organs, varying from slight
excitement to paroxysm. This disturbance,—whether strong or
weak,—even when it has no echo in the consciousness, influences the
unconscious activity.[157]
Footnote 157:
M. Pierre Janet mentions the case of a woman in whom “the family
feelings, the affective emotions, modesty, and the sensitiveness
of the genital organs appeared and disappeared simultaneously.” He
adds: “Which of these phenomena brings the others in its train? Is
genital sensibility a centre round which other psychological
syntheses are constructed? I draw no conclusion.”—_État mental des
Hystériques_, i. pp. 217, 218.
If from the organic, motor, and vaso-motor manifestations we pass to
the nervous centres, where impressions are received and movements
initiated, we can find scarcely anything but hypotheses. One point
only has been fixed since Budge’s researches: the existence in the
spinal cord of a centre or an area on the level of the fourth lumbar
vertebra, which governs the movements of the sexual act. Its
psychological function is slight or non-existent: it is properly an
instinctive centre, whose action is not obstructed by the removal of
the cerebral hemispheres and the cerebellum, in the inferior
vertebrates, and even in the dog, as proved by the experiments of
Goltz and others. Some authors admit, without precise localisation,
a second centre, situated near the ganglia at the base of the
encephalon, which they suppose to be the seat of the brute
sensations and their corresponding movements, and in relation with
the centres of olfactory and visual sensations. This centre would
have a psychological value. Lastly, a third and last centre in the
cortical layer, the organ of perception properly so called, and of
the revival of images. Nothing precise is known as to its position,
whether it is localised in a certain area, or diffused. On this
point we find nothing but hypotheses—if so much as that. The
occipital lobes, the neighbourhood of the olfactory centre, have
been suggested, but these are extremely doubtful. We have to be
content with the admission that, from the genital organs,
impressions are first transmitted to the lower or spinal centre,
which exercises a reflex action on the corresponding systems of
vascular, motor, and secretory innervation, and thence—whether there
is an intermediate centre, or not—reach the cerebral cortex, where
they produce a more or less definite state of consciousness,
according to circumstances.
Anatomy and physiology are not the only sciences concerned in this
question; for if the existence of these superposed centres,
connected with each other, though distinct in function, were
thoroughly established, this would give us certain landmarks, and
lay down fixed conditions, or stages, in the development of sexual
emotion, which may result from a state of the organs (instinctive
form) or from an external perception, or from a pure representation
(imaginative love). In the absence of an anatomical basis which
might serve for the normal psychology of the subject, and still
better for the comprehension of the pathological facts, let us
follow the evolution of sexual love so far as observation enables us
to do so. It has already been sketched in the Introduction, but too
briefly for our present purpose.
2. We have distinguished, in this psychological evolution, three
principal periods: the instinctive, the emotional, and the
intellectualised.
Taking the question at its remotest origin, some naturalists and
philosophers assert that the equivalents of sexual attraction exist
in living beings devoid of nervous systems, in vegetable or animal
micro-organisms. “It is curious,” says Balbiani, “to find, in beings
who from their small size, and the external simplicity of their
organisation, have been placed by all zoologists at the furthest
limit of the animal world, actions denoting the existence of
phenomena analogous to those by which the sex-instinct manifests
itself in a great number of metazoa.... Thus, with the paramæcids,
at the moment of propagation ... a higher instinct seems to govern
these little animals; they seek and pursue each other, they go from
one to another, feeling each other with their cilia, cling to one
another for some instants in the attitude of sexual approach, and
then let go in order to seize each other again. These singular
games, by which these animalcules seem in turn to provoke one
another to the act of copulation, often last for several days before
the act becomes definitive.” Other facts of the same nature have
been cited. Finally, it has been said that “the coupling of the two
sexual elements is analogous to the coupling of the two animals
whence these elements are derived: the spermatozoid and the ovule do
on a small scale what the two individuals do on a large one; the
spermatic element, in directing itself towards the ovule which it is
to fertilise, is animated by the same sexual instinct which guides
the complete being towards the female of the same species.”[158]
-----
Footnote 158:
This psychological thesis has been maintained, in all its rigour,
by Delbœuf: “That girl and that young man, in being attracted to
one another, obey the will, unknown to both, of a spermatozoid, an
ovule. But it may be taken as certain that this will is not
unknown either to the spermatozoid or the ovule; both know what
they want, and seek it. To this end they give their orders to
their respective brains through the medium of the heart, and the
brain obeys without knowing why. Sometimes it imagines that it has
been convinced by reason and explains its own choice to itself. At
bottom it has been but an _unconscious_ instrument in the hand of
an imperceptible workman who knew both what he wanted and what he
was doing.” (_Revue philosophique_, March 1891, p. 257.)
-----
If we confine ourselves to the micro-organisms, these facts of
sexual attraction have been interpreted in two ways, as we have
already seen—one psychological, the other chemical. Some, as we have
just heard, admit a desire, an elective action, a choice, quoting in
support of this not only the phenomena of generation, but several
others: as the habitat, the use of a certain substance in the
formation of the carapace, the movements of certain micro-organisms
in seeking and seizing a determined prey. Others reject this
psychology, which they call anthropomorphism, and maintain that
chemical action is sufficient to explain the whole. Pfeffer had
already shown, as far as generation is concerned, that the
spermatozoids of the cryptogamia are attracted by certain chemical
substances varying according to the vegetable species. More
recently, Maupas and Verworn, who have successively studied the
alleged cases of choice, eliminate all psychical elements and reduce
the whole to a purely mechanical process. I am inclined to adopt the
second opinion, while recognising that, as far as problems of origin
are concerned, we decide by probabilities rather than proofs.
Above this chemical or organic attraction we find the sex-instinct
properly so called, which, with its numberless adaptations, embraces
the whole animal world. It is useless to prove that this instinct is
fatal, blind, not acquired, anterior to all experience; but, as by
its nature it consists essentially of motor manifestations, its
psychology is scanty enough. Some remarks on this point may not be
without advantage. In fact, as regards the problem of instinct, an
entirely new position has been taken up.
During the first half of this century the inneity of instinct was
placed in the order of cognition, while recent psychology places it
in the order of movements, or, to be more accurate, in a fixed
relation between certain states of consciousness and certain
movements. According to the first hypothesis, stated in a masterly
manner by F. Cuvier, instinct consists in images, or innate and
constant sensations, which determine to action in the same manner as
ordinary sensations; it is “a sort of vision, a dream, analogous to
somnambulism.” According to the second hypothesis, sensations,
perceptions, and images excite movements determined by the
organisation, as in the case of ducklings when they see the water,
the kitten scenting a mouse, the squirrel laying up its winter
store. There are no innate representations, or even innate
movements, but a pre-established relation between some fortuitous
impressions and a group of movements: instinct is the _innate motor
reaction_ to an external or internal excitement; it results from the
nature of the animal. The impression only pulls the trigger and the
shot is fired. Like every other instinct, that of sex consists in a
fixed _relation_ between internal sensations coming from the genital
organs, or tactile, visual or olfactory perceptions on the one hand,
and movements adapted to an end on the other. As far as it is an
instinct, it is that and nothing but that. In the immense majority
of animals, and frequently in men, it does not rise above this
level; in plainer words, it is not accompanied by any tender
emotion. The act once accomplished, there is separation and
oblivion. More than this, in some cases there is not even
indifference, but hostility: the males of the queen bee are put to
death as useless, and it is well known that the mate of the female
spider often runs the risk of being devoured.
Sexual _love_ corresponds to a higher form of evolution. Over and
above instinct, it implies the addition of a certain degree of
tender feeling. It is not therefore a simple emotion, even in the
tolerably numerous species of animals in which it can be studied. In
man, more especially in civilised man, its complexity becomes
extreme. The analysis made by Herbert Spencer is well known and
somewhat lengthy, yet I do not hesitate to transcribe it, since I
can find no other to equal it, nor any point which could be added or
subtracted:—
“... The passion which unites the sexes ... is habitually spoken
of as though it were a simple feeling; whereas it is the most
compound, and therefore the most powerful, of all the feelings.
Added to the purely physical elements of it are first to be
noticed those highly complex impressions produced by personal
beauty, around which are aggregated a variety of pleasurable
ideas, not in themselves amatory, but which have an organised
relation to the amatory feeling. With this there is united the
complex sentiment which we term affection—a sentiment which, as it
can exist between those of the same sex, must be regarded as an
independent sentiment, but one which is here greatly exalted. Then
there is the sentiment of admiration, respect, or reverence; in
itself one of considerable power, and which, in this relation,
becomes in a high degree active. Then comes next the feeling
called love of approbation. To be preferred above all the world,
and that by one admired beyond all others, is to have the love of
approbation gratified in a degree passing every previous
experience, especially as there is that indirect gratification of
it which results from the preference being witnessed by
unconcerned persons. Further, the allied emotion of self-esteem
comes into play. To have succeeded in gaining such attachment
from, and sway over, another, is a proof of power which cannot
fail agreeably to excite the _amour propre_. Yet again, the
proprietary feeling has its share in the general activity: there
is the pleasure of possession; the two belong to each other. Once
more, the relation allows of an extended liberty of action.
Towards other persons a restrained behaviour is requisite. Round
each there is a subtle boundary that may not be crossed—an
individuality on which none may trespass. But in this case the
barriers are thrown down, and thus the love of unrestrained
activity is gratified. Finally, there is an exaltation of the
sympathies. Egoistic pleasures of all kinds are doubled by
another’s sympathetic participation, and the pleasures of another
are added to the egoistic pleasures. Thus, round the physical
feeling forming the nucleus of the whole, are gathered the
feelings produced by personal beauty; that constituting simple
attachment, those of reverence, of love of approbation, of
self-esteem, of property, of love of freedom, of sympathy. These,
all greatly exalted, and severally tending to reflect their
excitements on one another, unite to form the mental state we call
love. And as each of them is itself comprehensive of multitudinous
states of consciousness, we may say that this passion fuses into
one immense aggregate most of the elementary excitations of which
we are capable; and that hence results its irresistible
power.”[159]
-----
Footnote 159:
_Principles of Psychology_, vol. i., § 215.
-----
This evolutionary moment gives the complete type of love. As it goes
on, a breach of equilibrium is produced at the expense of the
physiological and instinctive elements, which gradually efface
themselves before a more and more intellectualised image.
Certainly, there lies at the root of all love the unconscious search
for an ideal, but for an ideal perceived in a concrete, personal
form, incarnate for the moment in an individual. By a process of
mental abstraction similar to that which draws from perceptions the
most general ideas, the concrete image is transformed into a vague
scheme, a concept, an absolute ideal, and we have a purely
intellectual, Platonic, mystical love; the emotion is totally
intellectualised. Let us remark that this last stage of evolution is
not so very rare. Not only do we meet with it sporadically, but it
has been fixed and expressed, at certain moments of history, in
institutions, such as the chivalric love, of which Geoffrey Rudel
seeking the Lady of Tripoli is the most perfect example; the
troubadours, the Provençal Courts of Love, deciding that true love
cannot exist in marriage, and excludes all cohabitation, etc. We
must not, however, allow ourselves to be misled by appearances.
Platonic and mystic lovers have always maintained that their
sentiment is perfectly pure, and has nothing in common with the
senses; the contrary opinion seeming to them a profanation and a
sacrilege. Yet how could love exist without physical conditions,
however attenuated we may suppose them? If they are wanting, all we
have or can have is a purely intellectual state, the representation
of an ideal conceived but not felt. Besides, we have more
satisfactory evidence than suppositions and arguments; facts of
tolerably frequent occurrence show how rapidly we may fall from the
ideal plane. It is only because all the circumstances are in its
favour that the fall is so easy.[160]
Footnote 160:
For some curious observations on this point see especially Moreau
(of Tours), _Psychologie morbide_, pp. 264-278.
In this ascending evolution from the instinctive to the idealistic
form there is a decisive moment—viz., the appearance of
the individual choice. This is the special criterion which
differentiates instinct from emotion. Sexual instinct contents
itself with a specific satisfaction; sexual love does not. And as
choice manifests itself among the superior representatives of the
animal kingdom, not only by sanguinary combats between the males, or
by the more pacific tournaments which precede sexual selection, but,
in the absence of all rivalry and competition, by the exclusive
preference of one male for one female, chosen among many others whom
he might possess, we may admit _a fortiori_ that primitive humanity
must very soon have left behind the stage of _Venus Volgivaga_. We
know that Schopenhauer, and after him Hartmann, have tried to
determine the reasons of choice; but such attempts must always be
partial failures, because we can never be sure of discovering all
the unconscious factors.
For the rest, the psychology of love contains many other mysteries.
Whence comes the blind violence which astonishes and sometimes
terrifies the calm spectator? Bain thinks it can be explained by the
concentration of the attention on an individual, and by the fact
that intensity and unity of object are associated in love. But this
applies also to other passions, such as ambition and hatred. Herbert
Spencer, in the analysis already quoted, attributes it to the
complexity of the passion, love being an aggregate of heterogeneous
tendencies all converging to one end and carrying the individual in
the same direction. At bottom, the irresistible element is in the
sexual instinct, and only exists in virtue of it; instinctive
activity alone has such power. This is what Schopenhauer calls, in
metaphysical terms, the Genius of the species, which makes of the
individual an instrument for the furtherance of its ends. We might
also call it, in biological terms, according to the hypothesis of
Weismann now in vogue: the continuity of the germ-plasm which
energetically manifests and affirms itself, safeguarding the rights
of the species against individual fancies. But all these metaphors
explain nothing, add nothing to the simple verification of the fact.
Sexual instinct remains the centre round which everything revolves;
nothing exists but through it. Character, imagination, vanity,
imitation, fashion, time, place, and many other individual
circumstances or social influences give to love—as emotion or
passion—an unlimited plasticity. It is the task of the novelists to
describe all its various shapes, and one which they have not failed
to perform.
II.
Though love, even in its average manifestations, is inseparable from
obsession and impulsion, I see in these two characteristics no
legitimate reason for placing it unrestrictedly—as some writers have
been pleased to do—in the category of pathology.[161] It has its
natural end, and tends to fulfil it by appropriate means. Every one
knows that it sometimes reaches the confines of madness; but in this
it does not differ from the majority of the emotions. There are the
impulsive and irresistible forms of love (erotomania), but they
remain within natural limits; the true pathology of love is
elsewhere—outside nature.
Footnote 161:
See Danville, _Psychologie de l’amour_, ch. vi., for a detailed
discussion of this question, which the author also answers in the
negative.
On the deviations and interversions of the sexual instinct so many
observations have been published,—especially in our own day,—so many
books written, so many medico-legal theses discussed, that we might
think the psychology of the subject had thereby been cleared up.
Nothing of the sort; and it is this alone which interests us.
Reduced to its simplest expression, the psychological problem
is this: The sex-instinct having a clearly-defined and
easily-verifiable end, how can it deviate therefrom? Other
instincts—that of conservation under its offensive and
defensive forms, that of self-feeling—have no mechanism
exclusively appropriated to them, and are susceptible of
various and multiple adaptations. This, on the contrary, is
confined by nature within strict limits. No doubt every
instinct has its oscillations; but it is only the means which
vary, the end remains the same. The ant, the bee, the beaver,
the spider, modify their manner of acting in accordance with
their environment, because they are confronted with the
dilemma that they must either adapt themselves or perish; but
they always arrive at the same end. The nutritive instinct in
man utilises animals and vegetables—the raw caterpillars of
the savage or the scientific cookery of the civilised man—but
the same end is always aimed at and attained. With the
deviations—at least the extreme ones—of the sex-instinct it is
otherwise: everything changes, means and end alike. The normal
end, generation and the perpetuity of the species, is ignored
or annihilated. This aspect of the question does not appear to
me to have been sufficiently noticed. How can an instinct so
solidly based, and having its own special mechanism, go
astray?
This subject deserves a purely psychological monograph, a very
difficult piece of work for which this is not the proper place. I
would only seek to inquire into the principal causes of the
alteration of this instinct. I shall cite no facts—they are
sufficiently well known, or will suggest themselves; besides, the
choice lies between excessive abundance and nothing. I pass over the
extreme cases, those of necrophily, or of sexual erethism
accompanied by a craving for violence, destruction, or blood. These
are the equivalent of the animal manifestations already mentioned,
in which the state of general excitement, so far from producing
tenderness, awakens by preference the aggressive tendencies. These
are merely insane impulses. I am limiting myself to deviations and
interversions—_i.e._, to cases where the natural mechanism of
instinct is falsified (excitations caused by impressions having
nothing to do with sexuality, attraction towards the same sex,
etc.).
We may pass over in silence the general causes, which are not
particularly instructive: degeneracy, brought in, as usual, to serve
as an explanation, and heredity, which is no explanation at all,
being merely a repetition, and brings us back to the primary case,
which states the question afresh. The inquiry can only be profitable
when directed to particular causes.
1. One principal anatomical and physiological cause is found in the
conformation of the genital organs: arrest of development,
incomplete sexuality, hermaphrodism, malformations, etc. This is the
simplest and most easily verifiable cause, and is found to be
sufficient in some cases. The action, from below upwards, of the
organ and its lower centre on the brain, is no longer normal; the
conditions of existence of the instinct are absent or altered.
2. Other causes are not so easily assignable. One of a sociological
order may be indicated: it is known what takes place when a number
of individuals of the same sex are shut up together, as in
boarding-schools, convents, prisons, barracks, ships on long
voyages. But the most numerous causes are of psychological origin,
and we may divide them into unconscious and conscious.
3. The existence of the unconscious, and therefore involuntary,
causes is rather suspected than proved. They consist in strange
associations of ideas formed at the period of puberty, whose
ultimate reason eludes observation; they might be compared to
certain cases of _audition colorée_, when a connection is formed
between a sound and a colour, apparently fortuitous, but in reality
resting on a common emotional basis. More than this, observation
seems to show that, at a much earlier age, in the fifth or sixth
year, there are apt to occur “unconscious genital impulses provoking
associations of ideas which frequently serve, in later years, as a
_substratum_ to our sentiments and volitions. Most of these
associations are unstable, and remain outside the consciousness. In
the degenerate they take on the impulsive and overpowering character
which distinguishes their psychology; their intensity expresses the
degree of consciousness which accompanies them, the recollection
which is still connected with them, even the importance they assume
in later existence. The existence of an unconscious sub-personality
directing the conscious one manifests itself here rather than
elsewhere with undeniable clearness.”[162]
Footnote 162:
Dallemagne, _Dégénérés et Déséquilibrés_, p. 327.
4. There remain the conscious voluntary causes which are the
converse of the physical causes, representing an action from above
downwards of the superior centres on the inferior centre and the
organs. It is here that instinct finds itself in conflict with its
most redoubtable enemy, the intense and persistent image. In
predisposed subjects the creative power of the imagination works at
some construction on an erotic theme, as in others it produces a
mechanical invention, a work of art, a scientific discovery. Every
vivid image tends to realise itself; in the present case it has the
power to divert instinct from its natural channel if its motor power
is stronger, and the sexual instinct has not in all men an equal
stability.
I do not think, however, that these causes are sufficient to explain
everything, even if we take account of imitation which fixes itself
in custom, and of the contagion of example. If the facts were taken
in detail, omitting nothing, we should meet with more than one
embarrassing complication. Thus, sexual aberrations are found in
animals, though of but moderate intelligence and living quite free
from constraint. Can we, considering this, throw all the blame on
imagination? They are also found among primitive races: the Huns,
say ancient historians, had made of unnatural love a regular
institution; can we blame civilisation? Many other difficulties of
this kind might be raised; but I may remind the reader that
pathology is only introduced into this work by way of elucidation,
and it seems to me that, in the present subject, it receives from
normal psychology more light than it throws on it.
CHAPTER VII.
TRANSITION FROM THE SIMPLE TO THE COMPLEX
EMOTIONS.
_The complex emotions are derived from the simple (1) by way of
complete evolution; in a homogeneous form: Examples—In a
heterogeneous form: Examples—(2) by arrest of development—(3) by
composition; two forms—Composition by mixture; with convergent
elements; with divergent elements—Composition by combination
(sublimity, humour)—Modesty—Is it an instinct?—Hypotheses as to
its origin._
Having studied in succession each of the tendencies which we look
upon as incapable of further analysis, together with the simple
emotion which expresses each, we now pass to the composite
emotions. There is no need to point out that a simple emotion
(fear, anger, etc.) is, in itself, a very complex phenomenon, and
that “simple” means irreducible by analysis to any other emotion.
All those which do not present this characteristic are complex.
The problem to be stated, then, is this: How have the secondary
and derivative emotions arisen from the primary or principal ones?
Since it is admitted that these are typical emotions, and, on the
other hand, the observation of human life shows us numerous
emotional states, with their individual varieties and gradations,
their transformations in the course of ages, how has this
multiplicity been produced?
It is under this form that the masters of the seventeenth century
had stated the question, and I take it up again, because this method
seems to me far superior to that of classifications, which has since
become prevalent. We know that Descartes admitted only six primary
passions: admiration, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness. “All
the others,” he says, “are composed of some out of these six, or
else they are different species of the same, and derived from
them;”[163] and he goes on to describe about forty. Spinoza admits
only three principal: desire, joy, and sadness, whence he deduces
the others, which, after eliminating some repetitions, amount to
forty-six. However, it is not very clearly shown by what method
these philosophers determine their primary passions; it seems as
though the criterion were their extremely general character, except
in the case of admiration. As for the other passions, they are
_deduced_, and in order to show this clearly, Spinoza always takes
care in his definitions to connect the primary with the derived
passion. Thus: “Fear is an ill-assured sadness, arising from the
idea of some past or future thing of which we are in some doubt as
to the result.” In short, their method is geometrical and deductive,
especially in the _Ethics_; but we can, with slight modifications,
adapt it to the exigencies of experimental psychology. Thus we have
determined the primary emotions by derivation, from the
chronological order of their appearance, not by their extremely
general character. As for the derivative emotions, we are about to
seek to determine the very various conditions of their genesis, not
by way of deduction, but by that of analysis or synthesis based on
observation, _i.e._, as far as possible by a genetic method. We have
elsewhere spoken of classification and the insurmountable
difficulties inherent in it; accordingly, the aim which we propose
to ourselves is not, given a composite emotion, to determine its
genus and species, but to know _from what primary emotion, and in
what manner, it is derived_.
Footnote 163:
_Traité des Passions_, sec. 69.
These natural methods of transition from the simple to the complex
seems to me capable of being ranged under three heads: (1)
evolution, (2) arrest of development, (3) composition (mixture and
combination). These three methods may act separately or conjointly;
the more complex emotions are usually the result of their
co-operation. We shall examine them in succession.
I.
The transition _by evolution_, complete or incomplete, is the
simplest and most general case. It consists, like all evolution, in
the passage from simplicity to complexity, from the undifferentiated
to the differentiated, from the lower to the higher. It depends on
the intellectual development, and is based on the law of
transference already described (Pt. I., chap. xii.), which is its
active and unconscious instrument. However feeble the development of
the emotions may be in any race or individual it is never entirely
wanting (idiots excepted), because the events of national and
individual life have always some variety and some changes of aspect,
which influence the emotional life.
It is convenient to distinguish two cases, according as the
evolution takes place in a homogeneous or a heterogeneous form.
I. _Evolution in homogeneous form._—The primary emotion remains
identical with itself, through the whole course of evolution; it
only increases in complexity. Here are some examples:[164]
-----
Footnote 164:
As all the emotions to be enumerated in this chapter have been
already—or are about to be—studied separately, they will only be
mentioned briefly, by way of example, and in order to illustrate
the work of the mind in the creation of composite forms.
-----
Æsthetic emotion has its origin in a surplus of activity expending
itself in a particular direction, under the influence of the
creative imagination; and it preserves this fundamental character
from the drawings scratched on flints by quaternary man, or the
symbolic dances of savages, through the classic ages, to the
quintessential refinements of the decadents. It is true that all are
not disposed to admit this: a person of delicate artistic
temperament, brought up in a very cultured environment, and suddenly
thrown into the midst of savage æsthetics, would deny any community
of nature, but in this he would be mistaken. Those centuries which
had no sense of evolution, of the continuity of development (the
seventeenth and eighteenth), could see nothing in the origin of art
but incomprehensible crudities, not worth notice. The transition
from simplicity to complexity took place through the accumulation of
knowledge, of ideas, and technical skill, and of causes or occasions
of new ways of feeling: thus were formed juxtaposed aggregates
acting by quality and quantity. This progress from simplicity to
complexity is seen better than anywhere else in the development of
the feeling for music, the most emotional of all the arts.
The religious sentiment is not of simple origin. It results: (1)
from the fusion of two primary emotions—fear, and love in the larger
sense (tender emotion); it is therefore a binary compound; (2) from
a process of evolution which we shall have to follow in detail and
which depends on intellectual conditions: predominance, first, of
images, then of inferior concepts, then of superior concepts. Here,
too, the continuity escapes the notice of many who do not see the
bond connecting fetichism with the most idealistic of religions. How
many travellers and ethnographers, after having ascertained the
existence, among a given tribe, of magic, amulets, funeral rites,
seriously affirm that these people are devoid of all religious
feelings! It is because for them complex and highly organised forms
are the only ones that count, and because they are accustomed to
think of religious feelings as formulated by the great established
religions.
II. _Evolution in heterogeneous form._—The primary feeling is
transformed to such a degree as to become unrecognisable, and can,
in many cases, only be recovered by laborious analysis. This case
resembles that of the morphological development of animals: the
forms of the adult give no hint of the forms of embryonic and fœtal
life.
The best example I can give is the genesis of the benevolent
emotions, which, however, will be more suitably placed in the next
chapter. We can, however, examine another case.
The instinct of conservation is, as we have seen, a collective term,
an abridged formula, used to designate the totality of particular
tendencies which assure the persistence of the individual, and one
of which, the craving for food, is fundamental. It manifests itself
in all its simplicity in most animals and in savage tribes who live,
strictly speaking, from day to day. Yet ants, bees, foxes, and many
other animals put aside a reserve store of food for future needs.
The human race has very rapidly acquired the habits of foresight and
care for the future, even while still in the savage stage and living
by hunting and fishing. With a nomadic or agricultural life, the
need of possession affirms itself more and more. As social progress
substitutes for exchanges in kind the use of the precious metals,
first in ingots, then as coined money, and later still, of paper
money, feeling follows the same course, transferring itself from
things to the values which represent them and the representations of
these values, in many cases with well-known tenacity; and we see
people who prefer illness to the expense of a cure, the risk of
being murdered to the unpleasantness of giving up their purses. So
that those values and signs of values which represent the
possibility of satisfying needs (food, clothes, lodging, etc.),
become in and for themselves a cause of desire and pleasure, and,
amassed as a security for life, remain useless—if, indeed, they do
not cause death. Avarice is a passion very well suited to illustrate
this evolution in heterogeneous form, which, in spite of a strictly
logical development, undergoes so many changes that its extreme
point seems the negation of its point of departure.
The feeling of strength, self-feeling in its positive form, is at
first, as we have seen, the consciousness of physical energy; but,
with the intellectual development, it radiates in different
directions, according to temperament and disposition. We can at
least note two very different directions: (1) an evolution in the
theoretical and purely individual sense, which leads a man to take
up all questions, examine and criticise everything, form an
independent opinion on every subject—in short, to have as his ideal
an absolute liberty of thought, without any sort of restriction; (2)
an evolution in the practical and social sense, extending one’s
power over things and men; the child who domineers over his
playmates may, at a later age, impose his personality on a party, a
nation, a number of nations (Cæsar, Napoleon). The quality of the
emotions felt in the two cases is very different; however, the
original source is common to both, the divergence is the effect of
character and intellectual evolution.
II.
The transformation of simple into derivative emotions, _by arrest of
development_, is of less frequent occurrence. While, in the
preceding case, there was a forward movement in a straight line,
intellectual evolution involving emotional evolution according to
the law of transference, here the mental process is more
complicated; it supposes an antagonism between two states of
consciousness, resolving itself into a compromise. There are, on the
one hand, emotional tendencies going in the direction of impulse; on
the other, images, ideas, intellectual states of all sorts acting by
way of arrest, so that the resultant emotion is composed at the same
time of movements and inhibitions of movement.
Except fear, all primary emotions imply tendencies to movement,
sometimes blind and violent, like natural forces. This is seen in
infants, animals, savages, the Barbarians of the first centuries of
our era as depicted by contemporary chroniclers; the passage of
emotion into action, good or bad, is instantaneous, rapid, and fatal
as a reflex movement.
Reflection is, by its nature, slow and inhibitory. How can an image
or a conception produce an arrest of movement? This is a very
obscure question, the psychological and physiological mechanism of
which has had but little light thrown on it; it is useless to treat
it here in a cursory manner; we need only remark that the arrest
exists as a matter of fact.
The intervention of this new factor, reflection, may result in two
ways. On the one hand, it may obstruct and finally suppress; thus a
passion kept in check ends, after various oscillations backward and
forward, in being altogether extinguished. The second is a
transformation or metamorphosis by arrest of development; the
passion is not extinguished, but it has changed its nature.
The biological sciences have familiarised us with the notion of
arrested development and the morphological modifications resulting
therefrom. We know that the parts of a living being are so closely
connected that none can change without involving a change on the
part of the others; such is the formula of the “Law of Organic
Correlations,” and it has its equivalent in the functional order.
The “compensation of development” exists beyond all doubt in
psychology, though it has not been as much studied as it deserves;
thus experience shows us that hypertrophy of certain faculties
entails as a consequence the hypertrophy or atrophy of certain
others.
I have previously (Chap. III.) mentioned hatred as an abortive form
of anger, the result of arrested development. I have only to add a
few supplementary remarks on the two antagonistic elements. One is
primary and tends to the partial or total destruction of the enemy,
attacking him in his own person or in that of his friends, in his
reputation, his honour, his interests. The other, made up of
reflection and calculation, consists in the representation of
consequences, in the fear of reprisals and of Divine or human laws.
Hence arises an emotional state comparable to the movement of a body
rotating on itself and incapable of passing certain limits; and it
must be admitted that the metamorphic process is here very
thorough-going, since many writers, so far from grasping the
affinities between hatred and anger, set up the former as a primary
emotion, the antithesis of love. Yet it is very clear that hatred,
by the inhibitory character peculiar to it, is not and cannot be a
primary emotion; it corresponds to a second stage. If it is objected
that we might as well assert that anger is the developed form of
hatred (_i.e._, that the latter is primary), and not hatred an
abortive form of anger, I should answer that this position is
inadmissible, because in experience we have no example of the
inhibitory form appearing _before_ the corresponding impulsive form.
What is primary is an instinctive, unconscious movement of retreat,
of aversion (in the etymological sense), but this is no more the
emotion of hatred than the instinctive and unconscious movement of
attraction is the emotion of love.
Resignation, with its varieties and gradations, is an abortive form
of grief. Its mode of expression has been described in detail by
Darwin (Chap. XI.). This state is the resultant of two currents: on
one side, moral pain, grief, which by itself and in its complete
form shows itself in prostration, tears, etc.; on the other hand, an
intellectual notion—that of the irreparable and irremediable, of the
futility of all efforts. The intellect has its teleology, which is
not that of feeling; if it prevails and asserts itself in the
consciousness, we shall have, after a period of oscillation, a fixed
state, in which the loss will be accepted and perceived in a
mitigated form.
Mystic, platonic, or intellectual love (there is no advantage in
distinguishing the exact shades expressed by these various epithets)
is, as we have seen, an abortive form of sexual love. Predominance
of the intellectual element, the conceived ideal; weakening of the
physiological and emotional manifestations and the organic erethism,
of the tendency to movements of contact and embrace, and everything
which constitutes emotion in its plenitude: such are its
characteristics. Here, more than elsewhere, the term “arrest of
development” is strictly accurate, because mystical love results,
not from a voluntary inhibition which mutilates or checks emotion,
but from an impotence on the part of emotion to develop its complete
form.
Experience furnishes the counterproof: let the antagonistic action
of reflection, or of the intellectual state—whatever it may
be—cease, and hatred will once more become anger, resignation grief,
or despair; mystical will change to sexual love, and the primitive
form reappears under the ruins of the derivative.
To sum up, all the emotions of this group whose genesis depends on
an arrest of development are reducible to a single formula:
_intellectualised emotions_, because the intellectual element
becomes dominant. We might also call them _attenuated_ emotions,
because they tend towards emotional weakening. The two contrary and
reciprocally dependent tendencies peculiar to this group, determine,
not a medium emotion, but a new form which, relatively to the
primary emotion, and to the general quantity of emotional life, is a
_loss_.
III.
Transformation _by composition_ is a general term including two
different cases: mixture and combination. This process consists of
additions, and can be thus formulated: When two or more intellectual
states coexist, each having its own peculiar emotional colouring,
there arises a complete emotional state; in other words,
intellectual complexity involves emotional complexity. If we compare
the primary emotions to the simplest perceptions of sight and
hearing, the complex emotions will correspond to the perception of
an extensive landscape or a symphony. It is thus formed by the
addition or fusion of binary, tertiary, quaternary compounds, and so
on, these terms implying the number of simple emotions which compose
them. The composition may be brought about in two ways, which we
shall distinguish by calling them respectively mixture and
combination, in the sense in which these words are employed by
writers on chemistry.
I. _Composition by mixture._—In the emotions derived from this
mental procedure, the constituent elements can be recovered from the
compound; they embrace without interpenetrating one another, and a
psychological analysis conducted with sufficient thoroughness is
able to determine and enumerate them. For greater clearness, I
distinguish two cases in the mixture of feelings.
(_a._) The elements are homogeneous or convergent. If they are
numerous, since they all tend in the same direction, the resultant
emotion will be of great intensity. We have found one example of
this in sexual love, an aggregate compound (according to Herbert
Spencer’s analysis) of physical attraction, æsthetic impressions,
sympathy, tenderness, admiration, self-love, love of approbation,
love of possession, and desire of liberty.
(_b._) The elements are heterogeneous or divergent. As an example I
take jealousy, which many authorities consider primary, perhaps
because it is manifested by animals and infants, which simply proves
that it is precocious,—quite a different thing. A contemporary
writer tries to define it by saying: “It is a morbid fear passing
from inert stupidity to active or passive rage.” I greatly prefer
Descartes’ definition: “Jealousy is a kind of fear related to the
desire we have of keeping some possession” (_Passions_, art. 167).
This passion deserves a monograph to itself, and one will certainly
be written when this style of work comes to be applied more
frequently to the psychology of the emotions. Our task at present is
not to study its gradations, from mild cases up to madness and
homicide, but to inquire into its composition. There is, firstly,
the representation of some good, possessed or denied—a pleasurable
element acting by way of excitement and attraction; and, secondly,
the idea of dispossession or privation (_e.g._, of the lover with
regard to his mistress, of the rejected candidate against his
fortunate rival, and in general, of any who fail against all who
succeed), an element of vexation which acts depressively; and,
thirdly, the idea of the real or imaginary cause of this
dispossession or privation, awakening, in various degrees, the
destructive tendency (anger, hatred, etc.). In the passive or inert
forms of jealousy this last element is very slight. This emotion is,
therefore, a binary compound.
We might further mention the religious sentiment (a binary
compound), the feeling of respect, composed of sympathy and a slight
degree of fear, and the moral sentiment, which we are about to
analyse in the next chapter.
I must remark that these derivative emotions, by reason of their
complexity, ought logically to show as many shades of variety as
they have constituent elements. In sexual love, where analysis
discovers at least ten tendencies, whether primary or not, the
predominance of one or more among these changes the aspect of the
emotion according to times and individuals. The instability of the
passions, of which we hear so much, is partly caused by their
composite character.
II. _Composition by combination._—The emotion resulting from this
mental procedure differs, in its nature and characteristics, from
its constituent elements, and appears in the consciousness as a new
product, an irreducible unit. Here the analysis, uncertain and
hazardous as it often is, cannot give us everything which we find in
the synthesis—a psychological case which has well-known equivalents
in chemistry.
A Danish psychologist, Sibbern, whom I believe to have been the
first to point out this mode of composition of the emotions under
the name of mixed sentiments, defines them as “Those in which the
disagreeable excites the agreeable, and _vice versâ_, so that one is
not antecedent to the other, but both act simultaneously, and the
disappearance of the one involves the disappearance of the
other.”[165] In fact, there is not merely coexistence, but
reciprocity of action; if you suppress a single term the emotion
changes its nature, as we shall see by the following examples.
-----
Footnote 165:
Sibbern’s _Psychologie_ (1856), having been published in Danish,
is only known to me through extracts quoted by his compatriots,
Höffding (_Psychologie_, 2nd German ed., pp. 330, 331) and Lehmann
(_Hauptgesetze_, pp. 247 _et seq._). These two authors may also be
consulted with advantage on this question.
-----
In the emotion accompanying all forms of activity in which we _seek_
great difficulties to overcome, or risks to run (as in hunting wild
animals, dangerous mountain climbing, exploring expeditions, etc.),
if we suppress the unknown element, the risk, the danger, there is
no longer any attraction. If we suppress this attraction and its
accompanying pleasure we have nothing left but fear or disgust. This
particular emotion exists only through the interdependence of its
various elements. It can be produced in a modified form, but without
changing its nature, in the spectators of bull-fights, wild beast
tamers, violent struggles, and thrilling dramas, and in a lesser
degree by mere recitation or reading.
I have already mentioned melancholy (in the ordinary, not the
medical sense) as one form of the luxury of grief. It implies the
calling up of pleasant states, past or distant, _plus_ a state of
present sadness which surrounds them. Suppress one or other of these
elements and the melancholy vanishes. If the pleasurable element,
however slight, disappears, nothing remains but grief pure and
simple. In this combination sometimes the one element predominates,
sometimes the other, and the resultant feeling receives a special
emotional _timbre_, as the case may be.
The feeling of the sublime is usually considered as a form of the
æsthetic sentiment, and we shall have to return to it later on.
Whatever it may have for its object—whether the spectacle of sullen
glaciers, of a boundless desert, or of a man who throws himself
recklessly into some great act of self-devotion,—it is composed of
discordant elements fused into a single synthesis: (1) a painful
feeling of oppression, of lowered vitality, of annihilation, which
drags us down and depresses us; (2) the consciousness of an upward
rush, of unfolded energy, of an inward lifting up, of an increase of
vital power; (3) the conscious or unconscious feeling of security in
presence of a formidable power. Without the last-named the emotion
would change its nature, and we should feel fear. These three
co-existent and interdependent elements enter collectively into the
consciousness, and present themselves to it as an irreducible unit.
Höffding (_op. cit._, p. 407) gives humour as an example of a
combination, or, as he calls it, a mixed feeling. He defines it as
“the sentiment of the ridiculous based on sympathy.” This state
consists in seeing simultaneously and indissolubly the petty side of
great events and the great side of the most trivial things. It is
the synthesis of two antithetic elements: the destructive and
contemptuous laugh which makes us feel ourselves superior; and the
indulgence, pity, and compassion which place us on a footing of
equality with others. This emotional manifestation may be simply a
passing whim, or it may be a permanent trait of character, a
peculiar manner of understanding nature and human life, striking an
average between optimism, which finds everything too bright, and
pessimism, which sees the ugly side of everything. The school of
“irony,” which, with Solger, Schlegel, and others, played its part
in German æsthetics at the opening of this century, proposed
humour—negative and destructive in form, positive and constructive
in reality—as its fundamental principle in the interpretation of the
universe.
I am inclined to place in this group an emotional state which has
given rise to many dissertations and discussions—I mean modesty. I
look upon it as a binary compound capable of being resolved into two
primary emotions: self-feeling and fear. Whatever may be thought of
this explanation, the subject is worth the trouble of a little
examination; it could scarcely be omitted from a treatise on the
psychology of the feelings.
There is no lack of documents respecting the manifestations of
modesty among different peoples; they may be found in the narratives
of travellers, and in works on anthropology and ethnology. The
psychological question of its nature and origin has been treated by
Spencer, Sergi, James, Mantegazza, to mention contemporary writers
only. The last-named even gives us a definition of it: “Modesty is
physical self-respect.”
It has a physical mode of expression peculiar to it, or at least
only met with in the emotions related to modesty (shame, timidity,
shyness), viz., the sudden redness of the face due to momentary
paralysis of the vaso-constrictor nerves. We know Darwin’s ingenious
explanations of this point: a person who thinks others are looking
at him directs his attention to his own face, whence results a flow
of blood towards that part. These explanations are now rejected. The
experiments of Mosso and others on the circulation of the blood
rather justify the view taken by Wundt, who sees in the momentary
relaxation of the vaso-motor innervation, causing the redness of the
face, a compensation for the accelerated pulsations of the heart,
produced by emotion.
Besides this special mode of expression, modesty shows itself by
concentric, defensive movements, by a tendency to cover or disguise
certain parts of the body. The means employed to this end are of the
most various description, according to race, country, or period:
some hide the whole body, some the sexual parts only, or the face,
or the bosom, some paint the body, or the face, etc. It is
impossible to determine the exact part played in this diversity by
circumstances, climatic conditions, the association of ideas,
compulsion, fashion, imitation, and even chance.
So far as psychology is concerned, it is especially the question of
origin which has been discussed: Is modesty an instinct? is it
innate or acquired, primary or derived? Some writers, rather
carelessly, assume that it is an instinct, on no other evidence than
its quasi-universal character, which they deduce, legitimately
enough, from its multiple manifestations. Most, however, adopt the
contrary opinion, alleging the example of children, and of certain
primitive races who seem totally devoid of it. This second view
seems the more tenable, though it is difficult to find a categoric
solution which is free from objections. Modesty, being an
ego-altruistic feeling (and the same applies to shame and shyness),
presupposes some degree of reflection.
The conditions of its origin are little understood. H. Spencer, and,
after him, Sergi, maintain that it results from the habit of wearing
clothes, which began with men (not with women) from motives of
ostentation and ornament. There are tribes where both sexes go
naked, others where clothing is the privilege of the male sex:
immodesty would thus be, in its origin, a lack of æsthetic feeling.
Exclusively appropriated, at first, to the male sex, the feeling of
modesty would then have transferred itself to the other. This
explanation seems very precarious, not to mention the theory
incidentally implied, that the feeling is not stronger in women than
in men.[166]
-----
Footnote 166:
Sergi, _Piacere e Dolore_, pp. 210 _et seq._
-----
W. James proposes another, which is less simple, but more
acceptable.[167] Briefly, it is this: The emotional state which lies
at the root of modesty, shame, and other similar manifestations,
arises from the application in the second instance to ourselves of a
judgment primarily passed upon others. The sight of certain parts of
the body, and the ideas which they suggest, inspire repulsion, and
“it is not easy to believe that even among the nakedest savages an
unusual degree of cynicism and indecency in an individual should not
beget a certain degree of contempt, and cheapen him in his
neighbours’ eyes.” (In our opinion, this psychological state
approximates to disgust, of which we have already seen the causes
and the significance.) What is repugnant to us in others must be
repugnant to them in us: whence the habit of covering certain parts
and concealing certain bodily functions. Modesty cannot be
considered an instinct in the strict sense of the word, _i.e._, as
an excito-motor phenomenon. Under the influence of custom, public
opinion, civilisation, it passes through its evolution, till it
reaches “the New England pitch of sensitiveness and range, making us
say stomach instead of belly, limb instead of leg, retire instead of
go to bed, and forbidding us to call a female dog by name” (James,
ii. p. 437).
-----
Footnote 167:
W. James, _Psychology_, ii. pp. 435-437.
-----
Taken as a whole, this emotion approximates most by its external
symptoms to fear. It also contains elements derived from
self-feeling. Must we add other elements derived from the
sex-instinct? This is only admissible in certain cases. In short,
its composition is variable. We cannot consider it as instinctive,
primitive, innate. On the other hand, analysis cannot clearly
resolve it into its constituent parts; we are inclined to see in it
a particular case of mental synthesis, a combination.
To conclude, with regard to the emotions formed by combination:—
They are based on an association of intellectual states, which is,
in most cases, an association by contrast.
They presuppose a fusion, in varying proportions, of agreeable and
disagreeable states, which justly entitles them to be called mixed
emotions.
The whole differs from the sum of its constituent elements.
Analysis ascertains and isolates these elements, but cannot boast of
having discovered them all.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE SOCIAL AND MORAL FEELINGS.
_Origin of the Social Feelings—Animal societies—Nutritive
societies—The individual and society—Domestic societies—Social
instinct has its source neither in sexual nor in maternal
love—Gregarious societies—Attraction of like for like—Origin of
social tendencies—Accidental and transitory unions, of variable
duration, and voluntary—The social tendencies arise from the
conditions of existence—Social life does not spring from
domestic life—The higher societies among animals: they exclude
family relations—Human societies—Two opposite theories of
their origin: the family, the horde—Evolution of the
family—Evolution of social life—The family and the clan not
similar institutions—The moral sense. Two views of its origin:
(a) the intellectual, (b) the emotional—They correspond to two
stages in its development—Its innateness and its necessity
belong to the motor, not the intellectual order—Genesis of
the benevolent feeling. Psychological analysis of its
generative elements. Facts in support of this—Discoverers in
morality—Genesis of the sense of justice—Phases of its
development—Conclusion: complexity of the moral sense—Pathology.
Elimination of the questions of criminal anthropology. Moral
insensibility._
At the moment of beginning the study of the composite emotions which
have had the most brilliant career, and played the most important
part in human life, it will be well to indicate the course which
will be followed, once for all. We cannot, in dealing with the
social, moral, religious, æsthetic and intellectual sentiments,
discuss the numerous questions which they suggest, and so lose
ourselves in endless details. The allotted task of psychology seems
to me to be quite clearly defined—viz., to take each feeling _at its
origin_ and try to determine its nature and follow its development,
in its principal phases, by the help of the documents supplied to us
by ethnology, and the history of morals, of religions, and of
æsthetic and scientific culture, thus avoiding vagueness and _a
priori_ reasoning, without losing our way in an inextricable tangle
of facts.
In conformity with this plan, we shall begin with the simplest forms
of the social instinct in animals, passing from them to man, and
thence to the evolution of moral tendencies.
Even if we admit the transformist hypothesis, zoological evolution
has not proceeded in a straight line. This point, it is true, is
contested, but it is all the more important to remember, because the
development of the organisation and that of the social instincts do
not always go on _pari passu_. Thus the social aptitudes of ants and
bees are far superior to those of certain mammals considered of a
far higher type of organisation. Without troubling ourselves,
therefore, about the frequent disagreements between zoological
taxinomy and sociological psychology, we shall follow the ascending
march of the social instinct, no matter in what order or class or at
what point of the genealogical tree it shows itself.
We thus find four principal forms of animal societies: at the lowest
stage, those founded on nutrition; further on, those based on
reproduction; then, unstable, gregarious societies; and finally,
societies with a stable and complete organisation.[168] Some special
question will be put with regard to each of them, so as to show us
the social question under some one particular aspect.
-----
Footnote 168:
For the general study of this question see Espinas, _Les Sociétés
Animales_, 2nd ed. (1878), and Ed. Perrier, _Les Colonies
Animales_.
-----
“The idea of a society,” says Espinas, “is that of permanent
co-operation between separate living beings, engaged in the same
action” (_op. cit._, p. 157). The character of permanence even is
not necessary for the inferior forms; there are temporary societies
differing _in toto_ from those heterogeneous, fortuitous, momentary
aggregates which we call crowds. Reciprocity and solidarity are the
two fundamental conditions, a fact which excludes from human and
animal societies two forms somewhat approximating to them:
parasites, in whose case there is no reciprocity, and who show a
modified form of the struggle for life; and messmates, where
community of life, though it involves no injurious action, likewise
implies no helpful one.
I. In animal societies founded on nutrition, it is this function
which constitutes the social tie; the individuals composing it are
attached to one another in a permanent manner, from their birth
onwards, and the nutritive liquid circulates from one to another,
thus establishing a material community. It is found in the hydroid
polypes, the Bryozoa and the Tunicata. As examples of the superior
forms, we may quote the hydractinia, composed of individuals each of
which has its own special and exclusive function: some, that of
feeding; others, that of feeling and exploring; others, of defending
the colony; others, again, of reproducing it—the last-named being
divided into males and females. The siphonophora present an
analogous division of labour, and the community, over a metre in
length, suspended to a floating bladder, executes well co-ordinated
collective movements.
Is there—at any rate in the higher forms of these colonies—a social
instinct? Solidarity and reciprocity can indeed be perceived, in an
objective, material way, in the form of adherence, and vascular
communication; but nothing proves that there is anything more than
an _organic_ solidarity and reciprocity. Perhaps, in circumstances
such as the nautical manœuvres just mentioned, in which a general
obedience to one directing individual has been ascertained, there is
a momentary consent—a certain unity of representation. To be
accurate, the terms individual and community are diverted from their
ordinary acceptation and used in an equivocal sense. Our notion of
the individual is that of an organised whole living independently by
itself: this no longer corresponds to the present case. Our notion
of a community is an assemblage of individuals, and as these are, in
the case under consideration, of a peculiar nature, it might thus be
contended with equal force that these aggregates deserve, or that
they do not deserve, the name of animal communities: it is a
question of the point of view. On the one hand, one may regard the
hydractinia or the siphonophora as a complex individual whose organs
are the fishing, the piloting, the reproductive, etc., individuals.
On the other hand, it may be maintained that the food-providers,
pilots, etc., are true individuals whose aggregation forms a
society. In short, it is an undifferentiated state, in which
individuals and community are hardly to be distinguished from one
another, and are only two different aspects of the same whole. The
social instinct, also, if existing at all, is not yet differentiated
from the conservative instinct under its simplest forms—the search
for food, defence, attack. In fact, the two coincide. This stage has
nothing more to teach us. Let us now pass on to social forms whose
psychology is clearer.
II. These are the societies founded on reproduction—domestic
societies, or families, under their various forms. I prefer to begin
with these rather than with the gregarious state; first, on account
of their universality; then because they are the first to appear in
chronological order. Common opinion finds in them the first
manifestation of the social sentiments, their origin, their source,
and their moment of entry into the world. I reject this view in
order to adopt that which connects the social instinct with the
gregarious state.
If we take, one after another, the conditions of every aggregate
founded on reproduction, we shall find three stages: that of
sexual approach, that of maternal love, and lastly, but in the
case of animals only exceptionally, paternal love. The social
instinct—_i.e._, the more or less vague consciousness of at least
a temporary solidarity and reciprocity—does not, as we shall see,
make its appearance at any of these stages.
1. Sexual approach results from one particular instinct; it unites
two individuals only: can we consider it as the embryo of a society?
“Around sexuality are co-ordinated the altruistic instincts of which
the animal is capable.” This formula of Littré’s needs defining with
more precision. First, in the immense majority of cases the
connection is not lasting; the blind instinct satisfies itself, and
all is over. Higher up there are more permanent forms, such as
polygamy and polyandry; but these small communities founded on
sex-attraction are closed, and have no power of radiation or
extension, no future. Higher still we find monogamy, as among
wolves, many birds, etc.; but the monogamic aggregate is still more
of a close corporation than the others. Let us note, in passing,
that these two forms, polygamy and monogamy, are distributed through
the animal world in an apparently fortuitous manner, having no
relation to the intellectual development—as, for instance, the
monogamy of the stork and the polygamy of the monkey.
Finally, this first stage yields us no result, tending rather
towards social restriction than social extension.
2. Maternal love is of much greater importance. In domestic
societies it is the universal and permanent element, the vital bond.
This emotion is so widespread, so well known, we might say so trite,
that it seems to involve no mystery, and yet, if we descend into
animal psychology, we find nothing more enigmatical. The development
of sympathy and intelligence partly explains it in the human species
and the higher animals; but in the lower orders the difficulty
becomes extreme. Yet it shows itself among the annelids, the
crustacea, the mollusca, and even the echinoderms, which carry their
eggs about adhering to their bodies. Frequently it shows itself as a
feeling which, though vague, is tenacious, devoted, heroic. We do
not indicate all the difficulties of the question, as for instance:
How can an insect take such care of its eggs when it cannot
recognise its own form in a creature which in nowise resembles
itself, and has not even a living form?[169]
-----
Footnote 169:
For a detailed study of this question see Espinas, _Les Sociétés
Animales_ (2nd ed.), pp. 334 _et seq._, 411 _et seq._, 444 _et
seq._
-----
Most naturalists content themselves with ascertaining the fact,
without inquiring into its origin. Darwin declares that it is
useless to speculate on this subject. Others connect maternal
affection with parasitism—scarcely a legitimate hypothesis, since
the parasite is the enemy of its host and lives against his will at
his expense. Romanes seems to have recourse to the principle of
serviceable variations; an animal which takes care of its eggs or
carries them about with it, has a better chance of preserving them;
and if this way of acting becomes a fixed habit in its descendants,
an instinct has been established. This explanation reduces itself to
chance and to the hereditary transmission—an open question—of
acquired modifications.
Excluding the insects and those analogous cases which, as Espinas
has shown (_op. cit._, pp. 334-339), require a special explanation,
it is preferable to admit, with this author and Bain, the prominent
part played by contact. “It seems to me that there must be at the
foundation that intense pleasure in the embrace of the young which
we find to characterise the parental feeling throughout. The origin
of the pleasure may be as purely physical as in the love of the
sexes; ... [there is] an initial satisfaction in the animal embrace,
heightened by reciprocation.”[170] “The female, at the moment when
she gives birth to little ones resembling herself, has no difficulty
in recognising them as the flesh of her flesh; the feeling she
experiences towards them is made up of sympathy and pity, but we
cannot exclude from it an idea of property which is the most solid
support of sympathy. She feels and understands up to a certain point
that these young ones which are herself at the same time belong to
her; the love of herself extended to those who have gone out from
her changes egoism into sympathy and the proprietary instinct into
an affectionate impulse. As sexual love implies the idea of mutual
ownership, so maternal love supposes that of subordinated ownership.
It is because this other self is so feeble that the interest felt
for it takes the form of pity.”[171] This last remark relates to an
emotional manifestation which Spencer regards as the source of
maternal love—tenderness for the _weak_. This seems to me rather one
of its elements than its sole basis. On the other hand, Bain
maintains that “an intensified attraction towards the weak is not
merely consistent with the gregarious situation, but seems to be
required by its varying exigencies.... An interest or solicitude
about weak members would be almost the necessary completion of the
social system” (Bain, _op. cit._, pp. 138, 139). This granted,
maternal love and social instinct would have an element in common,
but they nevertheless remain distinct and mutually independent.
-----
Footnote 170:
Bain, _The Emotions_, p. 140.
Footnote 171:
Espinas, _Les Sociétés Animales_, pp. 444 _et seq._
-----
I have insisted to some extent on maternal love, because it is one
of the most important manifestations of the emotional life. It is
clear that it belongs to the category of the tender emotions, of
which it is a well-determined form and remarkable by reason of its
intensity; but it is not the source of the social instinct, because
it implies neither solidarity nor reciprocity. It might be
maintained that it is the gate by which the feeling of benevolence
made its entrance into the world, and that its appearance is the
earliest in date; but other conditions are needed for the social
instinct to reveal itself.
3. The third stage, marked by the entrance of the father into the
domestic community, does not affect our conclusion. In the animal
world taken as a whole, paternal affection is rare and far from
permanent, and among the lower representatives of humanity the
feeling is a very weak one and the tie very loose. It exists,
however, and its origin is much more difficult to assign than in the
case of maternal love.[172] Though it may be maintained that in man
it originates in pride and the feeling of ownership (Bain), this
hypothesis is not applicable to animals; we cannot say, as in the
case of the mother, that there is a material and visible relation,
so that the offspring seems to be a separated portion of the parent.
It remains to establish the significance of sympathy for weakness,
as a primary cause of this feeling. We might add another element if
we admit, with Spencer, that the life in common of the father and
mother (paternal affection being only found where unions are
permanent) creates a current of affection in proportion to the
services rendered. Whatever origin we may assign to it, it adds
nothing to our discussion, and has no efficacity in arousing the
social instinct.
-----
Footnote 172:
For the theories on this matter see Espinas, pp. 401 _et seq._
-----
To sum up: what we find at the base of domestic aggregates is tender
emotion, the genesis of altruism, but restricted to a closed group,
without expansive force or elasticity.
III. The gregarious life—_i.e._, that of the animals who live in
troops or hordes—is founded on the attraction of like for like,
irrespective of sex, and for the first time manifests the true
social tendencies, through the habit of acting in common.
In its lowest degree it consists of accidental and unstable
assemblages which are, as it were, an attempt at life in common.
Every one knows that certain pelagic animals travel in vast numbers,
their course being determined by the temperature of the water or the
direction of the currents. We also know what happens in the
migrations of processionary caterpillars, of crickets, and more
especially of birds. Numerous species of animals assemble together
in the morning and evening to sing, utter their various cries,
pursue each other and gambol about, living dispersed at other times.
This shows, says Espinas, “a latent social tendency, always ready to
show itself when not combated by any other tendency.”
Higher still, we find assemblages of variable duration, but
voluntarily formed and maintained, in view of a common aim. They
have all the characteristics of a society—community of effort,
synergy, reciprocity of services. Darwin[173] has given many
examples of this: Pelicans fish in concert, and close in round their
prey like a living net; wolves and wild dogs hunt in packs, and help
each other to attack their victims. These communities are to some
extent accidental and unstable, and may come to an end in a final
competition for the sharing of the spoil. Much more stable are those
which have the common defence for their aim: rabbits warn one
another of danger; many mammals and birds place sentinels (it is
well known how difficult it is to approach a herd or drove of
animals); monkeys remove vermin or take out thorns from one
another’s skins, form a chain to cross the gap between two trees,
unite their forces to raise a heavy stone, and finally, gathered
into bands under the direction of a leader, they defend themselves
energetically and risk their lives to save their companions. We
might enumerate endless facts of this kind. No doubt, we have not
yet found the permanent organisation, the fixed division of labour,
the continuity, which are peculiar to the higher animal societies;
but the instability and intermittence of these social forms help us
to understand why they exist and whence they originate.
-----
Footnote 173:
_Descent of Man_, chap. iii. See also Espinas, _op. cit._, sec.
iv.
-----
Social tendencies are derived from sympathy; they arise in
determinate conditions. The facts already given supply the answer to
the questions: how do they arise? what is their source? They arise
from the nature of things, from the conditions of the animal’s
existence; they are not based on pleasure, but on the unconscious
affirmation of the will to live; they are auxiliary to the instinct
of conservation. Society, as Spencer justly remarks, is founded on
its own desire—_i.e._, on an instinct.
The gregarious life, as this writer has shown in detail,
predominates among the herbivora and graminivora, who, as a rule,
being ill armed for strife and finding food in abundance, find it to
their advantage to live in herds.
The contrary is the case with the carnivora; they are well armed,
and need ample space in which to hunt down their prey, so that it is
to their advantage to live in isolation, except in those cases
already mentioned, where they associate together for a difficult
chase, or for defence against a dangerous enemy.[174]
-----
Footnote 174:
Herbert Spencer, _Psychology_, ii. § 503 _et seq._
-----
We may add that there are animals which, as they find it to their
advantage or otherwise, live alternately in communities or isolated.
“Certain sociable birds in Australia build bowers of branches, where
they assemble in great numbers during the day. In pairing-time the
society is broken up, and each couple retires by itself to construct
its own separate nest. While the temporary families last there is no
longer any assemblage, nor any life in common; it only begins again
when the young are able to try their wings. This is only one of
numberless examples which might be mentioned.”[175]
-----
Footnote 175:
Houssay, _Revue philosophique_, May 1893, p. 487.
-----
In short, gregarious life depends on stature, strength, means of
defence, kind and distribution of food, and mode of propagation.
Derived from necessity, this habit of life in common creates a
solidarity which is not mechanical and external, but psychological:
the sight, the touch, the smell of his companions constitute in each
individual a part of his own consciousness, of which he feels the
want in its absence; the distressed state and the lamentations of an
animal separated by chance from the herd are well known.
Here a disputed question suggests itself. It has been already
settled by implication in the course of the statements already made,
but it cannot be thus treated retrospectively and merely in passing.
For the moment I may confine myself to indicating it. If we compare
family societies and gregarious societies, what relation is there
between them? We find ourselves in presence of two opinions or
theories—one in favour of unity, the other of duality.
The first, the most ancient and widespread, derives social life
from domestic life. The family is the social molecule: by its
increase are formed aggregates of a more or less complex
character, whose life in common creates a solidarity and an
exchange of services—_i.e._, the conditions of a community.
The second admits two groups of irreducible feelings and tendencies,
mutually independent, though there are points of contact. The social
instinct is not derived from the domestic feelings, while the latter
are not derived from the social feelings. They are distinct by
nature, having their respective sources in the attraction of like
for like, irrespective of sex, and in the sexual appetite and the
development of the tender emotions.
More than this: some writers, especially zoologists, have maintained
that there is not merely dualism but _antagonism_. When the feelings
of domestic life are strong, social solidarity is lax or
non-existent. When social solidarity is close and rigorous, the
family tendencies are transitory, effaced, or _nil_—_e.g._, in ants
and bees. The case of the Australian birds shows us this antagonism
in an alternating form, the domestic and the social tendency
predominating by turns. No doubt this antagonism is not irremediable
and is compatible with various modifications and compromises; but
there is, in fact, a dualism not to be explained away. I shall
return later on to this question, only remarking in anticipation
that the dualist view seems to me the only admissible one.
IV. The higher societies are those in which the animal world has
attained its loftiest degree of social development. In them we find
division of labour, solidarity, stability, and continuity through
several generations. Such are bees, wasps, ants, termites, beavers,
etc. It is not part of our subject to study them, since our only aim
is to follow the social tendencies to their highest point; but the
problem already suggested again arises: On what foundation do these
higher societies rest? Espinas, who admits the view of the family as
the source of social life, classes them among societies having
reproduction for their purpose. For my own part, I refer them to the
gregarious state, in which they mark the stage of the highest
perfection. Let me take this opportunity of pointing out the
inconveniences of a false position and the factitious difficulties
arising from it. The author draws out (pp. 370 _et seq._) a detailed
comparison between the societies of bees and those of ants; he
demonstrates the superiority of the latter, who, according to
circumstances, dig, carve, build, hunt, store up food, reap
harvests, keep slaves and cattle, and when they carry on war against
the wasps (the warlike representatives of the bees) gain the
victory. He also clearly shows that this superiority is due to their
terrestrial habits, in which every contact, every march, leaves them
a precise indication of the nature of their surroundings. But he
finds something perplexing in this superiority. As a matter of fact,
a hive is a perfect domestic society, since the queen-bee—_i.e._,
the common mother—is the visible soul of social life among the bees.
An ant-heap is imperfect, “inferior” as a domestic society, as
containing several females. The apparent contradiction disappears,
if we consider that in both cases, especially in the second, the
essential element is the solidarity among the members, the mutual
attraction between similar beings, and that, consequently, we must
refer them to the gregarious, and not to the domestic type. For the
rest, in neither case does the family, in the true sense of the
word, exist: it is needless to demonstrate this at length, it is
quite sufficient to note the absence of maternal love. And so
certain writers have made use of this argument—as I have already
said—to prove that such a high development of the social tendencies
has only been possible through the suppression of the family
tendencies.
II.
If we pass from animals to man, the situation remains the same, and
the tendency to social life, in spite of its manifold adaptations,
does not change its nature; it is always at bottom a solidarity and
a reciprocity of services, determined by the conditions of human
existence and variable as they. We need not come back to this; but
the question already hinted at—that of the relation between the
emotional manifestations serving as a basis to the family on the one
hand, and those which are the foundation of social life on the other
hand—presents itself anew. We cannot evade it, if we desire any
light on the origin of the social feelings.
If we assume the family as the primitive fact which, by its
increase, produced the clan, and afterwards, more complex
aggregates, such as tribes, connected with each other by the memory
of a common ancestor and at last subject to the authority of a
patriarch-king, the social development is simply an expansion of the
natural family. On this hypothesis, the domestic tendencies (founded
on reproduction) are primary; the social tendencies are derivative
and of secondary or tertiary formation.
If, on the contrary, we consider the smallest social groups (hordes,
clans, or whatever other name they may be called by) as existing by
themselves, independently of the domestic group, the tendency to
live in societies must be considered as irreducible and
self-determined; there is only one more general emotional phenomenon
whence it could be derived, viz., sympathy.
Evidently, this question cannot be settled _a priori_, but only by
the interpretation of facts. Now there is no lack of documents,
supplied by ethnology from observations on actually existing
primitive peoples, by the history of the remotest epochs, and by the
literary monuments of the earliest ages, which are the echo of
prehistoric times. There is no lack, either, of authorised works on
the subject: MacLennan, Bachofen, Tylor, Sumner Maine, Starcke,
Westermarck—to cite only a few at random. Although there is much
disagreement, both as to the facts and the interpretation of the
facts, the probability is very slight in favour of the priority of
the family, very great in favour of two distinct developments with
inevitable points of contact and interference.
Let us briefly recall the most generally admitted results of
research into the evolution of the family and the progress of social
development.
1. The evolution of the family has certainly not proceeded in all
places in the same way, a circumstance which always permits the
critic to oppose facts to the view he is combating. A disease
inherent in the human mind induces most writers to try and refer
everything to _one_ formula, to impose on facts that perfect unity
which, in such matters, does not appear very probable. Those who
assign the greatest length of time to the evolution of the family
admit three stages: promiscuity, matriarchate, patriarchate.
The period of primitive promiscuity (Bachofen, MacLennan,
Girard-Teulon, etc.) is contested and rejected by many authorities.
In any case, it does not seem as if we could establish the rule
without a great number of exceptions. Not to speak, however, of
archaic institutions which have been interpreted in this sense, and
as survivals, there are still certain Tartar populations which
approach this stage. At Hawaii, the individual was related to the
whole horde, age alone determining the relationships: every one
called all the old people indiscriminately grandfather and
grandmother; all those who, as far as age went, might be his
parents, father and mother; all those of his own generation,
brothers and sisters; and so on for sons and daughters, grandsons
and grand-daughters. These five terms expressed all known degrees of
kinship. We may note, in passing, that a very weak psychological
argument has been put forward in order to disprove the existence of
this period—viz., that the natural jealousy of man would have
rendered promiscuity impossible, at least for any length of time.
Those who have hazarded such reasoning have been too ready to judge
primitive man by civilised standards. However this may be, such a
mass, without individual relationships, is rather a society than a
family; or rather, it is an undifferentiated state, which might be
compared to the lowest form of animal societies (the nutritive),
which also is undifferentiated.
In the period of the matriarchate, which appears to have lasted for
a considerable time, the mother is the centre of the family. This
domestic form, coexisting with polygamy, polyandry, and even with
monogamy, has left so many traces, and is still met with in so many
different races and countries, from the ancient Egyptians and
Etruscans to the present natives of Sumatra and some regions of
Africa, that there is no dispute on the subject. The woman gives her
name to the children, kinship is reckoned, and the inheritance of
property (though not always that of political dignities) descends,
in the female line; the position of most importance is filled, not
by the father, but the uncle—the mother’s brother. The causes of the
matriarchal system have been much discussed. Did it originate in an
assumption that the true father was unknown, or in a common opinion
of his insignificance? Whatever view may be adopted, it seems to me
reasonable to compare the matriarchate with the predominating system
among animals—_i.e._, maternal societies where the male is not
admitted.
The patriarchate (_agnatio_) which makes the father the centre of
the family brings us down to the historic epoch, to which it was
even anterior in some parts of the globe. Its appearance is saluted
in lyrical terms by Bachofen as the triumph of ideas over matter:
“By the spiritual principle of paternity the chains of tellurism
were broken;” it was a conquest of mind over material nature—over
what can be seen and touched.[176] It is not known how it came
about, whether by adoption or by a pretence of childbirth. In any
case, it corresponds with the admission of the male into animal
societies.
-----
Footnote 176:
_Mutterrecht_, pp. 17-19. See also his interpretation of the myths
of Orestes and Bellerophon as expressing the triumph of the
patriarchate, p. 85.
-----
2. The development of social life is quite otherwise. It would be
foreign to our purpose to retrace its successive phases; let us
confine ourselves to the question of origin. What was primitive man?
On this point much has been written by way of argument and
conjecture. H. Spencer, in his _Sociology_ (vol. i.), has made a
complete restoration from prehistoric documents, burial-mounds, and
more especially from the condition of contemporary savages. Nothing
proves that this picture will suit all classes; there have existed
not one primitive man, but primitive men differing considerably,
according to race and environment.
However far we go back, the first form of life in common seems to
be the horde, an unstable, unorganised aggregate, without
recognised kinships, drawn together instinctively in view of
utility and defence. But the true social unit, which arose at an
early period in various parts of the globe, is the clan (and
analogous institutions), a fixed, stable, coherent, closed
aggregate, founded on religious or other affiliation (but not on
descent), independent of family conditions: a man cannot belong to
two clans at once, and in most cases each of these groups is in a
hostile attitude towards the rest. How has this social molecule
been able to aggregate to itself others, and this closed organism
to break its narrow limits, in order to extend itself by increase
and fusion? This is a somewhat obscure question; perhaps by
exogamy, _i.e._, the imperative custom which forbade marriage
within the group (yet in other groups the rule was endogamy,
_i.e._, the prohibition of marriage outside them); more probably
the great agent of assimilation and fusion was war, followed by
the assimilation of the conquered.
This simple comparison shows that the family and the clan are not
similar institutions: the first is an autonomous group belonging to
a master, and having for its end the enjoyment of property; the
second is a group of another nature having for its end the common
struggle for existence. “Where the interests defended by the family
are less important than those of the clan, the family is influenced
by the ideas which regulate the clan organisation; and this fact
repeats itself in all primitive societies when defence against an
outside enemy is the dominant necessity.”[177] The family group and
the social group have each sprung from different tendencies, from
distinct needs; each has its special, independent psychological
origin, and there is no possible derivation from one to the other.
-----
Footnote 177:
Starcke, _La famille primitive_, p. 116.
-----
III.
Life in common, even under the gregarious form, requires certain
ways of acting, and habits founded on sympathy and determined by the
concerted aim pursued by all. In order that it may become stable and
constitute a society, an element of fixity must be added—the more or
less clear consciousness of an obligation, of a rule, of what has to
be done or avoided. This is the appearance of the _moral sentiment_.
All conceptions of morality, coarse or refined, theoretical or
purely practical, agree on this point; divergences exist, in
practice, only as to the characteristics of the act reputed
obligatory; in theory, only as to its origin.
All _real_ morality which has lived, _i.e._ governed a human
society, large or small, which has existed, not in the academic
abstractions of moralists, but in the concrete development of
history, and has run its complete course, passes through two
principal periods.
One of these is instinctive, spontaneous, unconscious, unreflecting,
determined by the conditions of existence of a given group at a
given moment. It expresses itself in custom—a heterogeneous mixture
of beliefs and actions which, from the point of view of reason and
of a more advanced culture, we consider sometimes as moral,
sometimes as immoral, sometimes as unmoral, _i.e._, puerile and
futile, but all of which have been rigorously observed.
The other is conscious, reflecting, many-sided, complex, like the
higher forms of social and moral life. It expresses itself in
institutions, written laws, religious or civil codes; and still more
in the abstract speculations of philosophical moralists. Then, the
apogee being reached, vague aspirations reach out towards a new,
dimly apprehended ideal, and the cycle begins over again.
Most constructors of a scientific system of morality have forgotten
or neglected the first period; but wrongly so, for it is the source
of the second. This, too, is the reason for the two opposite views
held with regard to the origin of moral development.
Some seek it in the order of knowledge, whence they deduce all the
rest; they suppose innate ideas, or an adaptation acquired through a
long process and fixed by heredity (Spencer), or the consciousness
of a categorical imperative, or the notion of utility; all of which
are intellectual solutions.
Others seek it in the order of instinct and feeling. They admit
tendencies, impulses implanted in us by nature, _i.e._, forming part
of our organisation, like thirst and hunger, whose satisfaction
produces pleasure and their non-satisfaction pain; this is the
emotional view.
The two are not absolutely irreconcilable: each of them
corresponds to a different period of evolution; the emotional
view to the instinctive stage, the stage of moral chaos; the
intellectualist view to the reflective stage of rational
organisation; but it is clear that one alone can claim the mark
of its origin. In other words, we may say: in the moral
consciousness there are two elements—judgment and feeling. A
judgment (approving or condemnatory) on our own conduct and that
of others is the result of a deeper process—not an intellectual
one—of an emotional process of which it is only the clear and
intelligible manifestation in consciousness. It would be a
psychological absurdity to suppose that a bare, dry idea, an
abstract conception without emotional accompaniments, and
resembling a geometrical notion, could have the least influence
on human conduct. No doubt, we must admit that the evolution is
rather that of moral ideas than of the moral sentiment, which,
in itself, is no more than a tendency to act—a predisposition;
but an evolution of _purely speculative_ ideas, with no
emotional accompaniment, will have no results in the practical
order. We may note that the opposition between these two views
is constantly reflected in the history of moral theory. In
England, where psychology predominates, the doctrine of feeling
has had numerous champions, from Shaftesbury down to the present
day. In Germany, where metaphysics are predominant, the
intellectualist doctrine, since Kant, occupies the first place,
except with Schopenhauer and his adherents. It is quite natural
that the metaphysicians, intellectualists by temperament and by
profession, should have adopted this position.
For the rest we are concerned here with the moral sentiment, and
with that alone; the other elements of morality do not form part of
our study. It consists, at bottom, in movement or arrest of
movement, in a tendency to act or not to act; it is not, _in its
origin_, due to an idea or a judgment; it is instinctive, and herein
lies its strength. It is innate, not like an alleged archetype,
infused into man, invariable, illuminating him everywhere and
always, but in the same way as hunger and thirst and other
constitutional needs. It is necessary; it forces one to act (when
not kept in check by counter-tendencies), as the sight of water
forces the duckling to plunge into it. Thus we must say that the man
who impulsively throws himself into danger to save another is more
thoroughly moral than he who only does so after reflection; one must
be blinded by intellectualist prejudices to maintain the contrary.
_Natural_ morality is a gift—theologians would say a grace; it is
artificial, acquired morality, which is measured by the quantity of
resistance overcome. Finally, like every other tendency, it results
in satisfaction or dissatisfaction (_e.g._, remorse).[178] In short,
its innateness and its necessity place it in the _motor_, not in the
intellectual order.
-----
Footnote 178:
“The Australians attribute the death of their friends to spells
cast by some neighbouring tribe; for this reason they consider it
a sacred obligation to avenge the death of a relative by killing a
member of the tribe in question. A native having lost one of his
wives, announced his intention of going to kill a woman belonging
to a distant tribe. The magistrate told him that if he committed
this act, he would be confined in prison for the rest of his life.
He therefore did not start on his journey; but, month by month, he
wasted away: remorse preyed on his mind, he could neither sleep
nor eat; the ghost of his wife haunted him, reproaching him with
his negligence. One day he disappeared; a year later he came back,
having accomplished his duty” (Guyau, _Esquisse d’une Morale_,
etc., p. 109). Here we have an example of instinctive morality and
rational immorality. It should be noted that in this work Guyau
has returned to the view of the moral instinct, adopted by him,
after having previously criticised it, in his _Morale Anglaise_
(III. chap. iv.).
-----
These characteristics being determined, let us follow the progress
of its evolution. It presents two aspects: first, the positive,
corresponding to the genesis of the beneficent feelings, or active
altruism, an internal evolution—_i.e._, one of the primary feeling,
in and through itself; secondly, negative, corresponding to the rise
of the sense of justice, an external evolution—_i.e._, one produced
under the pressure of conditions of existence and coercive means.
I. We include under the name of beneficence, or active altruism,
such feelings as benevolence, generosity, devotion, charity, pity,
etc.; in short, those foreign or contrary to the instinct of
individual self-preservation. Their fundamental conditions are two
psychological facts already studied:
1. Sympathy, in the etymological sense, _i.e._, an emotional unison,
the possibility of feeling with another, and like him. Could a
society be based on this state alone? In extreme cases this might
happen; but such a society would be transitory, precarious,
unstable: we have found similar examples in the gregarious state,
animal or human. Stability requires stronger ties, that is to say,
moral ones.
2. The altruistic tendency, or tender emotion, which exists in all
men, except in those to be referred to at the end of this chapter.
It belongs to our constitution, as much as the fact of having two
eyes or a stomach.
Now the question put to us is this: How is active altruism
developed, and by what psychological mechanism? How do disinterested
feelings arise from primitive egoism? Setting aside all metaphysical
solutions, such as Schopenhauer’s theory of universal pity,
compassion (_Mitleid_) for all beings, founded on a vague
consciousness of community of being and identity of origin—a
monistic conception,—I shall confine myself to a strictly
psychological explanation.
Benevolence arises from a particular form of activity accompanied by
pleasure: this vague and obscure formula will be explained
presently.
The fundamental tendency consists, in the first place, of
preserving, and then of extending one’s self, of being and
well-being, _i.e._, expending activity. Man may devote this activity
to things: he cuts, hacks, destroys, overthrows,—these are
destructive activities; he sows, plants, builds, and exercises
preservative or creative activities. He may apply it to animals or
to men; he injures, maltreats, destroys, or he cares for, helps,
saves. Destructive activity is accompanied by pleasure, but by a
pathological one, since it is the cause of evil. Preservative or
creative activity is accompanied by pure pleasure, leaving behind it
no painful feeling; consequently, it tends to repeat and increase
itself: the object or the person which is the cause of pleasure
becomes a centre of attraction, the starting-point of an agreeable
association. To sum up, we have (1) a tendency to the display of our
creative activity; (2) the pleasure of succeeding; (3) an object or
living being to play a receptive part; (4) an association between
this being or object and the pleasure experienced; whence a
continually increasing attraction towards this being or object. The
conservative tendency in action and the law of transference (see
Part I., Chap. XII.) are the essential agents in the rise of
altruism.
This may be justified by several examples. If we reflect on the
preceding, it will be understood that benevolence may well be the
result of chance, and have, in its origin, no intentional character.
A man, without paying any special heed to it, happens to throw some
water on a plant which was drying up beside his door; next day he
chances to notice that it is beginning to revive; he repeats the
operation, intentionally; he becomes more and more interested in the
plant, grows attached to it, and would not like to be deprived of
it.[179] This is a very trivial, everyday occurrence, and there is
no one who has not experienced something of the sort; this is all
the better, as showing us the rise of the feeling in all its
simplicity. If this happens in the case of a plant, how much more
easily in that of an intelligent animal or a man!
-----
Footnote 179:
Friedmann, “Genesis of Disinterested Benevolence,” _Mind_, vol. i.
(1878), p. 404.
-----
It is an observed fact that a man attaches himself to another rather
in proportion to the services he renders than to those he receives
from him. There is, in general, a stronger current of benevolence
passing from the benefactor to his _protégé_ than _vice versâ_.
Common opinion considers this illogical: from the point of view of
reason, it is so—not from that of feeling; and the preceding
analysis even shows that it _must be_ so, because the benefactor has
put more of himself into the recipient of his bounty than the latter
can do to him. Thus, in many persons, gratitude needs to be
supported by reflection.
If we are ill-disposed towards any one, the best and surest remedy
against this incipient aversion is to render him some service.
Conversely, the person who refuses all our benefits and obstinately
avoids them becomes an object of indifference, or even hatred.
“During the proscriptions of Marius and Sulla,” says Friedmann,
“there were many sons who, out of fear, gave up their father, but it
was never known that a father had denounced his son; a fact that
somewhat startled the Roman moralists, who were unable to explain
it.” The explanation is involved in the constitution of the Roman
family, by which the father could confer many benefits on the son,
whereas the son was entirely dependent on the father, and could do
nothing for him.
Many other incidents might be cited to justify the accuracy of the
preceding analysis. Such is the mechanism by means of which our
emotional self succeeds in externalising, in alienating itself; but
this could not be done were there not at the origin and
starting-point a primary tendency, already studied under the name of
tender emotion. It is clear, also, that beneficence is a generic
term designating forms which vary according to circumstances:
charity, generosity, devotion, etc.
The extension and heightening of the feeling of beneficence have
taken place slowly, and owing to the work of certain men who deserve
to be called _discoverers_ in morals. This expression may sound
strangely in some ears, because they are imbued with the theory of
an innate and universal knowledge of good and evil imparted to all
men at all times. If we admit, on the contrary,—as observation
teaches us to do,—not a ready-made, but a growing morality, it must
necessarily be the discovery of an individual or group of
individuals. Every one admits the existence of inventors in
geometry, in music, in the plastic and mechanical arts; but there
have also been men in moral disposition far superior to their
contemporaries, who have initiated or promoted reform in this
department. Let us note (for this point is of the highest
importance) that the _theoretic_ conception of a higher moral ideal,
of a step in advance, is not sufficient; it needs a powerful emotion
leading to action, and, by contagion, communicating its own impulse
to others. The onward march is proportioned to what is _felt_, not
to what is understood.
Were the human race, in the beginning, cannibals? Some affirm this,
others deny it. What is certain is that the custom of eating one’s
fellow-men has existed in many places, and still exists in some. It
has been explained by scarcity of food, by superstitious beliefs, by
the intoxication of triumph in annihilating a vanquished enemy, by
the idea of assimilating his strength and courage, and by a variety
of other reasons; but it has not been sufficiently remarked that its
extinction has not always been due to the intervention of superior
races. It has sometimes taken place on the spot. In the Tahiti
Islands it had disappeared shortly before the arrival of
Bougainville; among the Redskins, and even among the Fijians,
parties had been formed in order to suppress not only cannibalism,
but the tortures inflicted on prisoners of war.[180] The promoters
of this abolition, whether individuals or groups, were certainly
inventors. The universality of human sacrifices is well known; they
are found still existing during the historic period, from China to
Judæa, from Greece to Gaul, from Carthage to Rome. How did they
disappear? On this point we have nothing but ignorance or legends,
but they could not have disappeared without the agency of man. Du
Chaillu cites a case in which reform is, so to speak, caught in the
act—that of an African chief who was the first to give orders that
no slave should be killed at his tomb.[181] Among the Aztecs, with
their bloodthirsty religion, a sect, formed before the arrival of
the Spaniards, had placed itself under the protection of a deity who
abhorred bloodshed. All the great ancient legislators, whether
historical or legendary—Manes, Confucius, Moses, Buddha,—we might
say all founders of religions, have been discoverers in morals;
whether the discovery originated with themselves alone or with a
collectivity as whose summary and embodiment they may be regarded,
matters little.
-----
Footnote 180:
About 1820, during the time of scarcity consequent on Tshaka’s
wars, certain of the Natal tribes (the natives say, at the
suggestion of a chief named Umdava) adopted the practice of
cannibalism. It was abandoned when food again became plentiful,
and has always been regarded with great horror; those individuals
who had acquired such a taste for human flesh as to prefer it to
other food, fled into the recesses of the Drakensberg and Maluti
mountains. Moshesh, the great Basuto chief, directed his efforts
for years to the extirpation of the practice, though unwilling to
do so, as his advisers desired, by means of a summary massacre of
the offenders. The _Amazimu_ (_Modimo_) are now a myth to both
Zulus and Basutos; indeed the word, as now used, is frequently
synonymous with “ogre.” It is to be noted that Moshesh was not in
any way acting under European influence, in fact the last of the
cannibals had disappeared long before the country came under
British rule, and though the memory of their atrocities was still
fresh when the French missionaries arrived in 1833, the chief had
already been proceeding against them for some time. See Casalis,
_Les Bassoutos_.
-----
-----
Footnote 181:
Staniland Wake, _Evolution of Morality_, vol. i. pp. 427 _et seq._
To be consulted for facts of this kind.
-----
It would be easy to continue this historical demonstration, but the
above is sufficient to justify the term discoverers. From causes of
which we are ignorant, but analogous to those which produce great
poets or painters, there arise men of indisputable moral superiority
who _feel_ what others do not feel, just as a great poet does
compared with ordinary men. And for one who has succeeded, how many
have failed for want of a favourable environment! A St. Vincent de
Paul among the Kanakas would be as impossible as a Mozart among the
Fuegians.
In primitive societies there has been a long struggle between the
strongest egoistic tendencies, with their dissolvent action, and the
weaker and intermittent altruistic tendencies, which have progressed
through the agency of some more enlightened individuals, and also
with the help of force, of which we still have to speak.
II. Let us now examine the development of the moral sentiment under
its negative and restrictive aspect—_i.e._, as the sense of justice.
Here the intellectual element evidently preponderates, and its
evolution involves the other.
“Justice,” says Littré, “has the same foundation as science.” One
rests on the principle of identity which governs the region of
speculation, the other rests on the principle of equivalence and
rules the sphere of action. Justice, in its origin, is a
compensation for damages. Its evolution starts from an instinctive
semi-conscious manifestation, rising by progressive steps to a
universalist conception. Let us mark the principal stages.
The first, and lowest, is neither moral nor social, but purely
animal and reflex—"a defensive reflex."[182] The individual who
suffers violence, who thinks himself attacked or injured,
immediately reacts. This is “the exasperated instinct of
conservation,” or, to call it by its true name, revenge. So the
savage who, before Darwin’s eyes, broke his son’s head for having
dropped a store of shell-fish, the fruit of a laborious day’s
fishing. This defensive reflex frequently recurs in the psychology
of crowds; it is needless to give instances. It may seem paradoxical
to take revenge as a starting-point for the sense of justice; but we
shall see how it becomes mitigated and rationalised.
-----
Footnote 182:
Letourneau, _L’évolution juridique chez les différents peuples_.
-----
In fact, a second stage corresponds to revenge deferred through
premeditation, reflection, or some analogous cause. It tends towards
equivalence and reaches it under the form of retaliation, so
frequent in primitive communities. The idea of equality, tooth for
tooth, eye for eye, has won its way; the instinct has become
intellectualised.
So far, the compensation claimed would appear to have only an
individual character; but it must very early have taken on a
collective character, by reason of the close solidarity uniting the
members of the small social aggregate—the clan or family. An
all-powerful opinion forces the injured party to pursue his revenge
even when he does not wish it; and when a _vendetta_ is in force as
between clan and clan, the stage of collective responsibility
appears, and the notion of the compensation due is enlarged.
However, revenge restores, in the social aggregate, a state of war,
which has to be eliminated; hence a reaction on the part of the
community tending to suppress or attenuate it. This is the stage of
arbitration and peace-making. Many facts show that, in the
beginning, the decision of the umpires is without binding value, and
supported by no coercive means. It is a proof not so much of
culpability as of an indemnity to be paid to those concerned; the
criminal trial is as yet a civil action.
For this temporary and unsanctioned arbitration the social
development logically substitutes a permanent and guaranteed
arbitration, exercised by a chief, or an aristocracy, or the popular
assembly. Compensation becomes obligatory and is forcibly imposed.
The condemned person must submit or leave the community; if
refractory, he is excommunicated, and in primitive societies the
outlaw’s life is intolerable; we see the equivalent of it in modern
strikes. Let us also note the somewhat widely distributed custom of
a division of the indemnity imposed, one portion being assigned to
the injured party, the other to the state—_i.e._, the chief. The
notion of justice has taken on a definitely social character.
It only remains that it should become universal. It long remains
enclosed within the limits of the social group. All that contributes
to the material and moral welfare of the group is good, and
conversely; outside the group, all acts are _unmoral_. We find in
history, and even at the present time, many proofs of this dualism
or duplication of the individual, according as he is acting within
his own social environment or with regard to strangers. Such were
the Germans of Cæsar’s time.[183] In their earlier period, the
Greeks considered themselves as less under moral obligation towards
the Barbarians, and the Romans towards foreigners (_hostes_). It is
especially owing to the efforts of the philosophers—Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle, the Stoics—that justice ceased to be national and became
universal. It might be added that at that period when the notion of
justice remains a national one, it still varies within the group,
according to caste; it is not the same for priests and warriors, for
free men and for slaves, for aristocrats and for merchants. In the
beginning, particularism was the rule.
-----
Footnote 183:
“Latrocinia nullam habent infamiam quæ extra fines cujusque
_civitatis_ fiunt.”—_De Bell. Gall._, vi. 21.
-----
It is evident that, on the negative side, the evolution of moral
life has been especially due to the progress of intelligence; the
emotional element has only been incidental. Compared with the sense
of justice, the feeling of active benevolence, if not evolved more
quickly, at least appeared sooner, because nearer to instinct and
less dependent on reason. A certain philosopher (Kant, I believe)
was surprised that there is so much kindness and so little justice
among men. He did not observe as a psychologist, or else he was led
astray by intellectualist prejudice. This must be so, because
tenderness is innate and spontaneous, justice acquired and
deliberate; because one springs directly from an instinct, while the
other has to undergo various metamorphoses. If man is sociable and
moral, it is less because he thinks than because he feels in a
certain manner and tends in a certain direction.
To conclude: moral emotion is a very complex state. Those
sentimentalists in the last century, or in this, who have maintained
the hypothesis of a “moral sense,” have erroneously considered it as
a special sense with an innate faculty of discriminating good and
evil. It is not a simple act, but the sum of a set of tendencies.
Let us eliminate the intellectual elements, and enumerate its
emotional constituents only: (1) as basis, sympathy—_i.e._, a
community of nature and disposition; (2) the altruistic or
benevolent tendency manifesting itself under different forms
(attraction of like to like, maternal or paternal affection, etc.),
at first weak, but gaining more expansion by the restriction of the
egoistic feelings; (3) the sense of justice with its obligatory
character—whose origin we have just traced; (4) the desire of
approbation or of divine or human rewards, and the fear of
disapprobation and punishments. As in the case of all complex
feelings, its composition must vary with the predominance of one or
other of its constituent elements; in one case it is obligation (the
Stoics), in another charity, in many the fear of public opinion or
of the law, of God or of the devil. It is impossible that it should
be constant and identical in all men.
IV.
The pathology of the moral sense cannot detain us long, its detailed
study belonging to the department of criminal anthropology. Numerous
works have been published on this subject within the last
half-century; there would be no advantage in presenting a bald
abstract of these. Lombroso’s view of the “born criminal,” with his
physiological, psychical, and social characteristics, has been
violently attacked, and sustained serious damage. Several successive
theories have attempted to explain the existence of this moral
anomaly: atavism, according to which the born criminal is a
survival, a return to primitive man, who is assumed to have been
violent and unsociable; infantilism, which has recourse, not to
heredity, but to arrested development, and alleges that the
perversion which is permanent in the criminal is normal, but
transient, in the child; the pathological view which connects the
criminal type with epilepsy, considered as the prototype of violent
and destructive impulses; the sociological view (the most recent),
which attributes a preponderant function to social conditions, and
maintains that the criminal is “a microbe inseparable from his
environment.”[184] We need not enter into a detailed examination of
these hypotheses, which have given rise to much passionate
debate: one question alone concerns our subject, that of moral
insensibility—a condition described, long before the days of
criminal anthropology, under the names of _moral insanity_
(Prichard, 1835), _folie morale_, impulsive insanity, instinctive
monomania, etc., and which will serve to show once more the
independence and the preponderance of feeling in the moral
life.[185]
-----
Footnote 184:
It should perhaps be added that the more scientific writers on
criminal anthropology do not regard the chief causes suggested
above as rival theories, but rather as factors which may
co-operate to produce criminality, the biological factor
(heredity, arrest of development, infantilism, etc.) acting as
predisposing cause, the sociological factor as exciting cause.—ED.
Footnote 185:
According to Krafft-Ebing, _Lehrbuch_ (vol. i., sec. 2, chap,
iii.), Regiomontanus already maintained, in 1513, that depravity
is quite independent of the accurate knowledge of good and evil;
he attributed this anomaly to the influence of the planet Venus.
-----
“Moral insanity is a form of mental derangement in which the
intellectual faculties appear to have sustained little or no injury,
while the disorder is manifested principally or alone in the state
of the feelings, temper, or habit.” Such is the formula of Prichard,
which has been but little modified since. Translated into the
language of pure psychology, it signifies: a complete absence or
perversion of the altruistic feelings, insensibility to the
representation of the happiness or suffering of others, absolute
egoism, with all its consequences. By a self-evident analogy, this
state has been called one of moral blindness; and, like physical
blindness, it has various degrees. It has also been compared to
idiocy. Reduced to the vegetative and sensitive life, the idiot is,
intellectually, opposed to the genius, while the moral idiot is the
antithesis of the great benefactors of humanity (Schüle).
We may find numerous instances of moral insanity in works on mental
pathology and criminal anthropology.[186] It shows itself in two
forms: (1) the passive, or apathetic—_i.e._, that of pure
insensibility; if the temperament is cold and the circumstances
favourable, there is no violence to be feared; (2) the active, or
impulsive, where there is no check on the violence of the appetites.
Taken as a whole, it consists in: complete insensibility, absence of
pity, cold ferocity, absence of remorse after committing acts of
violence, or even murder. On this last point statistics and figures
have been given whose precision makes me somewhat suspicious;[187]
for it is very difficult to penetrate so far into the consciousness
of a criminal as to be duped neither by the hypocrisy which
simulates remorse, nor by the boastfulness which feels but will not
acknowledge it. The absence of all maternal feeling, though rare,
has also been observed.
-----
Footnote 186:
Especially Despine, _Psychologie naturelle_ (ii. pp. 169 _et
seq._), and Maudsley, _Pathology of Mind_.
Footnote 187:
_Dictionary of Psychological Medicine_, art. “Criminal
Anthropology.” Here it is stated that, at Elmira, 34 per cent.
criminals on admission exhibit entire absence of moral
susceptibility; while (according to Dr. Salsotto, at Turin) in 130
women guilty of murder, or complicity in murder, genuine remorse
was only observed in 6.
-----
Moral insensibility is usually innate, and coincident with other
symptoms of degeneracy. Among several children of the same family,
brought up in the same surroundings, having received the same care,
a single one may differ from all the rest, be amenable neither to
gentleness nor to force, and manifest a precocious depravity, which
will only strengthen as he grows older.
This state may be acquired and momentary, its causes being epilepsy,
hysteria, apoplexy, paralytic dementia, senile decay, blows on the
head, etc. Krafft-Ebing, besides an observation made by himself
(_loc. cit._), quotes from Wigan the case of a young man who, in
consequence of being struck on the head with a ruler, developed
complete moral insensibility. When, by means of the operation of
trephining, a splinter of bone pressing on the brain had been
removed, he returned to his former state. We have met with other
analogous cases in the course of this work.
The most difficult and fiercely debated point is whether this moral
anomaly is strictly instinctive and emotional in its origin,
intellectual activity being entirely unconnected with it. Most
writers take the affirmative view of this question, others deny it.
The different modes of mental activity are so interdependent, and
their relations so close, that it is difficult to solve the question
definitely. We cannot refuse to admit that the intellect sometimes
suffers from a counter-shock; but observation shows that most of
these persons are well acquainted with the requirements of morality,
and have had the abstract ideas of good, of evil, and of duty
instilled into them by education, though without the slightest
influence on their conduct. They have moral _ideas_, not moral
feelings—_i.e._, a disposition to feel and act. The law is to them
nothing but a police regulation, which they are conscious of having
broken. Their intellect, often firm and clear, is only an instrument
for weaving skilful plots, or justifying themselves by subtle
sophisms.
It was worth our while to recall, if only in a cursory manner, the
nature of moral insensibility, in order to show the importance of
the emotional element. In these cases there is a lack of
completeness, and the deficit comes, not from the intellect, but
from the character.
CHAPTER IX.
THE RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT.
_Importance of the subject—Its Divisions. First Period: origin of
the religious feeling—Primitive notions of the Infinite (Max
Müller); Ancestor-worship (H. Spencer)—Fetichism, animism;
Predominance of fear—Practical, utilitarian, social, but not
moral character—Second period: (1) Intellectual evolution;
Conception of a Cosmic Order first physical, then moral—Function
of increasing generalisation; its stages; (2) Emotional
evolution; Predominance of love; addition of the moral
sentiment—Third Period: Supremacy of the rational element;
Transformation into religious philosophy; Effacement of
the emotional element—Religious emotion is a complete
emotion—Manifold physiological states accompanying it; ritual, a
special form of the expression of emotion—The religious
sentiment as a passion—Pathology—Depressive forms: religious
melancholy, demonomania—Exalted forms: ecstasy, theomania._
It must be confessed that psychologists have not troubled themselves
greatly with the study of the religious sentiment. Some omit it
altogether, while others content themselves with a brief reference
in passing; they note the two essential elements whence it is
derived—fear, and tender emotion (love)—without troubling themselves
about the variable relations between these two elements, or the
multiform changes undergone by them in the course of centuries,
through the annexation of other emotional states.[188] As we cannot
deny its importance, this abstention, or negligence, is not
justifiable. To summon to our aid an ill-understood respect, to
maintain that one religion only is true and all the others false, to
allege that all are alike false,—these and other analogous modes of
reasoning are not in any degree acceptable to psychology; for, even
if we take up an extreme position, and admit that all manifestations
of the religious sentiment are mere illusion and error, it remains
none the less true that illusion and error are psychic states, and
worthy of being studied as such by psychologists. To such, the
religious sentiment is _a fact_ which they have simply to analyse
and to follow through its transformations without being competent to
discuss its objective value or its legitimacy. Thus understood, the
question bears on two principal points: primary manifestations and
their evolution, _i.e._, the different elements which have
constituted the religious sentiment during the various stages of its
existence.
-----
Footnote 188:
Since the above was written two lengthy and valuable studies of
the psychology of religion, and more especially of the phenomena
of “conversion,” have been published by Leuba and Starbuck,
largely inspired by Prof. Stanley Hall (_Am. Jour. Psych._,
1896-97). Both these studies are founded on original data, in part
obtained by a _questionnaire_.—ED.
-----
In every religious belief there are of necessity two parts: an
intellectual element, a knowledge which constitutes the object of
belief, and an emotional state, a feeling which accompanies the
former and expresses itself in action. To any one deficient in the
second element, the religious feeling is unknown, inaccessible;
nothing remains to such persons but abstract metaphysical
conceptions. The study of the religious sentiment, in its evolution,
cannot dissociate these two elements; and it is the degree in which
the element of knowledge is present which renders a precise division
possible. I trace three periods: (1) that of perception and concrete
imagination, where fear and the practical, utilitarian tendencies
are predominant; (2) that of medium abstraction and generalisation,
characterised by the addition of moral elements; (3) that of the
highest concepts, where, the emotional element becoming more and
more rarefied, the religious feeling tends to be confounded with the
so-called intellectual feelings.
I.
As usual, authorities are not agreed on the question of origin.
Under what form did the religious sentiment first make its
appearance? We must first put aside two extremely systematic
answers, which, although differing in spirit, have this in common,
that they are both purely intellectualist.
The first, a very ancient one, has found its latest and clearest
interpreter in Max Müller, who thinks that the notion of the Divine,
more especially under the form of the Infinite, preceded that of the
gods. Our senses give us the finite, but “beyond, behind, beneath,
and within the finite, the infinite is always present to our senses.
It presses upon us, it grows upon us from every side. What we call
finite in space and time, in form and word, is nothing but a veil or
net which we ourselves have thrown over the infinite.”[189] What,
then, is the infinite, he asks, but the object of all religions? The
religion of the infinite precedes and comprehends all others, and as
the infinite is implied by the senses (_i.e._, the limits to our
sensory perceptions imply an unlimited region beyond), it follows
that religion can, with as much right as reason, be called a
development of our sensory perceptions. The earliest religion
consisted in the adoration of various objects, taken, each in turn,
and isolatedly, as incarnations of the notion of the Infinite. This
is what Max Müller calls “Henotheism.” For him, polytheism and even
fetichism are later developments, resulting from the breaking up of
the primitive unity, and due to a disease of language: each name
becomes a distinct deity; words are raised to the dignity of things,
having their life, their attributes, and their legends: _Nomina
numina_.
-----
Footnote 189:
Max Müller, _Origin and Development of Religion_ (Hibbert
Lectures), p. 227.
-----
This last view, though it has had a certain vogue among linguists,
is worth nothing as a psychological explanation, for it is quite
clear that the word is only a starting-point or a vehicle for the
process of thought, which is the sole agent of the metamorphosis. If
the _nomina_ become _numina_, it is by a disease of imagination or
thought, rather than of language.[190]
-----
Footnote 190:
For a discussion of this point see Goblet d’Alviella, _L’idée de
Dieu_, pp. 60 _et seq._
-----
As for the principal thesis, the alleged primitive notion of the
Infinite, which is the source of henotheism, it is a metaphysical
hypothesis of extreme improbability. Primitive man, enclosed within
hard conditions of life, is practical and positive rather than a
dreamer; he does not naturally tend towards the Beyond. But a better
reason than this, and an entirely psychological one, is that he is
incapable of attaining to even a medium degree of abstraction and
generalisation. How could a savage, who cannot count up to four,
form any idea whatever of the Infinite? Evidently, this notion of
the Illimitable is far beyond him.
There is only one way of imparting a certain psychological
verisimilitude to Max Müller’s view, viz., to strip it of its
intellectualist character, and admit as its origin a feeling rather
than a notion, a craving, a tendency, rather than a cognition. Of
these two factors, which make up all religious belief, one
intellectual, the other emotional, which has the priority? Did the
notion produce the feeling, or the feeling excite the notion? Such
is the problem which lies at the heart of all debates on the origin
of religious manifestations. Some place it in the region of
instinct: so Renan when he compares religion in humanity to the
nest-building instinct of the bird. Others maintain that every
feeling presupposes an object. “At first sight this latter theory
seems to have logic on its side. It is clear that, in order to love
or fear any being, one must have conceived the notion of his
existence. Yet, however indispensable it may be to assume an
intellectual operation at the beginning of religion, we must
recognise that the feelings set in motion by this operation must
have long preceded the most ancient formulas of primitive
theology.”[191] For my own part, I am inclined to accept the
priority of feeling, though unable to supply any arguments based on
fact; the period of origins being also that of conjecture.
-----
Footnote 191:
Goblet d’Alviella, _op. cit._, p. 50.
-----
The second theory, that of Herbert Spencer, brings us down from the
notion of the Infinite to the extremely terrestrial mental life of
savages. It is well known that he reduces all primitive religions to
the cult of ancestors—to necrolatry. The primordial fact is the
conception of a spirit, or rather, of a _double_. The savage
believes that he has a Sosia, or, in other words, a principal _ego_
and a secondary _ego_. He infers the existence of this double from a
great number of facts, to him inexplicable: his shadow, his
reflection in the water, echoes, apparitions in dreams, fainting,
trances, epilepsy, etc. The world is thus, for him, full of
wandering spirits which he tries to propitiate. According to
Spencer, fetichism and polytheism are only aberrant forms of
ancestor-worship, and he tries to prove this by a series of
arguments, through which we need not now follow him. Imperturbable
in his systematic deduction, he even asserts that he can derive from
the same root, by far-fetched and easily-controverted arguments, the
adoration of animals, plants, and inanimate objects.[192] It is
indisputable that a great number of beliefs have sprung from this
root, but this conception, which is anthropomorphism carried to its
extreme, is found to be too narrow to include all the facts. Tylor
and others have criticised it with some vivacity, and I do not think
that it now claims many adherents.
-----
Footnote 192:
_Principles of Sociology_, vol. i. pp. 130-142.
-----
These two systematic hypotheses being put on one side, we may remind
the reader how religious development _seems_ to have taken place
during this primitive period; for the march of evolution has not
been everywhere and always the same—a difficulty already pointed out
with regard to the social instinct. According to the best
authorities, the most frequent form has been the following.
The first stage is that of fetichism, polydemonism, naturism—terms
which in the history of religions are not quite synonymous, but
which answer to the same psychical condition, the adoration of some
object, living or not, which is _perceived_—_i.e._, apprehended as a
concrete form, at the same time body and soul—or rather animated by
a soul, judged to be benevolent or malevolent, useful or injurious;
for there is scant justification for the opinion that the worshipper
of a piece of wood or stone sees in it only a purely material
object.
The second stage is that of animism or spiritism, “a belief in
spirits having no substantial bond or necessary connection with
determinate natural objects.” The spirit is conceived as
independent, separable; it goes and comes, enters and departs; it is
attributed not only to men, but also to animals: the savage tries to
deprecate the wrath of the beast he has killed in hunting, the chief
has his horses and dogs buried with him. Psychologically, this stage
corresponds to a preponderance of the imagination over simple
perception.
These primitive forms of religious belief originate in the tendency
of the savage, and the child, perhaps also of the higher animal, to
look upon everything as alive, to attribute desires, passions, will,
to everything that acts, to form his ideas of nature from what he
knows of his own nature. This anthropomorphism results from the
awakening of reasoning thought under its baldest form: analogy, the
first source of myth, language, arts, and even science. But those
analogies, which to us are merely images, were realities to
primitive man. It is needless to insist on so well known a point. We
must remember, however, that this primitive god-creating operation
is a projection from our activity rather than from our intelligence;
it originates with man as a _motor_ rather than as a thinking being.
So far we have considered nothing but the object of belief,
perceived or imagined; but what does the believer feel? of what
elements is the religious sentiment composed during this period? We
may point out the following:
(1) First of all, the emotion of fear in its different degrees, from
profound terror to vague uneasiness, due to the faith in an unknown,
mysterious, impalpable Power, able to render great services, and,
more especially, to inflict great injuries; for historians have
always remarked that, in early times, it is always malevolent and
terrible genii who are adored; the good and merciful ones are
neglected; in the following periods this state of things will be
reversed. During this period Power is the attribute of the gods.
(2) A second and much less marked characteristic consists in a
certain attraction or sympathy which, though very slight, binds the
worshipper to his deity. The saying “Primus in orbe Deos fecit
timor” is not absolutely true; for fear has a tendency to
withdrawal, flight, aversion, while in every worship there is at
least some hope of moving the most maleficent power and exciting its
compassion,—consequently an approach to it. Later on, this
rudimentary attraction will become the essential point.
(3) A third characteristic resulting from the preceding is that the
religious feeling is strictly practical and utilitarian; it is the
direct expression of a narrow egoism. It connects itself with the
self-preserving instinct of the individual or the group, and is in
nowise, as Sergi has maintained it to be, a pathological symptom.
Quite on the contrary, it is a weapon in the struggle for life;
since it is not a matter of indifference whether those in power are
for or against one. This by no means disinterested character is
shown in the worship which rests entirely on the practical rule: _Do
ut des_. Hence the oblations and sacrifices proportioned to the
worshippers’ desires and requests, for which the deity owes his
faithful ones an ample recompense. Hence incantations, magic, and
sorcery, which are methods not only of alluring and appeasing the
god, but of getting possession of him by stratagem and holding him
in one’s power.
(4) Lastly, from this time forward, the religious feeling has a
_social_ character, or rather, the religious and social tendencies
amalgamate into a whole. It strengthens the principle of authority,
often in favour of the altruistic tendencies, which are still very
weak. The chiefs, priests, sorcerers, speak and act in the name of a
higher power, and keep up the social tie. The worship of the dead,
which Spencer has made the mistake of generalising too much, is an
element of stability, establishing a continuity between different
generations. The community of worship and ritual is the objective
and visible expression of social solidarity. I do not consider as
belonging to this period institutions such as the religious oath,
trial by ordeal, or others presupposing the addition of a novel
element, which is still absent. But there are other customs, local
or general—_e.g._, that of the _tabu_, existing in nearly the whole
of Oceania and elsewhere under different forms, in which religion
performs a social office, but a novel one (at least according to our
present ideas), and safeguards institutions and conventions by
terror, while still remaining outside the region of morality.
II.
Except the intellectual feelings themselves, no emotional
manifestation depends more on the intellectual development than the
religious sentiment, because every religion implies some conception
of the universe—a cosmology and a system of metaphysics. With the
first period we have scarcely passed beyond the stage of
imagination; with the second, reflection and generalisation, whose
upward progress we are about to follow, make their appearance. The
intellectual evolution and the emotional evolution must each be
studied in turn during this second stage.
I. _Intellectual Evolution._—We shall find it useful, moreover, to
divide the study of the intellectual element into two questions: (1)
the conception of a cosmic order, at first physical, afterwards
moral; (2) the progressive march of generalisation from an almost
unlimited multiplicity up to unity. These two processes have not
always coincided or kept pace with one another.
(1) We have seen that, for primitive man, everything is alive, full
of arbitrary caprices, desires, intentions, and especially
mysteries, because everything is unforeseen: it is the reign of
universal contingency. The formula, “everything is alive,” is,
however, too absolute; it only suits those things which were seen to
move and change—_i.e._, the majority, not the totality of things. It
seems as if the absence of motion, stability, fixity, the want of
reaction, had been a sort of revelation to a simple mind. Perhaps it
was through the spectacle of the fixity of things that the notion of
order or law made its very humble entry into the world. However that
may be, it is certain that the depersonification of nature began
early to mark the origin of science. In our present state of culture
we find a difficulty in representing to ourselves a state of mind in
which the idea of fixity in natural phenomena is almost _nil_; yet
such a state of mind has existed, and there is no want of documents
to prove it. The expression, “the new moon,” was not at first a
metaphor: men wondered if the sun would always continue his course;
the Mexicans anxiously awaited his new birth every fifty years;
eclipses seemed to happen at random, and caused great terror,
etc.[193] Gradually the spirit of observation and reflection arrived
at constant relations, and introduced into the conception of Nature
the ideas of order and regularity, diminishing in so far the domain
of chance and contingency. This notion of a cosmic order has
influenced religious conceptions; the government of the physical
world was attributed to the gods; they are its regulators; each has
his department where he is supreme. The co-existence of two opposite
principles has been remarked in the religion of several nations in
this period of their development: necessity being personified in an
abstract, mysterious, inaccessible deity (Rita among the Aryans, Ma
with the Egyptians, Tao with the Chinese, Moira or Nomos with the
Greeks, etc.[194]); while contingency, or rather limited arbitrary
power, was personified in more human gods having their legends,
acting within their own special sphere, as, for instance, the gods
of Greece. The latter are also sometimes divided into two
categories, which is the first step towards simplification, one kind
bestowing physical well-being—health, prosperity, riches; the other
inflicting physical ills—disease, famine, tempest, shipwreck.
-----
Footnote 193:
For the facts see Goblet d’Alviella, _op. cit._, p. 178.
Footnote 194:
Goblet d’Alviella, _ib._, pp. 176-198.
-----
The notion of the cosmic order led to that of a moral order; the
gods have first the physical government, in a later age the ethical
government of the universe. The conception of higher powers,
invested with moral attributes, has been, as we shall afterwards
see, an important stage in the evolution of the religious sentiment.
The very ancient opinion, still prevalent among many believers, that
the crimes of men occasion epidemics, unchain the elements, cause
floods and earthquakes, shows that the human mind, rightly or
wrongly, has supposed an analogy between all the forms of order in
the universe. Hence also the change of the physical dualism above
mentioned into a moral dualism; the genii of light and darkness
become respectively moral or immoral gods, good or bad counsellors,
saviours or tempters; and in this period a faith in the superiority
and definitive triumph of the good is firmly established. In short,
the gods have as attributes first power, then intelligence, and
lastly morality.
(2) Let us now see the part played by increasing generalisation in
the constitution of religious ideas.
When we wish to study the ascending degrees of generalisation, not
_in abstracto_, but according to facts and documents, we may take as
our guide the evolution of languages, or, better still, the progress
of the scientific spirit (as, for instance, by following the methods
of classification used in zoology, from antiquity up to the present
day); we might also have recourse to the development of religion,
for this is the same mental process applied to a different matter.
It is sufficient to indicate the various steps in a very cursory
manner.
It is a well known fact that the various races of mankind differ
greatly in their powers of abstraction and generalisation; some can
scarcely get beyond the concrete, while others disport themselves,
easily and swiftly, in the region of the abstract. This difference
of aptitude is expressed in their religions. Many peoples have never
passed beyond polydemonism—_i.e._, the cult of individual genii; in
other words, the realm of the concrete. Not to speak of savages,
such was the religion of the ancient Chinese empire (Tiele); such
the innumerable genii in the primitive religion of the Romans—a
people not greatly inclined to abstractions.
Certain tribes have, even at the present day, words to designate
every water-course in their country, but no general term for a
river. To have found such a one is a step in progress. It is the
same in the region of religious thought: by an analogous progress
the spirit of each tree is subordinated to the deity of the forest,
the various river-spirits to a river-god, etc. For a number of
particular divinities is substituted one specific and pre-eminent
divinity.
At a higher stage the mind seizes more remote resemblances and
constitutes one god for water, one for fire, one for the earth, so
that the spirits of the waters, the sky, and the earth are severally
grouped under the dominion of one power, known in Greece as Zeus,
Poseidon, or Hestia.
This generalising process which has taken place with regard to
natural phenomena also goes on in the social order. There have been,
successively, gods of clans, tribes, nations. We know how long
religions—even complex and highly organised ones—have remained
merely national: the god of a nation is its protector and
guardian—watches over it and over nothing else; but his existence
does not exclude that of other gods who are lords of other nations.
The transition to the universal, extra-national religions was
brought about by means of conquest and annexation, but also, and
more particularly, by philosophical speculation.
At the point we have reached there are divine hierarchies,
analogous, on one hand, to the ideal hierarchy of individuals,
species, genera, on the other to the hierarchies of human society:
they are conceived and constituted according to the human type. The
anarchy of Vedic India is reflected in the mythology of the Vedas,
the feudality of Egypt in its religion, Zeus resembles Agamemnon,
the Peruvian Inca is descended from the sun, and applies to his
empire the government of the solar deity; and “by an optical
illusion, human society seems to be a copy of the Divine
State.”[195]
Footnote 195:
For details, consult Tiele, _Manuel de l’histoire des Religions_,
Goblet d’Alviella, pp. 153-163. “The divine feudality is the
primordial fact in Egyptian religion, as political feudality is
the primordial fact of Egyptian history” (Maspero, _Histoire
Ancienne_).
In its movement towards absolute unity, the human mind has still
some stages to pass through before reaching the term. It conceives
of a divinity far superior to the rest, who, however, act under him
(Jupiter optimus maximus), and whom he does not suppress. This is
“monolatry” but not monotheism. We still find accommodations and
compromises in the conceptions of triads (trinities) and dyads
(associations of masculine and feminine divinities). In fact, pure
monotheism is a conquest of the metaphysical spirit, which traces
back the series of secondary causes to discover the first cause,
rather than an intuition of popular consciousness.
This survey of ascending generalisation is somewhat schematic, and
has been presented as an ideal restoration, though all its elements
have been taken from reality. Some nations have attained the first
stages only; others have, with much difficulty, passed beyond them;
others have passed through several at a bound. Perhaps the evolution
of religious ideas has not been in any two cases identical.
II. _Emotional Evolution._—It has been justly said that religious
feeling consists of two scales. One, in the key of fear, is composed
of painful and depressive states: terror, fright, fear, veneration,
respect, are its principal notes. The other, in the key of tender
emotion, is composed of pleasurable and expansive states:
admiration, confidence, love, ecstasy. One expresses a feeling of
dependence; the other of attraction, going even as far as reciprocal
union.
One of the first changes produced during this period of evolution is
the predominance of the second scale; in the combination of two
elementary emotions the proportional relation has changed, whence a
change in the nature of the resultant emotion. We have seen this in
the progressive effacement of the worship of the evil gods, in the
suppression of sanguinary sacrifices, first in the case of men, then
in that of animals; in the tendency to substitute for them simple
acts of homage.
A second change, and one of especial importance, consists in the
coalescence of the religious and the moral sentiment, which contract
a union so close that to many people it seems necessary and
indissoluble. We have seen that this is not the case, and that there
are religions without morality. Primarily, the religious feeling is
a special emotional form, the moral feeling is another form. There
are, first of all, the purely naturalistic religions, afterwards the
moral religions. A mass of facts demonstrate that, in the beginning,
the religious feeling is not only quite a stranger to morality, but
even in conflict with it. We know the bitter criticisms directed by
the Greek philosophers against the reigning religion, bearing, as it
did, the impress of myths springing from a primitive naturalism and
understood neither by orthodox believers nor by the philosophers
themselves. Contemporary criminologists have shown that prostitutes
and even ferocious criminals are most assiduous in their devotional
practices. This is because the religious feeling, in its origin and
taken by itself, is fundamentally selfish[196], being nothing else
but anxiety for one’s individual salvation. This superposition
of the moral sentiment has taken place in all the great
religions—_i.e._, all those which have had a complete evolution: in
Brahmanism and especially in Buddhism when compared with the Vedic
period, in the prophets of Israel, even among the Greeks, in the
mysteries, etc. People end by believing that a right state of mind
is the best of offerings.
-----
Footnote 196:
The theory of _do ut des_ is expressed with naïve completeness in
a Brahmanic hymn. “Well filled, O spoon [of the sacrifice], fly
down; well filled, return. As having agreed on a price, let us
make exchanges of strength and vigour. Give me, I give to thee;
bring to me, I bring to thee.” Better still: "If thou wilt injure
any one, say to Surya: ‘Strike such an one, and I will make thee
an offering,’ and Surya, to obtain the offering, will strike him."
(Barth, _Les Religions de l’Inde_, pp. 25, 26.)
-----
For most religions, the supreme question is that of human destiny.
Its history, having traversed two periods, the one naturalistic, the
other moral, shows once more that the religious and the moral
sentiment are, in their origin, two totally distinct feelings.
During the first period, we find no idea of retribution according to
men’s works. The life after death is a continuation or copy of the
earthly life, sometimes resembling it exactly, sometimes
better,—most often worse. We know the complaint of Achilles, in the
_Odyssey_ (xi), where Homer has left us a vivid picture of this
primitive belief; men remain slaves, masters, chiefs, or kings, as
they were during life. Nay, certain tribes, projecting their
aristocratic prejudices into the other world, believed that the
souls of chiefs alone were immortal.
During the second period there arises a belief in a preliminary
judgment on men’s actions, decisive of their future destiny. The
conceptions of this future life are various: temporary or eternal
penalties and rewards, transmigration upwards or downwards, total
liberation (_Nirvana_), etc., but all resting on a moral idea. This
notion appears at an early age among the Egyptians, in the judgment
of Osiris and the weighing of the souls. In the “Book of the Dead,”
of which a copy was placed in the tomb with every mummy, the defunct
addresses to the god a long enumeration of the good deeds he has
done and the faults he has not committed; it is remarkable that he
speaks, not of his oblations, but of his virtues.[197]
-----
Footnote 197:
This prayer will be found in full in Maspero, _op. cit._ (4th
ed.), p. 38.
-----
III.
At the point we have reached, the religious feeling has attained the
height of its development, and can henceforth only decline, so that
the third period need not detain us long. It may be summed up in the
following formula: an ever-growing predominance of the intellectual
(rational) element, a gradual effacement of the emotional element as
it tends to approximate to the intellectual feelings and to come
under that category.
When the march of thought towards unity has reached its limit in
pure monotheism, the work of theologians and especially of
metaphysicians tends to refine the conception of divinity, assumed
as First Cause, or moral ideal, or both at once, but always as an
inaccessible ideal, visible only in occasional glimpses. The
logical, necessary, inevitable consequence is the weakening of the
emotional state. In fact, we may lay down the following principle:—
From the perception to the image, and from the image to the concept,
the concomitant emotional element keeps on diminishing, other things
being equal; for we must take into account differences of
temperament and individual variations. This is only a summary way of
stating what I have so often said in Part I.: emotional states,
beyond all others, depend on physiological (visceral, motor, and
vaso-motor) conditions. Now it is clear that perception is the
operation which most rigorously demands complex organic conditions.
Among images or representations there are two categories: the vivid
and intense imagination approximates, by its hallucinatory tendency,
to the percept; while the cold and dull imagination, which is a bare
outline of things, approaches the nature of a concept. Finally, the
pure concept, reduced almost entirely to a sign, a substitute for
reality, is as much detached from organic conditions as it is
possible for a psychic state to be; it requires a _minimum_ of
physiology. In consequence, emotion, attacked at its source, flows
very scantily; and of the religious feeling properly so called there
remains only a vague respect for the unknowable—for the x—the last
survival of fear and a certain attraction towards the ideal which is
the last remnant of the love dominant during the second period.
We might say in clearer and simpler terms that religion tends to
become a _religious philosophy_, which is an entirely different
thing, for each corresponds to a distinct psychological condition,
one being a theoretic construction of argumentative reason, the
other the living work of a group of persons or an inspired great
man, involving the whole man, his thoughts and feelings. This
distinction is extremely important and throws light on our subject.
It would be easy to show that the great religions, at the height of
their development, become transmuted into a subtle metaphysic,
accessible to philosophers only. For the sake of impartiality, and
not to shock any one, let us place ourselves in a remote period. In
India, the religion which begins with the naturalism of the Vedas is
organised, becomes social and moral with Brahmanism, and attains a
transcendental ideality in the Bhâgavad-Gitâ. Take the following
passage, chosen at random among a hundred similar ones:—"I am
[Krishna is speaking] incomprehensible in form, subtler than the
subtlest of atoms. I am the light of the sun and moon; beyond the
darkness I am the brightness of flame, the rays of everything that
shines, sound in the ether, perfume on the earth, the eternal seed
of all that exists, the life of everything. As wisdom, I live in the
hearts of all. I am the goodness of the good, I am the beginning,
the middle and the end, eternity of time, the death and birth of
all."
Is this religion, or metaphysics, or rather a beautiful
philosophical poem, which moves us by the splendour of its images?
For such a doctrine to become a real religion it must be concreted
and condensed. That we may not, however, seem to cavil and dispute
about words, or come to an arbitrary decision that the one thing
is a religion and the other a religious philosophy, we may state
the question in an objective form. As soon as religious thought
ceases to have a worship or a ritual, and indeed finds itself
incompatible with such, it is a philosophical doctrine. Stripped
of all external and collective character, of all social form, it
ceases to be a religion, and becomes an individual and speculative
belief. Such is the deism of the eighteenth century, with all
analogous conceptions, where feeling is only present in a very
slight, almost imperceptible, degree.
Let us note, however, that in these periods of intellectual
refinement, feeling does not lose its rights: it has its revenge in
mysticism. In all great religions which have reached their highest
point, the antagonism between the two elements of belief, the
rational and the emotional, shows itself in the opposition between
dogmatists and mystics. History is full of their mutual antipathy:
in Christianity we find it, from the Gnostics, through the schools
of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, to the “pure love” of the
seventeenth century and later. The same may be said of other
religions: Islam, in spite of its dry monotheism and the poverty of
its ritual, has not escaped the universal law; it has had, and still
has, its mystical sects. When we study them we find that, for all
the differences of time, place, race and belief, the mystics, caring
little for rigorous dogmatism, all show a singularly strong family
likeness to each other. In this case it is argument which divides
and feeling which unites.
We have still to examine one question relating to the emotional
element alone: is religious emotion a _complete_ emotion? It is
worth while lingering over this, since many writers (not to mention
those who omit it altogether) set it down as a variety of the
intellectual feelings—_i.e._, of the coldest form of emotional life.
A complete emotion, as we know, includes, besides the purely psychic
state, a somatic resonance, a vibration of the organism, consisting
(_a_) of changes in the circulation, the respiration, and the
functions in general; (_b_) of movements, gestures and actions which
constitute its proper mode of expression. Without these, there is
merely an intellectual state. Does religious emotion fulfil these
two conditions?
(_a._) It has its physiological accompaniment; it penetrates as far
into the organism as any other. Since by its very nature it
contains, though in varying proportion, two elements, depression and
exaltation, let us very briefly survey their physiological
relations.
Depression is related to fear and under its acute forms has been
confounded with it. Does not the worshipper entering a venerated
sanctuary show all the symptoms of pallor, trembling, cold sweat,
inability to speak—all that the ancients so justly called _sacer
horror_? Physical and mental weakness makes us religious through
consciousness of human frailty. Austerities, macerations—in short,
the asceticism which is an institution in the so-called pessimistic
religions—though springing from a multitude of causes which need not
here be inquired into, prove at least that the physiological factor
is not regarded as indifferent. The Hindoo ascetics of the early
ages were able, by their insensate mortification, to dethrone the
gods and take their places—gods in their turn. The widespread belief
that austerities contribute to salvation is a very much modified
form of this.
Exaltation is related to love and tends to union, to possession. The
history of all ages abounds in physiological procedures made use of
for the artificial production of enthusiasm in the etymological
sense of the word, which implies having the deity within one’s self.
There are inferior forms: the mechanical exaltation produced by
dancing, or by the rhythmical music of primitive tribes, which
excites them and places them in a favourable mental attitude for
inspiration. Toxic exaltation: soma, wine, the Dionysiacs, the
Mænads. The sanguinary means so widespread in the cults of Asia
Minor: the Bona Dea and Atys, the Corybantes, the Galli, who
mutilated and gashed themselves with sword strokes; in the Middle
Ages, the Flagellants; and in our own day, Fakirs, dervishes, etc.
There are higher, less materialistic forms: the collective
excitement of pilgrimages and revivals, where the emotion of each
individual is increased by that of the rest; the artificial means,
known from antiquity, of attaining ecstasy, _i.e._, full possession;
the frequent confusion, which has so often excited the wrath of
theologians, between the language of carnal and that of mystical
love.[198]
-----
Footnote 198:
For many original and quoted observations showing the close
connection between the sexual and religious emotions, see the
recent series of valuable papers by Vallon and Marie, “Des
Psychoses Religieuses,” _Archives de Neurologie_, 1897.—ED.
-----
All these facts are well known, and thousands of others are recorded
in history. It is convenient to recall them in order to show that
they have their psychological reasons; they are not aberrations, as
might seem to be the case at first sight, but the necessary
conditions of intense emotion. If it is objected that some of them
border on madness, we may reply that every violent passion does the
same, and sometimes crosses the border-line.
(_b._) The religious sentiment, again, is attached to material
conditions by its mode of expression, which is ritual. Ritual
practices are not, as many think, purely exterior and artificial,
accessory and adventitious; they are a spontaneous creation,
originating in the nature of things. Every religion, great or
insignificant, is an organism constituted by a fundamental belief
attached to percepts, images, or concepts, _plus_ certain secondary
notions which are sometimes mutually contradictory, _plus_ an
emotional state. All this forms a living whole, which evolves,
vegetates, or retrogrades. This organic character distinguishes the
positive religions from the purely theoretical and metaphysical
conceptions, which are not alive, never have lived, and are nothing
but pure speculation. Now, as every animal organism, from the
infusoria to man, has its relational life,—_i.e._, relations with
external agents,—so religion, as an organism, has its life of
relations with the supernatural and mysterious powers on which man
believes himself to be dependent. This life is expressed by rites,
which are means of action, methods of establishing a relation.
The history of ritual is a chapter of the expression of the
emotions. The only difference is this: emotional expression, in the
sense given to the words by Duchenne, Darwin, their successors, and
the world in general, has an individualist character, showing fear,
anger, love, etc.; while ritual expression has a _social_ character;
being the spontaneous product of a collectivity, of a group, which
has become fixed and permanent, erected into an institution by the
influence of society, and safeguarded by tradition. On this subject
I cannot enter into detail; it is sufficient to remind the reader
that ritual is psychic in its origin. There have been two principal
phases in its development.
During the primitive period, ritual is the _immediate and direct_
expression of the religious sentiment, and bears the stamp of the
national character. Among the Greeks, it was graceful and joyous, as
is fitting for divinities who are merely superior and happy human
beings. Among the early Romans it has an agricultural and family
character, is formalist and methodical; the omission of the minutest
detail invalidates the sacrifice. The Mexicans immolated human
hecatombs to divinities who were intoxicated with blood. Rationalist
religions, being half philosophical, have little ritual and a dry
liturgy; they resemble persons of phlegmatic temperament, whose
gestures are rare and restrained. The religions of the imagination
and the heart, on the other hand, manifest themselves by the
splendour and exuberance of their ceremonies.
In the second period, we have the passage from the literal to the
figurative; ritual becomes _symbolism_. Since it is a means of
expression, a language, it is quite natural that this should be so,
and this phase corresponds to that of metaphor in spoken language.
Thus the offering of a lock of hair, or a figure made of dough,
becomes a substitute for human sacrifice. Having reached this point,
ritual can no longer be understood except through its history; but
worshippers still use it, without fully knowing its meaning, just as
they use metaphors without knowing their derivation, or being able
to trace them back to their primary sense. Lastly, there are some
rites which are simply survivals, analogous to a frown when we are
perplexed, vestiges of certain ways of feeling and acting which have
been, but have long ago disappeared.
The religious feeling is therefore a complete emotion, with its
train of physiological manifestations, and those writers who have
classed it among the intellectual feelings have only considered it
under its higher forms, and when it is on the point of extinction.
At the period of its fullest development, but rarely under either
its primitive or its intellectualised form, the religious feeling
may become a passion, yielding to no other in tenacity and violence,
which has its own special name: religious fanaticism. It borders on
madness without quite crossing the line. This passion would require
a psychological monograph to itself; and there is no lack of
documents whence to compose one. We may gather from these facts:
1. New proofs of the fundamental independence of the religious and
of the moral sentiments. In religious wars, persecution, the
torture inflicted on heretics, the murder of the chiefs of the
opposite party, are held to be meritorious acts; all which seems
inexplicable to persons of calm and deliberate sense. They would
be less astonished if they would consider that religious emotion,
when it reaches the point of a paroxysm of passion, becomes as
uncontrollable as violent love, and, like it, must have
satisfaction; that there is the firm belief in a right, superior
to human obligations, because of higher origin (a belief attaining
its highest degree in theomania, of which we shall speak
presently); and that the religious sentiment and the moral
sentiment, though having numerous points of contact and moments of
fusion, are yet, in their nature, essentially distinct, because
answering to two totally distinct tendencies of human nature.
2. We find a proof of the tendency of the religious feeling to
unite, group, _socialise_. Unity of belief creates the religious
community, as community of external and internal interests creates
the civil community. Both tend to expel dissidents (internal
enemies), and to conquer external enemies—in this case, the heathen.
The distinct or vague consciousness of the conditions of a society’s
existence, _i.e._, its instinct of conservation, determines its
morality and its way of acting. National religions, therefore, which
are the same thing as civil society, proselytise only slightly, or
not at all: the Greeks never tried to convert the Persians, neither
did the Romans the Gauls. The universal religions (Christianity,
Islam, Buddhism) forming societies other than, and outside
nationality, and transcending it, have aimed at spiritual conquest,
_i.e._, at their social extension.
IV.
The question whether there exist any tribes completely devoid of all
religious belief has been extensively discussed. That there are any
such seems doubtful, when we take into account, on the one hand, the
reticence of the savage towards strangers with regard to his own
feelings and beliefs; and on the other, the scanty psychological
equipment of travellers, who frequently understand by religion only
a developed and organised cult. The fact, even were it proved, would
be but of slight value, since it could only be the case among the
very lowest specimens of humanity.[199] A question scarcely ever
asked is this: Are there _individuals_ (not social groups) utterly
without religious feeling? We must eliminate idiots, imbeciles, and
the uneducated deaf and dumb; we are speaking of normal men living
in some society or other, all of which have a religion. I am
distinctly inclined to answer in the affirmative, though I find no
decisive observation on this point. The case would be analogous to
those of moral blindness already studied, to the absence, if it
exists, of all æsthetic feeling; it would denote a lacuna in the
emotional life. It should be noted that it is only in this
department that such a lacuna can occur. No normal man, living in a
society, can have his mind closed to religious _ideas_, can ignore
their existence, their object, their significance; but they may have
no hold on him, may remain within his consciousness as a foreign
substance, originating no tendency and exciting no emotion; they may
be conceived without being felt.
-----
Footnote 199:
For this discussion, Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, I. xi., and
Réville, _Religions des Peuples non Civilisés_, i., pp. 10 _et
seq._, may be consulted.
-----
I have already reminded the reader that the religious feeling may
become a violent passion; it may even pass this limit, take a
chronic form, and enter the region of pathology. For the alienist,
religious madness is not a morbid entity, but a symptom; it
sometimes exists by itself, but is more often associated with
epilepsy, hysteria, and the forms of melancholia. From a
psychological point of view, it has to be studied by itself, as a
complement to the normal state. Considered thus, from the purely
psychological standpoint, its manifestations, though very diverse,
may be reduced to a simple classification: the depressive, or
asthenic; and the exalted, or sthenic forms.
I. The depressive forms spring up and grow on the soil of
melancholia. Their physiological criteria are the symptoms so often
described—lowering of the vital functions, and so on. Their
emotional criterion is fear in all its varieties, ranging from the
simple scruple to panic terror; and the intellectual criterion, the
possession by a fixed idea. Religious madness follows a course
depending on character, education, environment, epoch, and form of
belief. So those who believe in predestination are tortured by the
idea of having committed the unpardonable sin. This obsession,
frequent among Protestants, is rare among Catholics, who admit the
possibility of absolution.[200]
-----
Footnote 200:
Hack Tuke says he has met with only a single case among Catholics.
(_Dict. of Psychol. Medicine_, Art. “Religious Insanity.”)
-----
One form, which we might call _subjective_, consists in religious
melancholy pure and simple, in which the patient believes himself
continually guilty, rejected, damned. In its anxious form it is
characterised by scruples about everything, lamentations over
imaginary crimes or faults. This state is connected with two primary
emotions, both of which have a depressive character: on one side
fear, on the other the self-feeling under its negative form of
humility and dejection. An unconscious or conscious course of
reasoning leads the subject to a feeling of abjectness and
self-contempt; he tries to weaken himself, to make himself worthy of
pity. Asceticism, though, rightly or wrongly, invoking moral reasons
in its own favour, rests on the fundamental desire of depreciating
the individual, at least in this life. This appears, even in its
simple and mitigated forms, but still more in its extravagances (the
monasticism of the fifth century, Simeon Stylites, etc.), in the
cases of castration, mutilation, partial destruction, and finally,
in the religious suicide of the Hindoos who threw themselves before
the car of Jaganath.
A second form, which for want of a better term may be called
_objective_, is demoniac melancholia—the delusion of obsession or
possession,—which, formerly superabundant in all religions, has now
become rarer.[201] In obsession, or _external_ demonomania, the
patient is not in the true sense possessed; he hears, sees, feels,
smells the spirits who are obstinately determined on his ruin, but
he does not feel them _within_ him. In possession, or _internal_
demonomania, they are inside him. There is doubling of the
personality, with sensory, visceral, and psychomotor hallucinations,
these last consisting of internal voices which the possessed person
hears speaking inside him and in spite of himself.
-----
Footnote 201:
For some recent observations see Krafft-Ebing, _op. cit._, vol.
ii. § 1; Dagonet, _Maladies mentales_, pp. 321 _et seq._
-----
II. The morbid exaltation of the religious feeling is derived from
attraction and love, as depression springs from fear. Related to
joy, and sometimes to megalomania, it is accompanied by partial or
total augmentation of both the physical and psychical life.
Ecstasy is a transitory and comparatively passive form. Seen from
without, it resembles catalepsy in the insensibility to external
impressions, and suspension of sensory activity. It differs from it
on the motor side. The ecstatic has not the “flexibility of wax” and
the complete immobility; he can move, walk, speak, and his face can
assume any given expression. Seen from within, ecstasy is an intense
state of consciousness, of which the recollection remains after
awaking, while catalepsy is attended by unconsciousness, or, at
least, complete oblivion. Its psychology is simple enough, if,
neglecting details, we confine ourselves to the essential
conditions. The confessions of ecstatics, which are tolerably
numerous, agree in their principal features: (1) restriction of the
area of consciousness, with one intense and overmastering
representation serving as the pivot and only centre of association;
(2) an emotional state—rapture—a form of love in its highest degree,
with desire and the pleasure of possession, which, like profane
love, only finds its end in complete fusion and unification (ἐνῶσις
of the Alexandrians). The declarations of the great mystics, however
involved they may be in metaphor, leave us in no doubt on this
point;[202] and their critics, even theologians, have reproached
them with frequently being mistaken in the nature of their love.
-----
Footnote 202:
For further details respecting ecstasy I refer the reader to my
_Maladies de la volonté_, ch. v., and to Godfernaux, _Le Sentiment
et la Pensée_, p. 49. Purely medical works contain little that is
instructive with regard to the psychology of this state; the works
of the mystics themselves may be studied with far more profit.
-----
A more stable and active form of religious exaltation is
theomania—_i.e._, “a mental state in which the subject believes
himself to be God, or at least inspired by Him to reveal His will to
men.” To draw a hard and fast line between the founders of
religions, the reformers, the promoters of religious orders, and
pure theomaniacs, is as difficult as to indicate the precise point
at which a violent love becomes madness. We might make use of a
practical test, and say that the one has succeeded where the others
have failed, but this would be too simple, success and failure
depending on a variety of causes. This discussion, moreover, is out
of place here. It is sufficient to remark that theomania is, in its
psychical characteristics, the complete antithesis to demonomaniac
melancholia. Instead of the sorrow of the possessed person with the
enemy lodged in his own body, we find an unalterable joy, which can
be affected neither by persecution, nor misfortunes, nor tortures.
To the feeling of abjectness is opposed the delusion of grandeur.
However modest a man may be by nature, or as a result of reflection,
he cannot with impunity believe himself chosen by the Deity as His
prophet, to speak and act in His name.
The preceding sketch, whence I have purposely eliminated details and
observations (of which, as is well known, there is no lack), has but
one object—viz., to show that the primary constituents of the
religious sentiment may serve as a guide to its pathology, which
rests entirely on fear and love. I may add that none among morbid
emotions has—and still more, has had—a more marked tendency to rapid
propagation in epidemic form: a further proof that, in its nature,
it is not so much individual as social.
CHAPTER X.
THE ÆSTHETIC SENTIMENT.
_Its origin: the theory of play, and its variants—Æsthetic
activity is the play of the creative imagination in its
disinterested form. Its instinctive nature—Transition from
simple play to æsthetic play: primitive art of pantomimic
dancing—Derivation of the arts in motion; of the arts at
rest—Why was æsthetic activity evolved?—Art had, in the
beginning, a social utility—Evolution of the æsthetic
sentiment—Its sociological aspect: progression from the
strictly social character towards individualism in the
different arts—Its anthropological aspect: progress from
strictly human character towards beings and things as a
whole—The feeling for nature—The feeling for the sublime only
partially belongs to æsthetics—Its evolution: it is not
æsthetic in its origin, but becomes so—Why there are not two
æsthetic senses—The sense of the comic—Psychology of
laughter—It has more than one cause—Theory of superiority.
Theory of discord—These correspond to two distinct stages, one
of which is foreign to æsthetics—Physiology of laughter.
Theory of nervous derivation—Theory of tickling—Pathology. Are
there cases of complete æsthetic insensibility? Difficulties
and transpositions of the subject—Pathological function of
emotion: pessimistic tendencies, megalomania, influence of
unconscious activity—Pathological aspects of the creative
imagination; its degrees—Reason why the intense image, in
artists, does not pass into action; ways in which it is
modified—Cause of this deviation; its advantages._
While all the emotions hitherto enumerated have their origin and
their _raison d’être_ in the preservation of the individual as an
individual, or as a social being, the æsthetic feeling, as we know,
differs from the rest by the fact that the activity which produces
it, aims, not at the accomplishment of a vital or social function,
but at the mere pleasure of exercising itself. The more directly a
tendency is connected with life, the more necessary, urgent, and
serious it is, and the less it paves the way for the æsthetic
feeling, which must always have a surplus to expend. However, its
inutility, which is only relative, has been exaggerated; for it
tends in some measure to the conservation of the individual and the
race, being, and especially having been in the past, a _social_
factor, though an incidental and subordinate one, as we shall see
afterwards.
In conformity with the plan adopted, we shall remain strictly within
the bounds of psychology, avoiding any excursions into the history
or theory of art, except for the purpose of seeking facts and
illustrations. We shall thus have to study the origin of æsthetic
emotion, the law of its development, and, subsequently, two forms of
emotional life, rightly or wrongly, considered as related to it: the
sense of the sublime and that of the comic; and we shall conclude by
some remarks on its morbid manifestations.
I.
On the origin of æsthetic feeling, and consequently on the character
peculiar to it among all other emotions, writers belonging to all
schools of philosophy are in agreement to an extent rarely found
elsewhere. It has its source in a superfluity of life—a luxury of
activity; in fact it is a form of play. Schiller is supposed to have
been the first to state its formula: “Supreme art is that in which
play reaches its highest point, when we play, so to speak, from the
depths of our being. Such is poetry, and especially dramatic
poetry.... As the gods of Olympus, free from all wants, knowing
nothing of work or of duty, which are limitations of being, occupied
themselves in taking mortal forms in order to play at human
passions, so, in the drama, we play with the achievements, crimes,
virtues, vices, which are not our own.”[203] Kant referred the
beautiful to the free play of the intellect and the imagination, and
his immediate disciples follow him on this point. Schopenhauer says
the same thing in other words, “Art is a momentary liberation.”
Finally, Herbert Spencer develops this thesis, from the experimental
point of view, by connecting it with biological conditions.
-----
Footnote 203:
This theory of play, however, appears, from recent researches, to
be of English origin, and due to Home (1696-1782), so that, when
taken up again by Herbert Spencer (_Principles of Psychology_,
vol. ii., last chapter), it would seem only to have returned to
its original home.
-----
The primary activity of our physical and mental faculties relates to
proximate ends: the conservation of the individual, and his
adaptation to his environment. The secondary activity is its own
end, and is of somewhat late appearance in the animal kingdom. The
lower animals are shut up in a narrow circle: they feed, defend
themselves, sleep, and propagate their species. On a higher level
appears “a useless activity of unused organs” (Spencer, _op. cit._,
ii. p. 630); as in the rat with incisors growing continuously in
adaptation to the excessive wear they undergo; the cat, exercising
her claws on the bark of a tree or the covering of a chair, etc.
Higher still appears the true play-impulse; dogs pretending to hunt
or fight, cats running after a ball which they catch, push away,
catch again, and pursue, bounding as if after their prey. In
children, we know the pre-eminent function of play, and how it
differs according to sex, disposition, and age: it has its
individual characteristics, and is often a creation.
Play is, however, a genus of which æsthetic activity is only a
species, and in determining the peculiarities of this species, the
authorities are somewhat vague.[204] The most definite, Grant Allen,
in his _Physiological Æsthetics_, has attempted a solution. For him
play is the disinterested exercise of the _active_ functions, as in
racing, hunting, etc.; art, that of the _receptive_ functions, as in
the contemplation of a picture or a monument, the reading of a poem,
listening to music, etc. This is definite, but quite inadmissible;
for it is clear that æsthetic emotion requires a certain mental
activity in the spectator, not to mention the creator.[205]
-----
Footnote 204:
In a recent book, very rich in observations on the play of animals
(_Die Spiele der Thiere_, 1896, the only existing monograph on the
subject), Groos substitutes for the thesis of a superabundance of
energy that of a primary instinct, of which play, in all its
forms, is the expression. I cannot see that the two theses exclude
one another. Some base their argument on external manifestations.
Groos connects them with an instinct—_i.e._, a motor disposition
_sui generis_. I am inclined to take Groos’s view, the more so as
the fundamental idea of the present work is that of finally
reducing the affective life to the sum of a set of tendencies
fixed in the organisation.
For the rest, the psychology of play is still awaiting
treatment in its totality. The word, in fact, denotes
several entirely different psychical manifestations. In its
first stage, it is unconscious in its origin, spontaneous,
an expenditure for the mere pleasure of spending; but,
however disinterested in its source and its aim, it is
useful; in children, play is often a form of imitation,
often a form of experimentation, an attempt at easy and
unconstrained exploration of beings and things. In the
second stage, it has become reflective; pleasure is sought
for its own sake, and with full consciousness of the reason;
it is a complex state formed by the fusion of variable
elements. In a special study, which, however, is merely
tentative (_Die Reize des Spieles_, 1883), Lazarus adopts
the following classification: (_a_) games connected with
physical activity, (_b_) the attraction of all kinds of
spectacles, (_c_) intellectual games, (_d_) games of chance.
This last item alone might well prove a tempting one to a
psychologist. It has a quasi-passive, somewhat blunted form,
being what Pascal called a diversion (that which turns
aside, distracts), a way of pretending to work, or filling
up the blanks of existence, of “killing time.” It has an
active form, the gambling passion, whose tragedy is as old
as humanity, and which is made up of attraction towards the
unknown and the hazardous, of daring, of emulation, of the
desire of victory, the love of gain, and the fascination of
acquiring wealth wholesale, instantaneously, without effort.
These and other elements show that, in play as in love, it
is complexity which produces intensity. The absence of any
complete first-hand studies on this subject shows once more
the scarcity of monographs relating to the psychology of the
feelings.
Footnote 205:
For a detailed criticism of this view, see Guyau’s _Problèmes de
l’esthétique contemporaine_, p. 12. This writer, afraid of
dilettantism, substituted for the theory of play that of life, as
a source of art. I do not see what is to be gained by substituting
a vague formula for a definite one. Moreover, are not all emotions
connected with life?
-----
The peculiar characteristic of this superfluous activity, this form
of play, is the fact of its spending itself _in a combination of
images and ending in a creation which has its aim in itself_; for
creative imagination sometimes has practical utility as its aim. It
differs from the other forms of play only in the materials employed
and the direction followed. We may say, more briefly, that it is the
play of the creative imagination in its disinterested form.
This is not the place for a dissertation on the creative
imagination, which seems to have been somewhat neglected by
contemporary psychology, so lavish in studies of what used to be
called the passive imagination (_i.e._, visual, auditory, motor,
etc., images). I wish only to indicate, as belonging to our subject,
its relations to instinctive activity.
When we have said that images, their association and dissociation,
reflection, and emotion are the constituent elements of the creative
imagination, it will be found that we have omitted an irreducible
factor, the principal element, the _proprium quid_ of this mental
operation, that which gives the first impulse, which is the cause of
creative work, and constitutes its unity. This _x_, which, for want
of a better term, we may call spontaneity, is of the nature of an
instinct. It is a _craving_ to create, equivalent, in the
intellectual order, to the generative craving in the physiological
order. It shows itself at first, modestly, in the invention of
childish games; later, and more brilliantly, in the budding of
myths, that collective and anonymous work of primitive humanity;
later still, in art properly so called. There always remains the
craving for superimposing on the world of sense another world,
having its origin in man, who believes in it, at least for the
moment. If it should seem a mistake to compare instinct, which is
fixed, with the æsthetic activity, which passes for absolute
liberty, we must remember that we are dealing, not with their
development, but with their origin; and in that point they coincide.
_True_ creative activity has the innateness of instinct, an
innateness in this case to be rendered by the word precocity. This
is proved by innumerable facts; at some unforeseen moment the spark
flashes out; experience has hardly anything to do with it. It has
its necessity and its fatality; the creator has his task to
accomplish; he is fitted for one kind of work only; even when he has
some adaptability, he is imprisoned within his own manner, and keeps
his own individual style; if he leaves it, he fails altogether, or
becomes a bad imitator of others. It has its impersonality; creation
is not the child of the will, but of that unconscious impulse which
we call inspiration; it seems to the creator as if another acted in
him and through him, transcended his personality and made him a mere
mouth-piece. What further is needed to show, as far as origin is
concerned, the characteristics of instinct? In physiological
creation the fertilised ovule assimilates to itself, according to
its nature, the materials of its environment, and, following the
laws of an inexorable determinism, becomes, in the end, a healthy
individual or a monster. In the case of instinct, an external or
internal excitation brings into play a pre-established mechanism,
and the act goes straight to its end, or turns to a gross error. In
æsthetic creation the process is identical; we know by means of
numerous biographical documents, which I cannot here reproduce, that
the creative moment with artists presents itself under one or other
of two forms: either a rapid intuition, in which the generating idea
appears as a whole, or a fragmentary, partial view, which gradually
completes itself; unity established beforehand or arrived at
afterwards; the intuition or the fragment. The intellectual ovule,
too, is forced to this dilemma—revelation or abortion.
I do not insist on a subject which would require to be dwelt on at
length, and which I propose to treat in another work where it will
be more in place; but it was necessary to point out that under this
superabundance of strength, this vaguely described useless activity,
there is something more definite, an active tendency utilising this
superfluous energy, and giving to it various directions, among
others that of intellectual creation, with images for materials—a
creative instinct having its type in primitive animism, the common
source of myths and arts.
Let it not be objected that all this concerns the creator only, and
that he alone feels this craving, this tendency, this inclination to
act, which is the root of æsthetic emotion. He who experiences it in
any degree, however coarse or however subtle—spectator, listener,
dilettante—must perform over again, in a measure proportioned to his
powers, the creator’s work. Without some analogy between their
natures, however slight, the spectator will feel nothing; he must
live the artist’s life and play his game, incapable of producing by
himself, but capable of being, and even forced to be, an echo.
Now let us lay aside these theoretic considerations for a question
of _fact_. Can we find the transition between play under its simple
form of movement, expended for the sake of pleasure, and æsthetic
activity, _i.e._, creation-play? This transition must represent the
origin and primitive form of art. This primordial art, now
impoverished, dried up, like an old tree which has emptied all its
sap into its suckers, is dancing, or rather the pantomime-dance
forming an inseparable whole. In its origin it is “an expression of
muscular force simulating the acts of life.” No commentary is needed
to show that here the junction between superfluous motor activity
and æsthetic creation takes place: dancing includes both. Since we
are at the source, it is as well to insist on this, all the more so,
as the importance of this primordial art has in general either been
forgotten or insufficiently emphasised by psychology.[206] Let us
note its principal characteristics.
-----
Footnote 206:
We must except Sergi, from whom I have borrowed the above
definition. In his _Psychologie Physiologique_, Bk. IV., chap.
vi., sec. 374, he gives some interesting historical details.
-----
First of all, the artist finds his material in himself: a
possibility of movements useful neither for seeking food, nor for
defending himself, nor for attacking others, nor for his
preservation, or that of his species, in any form whatever.
This art is primordial. We find it in the early stages of all
peoples and tribes, even the most savage. The documents collected by
ethnologists leave us in no doubt on this point, except, perhaps,
with regard to the Arabs and the Fuegians; and, even in their case,
there is nothing to prove that it is not our insufficient
information that is at fault. We may therefore call it the natural
art _par excellence_.
It is universal. It is found in all latitudes, all ages, all races,
as much among the utilitarian Chinese and the grave Romans of the
early ages, as among nations reputed artistic or frivolous.
It is symbolical, it means something, it expresses a feeling, a
state of mind; that is to say, it has the essential and fundamental
character of æsthetic creation. Originally, dancing had a sexual,
warlike, or religious significance; it was appropriated to all the
solemn acts of public and private life. Among the natives of North
America there were dances for war, for peace, for diplomatic
negotiations, for hunting expeditions in common; others, again, for
each of the gods, for harvests, deaths, births, marriages. The
negroes have a passion for it which almost reaches delirium. The
ancient Chinese judged of the manners of a people from their dances;
they had themselves a great number, bearing different names. This
enumeration would be endless; it is simpler to say that dancing
marks a phase of symbolism which all races of mankind have passed
through.
Indubitably, in the genesis of the æsthetic sentiment, we have here
the first stage, semi-physiological, semi-artistic, play becoming
art. Let us further remark that primitive dancing is a composite
manifestation, including the rudimentary form of two acts destined,
later on, to separate in the course of their evolution—music and
poetry. Poor music indeed, consisting sometimes of three notes only,
but remarkable for the strictness of rhythm and measure, and poor
poetry, consisting in a short sentence incessantly repeated, or even
in monosyllables without precise signification.
Such is the original form of the arts aiming at motion. As for the
arts whose result is repose, they are, with the exception of
architecture, indirectly derived from the same source. Dancing,
being a pantomime, has plastic qualities; it is living plasticity.
Furthermore, as a social and ceremonial act, it requires ornaments
which at first were applied to the human body: drawings, tattooings,
or colours simply smeared on. Later on, the representation of forms
and colours is externalised, passes from men to things, in order to
fashion or modify them, becoming ornamentation, sculpture, painting.
We have just seen how æsthetic activity arose, and how humble was
its origin. Another question still remains in debate: _Why_ was it
evolved? In fact, by its nature, by its definition, it seems to have
had no utility as a stimulant, since it springs from superfluous
activity and is not bound to the conditions of individual existence.
The persistence and development of the individual social, moral, and
religious emotions explain themselves through utility. The
intellectual or scientific emotion, also, was at first entirely
practical, and therefore useful: knowledge is power. The case of
æsthetic emotion stands alone. How, amid the rough struggle for life
in which humanity was involved, was it able, not merely to blossom,
but to live and prosper? It is no answer to say that it resisted and
grew, because rooted in an instinct, a craving; for this instinct,
by reason of its biological uselessness, might have become
atrophied, or disappeared, like functionless organs, and it is the
contrary that has happened. Darwin’s well-known explanation based on
sexual selection, the preference of the females for the most
skilful, the most graceful, the most brilliantly coloured, or the
best singers among the males, is only partial, available for certain
species of animals, not for all. More than this, the tendency
dominant of late years to deny absolutely the heredity of acquired
modifications cuts us off from the hypothesis of the transmission,
consolidation, and increase of the æsthetic instinct in the course
of generations. Hence the great embarrassment in which Weismann,
Wallace, and all others who take this negative view, find
themselves. They admit variation and selection only—not the fixing
of variations by heredity. The first factor is sufficient to explain
the appearance of the æsthetic activity, but the other two,
selection and transmission, have nothing to do with it; so that,
however frequently we may suppose this creative instinct to appear,
it would always have to begin again at the beginning. The two
above-mentioned writers have been much exercised on this point. How
could the aptitudes for mathematics, music, and art in general, so
rudimentary in primitive man, take so marvellous a flight? “In the
struggle for life these mental gifts may very possibly have proved
serviceable from time to time, and even of decisive importance; but
in most cases they are not so, and no one will pretend that a gift
for music or poetry, ever, in primitive times, increased the chances
of founding a family.... These are not qualities which favour the
preservation of the species; they could not, therefore, have been
formed by natural selection.”[207]
Footnote 207:
Weismann, _Essais sur l’hérédité_ (French ed., p. 475); Wallace,
_Darwinism_, chap. xv. Before these, Schneider (_Freud und Leid_,
pp. 28, 29), an adherent of the English theory of the inherent
uselessness of the æsthetic activity, has tried to connect it with
the conservation of the individual and the species by an extremely
bold and problematical hypothesis resting on heredity. If we
experience different feelings before a stormy sea, or a calm, blue
lake, covered with boats, or a vast plain, or snow-covered
mountains, “it is because our feelings are those of primitive man,
when he lived really in the midst of nature and had to wrest his
daily bread from it. Through countless generations our ancestors,
on finishing their daily task, in the evening have thought with
satisfaction of the work accomplished; it was in this frame of
mind that they looked on the approach of evening and the sunset.
Why does a landscape representing it produce on us an impression
of repose and peace? We have no other answer than this: for
countless generations past the evening sky has been associated
with the consciousness of work finished and a feeling of rest and
satisfaction.” Apart from its extreme flimsiness, this hypothesis
would not be applicable to all the arts.
There is only one possible answer: æsthetic activity, at its origin,
had some indirect utility as regards conservation, being based on
directly useful forms of activity to which it was auxiliary.
Besides, to connect art with play, itself connected with an excess
of nervous and muscular energy, is to place it in mediate relation
with the vital functions. We have still to define the nature and the
measure of its utility.
The arts which aim at motion, at their first appearance consisted
entirely of dancing, accompanied by song. Weismann tells us that the
musical sound is the complement of the sense of hearing, which
itself is connected with natural selection, because it is not a
matter of indifference, either for animals or men, that they should
clearly hear and rightly distinguish the sounds of inanimate or
animate nature, so as to act accordingly. This, however, explains
nothing, acuteness of hearing and musical ear being two entirely
distinct mental states, each requiring distinct cerebral and psychic
conditions. It is in the dance accompanied by song and gesture that
we must seek for the explanation; it had a _social_ utility, it
favoured concerted movements and common action, it gives unity, and
the consciousness and visual perception of unity, to an assemblage
of men; it is a discipline, a preparation for corporate attack or
defence, a school of war. Hence the capital importance of _time_.
The Kaffirs, in immense numbers, sing and dance with such precision
as to resemble a huge machine in motion. Among several tribes the
rhythm must be perfect, and any one who makes a mistake is punished
with death.[208]
Footnote 208:
Wallaschek, _Primitive Music_, chap. x., which may be consulted
for details.
In the case of the arts whose result is repose, the explanation is
more difficult. We have seen that there is a possible transition
from one group to the other,—dancing being a living picture,—but
what utility is there in the ornamentation of utensils, in drawing,
in sculpture? Wallaschek (_op. cit._) supposes that savages drew or
carved horrible figures on their weapons in order to frighten the
enemy, as is still seen among the Dyaks. I prefer Grosse’s
explanation, as being at the same time more positive and more
general.[209] In the first place, ornaments are signs, and have as
such a social value. Besides, and more especially, primitive plastic
art supposes two factors whose development must be favoured among
savages by the struggle for existence: good visual memory and great
manual skill. They are, like children, very acute observers; they do
not pass beyond the narrow limit of their sensations; but within
that limit they see, hear, feel, and smell with extreme precision;
their existence depends on it. They have (as can be proved by
numerous instances) an excellent memory for forms and figures.
Lastly, they have few tools, but they know how to use them; they are
skilful because their life also depends on their skill. The
distance, therefore, between the practice of arts serviceable to
life and the primitive practice of art is not so very great after
all.
-----
Footnote 209:
_Die Anfänge der Kunst_ (1894). This book, extremely lucid and
interesting, full of ethnographic documents and general
considerations, may be consulted with great advantage on the
question of the beginnings of art. On the special point which
occupies us, see pp. 191 _et seq._
-----
In the beginning, art is dependent on and auxiliary to the useful;
the æsthetic activity is too wide to subsist by its own strength;
but it will be emancipated later on. We shall return to the old
question of the “relations between the beautiful and the useful,”
which cannot be cleared up unless we turn our attention from
civilised ages and countries—where the divorce is already
accomplished—to the remote epoch of their origin.
II.
Let us now, starting from its source, see how the æsthetic sentiment
has, in the course of ages, come to specialise and differentiate
itself. Its evolution presents two aspects—one sociological, the
other anthropomorphic—which in the nature of things are inseparable,
but which, for the sake of clearness in exposition, we shall study
separately.
1. The æsthetic feeling, of a strictly social character in its
origin, tends progressively towards individualism. A division of
labour takes place in it, rendering its manifestations more numerous
and more complex.
2. The æsthetic sentiment, of a strictly human character at its
origin, gradually loses this in order to embrace the whole of
nature. It passes from human beauty in its organic form to abstract
beauty, loved for its own sake.
Let us consider its developmental progress under this double aspect:
I. In recent times, especially in France, many writers have occupied
themselves with the relations between the æsthetic feeling and
social conditions. It is sufficient to mention the names of Taine,
Hennequin, Guyau,[210] but all are studying the question under its
contemporary, or at least its civilised form; they place themselves
at an epoch when art has already to a great extent lost its social
value. For Hennequin, a form of art expresses a nation, because,
having adopted it, the nation recognises itself therein as in a
mirror. The famous theory (Taine’s) of the work of art as the
necessary product of race, time, and environment is much contested
and very vague. Still more vague is Guyau’s view: “Art is, through
the medium of feeling, an extension of society to all natural beings
and even to beings conceived as transcending the limits of nature,
or, in fact, to fictitious beings, created by human imagination.” It
is an abuse to words to apply the name of society in this way: a
society implies solidarity; every other use of the word is merely
arbitrary. The question is, therefore, Has art been a co-operative
factor in the establishment of solidarity among men? It is in this
sense only that it has or has had a social character. Now, to find
in it this characteristic in a clear, positive, incontestable form,
we must go back to the beginning, to an epoch when æsthetic needs
collaborated in social unity and served a social end. This
characteristic is, as we have already said, so evident—at least as
far as the arts resulting in movement are concerned—that it seems
preferable briefly to recapitulate how differentiation and
individualism gradually came about.
-----
Footnote 210:
For a historical survey of the question see Grosse, _Anfänge der
Kunst_, pp. 12 _et seq._
-----
We have seen that, in the beginning, dancing is everywhere and
always a collective manifestation, regulated and safeguarded by
tradition, later on by laws, as in the Greek republics, and later
still subject to the influence of fancy and individual caprice—to
the great scandal of the conservatives. But the evolution of this
art has been poor enough when compared with its two acolytes, poetry
and music. Poetry, even when separated from dancing, long remains
inseparable from music; it is sung and accompanied by the playing of
an instrument. It is at first anonymous; whoever the author may be,
it is common property; it belongs to the clan, the group, as if it
were the work of all. Later,—the first social differentiation,—there
are found corporations of poet-singers: the ἀοιδοὶ, rhapsodists,
jongleurs, minstrels, bards; among the higher Negro races of the
Upper Nile these corporations are held inviolable, even in time of
war.[211] Afterwards the poet’s individualism, freed from its
association with music, accentuates and asserts itself, and becomes
the definitive form among civilised nations. It would not be rash to
say that, in our day, poetry is tending more and more in the
direction of pure subjectivity and absolute individualism. Stuart
Mill even ventured to say, “All poetry is of the nature of
soliloquy”; and according to him, “the peculiarity of poetry appears
to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener”;[212]
which proves how little he understood of its true origin. I do not
inquire whether this sort of isolation in an ivory tower is a gain
or a loss for poetry; but I observe its growing frequency as
civilisation advances; the complete antithesis to its collective
character in the earliest ages.
-----
Footnote 211:
Letourneau, _L’évolution littéraire chez les différents peuples_,
p. 66, a work which may be consulted for documentary evidence.
Footnote 212:
Quoted by Grosse (p. 48), who gives an acute criticism of this
view, rightly pointing out that a strictly individualistic art is
“neither thinkable nor discoverable.”
-----
Indissolubly associated at first with dancing and poetry, music
shares the common destiny; it is subject to inflexible rules, it is
a State function, an instrument of education and order. Its function
among the Greeks, especially the Dorians, is well known, as also its
importance to philosophers who, like Plato, wished to reform or
reconstruct society. In two other widely separated parts of the
world, among absolutely different people, we find, in China, 2000
years before our era, a Minister of Music, whose importance is
continually insisted on by the philosophers; and in Mexico, before
the conquest, an official academy of music, regulating both that art
and poetry. It is therefore regarded as being, in the first place,
of social utility. It thus passes through a process of evolution
similar to that already described in the case of poetry, slowly
separates from it, and still more slowly takes its great flight to
become the least imperfect mode of expressing the most refined and
intimate feelings, and to admit of no rule outside itself. The
separation which took place at the Renaissance between religious
music, which is in its essence collective, and secular music, which
tends towards individualism, would, if need were, supply other
proofs in support of the regular march of æsthetic evolution.
In the group of plastic arts, the relation between æsthetic activity
and individual or social utility shows itself less clearly, and
rather under the form of a parasitical superfetation. Here the
evolution has started from two quite distinct sources: the one,
leading to no great results, is the ornamentation of the human body,
which, however, has, as we have seen, a certain social value as a
sign. The other, architecture, is for this group the equivalent of
dancing, _i.e._, the primordial and synthetic form whence
differentiation started. As soon as man had passed the period of
caverns and such shelters, and had learnt to construct durable
buildings, he worked at first for gods and kings, who embodied the
social order and were alone worthy of so great an effort, or for the
assemblies and deliberations of the clan, as is seen even at the
present day in the case of many savages, whose rudimentary
architecture is only shown in the construction of the communal
house. The work is at once architecture, sculpture, and painting,
forming an inseparable whole, as do dancing, poetry, and music. Then
the association was gradually dissolved, the independence of each
art asserted itself, and each of these arts, at first exclusively
reserved for kings or the community at large, afterwards entered the
service of the rich and great, and, in time, of every one, thus
becoming more and more individualised.
In short, the relation between disinterested æsthetic feeling, and
practical, utilitarian ways of thinking, would be scarcely
intelligible if we confined our attention to civilised ages. It has
varied greatly, and in these variations we can distinguish three
principal stages.
The first stage is that of close relation. Æsthetic pleasure, in its
rudimentary form, co-exists with the useful, or rather, is involved
with it in a common state of consciousness—the agreeable. To be
felt, it must possess some individual or social utility. This mental
state is still, at this very hour, that of many human beings,
probably of the majority.[213]
-----
Footnote 213:
Grant Allen (_Mind_, xx., Oct. 1880) points out that Homer
describes beautiful districts as “fertile,” “rich in wheat,”
“horse-feeding,” etc. He heard a peasant in the neighbourhood of
Hyères praising the magnificence of a cultivated plain covered
with vegetables, while showing the greatest contempt for a
picturesque bit of woodland. An American visiting England said,
“Your country, sir, is very beautiful. In many parts you may go
for miles together and never see a tree except in a hedge.” Any
one who has had much to do with the peasantry could quote hundreds
of remarks similar to the above.
-----
The second stage is that of loose relation. Emerson’s saying, that
what Nature at one time provides for use she afterwards turns to
ornament, is the formula which sums up this period. The æsthetic
feeling has no fixed connection with the conservation of the
individual; it is called up by occurrences which give its distant,
disinterested echo, serving the purpose of pleasure only. The
legends, the genii, fairies, mythological beings who have become
mere material for poems, pictures, operas, were once a belief, a
reality, a terror, of which we retain only the similitude in the
shape of a game.[214] There are many reasons why the serf of the
Middle Ages was not inspired with any sort of poetry by the Gothic
castles or the donjons built on high rocks whose ruins we admire. It
is possible that one day, under some entirely different
civilisation, our factories, with their tall chimneys, may become
material for art by calling up memories of a vanished past.
-----
Footnote 214:
See Spencer, _Essays_, i. 434, 435.
-----
The third stage is that of complete liberation, which has its
expression in the thesis of art for art’s sake. My object is neither
to defend it, nor to attack it, nor to pronounce judgment on it, but
simply to ascertain its existence in theory and practice, and that
it only makes its appearance at a late age and in mature
civilisation.
To sum up: there is no more an innate and infused notion of the
beautiful than there is an innate and infused notion of the good,
but a system of æsthetics which comes into being just as morality
does; and the history of the æsthetic feeling is that of its
fluctuations during the process of coming into being.
II. The second aspect of its evolution consists in the progressive
movement which sets it free from strict anthropomorphism, gradually
withdrawing it from the purely human and extending it so as to
embrace everything. The best way to follow this movement of
extension is to put the question in a concrete form, as Grant Allen
has done.[215] What objects did man at first consider beautiful, and
in what order did he extend this judgment? In so doing we avoid the
disadvantages of an _a priori_ proceeding and the risk of confusion.
-----
Footnote 215:
_Mind_, 1880, p. 445.
-----
Human beings began by thinking that beautiful which resembled
themselves; the Australian woman admired the Australian man, and the
Fuegian man the Fuegian woman. Primitive æsthetics have a strictly
_specific_ character, and their relations with the sexual instinct
are evident. At this stage they can scarcely be distinguished from
animal æsthetics, if—which is a disputed point—animals are
susceptible to the æsthetic sentiment. In any case their dances,
their music, their tournaments, their ornaments, are only addressed
to individuals of their own species, and have generation as their
object. There is no fact to indicate that, for any species whatever,
there has been any change or progress in this direction.
Man, on the other hand, rose out of this state, in the first
instance, by ornaments added to his person. This addition may seem
futile enough, but in reality it was the first step outside nature.
It has been attempted to define man as a rational, or a religious
animal; he might just as well be defined as an æsthetic animal.[216]
In the colours and designs applied directly on the body, and at a
later period fixed by the operation of tattooing, we already note a
choice, a symmetry, a certain artistic arrangement.
-----
Footnote 216:
I shall be pardoned for introducing the following passage from
Théophile Gautier; it is, under its humorous form, so just from a
psychological point of view: “Ideals torment even the coarsest
natures. The savage, when he tattooes himself, or smears his body
with red and blue, or sticks a fish-bone through his nose, is only
obeying a confused sense of the beautiful. He is seeking for
something beyond what exists; he is trying to perfect his type,
guided by a dim notion of art. The taste for ornament
distinguishes man from brute more clearly than any other
peculiarity. No dog ever thought of putting rings into his ears;
and the stupid Papuans, who eat clay and earthworms, make
themselves earrings of shells and coloured berries.”
-----
From the human body the artistic instinct then extends to whatever
comes in contact with it; it externalises itself, and is applied to
weapons, shields, garments, vases, utensils. From the polished stone
age onward we find a whole arsenal of ornament. In caverns and
tumuli of a date anterior to the use of metals we find necklaces,
bracelets, pins, and rings of pleasing shapes. There exist numerous
and correct representations of various animals drawn or carved at a
time when the reindeer was still living in Central Europe.
We may pass over architecture, an art which was useful from the
first, and of which I have already spoken. It might, if necessary,
be classed as an extension of clothing. Let us only note that, as
far back as the epoch of the lake-dwellings, we observe the taste
for symmetry; it is natural and innate, and probably derived from an
organic source in the arrangement of the human body, the two halves
of which exactly resemble one another.
The poetry of the earliest ages is as yet undifferentiated; being at
once epic, dramatic, and lyric. The generic division was established
later on, but all are characterised by the common trait of being
exclusively human, being concerned with man, with human actions and
human feelings only. Nature is absent, or nearly so, from the
_Iliad_, the _Nibelungenlied_, the _Song of Roland_, etc. The poet
is moved only by those whom Nietzsche calls _Uebermenschen_, gods or
deified men, kings, heroes; and it is only gradually that art
descends to the middle classes or the populace, to the humblest
representatives of humanity.
We need not discuss the origin of music, which has given rise to
various hypotheses; but we find it associated with dancing, at first
in vocal form, _i.e._, translating human emotions by means of the
human organ. Very soon it objectivises itself in instruments of
percussion, extremely rough, but sufficient to mark time or rhythm
accurately, and also to produce a certain physical exaltation of the
senses. Then comes the imitation of the human voice by means of the
flute, and other wind or stringed instruments; and the ever-growing
desire to give utterance by means of music to the most delicate
shades of emotion has brought into existence instruments of
increasing flexibility, number, and complexity, from the invention
of the organ (in the Alexandrian age) up to our own day when
instrumentation plays the preponderant part.
At an early stage the æsthetic activity was exerted to bring animals
into its domain, especially the domestic animals, companions or
servants of man, as is proved by the paintings or sculptures of
India, Egypt, Assyria. The horses of warriors became characters in
heroic poems; so do the dog of Ulysses and that of the Pandavas in
the Hindu epic. They take their place in art by reason of their
moral virtues—bravery, fidelity, etc.
At last we come to the stage where the æsthetic feeling is quite
_dehumanised_; it is no longer attached to men or animals, but to
the vegetable and inorganic world: it is the appearance of the
“feeling for nature.” Its late appearance is a recognised fact, and
I think it needless to accumulate citations in proof. In primitive
poetry, as we have just said, man occupies the foreground; nature is
only an accessory. Very little description suffices in the
beginning—a few lines, or a few epithets merely. Even at a later
date, the Greeks, says Schiller, “artistic as they were, and blessed
with so genial a climate, have some accuracy in the description of a
landscape, but only as they might describe a weapon, a shield, or a
garment. Nature appears to have interested their understanding
rather than their feelings.” The Greco-Roman period became conscious
of some artistic communion with nature only in the so-called
decadent epoch—_i.e._, that of advanced civilisation (Euripides, the
Alexandrians, the Augustan age, and especially the age of Hadrian).
Landscape painting seems to have been almost unknown among the
ancients. Humboldt, in his _Cosmos_, points out that, in the long
catalogue left to us by Philostratus of the pictures of his time, we
find, quite by way of exception, the description of a volcano. In
the time of the Roman Empire mural paintings became a fashion, but
they depicted only a tame and cultivated nature.
Without insisting on well-known facts, we may say that the æsthetic
conquest of nature has passed through two very definite stages.
During the first, art reproduces a smiling, cultivated, fertile
nature, close to man, fashioned by him, bent to his needs,
_humanised_. Such are the Pompeian paintings, and those found in the
villas of the Roman Campagna or the shore of Pozzuoli. During the
second, the taste for primitive, wild, untamed nature is developed,
for the stormy sea, the boundless deserts, glaciers, inaccessible
peaks. The taste for scenery of an abrupt or violent character only
dates, it is said, from the time of Jean-Jacques Rousseau;[217]
certainly, in the eyes of the ancients, and for centuries
afterwards, such scenery consisted merely of horrible spectacles, to
be avoided if possible. The Romans, who so often passed through
Switzerland, found no beauty there; and it will be remembered that
Cæsar, when crossing the Alps, composed a treatise on grammar to
beguile the tedium of the journey. Even in modern times the
revelation of tropical countries and their terrible grandeur has had
but a tardy effect on poetry and art. In the present age, an immense
majority of people feel only repelled by the wildness of nature. It
is, therefore, only for the pleasure of the minority and within the
last century that the relative positions have been inverted; the
human _dramatis personæ_ becoming accessories, and nature furnishing
the main subject of the picture.
-----
Footnote 217:
Sully, _The Human Mind_, vol. ii. p. 144.
-----
This lateness in the appearance of the feeling for nature has been
accounted for in a variety of contradictory ways. Some consider that
this feeling is awakened by contrast; the satiety of civilisation
and disgust at its refinements drive man from it, at least in
imagination, and lead him to seek another ideal elsewhere. Others
(Schneider, Sergi) appeal to ancestral influences; primitive man
feared nature more than he enjoyed her charms (as is still the case
with peasants and children), wild nature, especially, inspiring him
with a superstitious terror, and being, as he believed, full of
maleficent spirits. This terror lasted for a long time, even after
the conception of the world had been changed by the increased
knowledge of physical phenomena, like an echo from ancient times.
Grant Allen points out that facility of communication implies an
advanced state of civilisation; however practical the explanation
may appear, it is not without value; the traveller who has to make
his way across unexplored glaciers, or through virgin forest, is
engaged in unceasing effort and struggle for mere life, which is
incompatible with the disinterested character of æsthetic
contemplation. One needs a certain security to be able to admire.
These explanations seem to me only partial. The true psychological
reason lies in the natural extension of sympathy. We have elsewhere
seen that it implies two principal conditions: an emotional
temperament and a comprehensive power of representation. These
conditions are most likely to be met with in a highly civilised
generation, whose sensibilities are exceedingly acute and subtle,
and their faculty of comprehension greatly extended.
The conquest of nature by intellect and emotion takes place through
a process identical in both cases. There is an ascending movement of
the intellect, which, by way of abstraction and generalisation, goes
on to seek resemblances less and less obvious, and increasingly
difficult to grasp. Certain races stop at the lowest stages: some
ages never pass beyond a certain average of knowledge—_e.g._, the
first centuries of the Middle Ages. In the same way, there is a
progressive movement of feeling towards analogies in nature of ever
greater tenuity, and the same remark applies to races and epochs.
It has been said that the pantheistic tendencies peculiar to certain
peoples, such as those of India, are favourable to a more rapid
development of the feeling for nature. This is, in fact, the thesis
of sympathy under another form, since the assumed community of
nature among all beings involves a community of feeling.
Let us note, in conclusion, that this extension of the æsthetic
feeling to inanimate nature is produced by a process analogous to
that which explains the genesis of benevolence. The pleasures and
pains belong to us, but we attach them to the objects which occasion
them; what we call the soul of things is our own soul projected
outside ourselves and imparted to the things which have been
associated with our feelings.
By a few facts, chosen out of a vast number at our disposal, I have
tried to show that the æsthetic feeling has progressed by evolution
from the social form to that of individualism, and from man to
nature. This mode of _objective_ exposition has seemed to me
preferable, because it allows us to seize in a concrete and
verifiable shape the law of its development and increase in
complexity.
III.
It is usual to include under the same heading as the æsthetic
sentiment two other emotions, that of the sublime and that of the
comic, though I can only perceive a somewhat vague analogy and
partial affinities between them. We shall attempt to see wherein
these three states approximate to and differ from one another.
"The feeling of sublimity is that peculiar emotion which is excited
by the presentation or ideal suggestion of vastness, whether in
space or time (Kant’s ‘mathematical’ sublime), or physical or moral
power (Kant’s ‘dynamical’ sublime)."[218] The distinction generally
drawn between the mathematical and the dynamical sublime appears to
me quite secondary, as the two cases reduce themselves to the idea
of a force in action. Current opinion asserts that the emotion of
the sublime is simpler than the æsthetic emotion properly so called.
If we understand by this that the latter is richer in its
development, much more complex, much more varied in aspect,
comprehending the pretty, the graceful, the purely beautiful, the
pathetic, etc., the opinion cannot be disputed; but if we mean that
the sense of sublimity is simpler as regards its origin, we cannot
admit it. I have already given the emotion of the sublime as an
example of a binary combination (Part II., Chap. VII.) formed by
synthesis of (_a_) a painful feeling of oppression, dejection,
lowered vitality, reducible to one primary emotion—fear; (_b_) the
consciousness of a rush, of violent energy in action, of a
heightening of vitality, reducible to one primary emotion—the sense
of personal power, “self-feeling” under its positive form. Moreover,
one negative condition is necessary: the conscious or unconscious
feeling of our security in the presence of some formidable power.
Without this last all æsthetic feeling disappears.
-----
Footnote 218:
Sully, _The Human Mind_, vol. ii. p. 146.
-----
The sentiment of the sublime loses the egoism which lies at its root
by extending, through sympathy, to men and things. In participating,
through the imagination, in the grandeur of a real or fictitious
personage,—the Napoleon of history, the Moses of Michael Angelo, the
Satan of Milton,—the _ego_ is objectivised and alienated. It is the
history of this development that we must now follow.
“Human might,” says Bain, “is the true and literal sublime, and the
point of departure for the sublimity of other things.” This is, in
fact, the starting-point. Grant Allen[219] has brilliantly
illustrated this view, by trying to demonstrate that the feeling of
the sublime has been evolved from a narrow anthropomorphism—the
admiration for man’s physical strength—towards the sublimity of
moral and intellectual qualities, and that of mass and time in
nature. This conception deserves to be given in a condensed form,
though it is somewhat of an outline, and not without lacunæ: neither
is it certain, whatever this writer may say, that the terror with
which man was inspired by natural phenomena did not show itself at a
very early period, in a form approaching to the emotion of
sublimity.
-----
Footnote 219:
_Mind_, October 1878.
-----
According to Grant Allen, the earliest object of human
admiration—_i.e._, of a feeling of respect mingled with fear—is the
strong man, the invincible warrior, whom none can resist. This
feeling shows itself even among the higher animals, with regard to
each other, and still more unmistakably among children: they admire
physical strength. In the course of social progress, the chief or
despotic king, with power of life and death over all, becomes the
incarnation of power—the sublime object—and so the feeling is
specialised. After his death, it is believed that his surviving
“double,” or ghost, is invested with the same, or even greater
privileges. Thus the feeling hitherto enclosed within the world of
experience is transferred to a supersensuous region.
The author might have shown that, at this stage of evolution, the
idea of an intellectual power, proved by superior knowledge and
foresight, and that of a great moral power, proved by courage and
energy in effort, must have inspired the same feeling.
As, at this period, everything in nature is conceived as alive, man
has necessarily assimilated natural forces to human power: as with
thunderstorms, hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanoes. Looking at
mountains, he seems to see a superhuman power which has raised them.
Finally, the movement of thought, continually going on, leads to the
idea of a paramount or sole deity, considered as absolute and
unlimited power, and the maker of all.
As for the sublimity of mass, it was probably first felt in presence
of great monuments, temples, palaces, pyramids, tombs, constructed
by the pride of kings, and suggesting the idea of their vast power
and the enormous amount of human strength expended. As for sublimity
in the immensity of time, it is not attached to the conception of
empty and abstract time: it moves us because it appears to us as
peopled by a myriad of past or possible events, of activities
succeeding each other with unfailing prodigality.
Thus all these cases are reduced to an overwhelming force, conceived
by analogy and felt by sympathy. Taking this evolution in its main
lines, it has passed through two principal periods, one of
predominant terror, which is not and cannot be æsthetic, and one of
predominant admiration and sympathy, where the consciousness of
personal safety gives the feeling a disinterested character: here
emotion has _become_ æsthetic. It is probable, says Sully, that this
feeling passed from a disagreeable into an agreeable one, and became
æsthetic “through the elimination of the gross element of personal
fear.”[220]
-----
Footnote 220:
_The Human Mind_, ii. p. 148.
-----
Attempts have been made to reduce the emotion of the sublime to
a contrast; it rests rather on a harmony, a synthesis of
contradictories (in the Hegelian sense); it is a case of
_combination_, as we have tried to show in another part of this
work. It is neither fear nor pride (consciousness of strength)
felt directly or by sympathy, but a product of their coexistence
in consciousness, and their fusion in a special state which can
never be completely dissociated by analysis. In short, it is far
more closely related to the two primary feelings already named
than to the æsthetic feeling, to which it approximates, not by
nature, but by accident.[221]
Footnote 221:
Æsthetic activity is that form of play which uses images as its
creative materials. It is generally admitted that visual and
auditory perceptions or representations are the only ones which
provoke æsthetic emotion; yet Guyau (followed perhaps by others)
has maintained that we must attribute this power to all external
sensations, without exception (_Problèmes de l’esthétique
contemporaine_, chap. vi.), heat, cold, contacts, tastes, and
odours; but the facts he enumerates are in most cases referable to
association, especially where odours are concerned. The so-called
lower sensations do not act directly, they only revive the
representations of sight and hearing. A delicious coolness, a soft
contact, an intoxicating odour produce an agreeable state—_i.e._,
a physical pleasure, and nothing more, if there is no association.
Besides, without entering into an idle and hair-splitting
discussion, it is sufficient to observe that, as a matter of fact,
there exists no art, in the æsthetic sense, based on any other
sensations than those of sight and hearing, unless we are to look
on perfumery and cookery as such.
Why is this privilege exclusively confined to two species of
sensations? Various reasons have been given: because they are more
remote from the life-serving functions with which the sensations
of touch, taste, and smell are closely connected (II. Spencer); or
because their pleasures and pains have, in general, a moderate
character, and their special nerves are rarely subjected to a
violent shock (Gurney); or, according to Grant Allen, because the
nerves of the lower senses are excited in mass, and those of the
higher by isolated fibres (? ?). It appears to me that one of the
principal reasons has been forgotten. If we refer back to the
inquiries detailed in Chap. IX. (Part I.) as to the olfactory and
gustatory images, we shall see that they have their own peculiar
characters. For visual and auditory images, revival and
association are easy, whether simultaneously, in groups, or
successively, in series. For images of smell and taste, it is
quite the contrary; their revivability is feeble or _nil_, their
power of association with each other _nil_. (The tactile-motor
images form an intermediate group, but nearer to the lower
senses.) These psychological conditions render them quite
unsuitable for a place in a constructive scheme. Called up with
great difficulty by the memory, incapable of being grouped, either
in simultaneities or in series, they can supply neither an art in
rest nor an art in movement.
IV.
It is also through an abuse of language that the emotional state
designated by the various names of a sense of the laughable, of the
ridiculous, of the comic, is considered as a department of æsthetic
emotion, for no other reason, as it seems, than because the comic
enters into all the arts and produces a disinterested pleasure. Its
domain, however, extends far beyond this. It has been closely
studied in the general and special works of Darwin, Piderit,
Spencer, L. Dumont, Hecker, Kräpelin, and others; and I do not
propose to dwell on it at length, having very little to offer in the
way of personal opinion on the subject. Yet this manifestation of
the affective life, with its peculiar mode of expression, laughter,
cannot be omitted from a complete treatise on the feelings.
This subject presents two aspects, one internal, subjective,
psychological, the other external, objective, physiological. The
latter presents no difficulties, being susceptible of an exact
description; but to connect it with an internal cause, to say why
one laughs, is a very difficult problem, which has been solved in
various manners. In my opinion the error lies in thinking that
laughter has _a cause_. It has very distinct _causes_ which,
seemingly, can be reduced no further, or, at least, their unity has
not hitherto been discovered. If we were to recount only a few of
the numerous definitions of laughter current in books, we should
find none that was not in some way open to criticism, because there
is none which embraces the question in all its manifold aspects.
Thus L. Dumont, in a special work on Laughter, says, “It is an
assemblage of muscular movements, corresponding to a feeling of
pleasure.” Is the laughter caused by tickling, by cold, or by the
ingestion of certain substances, the hysteric laughter alternating
with tears, the nervous laughter of soldiers in action, after the
moment of danger is over—are all these to be put down to the account
of pleasure? Even if we class these and analogous facts by
themselves, as purely reflex actions, there still remain
difficulties.
1. Considered from the purely psychological point of view, the
mental state which shows itself in laughter consists, according to
some, in the consciousness of incongruity, of a certain kind of
contradiction; according to others, in a consciousness of
superiority in relation to men and things on the part of the
laugher.
The first view seems to number most adherents. It assumes as a
fundamental fact the grasping of a contrast between two perceptions,
images, or ideas. Yet all contradictory contrasts do not make us
laugh; if they are to do so, they must fulfil certain conditions. In
the first place, the two contradictory elements must be given
simultaneously as belonging to the same object, so as to induce us
to think that a thing both is and is not at the same time. A monkey
makes us laugh, because he reminds us of, but is not, a man; he
makes us laugh still more if dressed in human clothes, because the
contradiction is more striking. Next, the two states of
consciousness must be very nearly of the same mass and intensity—a
broken-down old man carrying a heavy burden does not make us laugh.
“The two contradictory forces brought into play in laughter, being
unable to attain to the unity of a conception, are forced to escape
outwards by an expenditure of muscular energy” (L. Dumont).
The second theory, first formulated by Hobbes, but perhaps of still
earlier date, is as follows: “The passion of laughter is nothing
else but sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some
eminency in ourselves by comparison with the infirmity of others or
with our own formerly.”[222] The partisans of this view have
severely criticised the theory of incongruity, or discordance in
things. “An instrument out of tune, a fly in ointment, snow in May,
Archimedes studying geometry in a siege; ... everything of the
nature of disorder; ... and whatever is unnatural; the entire
catalogue of the vanities given by Solomon—are all incongruous, but
they cause feelings of pain, anger, sadness, loathing, rather than
mirth.”[223] This view is quite as open to criticism as the
preceding; and we might enumerate a long list of cases where the
feeling of superiority, whether justifiable or not, does not make us
laugh. In my opinion, both views ought to be admitted, as being
partially true, and meeting distinct cases.
-----
Footnote 222:
Hobbes, _Human Nature_ (2nd ed.), 1650.
Footnote 223:
Bain, _The Emotions_, p. 257.
-----
The second theory is suited to the primitive and lower form of that
emotional state which shows itself in laughter. In the case before
us, this state is directly derived from the sense of strength or
power, or, as Hobbes calls it, glory; the contradictory contrast, if
perceived at all, is in the background. The coarsest and most
brutal, almost physiological, expression of this mental state, is
the laugh of the savage after a victory, when treading his
vanquished enemy under foot.
“It appears to be fairly certain, not only that laughter is a
concomitant of brutality and cruelty among uncivilised races, and
children, but that even in the cases of the more refined and
benevolent, it is apt to accompany the recognition of any slight
loss of dignity in another, when this loss does not evoke other and
painful feelings.”[224] It is a matter of common observation, that
many people have a tendency immediately to burst out laughing at any
accident, even if serious, happening to others; and this instinctive
laughter certainly does not spring from the good side of human
nature. It is clear that, under this form, laughter has nothing to
do with æsthetics.
-----
Footnote 224:
Sully, _Sensation and Intuition_, p. 262; _The Human Mind_, i. p.
148.
-----
The theory of discord suits well with the secondary and superior
forms: the feeling of superiority becomes effaced and passes into
the background. It is an intellectualised manifestation, which has
or may have an æsthetic value, the mental development permitting
those fugitive and subtle contradictions which constitute the
principal element of the comic to be caught on the wing. It takes on
an almost disinterested character, though never, perhaps, completely
losing its original blemish.
Finally, laughter may take a still more elevated form in the
humorous spirit we have already mentioned (Part II., Chap V., 3), in
which the feeling of superiority is mitigated by a large proportion
of sympathy.
2. The nature of laughter would be very incompletely known were we
to confine ourselves to pure psychology, but the physiological study
of this phenomenon has not been neglected. The description will be
found in special works on the expression of the emotions, especially
in Darwin (chap. viii.). Laughter is a strengthened expiratory
movement; when prolonged, the excess of the expirations over the
inspirations necessitates deep sighs in order to restore the
equilibrium; there is a drawing back and raising of the corners of
the mouth, the eyes become brighter through the quickening of the
circulation. According to Darwin, the uninterrupted gradation from
violent laughter (which in all human races is accompanied by tears)
to moderate laughter, a broad smile and a gentle smile, proves their
common nature; but is laughter the complete development of the
smile, or the smile a modified form of the noisy laughter of the
first period? Evolutionists are, in general, inclined to consider
noisy laughter as the primary form, connected with the brutal sense
of superiority. Yet the early appearance of the smile in infants, at
about two months, while laughter is not observed, as a rule, till
the fourth month, seems, on this theory, to contradict the principle
that the evolution of the individual reproduces, in an abridged and
accelerated form, the evolutionary process of the species. On the
other hand, animals do not give us any information on this point.
Certain monkeys smile or laugh—_i.e._, the corners of the mouth are
drawn back, their eyes become brilliant, and they emit a certain
sound approximating to a chuckle (Darwin, Wallace, Mantegazza,
etc.).
But the important point is to know why this collection of
physiological facts is connected with certain mental dispositions.
If laughter were the constant and exclusive expression of joy and
pleasure, the answer would be easy; as in addition to this it is
sometimes morbid, sometimes futile and simply physiological, the
explanation ought to be framed to include all these cases.
Herbert Spencer has proposed one, which, though published some time
ago (1863), still remains one of the most satisfactory. In his
view[225] laughter is due to a sudden diversion of nervous energy
into a new path—an overflow-channel. The excitation of the nervous
system existing at any given moment, especially if intense, can only
be expended in three ways—either by transmission to some other part
of the cerebro-spinal organism, exciting other feelings or thoughts;
or by acting on the viscera, the heart, lungs, and digestive organs;
or else by producing muscular movements; and, as the nervous
discharge, especially if moderate, follows the line of least
resistance, and the most easily moved muscles are the first to be
shaken, it acts on the vocal organs, on the mouth, and on the face.
Laughter is connected with this last line of action.
-----
Footnote 225:
“Physiology of Laughter,” _Essays_, vol. i. (1883) pp. 194 _et
seq._
-----
It may result from purely physical excitants: tickling, cold, toxic
action, sudden relaxation after a long period of constraint.
It may be connected with representations—_i.e._, have a psychical
cause. Spencer admits the theory of incongruity, and defines it more
precisely. He distinguishes the ascending incongruity, which goes
from the less to the greater, and the descending incongruity between
the greater and the less. The latter alone provokes laughter. There
must be a sudden transition from one intense state of consciousness
to one which is much less intense, while forming a complete contrast
to it. Thus, while we are listening to a symphony, a sneeze on the
part of one of the spectators may make us laugh. During a
reconciliation scene, on the stage, between two lovers, after a long
estrangement, a goat begins to bleat, and so introduces a comic
element. The heightened attention of the first moment is suddenly
transferred to a trifling incident which does not supply it with
sufficient matter on which to expend itself; the surplus has to find
an outlet, and this produces laughter.
The excess of emotion, when it does not give a shock to the whole
frame, and is not the result of a contrast, takes another
direction—_e.g._, the automatic actions of certain barristers or
other public speakers, of the embarrassed schoolboy twisting his pen
between his fingers, etc.
Hecker, in a special work, propounds another hypothesis.[226] He
connects everything with a typical fact—tickling, which explains the
laughter arising from physical, and that arising from mental causes.
-----
Footnote 226:
_Physiologie und Psychologie des Lachens und des Komischen_
(1873). For criticisms, see Léon Dumont, _Theorie scientifique de
la sensibilité_, p. 211; Piderit, _Mimik_, pp. 138 _et seq._
-----
In tickling, there is, first, the effect produced by each cutaneous
sensation: excitement of the vaso-motor and the great sympathetic
nerves, dilatation of the pupil, brightness of the eyes,
constriction of the vessels, as may be verified experimentally in
the application of a mustard plaster or a sudden effusion of hot
water. There is another necessary condition: intermittence; for
tickling, there must be change in the rate or direction of the
movements, or interruption.
The expiration corresponds to the moment of contact, the expiration
to that of interruption; in the first case the diaphragm is raised,
in the second lowered. To sum up, tickling is an intermittent
excitation of the skin producing an intermittent excitement of the
vaso-motor nerves and the respiration, and an alternation of
pleasurable and uncomfortable states. But what is the use of
laughter in this occurrence? Its function is protective, it
compensates for the diminished pressure of the blood on the brain;
the frequent expirations which compress the thorax, and consequently
the heart, the larger vessels and the lungs, prevent the
blood-vessels from emptying themselves.
As to intellectually-caused laughter, Hecker, who borrows his
psychology from the æsthetician Fischer, and seems to fuse together
the two theories of contrast and superiority, traces all
manifestations of this kind to the comic. Now, in the comic there
are two simultaneous states: one, pleasurable, the sense of our own
superiority; the other unpleasant, the contradiction in the object.
Hence a rapid alternation of pleasure and pain. The comic is an
intermittent impression, which acts like tickling; it is a psychical
titillation which, like the other, shows itself in laughter, and for
the same cause. Such is Hecker’s theory in its main outlines.
In conclusion, laughter manifests itself in circumstances so
numerous and heterogeneous—physical sensations, joy, contrast,
surprise, oddity, strangeness, baseness, etc.—that the reduction of
all these causes to a single one is very problematical. In spite of
all the work devoted to so trivial a matter, the question is far
from being completely elucidated.
V.
The pathology of the æsthetic sentiment would require a work to
itself.[227] We must here confine ourselves to some remarks on the
most general physiological conditions producing it, and on the
natural causes nearly always at work to produce deviation.
-----
Footnote 227:
The only attempt in this direction I am acquainted with is
Nordau’s book, _Degeneration_ (_Entartung_), which is limited to
the present day, and, moreover, treats of other questions as well.
-----
Can the faculty of artistic feeling be absolutely wanting? Are there
cases of complete insensibility to every artistic manifestation,
however humble? I do not think it in any wise rash to affirm this.
_A priori_ since the existence of moral blindness and religious
indifference is certain, it is improbable that a superfluous emotion
should have, in all men without exception, an indelible character.
As a matter of fact, it is difficult to supply the proof; the
insensibility passes unnoticed, having no injurious consequences to
the individual or to society. However, partial cases, at least, may
be observed. Total insensibility to music is not rare, and if this
is a known fact, it is because it is the most easily verified.[228]
Many people declare that the reading or hearing of poetry bores and
wearies them to an extreme degree, and they cannot understand why
poets take so much trouble, when it would be so much easier to
express themselves in prose.
-----
Footnote 228:
There is, with regard to this point, a very complete observation
of Grant Allen’s (“Note Deafness,” in _Mind_, iii. 1878). The
subject, a young man of great intellectual cultivation, had
studied music during his childhood without result. It was
discovered, later on, that he was incapable of distinguishing one
note from another, except at intervals which were sometimes as
much as an octave, or even more. He was quite unconscious of
harmonies and discords, or the _timbre_ of instruments. The
distinctive features of the latter were, for him, only clearly
perceived noises of different kinds—a sound of wire-work for the
piano, a scraping for the violin, a puff of air for the organ. He
was very sensitive to the rhythm of poetry. It is not known
whether anomalies of this kind originate in Corti’s organs or in
the cerebral centres.
-----
Leaving these extreme cases in order to consider pathology proper,
we may first ask ourselves whether we really have here a subject for
study, or whether we are pursuing a mere chimera. The question is
not here put quite in the same form as elsewhere. Pathology
signifies disorder, deviation, anomaly; now, in æsthetic activity,
where is the rule? It has often been repeated that the essence of
art is absolute liberty. I see no objection to this statement; art
has its end in itself, and is subject to no other requirement than
that of creating works able to live, accepted by contemporaries,
and, if possible, by posterity also. By what method, then, can we
decide that any given æsthetic manifestation is normal or abnormal?
Such a decision can be merely arbitrary. We have not even the
resource of saying that everything belonging to beauty is healthy,
and everything belonging to ugliness unhealthy; for—not to mention
that the line of demarcation between the two is frequently very
vague—the ugly is admitted into all the arts by way of ingredient or
foil, and one author (Rosenkranz) has even written on the “Æsthetics
of the Ugly.” I see only one way of escaping from the difficulty,
viz., transposing the subject, studying, not the pathology of the
æsthetic feeling itself, but that of the source whence it emanates;
in other words, considering it merely as a symptom. This requires
some explanation.
Every failure of harmony between the tendencies which constitute a
healthy human being shows itself in a disturbance of equilibrium, an
anomaly in the affective life. This deviation from normal life may
be considered under two aspects: one general, the other special; one
human, the other professional.
If we consider it under its general form—_i.e._, as simply inherent
in the human constitution—the want of equilibrium expresses itself
in many ways, following different directions according to
temperament, character, and circumstances, such as melancholia,
phobias, sexual aberrations, irresistible impulses, etc.
If we consider it under its special, particular form, as peculiar
to a given individual carrying on a given occupation and having
given habits of life—an artisan, a labourer, a tradesman, a
lawyer, a physician, etc.—the disturbed balance will appear to us
as setting its mark on the individual’s professional activity and
its products. The artisan will pass from a fury of work to
excesses of idleness or drink; the merchant from exaggerated
caution to a reckless daring in his enterprises; and the same in
every trade or profession. Now art is a profession like any other,
and the artistic _product_ must bear the mark of the craftsman—a
mark of disequilibrium in the present case. Consequently the
anomalies of the æsthetic sentiment may be studied by comparison,
not with an imaginary norm, not with any alleged regulative
principles of art with which we are unacquainted, but with a
psychological criterion; they may be studied as the effects and
the revelation of a morbid diathesis. To speak more simply, we
have to deal, not with æsthetics, but with psycho-pathology in
connection with æsthetics.
Even thus transposed, the subject still presents inevitable
difficulties, the principal being as follows. With regard to the
psycho-physiological constitution of the creative artist, there are
two theories. (We must not forget that, in the amateur, or mere
taster of works of art, the same psychological conditions are
required, though in a less degree, being more strongly accentuated
in proportion as he feels more acutely.)
One of these theories, set forth in many well-known works, maintains
that æsthetic superiority is incompatible with health of mind and
body. The facts in support of it have often been very uncritically
collected, and among the characters mentioned as typical we find all
sorts. Among creative artists there are vigorous men and puny ones,
tall and short, handsome and deformed, weak-willed and enterprising,
slowly-developed and precocious, misanthropists and men of pleasure,
the morose and the cheerful. In short, we can only conclude, at
most, that they have a tendency to depart from the average—whether
to rise above it or fall below it.
According to the other theory, all this is secondary, accessory,
physical and psychical defects being by no means a necessary
condition of genius. It grows equally well on a sound stem or a
rotten one; it bears the marks of its origin, but this is quite a
matter of accident. There are also facts in support of this view,
though it must be acknowledged that they are less numerous than
those on the other side.
We may also generalise the question, and ask whether æsthetic
activity is not always a deviation. Nordau has maintained the
affirmative: “Art is the slight beginning of a deviation from
complete health.” Thus presented, the question is equivocal. If we
understand by mental health the _ataraxia_ of the ancient
philosophers, it is clear that creative and even æsthetic enjoyments
are incompatible with it. To demand that we shall create or enjoy
without excitement, remaining all the time in the level, prosaic
calm of every-day life, is to expect the impossible. On this showing
we might say as much of any emotion whatever and allege it to be a
deviation from health. Some intellectualists, Kant among others,
have ventured to make this claim, which is as much as to say that
man is, by nature, an exclusively reasonable being—so enormous a
psychological error that we need not discuss it. Besides, even
supposing this to be the ideal, the mission of psychology is not to
study an ideal man, but the real one.
After this somewhat lengthy preamble, rendered necessary by the
ambiguity of our subject, let us investigate the part played by the
two essential factors, emotion and imagination, when their activity
is pathological, and in clearly-defined cases.
I. The necessity for vividness and sincerity of feeling in the
artist is so obvious that I need not insist on it. This disposition,
however, is not in all cases identical. Acute emotion may be
intermittent, appearing only at moments of inspiration and creation,
and then, the crisis over, disappearing to let the emotional life
take its normal course. This is the characteristic of healthy genius
or talent, which, descending from the heights, returns and adapts
itself to the groove of ordinary life. A more frequent case, if we
may judge by biographical documents, especially as we approach our
own day, is the state of permanent excitement or hyper-excitability.
Artists and dilettanti are exceedingly delicate instruments
vibrating continually to every sound. Here our triple criterion of
pathological activity comes again into use: we find (apparent)
disproportion between cause and effect, violent and prolonged shock
to the system, chronicity. This physiological state is one of
continual loss; not a combustion, but a series of explosions; not a
life, but a fever. Hence the craving for artificial excitement so
frequent in emotional natures of this kind; they seek it under all
its forms, and the remedy aggravates the evil. It is needless to
multiply examples, we need only recall the great contingent of
melancholiacs, hypochondriacs, alcoholics—persons subject to
hallucinations, insane, or merely _déséquilibrés_—furnished by
artists or passionate lovers of art. Besides these general
characteristics, we may note as particular pathological symptoms of
æsthetic emotion:
1. An obstinate tendency to pessimism—the persistent and exclusive
taste for gloom in art predominating in certain epochs of history,
especially in our own. Its contagion is not sufficiently explained
by imitation and fashion; it springs from deeper causes—from a
general state of depression, enervation, and debility. Art is the
expression of this secret uneasiness, both among those who create
and those who enjoy. This pessimism is not a disease of art, but of
the individual and the age, which can bring forth no other fruit. We
know that the nature of the ground modifies the flowers of plants
and gives to their fruits a peculiar taste—the flavour of the soil;
the human soil is subject to the same necessity, and at certain
stages of civilisation it can produce nothing save a melancholy crop
of flowers with strange and acrid odour. The constant love and
complacent enjoyment of the mournful and morbid, of all connected
with death, is the æsthetic form of the _luxury of pain_ which I
have already (Part I., chap. iv.) tried to analyse, and to determine
its pathological causes.
2. The tendency to megalomania under the form of pride, and still
more of excessive vanity. The remark on the _genus irritabile vatum_
is of old date; but at various epochs the insanity of greatness has
raged like an epidemic in the domain of art. It has found its
supreme expression in this century in the doctrine of “the divinity
of art” proclaimed by the school of Schelling, and surviving among
contemporary “æsthetes.” “The beginning of all poetry,” said
Schlegel, “is to suspend the march and the laws of reason, to plunge
us once more into the beautiful maze of fantasy, the primitive chaos
of human nature. The good pleasure of the poet suffers no law above
him.” We have gone still farther since then, and an interesting
collection might be made of the folly written on this subject. When,
sincerely and without prepossessions, we ask ourselves what are the
grounds of these high pretensions, of this apotheosis, they are not
very evident. Is it because art yields enjoyments far superior to
those of the senses? But scientific research, and the love of
travelling and exploration, do the same thing. Is it because of its
creative function? But we find creation everywhere—in science,
mechanic art, politics, commerce, industry: artistic creation is
only one form among many others. Is it because it adds an ideal
world to the real? Religions do as much, with the advantage that
they do not work for the few, the elect, but for the whole world.
Malherbe used to say that a good poet is no more useful to the State
than a good skittle-player. This is an extreme statement on the
other side, for the poet, after all, has a social value; he can
foresee, instruct, express the confused feelings of the mass of
human beings who arrive through him at the consciousness of life.
If, accepting this form of megalomania as a fact, without discussing
its legitimacy, we seek for its psychological causes, we shall find
two principal ones.
The first is in the character of the individual, the hypertrophy of
his _ego_. The self-feeling breaks out under an æsthetic mask, as it
might do under any other. “Egotist” art is the sincerest expression
of this impulse of pride (be it noted in passing that it is the very
antipodes of primitive art, which is collective, social, anonymous);
but it is an ephemeral form destined to die of inanition. Besides,
its expansive force would be, if necessary, limited by the expansion
of rival individualities. The production of monsters is a necessity
of civilisation. By means of the division of labour, it imposes, in
all positions and occupations, an excess of unilateral development,
of tendency towards a single aim; it requires specialisation. In
primitive times, art was not a profession; the artist, while all the
time going on with other work, produced naturally, spontaneously, as
a rose-tree gives its roses; it was a superabundance of mental
activity which thus found vent. Gradually he fell into the
professional track, and now, a victim to his own glory, he is
_forced_ to produce, _nolens volens_, as he can, consciously
fabricating works of art as others do articles of commerce, reckless
of over-production. It is a hypertrophy of the creative function.
The second cause must be sought in a deeper region than that of
consciousness, in that unconscious part of us (whatever opinion may
be entertained as to its nature) which produces what is vulgarly
called inspiration. This state is a positive fact accompanied by
physical and psychical characteristics peculiar to itself. First and
foremost, it is impersonal and involuntary; it acts like an
instinct, when and as it pleases, it may be solicited but not
compelled. Neither reflection nor will can supply the place of
original creation. We have numerous anecdotes relating to the habits
of poets, painters, and musicians when composing: striding up and
down, lying in bed, seeking complete darkness or full daylight,
keeping the feet in water or ice, and the head in the sun, the use
of wine, of alcohol, of aromatic drinks, of haschisch or other
poisons acting on the intellect. Apart from some oddities not easy
to explain, all these proceedings have the same object—viz., to
bring about a particular physiological condition, and increase the
cerebral circulation in order to provoke or maintain the unconscious
activity. The ancients saw in inspiration a supernatural state, a
divine action, a possession in which they firmly believed.
Certainly, we now look on the Muses, and the various mythological
gods of music and poetry, merely as superannuated fictions; yet
there remains an impression of mystery, of a superior power, of a
rare inborn gift bestowed on a man, which is his special privilege,
which acts through him and is unknown to others, something analogous
to what we have already met with in the case of theomania. From the
vague consciousness of this state of election, this exceptional
favour on the part of nature, it is for the artist an easy step to
the affirmation of his greatness.
II. The pathology of the creative imagination does not belong to our
subject; it is only connected with it through the influence of
feeling on its operations. The power of constructing an imaginary
world is a human attribute of which no one is devoid, since without
it we could never take one step out of the present into the future
and form for ourselves an image, however inadequate, of the latter.
Observation shows that, from this universal level upward, there are
all gradations, from the dry, clear, coherent imagination to
incoherent, impalpable reverie and disordered exuberance: now, the
increasing predominance of the imagination involves the danger of
living entirely in the world of the unreal, which frequently
happens. Biographical documents permit us to note the stages in this
ascent towards the suprasensible.
There are artists who divide their lives into two parts and keep
them distinct; they keep their accounts in double entry; they have
their hours of unbridled imagination, and their hours of practical
good sense. Ariosto was one of these; it was said of him that he had
put his folly into his books and his wisdom into his life.
Others are, for the moment, caught by their own creations, and so
violently carried away by them that they are near the state of
hallucination. According to the constitution of their minds, they
either see their characters or hear them speak; the sounds are in
their ears, they breathe odours, taste flavours. On this last point,
Flaubert’s declaration, reported by Taine has been doubted, but
without sufficient reason.
There are some who appear to be in an almost continuous state of
hallucination. Such seems to have been the case of Torquato Tasso.
“At certain moments,” Gérard de Nerval used to say, “everything
would assume a new aspect to me: secret voices rose from plants,
trees, animals, to warn and encourage me. Formless and lifeless
objects had mysterious ways, whose meaning I understood.” The
“symbolists” of various countries—French, Belgian, English—are now
telling us the same thing with more to the like effect. I do not
think, however, that we can be deceived by them. They are returning,
through a sharpened and refined sympathy, to the primitive period of
naïf animism, in which everything in nature has life, sight and
voice, in which, as one of them says, the real world assumes the air
of fairyland.
Beyond this there is only one step, that of complete and permanent
hallucination, such as is to be found in lunatic asylums; the total
substitution of an imaginary world for the real, without
intermission, doubt, or consciousness of unreality.
This is the clearest part of the subject, but there is one obscure
point which must detain us, the more that it is connected with the
fundamental phenomenon of emotional life: _tendency_. If there is
one psychological law more firmly established than another, both by
facts and argument, it is that every intense representation of an
act tends to realise itself; which is inevitable, since the vivid
image of a movement is the beginning of a movement—a revival of
motor elements included in the image. A man who, standing on the top
of a tower, is fascinated by the idea of a possible fall, runs the
risk of throwing himself over; the attraction of the abyss is
nothing else but this. On the other hand, artists naturally have
intense representations and feel things violently; they dream of
orgies, love adventures, sanguinary dramas, self-devotion, virtues
and vices of all sorts. How comes it that all this is merely
imagined, and never passes into action, or becomes a reality?
It is because in their case the law is subject, not to an exception,
but to a _deviation_. The intense representation _must_ be
objectivised—_i.e._, from being internal become external, and it may
arrive at this result in two ways: by a real action, as in the case
of ordinary people, or by the creation of a work of art which
delivers one from the haunting idea: this is the peculiarity of
artists. If, besides this, a physiological reason is required, it
might be admitted, merely as a hypothesis, that in these cases the
motor centres have not, usually, sufficient energy for practical
realisation, whence it comes that their satisfaction is a purely
æsthetic one.
To keep strictly to our subject, we have a large body of testimony
to show that many have only been delivered from their haunting ideas
by creative production, as I have already mentioned when treating of
memory. It is fixed in a poem, a novel, a drama, a symphony, on the
earth, or in stone; we may remember Michelangelo and the sculptures
of the Medici chapel, Schiller’s early manner and the “Robbers.” Is
not Byron, whose psychological state has been so well analysed by
Taine (born for action and adventure, returning, perhaps, to his
true vocation when he went to die at Missolonghi), the poet of
pirates, of strange and doubtful enterprises? The reader will think
it needless for me to enumerate further instances.
This rule, however, is not without exceptions. The law which
requires that the intense image shall be actualised is always
satisfied; but sometimes this happens in two ways, artistically and
practically, at once. Many have lived out their dreams of love,
orgies, adventures, violence, and have produced a work of art
besides; a double stream has flowed from the same source. Some of
the romantic school have revived the aspect of past ages in their
houses, their furniture, their lives. Artistic sovereigns have been
able to realise their imaginations to the full: Nero, Hadrian,
Ludwig II. of Bavaria, and others.
An Italian anthropologist, Ferrero, has pointed out, with some
justice, that, in spite of our complaints of the pessimistic,
satanic, _macabre_, or neurotic character of contemporary art, this
evil is not without its accompanying good; it is a safety-valve, an
overflow channel. Morbid art “is a defence against abnormal
tendencies, which, otherwise, would tend to transform themselves
into action.” Many content themselves with a literary, plastic, or
musical satisfaction. This seems to be indisputable. We may also
grant to this author that the suggestion of a work of art has not
the power of direct suggestion, that of the actually perceived fact,
and that, so far, it is less dangerous. But as it is more widely
diffused and acts especially on subjects predisposed to it, it may
be questioned whether, in the long run, the gain is serious.
This is a sociological question which it would be out of place to
discuss here, and which, consequently, we may dismiss with a bare
reference. Our conclusion is that the pathology of the æsthetic
sentiment has no independent existence. It is one among many forms
of expression (of which we have already pointed out several) of a
morbid predisposition which can only follow this track in a small
minority of persons—those possessed of the power of creative
imagination.
CHAPTER XI.
THE INTELLECTUAL SENTIMENT.
_Its origin: the craving for knowledge—Its evolution—Utilitarian
period: surprise, astonishment, interrogation—Disinterested
period: transition forms—Classification according to
intellectual states—Classification according to emotional
states: dynamic forms, static forms—Period of passion: its
rarity—Pathology—Simple doubt—Dramatic doubt—"Folie du
doute"—Mysticism in science: deviation comes, not from the
object, but from the method of research._
I.
This name stands for the emotional states—agreeable, disagreeable,
or mixed—which accompany the exercise of the intellectual
operations. Intellectual emotion may be connected with images,
ideas, reasoning, and the logical course of thought; in a word, with
all the forms of knowledge. Except in some rare cases, which will be
pointed out later on, it scarcely ever rises beyond a medium tone,
especially in its higher manifestations.
After having traced it to its origin, we shall have to follow its
evolution, which passes through three principal phases: the first,
utilitarian and practical; the second, disinterested and scientific;
in the third, which is much less frequent, it attains the power and
exclusiveness of a passion.
I. This feeling, like all the others, depends on an instinct, a
tendency, a craving; it expresses in consciousness its satisfaction
or non-satisfaction. This primitive craving—the craving for
knowledge—under its instinctive form is called curiosity. It exists
in all degrees, from the animal which touches or smells an unknown
object, to the all-examining, all-embracing scrutiny of a Goethe;
from puerile investigation to the highest speculations; but whatever
may be the differences in its object, in its point of application,
in its intensity, it always remains identical with itself. Those
devoid of it, such as idiots, are eunuchs in the intellectual order.
Assuming this innate craving, how is it developed during the first
period?
The first stage is that of _surprise_. It appears early in the
child; quite clearly, at latest, in the twenty-second week,
according to Preyer. It is a special emotional state which cannot be
traced back to any other, consisting of a shock, a disadaptation. In
my opinion, its special and peculiar character lies in its being
without contents, without object, save a relation. Its material is a
_relation_, a transition between two states—a mere movement of the
mind, and nothing more. The mode of expression and the physiological
accompaniments of surprise are very clearly defined. The description
of these will be found in Darwin (_Expression of the Emotions_, ch.
xii.); the eyes and mouth are wide open, the eyebrows raised, the
sudden shock is followed by immobility, the pulsations of the heart
and the respiratory movements are accelerated, etc.
The second stage is that of _wonder_. I think with Bain and
Sully,[229] that the distinction between these two stages is not a
vain subtlety. Surprise is momentary, wonder is stable; one is a
disadaptation, the other a readaptation; one is without objective
material, the other has for its material some strange or
unaccustomed object. It is this second stage, no doubt, which
Descartes called admiration, and which he placed among his six
primary passions:—"Admiration is a sudden surprise of the soul which
leads it to consider with attention the objects which appear to it
rare and extraordinary."[230] In fact, wonder is the awakening of
the attention, of which it has the principal characteristics—unity
of consciousness, convergence towards a single object, intensity of
perception or representation, adaptation of movements.[231] In the
beginning, before wonder is accompanied by pleasure (or pain, as the
case may be), it has a peculiar character approximating to what we
have called the neutral state, or that of simple excitation.
-----
Footnote 229:
Bain, _The Emotions_, ch. iv. pp. 85, 86; Sully, _Psychology_,
vol. ii. p. 126.
Footnote 230:
Descartes, _Traité des Passions_, Part ii., § 70.
Footnote 231:
I have given further details on this point in my _Psychologie de
l’attention_.
-----
The third stage is that of _interrogation_, of reflections
succeeding to the consternation produced by the first shock. This is
the stage of curiosity properly so called, which consists in two
questions, put implicitly and explicitly: What is that? What is the
use of it? What is the concrete nature of this object? and what can
be its utility? Primitive peoples, children, animals, incessantly
put to themselves this double question; not, certainly, in clear and
analytical terms, but instinctively and by their actions. The dog,
brought face to face with an unknown object, looks at it, smells it,
approaches, withdraws, ventures to touch it, returns, and begins
again; he is pursuing this investigation after his own fashion; he
is solving a double problem of nature and utility.[232] The
interrogation consists in assimilating the new object to our former
perceptions or representations—classing it, in fact.
-----
Footnote 232:
See for facts as to the curiosity of animals, Romanes, _Mental
Evolution_, pp. 283-351.
-----
Is primitive man curious? Herbert Spencer alleges a large number of
facts in proof of his distaste for novelty.[233] However, the
craving for knowledge seems to be very unequally distributed among
the various races; the only universal fact appearing to be that
primitive curiosity is limited to very simple things, all of which
have, or seem to have, some practical utility. Curiosity and the
emotional state which accompanies it have no other end than the
preservation of the individual—just as we have seen with regard to
the tendency to live in communities, or to revere the gods, in this
same initial period of evolution. To be wide awake, to make
inquiries as to what will help or harm one, in a word, knowledge in
the practical order, is a powerful weapon in the struggle for life;
a cause of selection in favour of the curious, and at the expense of
the incurious. It is the survival of this entirely utilitarian
curiosity which explains why, at the present day, uncultured and
even semi-civilised peoples object to the entrance into their
country of travellers from a distance for the purpose of geological
or other scientific explorations; they are always suspicious of a
search for treasure, of espionage, or of some unknown ill deed on
the part of the strangers.
-----
Footnote 233:
_Principles of Sociology_, i. pp. 98, 99.
-----
II. How did the transition to the disinterested period come about?
We may admit, with Sully,[234] that this took place through the
natural, innate inclination of the human intellect towards the
extraordinary, the strange, the marvellous. The same tendency which,
under its creative form, engenders religious, poetical, social
myths, attempts under the form of research to discover instead of
imagining causes.[235]
-----
Footnote 234:
_Psychology_, vol. ii. p. 131.
Footnote 235:
In the following, reported by a traveller, we have an instance of
this spontaneous transition to disinterested curiosity, in the
case of an intelligent Basuto. “Twelve years ago” [the man himself
is speaking] “I went to feed my flocks. The weather was hazy. I
sat down upon a rock and asked myself sorrowful questions; yes,
sorrowful, because I was unable to answer them. Who has touched
the stars with his hands? On what pillars do they rest? I asked
myself. The waters are never weary; they know no other law than to
flow without ceasing,—from morning till night, and from night till
morning; but where do they stop? and who makes them flow thus? The
clouds also come and go, and burst in water over the earth. Whence
come they? Who sends them? The diviners certainly do not give us
rain; for how could they do it? and why do I not see them with my
own eyes, when they go up to heaven to fetch it? ... I cannot see
the wind; but what is it? Who brings it, makes it blow? ... Then I
buried my face in both my hands.”—Quoted by Vignoli, _Mito e
Scienza_, p. 63. This passage is from _The Basutos_, by the French
missionary Casalis (p. 239).
We are here at the point of junction between the æsthetic and the
intellectual sentiments, which will presently bifurcate, and pursue
each its own course. This inquiry is only half disinterested,
however, for if man tries to penetrate the mystery of things it is
in the hope of profiting thereby.
For the rest, however this transition may have come about, it took
place when the struggle for existence became less keen, and it was
possible to cultivate disinterested research for its own sake. Next,
curiosity became scientific emotion, and gradually extended itself
to every kind of investigation: the intellectual sentiment was
formed in all its fulness.
It has been studied with a certain favour by psychologists,
especially those of the school of Herbart, or those who have felt
his influence, under the name of “feelings of relation,” "feelings
connected with the cause of representations." I do not intend to
follow them through their tedious and uninstructive task of
divisions, subdivisions, and distinctions worthy of the schoolmen
of the fourteenth century. Besides, the alleged classification of
the intellectual feelings varies from one writer to another—one
giving fifteen, another sixty. It is an artificial method, a
labyrinth, a source, not of clearness, but of obscurity. I defy
the subtlest psychologist to note and fix the delicate gradations
of feeling which, _ex hypothesi_, should answer to this endless
enumeration.[236] But its most serious defect lies in its
including only the intellectual and not the emotional states.
-----
Footnote 236:
I give a specimen, choosing a classification which is neither one
of the longest nor one of the shortest: (1) Emotions arising from
logical relations (reasonable, unreasonable, contradictory,
logical satisfaction, ignorance, the unknown, the hypothetical;
possibility or impossibility of coming to a conclusion). (2)
Emotions arising from relations of time (present, past, future,
anticipation, hope, presentiment; feeling of the irremediable, of
opportunity, of routine, etc.). (3) Emotions arising from
relations of space (size, nearness, distance, etc.). (4) Emotions
arising from relations of coexistence and non-existence, quantity,
identity, etc. This is a much abridged catalogue; there are
thirty-two subdivisions in all.
-----
I can only admit one division, which has the advantage of
simplicity, and, more especially, of being based on the very nature
of the emotional process. This is, into the pleasures and pains
accompanying research or the acquisition of knowledge, and those
which are attached to its possession, or the state of being without
it. The former are _dynamic_, the second _static_.
Intellectual emotion, under its _dynamic_ form, depends on the
quantity of energy expended. In fact, it is only a particular case
of the emotional state accompanying every form of activity directed
towards an end compatible with success or failure; it is only one
form of self-feeling, differing only in its object, not in its
nature, from the feeling of the explorer or the hunter. The search
for knowledge is a hunt like any other, truth being the game, and
just as many sportsmen find more charm in the vicissitudes of their
expedition than in their spoils, so many truth-seekers will accept
as their own, Lessing’s well-known saying: “If I were offered the
choice between already ascertained truth and the pleasure of finding
it out, I would choose the second.”
Under its _static_ form, intellectual emotion is still a particular
case of self-feeling, whose principal manifestation is the sense of
power, or its opposite. It is one form of this sense, by the same
right as the pleasure of physical strength, the pleasure of riches,
or their opposites. It approximates especially to the feeling
inspired by possession or property; it is felt, under its positive
form as augmentation, under its negative as diminution and poverty;
ignorance is a retrenchment, a limit.
To sum up, intellectual emotion is simple enough; it is only the
transfer of the emotional manifestations already known to us, to a
group of mental operations. There is no need, therefore, to insist
further on the matter.
III. We have still to follow it into a third stage, which it rarely
attains, because pure ideas have little attraction for average human
beings—viz., the cases in which it becomes a _passion_. It is
evident that the intellectual passion cannot exist outside the
dynamic group, possession being, in the nature of things, a calm
pleasure, or, as the ancients said, a pleasure at rest.
We might find numberless instances in the biographies of scientific
men and philosophers. Some names suggest themselves at once: Kepler,
Spinoza, and many others who devoted their lives strictly and
exclusively to the pursuit of truth. It may be objected, however,
that, in certain cases and with certain men, nothing proves that the
intellectual passion has not been fed or sustained by foreign
elements; that the love of learning, though the principal motive,
has been the only one; that it has not been adulterated with
others—_e.g._, desire for position, influence, riches, fame, glory,
in short, ambition under its manifold aspects. It is not easy to
find absolutely pure cases; for, besides the rarity of the
intellectual passion, the terms in which the demand is framed are
almost contradictory, since the men we want to find must be unknown
to fame. The following instance, however, seems to me to answer
perfectly to all the conditions. Descuret, in his _Médécine des
Passions_, gives a brief biographical sketch of a Hungarian named
Mentelli, a philologist and mathematician, who, without a definite
end in view, simply for the pleasure of learning and to satisfy his
intellectual cravings, consecrated his whole life to study, having
apparently no other want. “Living at Paris, in a filthy lodging, the
use of which was allowed him out of charity, he had cut off from his
expenditure all that was not absolutely necessary to sustain life.
His outlay—apart from the purchase of books—amounted to seven sous a
day, three of which went for food and four for light; for he worked
twenty hours a day, without intermission, except on one day in the
week, when he gave lessons in mathematics, on the fees received for
which he subsisted. All he needed was water, which he fetched for
himself, potatoes which he cooked over his lamp, oil to feed the
latter, and coarse brown bread. He slept in a large packing-case,
into which, during the day, he used to put his feet wrapped in a
blanket or a little hay. An old arm-chair, a table, a jug, a tin
pot, and a piece of tin roughly bent into a convex shape, and
serving as a lamp, formed the rest of his furniture. Mentelli saved
the price of washing by wearing no linen. A soldier’s coat bought at
the barracks and only replaced in the last extremity, a pair of
nankeen trousers, a fur cap, and huge _sabots_ composed his entire
costume. In 1814 the cannon-balls of the allies fell all round the
lodging he was then occupying, but failed to disturb him.... During
the first epidemic of cholera at Paris, it was necessary to employ
armed force to compel this scientific anchorite to interrupt his
studies, so as to clean out his pestilential cell. He lived thus,
uncomplainingly, and indeed happily, for thirty years, without a
day’s illness. At last (on December 22nd, 1836), at the age of
sixty, having gone as usual to fetch water from the Seine, his foot
slipped, he fell into the river, then in flood, and was drowned.
Mentelli left no work behind him, in fact there remains no trace of
his long researches.”[237]
-----
Footnote 237:
Quoted by Letourneau, _Physiologie des Passions_, p. 23.
-----
Other instances might be quoted, but they would appear trifling by
comparison with this. Great anonymous collaborations, like those of
the Benedictines, have certainly enlisted the services of
enthusiasts of this kind; thus Dom Mabillon was the type of a worker
animated with passionate fervour, modest, unknown, punctually
fulfilling his religious duties, and when free from these,
travelling about the world on foot to collect historical documents.
Thus we find cases where the love of knowledge alone, untarnished by
other motives, has all the characteristics of a fixed and tenacious
passion, filling the whole of life, and expressing the whole nature
of a man.
II.
The intellectual feeling also has its pathology, in connection with
which I have to point out two principal cases: the extreme forms of
doubt, and the introduction of mysticism into science.
1. Doubt is a state of unstable equilibrium in which successive
contradictory representations neither mutually exclude nor
conciliate each other. I distinguish simple doubt, dramatic doubt,
and the insanity of doubt.
In simple or limited doubt, intellectual indecision has as its
emotional accompaniment a slight uneasiness, a state of discomfort
resulting from an unsatisfied desire, a tendency which comes to
nothing. Under this form doubt is normal, legitimate, and even
necessary; it becomes morbid when it takes a chronic, permanent, and
aggressive form, when it produces a violent shock and a long
reaction.
This is the doubt which I call dramatic, because it is an internal
convulsion, a crisis which often lasts a long time and repeats
itself. It precedes great conversions and then subsides, but
sometimes lasts through life, as with Pascal. There is nothing
surprising in its violence, since it is, in the intellectual order,
the equivalent of an intense, incurable, and hopeless love; in the
two cases the situation and effects are identical.
The insanity of doubt takes us further into the intricacies of
pathology. It is “a chronic disease of the mind, characterised by
constant uneasiness.” It presents numerous varieties, which have
been classified by alienists. Some do not pass beyond the region of
every-day trivialities, as the man who will return twenty times to
see whether he has really locked his door. Others exhaust themselves
in abstruse and insoluble questions, never able to satisfy
themselves or stop, like an ever-turning wheel. Others, the timid,
lose themselves in endless scruples and puerilities. But, whatever
be the matter to which the mind applies itself, the psychological
process remains the same. It is a questioning without pause or
limit, accompanied by distress, constriction of the head, epigastric
oppression, vaso-motor troubles, etc. There is the ardent desire to
find a fixed state for thought without the ability to do so.
Under its gravest form it is “the complete loss of all notion and
feeling of reality.” It is absolute scepticism, not theoretic and
speculative, after the manner of the Pyrrhonians, but _practical_,
bearing not only on ideas, abstract conceptions, memories,
reasonings, but even on perceptions and actions; the exercise of the
intellect is not accompanied by any belief—_i.e._, any state of mind
which presupposes a reality. “I exist,” says one of these patients,
“but outside real life and in despite of myself ...; something which
does not seem to be in my body impels me to act as I formerly did,
but I cannot succeed in believing that my actions are real. I do
everything mechanically and unconsciously. My individuality has
completely disappeared; the way in which I see things makes me
incapable of realising them, of feeling that they exist.... Even
when I see and touch, the world appears to me like a phantom, a
gigantic hallucination.... I eat, but it is a shadow of food
entering the shadow of a stomach; my pulse is only the shadow of a
pulse.... I am perfectly conscious of the absurdity of these ideas,
but cannot overcome them.”[238] This state belongs, in fact, to the
category of conscious madness.
-----
Footnote 238:
See Hack Tuke’s _Dictionary of Psych. Medicine_, article,
“Insanity of Doubt.” Analogous cases have been reported by various
authors, Griesinger, Clouston, etc.
-----
But it is not essentially a disease of the understanding: the
intellectual element is secondary; this perpetual doubt, these
endless questionings are merely the effects; the cause lies in a
weakening of the emotional life and the will, rendering them
incapable of arriving at a belief—_i.e._, an affirmation—and, more
deeply still, in a disturbance of the organic life, as demonstrated
by sensory perversions, motor enfeeblement, and the melancholic
state of the patient with its physiological accompaniments, and
lowering of the vital functions.
2. The introduction of mysticism into science, though particularly
prevalent just now, is an intellectual disease incident to all ages.
In the beginning, scientific research had no clear consciousness
either of its method or its object.
The earliest Greek philosophers speculated at once on first causes,
second causes, and practical applications, without drawing any hard
and fast distinction between these subjects. Thales constructed a
cosmology and calculated eclipses; Pythagoras reduced the universe
to numbers, but he also greatly advanced the study of mathematics,
and founded a communistic society on his own principles. By slow
degrees the proper domain of science became recognised: the
determination of second causes, of natural laws. At the Renaissance,
alchemy, astrology, and the occult sciences were discredited, in
spite of their provisional services, and some positive discoveries
due to them. At present, the methods are fixed, in their main lines;
a fact which permits us to determine the anomalies and deviations of
the intellectual sentiment.
How does it deviate from the normal track? It is needless to remark
that it is not by seeking the unknown, since this is its fundamental
task, for every day and for all time. Is it by pursuing the
unknowable? This view is scarcely tenable, for how can we determine
where the unknowable begins? Let us admit, for the sake of argument,
and in order to simplify matters, that this word covers the whole
region of first causes, taken as inaccessible; but, having
eliminated these, only by an arbitrary act can it be decided that
this or that thing is unknowable. The history of science supplies us
with proofs in abundance. To give but one example, which is closely
connected with psychology: one of the greatest physiologists of the
century, J. Müller, declared that the time necessary for perceiving
a sensation is not measurable and can never be determined; this,
however, did not prevent Helmholtz from measuring it some years
later, and it is well known what successful experiments have since
been made in that direction.
It is not so much in the object pursued as in the method employed
that the love of science may go astray. Scientific mysticism
consists in replacing regular methods by intuition and divination;
in expecting everything from an inward revelation, a supernatural
illumination; in substituting the subjective for the objective,
belief for demonstration and verification, individual for universal
validity. True, it would be a great mistake to assert that intuition
and divination have not played an important part in the discoveries
of scientists; they lie at the origin of nearly all, and there is a
certain point where the psychological conditions of scientific and
of artistic creation coincide; but no scientist worthy of the name
will confound the vision of a truth with its demonstration. He does
not allow it to rank as scientific till he has furnished his proofs.
Mysticism is the reintegration, in science, of the love of the
marvellous, and the illusory desire of acting on nature without
preliminary research, work, or trouble.
Intellectual emotion, therefore, has two principal morbid forms:
doubt, which, at the last extremity, ends in dissolution; and
mysticism, which is only a deviation, and whose essence consists in
substituting imagination for logical methods.[239]
Footnote 239:
Two American psychologists, without mentioning the principal forms
we have just studied, reckon among contemporary aberrations of the
intellectual feeling some tendencies which appear to me to be very
slight infirmities by comparison: (1) “A more subtle form is that
distinctively nineteenth-century disease, the love of culture, as
such. When the feeling is directed, not towards objects, but
towards the state of mind induced by the knowledge of the objects,
there originates a love of knowing for the sake of the development
of the mind itself. The knowledge is acquired because it widens
and expands self. Culture of our mental powers is made an end in
itself, and knowledge of the universe of objects is subordinated
to this. The intellectual feelings are separated from their proper
place as functions of the integral life, and are given an
independent place in consciousness. Here, as in all such cases,
the attempt defeats itself. The only way to develop self is to
make it become objective; the only way to accomplish this is to
surrender the interests of the personal self. Self-culture
reverses the process and attempts to employ self-objectification
or knowledge as a mere means to the satisfaction of these personal
interests. The result is that the individual never truly gets
outside of himself” (Dewey, _Psychology_, pp. 305, 306). This
criticism is just. We might say, more simply, that the pursuit of
intellectual emotion for its own sake borders on scientific
dilettantism—_i.e._, a superficial disposition and a tendency of
the mind to run in every direction without going very deeply into
anything. But we cannot reckon as morbid the love of abstract and
purely speculative research; for in this the intellectual feeling
remains faithful to its nature, _i.e._ curiosity, and its mission,
_i.e._ the pursuit of truth. Besides, the speculations which in
appearance are the most useless and merely theoretical, may some
day show themselves in results susceptible of practical
application. (2) Ladd, _Psychology Descriptive and Explanatory_,
pp. 566 _et seq._, considers as a morbid form of the intellectual
sentiment the personification of Science, which is so popular at
the present day (in my opinion, it is rather a disease of thought,
an instance of the incurable tendency of the human mind to realise
abstractions and bow the knee before idols of its own
fabrication), and also criticises the growing love of minutiæ and
the obstinate pursuit of small facts. It must be acknowledged that
this tendency sometimes becomes a nuisance in sciences founded on
observation, experiment, or documents, and that those whose
attention has been confined to this kind of work have a natural
disposition to exaggerate its importance; but it is nevertheless
necessary, and is the price paid for all progress in science. Each
individual contributes in his degree and according to his
strength; there is no architecture without labourers.
To sum up, the intellectual emotion moves between two poles: one,
where it involves a confused knowledge and plays a preponderant part
under that instinctive form which may be called _flair_, or
intuition; the other, where it is only the pale shadow of the
exercise of abstract thought. Under this last form it is the type to
which all other emotions approximate, when the affective element is
impoverished—viz., moral emotion in rationalistic theorists (the
Stoics, Kant), æsthetic emotion in critics, and religious emotion in
metaphysicians and dogmatic theologians.
CHAPTER XII.
NORMAL CHARACTERS.[240]
_Necessity of the synthetic point of view in psychology—Historical
summary of theories of character: physiological direction,
psychological direction—Two marks of the real character: unity,
stability—Elimination of acquired characters—Classificatory
procedure: four degrees—Genera: the sensitive, the active, the
apathetic—Species—Secondary function of the intellect: its mode
of action—Sensitives: the humble, the contemplative, the
analytical, the purely emotional—Active type: the medium, the
superior—Apathetic type: pure type, intelligent type,
calculators—Varieties: the sensitive-active, the
apathetic-active, the apathetic-sensitive, the
temperate—Substitutes for character: partial characters; (a)
intellectual form, (b) emotional form._
Several writers have on various occasions pointed out, with some
reason, that the great analytical work carried on in our day, in the
domain of psychology, ought to be completed by studies of a directly
opposite character; _i.e._, analytic and abstract psychology has as
its indispensable complement a synthetic and concrete psychology.
Like every other science, ordinary psychology proceeds by means of
generalities. Whether it is concerned with percepts or concepts,
with the association of ideas or with movements, with the attention
or the emotions, it takes these manifestations, wherever it finds
them, in men or in animals, and attempts to explain them by tracing
them back to their most general conditions. It starts with the
implied assumption that instincts, habits, intellectual, emotional,
voluntary phenomena are to be found in every man. But in what
proportions are these elements combined in order to constitute the
various psychological individualities? What complex assemblages can
they produce? Is there a preponderance of emotion, intelligence, or
action? Has the preponderance of one any influence on the
development of the rest? These questions, and many other analogous
ones, are not put by analytical psychology, and justly so, because
they do not come within its province. Yet it is worth while to put
them, were it only for the sake of practical utility.
-----
Footnote 240:
This chapter was published as an article in October 1893; it has
been left unchanged as far as the main argument is concerned.
-----
It has been said with regard to medicine that “there are no
diseases, only diseased persons.” This is why pathological
treatises, describing the general characteristics of a disease in
the abstract, are necessarily supplemented by those clinical studies
which describe concrete, particular cases. In the same way, in
psychology, it might be said that there is no such thing as
humanity, but only human beings. It is not sufficient to describe
the manifestations of the mind in general, we must also take into
account the individuals in whom they are incarnated and the
varieties which they reveal to us. The synthetic point of view is
neither visionary nor negligible, and less so in psychology than
elsewhere.
A very widespread error consists in believing that when we have
resolved a complex whole into its elements we have _all_ the
constituents. We are apt to forget that the greater number of
combinations resemble rather chemical _combinations_ than simple
mixtures, that they are not formed by simple addition, and that
there is _more_ in the synthesis than there can be in the analysis.
The elimination of the synthetic point of view becomes less and less
admissible as we rise from inorganic nature to life, consciousness,
society. Even in the inorganic world, which contains only the
general properties of matter in the rough, certain composite bodies
already show a sort of individuality—_i.e._, a way of acting and
reacting peculiar to themselves. This is best seen in crystals;
their growth may be interrupted and go on again; when broken or
mutilated they can repair their losses; they may undergo
disaggregation or profound modification, but so long as one portion
remains unaltered it still has the power of growing and escaping
“senility.” Two totally different substances, even, may be almost
inextricably intertwined, while preserving each its own
individuality. In the world of life the cell and the ovule have a
very definite individuality; then come aggregates of a vague,
unstable, and precarious unity, such as those of vegetables,
hydrozoa, and those fixed or wandering animal colonies which have
been called federations; but after passing through these stages of
evolution, the higher animal forms assert their individuality so
decidedly that argument is needless. The same may be said of
psychology. What has not been said of the unity and utility of the
_ego_, considered as a simple and indissoluble entity? The present
writer will not be suspected of an inclination towards this view.
Yet it must be acknowledged that we have been so much occupied of
late years with disturbances, alterations, disaggregations, and
dissolutions of personality, that the triumph of the analytical
method has been complete, and the synthetic side of the subject
somewhat neglected.
Without insisting on a question of too great extent to be treated
incidentally—viz., the opposition between analytic and synthetic
psychology,—we may say that there are two equally legitimate ways of
considering all things in nature: the analytic, abstract manner,
which recognises only laws, genera, species, generalities; and the
synthetic, concrete manner, which sees only particular facts,
events, individuals. Each one presupposes and completes the other:
they are two stages of the same method.
So far it is clear that, in the new psychology, the analytic process
has prevailed. In spite of these unfavourable conditions, some
valuable work has been done in the other direction, the principal
being the determination of certain types of imagination, visual,
auditory, motor, and other varieties. But the chief problem proposed
to synthetic psychology is elsewhere, in the region of action, not
of knowledge. It is practical, and consists in determining the
principal types of individuality from the kind of action and
reaction which has its source in the feelings and the will. This is
called by a name slightly vague, but consecrated by usage—character.
I.
The aim of the present chapter is not to treat this difficult
subject, but simply to attempt a classification of characters, and
to show their relations with affective psychology.
I shall pass by in silence the history of the question; it would be
long and monotonous. It seems to me that it has developed in two
directions, one especially physiological, the other especially
psychological.
The physiological theory is very ancient, and was for centuries the
only one current. It is summed up in the classical doctrine of the
four temperaments, which dates from the Greek physicians. These
great observers had deduced it from their long experience, adding,
it is true, chimerical hypotheses as to the predominance of the
liquids of the organism or the cosmic elements. Criticised,
defended, abandoned, taken up again, modified, increased by Cabanis
by the addition of the nervous and muscular temperaments, reduced by
others to three, it has remained substantially the same up to the
present day. Psychology has been content with adapting this
arrangement to its own use, and translating the terms into its own
language. For the rest, this work was, so to speak, done in advance;
for the description of each temperament enumerates not merely
physical, but also psychical characteristics. The _sanguine_ is
reputed to be light, versatile, superficial, accommodating; the
_melancholic_, deep, self-involved, hesitating; the _choleric_ has
an active imagination, and intense, tenacious passions, difficult to
supplant; the _lymphatic_ (or phlegmatic) is soft, cold, with slow
reactions and dull imagination. The detailed description of these
four types may be found almost anywhere, so that I need not dwell on
them. I notice that, during the present century, it is mostly in
Germany that this psycho-physiological theory has been dominant.
Kant adopted and developed it (_Anthropologie_, Bk. III.). Lotze
substitutes the term “sentimental” for that of “melancholic,” as
being less equivocal; while Wundt, in his _Physiologische
Psychologie_, reproduces Kant’s divisions almost unchanged.
The psychological theory is more recent, and, I believe, of English
origin. We know that J. S. Mill demanded the constitution of a
science of character (“Ethology”) to be deduced from the general
laws of psychology. Bain seems to have attempted a response to this
appeal in his book _On the Study of Character_ (1861). This is not
the place to analyse his work. Half of it is devoted to a criticism
of the phrenologists, who also, in their way, were making an
examination of our subject without paying much attention to the
temperaments. It is only of importance to note that Bain’s position
is strictly, rigorously psychological; he admits three fundamental
types: the intellectual, emotional, and volitional or energetic.
More recently, M. B. Perez[241] has proposed a classification of
characters, based solely on an objective phenomenon—viz., the
movements, their rapidity and energy. He distinguishes, in the first
place, the lively, the slow, and the eager; further, as mixed types,
the lively-ardent (_vifs-ardents_), the slow-ardent, and the
deliberate (_pondérés_). Paulhan traces back the law explaining the
formation of character to a more general law: that of “systematic
association—_i.e._, the aptitude inherent in every element, desire,
idea, or image of exciting other elements which may associate
themselves with it in working towards a common end.” He has given a
very detailed description of the numerous and varied forms to be met
with in ordinary life, illustrating it with a vast multitude of
instances. Fouillée makes a separate study of temperaments and
characters, and divides the latter into three categories: the
“sensitive,” the “intellectual,” and the “voluntary,” with several
subdivisions.[242]
-----
Footnote 241:
B. Perez, _Le caractère de l’enfant à l’homme_, chap. i. With this
objective classification may be compared the work of graphologists
and of those who have devoted themselves to the expression of the
emotions.
Footnote 242:
Paulhan, _Les caractères_ (1894); Fouillée, _Tempérament et
caractère selon les individus, les sexes, et les races_ (1895).
These two works have appeared since the first publication of the
present chapter.
-----
If we now try to take up the question again at our own risk, the
first thing to be done is clearly to determine the essential marks
of a true individuality, a real character. This will permit us to
eliminate at once all that resembles it, but is not: appearances,
_simulacra_, phantoms of individuality.
In order to constitute a character, two conditions are necessary and
sufficient: unity and stability.
Unity consists in a manner of acting and reacting which is always
consistent with itself. In a true individuality the tendencies are
convergent, or at least there is one which subdues the others to
itself. If we consider man as a collection of instincts, cravings,
and desires, they form, here, a tightly fastened bundle acting in
one direction only.
Stability is merely unity continued in time. If it does not last,
this cohesion of the desires is of no value for the determination of
character. It must be maintained or repeated, always the same in
identical or analogous circumstances. The special mark of a true
character is, that it shall make its appearance in childhood and
last through life. We know beforehand what it will or will not do in
decisive circumstances. All this is as much as to say that a true
character is _innate_.
This disposition might be found fault with as being too ideal. In
truth, invariable characters, all of a piece, are rare enough; yet
some exist, and it is the conscious or sub-conscious notion of this
type which influences our judgment. There is an instinctive craving
for this ideal unity in our psychological, moral, æsthetic
conception of character. It does not please us to see a
contradiction between a man’s beliefs and his acts. We are annoyed
if an ascertained rascal should show a good side, or a very good
person some weakness. Yet what more frequent? On the stage, or in a
novel, undecided or contradictory characters do not attract us. This
is because individuality appears to us as an organisation which must
be governed by an inner logic following inflexible laws. We are very
ready to put down to duplicity and hypocrisy what is often only a
conflict between incoherent tendencies; and it is not the least
important among the practical results of recent investigations into
personality to have shown that its unity is merely ideal, and that,
without going the length of mental dissolution and madness, it may
be full of unreconciled contradictions.
These reserves being made, our definition of character has the
advantage of supplying us with a criterion which remarkably
simplifies our task; for it is clear that, among the innumerable
individuals of the human species, there must be some, and these by
far the greater number, who have neither unity nor stability nor
personal characteristics peculiar to themselves. This immense number
of defective cases, which are ruled out of our study, may be divided
into two categories—the _amorphous_ and the _unstable_.
The _amorphous_ are legion. I understand, by this term, those who
have no special form of their own, the acquired characters. In these
there is nothing innate, nothing resembling a vocation; nature has
made them plastic to excess. They are entirely the product of
circumstances, of their environment, of the education they have
received from men and things. Some other person, or, failing that,
the social environment, wills for them, and acts through them. They
are not voices, but echoes. They are this or that, according to
circumstances. Chance decides on their occupation, their marriage,
and other things; once caught in the machinery of life, they act
like every one else. They represent, not an individual, but a
specific, professional character; they are copies, to an unlimited
number, of an original which once existed. It has been said that the
production of amorphous people is the speciality of civilisation, to
which we owe their present abundance. This is only half true. It is
certain that excessive culture rubs down the angles of character,
and that, by raising some and lowering others, it tends to a general
dead level. But we must not forget that, at the other extreme of
social life, in the savage state, where the manners, customs,
ritual, traditions of the tribe or clan, which can neither be
discussed nor infringed, weigh heavily on each individual, where
every innovation is rejected with horror (this is what Lombroso
calls misoneism), the conditions are also very unfavourable to
individual development. It seems, if we may judge from history, as
if the period best suited for the growth of true characters were the
half-civilised ages, such as the first centuries of the Roman
Republic and of the Middle Ages, or epochs of disturbance like the
Italian Renaissance, and, in general, all periods of revolution.
The _unstable_ are the _disjecta_ and scoriæ of civilisation, which
may justly be accused of multiplying them. They are the complete
antithesis of our definition, having neither unity nor permanence.
Capricious, changing from instant to instant, by turns inert and
explosive, uncertain and disproportionate in their reactions, acting
in the same manner under different circumstances, and varying their
actions in the same circumstances, they are indefiniteness itself.
These are, in different degrees, morbid forms, expressing the
inability of tendencies and desires to attain cohesion, convergence,
unity. We shall return to these in the next chapter.
These two categories being excluded, the first because they
are simply a product of their environment, and the second as
being only an incoherent bundle of almost impersonal impulses,
there remain the self-existent characters, which we must
attempt to classify. Like every good classification, this must
be systematically conducted—_i.e._, descending, step by step,
from the general to the particular. It must determine genera,
species, varieties, and thus, at last, reach the individual.
The principal defect in the doctrine of the four temperaments
(adapted to psychology, as we have already seen) is that of
being too general: it remains, as it were, suspended in air,
without intermediary, without middle term, or anything to
connect it with the individual. It states the genera, nothing
more. For the rest, some writers appear to have perceived this
lacuna, having described mixed temperaments, but they are far
from being agreed as to the nature and number of the latter.
The attempt at classification I am about to make includes four
degrees of increasing definiteness and diminishing generality. On
the first stage, we have the most general conditions, a mere
framework, almost empty, and not corresponding to any concrete
reality, but analogous to the zoological and botanical genera. In
the second degree (corresponding to species), we have the
fundamental types of character, pure forms, but real, this time,
and, later on, justified and verified by observation. In the third
degree, the mixed or composite forms (corresponding to varieties)
are less clearly defined than the preceding. In the fourth degree,
we have those substitutes or equivalents for character (they might
also be called _partial_ characters) which depart more and more
widely from the pure type, but, in many people, take its place.
II.
We may begin by laying down the most general conditions for the
determination of character, the main guiding lines, the dominant
traits which impress on it a clear and decisive mark.
As the psychic life, considered from the most general point of view,
can be reduced to two fundamental manifestations: feeling and
acting, we have in the first place, broadly speaking, distinguished
two types: the sensitive and the active.
1. The _sensitive_, who might also be called the affective or
emotional, have as their special characteristic the exclusive
predominance of sensibility. Impressionable to excess, they are like
instruments in a perpetual state of vibration, and their life is for
the most part inward. The physiological bases of this type of
character are not easy to enumerate; but if we admit what seems to
me incontestable—viz., that the internal organic sensations of
vegetative life are the principal source of the affective
development, as external sensations are the source of the
intellectual development,—we must admit also that here the balance
inclines in favour of the first. It may be known by the extreme
susceptibility of the nervous system to agreeable or disagreeable
impressions. In general, this type may be said especially to include
the pessimists; for experience as old as the world itself proves
that sensitive subjects suffer more from a small misfortune than
they enjoy a great happiness. Uneasy, timid, fearful, meditative,
contemplative, such are the very vague terms in which they may be
for the moment characterised, without passing beyond the region of
generalities.
2. The _active_ have as their dominant characteristic a natural and
continually renewed tendency to action. They are like machines
always in motion, and their life is mostly directed outwards. The
physiological basis of this type of character consists in a rich
fund of energy, a superabundance of life,—what Bain calls
spontaneity,—which is very different from the intermittent and
explosive reaction of the unstable, and which, in the end, amounts
to a good state of nutrition. Taken in mass, and under their pure
form, they are optimists, because they feel strong enough to
struggle with obstacles and overcome them, and take pleasure in the
struggle. Gay, enterprising, bold, daring, rash—such words describe
their principal characteristics.
H. Schneider, in an interesting article on zoological
psychology,[243] has attempted to show that all special movements in
the higher animals are only differentiations of two simple, primary
movements: contraction and expansion. The tendency to contraction is
the source of all impulses and reactions, including flight, by which
the animal acts in a manner tending towards its own preservation.
The tendency to expansion shows itself in impulses and instincts of
an aggressive form: feeding, fighting, seizing on a female, etc. The
antithesis between the sensitive and the active connects itself also
with this fundamental contrast between contraction and expansion,
between the tendency towards the inward life in some and that
towards the outward life in others.
-----
Footnote 243:
_Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie_, vol. iii.
-----
3. The above classification is not sufficient. No doubt, if we
confine ourselves to theory, there is nothing to be taken into
account beyond feeling and acting; but observation teaches us that
it is necessary to form a third class, that of the _apathetic_,
corresponding, on the whole, to the lymphatic temperament of
physiology. Its general characteristics are very well defined; they
consist in a state of _atony_—a lowering of the powers of feeling
and acting beneath the ordinary level. The two other classes are
positive; this is negative, but very real. The apathetic characters
must not be confounded with the amorphous, the first being innate
and the second acquired: the special mark of the pure type of
apathetic is _inertia_. He is not plastic, like the amorphous type:
there is no hold over him. He cannot feel enough to induce him to
act. He is neither an optimist nor a pessimist, but indifferent.
Idle, sluggish, inert, careless: such are the epithets which usually
describe him. The physiological basis of his character is the
often-described lymphatic constitution—lowering of the nervous
tension, increase of the lymphatic circulation according to some,
weakening of the circulation of the blood according to others.
However, we must not conclude that it is only a barren soil, on
which nothing will grow. Add a third element,—which till now we have
purposely refrained from mentioning,—intelligence, and the apathetic
character assumes an individuality, as we shall see presently.
In this definition of the genera, of the fundamental types reduced
to their most general form, are we to admit a fourth type—the
_temperate_? We might say that when we have (_a_) predominance of
feeling, (_b_) predominance of action, (_c_) apathy in the absence
of both the foregoing, there is required, as a complement, a fourth
state of perfect equilibrium between sensibility and action. This
type exists, but I cannot admit that it should be included in a
primary definition. It is a mixed, composite form, whose study is
consequently out of place here. Besides, we must not allow ourselves
any illusions; every character is hypertrophied or atrophied; the
“perfectly balanced” character is an ideal analogous to the
_temperamentum temperatum_ of physiologists; or else it approaches
the amorphous.
III.
Leaving this very general classification, let us enter upon our
definition of the second degree. Let us pass from genera to species.
Here there enters on the scene a new factor: the intellectual
dispositions.
The term _feeling_ is applied to two distinct groups of psychic
manifestations, originally confounded—the affective and the
representative states. So far, in employing this term we have taken
account of the affective states only, because they and the movements
are the sole primary constituents of character. They form the lower
stratum, which is the first to make its appearance: the intellectual
dispositions form a second layer, superimposed on the first. What is
fundamental in the character is the instincts, tendencies, impulses,
desires, and feelings; all these, and nothing else. This fact is so
easily verified, and so obvious, that there would be no need to
insist on it if the majority of psychologists had not confused the
question by their incurable intellectualist prejudices—_i.e._, by
their efforts to connect everything with intelligence and explain
everything by means of it, to lay it down as the irreducible type of
mental life. This view is quite untenable, for just as,
physiologically, the vegetative life precedes the animal life based
on it, so, psychologically, the affective precedes the intellectual
life, which is based on it. The groundwork of every animal is
“appetite” in Spinoza’s sense, “will” in Schopenhauer’s—_i.e._,
feeling and acting, not thinking. I do not wish to insist on this
point, which would require to be developed at great length; I
forbear, not on account of the scarcity, but of the superabundance
of proof.[244]
-----
Footnote 244:
I refer the reader to the brilliant chapter of Schopenhauer
entitled “On the Primacy of Will,” while reminding him that, with
this writer, “will” signifies tendency or feeling. (_Die Welt als
Wille und Vorstellung_, supplement to Book II., chap. xix.) I
shall return to this subject in the Conclusion of this work.
-----
Let us confine ourselves to some decisive remarks which belong, in
the strictest sense, to our subject. As the character expresses the
inmost qualities of the individual, it can only be composed of
essentially subjective elements, and these must not be sought among
the intellectual qualities, since the intellect, in the ascending
evolution from sensations to perceptions, images, concepts, tends
more and more towards the impersonal.
We might in addition prove, by means of numerous examples, that the
excessive development of the intelligence frequently involves
atrophy of the character, clearly establishing their independence.
The great manipulators of abstractions, confined to pure
speculation, tend to reduce their ordinary life to a monotonous
routine, whence emotion, passion, the unforeseen in action, are as
far as possible excluded (Kant, Newton, Gauss, and many others).
Schopenhauer was right in saying that many men of genius are
“monsters by excess,” _i.e._, by hypertrophy of the intellectual
faculties. “If normal man,” he says, “is made up of two-thirds will
and one-third intellect, the man of genius consists of two-thirds
intellect and one-third will.”[245] There are exceptions, as we all
know. They prove, not that the development of the intellect favours
that of the character, but that _in some cases_ it does not fetter
it. Is it not also a matter of common observation that these two
factors, character and intellect, are often discordant? Men think in
one way and act in another; they write sublime treatises on a
morality which they do not practise; they preach action and remain
inactive; they have the tenderest hearts in the world, and dream of
plans for universal destruction.[246]
-----
Footnote 245:
_Op. cit._, supplement to Book III., chap. xxxi.
Footnote 246:
Need we recall the often-quoted cases of Francis Bacon,
D’Alembert, etc.? On this point see Dr. Le Bon’s article in the
_Revue philosophique_, vol. iv. p. 496.
-----
Intellect, then, is not a fundamental constituent of the character;
it is its light, but not its life, nor, consequently, its action.
The character sends its roots down into the unconscious—_i.e._, into
the individual organism: this is what makes it so difficult to
penetrate and modify. The intellectual dispositions can only
exercise an _indirect_ action in its constitution. We have now to
see by what mechanism they do so.
We know that the various emotions (fear, anger, love, contempt,
etc.) show themselves in certain spontaneous movements and attitudes
of the body, which constitute their natural expression. Emotion is
the cause; the movements are the effect. It is less generally known
that movements and attitudes of the body, artificially produced, are
capable (in some cases, and to a slighter degree) of exciting the
corresponding emotions. Remain for some time in an attitude of
sadness, and you will feel sad. By mingling in cheerful society and
regulating your outward behaviour in accordance with it, you may
awaken in yourself a transient gaiety. If the arm of a hypnotised
subject is placed, with clenched fist, in a threatening attitude,
the corresponding impression spontaneously appears in the face and
in the rest of the body; the same holds good for the expressions of
love, prayer, contempt, etc. Here the movement is the cause and the
emotion the effect. The two cases are reducible to a single formula.
There is an indissoluble association between a given movement and a
given feeling. Emotion excites movements, movements excite emotion;
but with this very important difference: that movements are not
always capable of exciting emotion, and when they do succeed, the
states they bring about are neither intense nor permanent. In a
word, the action from without inwards is always inferior to the
action from within outwards.
It is exactly the same psychological law which governs the relations
between the affective and the intellectual dispositions in the
manifestations of the character.
Let us (merely in a metaphorical way, and for the sake of making the
matter clear) call the action of the feelings on the ideas, action
from below upwards, and that of the ideas on the feelings, action
from above downwards.
The action from below upwards is solid, tenacious, energetic,
efficacious; it has its strength within itself, drawing it from the
region of the unconscious—_i.e._, from the organisation. When it
reaches the consciousness, it merely becomes sensible. Thus what is
at first a vague sense of discomfort, asserts itself in the
consciousness as hunger, and may lead to theft, murder, and all
sorts of excesses. Another state of the organism shows itself in
floating, indeterminate desires, then asserts itself as love for
some particular being, and may in the end break out like a
thunderstorm. It would be superfluous to review in like manner the
whole of the passions, making the same comments. Whether simple or
complex, their evolution is the same. The moral, religious, or
æsthetic vocations have their periods of incubation, of revelation,
and of action. The saying of Correggio, on looking at the painting
of a master, whether true or false historically, is psychologically
true.
On the other hand, the action from above downwards is unstable,
vacillating, variable, weak, and of doubtful efficacy. It has only a
borrowed, extrinsic force. The psychological (and often pedagogic)
problem stated is the following: How to bring about intellectual
states, ideal images, so that they may, if they can, provoke, by way
of reaction, the corresponding feelings. The action is mediate,
indirect, and usually fails or shows very poor results. The
sensibility produced is entirely intellectual; and who does not know
that intellectual passions are mere phantoms, which a real passion
sweeps away like a gust of wind?
In conclusion, the action of the emotions on the movements resembles
that of the feelings on the ideas; the action of the movements on
the emotions is like that of the ideas on the feelings.
Having thus briefly established the secondary and superficial part
played by the intellect in the formation of character, let us return
to our classification. We are now face to face with real
individuals, unequally endowed with energy, sensibility, and
intelligence. Let us now take our three great skeleton divisions,
and fill them up, one by one.
I. _The Sensitive._—In this genus I distinguish three principal
species, which I am about to describe, taking the simplest first,
and consequently departing more and more from the pure type as we
approach the mixed characters.
1. The first species cannot be designated by any proper name; it is
that of the _humble_. Excessive sensibility, limited or moderate
intelligence, no energy—such are their constituent elements. Every
one knows such persons, for they are frequently met with. Their
dominant note is timidity, fear, and all paralysing modes of
feeling. Like La Fontaine’s hare, they live in perpetual uneasiness.
They are afraid for themselves, for their families, for their small
position or business, for the present, for the future. They worry
themselves about everybody’s opinion, even that of unknown
passers-by. They tremble for their salvation in the other life, and
in this they feel their own nothingness, and the weight of the
social organism pressing upon them, which, in most cases, they
cannot understand. The smallest misadventure gives them a severe
shock, because they are conscious of being weak, and without springs
of action or the spirit of initiative.
There is no one who cannot affix one or more names to this portrait;
but I need mention none in particular, just because they are humble.
I have eliminated all pathological cases from this study; but I may
point out, by way of illustration, that many hypochondriacs belong
to this type, and show it in an exaggerated form.
2. The second species is that of the _contemplative_, distinguished
from the preceding by a much higher intellectual development, so
that their constituent elements may be enumerated in the following
order: acute sensibility, sharp and penetrating intellect, no
activity.
A tolerably large number of varieties may be grouped under this
heading; they all resemble one another by having the above three
marks in common:
The irresolute, like Hamlet, who feel and think deeply, but cannot
pass to action.
Certain mystics, not the great ones, who have acted, and whom we
shall find later on, but pure adepts of the Inner Life, such as may
be found in all ages and countries—Hindu Yogis, Persian Sufis,
Therapeutæ, monks of all creeds—plunged in the beatific vision,
writing nothing and founding nothing, and, always in pursuit of
their dream, passing through life without leaving a trace behind
them.
The analysts, in the purely subjective sense—_i.e._, those who
assiduously and minutely analyse themselves, who keep diaries,
noting down from hour to hour the small changes of their inner life,
the variations of their feelings according to the prevalent
atmospheric influences. Such were Maine de Biran among psychologists
and Alfieri among poets. For the rest, it is needless to mention
particular names, since this mania for personal analysis has, in
recent times, under the influence of excessive nervous excitement,
of intellectual refinement, and the enervation of the will, become a
disease. It should be noted that these sensitives are nearly all
pessimists.
3. There still remains the third species, whom I shall call the
_emotional_ type, though not in the wide sense in which the word is
used by Bain, who makes them into a class. In this type, which
abounds in great names, the category of the sensitives attains its
apogee. Activity is here added to the extreme impressionability and
the intellectual subtlety of the contemplatives. But their activity
has its own special characteristic: it is intermittent and sometimes
spasmodic, because arising from an intense emotion, not from a
permanent reserve of energy. The purely emotional character, says
Bain, is inclined to indolence. Nothing can be juster, under an
appearance of paradox. He only acts under the momentary influence of
powerful motives, then he falls back into the inaction which is his
essential nature; he alternates between impetuous energy and sudden
collapse.
To this group belong many great artists: poets, musicians, and
painters, capable of feverish activity when sustained by
inspiration—_i.e._, by an unconscious impulse; then undergoing
periods of exhaustion and impotence. We may cite, at random, Jean
Paul Richter, Mozart, Rousseau. This last, as has frequently been
demonstrated, should be regarded as a pathological case. The same
may be said of certain orators, those who have “temperament.” It is
only on certain occasions that they put forth their full power, when
there is a cause, in which their feelings are deeply engaged, to be
defended, or enemies to be overthrown.
II. _The Active._—I divide this type into two species, according as
the intellect is mediocre or powerful.
1. The species of the _mediocre active_ shows us more clearly the
distinctive traits of this form of character and the points in which
it differs from the _sensitive_. “The active man does his work
better [than the sensitive] because he can do the uninteresting
drudgery, while the other neglects whatever has not an intense and
sustaining interest. One man can take a walk without any object in
view more engrossing than the prospective warding off of ill-health;
the other cannot move abroad without a gun, or a fishing-rod, a
companion or something to see.”[247]
-----
Footnote 247:
Bain, _Study of Character_, p. 214.
-----
The _active_ are strongly constructed machines, well supplied with
vital force, and still more with potential energy. Look at a small
shopkeeper belonging to this type, a man without talent or
education; he wears himself out in continual goings and comings, in
offers of service, in talk without end or cessation. It is not the
love of gain alone which impels him, it is his very nature, he
_must_ be active. Put a sensitive in his place, he will do nothing
but what is absolutely necessary, or what interests him. To this
first group belong all those who have an abundant supply of physical
energy and need an outlet for it: sportsmen, those who love an
adventurous life without other aim than action, globe-trotters, who
hurry about the world as fast as steam will take them, not for the
sake of business or of acquiring knowledge, making no attempt to
study the countries they pass through, either at the time, or
before, or afterwards, hurrying to the end of their journeys in
order to begin again. We may add those fighters who are actuated by
no resentment or ill-feeling, but are merely letting off their
superfluous energy. The mercenary armies of former times must have
been recruited almost entirely among men of this type.
2. Let us now take the ordinary _condottiere_, such as the Italian
republics had in their pay by the thousand, fine types of physical
energy and mindless activity. On this robust stock, graft an
intellect, powerful, penetrating, supple, refined, unscrupulous,
thoroughly skilled in diplomacy, and the ordinary _condottiere_
becomes Cæsar Borgia, and we pass from the lower to the higher form
of the active character.
The latter, the _great active_ types, abound in history, and play
prominent parts in it. Unhappily, the line of separation between
these and the mixed forms which we shall encounter later on is so
vague that I hesitate to name any individuals. Julius Cæsar seems to
belong to this pure type; Lucan’s line _Nil actum reputans si quid
superesse agendum_, is the complete formula for the active. Nothing
either in his life or his style indicates an acute sensibility,
unless we reckon certain well-known passions, and his epileptic
fits, which, however, prove nothing. We may also cite the
Conquistadores of the sixteenth century (Cortez, Pizarro), those
Spanish captains whose expeditions read like romances, who, with a
handful of men as daring as themselves, overthrew the great empires
of Mexico and Peru, and appeared to the vanquished as gods.
III. _The Apathetic_ (lymphatic, or phlegmatic, in the ordinary
classification of the temperaments).—I use this word in the
etymological sense, to denote, not a complete absence of feeling,
which is impossible, but a slight degree of excitability and
consequently of reaction. We should be disposed to think, _a
priori_, that this type of character never rises above mediocrity;
experience, however, shows the contrary. It is here that intellect
is paramount. In the silence of the passions, and the absence of
physiological activity, it finds a medium suitable for its
development.
Nowhere can we better see the influence of the intellectual powers
on the constitution of the character, and the exact limits imposed
on them by nature.
In this class, too, I distinguish two species:
1. The first is the pure apathetic type: slight sensibility, slight
activity, slight intelligence, a negative state. There is little to
add to what has been already said. They are at once above and below
the amorphous: above, because they have their own special character,
their indelible mark, inertia, which the amorphous have not; and
below, because they meet external occurrences with a passive
resistance. They are only slightly influenced by education or
suggestion, not plastic, equally incapable of good and evil.
2. With a powerful intellect, the case is quite different; but we
have to distinguish two cases, according as the intellectual
tendencies are speculative or practical.
The first case is outside our subject. If a lymphatic temperament
coincides with a lofty speculative intellect, which has occurred in
a tolerably large number of mathematicians, metaphysicians, and
scholars generally, we have to do with pure intellect only: these
are Schopenhauer’s _monstra per excessum_, and I have nothing
further to say of their character.
The second case, that of practical intellect, deserves attention,
because it shows us a very special form of character, that which is
the result of the action from above downwards, of the influence of
ideas on feelings and movements. I call this group of characters the
_calculators_. The ideas give the first impulse, and thus we observe
a lack of spontaneity; the tendencies are only excited indirectly,
the will is not a _laisser faire_, but an alternation of effort and
inhibition: of effort, because the motor power of ideas is always
very weak compared with that of desires; of inhibition, not because
there are any violent movements to check, but because reflection is
dominant and only allows of action at proper times and places. These
characters might also be called _reasonable_, and they are the work
of art much more than of nature. If this chapter were not
exclusively devoted to individual psychology, I should point out
that this form of character has been predominant among certain
races, in certain tribes, and at certain epochs.
Benjamin Franklin is an excellent example: he is “the great genius
of prudential calculation.” In his letter to Priestley entitled
“Moral Algebra, or method of deciding doubtful matters for one’s
self,”[248] the reasons _pro_ and _con_ are entered opposite one
another every day, after reflection for a sufficient, frequently a
long, period; they are then compared, cancelled, balanced, and, this
arithmetical operation concluded, we proceed to action.
-----
Footnote 248:
Reproduced _in extenso_ in Bain, _The Will_, p. 413 (chap. vii.).
-----
Among the great names of history bearing this mark we may mention
William the Silent; Louis XI., who, considering his epoch, was so
devoid of the chivalrous spirit; Philip II., who would not be
interrupted in his vespers by the news of the victory at Lepanto,
and, shut up in that cold bare room which is still to be seen at the
Escurial, concocted plots involving the fortunes of both worlds.
In more modest circumstances we may observe the same character in
cold-hearted speculators, tenacious of purpose, who leave nothing to
caprice, imagination, or chance—neither uplifted by success nor
dejected by reverses.
To sum up: the three classes include great names. The celebrated
sensitives have acted through the intensity and contagion of their
feelings; the celebrated actives by the force of their energy
imposing itself upon others; the great calculators by their power of
reflection, which leaves nothing to chance. They are strong, because
wise; but their glory is lustreless, unsympathetic, without
prestige. They are, however, _true_ characters, because they have
reactions peculiar to themselves—coming from within, not from
without.
IV.
I cannot enter on my definition of the third degree without some
preliminary remarks. We pass from species to varieties—from
relatively simple to composite characters. The doctrine of
temperaments attempts a similar definition when it undertakes the
description of the mixed temperaments (lymphatico-sanguine,
nervous-sanguine, etc.), which has given rise to many discussions.
Instead of one dominant characteristic—sensibility, energy, or
reflection—we have _two_, in juxtaposition and coexistent, sometimes
in harmony, sometimes in contradiction. We are departing from unity.
Those who, treating this subject as logicians, reason on pure
concepts, have said: There are states of being which are mutually
exclusive; we cannot, _e.g._, be at the same time apathetic and
active; _ergo_, mixed forms must be rejected. We need pay no
attention to this: our business is to observe, not to reason. Has
experience established the existence of mixed characters, whether
contradictory or not? This is the whole question. And it is not this
point which perplexes me, but the difficulty of finding clear, and,
above all, legitimate and incontestable differences between the
second and third degrees of definition—between the species and the
varieties of character. I have already pointed out that the higher
forms of the sensitive, active, and apathetic types tend to shade
away into the mixed types.
Without undervaluing possible objections, I would propose the
following groups:—
1. The _sensitive-actives_. Nothing contradictory in this form of
character. An acute sensibility, without excess or morbid
hyperæsthesia, is easily reconciled with an active and energetic
temperament, because there is a natural connection between feeling
and acting. These characters result from a synthesis of the
sensitive and the active types, having all the qualities not
mutually exclusive found in both. In short, as shown in its most
brilliant representatives, it seems to us one of the richest and
most harmonious varieties of character.
I find it in its lowest degree in those who, without much
intellectual scope, live a life of pleasure, have a purely egoistic
craving for enjoyment and action. These specimens of the
sensitive-active character are without marked features and have no
originality; it would not always be easy to distinguish them from
the amorphous on the one hand, or the unstable on the other.
On a higher plane are the martyrs and enthusiastic heroes who feel
the need of action, of self-devotion, of sacrificing themselves for
their country or their faith: the great mystics, founders or
reformers of orders: St. Teresa, St. Francis of Assisi; the great
religious preachers: Peter the Hermit, Luther; and men consumed by
love for others, as St. Vincent de Paul; in short, all those who may
be called, in the widest sense of the word, apostles.
Further, we may include warriors like Alexander and Napoleon; many
great leaders of revolutions, like Danton; such poets as Byron; and
such artists as Benvenuto Cellini and Michelangelo. I mention only
well-known names, and of these only just enough to make my meaning
clear.
2. The _apathetic-active_. This variety closely approximates to the
species just described as “calculators.” It seems to me, however, to
be rendered more complex by the addition of a certain quality of
feeling or passion which allows them to act, but rather defensively
than offensively. The dominant element is the idea which gives to
this character an unalterable fixity, and subjects their somewhat
weak sensibilities to its sovereign power. It is the “_moral
temperament_,” _par excellence_, but its morality is cold, has been
hardened by habit, and inspires respect rather than sympathy. The
moral ideal which is the groundwork and support of this form of
character may be either true or false: it varies according to time
and place, consisting now of public health, now of the general
advantage, or belief in some dogma, religious or other, or duty in
the abstract, or the categoric imperative. It is found among martyrs
and _passive_ heroes, who do not run to meet danger, or challenge
tortures and death, but without enthusiasm, and equally without fear
or hesitation, do their duty to the end.
Current language calls them stoics. We may add to them cold-blooded
fanatics of all sorts, the Jansenists and others.
3. The _apathetic-sensitive_. This is a contradictory synthesis,
which, nevertheless, exists. It must be recognised that if
“character” signifies an essential, fundamental, invariable mark,
this variety is not so much normal as semi-pathological. I reduce it
to the following formula: atony and instability. We meet with people
(this is not a fancy portrait, but one taken from nature) of
lymphatic temperament, passing their days in inaction and torpor,
who, flung into action by some unforeseen circumstance, spend
themselves with as feverish an energy as the sensitives; but this
only happens by way of episode. A man of this sort, whom I knew as
leading a sedentary life and disliking locomotion and change,
suddenly started for Australia, fascinated by some very hazardous
project, and returned as quickly as possible, vowing he would never
do such a thing again. The dominant note of this variety is apathy,
though it approximates to the unstable.
4. If we admit the existence of the _temperate_ character, it ought
to find its place here. Can we admit it, or ought it not rather to
be looked on as a purely ideal category? Though we may admit that
persons are actually to be found in whom feeling, thought, and
action are present in strictly equal proportions, ought we not to
consider this as the absolute suppression of character, _i.e._, of
any marks of individuality? Such perfect equilibrium belongs to a
being favoured by nature, and is a pledge of happiness, no doubt;
but the constitution of a character requires something other than
this. We might say that the _temperate_ come under our definition of
character as complying with its two fundamental conditions, unity
and stability, and that they have a system of action and reaction
peculiar to them and consistent with itself, so that it can be
foreseen. But we should need to know whether this initiative does
not come from circumstances rather than from themselves, and whether
their personality is not above all things an adaptation.
I do not intend to dwell on an ambiguous problem, which would become
a mere debate about words. In any case, it is a fugitive, indecisive
form, without marked traits, and bordering on the amorphous.
I can find no names of mark to place under this heading. Goethe has
often been cited as a fine example of a balanced character; but is
he to be reckoned as a character or a genius?
V.
Departing more and more from simple, clear, and definite forms, we
come at last to a group of what I have called the _substitutes_, or
equivalents for character. The shortest and most suitable
appellation for them seems to me to be “partial characters.” Their
formula is: amorphousness _plus_ an intellectual disposition, or a
well-marked affective tendency. The complete character expresses the
whole individual; the sensitive, active, and apathetic are
respectively sensibility, energy, apathy to the backbone; all their
reactions, or failures to react, show it. The partial character only
acts on one point; but on this one point the reaction is energetic,
invariable, consistent with itself, foreseen. In all other ways, he
thinks, feels, and acts like the rest of the world. He is an
imitator, a copy, an impersonal product of his education and
environment. This state of being takes the place of a character in
many persons, and many take it for such.
The partial characters resulting from intellectual aptitudes are the
simplest. If we suppose an innate aptitude for mathematics,
mechanical arts, music, painting, etc., it tends to develop itself
and to mask all the rest of the character, to become the mark of the
individual as a whole, and to produce the illusion of a character
which, after all, does not exist, _i.e._, is impersonal. Current
speech applies to this sort of hypertrophy an expression borrowed
from the phrenologists: “He has such or such a bump.”
Partial characters of an affective form consist in the exclusive
predominance of some one passion—_e.g._, sexual love, gambling,
avarice, etc. Anything which excites this, whether near or far off,
causes an energetic and identical reaction. Outside this ruling
passion there is either slight reaction, or indifference. It should
be noted that this form of partial character has not much stability,
because it is in the nature of passion to extend its influence,
gradually to invade the whole individual, and to bring about in him
a pathological transformation.
Lastly, as nature is fertile in combinations, and we must try not to
forget any, we find composite forms—_e.g._, an amorphous character
_plus_ an intellectual aptitude and a passion.
However incomplete, the classification just detailed may have seemed
over minute. I have no apologies to make for this, my aim being to
follow the natural method—viz., carefully to distinguish the
dominant from the subordinate elements, to descend from the general
to the particular by an uninterrupted derivation, adding new
characteristics as we proceed. Is this a practical method? can it
serve to guide us amid the multitudinous manifestations of
character? If not, it ought to be rejected.
What, at any rate, is apparent from this classification is the
diversity and heterogeneity of those individual modalities which we
designate under the collective name of character. The unity of the
word disguises the multiplicity of the cases. This permits us to
reply, in conclusion, to a very important question frequently
debated from the practical point of view: Is character immutable?
Two opposite answers have been given, both equally sweeping.
Some think that character is acquired, and, consequently,
indefinitely transformable by appropriate culture. This is the
theory of the _tabula rasa_ transferred from the region of the
sensations to that of the tendencies and feelings. It was held by
some of the eighteenth century philosophers, and is implied in the
views of all who have blind faith in the omnipotence of education.
Others look upon character as innate and immutable. All acquired
gradations are borrowed garments, or a superficial and fragile
coating which falls off at the least shock. With a vast superfluity
of metaphysical distinctions, Schopenhauer has maintained this view
with much spirit and vigour.
The problem, therefore, seems to be reduced to this dilemma: innate
or acquired. I cannot, however, accept it under this form; it is not
so simple. Character is an abstract entity—there exist only
_characters_. For this ambiguous term, which has only an abstract
and factitious unity, let us substitute the multitude of species and
varieties already described, and perhaps forgotten. Let us place at
one extreme the clear and definite forms which I have called the
pure types. Nothing modifies them, nothing impairs them; good or
bad, they are solid as the diamond. At the other end of the scale
let us place the amorphous, who, by their very definition, are
plasticity incarnate. Between these two extremes we may arrange
_seriatim_ all modes of character, so as to pass by imperceptible
gradations from one end to the other. It is clear that, as we
descend towards the amorphous, the individual becomes less
refractory to the influences of his environment, and the proportion
of acquired character increases in the same ratio. This is
equivalent to saying that _true_ characters never change.
CHAPTER XIII.
ABNORMAL AND MORBID CHARACTERS.
_Are all normal characters mutually equivalent?—Attempt at
classification according to their value—Marks of abnormal
character: absence of unity, impossibility of prevision—Class I.
Successive contradictory characters: anomalies, conversions;
their psychological mechanism. Alternating characters—Second
class: Contradictory coexistent characters. Incomplete form:
contradiction between principles and tendencies. Complete form.
Contradiction between one tendency and another—Third class:
Unstable characters. Their physiological and psychological
characters—Psychological infantilism._
In the works already quoted—those of Perez (1892), Paulhan (1894),
and Fouillée (1895)—and in the preceding chapter, the various forms
of character have been classified, described, traced back to
explanatory principles. In spite of divergent interpretations and
differences of nomenclature, there are types universally accepted:
the active, the sensitive, the apathetic. But are they equivalent?
Such is the question put in the first instance when we pass from
normal to morbid characters. It seems to be implicitly admitted
that, each type having its qualities and defects, its advantages and
disadvantages, they ought to be placed on the same level. The writer
who confines himself to classification and description may, by going
no further, avoid the difficulty. But as soon as we enter the region
of frankly morbid characters, we are led to ask, in the first place,
whether the characters reputed normal are all so in the same degree,
or whether some are not, by their very nature, nearer to
pathological forms, and more apt to undergo a retrogressive
metamorphosis; in other words, we have now to establish, not a
classification, but a hierarchy, a valuation often disputed, and
difficult to fix.
A Russian anthropologist, N. Seeland, is the only writer, so far as
I know, who has taken up the question from this point of view. In
fact, the ancient authors, when classifying temperaments, and
consequently characters, only divided them into strong (the choleric
and melancholic) and weak (the sanguine and phlegmatic).
This division (recently accepted by Wundt) is not at bottom very
clear, and might give rise to numerous objections. Seeland has once
for all broken with tradition and abandoned the quadripartite
division; he “does not look upon all temperaments, as having the
same value, some approximating more to the idea of perfection, some
less.”[249] His classification is, therefore, in fact a hierarchy;
and, beginning with the most perfect forms of character, may be
briefly stated as follows[250]:—
I. The _strong_ or _positive_ temperaments, including—
1. The gay temperament, a type of which the classic “sanguine” is
only a variety; it comprehends three species: (_a_) the strong
sanguine, vegetative life predominant, reactions rapid but
appropriate, adapted to their end, without agitation; (_b_) the
weaker sanguine, resembling the preceding, but with a mixture of the
nervous type, the reactions are less moderate and controlled; the
French and the Poles belong to this division; (_c_) the serene
temperament which stands midway between the strong sanguine and the
phlegmatic, uniting the advantages of both.
2. The _phlegmatic_ or calm temperament never rises above medium
intensity, and presents a singular uniformity; it is a mass whose
movement can neither be accelerated nor retarded: but calm does not
exclude the possibility of strength; on the contrary, it presupposes
it. As nations, the English, the Dutch, the Norwegians belong to
this type.
II. We descend a degree lower with the _medium_ or _neutral_
temperament, “unknown to science, though that of the majority of
men.” It corresponds to the “balanced natures” of Paulhan, and to
those whom elsewhere we call the amorphous, because they have no
definite characteristic peculiar to themselves.
III. Lastly, we descend another step with the _weak_ or negative
characters. “Their reaction may be quick or slow, but what
characterises them is the irregularity, the superfluity, and even
the perversity of their manifestations. There are three varieties:
(_a_) the pure melancholic, distinguished by sadness and apathy,
without nervous symptoms, or at any rate, without dominant ones;
(_b_) the nervous, versatile, with alternations of normal activity,
and dejection, or excitement; (_c_) the choleric, which is not a
genus, is tolerably rare and distinguished by irascibility, and may
be combined with the melancholic or the weaker sanguine; the serene
and the phlegmatic are incompatible with it.”
-----
Footnote 249:
“It has been asserted that every temperament is equal to every
other, and that all are equally necessary to the progress of
humanity: I do not believe this.”
Footnote 250:
“Le tempérament au point de vue psychologique et anthropologique,”
a paper published (in French) in the _Bulletins du Congrès
International d’Anthropologie_, iv. St. Petersburg, 1892, pp.
91-154.
-----
In support of this classification follows a long anthropological
inquiry, drawn up in six tables. Its subjects were 160 men and 40
women belonging to the four principal types, gay, phlegmatic,
neutral, and melancholic. It includes comparative statistics of
stature, chest measurement, neck and arm measurement, cubic capacity
of the lungs, respiration, pulse, temperature, dynamometric
pressure, cephalic indices, state of the senses, etc. The results
are decidedly favourable to the gay and unfavourable to the
melancholic temperament (see especially Table V., p. 114), the
latter being ascertained to have less strength and less delicate
senses, except as regards sensitiveness to pain. In women, the
nervous group, which takes the place of the melancholic group in
men, is the only one presenting any anomalies.
In his conclusions, this writer combats the “rooted tendency to seek
the essence of the temperaments in the phenomena of the circulation
and its satellite, the activity of tissues.” Eight soldiers in good
health, four of whom belonged to the gay, and four to the
melancholic type, were kept by him on the same diet and carefully
watched for three days: the result of the analysis of weight,
secretions, and excretions “does not show that a more rapid change
of tissue took place in the case of the sanguine than in that of the
melancholic subjects.”
Can so limited an experiment, and one of such short duration, be
called decisive?
However that may be, rejecting the chemical theory, Seeland prefers
a physical explanation. In his view, “the nervous tissue, besides
its general activity, possesses an elementary life which is the
basis of temperament and character.” Everything depends on the way
in which the nervous system responds to external or internal
excitation. The gay temperament would correspond to rapid and
harmonious molecular vibrations; the phlegmatic to vibrations less
rapid, but of imperturbable regularity; the neutral to slow but
constant vibrations, and the negative forms to slow and discordant,
or rapid and interrupted vibrations.
This arrangement in order of precedence is not free from objection.
I give it merely as an instance of a classification according to the
presumed value of characters, and as an introduction to the study of
the morbid forms which we are about to commence.
I
In the first place, it is necessary to know by what signs we can
recognise whether a character deviates from the normal types. Not to
return to a subject already treated in the preceding chapter, we may
briefly say:
1. A true character is reducible to one characteristic, one
preponderant tendency which ensures its unity and stability
throughout life. This conception is somewhat ideal, but definite
characters tend, in varying degrees, to approximate thereto.
2. In practice, a clearly defined character always (except in rare
cases, which explain themselves) permits us to foresee and foretell.
We know beforehand what an active, a sensitive, a phlegmatic, or a
contemplative will do under given circumstances. Neutrals, who are,
properly speaking, not characters at all, are acted on by events or
by other people, and calculations as to their future must start from
a point, not within, but outside them.
One, if not both of these marks, is wanting in abnormal
characters, and the further they depart from these two constituent
conditions—unity and the possibility of foresight—the further they
depart from the typical forms, to become at last unmistakably
morbid.
We might be tempted to believe that the anomalies of character, as
observed, are so varied in aspect, so manifold, as to elude all
classification, so that it is impossible to find our way through the
chaos. I think, however, that the determining characteristics given
above will supply us with a clue. It is scarcely necessary to say
that I exclude from the group of anomalies those slight, temporary,
and intermittent deviations which are only passing infractions of
the unity of character. Cæsar, Richelieu, Napoleon were well-defined
types; yet, at certain points in their lives, they ceased to be
themselves. On his journey to Elba, in face of the fury and the
insults of the populace, Napoleon had moments of strange timidity.
Facts of this kind prove, once more, that the complete character
only exists as an ideal; but an indisposition lasting a few hours
cannot be called an illness. Having made this reserve, we may, in
our classification, follow the retrogressive march from co-ordinate
unity to multiplicity, from stability to dissolution, and we thus
have three groups departing more and more widely from the normal
forms: (1) successive contradictory characters; (2) simultaneous
contradictory characters; (3) unstable or polymorphic characters:
the last stage of disaggregation. It only remains to study them, one
by one, in their order.
By _successive_ contradictory characters, I understand two opposite
forms or manners of feeling and acting, so that the life taken as a
whole seems to be that of two individuals, one preceding, the other
following the crisis.
Before dealing with the genuine cases, we must eliminate:
1. The apparently contradictory characters abounding in political
history, such as the triumvir Octavius and emperor Augustus.
Cromwell, by turns an illuminated mystic and a practical joker,
retained, under these appearances, the fundamental tendencies of an
entirely practical nature. So far from contradicting themselves and
being unstable, the character is single and homogeneous throughout:
there is perfect unity in the aims: it is only in the means that
contradiction appears. The moralist has a perfect right to call them
false characters, because they wear masks; for the psychologist they
are quite normal and well marked. They may frequently be met with in
ordinary life, and there one need not be an actor on a great stage
to appear to contradict one’s self; it is enough to be faithful to
the end in view and unscrupulous in the choice of means. Those whom,
in revolutionary times, fear makes suddenly cruel belong to the same
category; their unity lies in the instinct of self-preservation.
2. The transformations produced by the evolution of life and the
change of circumstances. Thus an active character may show itself
successively in love, in dangerous adventures, in ambition, and in
the pursuit of riches.
Having got rid of doubtful cases, we may divide the successive
contradictory characters into two classes: the first including
anomalies, the second pathological forms.
I. As, in our classification, we start from the normal state and
gradually leave it behind us, we must begin with the modified forms
which are simple deviations from the ideal of the character—_i.e._,
from a constant and undisturbed unity. Apart from all ideals, the
successive characters are exceptional with regard to the generality
of people; for even neutrals have throughout their lives a kind of
unity, that of their perpetual plasticity.
In this first class I distinguish two cases. The reader may find
these divisions and subdivisions excessively minute, yet they are
necessary. There is no classification without distinctions, and it
is impossible to follow a retrogressive order without marking every
step on the way to dissolution.
1. The simplest case, and the nearest to the normal condition,
consists in a change of direction in one and the same predominant
tendency in the individual. Such is the case of Raymond Lulli, the
change of the profane loves which occupied the first part of his
life into the platonic and chivalrous love which filled the second;
while the converse case, too, is not rare, and examples might be
found among the mystics. Such are sincere conversions in religion or
in politics (St. Paul, Luther). The same may be said of the cases
where the fire of the temperament, having previously expended itself
for good, now does so for evil, or conversely. All this, from the
moralist’s point of view, is a complete change—_i.e._, there are two
men; from the psychologist’s, it is simply a change of direction,
and there is only one man. It is easy to see that, under the two
contrasts, there is a common foundation, a latent unity, the same
quantity or the same quality of energy directed to different ends;
but we can recognise the chrysalis in the butterfly without
difficulty.
2. These last are the modified forms; the clear cases, which
depart further from the rule, imply a fundamental and genuine
duality—_e.g._, the passage from a life of orgies to a _lasting_
ascetic one (if it does not last, the change is only a passing
accident), from active to contemplative life (Diocletian), from
contemplative to active life (Julian the Apostate); in short, all
the cases where men burn what they have worshipped and worship
what they have burnt, where we find two individuals in the same
person. The common language calls this “a conversion.” It may be
religious, moral, political, artistic, philosophical, scientific,
etc., but it always consists in the substitution of one tendency
or group of tendencies for the contrary, of one belief for its
opposite, of one form of unity for another form, synonymous
expressions which express the different psychological aspects of
transformation. We may note, in passing, that in men who have
passed through two opposite phases, common opinion is only
cognisant of one, usually the final, or else the one of longest
duration and the most conspicuous, the other being overlooked. We
understand by St. Augustine, the man of the post-conversion, by
Diocletian, the man of the pre-abdication period. This judgment is
founded on the need for simplification and unity of mind as
applied to character.
How does this change, dividing life in extreme cases into two
contradictory phases, come about? It is impossible to reply in
general terms; each particular case supposes special conditions. We
may try, however, to determine, approximately, the causes oftenest
in action.
First, the physical causes. A serious illness may, by changing the
constitution, transform the character, thus showing how far it
depends on cœnæsthesia. It is immaterial whether we suppose the
ultimate condition to consist of chemical (or nutritive), or of
physical modifications, the latter being the view of Henle and
Seeland. There are violent shocks, more especially injuries to the
head, of which we shall take occasion to speak later on. Azam gives
some examples of these metamorphoses.[251] A steady, industrious man
sustains a complicated fracture of the leg and subsequently becomes
impulsive and ill-tempered; the author supposes that there must have
been cerebral ischæmia. Another, under similar circumstances,
exchanges a cheerful disposition for incurable melancholia.
Persistent facial neuralgia has transformed a thoroughly
kind-hearted man into a spiteful and morose being.
-----
Footnote 251:
_Le Caractère dans les Maladies_, p. 188 _et seq._
-----
We now come to the moral causes. They appear to act like a shock
whose effect is either immediate or falls due some time later; hence
the change is either sudden or consequent on a long incubation. The
type of the former is found in conversions following an unforeseen
crisis: St. Paul and his vision, Pascal and his accident, Raymond
Lulli and the revelation of one of his mistresses; the Spanish
nobleman, Maraña, whose story has so often been told, who, for half
his life, was a Don Juan, and was suddenly changed by listening to
church music. The “sudden conversions” of theologians involve a
psychological truth. Those of the second type do not take place all
at once, but after a struggle between the old and new tendencies.
St. Augustine, Luther, Loyola, Francisco de Borgia, who, on seeing
the corpse of his empress (Charles V.’s wife), resolved to renounce
the world, but did not do so for many years after. To these
illustrious names each reader may add for himself less known ones
from among his own acquaintances.
We may ask whether even the most sudden changes are, in truth, as
much so as they seem, if they have not their antecedent conditions
in the life of the individual in question, and are not the
accelerated result of a subconscious process. Whatever we may think,
the psychological mechanism of conversions is very similar to that
of irresistible impulses. In its complete evolution it passes
through three stages: (1) the conception of an opposite aim or
ideal; this may happen to any one without lasting or leading to
action; this state will produce no effect if it merely passes
through the mind. (2) This conception must become a _fixed_ idea,
with the permanence, the predominance, the overmastering possession,
which are the peculiarities of such ideas. (3) The action takes
place because already included in the fixed idea, and because the
fixed idea is a belief, and all beliefs presuppose something
existing or about to exist. In short, there is no result till the
idea becomes an impulse. In the cases where the individual is, so to
speak, struck by lightning, the impetuous movement of the passion
springs up suddenly and triumphs immediately. This is yet another
point of resemblance to the irresistible impulses which pass into
action, sometimes after a period of struggle, sometimes in a sudden
ecstasy.
There is, in any case, this difference, that the new
character—_i.e._, new ways of feeling, thinking, and acting—is
lasting. This could not be, if in both stages, incubation and
eruption, a profound change had not taken place in the individual
constitution. Conversions do not create a new tendency, but they
show that the greatest antitheses are latent in us, and that one may
replace the other, not by an act of the will, which is always
precarious, but by a radical transformation of our sensibility.
2. This division includes the _alternating_ characters, whose phases
sometimes succeed one another with such rapidity and frequency as to
approximate to the simultaneous contradictory characters. Instead of
two different characters, one before and one after the crisis, whose
formula for the whole life of the individual would be A, B, we have
the alternation of two forms of character, with or without
intermediary crises, and the formula would be A, B, A, B, and so on.
This alternation is found in the normal or quasi-normal state, but
is too fugitive or too difficult to fix, to be distinguished from
the unstable characters; but the case is not the same with the
morbid types which show it in an exaggerated form. Such are the
phenomena so much studied in our own day, under the name of
alterations, diseases, disorders of personality. They will be known
to the reader, but they are not altogether germane to our subject,
and I only touch upon them in order to elucidate a particular point,
the variations of character.
In cases of alternating personality we may consider either the
physiological changes, which are rather obscure, or the intellectual
changes, which have been referred, on the whole, to the memory, or
the emotional changes, which have been somewhat neglected and in
some observations omitted altogether. It is these last alone which
interest us, because they may be summed up as alternations of
character.
If, in fact, we take complete observations, it will be seen that the
two personalities (there are sometimes more) do not consist merely
in the alternation of two memories, but also in that of two distinct
and usually opposite affective dispositions. Azam’s celebrated
Félida is, in her first state, gloomy, cold, and reserved; in her
second, cheerful, talkative, lively to the point of coquetry and
boisterousness. In the case of Mary Reynolds, reported by Weir
Mitchell, we have first a melancholy, silent, retiring woman; then,
in her new personality, “her disposition is totally and absolutely
changed,” she is fond of pleasure, noisy, always seeking company,
except when taking long rides and walks through the woods and over
the mountains, delighting in the spectacle of nature and absolutely
unconscious of fear. These alternations lasted for sixteen years,
after which “the emotional opposition between the two states seems
gradually to have effaced itself,” and resolved itself into a medium
state between the two—"a well-balanced temperament," which for a
quarter of a century coincided with her now permanent second state.
We may also recall the well-known case of L. V., who _spontaneously_
showed at the same time two opposite forms of character: at one
time, talkative, arrogant, violent, brutal, insubordinate, a thief,
ready to kill any one who gave him an order; at another, gentle,
polite, silent, sober, of an almost child-like timidity. I say,
spontaneously, for MM. Bourru and Burot have _artificially_ produced
physical modifications in V. which are accompanied by some
modifications in his character; but I am only speaking of natural
changes. For other instances I refer the reader to special works on
the alteration of personality.
I am inclined to believe that alternations of memory, though the
strongest and most disturbing phenomena, result from an alternation
of the affective dispositions (in other words, of the character),
which themselves result from physiological changes, so that, in the
last resort, we arrive at cœnæsthesia as the ultimate cause. When we
see, _e.g._, that in L. V. the violent character always accompanies
hemiplegia and anæsthesia on the right side, and the gentle
character, hemiplegia and anæsthesia on the left side, not to
mention the partial modifications accompanying the paraplegia, total
anæsthesia, etc., artificially produced in the hypnotic state, it is
difficult not to admit that changes in memory, in character, and in
physical habit form an almost indissoluble whole, which is also the
conclusion drawn by Bourru and Burot from their experiments.
In default of positive proofs that the change of cœnæsthesia is
primordial in these alternations of character, we may compare them
with a mental disease, where the alternation, being still simpler,
allows us more easily to detect its physiological conditions. This
is that duplex form of madness, sometimes called _folie circulaire_,
or “alternating insanity,” etc. It consists in the regular
alternation of two periods, that of depression and that of
exaltation. The transition from one to the other is instantaneous,
or takes place by imperceptible gradations, but nothing can be
clearer than the contrast between the two periods.
During the depression, the affective symptoms are: melancholy,
feeling of fatigue, torpor, indifference, vague terror, uneasiness
with regard to everything. Physically, the patient is emaciated,
aged, broken down, the temperature is lowered, and there is an
enormous decrease in the pulse, the secretions and excretions, and
the weight of the body, the latter going down as much as ten pounds
in one week.
During the period of excitement the reverse takes place, point for
point: a feeling of well-being, joy, pride, exuberant activity; the
patient looks younger, grows stout, and his organic functions go on
extensively and regularly. “This contrast,” says an alienist, “is
one of the most curious and interesting peculiarities of mental
medicine.”[252]
-----
Footnote 252:
Régis, _Maladies mentales_, p. 200.
-----
Here the connection between the affective disposition and the
somatic state is quite clear, and seems to be referable to a
tropho-neurosis of the brain (Schüle, Krafft-Ebing). It must be
recognised that this disease, which is the extreme form, and the
alternations of personality, which are modified forms, supply us
with none but pathological examples; but the germs of morbid
manifestations are present in normal life. Unfortunately, these
alternations are only perceptible where strongly marked, and
therefore none but exaggerated cases can be quoted. Compared to the
successive characters, where the second has destroyed the first, the
alternating characters mark a new stage on the road to dissolution,
and form a transition to our second group—the _coexistent_
contradictory characters.
II.
They consist in the coexistence of two opposite tendencies of equal
force and mutually incompatible; there are two characters, two
contradictory springs of action, and, tested by our practical
criterion, there are, in any given circumstances, two possible and
equally probable courses to be foreseen. They differ, both from the
successive characters, in which the second man has eliminated the
first, and from the alternating characters, which occupy the stage,
in turn, _exclusively_, and for some time. They present themselves
under two principal forms.
1. The first form is not a pure or complete type. It is the result
of a contradiction between thought and feeling, between theory and
practice, between principle and tendency. Nothing is less rare, and
I need scarcely adduce examples: the contrast between a man’s
private and public life, between his aspect as a scientific man and
his aspect as a believer. One who, in a question of scientific
proof, is quite intractable, will show, in religion or in love, an
unparalleled simplicity and ingenuousness. As for those who loudly
profess any given doctrine, and contradict it by their actions,
there is no lack of them. Schopenhauer, in theory a pessimist and
misogynist, penetrated with compassion for all living beings, a
professed ascetic, was nothing of the sort in practice. He is an
instance of unreconciled contradiction, to which we may oppose the
perfect unity of a Spinoza.
A man who was, _ex hypothesi_, entirely intellectual, and yet (if
that were possible) capable of acting, would, by his constitution,
escape this contradictory duality. The magistrate, observed by
Esquirol, who, though perfectly lucid in mind, had lost all
sensibility, and was “as indifferent to his family and everything
else as to a theorem of Euclid,” approximates to it. We find
modified forms of the same in the apathetic-intellectual division.
But this contradictory duality is so common that we should not
venture to insist on it were it not that it completely exposes the
inanity of the widespread prejudice that it is sufficient to
inculcate principles, rules, and ideas, in order to make them result
in action. No doubt, authority, education, law, have no other means
of influencing men; but these means, by themselves, are not
efficacious; they may succeed, or they may fail. The question which
the experiment is intended to solve amounts to this: Do the
intellectual character (if there are, as some writers admit, such
things as intellectual characters, properly speaking) and the
emotional keep an even rate of progress?
2. The second form is pure and complete; it involves a deeper
contradiction because subsisting between two ways of feeling, two
tendencies, two modes of action, one of which is the negative of the
other. These characters bring us to our last group, the unstable;
there are incoherent beings who will not or cannot resolve the
contradiction in them. One of the commonest instances is that of
those men who carry to an extreme degree both religious sincerity
and licentiousness of conduct. Popular opinion judges them severely
and considers them hypocrites, thus confounding two very distinct
cases, that of voluntary dissimulation and that of incurable
contradiction. The religious and the sexual sentiment, both deeply
rooted in their natures, act on them, each in its turn; and they
make no attempt to reconcile the two. We may also mention those men
who are divided between the craving for activity and that for
repose, passing incessantly from the one to the other; the lover who
feels for his mistress at the same time an ardent love and a violent
contempt. In towns and countries where the monarchical sentiment is
still deeply rooted we find an analogous state of mind in some
subjects, who feel an unutterable loyalty to the throne and a
profound contempt for the person of the king. In studying the
“composite characters,” Paulhan reminds us that Rubens, calm,
tranquil, and of decent behaviour in practical life, became a prey
to a tragic fermentation as soon as he seized his brush. It has been
said of a celebrated contemporary (Wagner) that he had in him “the
instincts of an ascetic and of a satyr, cravings for love and
hatred, an appetite for enjoyment and a thirst for the ideal, a
haughty dignity and a cringing courtiership, a mixture of devotion
and base treachery.” This portrait might suit many others. It
denotes something more than a contradictory duality, for it cannot
be reduced to two essential points; but it is not yet the genuine
type of the unstable.
If we might trust certain authors, the cause of simultaneous
contradictory characters would be very simple, being due merely to
the dual form of the brain. It is known that the two cerebral
hemispheres, even when normal, are asymmetrical, differing in
weight, in the distribution of the arteries, and in functional
importance, the left having the preponderance; that hallucinations
may be unilateral or bilateral, vary in character, etc. In short,
cerebral dualism is undeniable; but that it should suffice to
explain the duality of character is a hypothesis of such exceeding
_naïveté_ that I am unwilling to waste any time in discussing it.
An explanation drawn from psychology is less simple, but also less
easily overthrown. To understand how characters are constituted, the
following process seems to me the best. Let us take as our
starting-point the well-balanced, “completely unified” characters,
which present a graduated co-ordination of the various tendencies.
The first step towards a break is marked by the predominance of a
single tendency: the character is active, contemplative, sensitive,
etc. It is still a unity; but, instead of a convergent unity which
may be compared to a federation, we have a unity of preponderance
reminding us of an absolute monarchy. A second decisive step is
marked by the appearance of two dominant tendencies, but, to fulfil
the conditions, they must be contradictory. Thus, Miguel Cervantes,
who, after a life of chivalrous adventure, became the great
novelist, gives us an instance of a complex and composite but by no
means contradictory nature. The contradiction is found in cases
analogous to that of the devout libertine, because, while asserting
in words the rule of morals prescribed by his religion, he denies it
by his acts. Hence two un-coordinated tendencies. Yet this is only
the exaggeration of a perfectly normal occurrence. A man of grave
demeanour may have sudden fits of mad spirits; another may be seized
upon by a passion at variance with all his habits. If this
transitory, episodic state becomes stable and permanent, the
contradictory character is established. This transformation may be
assigned to circumstances. I believe that it is still more dependent
on innate tendencies inherent in the individual constitution, which
are only developed by opportunity.
Speaking decisively, we may maintain, without paradox, that these
characters are or are not contradictory, according to the point of
view adopted. They are so for the logic of the intellect, but not
for the logic of the feelings.
When we judge a contradictory character, whether our own or another
person’s, we are apt to proceed _objectively_; we ascertain in the
individual the simultaneous existence of two governing ideas, one of
which negatives the other; we rationally declare this to be
illogical, because the principle of contradiction is the pith of all
our affirmations, and the logic of the intellect rests on it.
The logic of the feelings is _subjective_; it is ruled by the
principle of finality or adaptation. The individual, as a purely
emotional being, aims at one end only, the satisfaction of his
desires; and in him every special tendency makes for its own special
end, its own special good. If, therefore, the scholar, moved by the
love of truth, strives after strict truth, and moved by a strong
religious sentiment, satisfies himself with childish beliefs, there
is not and cannot be any contradiction between these two desires;
the discrepancy exists only objectively, in the region of ideas.
The logic of the feelings also has its illogicalities, but of
another sort, and I can only find two: (1) when an isolated
tendency, in attaining its end, is the cause of injury or ruin to
the whole individual; and (2) when the individual is quite content
with his own destruction, as in the case of the “luxury of grief,”
which we have studied elsewhere, and whose highest term is the
fascination of suicide.
III.
Unstable or polymorphic characters cannot be called “characters”
except by an abuse of that word, for there is neither unity,
stability, nor possibility of prevision. How will they act? Every
fresh moment brings us face to face with another enigma. In fact, we
have here to do with the decay of character, and all the specimens
given in this group are pathological.
It is needless to describe them, for they are self-evident. Their
principal types are to be met with in the hysterical, whose Protean
psychology has so often and so thoroughly been studied that we need
not dwell on it; in the adventurer, whose history, with its
numberless variations, is, in the main, always the same, and may be
summarised thus: precocity, insubordination at home or at school,
frequent flights, inaptitude for all sustained work; he passes
suddenly from enthusiasm to disgust, tries everything in turn and
drops it, drifting at the caprice of impulse or circumstance, till
some final catastrophe lands him in the prisoner’s dock or the
lunatic asylum.
The causes of this instability are either congenital or acquired.
The spasmodic diathesis, as Maudsley calls it, is most usually
innate. It is characterised by the various symptoms comprised under
the name of degeneration, grouped as physical and psychical
stigmata; they are too well known to need enumeration.
The instability acquired in the course of life is left behind by
certain maladies, especially injuries or shocks to the brain, and
above all, lesions of the frontal lobe. Such is the conclusion
resulting from the observations of David Ferrier, Boyer, Lépine, and
others. More recently, Allen Starr,[253] out of forty-six cases, has
ascertained that, in twenty-three, the only symptoms were mental
obtuseness, impossibility of attention, irritability, un-coordinated
and impulsive acts, absence of voluntary control and the loss of
inhibitory power, phenomena specially coinciding with lesions on the
left side of the frontal region.
-----
Footnote 253:
_Brain_, No. 32, p. 570, and _Brain Surgery_ (1863), chap. i.
-----
M. Paulhan, in his book on Characters, when studying those whom
he calls the unquiet, the nervous, and the contradictory
(_contrariants_), gives several instances; among others, Alfred
de Musset, from his own portrait, confirmed by that given by G.
Sand. Let us listen to each of them in turn.
“When these frightful scenes were over, a strange love, an
exaltation carried to excess, made me treat my mistress as a
divinity. A quarter of an hour after I had insulted her I was at her
knees; as soon as I ceased to accuse her I asked her pardon; the
moment I was no longer uttering bitter words I burst into tears”
(Musset). “His reactions were sudden and violent in proportion to
the acuteness of his joys.... One might have thought that two souls
were engaged in a desperate contest as to which should animate his
body.... It was an invariable rule, unheard of, but absolute in this
strange organisation, that, sleep changing all his resolutions, he
would go to rest with his heart full of tenderness, and awaken in
the morning eager for battle and murder; but if he had left in the
evening cursing, he returned next morning to bless” (G. Sand).
Hence, and from analogous cases, Paulhan concludes that “these types
result from the predominance of association by contrast.” It seems
to me impossible to refer the psychology of the unstable, and of the
contradictory characters which come nearest to them, to this single
fact. In the first place, association by contrast is not a primary
fact. Psychologists are right in connecting it indirectly with
association by resemblance, sometimes mixed with elements of
contiguity. Furthermore, contrasts only exist in couples, and in the
“nervous, unquiet, and contradictory” there is not merely a
transition from contrast to contrast, but from difference to
difference—they traverse the whole scale. Lastly, association by
contrast only has a precise form as an _intellectual_ phenomenon,
and it could not be maintained that love, as a representation, would
suggest the _representation_ of violence, or the _i.e._ of jealousy
that of indifference. Here the association of ideas is only an
effect, a result, a rendering to the consciousness of deeper
occurrences belonging to the emotional or even the organic part of
us. If Musset, having represented George Sand to himself as a
divinity, rages at her immediately afterwards, as a brutal planter
might at a slave, his change of attitude is in his feelings, not in
his thoughts. I see rather the effect of a rapid but partial
exhaustion,—a frequent occurrence in unbalanced natures. If we
insist on retaining the word contrast, it will have to be taken, not
in its psychological sense, but in that given to it by physiologists
when they speak of “successive contrast,” and attribute it, rightly
or wrongly, to the fatigue of certain portions of the retina.
The formula which, in my opinion, sums up and explains the unstable
is this: _psychological infantilism_. We might also call it arrest
of development, but this latter expression would not be applicable
to all cases.
If, in fact, we consider the distinctive marks of the character of
children, apart from exceptions, we find, first, mobility. They wish
for one thing, and then another and another; they pass rapidly from
one extreme to the opposite, from eagerness to disgust, from
laughter to tears; the character is an un-coordinated bundle of
appetites and wishes, each of which, in turn, drives out the rest.
Then there is weakness or total absence of will under its higher
inhibitory form, which rules and co-ordinates. Are they impulsive
for want of inhibition, or incapable of controlling themselves
through the excess of their impulses? Both these cases are met with,
and the result is the same. The formula of their character, which we
need not enumerate in detail, is the same as that of the
unstable—_i.e._, there is no constituted character.
The term _infantilism_ is equally applicable to the congenital and
the acquired forms. The former have never left their childhood
behind, the latter return to it; they are on the same level, the
first through not having climbed high enough, the second through
having descended too far. In the one case we have arrested
development, in the other retrogression. It is no objection to say
that this instability has often been met with in minds of a superior
calibre; genius is one thing, character another, and we are here
dealing with character only. The populace, who, struck by the
incoherence of their conduct, call these people “grown-up children,”
have hit on the right expression, without any subtleties of
analysis.
In short, beginning with the _true_ character (_i.e._, the
affirmation of a personality under a stable form consistent with
itself), which is never completely realised, or free from transient
eclipses, there are all possible shades of deviation from unity and
stability, till we reach that stage of uncoordinated multiplicity at
which character has either not come into being or has ceased to
exist.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE DECAY OF THE AFFECTIVE LIFE.
_Law of Decay: its formula, and its general application in
psychology—Difficulties where the affective life is
concerned—Successive disappearance of the disinterested emotions
(the æsthetic and intellectual), of the altruistic (moral and
social), the ego-altruistic (religious feeling, ambition, etc.),
and lastly, the egoistic—Converse proof: cases of arrested
development—Theory of degeneration—Its relation to decay._
At the opening of this work I gave a general survey of the evolution
of the affective life; at its close we have to undertake a task of
an opposite nature: the survey of its decay. Does this take place at
haphazard, varying from one man to another? or does it follow a
regular and ascertainable course? Is it reducible to any formula
which can be referred to a law?
The law of decay, in psychology, consists in a continuous
retrogression, descending from the higher to the lower, from the
complex to the simple, from the unstable to the stable, from the
most to the least organised; in other words, those manifestations
which are the latest in date of evolution are the first to
disappear; while those which were the first to appear are the last
to vanish. Evolution and decay follow opposite courses.
I have already shown that the slow and continuous disappearance of
memory verifies this formula, and, as a converse proof, that, in the
rare cases where this faculty is recovered, the restoration
proceeds, step by step, in the opposite direction, up the path
previously descended. The methodical process of decay is still
better seen in motor psychology. I may perhaps be permitted, by way
of elucidation and preparation, to recapitulate briefly what I have
detailed at greater length elsewhere: motor retrogression in the
well-known case of drunkenness. There is, first, a period of
excitement, even of exuberant spirits, which is the very antithesis
of reflection; that is to say that attention under its highest form,
as the result of a motor convergence, can no longer exist. Next, a
man can no longer control his tongue, he tells all his secrets; the
will, under its higher, inhibitory form, has disappeared. After
this, he becomes incapable of any continuous plan or action: the
will, even under its lower or impulsive form, remains powerless.
Then the most delicate voluntary movements, those of speech and of
the hands, cease to be coordinated. One degree lower, he loses the
semi-automatic movements, those of walking: he staggers and loses
his balance. Still lower, the muscular tonicity is weakened, he
falls from his seat under the table; then the reflex movements are
abolished; and finally, if the condition is continued long enough,
there is cessation of the automatic movements—those of respiration
and of the heart. Here is a well-marked, easily determinable
retrograde process, the psychological function of the movements
being comparatively simple.
The object of this chapter is to prove that the disappearance of
feelings, when it takes place gradually and continuously, in
consequence of age or of some slowly evolved malady (general
paralysis, senile dementia, etc.), conforms to the same law. But, by
reason of the complexity of the affective life, the question
presents some difficulties which we must first of all point out.
The first is this: May not affective retrogression be simply the
consequence of an intellectual retrogression? or must we take it as
primary, independent, and self-determined, not secondary and
consequent upon the decay of intellect? Or else—and this view
appears to me the most probable—do both cases occur? It is
impossible to give a categorical answer; the two elements, the
intellectual and the affective, being closely associated. Yet, as
retrogression is irremediable and results from organic decay or
waste, the presumption is rather in favour of a gradual extinction
of the tendencies.
The second difficulty is at least equally important. We have
admitted that in every normal person all the primary tendencies
exist; but their coexistence does not imply their equality.
Experience proves this. The individual character results from the
preponderance of one or more tendencies: the æsthetic or the sexual,
the moral or the religious; one man is constitutionally timid, and
another choleric. It follows from this that all cases of
retrogression are not strictly comparable with one another; for it
is evident that the dominant tendency is better able than the rest
to withstand shocks and assaults, and to resist destructive action.
This, in my opinion, explains how it is that—as in a case mentioned
below—the æsthetic sentiment, one of the most delicate and latest in
formation, is of very late extinction in an artist. This apparent
exception is, in fact, a confirmation of the law.
The ideal case for illustrating our subject would be this: An
average man, all of whose tendencies are nearly equipollent, is
struck down by a disease involving slow retrogression, so that the
order in which the feelings are weakened and extinguished can be
noted; then the decadence stops short, and is followed by a
restoration of the affective life, which can be followed, step by
step, in its gradual ascent, so as to ascertain whether it is or is
not the repetition, in reversed order, of the period of dissolution.
The search for such a case, however, would be no less than the
pursuit of a chimera. The only practical method would be to collect
a great number of observations on different patients, and thus draw
up a schematic table of decay, analogous to Galton’s composite
photographs—formed by the accumulation of resemblances and the
elimination of individual differences. This is what I shall try to
do, as far as the extreme scarcity of material and the difficulties
of an unexplored subject will permit. I shall first examine
dissolution properly so called; then, by way of converse proof, the
arrest of development.
I.
As the decay of the feelings progresses from the higher to the
lower, from complex adaptation to simple adaptation, gradually
narrowing the area of the affective life, we may, in this decadence,
distinguish four phases, marked by the successive disappearance of
(1) the disinterested emotions, (2) the altruistic emotions, (3) the
ego-altruistic emotions, and (4) the purely egoistic emotions.
(1.) I class under the first head the æsthetic emotions and the
higher forms of intellectual emotions, which aim at no practical or
utilitarian end, but are luxuries, not necessaries of life. Æsthetic
and scientific cravings are so slightly marked, and so far from
imperative in the majority of men, that it is impossible to
demonstrate with certainty that they are the first to disappear; but
it may be indirectly inferred.
It cannot be denied that those who have a passion for art or
science, and for whom these are necessary conditions of life, are
extremely rare compared with those who are moved or possessed by
love, the desire for riches, or ambition. In the mass of men the
æsthetic and intellectual feelings remain in a rudimentary
condition, or attain only a slight, at most a medium development,
and it cannot be said with certainty when they become extinct,
seeing they have never really existed. Compared with the higher
forms, they resemble a case of arrested development, _i.e._, of
retrogression; and this arrest of development is the rule, as it
must be for all tendencies beyond the bounds of the mere necessities
of life.
To this negative proof I may add other positive proofs.
Age and diseases whose effect is retrogressive diminish, if they do
not annihilate, zeal, enthusiasm, the impulse towards creation,
discovery, or the simple enjoyment of art, and the curiosity which
is always on the alert. I omit some very rare exceptions, each of
which would require individual examination. In the majority of men
weakened vitality at once destroys all taste for the superfluous.
We must also note the decided hostility to all innovations—new forms
of art, new discoveries, new ways of stating or treating scientific
questions—which comes on with old age. The fact is so well known as
to make proof unnecessary. As a general thing, in art especially,
every generation rejects that which follows it. The usual
explanation of this “misoneism” is that there is a fixed cerebral
constitution, organised intellectual habits. Yes—but if the proposed
new scientific or artistic ideal caused a true, deep, intense
emotion, it would break down and sweep away the barriers of habit.
There would be a shock, a turning upside down, a conversion. Cases
of a rupture with the artistic or scientific past sometimes occur,
but rarely, as they presuppose the possibility of a violent shock
and the revival of an imperious passion, but turned in another
direction. This repulsion for novelty is rather of emotional than of
intellectual origin; it is a sign of the weakening of the affective
life, and of a tendency towards diminished effort, repose, inertia.
(2.) The altruistic feelings (social and moral emotions) having a
practical value, and being reckoned among the conditions of human
existence, it is much easier to fix the moment of their partial or
total decay. Now, the preceding groups apart, they are the first to
disappear. They may have been altered or extinct for a long period,
while the ego-altruistic, and still more the egoistic tendencies,
are still intact. We have seen, again and again, how quickly persons
become unsociable and ungovernable through dementia, general
paralysis, melancholia, epilepsy, hysteria, shock, and injuries to
the head.
But their retrogression takes place by gradations to be determined
by observation alone.[254]
Case 1. "F—— entered the asylum December 20, 1889, suffering from
general paralysis, which took the form of dementia. He was an
intelligent, well-educated man, capable of filling a brilliant
position in society. Being a gifted musician, he became well known
as a violoncellist and his playing was long an attraction at the
most frequented concerts. What especially struck one in this
patient on his admission was his utter indifference to all about
him—doctors, nurses, and patients alike. When shown an aged
dementia patient who was dying he was neither touched nor
disturbed, but simply remarked, ‘There’s one of ’em going to
croak’ (‘_En voilà un qui va claquer_’). To suggestions that he
should leave the asylum and mingle again in society, he never
returned any other answer than ‘I like my own comfort too well—I
wish people would leave me in peace.’ The more general altruistic
feelings, therefore, would seem at this date to have vanished; but
family affection, especially filial love, is still intact. F——
incessantly speaks of his father, wants to write to him, to see
him. On being shown his picture he burst into tears. The personal
feelings are still intact, the love of liberty, and the instinct
of self-preservation in all its forms.
"Jan. 15, 1891 (a year and a half later). F—— is now in the
_gâteux_ ward. The feelings already ruined or destroyed have not
reappeared. Retrogression has gone on almost uninterruptedly. F——
no longer speaks of his father, and if spoken to about him he
replies with indifference. One day, all his family being assembled
at the foot of his bed, he recognised each of his relations and
spoke to them by name, but showed no emotion whatever; the moment
of separation left him as indifferent as their arrival had found
him.
"Even the egoistic feelings are now impaired; he no longer demands
freedom of movement. Eating is the only thing that interests him;
he devours ravenously, and, after his meals, picks up the crumbs
which have fallen on the bed-clothes. The nutritive instinct is
the last surviving.
"Yet, in this patient, the artistic feeling long remains
unimpaired, for the reason indicated above, viz., that it is the
direct expression of his temperament, and an essential part of his
_ego_: because he is an artist.
"Two months after his admission into the asylum, though devoid of
social tendencies and generous feeling, he was still able to
co-ordinate his movements and play his old tunes on the
violoncello. One day, in the garden, he was found gazing
ecstatically at the blue sky, flecked with small white clouds; he
was saying, ‘How beautiful it is! how beautiful it is!’ Nothing
else, by-the-bye, could be got from him that day. Chance having
brought the famous violinist X—— as a visitor to the asylum about
a month before F.’s death, he was asked to play to the latter. The
patient had been, for some time, in the last stage of insanity and
was past understanding anything, yet he understood this, and when
he heard the familiar airs of old times played on the violin his
eye became clear, and for a minute the mind seemed to have found
itself again under the influence of art."
Case 2. “Ph. R——, aged 70, suffering from senile dementia, was up
to this age an intelligent, peaceable, respectable citizen. At the
last elections he presented himself as a candidate for the
Chamber, and, in spite of the protests of his family, placed
himself at the head of an Anarchist group, and drew up a programme
which we will not inflict on the reader. He claimed to have
received 700 votes. However that may be, it became necessary to
place him in seclusion. His political and social tendencies
perished in the first catastrophe, but his domestic feelings still
remained intact. He spoke of his family with a touching
simplicity. A letter written to his brother-in-law (too long for
reproduction here, but very sensible) furnishes throughout
irrefragable proofs of this. Gradually these feelings became
weaker, the disease progressed rapidly, he became dirty in his
habits, and the only function now remaining is the generative
instinct in its simplest form, as masturbation.”
Footnote 254:
I owe these observations to the kindness of Dr. Dumas, who
collected them with a view to a special study of the decay of
feeling.
In the following cases intellectual retrogression seems to precede
and determine the affective evolution:—
Case 3. "D——, a general paralytic, on his admission into the asylum,
is fond of talking of the 3000 francs he has invested; he is
much occupied with the dividends and coupons now due which he
ought to have received. On inquiries being made all this was
found to be accurate. He had, therefore, a tolerably clear idea
of property, since this idea was suggested by the image of
certain papers representing the values involved. At a later
period, when spoken to about his 3000 francs, he had forgotten
everything and did not understand. When reminded of what he had
himself said, and that he possessed the values guaranteed by the
receipts, he understood no more than before. But D—— carries
money about with him, and knows very well how much he has at the
time. ‘For ten centimes,’ he says, ‘I can have a cup of coffee
every day, and I have three francs.’ The sight of a white,
shining metal is sufficient to awaken in him the idea of
possession represented by the pleasure to be bought with it."
Three months later he no longer understands even this third
degree of possession: possession with him means having something
to eat; the piece of bread which he is holding in his hand and
greedily devouring is the only thing he cannot be induced to
give up.
Case 4. "M——, formerly employed in the _octroi_; paralytic
dementia. During the first few days after his admission he gave
himself up to political divagations, spoke much of universal
suffrage, and especially of liberty. When asked for a definition
of this word he gave the following explanation: ‘Liberty is the
right to do what one wishes.’ A short time after this he ceased
to make speeches and seemed to collapse. He was no longer
capable of giving his definition, or of understanding it; when
pressed with questions he said at last, ‘Liberty is being able
to walk about in the yard.’ The abstract idea is replaced by a
concrete idea indicating an assemblage of movements. Later
still, a few days before his death, he answered the same
question with, ‘Being free is when any one is in bed; I shall be
free when I am in bed.’ The idea of liberty, therefore, was at
last confused in his mind with that of a vague state of
comfort."
These observations show how the group of altruistic sentiments
dissolves piecemeal, and the affective sphere narrows itself more
and more. The first to disappear are the vaguest and weakest of all
the forms of benevolence—those embracing the whole human race; then
the family emotions, which are more stable, more restricted, more
frequently repeated; finally, there is absolute indifference to
every one.[255]
-----
Footnote 255:
“When the mind undergoes degeneration, the moral feeling is the
first to show it, as it is the last to be restored when the
disorder passes away; the latest and highest gain of mental
evolution, it is the first to witness by its impairment to mental
dissolution.... In undoing a mental organisation, nature begins by
unravelling the finest, most delicate, most intricately woven, and
last completed threads of her marvellously complex network. Were
the moral sense as old and firmly fixed an instinct as the
instinct to walk upright, or the more deeply planted instinct of
propagation,—as many people in the presumed interests of morality
have tried to persuade themselves and others that it is,—it would
not be the first to suffer in this way when mental degeneration
begins; its categorical imperative would not take instant flight
at the first assault, but would assert its authority at a later
period of the decline; but, being the last acquired and the least
fixed, it is most likely to vary, not only ... in the pathological
way of degeneracy, but also ... in physiological ways, according
to the diversities of conditions in which it is placed.”
(Maudsley, _Body and Will_, p. 266.)
-----
(3.) The ego-altruistic emotions (to employ H. Spencer’s
terminology) form a group whose limits are vague, floating, and
indecisive. It is even uncertain whether it exists as a distinct
group or simply corresponds to a particular “moment” in the
evolution of complex emotions. Without arguing this point, or
attaching any importance to it, I employ this formula, because it is
a convenient one in following step by step the retrogression from
pure altruism to pure egoism.
Sexual love is a fairly good representative of the group. Need we
say that, appearing later than the other instincts, it disappears
before them, thus being in strict conformity with the law of
retrogression. It does not belong to childhood, but neither does it
to old age. We must eliminate the survivals and _simulacra_, which
are only a factitious product of imagination; we are dealing with
the tendency under its normal and complete form, with _all_ its
physiological and psychological conditions.
The religious sentiment in its medium forms, neither too coarse nor
too subtle, belongs also to this category, plunging its roots deeply
into the individual, but in order to rise beyond him. Of its two
constituent elements, love tends towards the dispossession of the
individual; the other, fear, towards strict egoism; with
retrogression, the latter becomes exclusive. The believer,
especially in the melancholic state, at first complains of being
wanting in pity, fervour, love of God; he no longer finds
consolation in prayer. Thus, as decadence increases, or simply in
consequence of age and the approach of death, the egoistic anxiety
about personal salvation becomes imperious. This was the time of
life when the kings, princes, and lords of the Middle Ages
multiplied pious foundations—monasteries, churches, and hospitals;
and the same thing still takes place, in our own day, in religions
which admit of the efficacy of works in purchasing salvation, and of
prayers for the dead. The religious feeling thus comes back to fear,
its primary form in evolution. We might also note the frequent
survival of observances and rites when the _true_ feeling has
disappeared, _i.e._, the solidity of the organic and automatic
element. In a retrograding religion, dogma dissolves before outward
acts of worship, which, as we have seen, is the inversion of the
evolutionary process.
Ambition is the type of the higher form of egoism; but as it must
take into account the nature of other men and employ them in
carrying out its designs, it is a modified form of egoism. We know
how tenacious and durable is this passion in its numerous forms—the
pursuit of power, honour, renown, riches; in it we have a foretaste
of the stability of egoism after the ruin of all other tendencies.
It disappears when the stage is reached when man sincerely declares
himself disgusted with everything, and speaks like the author of
Ecclesiastes. The greatest of the Cordovan Caliphs, Abderrhaman
III., who noted down the principal events of this life, wrote: “I
have reigned fifty years in peace and in war, loved by my people,
feared by my enemies, respected by my allies, seeing my friendship
sought for by the greatest kings on earth. Nothing have I lacked
that the heart of man could desire—neither glory, nor power, nor
pleasures. Yet, having counted the days in this long life in which I
enjoyed unalloyed happiness, I found that there were fourteen.” But
this contempt for human interests comes late, and springs rather
from weakness than from wisdom. Men renounce the world, not so much
because they have weighed it and estimated it at its true value, as
because they no longer have the courage to conquer or keep it.
Except in the case of philosophers, the disappearance of all
ambition is the first symptom of the decadence of the egoistic
tendencies: it indicates weariness, exhaustion, and a want of faith
in one’s self.
(4.) The last group, that of the strictly egoistic feelings, the
most general and most firmly organised of all, is the last to
disappear. The threefold group formed by the offensive instinct
(anger), the defensive instincts (fear), and the nutritive cravings,
persists in men and animals up to the farthest limit of
consciousness. We know that anger makes its appearance later than
fear; does it vanish earlier? I have no data to enable me to reply
to this question. What is certain is that the affective states
associated with nutrition last to the end, and that all remaining
activity is concentrated in them, as shown by the cases above
quoted. The fact, moreover, is so well known that there is no need
to dwell on it.
II.
We have just seen how the process of decay, beginning at the top of
the building, gradually destroys all its storeys, one after another,
as it descends to the foundations. It would be interesting to
ascertain whether the work of restoration would follow, as it ought,
the inverse order; but, when decay has fully accomplished its task,
all is over, without hope of recovery. We only meet with partial and
fragmentary cases of restoration. In the absence of this converse
proof we may proceed from below upwards, not to retrace the normal
evolution of the affective life, which has already been done, but to
consider the cases in which this evolution remains in a rudimentary
state, or becomes abortive at various stages of its ascending
progress, _i.e._, in idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, human
beings of incomplete development.
In the lowest stage, that of the complete idiot, all instincts are
wanting, even that of nutrition. In infancy idiots only learn to
take the breast with difficulty. At a more advanced age, there are
some who feel neither hunger nor thirst; the sight of food fails to
awaken them from their torpor, and without the help of others they
would perish of inanition. Ordinary cases, on a higher level than
this, show unbounded voracity. Idiots may be capable of feeling
nothing but the nutritive cravings, and giving no signs of pleasure
or pain except inarticulate growls, shrill cries, or strident
laughter.
The complete idiot shows no sign of fear; he cannot fear, because he
feels and comprehends nothing. Those less devoid of sensibility
dread punishment, especially blows.
With regard to anger, there are the apathetic and insensible, and,
above them, in imbeciles, fits of bestial rage, with convulsions,
suffocations, violent impulses, and destructive cravings.
Those who pass the purely egoistic stage and do not remain totally
indifferent to those about them, show a vague and transient
affection for the person who takes care of them. Others, less
destitute, “seem amiable and affectionate, and we may compare these
patients to the dog who fawns on those who caress him” (Schüle). The
highest step attained by them, and that rarely, is a certain sense
of injustice. Itard observed this in his famous “savage of the
Aveyron,” whom he had purposely punished without cause.[256] In
short, the social and moral tendencies are rudimentary or
non-existent.
-----
Footnote 256:
Itard, _Mémoire sur le sauvage de l’Aveyron_, éd. Bourneville, pp.
xlviii. _sqq._
-----
With regard to the sex-instinct, it is either entirely absent or
there are various perversions and unrestrained erethism.
Lastly, there are some who can rise to a rudimentary manifestation
of the superfluous or disinterested feelings. The idiot, as a rule,
does not play; he is self-centred, isolated, and has no surplus
vitality to expend. That activity which seems to live on itself and
costs no effort, but is a source of pleasure without fatigue, is
almost, if not quite, unknown to him. Even when invited and induced
to play, he does so with little enthusiasm. We find, however, a
rudiment of artistic tendency in those who have some taste for
drawing or music. We may note, in passing, that the musical faculty
being, as we know, one of the first to appear, ought also to be one
of the last to disappear.[257] But all this is very poor and reduces
itself to mere imitation, and even this natural and simple tendency
is wanting among the lower grades of the feeble-minded.
-----
Footnote 257:
Ireland (_Journal of Mental Science_, July 1894) has published
some observations which tend to favour the idea of this slow
retrogression in dementia. He gives the case of a patient, sinking
into dementia, who not only retained her musical ability, but
could even pick up new tunes; and mentions cases where the
patient, seated before a piano, could play old melodies though
incapable of anything else. A girl, aged fourteen, became demented
through brain fever and had ceased to speak, save a few words, but
was still fond of music and would play fragments of tunes. Two
lady patients, though incoherent in speech, played with great
accuracy on the piano—one by ear only, the other from musical
notes, although she was quite unable to read a book, etc. (Perhaps
in this last case there was “word-blindness” applying to words
_only_.)
-----
Such, briefly, is the balance-sheet of the affective life in these
disinherited ones. It is generally admitted that, in this abortive
development, there are two main periods: the first lasting from
birth till about the third or fourth year, when, if arrest of
development takes place, the psychic state remains almost _nil_; the
second, from the fourth year onwards, allows of a less scanty, but a
discordant and perverted psychology. In both cases, the evolution,
however incomplete, reproduces in all its stages the contrary order
to that of decay.
It will be necessary, in concluding this study of decay, to say a
few words about a doctrine, much used and abused in these days, and
often alluded to in the course of this work, which stands in direct
relation to the pathology of the feelings, and, in short, permits us
to return some sort of answer to the question put at the beginning
of this chapter: the Theory of Degeneration.
When we review the abnormal or morbid forms of the affective life:
destructive impulses, phobias, incurable melancholy, sexual
perversions, failure of the moral sense, insanity of doubt, etc.,
and seek their causes, we at once find some which are proximate or
immediate. Among the most frequent are physical maladies, injuries
to the head, sudden shocks, as in railway accidents; sorrow,
whatever its origin, whether love, ambition, ruin, separation;
intellectual overwork, and excesses of all sorts. A little
reflection, however, shows us that the alleged causes are not the
_whole_ cause—that, in fact, they are often, rather, accidental and
occasional. One man bears courageously or even cheerfully a loss
under which his neighbour succumbs. Many are able to give themselves
up with impunity to excesses of pleasure or work, physical or
mental. Of the passengers in the same train, at the time of an
accident, the greater number will suffer nothing worse than fright,
while one perhaps may on this account become insane, or permanently
subject to phobias. To explain this difference of results under
identical conditions, we must seek a supplementary cause in the
constitution of the individual himself. When he offers only a slight
resistance, and succumbs to the least shock, we say that he is a
degenerate.
The conception of degenerescence as a fundamental cause is due, as
every one knows, to Morel, and has flourished famously since his
day. Unfortunately, it has been called in to account for occurrences
so numerous and so dissimilar that, in the end, it has brought down
on itself the suspicions of some writers, who have recently
stigmatised it as a “metaphysical,” _i.e._, vague and transcendental
explanation. In fact, different writers seem to understand by this
word totally different things. The original propounder of the
doctrine had a clear if not a correct notion of degenerescence. “The
clearest idea,” says Morel, “which we can form of human
degenerescence is by representing it to ourselves as a morbid
deviation from a primitive type. This deviation, however simple we
may suppose it at its origin, nevertheless contains such elements of
transmissibility that he who carries its germ in himself becomes
more and more incapable of performing his functions as a member of
the human race, and progress, already impaired in his person, is
threatened in those of his descendants.... Degenerescence and morbid
deviation from the normal type of humanity are therefore, in my
idea, one and the same thing.” This is quite clear. Morel, as a
Christian, believed in a typical man, perfect as he came from the
hands of the Creator: such a belief simplifies many things. This
position has been given up. At present, we understand by
degenerescence, a morbid predisposition, having its peculiar signs,
its physical and psychical “stigmata.”
The physical stigmata, which have been enumerated at great length by
specialist writers, consist in anomalies of the skeleton, the
muscular and the digestive system, of the respiratory, circulatory,
and genito-urinary apparatus, of the skin, the special sense-organs,
of speech, and especially of the central and peripheral nervous
system. The detailed lists contain about sixty items.
The psychic stigmata are more vaguely defined. The principal are:
irritability, showing itself in a marked disproportion between
action and reaction; instability of character, absence of unity, of
consent, incessant changes, eccentric conduct, painful haunting by
fixed ideas, irresistible impulses, or extraordinary apathy.
It has been objected to this doctrine that, of a thousand
individuals taken at random, there is perhaps not a single one who
does not show one or more of the stigmata, so that the whole human
race would be included in the alleged class of degenerates. No
stigma, it has been said, is specific by itself; neither is any
group of symptoms, at least in a clear and indisputable form; so
that one can come to no conclusion from them.
This and other difficulties have supplied matter for many
discussions, into which this is not the place to enter.
Degenerescence, whatever its value as an explanation, and the abuse
to which it has been subjected, is not a mere word; it expresses a
reality: it sums up in itself a number of characters. This is
sufficient for us, and allows us to eliminate one hypothesis: that
the decay of the feelings is necessarily dependent on intellectual
decay.
To say truth, the question stated above: Is the retrogression of the
feelings a primary, and that of ideas a secondary fact? or the
contrary? is, under this form, somewhat factitious. It is only by
analytical artifice that we separate thought and feeling, which, by
their nature, are closely connected. The law of retrogression is
generally valid in biology, and probably also in psychology; it does
not act on isolated points, it gradually surrounds and saps the
whole building, no matter on what side it begins. It is clear that
all weakening of the intellect, such as that produced by old age and
disease (difficulty in understanding general ideas, loss of certain
groups of recollections, etc.), involves the disappearance of the
corresponding affective states: one of the observations already
quoted (Case B.) is an instance in point. But we must not thence
conclude that the retrogression of the affective life _is_, _by
right_, always subordinated to that of knowledge. Most cases of
degenerescence prove the contrary; it is essentially an organic
decadence, a state of physiological poverty, showing itself first of
all by alterations in the range of the emotions, tendencies,
actions, and movements. The intellect, for its part, is better able
to stand the shock, and sometimes remains uninjured. More than this,
the adherents of this doctrine have shown that the degenerate are
sometimes endowed with brilliant intellectual faculties; while some
have even maintained that degenerescence is a necessary condition of
high mental originality (“genius a neurosis,” etc).
Apart from all exaggeration, the mass of facts permits us to make
the induction that decadence is primarily (not exclusively) that of
the affective tendencies and manifestations, since it is on them
that degenerescence (taking the word in its least vague sense) first
and principally acts.
CONCLUSION.
_The place of the feelings in psychic life—They come
first—Physiological proofs—Psychological proofs._
Through the multiple aspects of our subject and the diversity of
questions we have dealt with, the fundamental idea of this book has
been to show that the foundation of the affective life is appetite
or its contrary—that is to say, movement or arrest of movement; that
at its root it is an impulse, a tendency, an act in the nascent or
complete state, independent of intelligence, which has nothing to do
with it and may not even be present. It is unnecessary to inflict
upon the reader any new variations on a theme so often repeated. I
only desire, in conclusion, to add some remarks on the place of the
feelings in the total psychic life, and to show that that place is
the _first_.
This statement must be made precise. To compare “sensibility” and
“intelligence,” as some authors have done, to see which of these two
“faculties” is inferior to the other, is an artificial and
unreasonable task, since there is no common measure of the two, and
there can be no solution of the question which is not arbitrary. But
we may proceed objectively, and ask if the one is not primary and
the other secondary, if the one is not grafted on the other, and in
that case which is the stock and which the graft. If the feelings
appear first it is clear that they cannot be derived, and are not a
mode or function of knowledge, since they exist by themselves and
are irreducible.
Thus stated the question is simple and the reply evident.
The physiological evidence in favour of the priority of the feelings
need only be briefly recalled; it all centres in one point: organic
vegetative life always and everywhere appears before animal life;
physiologists constantly repeat that the animal is grafted on the
vegetable which precedes him. Now organic life is directly expressed
by the needs and appetites, which are the stuff of the affective
life; animal life by the sensations, the stuff of the intellectual
life. The primordial part played by organic sensibility has been
shown in the Introduction. We may remember also the myriads of
animals which are only bundles of needs, their psychology consisting
in the search for food, in defence, and in propagation; their senses
(often reduced to touch alone) are only tools, coarse instruments,
teleological weapons in the service of their needs; but closed in as
they may be from the external world, appetite in them is not less
intense. Even in man is not fœtal life, and that of the first months
after birth, much the same, almost wholly made up of satisfied or
unsatisfied needs, and consequently of pleasures and pains? From the
purely physiological point of view, knowledge appears not as a
mistress but as a servant.
The psychological evidence is not difficult to supply, and has
indeed already been presented by Schopenhauer in so brilliant
and complete a manner that it would be a bold task to present
it afresh. The chapter entitled “The Primacy of Will in
Self-Consciousness”[258] is a long argument in favour of the
priority of impulse over knowledge. We need not be duped by
the equivocal use of the word “will,” since for Schopenhauer
“to will is to desire, to aspire, to flee, to hope, to fear,
to love, to hate; in a word, all that directly constitutes our
good and our ill, our pleasure and our pain.” Nor need we
occupy ourselves with his metaphysics nor his antiquated
physiology, nor his personal hatred of intelligence, which he
treats as an enemy and usurper, “because all the philosophers
up to to-day have made it the intimate primitive essence of
their so-called soul;” and having made these eliminations we
may find many of his pages full of penetrating and consummate
psychology. I recall his chief arguments.
-----
Footnote 258:
_Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, Part III., chap. xix.
-----
Will (in the sense above indicated) is universal. The basis of
consciousness in every animal is desire. This fundamental fact is
translated into the impulse to preserve life and well-being, and to
propagate. This foundation is common to the polypus and to man. The
differences among animals are due to a difference in knowledge; as
we descend in the series intelligence becomes weaker and more
imperfect; there is no similar degradation in will (or desire); the
smallest insect wills what it wills as fully as man; will is
everywhere equal to itself. Relatively to intelligence it is the
robust blind man carrying on his shoulders the paralytic who sees
clearly.
It is fundamental. The will to live, with the horror of death which
results from it, is a fact anterior to all intelligence and
independent of it. In it is the basis of identity and of character;
“the man is hidden in the heart and not in the head.” It is the
source and the bond of all stable associations, religious,
political, or professional. It makes the strength of party spirit,
of sects, and of factions. Compare the fragility of friendships
founded on similarity of intelligence with those that spring from
the heart. Thus religions have had every reason to promise eternal
recompense to man’s moral qualities, and not to the gifts of the
mind.
Its power is sovereign. It is not reason which uses passion, it is
passion which uses reason to reach its ends. Under the influence of
intense desire, the intellect sometimes rises to a degree of vigour
of which none would believe it capable. Desire, love, fear render
the most obtuse understanding lucid. And besides, if will and
intelligence were identical in nature, their development would
proceed side by side, whereas nothing is more frequent than a great
intellect united to an inferior character, and “we sometimes find
violent desires, impassioned and impetuous impulses, joined to a
feeble intellect, that is to say a small brain badly enclosed in a
thick skull.”
Memory, which is commonly considered a purely intellectual
phenomenon, often depends—as we have seen—on the state of the
feelings. This had not escaped Schopenhauer. “Even a weak memory
sometimes retains perfectly what concerns the passion dominant at
the moment; the lover never forgets a favourable opportunity, the
ambitious nothing that serves their projects; the miser never
forgets his losses, nor the proud man a wound to his honour; the
vain remember every word of praise and every distinction they
receive.... That is what might be called the heart’s memory, more
intimate than the mind’s.”
How is it that facts of common observation, so clear and so
numerous, requiring for their discovery neither experiment nor
special research, nor even long reflection, have been so generally
misunderstood; and that the contrary opinion has always
predominated, reducing the manifestations of feeling to “qualities
of sensation,” to “confused intelligence,” and other oft-repeated
formulas? The only reason I can find is that during centuries this
subject has been treated philosophically, not psychologically, and
the method of philosophy is necessarily intellectualist. Only the
adult and complex forms of the affective life were considered,
without regard to their evolution, which alone brings us to their
origin. The parts played by movements as psychological factors, and
by unconscious activity, were forgotten or misunderstood. Pleasures
and pains in their manifold forms were regarded as the essential
phenomena in place of the hidden springs which give rise to them.
To sum up, the psychology of the emotions has its point of departure
in those complex feelings which daily life brings beneath our eyes
every moment. Their complexity is the work of our intellectual
nature, which associates and dissociates, mixing and combining
perceptions, images, ideas, each of which, in so far as it relates
to the individual or social conditions of existence, to the
physiological needs, to the offensive and defensive instinct of
conservation, to the social, moral, religious, æsthetic, and
scientific tendencies, produces in the organism variable effects
which, translated into consciousness, impart an affective tone to
intellectual states. Analysis shows that these complex forms are
reducible to a few simple emotions. The simple emotion itself is a
complexus made up of impulses, that is of motor elements, and
agreeable, painful, or mixed states of consciousness; these two
factors form a whole apparently indissoluble. Finally, the
fundamental motor or dynamic element manifests itself under two
forms: conscious impulses or desires, unconscious impulses or
appetites; there is identity of nature, the first possessing
consciousness in addition. Hence for the desires (the psychological
form), thanks to consciousness, there is the possibility of manifold
adaptations and indefinite plasticity. Hence for the appetites (the
physiological form) there is stability, fixity, automatism, the
absence of invention, and of that state of indecision arising
simultaneously with consciousness.
If we include all the primitive conscious impulses beneath the name
of _desire_ (or its opposite, _aversion_), we find two apparently
contradictory theses concerning its origin. According to one, desire
is a primitive phenomenon, anterior on the one hand to all
knowledge, and on the other to all experience of pleasure or pain.
According to the other, desire is a secondary phenomenon, the
anticipation of a known pleasure to seek for, a known pain to avoid;
the latter counts most partisans, and is also condensed into
well-known axiomatic sayings and formulas: “We cannot desire what we
do not know,” “We can only desire what seems to be for our
advantage,” “Desire is founded on a proved pleasure.” Both theses
are true, each for a separate moment, and the first alone relates to
the question of origin.
At the first moment desire is anterior to all experience, to every
consideration of pleasure or of pain; it acts as a blind force; it
is a _vis a tergo_, a propulsion only explicable by the physical and
mental organism. It must necessarily act at once without knowing
whither it goes, else it would act too late or not at all.
At the second moment, it is guided by experience and rests on proved
pleasure or pain, seeking one and avoiding the other. It is to this
moment that the sayings above quoted apply. That is the final form,
and it embraces the immense majority of cases. Even in the adult,
however, we have noted examples of vague desire, without object or
determined aim.
Blind impulse, when it reaches its end, finds its satisfaction
there, and seeks it anew because it is pleasant. But the pleasant
and the unpleasant are relative qualities, varying in individuals,
and at different moments in the same individual. If the physical and
mental organisation changes, the impulses, the position of pleasure
and pain change also; pathology furnishes us with unquestionable
proof.
Impulse, therefore, is the primordial fact in the life of the
feelings, and I cannot better conclude than by borrowing from
Spinoza a passage which sums up the whole spirit of this book:
“Appetite is the very essence of man, from which necessarily flow
all those things which seem to preserve him.... Between appetite and
desire there is no difference, save that desire is self-conscious
appetite. It follows from all this that we desire and follow after
nothing because we deem it to be good, but on the contrary deem that
to be good which we desire and follow after.”[259]
-----
Footnote 259:
_Ethica_, iii. prop. 9, schol.
-----
INDEX.
Abderrhaman III., 431
Abnormal characters, 404 _et seq._
Aboulia, 70
Abstraction, faculty of, 18, 313
Acquired pleasures, 56
Active characters, 388, 395-397
Activity accompanied by risk, pleasures of, 270
Actynophrys, 4
Admiration, 369
Æsthetic emotion, 101
” sentiment, 328 _et seq._; pathology of, 357 _et seq._; decay
of, 426; survival of, 428; rudimentary in idiots, 433
” superiority incompatible with health, 360
Affective type of memory, 166
Affinity, 6
Aggression, real, 220
” simulated, 221
” deferred, 222
_Agnatio_, 288
Aïssaouas, 33
Alexander, 400
Alfieri, 395
Algebra, Franklin’s moral, 398
Alternating characters, 413
Althaus, 53
Altruism, 237; its genesis, 281
Altruistic feelings, 292; decay of, 427
” (or sympathetic) pain, 44
Ambition, 431
Amnesia, 165, 166
Amorphous characters, 386
Anæsthesia, 36, 53, 54, 95, 96
Analgesia, 32 _et seq._
” artificial, 34
Analysts, 395
Anencephalic monsters, 32
Anger, 14, 218 _et seq._; its symptoms, 219; its pathology, 223
Animism, 308, 309
Ants, 263
Anthropomorphism, 309, 349
Apathetic characters, 389, 397, 398
Apathetic-active characters, 400
” sensitive ” 401
Appetite, 438
Approbation, desire of, 242
Architecture, 341
Ariosto, 364
Aristotle, 72, 299
Arrest of development, 264 _et seq._, 432 _et seq._
Art, 330 (and Chap. X., _passim_)
” influenced by environment, 339
” for art’s sake, 342
” set free from anthropomorphism, 343
” animals in, 344
” wild nature in, 345-347
Asceticism, 319, 325
Assimilation, 6
Association of ideas, 172 _et seq._
_Ataraxia_, 360
Atony, 389
Attraction and repulsion, 6
_Audition colorée_, 181
Augustine, 411, 412
Augustus, 409
Auto-intoxication, 40, 224
Avarice, 264
Aveyron, savage of the, 433
Azam, 412, 414
Aztecs, 191, 296, 321, 341
Bachofen, 286, 287, 288
Bacon, Francis, 216, 391
Bacteria, 5
Bain, 74, 78, 82, 130, 134, 141, 162, 190, 208, 210, 212, 218, 221,
230, 231, 235, 238, 241, 242, 280, 349, 353, 369, 384, 395, 396,
398
Balbiani, 251
Baldwin, 231
Barth, 315
Bastian, 6
Basutos, 296, 371
Beard, 214
Beau, 35
Beaunis, 26, 39, 49, 60, 119, 120, 133
Beauquier, 103, 105
Bell, Ch., 113, 115, 124, 219
Belmondo, 202
Benedictines, 374
Beneficence, 292
Benevolence, rise of, 293
Bennett, 143
Berkeley, 96
Bernard, Claude, 4, 62, 116, 117, 118
Bert, 92
Bhâghavad-Gita, 318
Bichat, 114, 219
Biran, Maine de, 395
Blanville, 138
Blind impulse, 422
Blood, syncope at sight of, 217
” taste for, 68, 228, 365
Blushing, 114, 271
Borgia, Francisco, 412
Boudet de Paris, 106
Bougainville, 190
Bouillier, 63, 64, 73, 77, 80
Bourdon, 51
Bourru, 414, 415
Boyer, 420
Boyle, 216
Brahmanism, 318
Braid, 182
Brain, function of, in transmitting sensation, 28
Brain as seat of emotion, 115 _et seq._
” separate action of hemispheres, 418
” change of character through lesions of, 302, 412, 420
Briquet, 201
Broca, 92
Brown-Séquard, 27, 28, 32, 53, 200
Brugia, 200
Bryozoa, 277
Buccola, 106
Buckle, 192
Bucknill, 68
Buddha, 296
Budge, 249
Bull-fights, 68, 228
Burckhardt, 35
Burot, 414, 415
Byron, 366, 400
Cabanis, 383
Cæsar, 264, 298, 346, 397, 409
Calculators, 398
Campbell, 202
Cannibalism, 295, 296
Cardan, 64
Carus, 115
Casalis, 371
Cause and effect, 112
Cellini, Benvenuto, 400
Cerebral dualism, 418
Cervantes, 418
Chambard, 182
Characters, classification of, 383 _et seq._
” true, 379, 384
” consistent, 385
” invariable, _ib._
” amorphous, 386
” unstable, _ib._
” partial, 387, 402, 403
” sensitive, 388, 393-395; humble, 394; contemplative, _ib._;
emotional, 395
” active, 388, 395-397; (mediocre, 396; great, 397)
” apathetic, 389, 397, 398; pure, 397; intellectual, 398
” temperate, 389, 390, 401
” mixed, 379 _et seq._; sensitive-active, 400;
apathetic-active, _ib._; apathetic-sensitive, 401; temperate,
_ib._
” Seeland’s classification of, 406, 407
” abnormal, 408 _et seq._
” contradictory, 409 _et seq._
” contradictory (apparently), 409, 410
” ” successive, 410 _et seq._
” ” ” co-existent, 416-419
” alternating, 413-415
” unstable or polymorphic, 419 _et seq._
Chateaubriand, 170
Chemical action, 40, 120 _et seq._
Chloroform, 37
Clan, social unit, 288, 289
Classification of feelings, 130 _et seq._
Cloquet, 142
Clouston, 46, 85, 376
Cocaine, 37
Cœnæsthesia, 8, 9, 176, 200, 411, 415
Coleridge, 174
Coloured hearing, 181
” taste, smell, etc., 182
Combination, 269
Complex emotions, 260 _et seq._
Composition of feelings, 267 _et seq._
Condottieri, 396
Confucius, 296
Conquistadores, 205, 397
Contact, element in maternal love, 280
Contemplatives, 394
Contiguity, 177 _et seq._
Contradiction, principle of, 193
Conversions, 410 _et seq._
Correggio, 393
Cortez, 397
Corti’s organ, 26, 358
Corybantes, 320
Cosmic order, 311, 312
Creation-play, 334
Creative imagination, 331 _et seq._
Criminals, 300
Cromwell, 409
Cros, 53
Culture, morbid love of, 378 _note_
Curiosity, 368
” disinterested, 371
Cuvier, 192
” F., 252
Cyon, 117, 118
Dagonet, 244, 325
D’Alembert, 391
Dallemagne, 259
Danger, fascination of, 270
Danton, 400
Danville, 256
Darwin, 13, 14, 16, 44, 82, 113, 124 _et seq._, 190, 207, 209, 218,
219, 231, 234, 235, 240, 271, 279, 282, 336, 351, 354, 355, 369
Dauriac, 104
Davy, Sir H., 52, 101
Decay of feelings, 423 _et seq._
” of the æsthetic emotions, 426
” of the altruistic emotions, 427 _et seq._
” of the ego-altruistic emotions, 430
” of the religious sentiment, 430, 431
” of ambition, 431
” of the egoistic feelings, 32
Degenerescence, 302, 357 _et seq._, 434 _et seq._
Dehumanisation of art, 345-347
Delbœuf, 251
Depravation of appetite, 201
Depression, 319
Descartes, 12, 51, 80, 110, 111, 261, 268, 369
Descuret, 373
Desire, 442
Despine, 301
Development, arrested, 264, 432 _et seq._
Dewey, 378
Diocletian, 411
Dipsomania, 203
Direct evolution of emotion, 193
Discoverers in morals, 295
Discord between character and intellect, 391
Disgust, 204 _et seq._
Disinterested curiosity, 371
Disinterested emotions, decay of, 426
Domestic life _v._ social solidarity, 284, 285
Domination, instinct of, 221
Doubt, 375 _et seq._
Dreams, 142
Drobisch, 137
Dualist view, 111
Du Chaillu, 296
Duchenne, 124, 125
Dumas, G., 52, 71, 72, 93, 427
Dumont, L., 82, 83, 126, 131-133, 351, 352, 356
Dynamogeny, 53
Dynamometric experiments, 83, 407
Dyaks, 338
Dynamic form of intellectual emotion, 372
Ecclesiastes, 431
Ecstasy, 325, 326
Ego, 238 _et seq._
Ego-altruistic emotions, decay of, 430
Egoistic feelings, decay of, 432
Egoistic pain, 44
Elmira, 301
Emotion, 12
” simple, 13
” sexual, 15
” higher, 17
” ” development of, 18
” intellectual, 19, 101, 368 _et seq._
” James and Lange’s theory of, 93 _et seq_.
” coarse, 97
” subtle, _id._ _ib._
” moral, 100
” relations of, with physical environment, 107
” internal conditions of, 113 _et seq._
” expression of, 124 _et seq._
” revival of, 152 _et seq._
” tender, 230 _et seq._
” complex, 260 _et seq._
” evolution of, 262, 263
” produced by movements, 392
Emotional memory, 161, 162
” type, 167
” type of sensitives, 395
Endogamy, 289
Epilepsy, 9, 223
Espinas, 276, 279 _et seq._
Esquirol, 54, 224, 416
Ethology, 384
Euphoria, 67, 88
Exaltation, 320
Exogamy, 289
Expression of emotions, 124 _et seq._
Falret, 213
Family, 284; evolution of, 286 _et seq._
Fatigue, 147
Fear, 10, 13, 207 _et seq._
” definition of, 207
” psychology of, 209 _et seq._
” hereditary, 210
” morbid, 212 _et seq._
” an element in the religious sentiment, 309, 431
Fechner, 55, 102
Feeling, law of, 173
Feelings, priority of, 438
Félida, case of, 414
Ferrero, 366
Ferri, 179
Ferrier, 28, 29, 420
Fetichism, 308
Fétis, 103
Finality of pleasure and pain, 86
Fischer, 357
Fixed ideas, 226
Flaubert, 364
Flourens’ vital knot, 28
Flournoy, 181
_Folie circulaire_, 415
Fonsagrives, 53
Fouillée, 78, 126, 141, 151, 162, 172, 173, 183, 384, 405
Francis of Assisi, 400
François-Franck, 32, 142, 200
Franklin, 398
Frey, 27, 51
Friedmann, 293
Fuegians, 191, 297, 343
Gall, 115, 228
Galton, 146, 167, 425
Gauss, 391
Gautier (Th.), 343
Gélineau, 214, 215, 217
Generalising process in religious ideas, 312-314
Genius, 360, 363, 364, 437
Georget, 47
Germ-plasm, 256
Gevaert, 105
Girard-Teulon, 287
Gley, 92, 142
Goblet d’Alviella, 307, 311, 312, 314
Godfernaux, 326
Goethe, 164, 369, 402
Goldscheider, 27, 47
Goltz, 200, 250
Grant Allen, 83, 87, 88, 102, 331, 342, 343, 347, 349, 352, 358
Gratiolet, 7, 128, 143, 210
Greeks, limitations of their humanity, 192
Gregarious life, 281 _et seq._
Grétry, 103, 105
Griesinger, 62, 68, 376
Grief, 15, 45
Groos, 330
Guislain, 68
Gurney, 106, 111, 352
Guyau, 292, 331, 339, 351
Habeneck, 141
Hack Tuke, 28, 30, 68, 114, 144, 324, 376
Hadrian, 366
Hahnemann, 47, 133
Hall, Stanley, 211, 305
Hallucinations, 143
Hamilton, 64
Hamlet, 394
Hartmann, 42, 255
Haschisch, 8, 9
Hatred, 266
Hecker, 351, 356
Heidenhain, 30
Helmholtz, 377
Henle, 412
Hennequin, 339
Henotheism, 306
Herbart, 137, 372
Heredity, 175, 190, 191, 217, 246, 279, 336
Hering, 3
Hermann, 142
Hobbes, 353
Höffding, 19, 141, 172, 192, 239, 269, 271
Home, 330
Homer, 63, 316, 342
Homicidal mania, 225 _et seq._
Horwicz, 75, 172, 183
Houssay, 283
Humble, the, 394
Humour, sense of, 271, 351 _et seq._
Hunger and thirst, 147, 158, 202
Hunter, 115
Hydractinia, 277
Hydroid polypes, 277
Hyperæsthesia, 36
Hyperalgesia, 36
Hypertrophy of intellect, 391
Hypochondria, 46, 361, 394
Hysteria, 36, 47, 116
Ideas, fixed, 226
Ideal, search for, 254
Idiots, 323, 369, 432 _et seq._
Images of taste and smell, 145
Imitative instinct, 231, 232
Incongruity, 352
Indifferent state, 57
Inertia, 389
Infantilism, 300, 422
Infinite, 306, 307
Inhibitory forces, 265
Injury connected with pain, 87
Instinct of preservation, 11, 199 _et seq._
” nutritive, 200 _et seq._
” of domination, 221, 222
” imitative, 231, 232
” sexual, 248 _et seq._
Instincts, 194 _et seq._
Intellectual development of the race, 189
” memory, 152
” sentiment, 368 _et seq._
Intellectualised emotion, 101, 267
Intellectualists, 28, 35, 75, 137, 172, 390
Intensity of stimulation as a cause of pain, 39
Internal sensations, 119, 143, 147
Interrogation, 370
Ipecacuanha, 95
Ireland, 243, 434
Irons, 111
Irony, 271
Itard, 433
Jacoby, 243
James, W., 11, 93, 95 _et seq._, 101, 106, 110, 111, 141, 162, 172,
174, 194, 231, 241, 249, 271, 273
James I., 216
Janet, 33, 201, 249
Jealousy, 268
Jessen, 3
Joy, 15
Julian the Apostate, 411
Justice, 297
Kaffirs, 337
Kant, 19, 81, 290, 299, 330, 348, 360, 379, 384, 391
Kepler, 373
Kinæsthetic sense, 27
” sensations, 50
Kraepelin, 351
Krafft-Ebing, 65, 67, 72, 224, 300, 302, 325, 415’
Kröner, 7, 119, 120
Külpe, 76, 102
Kurella, 93
Ladd, 188, 379
Landscape-painting, 345
Lange, 15, 52, 93 _et seq._, 110, 111, 114, 208, 219, 235, 249
Laughter, 351 _et seq._
Lavater, 124
Laycock, 3, 175
Lazarus, 331
Le Bon, 100, 391
Lehmann 7, 28, 30, 35, 52, 75, 137, 141, 176, 178, 269
Leibnitz, 234
Lépine, 420
Lessing, 372
Letourneau, 20, 297, 340, 374
Leuba, 305
Leuret, 105
Lewes, G. H., 54
Littré, 153, 162, 297
Lloyd Morgan, 237
Löb, 6
Lombard, 92
Lombroso, 300, 386
Longet, 32
Lotze, 383
Louis XI., 398
Love, 249 _et seq._
Loyola, 412
Lubbock, Sir J., 233
Lucan, 397
Luckey, 37
Lucretius, 63
Ludwig, 142
Ludwig II. of Bavaria, 366
Lulli, Raymond, 410, 412
Luther, 400, 410, 412
Lymphatic temperament, 397
Mabillon, 374
MacLennan, 286, 287
Magic, 310
Maine de Biran, 345
Malarial regions, their influence, 72
Malebranche, 110, 111
Malherbe, 362
Manes, 296
Mania, 67, 224
Mantegazza, 29, 30, 31, 36, 50, 63, 67, 125, 127, 128, 208, 209,
219, 222, 235, 240, 271, 355
Maraña, 412
Marie, 320
Marie Antoinette, 45
Marshall, 111
Marshall, Rutgers, 37, 39, 59
Maspero, 314, 316
Mass, sublimity of, 350
Maternal love, 279, 280
Matriarchate, 287
Matter and form, 112
Maudsley, 92, 111, 301, 420, 430
Maupas, 6, 252
Maury, A., 142
Medium activity the cause of pleasure, 54
Medulla, 28
Megalomania, 243, 244, 362, 364
Melancholia, 65
” attonita, 69
” passive, 71
” religious, 324
” demoniac, 325
Melancholy, 270
Memory of feelings, 140 _et seq._
” pain, 43, 149 _et seq._
” sorrow, 153 _et seq._
” taste, smell, etc., 157 _et seq._
” emotional—false, or abstract, 160, 161
” emotional—true, or concrete, 162 _et seq._
” affective type of, 166
” influenced by unconscious feelings, 174 _et seq._
Mendoza, Suarez de, 182
Mentelli, case of, 373
Mercier, 135
Meynert, 84, 85
Michelangelo, 43, 349, 366, 400
Micro-organisms, 251
Mill, James, 211
” J. S., 340, 384
_Mind_ quoted, 74, 93, 102, 106, 111, 342, 343, 358
Misoneism, 386
Mitchell, Weir, 33, 36, 39, 414
Mixed states, 10
Mixed temperaments, 399
Mixture, 268
Modesty, 271 _et seq._
Monkeys, 219, 279, 355
Moore, Mrs. K. C., 14
Moral pain, 42 _et seq._
” emotion, 100; complexity of, 299
” influence of ideas, 192
” sentiment, 289 _et seq._
” evolution, 292 _et seq._
” insanity, 300
” insensibility, 54, 302, 391, 417
Morbid state, its criteria, 62
” pleasures, 63 _et seq._
” pains, 69
” fears (phobias), 213
” tenderness, 238
” self-esteem, 242
” religious feelings, 324, etc.
” characteristics of genius, 360 _et seq._
” characters, 405 _et seq._
Moreau (de Tours), 8, 255
Morel, 33, 216, 229, 238, 435
Morgan, Lloyd, 237
Morselli, 106, 245
Mortimer, Granville, 106
Moses, 296
Moshesh, 296
Mosso, 30, 92, 118, 208, 216, 272
Motor manifestations of feeling, 2
” functions affected by pain, 30
” reflexes, 84
” elements in emotion, 92; revived in memory, 152, 158, 159
” disturbances, 203; as symptoms of mania, 224
” retrogression, 434
Movements, 183
Müller, J., 124, 142, 377
Müller, Max, 233, 306, 307
Münsterberg’s experiments, 52, 53, 183
Music, 103 _et seq._, 335, 431, 434
Musset, A. de, 420, 421
Mysticism in science, 377
Mystics, 319, 320, 326, 394, 400
Nahlowsky, 137, 138
Napoleon, 264, 349, 400, 409
Natal, cannibalism in, 296 _note_
Nature, sympathy with, 343 _et seq._
Naunyn, 35
Needs, 10, 11, 196, 439
Negative form of self-feeling, 241
Nero, 366
Nerval, Gérard de, 365
Nerves, painful impressions transmitted by, 26
Nerves, special, for pain, 27
Nervous temperament, 407
Neutral states, 57, 73 _et seq._
Newton, 21, 391
Nichols, 37, 38, 51
Nietzsche, 344
Nirvana, 316
Noiré, 232
_Nomina_, _numina_, 306
Nordau, 357, 360
Normal characters, 380 _et seq._
Note-deafness, 358
Nutrition, societies founded on, 278
Nutritive functions and instincts, 199 _et seq._
Objective representations of emotions, 156
Obsession, 20, 21, 256, 325
Occipital lobes, 29
Odours, memory of, 158
” Galton’s experiments on, 146
Oppenheimer, 40
Orators, 395
Organic sensibility, 3
” origin of melancholia, 72
” Correlation, law of, 265
Ornaments, 338, 344
Pain, 8, 16;
(physical), 25 _et seq._;
(moral), 42 _et seq._;
” definition of, 25; its influence on the heart and the
respiration, 29; on the digestion and motor functions, 30
” lower races less sensitive to, 36 a quality of sensation, 39
” depends on quality and intensity of stimulus, 39
” caused by chemical modifications, 40
” connected with injury, 87
Pain-bearing nerves, 27, 37
Painful state, 10
Pain-phenomenon, independence of, 35
Pain-points (Sachs’s), 27
Panphobia, 214
Pantheistic tendencies, 347
Pantomime-dance, 334
Paramæcids, 251
Partial characters, 387, 402, 403
Pascal, 33, 215, 331, 412
Passion, definition of, 20, 21
” of love, 256, 257
” ruling, 403
Passions, 12, 19, 92, 261, 369
Paternal love, 281
Pathological method, 60, 61
Pathology of pleasure and pain, 63 _et seq._
” fear, 212 _et seq._
” anger, 223
” nutritive instinct, 201-204
” tender emotion, 238
” self-feeling, 242 _et seq._ (see Megalomania)
” sexual instinct, 256 _et seq._
” social and moral feelings, 300
” religious sentiment, 324
” æsthetic sentiment, 357
” creative imagination, 364
” intellectual sentiment, 375
Patriarchate, rise of, 288
Paul, St., 410, 412
Paul, St. Vincent de, 297, 400
Paulhan, 384, 405, 407, 417, 420
Perez, 13, 14, 207, 218, 234, 384, 405
Perrier, 276
Persecution, 322
Personal unconsciousness, 176
Personality, alteration of, 413 _et seq._
Pessimism, 361, 362, 366
Peter the Great, 215
Peter the Hermit, 400
Pfeffer, 252
Phagocytosis, 5
Philip II. of Spain, 398
Phlegmatic temperament, 397
Phobias, 10, 213 _et seq._
Physiological conditions of religious sentiment, 99, 319
Physiological conditions of feeling, 16
” ” of music, 103 _et seq._
” ” theory of character, 383
Physiology of pleasure, very little known, 50
Piderit, 127, 129, 351, 356
Piesse, 158
Pitres, 36, 116, 182
Pizarro, 397
Plato, 114, 299, 341
Platonic love, 19, 267
Play-instinct, 198, 329 _et seq._
” absent in idiots, 433
Pleasant states, revival of, 152
Pleasure, 8, 16, 48 _et seq._
” a sensation? 50
” due to medium activity, 54
” connected with utility, 87
” in suffering of others (anger), 221
Pleasure and pain only symptoms, 2, 3
” ” general conditions of, 16
” ” common basis of, 57 _et seq._
” ” result of difference between receipt and expenditure,
57, 58
Plethysmograph, 30, 119
Poetry, 335, 340
Poets, peculiar habits of, 363
Polymorphic characters, 386, 419-422
Possession, 325
Predatory tendencies, survival of, 87
Preservation, instinct of, 11, 198 _et seq._, 207 _et seq._, 218
_et seq._
Preyer, 8, 13, 14, 16, 17, 44, 81, 207, 209, 210, 218, 231, 369
Prichard, 300, 301
Primitive emotions, 12
” man, 188, 189, 242, 309, 311
” tendencies and instincts, 194 _et seq._
Primitive religious belief, 308 _et seq._
” art, 340, 341
Promiscuity, primitive, 287
Proselytising, 323
Pruner Bey, 36
Pseudophobia, 214
Psychological theory of character, 383, 384
Psycho-physicists, 75
Ptomaine increased in quantity by anger, 219
Pure states of feeling, 7
Pyromania, 225
Pyrrhonians, 376
Pythagoras, 377
Reciprocity, 277
Reflection, 265
Régis, 213, 415
Regiomontanus, 301
Religious sentiment, 99, 263, 305 _et seq._; decay of, 431
” philosophy, 317
” ideas, 324
” belief, absence of, 323
” psychoses, 320
” melancholia, 324
” exaltation (theomania), 326
Renan, 307
Renaudin, 47
Representation as a source of pain, 85
Reproduction, societies founded on, 278 _et seq._
Resemblance, 178
Resignation, 266
Retrogression, 227, 424 _et seq._
Revivability of impressions, 140 _et seq._
Revenge, 297, 298
Réville, 323
Richelieu, 409
Reynolds, Mary, case of, 414 (see Weir Mitchell)
Richet, 25, 34, 35, 53, 204, 205
Richter, J. P., 395
Ritual, 320-322
Romanes, 237, 279, 370
Rosenkranz, 359
Rosseuw St.-Hilaire, 79
Rousseau, J. J., 164, 188, 346, 395
Rubens, 417
Rudel, Geoffroi, 255
Ruling passion, 403
Rutgers Marshall, 37, 39, 59
_Sacer horror_, 99, 319
Sachs, 6
Sacrifices, 310
Saint-Simon, 110
Salsotto, 301
Sand, George, 420, 421
Saponine, effects of, 37
Scaliger, 216
Schelling, 362
Schiff, 59, 200
Schiller, 329, 366
Schlegel, 271, 362
Schneider, 87, 90, 175, 330, 346, 387
Schopenhauer, 255, 256, 290, 293, 330, 390, 391, 398, 404, 416, 439
_et seq._
Schüle, 70, 71, 223, 228, 300, 415, 433
Science, personification of, 379
Scientific emotion, 371
Seeland, 406, 412
Self-feeling, 239 _et seq._
” its symptoms, 240
” in animals, _ib._
” becomes anti-social, 242
” its pathology, 242 _et seq._ (see Megalomania)
Seneca, 63, 219
Sensibility, unconscious (vital, organic, or protoplasmic), 3, 4, 6
Sensibility, general, 37
Sensitives, 388
Sensitive-actives, 400
Sergi, 11, 28, 74, 271, 272, 273, 334, 346
Sexual attraction, 6, 278
” emotion, 15, 248 _et seq._; instinctive stage, 250; emotional
stage, 253; intellectual stage, 254
” ” ascending evolution of, 255
” ” its pathology, 256 _et seq._
” connected with religious emotion, 320
” decay of, 430
Sforza, Ludovico, 45
Shadworth-Hodgson, 137, 172, 174
Shaftesbury, 290
Sibbern, 269
Siphonophora, 277
Smell, 145, 146, 158, 182, 202; no art based on, 351
Societies, animal, 276
” ” founded on nutrition, 277
” ” founded on reproduction, 278 (_a_, sexual approach, 278;
_b_, maternal love, 279; _c_, paternal love, 281)
” ” gregarious, 281 _et seq._
” ” highest forms of (ants, bees, etc.), 284, 285
” ” human, 285 _et seq._
Social character of religion, 310
” environment, emotion adapted to, 109
” feelings, 275 _et seq._
” group, morality confined to, 298
” instinct, 277
” life, development of, 288
” solidarity, 277; opposed to family tendencies, 285
Socrates, 299
Solger, 271
Solidarity, 277
Sollier, 96
Sommer, 183
Spalding, 210
Spasmodic diathesis, 420
Spencer, Herbert, 49, 54, 63, 64, 82, 87, 88, 107, 126, 127, 134,
141, 175, 176, 190, 233, 237, 253, 256, 268, 271, 272, 280, 283,
288, 290, 307 _et seq._, 330, 342, 351, 352, 355 _et seq._, 370,
430
Spinoza, 111, 261, 373, 390, 416, 442
Spiritism, 308, 309
Stability, 385, 393-395
Stanley, Hiram M., 111
Stanley Hall, 211, 305
Staniland Wake, 296
Starbuck, 305
Starcke, 286, 289
Starr, Allen, 420
States of feeling, 7;
four types of, 10
Static form of intellectual emotion, 373
Stewart, Dugald, 163
_Stigmata diaboli_, 32
Stoics, 299, 379
Strength, feeling of, 240
Stricker, 231
Strong, 33, 37, 38
Strümpell, 96
Stumpf, 104
Suarez de Mendoza, 182
Sublime, feeling for the, 270, 348 _et seq._
Sufis, 394
Suicide, 244 _et seq._; the supreme negation of self-feeling, 245
” deliberate or voluntary, 245
” impulsive, 246
” hereditary, 246
Sully, 19, 74, 78, 102, 130, 172, 176, 180, 208, 211, 231, 236,
237, 241, 346, 348, 350, 354, 369, 371
Sully-Prudhomme, 154, 162, 381
Sumner Maine, 286
Superiority, feeling of, 354
Surprise, 369
Symbolism, 322, 365
Sympathy, 230 _et seq._, 292
Synæsthesia, 231
Synergia, 231
Syringomyelia, 38
_Tabes dorsalis_, 35
_Tabula rasa_ theory, 403
Taine, 162, 167, 336, 364
Tamburini, 202, 226
Tanzi, 59, 92
Tarchanoff, 106
Tasso, 365, 366
Taste, 142, 145, 146, 351
Tattooing, 335
Tears, 235, 236
Temperaments, 383 _et seq._ (see Characters)
” Seeland’s classification of, 406
_Temperamentum temperatum_, 390
Temperate characters, 389, 401
Tendency, 365
Tenderness, 234 _et seq._
Terror, 209
Thales, 377
Theomania, 326
Therapeutæ, 394
Tickling, 355
Tiele, 314
Time, sublimity of, 350
Titchener, 171
Tissues, exchange of, 407
Todd, 28
Touch suppressed by saponine, 87
” sympathy connected with, 235
Toulouse, 170
Toxin, 40
Toxic changes in organism, 121
” secretions in anger, 219
Transference of feelings, 176 _et seq._
Trousseau, 219
Tuke, Hack, 28, 30, 68, 114, 144, 324, 376
_Tunicata_, 277
Tylor, 286, 323
Unconscious, the, 3, 174-176, 216, 254, 363, 441
Unity of character, 385
Unstable characters, 386, 419-422 (see Polymorphic)
Utility connected with pleasure, 87
” connected with art, 342
V., L., case of, 414 (see Personality, Alteration of)
Valentin, 142
Vallon, 320
Van Swieten, 219
Vascular reflexes, 84
Vaso-motor modifications, 94
Vaso-motor apparatus, affected by fear, 208
Verworn, 6, 252
Vignoli, 371
Vigouroux, 106
Vincent de Paul, St., 297, 400
Vintschgau, Von, 142
Visceral theory, 114
Vulpian, 32
Wagner, Richard, 418
Waitz, 137
Wake, Staniland, 296
Wallace, 190, 336, 355
Wallaschek, 104, 337
Warner, 127
Weir Mitchell, 33, 36, 39, 414
Weismann, 190, 256, 336, 337
Welfare of the individual and of the race, 88
Westermarck, 286
Westphal, 213
Wigan, 164, 302
Will to live, 439, 440
William the Silent, 398
Witch-marks, 32 (see _Stigmata diaboli_)
Wonder, 369
Worcester, 111
Wundt, 49, 75, 102, 111, 127, 128, 129, 137, 180, 272, 383
Yogis, 394
Zola, 170
_Zones idéogènes_, 182
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber’s Note
The Index topics beginning with 'Su' preceded those 'St'. They have
been moved to their proper position to avoid unnecessary confusion.
Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected,
and are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the
original.
20.14 [“]it is a violent and sustained desire Added.
49.13 sometimes in the other.[’/”] Replaced.
106.7 The resea[r]ches of Boudet de Paris Inserted.
117.36 (accord[ing] to Claude Bernard) Added.
147.32 [“]general lassitude, of a diffused kind Added.
167.3 revival of affective impressions[.] Added.
170.n2.7 Emile Zola: Enquête M[e/é]dico-psychologique Replaced.
196.26 consequent in[s]terstitial exchanges Removed.
236.2 organs assuag[e]ing assuaging pain Removed.
278.3 question of the point of view[.] Added.
336.23 exercised on this point[.] Added.
384.n2.1 Fou[i]llée Inserted.
434.n1.9 play fragments of tunes[.] Added.
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