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- Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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.
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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS
BY
THEODULE RIBOT
PROFESSOR AT THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE, EDITOR OF THE
“REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.”
1897
© 2022 Librorium Editions
ISBN : 9782383833413
PREFACE.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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]
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
