JAn illustration may, perhaps, be helpful. An observer reports: "Akt der Zustimmung wesentlich motorischer Natur (unmittelbar auf der Ichseite erlebt) ": an act of acceptance, of essentially kinaesthetic character, felt as belonging to the self-side of experience. The latter phrase means that the reactor felt himself in the attitude of acceptance, irrespectively of the actual, physical attitude of the body.
468 Action of reports, do not discover an active element; unrest, effort, urgency appear in organic, especially in kinaesthetic terms. The time has gone by for reflective psychologising in the study; if the champions of the active element wish to be taken seriously, they must either experiment themselves or must propose crucial experiments for others — and must then abide by results. Nothing is easier than to manufacture mental elements (p. 49); but the penalty should be six months of introspective labour under laboratory conditions.
The latter part of the definition implies a view of mind that we cannot accept. " Mental activity exists when and so far as process in consciousness is the direct outcome of previous process in consciousness." l If that is the case, the author can only reply that it does not exist at all. The direction of a present conscious- ness may be predetermined by a suggestion which was itself rep- resented in consciousness; but to say that the present consciousness is the direct outcome of the foregoing suggestion- consciousness is either to say, simply, that the one immediately follows the other, or is to make consciousness a form of energy (p. n). And when we read of a ' tendency ' of consciousness ' by its intrinsic nature to develope into something else,' we surely have before us nothing more than a figurative expression drawn from popular biology.
The Motivation of Action by Affection. — We referred on p. 263 to the doctrine that pleasantness and unpleasantness are sympto- matic of a normal and abnormal mode of life; and we dismissed it as unproved and irrelevant. This doctrine is often found in con- nection with another, which gives pleasantness and unpleasantness an active role in the mental life; they are incentives to and deter- rents from action, they guide the vital functions, they stimulate the organism's activity for ends. Pleasantness is thus the sign that we are well; but it also prompts us to act in such a way that we remain well. Unpleasantness is the sign that we are unwell; but it also prompts us to refrain from acting in such a way that we become unwell.
There are various ways in which this position may be met. We might question the correlation, as we did before. We might ask References for Further Reading 469 how it is that a mental process can incite or deter, ' stamp in ' this and ' stamp out ' that mode of reaction. All that is necessary, however, is to appeal to the facts. Movement follows on sugges- tion; and the conscious aspect of suggestion may be pleasurable, unpleasurable or indifferent. Kiilpe wrote, in 1893, that "the in- centives to voluntary activity may be of exceedingly different kinds," so far as they are conscious, and that volition may be " partially de- termined by unconscious incentives." Thorndike, in 1905, declares that " any mental state whatever may be the antecedent of an in- tentional act." This position, extreme as it is, squares far better with the introspections of the reaction experiments than does the traditional doctrine of motivation by pleasure-pain.
References for Further Reading §§ 121-127. W. Wundt, Physiol. Psychol., Hi., 1903, 242 ff.; Out- lines of Psychol., tr. 1907, 203 ff.; W. James, Princ. of Psychol., ii., § 121. E. C. Sanford, Personal Equation, in American Journal of Psychology, ii., 1888-89, 3' 27J> 4°3- For the history and technique of the reaction experiment, E. B. Titchener, Exper. Psychol., II., i., 1905, 141 ff.; ii., 326 ff., 356 ff.
§ 122. Wundt, Physiol. Psychol., iii., 1903, 410 ff. The analysis follows N. Ach, Ueber die VVillenstatigkeit unci das Denken, 1905; but, so far as these simple reactions are concerned, it has been repeated and verified in the author's laboratory.
§ 123. Wundt, op. cit., 450 ff.; also ii., 1910, 38; Ach, op. cit. For the subtractive procedure, Wundt, iii., 450 ff.; Ach, 156 ff.; O. Kiilpe, Outlines of Psychol., 1909, 410 ff. For the psychology of instruction, Titchener, Lectures on the Exper. Psychol, of the Thought-processes, 1909, index under Problem. For the diagnostic association experiment, C. G. Jung, The Association Method, in American Journal of Psy- § 124. Kiilpe, op. cit., [1893] 1909, 409, 415. For determining ten- dencies, Ach, op. cit., esp. 191 ff.; Titchener, op. cit., index under Tendencies. For suggestion, J. M. Baldwin, Mental Development in the Child and the Race: Methods and Processes, 1906, 100 ff.
§ 125. Titchener, Were the Earliest Organic Movements Conscious or Unconscious? in Pop. Sci. Monthly, lx., 1901-2, 458 ff.; cf. Feel- 470 Action tug and Attention, 1908, 387; C. J. Herrick, The Evolution of Intelli- gence and its Organs, in Science, N. S. xxxi., 1910, 7 ff.; Baldwin, § 126. For the negative instruction, H. S. Langfeld, Suggestion with Negative Instruction, in Psychol. Bulletin, vii., 1910, 200 ff. For instinct, James, as quoted in the text; W. McDougall, An Introduction to Social Psychology, 1908.
§ 127. Ach, 230 ff.; A. Messer, Experitnentell-psychologische Unter- suchungen ilber das Denken, in Archiv f. d. gesamte Psychol., viii.. 1906, 203. In support of a conative element, G. T. Ladd, Psychol Descriptive and Explanatory, 1894, 211 ff. On motivation, Kiilpe, op. cit., 445 ff.; E. L. Thorndike, The Elements of Psydwlogy, 1905, 282 ff.; D. C. Nadejde, Die biologische Theorie der Lust und Unlust, EMOTION EMOTION § 128. The Nature of Emotion. — Suppose that you are sitting at your desk, busy in your regular way, and ob- scurely conscious of a rumble of a car that is passing down the street; and suppose that the rumble is suddenly inter- rupted by a shrill scream. You leap up, as if the scream were a personal signal that you had been expecting; you dash out of doors, as if your presence on the street were a matter of imperative necessity. As you run, you have fragmentary ideas: 'a child,' perhaps, in internal speech; a visual flash of some previous accident; a scrap of kinaes- thesis that carries your whole attitude to the city car- system. But you have, also, a mass of insistent organic sensation: you choke, you draw your breath in gasps, for all the hurry you are in a cold sweat, you have a horrible nausea; and yet, in spite of the intense unpleasantness that floods your consciousness, you have no choice but to go on. In describing the experience, later, you would say that you were horrified by hearing a child scream; the mental processes that we have just named make up the emotion of horror.
An emotion is thus a temporal process, a course of con-. sciousness, and it is also, characteristically, a suddenly ) initiated consciousness; it begins abruptly, and dies down \ gradually. It is a highly complex consciousness, since its stimulus is not an object, a perceptive stimulus, but some total situation or predicament. It is through and through an affective consciousness, since both the situation itself Emotion and the organic sensations of the emotive reaction are def- initely pleasant or unpleasant. It is an insistently organic consciousness, although the proportion of organic to idea- tional constituents varies greatly from emotion to emotion and from individual to individual. And, finally, it is always a predetermined consciousness, proceeding in the given case to a natural terminus; although here, too, there is great variability, since the determining tendencies to which the situation appeals may be almost wholly instinc- tive, or may be partly instinctive and partly acquired.
We have very elaborate accounts of the 'expression' of emotion, and we have elaborate diagrams, so to speak, of the emotive con- sciousness; but, so far as the author is aware, we have no system- atic description of emotion, taken under standard conditions. In other words, we have no first-hand analytical psychology of emotion; and it is this lack that makes the chapter on emotion in the text-books the dreary reading that it is. Two reasons are usually given for the deficiency: first, that it is im- possible to bring emotion into the laboratory j the emotions there setup are artificial, washed-out, insipid affairs; and secondly that we have no method for the study of emotion, since attention to affection defeats its own object (p. 231). Neither reason is valid. It is not difficult, with a little ingenuity, to arrange situations in the laboratory that shall arouse a fairly wide range of emotions. If these emotions are not of the very intensest, neither are the ordinary emotions of everyday life; and if they tend to disappear with repetition of the situations, our everyday emotions do the same thing. Besides, the laboratory offers the very great advan- tage of isolation; we can get the emotion pure, and without interruption from extraneous processes. On the other hand, it is not necessary to affective introspection that attention be directed upon the affection. Recent work has shown that, if attention is directed upon the stimulus, the situation, an affective judgment comes directly, of itself; the quality and intensity of the affection touch off the corresponding expression or report. Nothing more § 128. The Nature of Emotion 473 is required than that the observers shall be fittingly instructed, affectively predisposed. When the predisposition to express the feelings has been set up, it is this that is actualised by the pres- entation of stimulus, and that dictates the introspective report. The observer has no impulse to describe the situation in sensory terms, focal as these terms were. What, now, this predisposition is; how far (if at all) it interferes with the impression of the stim- ulus on the sensory side; with what degree of constancy it may be induced, and how widely it varies from one observer to another: of all these things we are still ignorant. But there can be no question that the mechanism of affective introspection is as it is here described.
The reason, then, that our descriptive psychology of emotion is schematic rather than analytical is, simply, that experimental psy- chology has so far found neither the time nor the courage to take emotion into the laboratory. But we shall presently have analyses of this, as we are beginning to get analyses of the action con- sciousness.
Feeling and Emotion. — It seems almost self-evident that there is a close connection between the sense-feeling (p. 227) and the emotion, that — to put it roughly — a feeling is a simpler emotion, an emotion a more complex feeling. And the assumption of this connection is justified if, as we explained on p. 408, an emotion may degenerate into a feeling. Nevertheless, certain psychologists draw a sharp line of distinction between the two experiences; feel- ing is, for them, a passive and receptive matter, emotion is feeling- attitude, a reaction of the whole conscious organism upon the situation.1 We can all understand what this distinction means, and we can all think of cases in which it is introspectively attested. But we can also, very certainly, think of intermediate cases, in which the sense-feeling passes into emotion, and the emotion into sense-feeling, without sensible break. The author cannot but think that the majority is in this case right, and that feeling and emotion are species of the same mental genus.
1 D. Irons, The Nature of Emotion, in Philos. Review, vi., 1897, 242; C. Stumpf, Ueber Gefithlsempfindungeti, in Zeits. f. Psychol., xliv., 1906, 7; 474 Emotion § 129. The ' James-Lange Theory ' of Emotion. — In 1884, James propounded the rather paradoxical theory that what had ordinarily been regarded as the ' expression ' of an emotion is, in reality, the source of emotion as a conscious process. It is worth while to quote the critical passages.
" Our natural way of thinking about the emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion. Common sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifesta- tions must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be."1 No one, James continues, " will be inclined to doubt the fact that objects do excite bodily changes by a preorganised mechanism, or the farther fact that the changes are so indefinitely numerous and subtle that the entire organism may be called a sounding-board, which every change of consciousness, however slight, may make rever- berate...Every one of the bodily changes, whatsoever it is, is FELT, acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs...Each emo- tion is the resultant of a sum of elements, and...the elements are all organic changes, and each of them is the reflex effect of the exciting object." 2 1 W. James, What is an Emotion? in Mind, O. S. ix., 1884, 189 f. The first sentence of the quotation has been verbally modified. See also Princ.
2 Princ. of Psychol., ii., 450 ff. James is writing as an advocate, and has — naturally enough — forgotten for the moment the fact of the limen.
§ 129. The %James-Lange Theory' of Emotion 475 Emotion, then, is on this view a group of refiexly excited organic sensations, clustered about a perception. There is no special affective moment in emotion; the whole experi- ence is reducible, psychologically, to refiexly aroused organic sensations.
The theory, which was vigorously and persuasively stated, received a further impetus by the publication, in 1885, of a tract by C. Lange, professor of medicine in Copenhagen. Lange comes independently to a conclusion which, in principle, is the same as that of James, though it is more narrowly formulated. He says: "It is the vasomotor system that we have to thank for the whole emotional aspect of our mental life, for our joys and sorrows, our hours of happiness and misery. If the objects that affect our senses had not the power to throw this system into action, we should travel through life indifferent and dispassionate; the im- pressions from the outside world would enrich our experience, would increase our knowledge, but that is all; they would neither rouse us to joy nor goad us to anger, neither bow us in care nor overwhelm us with terror."
An emotion thus consists, for Lange, of two factors: first, of what he calls the ' cause,' a sense-impression which operates, as a rule, by way of a remembrance or an asso- ciated idea, and secondly of the • effect,' namely, the refiexly aroused vasomotor changes (changes in the blood supply of the various organs and members of the body) and the changes, mental and bodily, that depend upon them. There is no affective intermediary between these two terms.1 which he remembers, e.g., 526 «., 535. No bodily change can be felt (the reader will be on his guard for the differences of terminology between James' book and the present work) unless it has attained a certain degree of intensity.
1 The Danish work of 1885, Om Sindsheva-geher, was translated into Ger- man in 1887 under the title Ueber Gemiithsbe-vegiingen: see pp. 47, 50, 76.
476 Emotion Affectioti as Reflexly Excited Sensation. — In § 70 we gave a brief account of some of the ways in which affection is regarded by modern psychologists. The James-Lange theory of emotion sug- gests yet another view: that the processes which, aroused by the regular channels of adequate stimulation, appear as organic sen- sations appear, when reflexly aroused, as affections. Miinsterberg, in fact, represents this view. " James, Lange and others have taught us to regard the emotions as the mental effects of reflexly excited peripheral processes...We may extend this principle of explanation from emotion to the simple feelings, and may affirm that reflexly excited extensions and flexions are the condi- tions of the conscious processes that we term pleasantness and unpleasantness." What appears under the ordinary conditions of stimulation as kinaesthesis or ' muscular sensation,' appears under the conditions of reflex arousal as affection.1 Miinsterberg's theory of affection thus furnishes an affective basis for the James-Lange theory of emotion; the bodily rever- beration of emotion would be affective, and not sensational, be- cause it is set up directly, reflexly, through a preorganised nervous mechanism. It must, however, be added that any such idea of the transforming character of reflex excitation seems to have been foreign to James' own thought; the nervous processes upon which emotions are conditioned are spoken of by him as ' sensational' processes, without qualification. The theory itself has the obscurity of all genetic (as opposed to nativistic) theories; it fails to show us how the physiological fact of reflex excitation can change the mental process correlated with muscular contraction from sen- sation to affection.
§ 130. The 'James-Lange Theory: Criticism and Modifica- tion. — The theory of emotion outlined in the previous Section has been preeminently successful in ' getting itself discussed.' Some psychologists hailed it as the light of a new psychological dispensation; others as vigorously re- 1 H. Miinsterberg, Beitrdge zur experimentellen Psychologic, iv., 1892, 227; Crundzuge dcr Psychologic, i, 1 900, 293.
§ 130. Criticism and Modification 477 jected it; yet others, and they the wisest, went critically to work upon it, examining arguments, weighing evidences, considering objections. There can be no doubt that it has exerted a profound influence upon current psychology, though there can, in the author's opinion, be no doubt, either, that its original formulation was one-sided and exaggerated.
An obvious objection, for instance, is that the bodily changes to which James refers may appear identically in very different emotions. There are tears of joy and tears of rage, as well as tears of sorrow; we may strike in fear or in cruelty, as well as in anger; we may run as hard to overtake a friend as we run from the pursuing bear; we may tremble from eagerness or from a maudlin sentimen- tality, as well as from fright. This objection is fatal, if we take James' earlier statements at their face value. In replying to it and to other criticisms, James has offered a revised version of his theory, whose divergence from the original text is very variously estimated, but which seems to the author to mark a definite retreat from an untenable position.
There are two principal points to be noted. The first is that James now admits the affective character of the per- ception which initiates the ^motion He grants a pleasant- ness or unpleasantness which seems immediately to inhere in the sensible qualities of the perception, which is ' beaten up together [with it] in our consciousness'; and while he finds, in his own case, that this affection is a 'very mild and, so to say, platonic affair,' he writes that "the primary Gcfiihlston [affective tone] may vary enormously in distinct- ness [or, as we should say, in intensity] in different men." It is not the affective character of emotion, therefore, that 478 Emotion derives from the reflexly excited organic sensations, but rather its specifically emotive character as a general seiz- ure of excitement.1 Secondly, James explains that the- perception which initiates the emotion is not the bare per-j ception of an object, but is the apprehension of a total situation.
" ' Objects ' are certainly the primitive arousers of instinctive reflex movements. But they take their place, as experience goes on, as elements in total ' situations,' the other elements of which may prompt to movements of an entirely different sort. As soon as the object has become thus familiar and suggestive, its emotional consequences...must start rather from the total situation which it suggests than from its own naked presence."2 The object which starts the emotion is thus a great deal more than a simple stimulus, transformed by a preorgan- ised nervous mechanism into a secondary or reflected afferent discharge; it is a total situation, to which the organism responds along the line of acquired as well as of congenital tendencies.
How far these two acknowledgments, of a primary af- fection attaching to the perception, and of the situational nature of the perception itself, — how far these admissions alter the theory, the reader must decide. What remain to constitute it are, first, the assignment of an instinctive basis to the emotional reaction, and secondly the insistence on organic sensations as the vehicle of a « rank excitement.'
The James-Lange theory undoubtedly owes much of its vogue, among English-speaking psychologists, to the manner of its pro- pounding. The accounts of emotion in the psychological text- 1 W. James, The Physical Basis of Emotion, in Psychol. Review, i., 1894, 523 ff. A like ' primary and immediate pleasure ' is accredited to the subtler (moral, intellectual, aesthetic) emotions in Princ. of Psychol., ii., 468; cf. the article just quoted, 534.
§ 130. Criticism and Modification 479 books had become too academic, too conventionalised, and James brought us back to the crude and the raw of actual experience. Nevertheless, it would be quite wrong — as well as being a poor compliment to James and Lange — to suppose that the theory had in it anything absolutely novel. Lange himself points out that his vasomotor hypothesis had been anticipated, in a curiously complete way, by Malebranche.1 And the emphasis on the organic constit- uents of emotion is, in reality, as old as systematic psychology. " In reply to the question: What is anger?" Aristotle writes, " the speculative philosopher says it is the desire of retaliation or some- thing of that sort, the naturalist says it is the seething of the peri- cordial blood or heat. Which of these now, is the real physical philosopher? I answer, it is the man who combines both of these characters." 2 There are passages in Descartes 3 and Spinoza4 that look in the same direction. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the anatomist Henle defines emotions as " ideas in con- nection with the bodily changes that they arouse, changes which manifest themselves in consciousness either as sensations or as dispositions \_Stimmungen~\ of the muscular system." 5 There is a page of Lotze's Medicinische Psychologie that might have been written by James in support of his theory,6 and Maudsley, in 1867, 1 Ueber Gemiithsbewegungen, 88 ff.; N. Malebranche, De la recherche de la verite, [1674-5] tr. 1694, bk. v., ch. iii.
2 W. A. Hammond, Aristotle's Psychology, 1902,8 (the translation has been somewhat condensed); cf. the whole passage, 6 ff., and also 211 f.; H. Sie- beck, Geschichte der Psychologie, I., ii., 1884, 89 f.
3 R. Descartes, Les passions de Pd??ie, 1649, arts. 27, 29, 33, 36-38, 46, etc. Cf. D. Irons, Descartes and Modern Theories of Emotion, in Philos. Review, 4 B. de Spinoza, Opera Posthuma, 1677; Ethic, tr. 1883 and later, pt. iii., def. 3. " By emotion I understand the affections of the body, by which the power of acting of the body itself is increased, diminished, helped or hindered, together with the idea of these affections." This conception underlies the whole of the analytical treatment of emotion in pt. iii.
6 F. G. J. Henle, Handbuch der rationellen Pathologie, 1846, 257; cf. An- thropologische Vortrage, i., 1876, 64 (emotion is " ideation with nerve-sympa- thies," that is, with organic sensations).
6 R. H. Lotze, Medicinische Psychologie oder Physiologic der Seele, 1852, 480 Emotion lays stress both upon the organic basis of emotion and upon its relation to instinct.1 This list of names might, without injustice to James and Lange, be very greatly lengthened, while the psy- chological parentage of the theory cannot, without injustice to psychology, be entirely passed over. There was no James-Lange theory before James and Lange; but the originality of the theory lies more in its formulation and — if one may so put things — in its timeliness than in its content.
The instinctive nature of the emotive reaction was clearly in- dicated, in 1880, by Schneider,2 — who, again, had his predecessors. It has been worked out recently, in systematic form, by McDougall.3 " Each of the principal instincts conditions some one kind of emotional excitement whose quality is specific or peculiar to it." McDougall couples in this way the following instincts and emotions (the first member of every pair is. the instinct, the second the cor- responding emotion): flight and fear, repulsion and disgust, curiosity and wonder, pugnacity and anger, self-abasement and subjection; self-assertion and elation, parental instinct and tender emotion. The principle upon which this list is based, the principle that every emotive situation appeals to preexisting determining tendencies, is undoubtedly correct; but the list itself is, just as certainly, a matter of individual preference rather than of scientific finality. Anger, e.g., cannot always be referred to pugnacity; tender emo- tion may be referred to other instincts than the parental. McDougall mentions, further, a number of instincts with less well-defined emo- tive reaction: the instinct of reproduction, the gregarious instinct, the instincts of acquisition and construction. Yet there are wellmarked emotions of sexual love, of security or self-expansion, of possession or self-extension, of success; and if the names of these latter emotions are strange, so are those of subjection and elation, which McDougall admits among the primary emotions. But no 1 H. Maudsley, The Physiology [and Pathology'] of Mind, [1867] 1876, 8 W. McDougall, An Introduction to Social Psychology, 1908, 46 ff.; cf. Physiological Psychology, 1905, 108 ff.
§ 131. The Organic Reaction as Constitutive 481 classification of this sort can be complete until we have a psycho- logical analysis of the various emotive consciousnesses.
§ 131. The Organic Reaction as Constitutive of Emotion. — In the first form of his theory, in which emotion is identified outright with organic sensation, James relied upon two principal arguments. The one is that "if we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our conscious- ness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no ' mind-stuff ' out of which the emotion can be constituted." The other is that there are many pathological cases in which emotion is objectless; if, then, we accept the theory, we are able to bring these pathological, unmotived emotions under a common scheme with the normal emotions. The arguments are, of course, strong or weak in themselves, and not in their relation to any theory; and we must accordingly examine the evidence upon which they rest.