the muscular tension which accompanies them. Darwin has given a remarkable description of the physiological symptoms of rage. ' The action of the heart is much accelerated...The face red dens or may turn deadly pale. The respiration is laboured, the chest heaves, and the dilated nostrils quiver. The whole body often trembles. The voice is affected. The teeth are clenched or ground together and the muscular system is commonly stimulated to violent, almost frantic action. The gestures...represent more or less plainly the act of striking or fighting with an enemy." l We shall not go so far as to maintain, with Professor James, 2 that the emotion of rage is reducible to the sum of these organic sensations: there will always be an irreducible psychic element in anger, if this be only the idea of striking or fighting, of which Darwin speaks, and which gives a common direction to so many diverse movements. But, though this idea determines the direction of the emotional state and the accompanying movements, the growing in tensity of the state itself is, we believe, nothing but the deeper and deeper disturbance of the organism, a disturbance which consciousness has no difficulty in measuring by the number and extent of the bodily surfaces concerned. It will be useless to assert that there is a restrained rage which is all the more intense. The reason is that, where -J emotion has free play, consciousness does not ^ "\ 1 The Expression of the Emotions, ist ed., (1872), p. 74. c >" 1 " What is an Emotion? " Mind, 1884, p. 189.
/ t 30 TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP, i J* f dwell on the details of the accompanying move ments, but it does dwell upon them and is concen trated upon them when its object is to conceal them. Eliminate, in short, all trace of organic disturbance, all tendency towards muscular contraction, and all that will be left of anger will be the idea, or, if you still insist on making it an emotion, you will be unable to assign it any intensity.
" Fear, when strong," says Herbert Spencer, " expresses itself in cries, in efforts to escape, in palpitations, in tremblings." l We go refl«sl move- further, and maintain that these move- wsentiai °dif- ments form part of the terror itself: by ferencc be-,,,-, -, tween inten- their means the terror becomes an emotion capable of passing through violent "^mo- different degrees of intensity. Suppress them entirely, and the more or less intense state of terror will be succeeded by an idea of terror, the wholly intellectual representation of a danger which it concerns us to avoid. There are also high degrees of joy and sorrow, of desire, aversion and even shame, the height of which will be found to be nothing but the reflex movements begun by the organism and perceived by conscious ness. ' When lovers meet," says Darwin, " we know that their hearts beat quickly, their breathing is hurried and their faces flushed." 2 Aversion is marked by movements of repugnance which we repeat without noticing when we think of the 1 Principles of Psychology, 3rd. ed., (1890), Vol. i, p. 482. 1 The Expression of the Emotions, ist ed., p. 78.
CHAP, i VIOLENT EMOTIONS 31 object of our dislike. We blush and involuntarily clench the fingers when we feel shame, even if it be retrospective. The acuteness of these emotions is estimated by the number and nature of the peripheral sensations which accompany them. Little by little, and in proportion as the emotional state loses its violence and gains in depth, the peripheral sensations will give place to inner states; it will be no longer our outward move ments but our ideas, our memories, our states of consciousness of every description, which will turn in larger or smaller numbers in a definite direction. There is, then, no essential difference from the point of view of intensity between the deep-seated feelings, of which we spoke at the beginning, and the acute or violent emotions which we have just passed in review. To say that love, hatred, desire, increase in violence is to assert that they are projected outwards, that they radiate to the surface, that peripheral sensations are substituted for inner states: but super ficial or deep-seated, violent or reflective, the intensity of these feelings always consists in the multiplicity of simple states which consciousness dimly discerns in them.
We have hitherto confined ourselves to feelings and efforts, complex states the intensity of which Magnitude of does not absolutely depend on an ex- sensations.. Affective and ternal cause. But sensations seem to us representative sensations. simple states i in what will their magnitude 32 TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP, i consist? The intensity of sensations varies with the external cause of which they are said to be the conscious equivalent: how shall we explain the presence of quantity in an effect which is inexten- sive, and in this case indivisible? To answer this question, we must first distinguish between the so-called affective and the representative sensa tions. There is no doubt that we pass gradually from the one to the other and that some affective element enters into the majority of our simple representations. But nothing prevents us from isolating this element and inquiring separately, in what does the intensity of an affective sensation, a pleasure or a pain, consist?
Perhaps the difficulty of the latter problem is prin cipally due to the fact that we are unwilling to see Affective sen- m tne affective state anything but the "redo S?- conscious expression of an organic disturbirbanoe. ^HCC, the mward echo Qf an outwar(i CaUS6.
We notice that a more intense sensation generally corresponds to a greater nervous disturbance; but inasmuch as these disturbances are uncon scious as movements, since they come before con sciousness in the guise of a sensation which has no resemblance at all to motion, we do not see how they could transmit to the sensation anything of their own magnitude. For there is nothing in common, we repeat, between superposable magnitudes such as, for example, vibration- amplitudes, and sensations which do not occupy CHAP, i AFFECTIVE SENSATIONS 33 space. If the more intense sensation seems to us to contain the less intense, if it assumes for us, like the physical impression itself, the form of a magnitude, the reason probably is that it retains something of the physical impression to which it j, corresponds. And it will retain nothing of it if it * is merely the conscious translation of a movement of molecules; for, just because this movement is translated into the sensation of pleasure or pain, it remains unconscious as molecular movement.
But it might be asked whether pleasure and pain, instead of expressing only what has just pleasure and occurred, or what is actually occurring, m *ne organism, as is usually believed, could not also point out what is going to, or what is tending to take place. It past stimulus. seems indeed somewhat improbable that nature, so profoundly utilitarian, should have here assigned to consciousness the merely scientific task of informing us about the past or the present, which no longer depend upon us. It must be noticed in addition that we rise by imperceptible stages from automatic to free movements, and that the latter differ from the former principally in introducing an affective sensation between the external action which occasions them and the volitional reaction which ensues. Indeed, all our actions might have been automatic, and we can surmise that there are many organized beings in whose case an external stimulus causes a definite reaction without calling up consciousness as an 34 TIME AND FREE WILL intermediate agent. If pleasure and pain make their appearance in certain privileged beings, it is probably to call forth a resistance to the automatic reaction which would have taken place: either sensation has nothing to do, or it is nascent free dom. But how would it enable us to resist the reaction which is in preparation if it did not acquaint us with the nature of the latter by some definite sign? And what can this sign be except the sketching, and, as it were, the prefiguring of the future automatic movements in the very midst of the sensation which is being experienced? The affective state must then correspond not merely to the physical disturbances, movements or phe nomena which have taken place, but also, and especially, to those which are in preparation, those which are getting ready to be.
It is certainly not obvious at first sight how this hypothesis simplifies the problem. For we are intensity oi trYmg to ^n^ wnat there can be in common, from the point of view of magni- tude» between a physical phenomenon an(* a state °f consciousness, and we seem to have merely turned the difficulty round by making the present state of consciousness a sign of the future reaction, rather than a psychic translation of the past stimulus. But the difference between the two hypotheses is considerable. For the molecular disturbances which were mentioned just now are necessarily unconscious, since no trace of the movements connsciobuesne°ssr CHAP, i AFFECTIVE SENSATIONS 35 themselves can be actually perceived in the sensation which translates them. But the auto matic movements which tend to follow the stimulus as its natural outcome are likely to be conscious as movements: or else the sensation itself, whose function is to invite us to choose between this automatic reaction and other possible movements, would be of no avail. The intensity of affective sensations might thus be nothing more than our consciousness of the involuntary movements which are being begun and outlined, so to speak, within these states, and which would have gone on in their own way if nature had made us automata instead of conscious beings.
If such be the case, we shall not compare a pain of increasing intensity to a note which grows louder and louder, but rather to a Intensity o! a...pain estim- symphony, in which an increasing numated by extent / r •,,1 of organism ber of instruments make themselves heard. Within the characteristic sen sation, which gives the tone to all the others, consciousness distinguishes a larger or smaller number of sensations arising at different points of the periphery, muscular contractions, organic movements of every kind: the choir of these elementary psychic states voices the new demands of the organism, when confronted by a new situa tion. In other words, we estimate the intensity of a pain by the larger or smaller part of the organism which takes interest in it. Richet l 36 TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP. I has observed that the slighter the pain, the more precisely is it referred to a particular spot; if it becomes more intense, it is referred to the whole of the member affected. And he concludes by saying that " the pain spreads in proportion as it is more intense." l We should rather reverse the sentence, and define the intensity of the pain by the very number and extent of the parts of the body which sympathize with it and react, and whose reactions are perceived by conscious ness. To convince ourselves of this, it will be enough to read the remarkable description of disgust given by the same author: "If the stimu lus is slight there may be neither nausea nor vomiting...If the stimulus is stronger, in stead of being confined to the pneumo-gastric nerve, it spreads and affects almost the whole organic system. The face turns pale, the smooth muscles of the skin contract, the skin is covered with a cold perspiration, the heart stops beating: in a word there is a general organic disturbance following the stimulation of the medulla oblongata, and this disturbance is the supreme expression of disgust." * But is it nothing more than its expression? In what will the general sensa tion of disgust consist, if not in the sum of these elementary sensations? And what can we un derstand here by increasing intensity, if it is not the constantly increasing number of sensations AFFECTIVE SENSATIONS 37 which join in with the sensations already experi enced? Darwin has drawn a striking picture of the reactions following a pain which becomes more and more acute. " Great pain urges all animals...to make the most violent and diversified efforts to escape from the cause of suffering...With men the mouth may be closely compressed, or more commonly the lips are retracted with the teeth clenched or ground together...The eyes stare wildly...or the brows are heavily contracted. Perspiration bathes the body...The cir culation and respiration are much affected."1 Now, is it not by this very contraction of the muscles affected that we measure the intensity of a pain? Analyse your idea of any suffering which you call extreme: do you not mean that it is unbearable, that is to say, that it urges the organism to a thousand different actions in order to escape from it? I can picture to myself a nerve transmitting a pain which is independent of all automatic reaction; and I can equally understand that stronger or weaker stimulations influence this nerve differently. But I do not see how these differences of sensation would be interpreted by our consciousness as differences of quantity unless we connected them with the reactions which usually accompany them, and which are more or less extended and more or 1 The Expression of the Emotions, ist ed., pp. 72, 69, 70.
38 TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP. I less important. Without these subsequent re actions, the intensity of the pain would be a quality, and not a magnitude.
We have hardly any other means of comparing several pleasures with one another. What do pleasures com- we mean bY a §reater pleasure except a S"taci5ation! pleasure that is preferred? And what can our preference be, except a certain disposition of our organs, the effect of which is that, when two pleasures are offered simultane ously to our mind, our body inclines towards one of them? Analyse this inclination itself and you will find a great many little movements which begin and become perceptible in the organs con cerned, and even in the rest of the body, as if the organism were coming forth to meet the pleasure as soon as it is pictured. When we define inclina tion as a movement, we are not using a metaphor. When confronted by several pleasures pictured by our mind, our body turns towards one of them spontaneously, as though by a reflex action. It rests with us to check it, but the attraction of the pleasure is nothing but this movement that is begun, and the very keenness of the plea sure, while we enjoy it, is merely the inertia of the organism, which is immersed in it and rejects every other sensation. Without this vis inertiae of which we become conscious by the very resistance which we offer to anything that might distract us, pleasure would be a state, but no longer a magnitude. In the moral as in CHAP, i REPRESENTATIVE SENSATIONS 39 the physical world, attraction serves to define movement rather than to produce it.
We have studied the affective sensations separ ately, but we must now notice that many repre- The intensity sentative sensations possess an affective tive sensations, character, andthus call forth a reaction Many also af-.
fectiveandin- on our part which we take into account forth, in siderable increase of light is represented others a new.,...
element enters- for us by a characteristic sensation which is not yet pain, but which is analogous to dazzling. In proportion as the amplitude of sound-vibrations increases, our head and then our body seem to us to vibrate or to receive a shock. Certain representative sensations, those of taste, smell and temperature, have a fixed character of pleasantness or unpleasantness. Between flavours which are more or less bitter you will hardly distinguish anything but differ ences of quality; they are like different shades of one and the same colour. But these differ ences of quality are at once interpreted as differ ences of quantity, because of their affective char acter and the more or less pronounced movements of reaction, pleasure or repugnance, which they suggest to us. Besides, even when the sensation remains purely representative, its external cause cannot exceed a certain degree of strength or weakness without inciting us to movements which enable us to measure it. Sometimes indeed 40 TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP, i we have to make an effort to perceive this sensa tion, as if it were trying to escape notice; some times on the other hand it obsesses us, forces itself upon us and engrosses us to such an extent that we make every effort to escape from it and to remain ourselves. In the former case the sensation is said to be of slight intensity, and in the latter case very intense. Thus, in order to perceive a distant sound, to distinguish what we call a faint smell or a dim light, we strain all our faculties, we " pay attention." And it is just because the smell and the light thus require to be reinforced by our efforts that they seem to us feeble. And, inversely, we recognize a sensation of extreme intensity by the irresistible reflex movements to which it incites us, or by the powerlessness with which it affects us. When a cannon is fired off close to our ears or a dazzling light suddenly flares up, we lose for an instant the consciousness of our personality; this state may even last some time in the case of a very nervous subject. It must be added that, even within the range of the so-called medium inten sities, when we are dealing on even terms with a representative sensation, we often estimate its importance by comparing it with another which it drives away, or by taking account of the per sistence with which it returns. Thus the ticking of a watch seems louder at night because it easily monopolizes a consciousness almost empty of sensations and ideas. Foreigners talking to one CHAP, i REPRESENTATIVE SENSATIONS 4!
another in a language which we do not under stand seem to us to speak very loudly, because their words no longer call up any ideas in our mind, and thus break in upon a kind of intellectual silence and monopolize our attention like the ticking of a watch at night. With these so-called medium sensations, however, we approach a series of psychic states, the intensity of which is likely to possess a new meaning. For, in most cases, the organism hardly reacts at all, at least in a way that can be perceived; and yet we still make a magnitude out of the pitch of a sound, the intensity of a light, the saturation of a colour. Doubtless, a closer observation of what takes place in the whole of the organism when we hear such and such a note or perceive such and such a colour has more than one sur prise in store for us. Has not C. Fere shown that every sensation is accompanied by an in crease in muscular force which can be measured by the dynamometer? * But of an increase of this kind there is hardly any consciousness at all, and if we reflect on the precision with which we distinguish sounds and colours, nay, even weights and temperatures, we shall easily guess that some new element must come into play in our estimate of them.
Now, the nature of this element is easy to deter- 1 C. F6r£, Sensation et Mouvcment. Paris, 1887.
42 TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP. I mine. For, in proportion as a sensation loses its affective character and becomes The purely re-...presentative representative, the reactions which it sensations are S5BStenS called f°rtn °n OUr Part tend t0 dlS" causes. appear, but at the same time we per ceive the external object which is its cause, or if we do not now perceive it, we have perceived it, and we think of it. Now, this cause is ex tensive and therefore measurable: a constant experience, which began with the first glimmer ings of consciousness and which continues throughout the whole of our life, shows us a definite shade of sensation corresponding to a definite amount of stimulation. We thus associ ate the idea of a certain quantity of cause with a certain quality of effect; and finally, as happens in the case of every acquired perception, we trans fer the idea into the sensation, the quantity of the cause into the quality of the effect. At this very moment the intensity, which was nothing but a certain shade or quality of the sensation, becomes a magnitude. We shall easily understand this process if, for example, we hold a pin in our right hand and prick our left hand more and more deeply. At first we shall feel as it were a tickling, then a touch which is succeeded by a prick, then a pain localized at a point, and finally the spreading of this pain over the surrounding zone. And the more we reflect on it, the more clearly shall we see that we are here dealing with so many qualitatively distinct sensations, CHAP, i SENSATION OF SOUND 43 so many varieties of a single species. But yet we spoke at first of one and the same sensation which spread further and further, of one prick which increased in intensity. The reason is that, without noticing it, we localized in the sensation of the left hand, which is pricked, the progressive effort of the right hand, which pricks. We thus introduced the caus^ into the effect, and uncon sciously interpreted quality as quantity, intens ity as magnitude. Now, it is easy to see that the intensity of every representative sensation ought to be understood in the same way.
The sensations of sound display well marked degrees of intensity. We have already spoken of the necessity of taking into account The sensa-. J ° tions of sound, the affective character of these sensa- Intensity mea-.
iured by effort tions, the shock received by the whole necessary to J produce a sim- of the organism. We have shown that ilar sound. °