Instinct and Emotion

Ie considere que, dÉs le premier moment que nostre ame a estÉ iointe au corps, il est vray-semblable qu’elle a senty de la ioye, & incontinent aprÉs de l’amour, puis peut-estre aussi de la haine, & de la tristesse; & que les mesmes dispositions du corps, qui out pour lors causÉ en elles ces passions, en out naturellement par aprÉs acompagnÉ les pensÉes.—RenÉ Descartes

§ 46. The Nature of Instinct.—We left the sense-feelings a long time ago (§ 18), though we have made occasional reference to them and to emotion in recent paragraphs. Now we return to the feeling-side of mind; but we must begin with an account of instinct, which is related both to emotion and to action.

Instinct and reason are familiar catch-words of popular psychology. Animals are said to act ‘on instinct,’ while man, at any rate in his specifically human capacity, acts ‘by reason.’ The terms, as thus used, are not descriptive but explanatory. Just as a mental connection is supposed to be explained by similarity or contiguity of ideas (p. 146), so a particular activity or performance is supposed to be explained when we have labelled it ‘instinctive’ or ‘rational.’ But what is instinct?

If we observe the behaviour of the lower animals, we find two sorts of response to stimulation: the one points to the working of an inherited nervous mechanism, the other depends upon nervous connections formed during the life-time of the individual. The second year’s bird builds the nest of its species, though it has never built a nest before; the cage-reared migrant beats its wings against the bars at the approach of winter, though it has never taken flight to the southward. Here is behaviour that we must refer to innate nervous tendencies, to the working of an inherited nervous mechanism. If, on the other hand, the parent birds come to the window-sill and take crumbs from our hand, we are in presence of behaviour of the second type. The difference, in the broad, is clear enough; only we must not press it too far. The second year’s bird, we say, builds the nest of its species; but one nest is never quite like another; something will depend upon the situation. Contrariwise, the birds would not come to the window if they had not an innate attraction to food, or a natural boldness of disposition, or a native tendency to flock with their fellows. The two sorts of behaviour can be distinguished; but they are likely to enter together, though in unequal degree, into one and the same performance.

Instinct, now, is the general name for these innate tendencies to behaviour. The word explains nothing; it is the business of science to find out what the inherited nervous mechanisms are, and how they work; but though nothing is explained, we are helped by the term toward a classification of the facts of behaviour. All of man’s conduct will be instinctive, for example, that can be shown to issue from innate nervous tendencies; and further, all of man’s conduct will be in so far instinctive as innate nervous tendencies can be shown to have a share in producing it. How large a part, then, does instinct, in this sense, play in the life of man? Not a question that can be answered offhand! For you might argue, as has been argued, that because man is the most flexible and adaptable and teachable of all animals, because he lives in all climates and thrives in the most varied conditions of life, therefore he has but few instincts. Or you might argue that, since man has undergone more change and has progressed further than any other animal; since his evolutionary history, though not longer in time, is richer in biological incident than that of the other animals; therefore he must have a great variety of instincts, or at any rate a great variety of inherited nervous mechanisms that help to guide and shape his conduct. What are the facts?

If we try to work out a rough list of human instincts, we find, at the lower end of the scale, a number of definite modes of response to particular stimuli; such things as coughing, sneezing, swallowing, smiling, threading our way in the street, beating time to music; or, in the baby, such things as sucking, clasping, biting, turning the head aside, standing, creeping, walking, crying, vocalising. At the upper end of the scale, we find gross general tendencies: the tendency to take the world of perception as a world of real things in outside space (p. 115); the empathic tendency to humanise and personalise our surroundings (p. 198); the social tendency that makes us imitative and credulous; the tendency to classify everything in pairs; the tendency to try things out, which is always at war with the tendency to let things be. These tendencies, and others of the same character, represent directive pressures laid upon the organism, more strongly upon some individuals and more weakly upon others, but in some measure upon all; they are realised or expressed on very various occasions, and with wide differences of mental accompaniment. We have spoken of some of them already; and instances may be found for the looking. Take the empathic tendency: what lover of books has not shifted the place of certain volumes on a shelf, because he could not bear to put good and bad, sound and trivial, side by side,—as if the books would feel the incongruity? Take the social tendency: we all tend to pay respect to fashion, even the silliest; we all tend to believe what we see printed in large headlines; we are all gullible, if only the cheat speaks to us in good English and appeals to our habitual standards of living. The tendency to classify by pairs shows not only in the dogmatism of uneducated persons—an action must be positively right or wrong, a man must be positively innocent or guilty—but also in the structure of systems of philosophy, in the distinctions of active-passive, subject-object, body-mind, thing-attribute, appearance-reality, and so on. The tendency to try things out is largely responsible both for the play of the child and the research of the man of science; read Andrew Lang’s story of the first radical! The tendency to let things be, the conservative tendency, is on its side largely responsible for the laziness of a life of routine.

Between these extremes lie the instincts that are so called in our ordinary speech, and that you would probably have thought of, if you had been asked to give examples of human instincts: such things as fear, love, rivalry, jealousy, pugnacity, bashfulness, self-assertion, various lines of ‘interest.’ All these names, and many like them, stand for inherited nervous dispositions which are realised or expressed in emotion. They too are differently combined, and exist in varying degree, in different individuals; and they too are common, in some measure, to all humanity.

Can we now say how man compares, in the matter of instinct, with the lower animals? James commits himself so far as to declare that “no other mammal, not even the monkey, shows so large an array.” The statement is probably true, if we mean by instinct, not a fixed and unchanging mode of response to the given stimulus or situation, but rather an equipment of innate tendencies that may form the basis of all sorts of response; an all-round readiness of behaviour, as it were, such that no stimulus or situation finds us wholly unprepared, while yet the preparation is not so narrow and definite as to force us into special and invariable response. Civilised man ‘reasons’ always on the basis of his instinctive tendencies; his ‘instincts,’ on the other hand, are in general less absorbingly possessive and less close-knit than those of lower forms of life.

§ 47. The Two Sides of Instinct.—If instinct is the general name for the innate nervous tendencies to behaviour, then the detailed study of instinct belongs to physiology and general biology. The psychologist is concerned with it only in so far as the innate tendencies guide and form the stream of thought. There is, however, another side to instinct, which makes it a matter of direct psychological observation; the touching-off of an instinctive response may be accompanied by mental processes, by sensations and feeling. We must say something of instinct in both relations; and we look at it, first, from the biological point of view.

The list of instincts given on pp. 205 ff. includes tendencies of very different kinds, simple and complex, variable and constant. Sweeping statements are therefore dangerous; we must be careful to guard our generalisations by giving instances. That premised, we note, to begin with, that the innate tendencies are rarely perfect, completely ready for action, at birth; they ripen as the organism developes. The child does not learn to walk, or the bird to fly, in any strict sense of the word ‘learn’; the innate tendencies settle to their perfect work as time goes on. We note, secondly, that the tendencies may ripen at very different levels of individual development; the culmination of sex-interest at adolescence, the appearance of bashfulness in the child of three or four years, the lack of fear in the new-born babe, are cases in point. Thirdly, they are extraordinarily persistent. Our instincts, no doubt, wax and wane; but they change far less than their outward expression would indicate. The boy, we say, goes through the collecting stage, and therewith an end; but do not grown men too collect, if they have time and money? The little girl with her doll is the later mother with her child; and the play of the child persists in the technical play of the gambler and the experimental essays of the man of science. Fourthly, they are by no means harmonious among themselves. In many animals the instinct to crouch motionless conflicts with the instinct to flee from the object of fear, and you may see them obeying now the one and now the other. Curiosity conflicts with alarm: watch a young child on its first introduction to a dog or a beetle! The sparrow is at once audacious and cautious, bold and timid; and every human adult—despite the song in Iolanthe—is both conservative and radical. Fifthly, they are looser, have (so to say) a greater freedom of play, than is commonly supposed; and this in two directions; the same response may be touched off by situations that have only a general resemblance; and, conversely, situations that seem to be identical may touch off responses that show a good deal of difference. In briefer statement, like stimuli may call out the same response: we smile from happiness or from superiority; and the same stimulus repeated may call out responses that are hardly even like: the extreme case is, perhaps, our crying or laughing for joy. Sixthly, they are liable to be checked, turned aside, inhibited, by acquired nervous tendencies; habit is not only second nature, but may also overcome nature. A chick pecks at an humble-bee, and pays the penalty; thereafter it rejects yolk of egg. A pike in an aquarium, separated from minnows by a glass screen, struck repeatedly at its natural prey and bumped its head; when the screen was removed, the minnows were left undisturbed. If a sheet of glass is placed before the eyes, and a rubber-tipped hammer springs up and hits it, you wink, perhaps, for the first hundred times; but you can presently inhibit the wink. This liability to inhibition is, of course, more obvious in the case of the more complex tendencies. Seventhly, they are liable to specialisation. A bird builds its nest in a certain suitable place; and then, though the site may become increasingly dangerous and exposed, persists in building there again, year after year. The routes that various birds follow in their migratory flight south and north show the same kind of specialised set. Eighthly and lastly, the more complicated tendencies may, especially in the case of man, be broken up into partial tendencies; and these partial tendencies may then form connections of the most varied sort with acquired tendencies. A father strikes a blow in defence of his child: love and hate and possibly fear are involved; if the deed is done in public, such social instincts as love of approbation and fear of ridicule may come in; all these instincts are concerned, and yet the father would give you his reasons for the blow! Civilised man, we said, always ‘reasons’ on the basis of his instinctive tendencies; we had better have said that he reasons on the basis of various fragments of instinctive tendency, disjoined from their original connections and recombined for an immediate purpose.

So much for the biological side of instinct. We have no space for a longer treatment; though, indeed, if you go to the larger works, you will find little more that is definite and firmly established; the detailed study of the innate tendencies has hardly begun. If we turn now to the mental accompaniments of instinctive response, we find ourselves in even worse case; we know practically nothing. It is clear that some of the more limited responses have a characteristic mental correlate—think of coughing, sneezing, smiling—which may, however, according to circumstances, be either vivid or so obscure as to escape notice. It is clear, again, that the empathic tendencies are likely to be characterised by more or less massive complexes of organic sensation; and it is perhaps true that this organic surge represents the mental aspect of the instincts proper, those that pass over into emotions; for they are responses or reactions of the whole organism, and not of some particular organ or member. Most of the large directive pressures, that we placed at the upper end of the scale, show themselves rather in the volume and trend of the mental stream than in the addition of new processes, though it is quite possible that they imply specific bodily attitudes, and arouse specific patterns of kinÆsthesis in head or eyes, from breathing or from the muscular set of the trunk. We all know how it feels to be critically on guard against deception; but is there not, sometimes at any rate, a felt attitude of acceptance, of credulity? could we not, sometimes, after the serious-faced jester has played his trick upon us, feel ourselves back into our credulous attitude? We all know, again, how disconcerting it is to be faced by a third possibility when we have comfortably reduced things to a choice of alternatives; but can we not, now and then, catch ourselves in a felt attitude of dividing by two? Let the reader keep an eye on his own experiences! Lastly, a response that is often repeated will illustrate the psychological law of growth and decay (p. 183); the organic and kinÆsthetic sensations will be supplemented by images, which will increase up to a certain point, and thereafter fall away. Fear of the dark is one instance; the use and disuse of terms of endearment offer another.

As regards feeling, we can only say that all six types of sense-feeling—the agreeable and disagreeable, the exciting and subduing, the straining and relaxing—may appear in connection with instinctive responses, and especially with those that we have placed in the middle portion of the scale. Such words as fear, pugnacity, rivalry, carry the stamp of feeling upon them.

§ 48. Determining Tendencies.—The reader must have felt for some time past that we sorely need a technical term for all the directive nerve-forces, brain-habits, instinctive tendencies, and so forth, that figure in psychological discussion. There is such a term, formed on the analogy of ‘associative tendencies’; psychologists are coming more and more to speak of determining tendencies. Any nervous set or disposition that turns our attention in a certain direction, that casts our perceptions into a certain form, that places a definite meaning upon an equivocal word, that governs our response to a particular situation, may be called a determining tendency. Some of these tendencies are simple, and some are extremely complex; some are inherited, and some are acquired in the life-time of the individual. All alike lay down a path of least resistance for the psychoneural processes (p. 164) to follow, and thus determine the flow of the mental stream.

Why, then, has not the term been introduced before? would not its use have simplified things, have brought the different topics together, have saved a good deal of roundabout phrasing? No doubt. But there are two dangers in the use of such a technical term. The one is that you think merely the words themselves, and do not carry your thought back to the nervous system. A determining tendency is an affair not of mind but of body; and if we had used the words from the outset, you might easily have slipped into the belief that there are determining tendencies in the mind, and might thus have left the nervous system out of account. Have you not—to be honest!—thought and spoken of your ‘bodily sensations’ ever since you studied the chapter on sensation? Yet there are no physical or bodily sensations, any more than there are mental determining tendencies; the bodily processes correlated with sensation are not the sensation, and the mental flow correlated with a nervous tendency is not that tendency. The second danger is that you look upon the technical term as self-explanatory; so that, just as popular psychology explains the conduct of the lower animals by ‘instinct,’ without ever asking what instinct is or how it explains, you too explain certain mental phenomena by ‘determining tendency,’ forgetting that the work of correlation is still all to do. New terms bring these risks, that you put the word in place of the facts and confuse a label with an explanation; but they are also inevitable, when new observations accumulate; and this particular term should now be as harmless as it is necessary.

We shall meet the determining tendencies again, when we come to deal with action and thought. Meantime let us note that they furnish a definition of that rather obscure word ‘suggestion.’ A suggestion is something that comes to us with more or less of the force of a command; but what does this ‘force of a command’ mean? Our new technical term helps us: a suggestion is any stimulus to nervous activity, external or internal, with or without mental accompaniment, that touches off a determining tendency. The determining tendency may be realised, or may be inhibited, as circumstances decide; the essence of a suggestion is, always and everywhere, that it releases such a tendency. Thus, the psychological observer of whom we spoke on p. 96 received from the experimenter certain instructions; these instructions were obeyed, that is, they were effective suggestions. What, now, set up the determining tendency to follow instructions? A foregone suggestion: the student came into the laboratory to observe, to be taught, to put himself under direction. What brought him into the laboratory? Another foregone suggestion: the wish to learn psychology at first hand, the example of his friends. What led him to choose at the university the course that includes psychology? What led him to choose this particular university? What led him to enter any university? All these results are due to suggestions, which grow in number and complexity the farther back we go; and the force of the suggestions, in every case, is their appeal to determining tendencies. A nervous system that lacked these tendencies would furnish its possessor with connections that were all, so to speak, on the same plane; the organism could neither lead nor follow, neither choose nor reject, neither work nor play; it would not be suggestible.

From this digression we pass to the study of emotion, which, as we have seen, is closely related to the instincts of the middle part of our scale.

§ 49. The Nature of Emotion.—Suppose that you are sitting at your desk, busy in your regular way; and suppose that a street-car passes by the house. The familiar rumble does not distract you; it slips in among the obscure processes of the margin. Suddenly you hear a shrill scream; and now the noise of the car shoots to the focus of attention, becomes the context of the 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 imperatively necessary. As you run, you have fragmentary ideas: ‘a child,’ perhaps, in internal speech; a visual flash of some previous accident; a momentary kinÆsthetic set, the stiffening of protest, that represents 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 discomfort that floods you, 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 experience, a course of connected processes; it begins, in our illustration, with the empathic perception of the scream, and lasts through and beyond the events that we have described; indeed, the last traces of the horror may not wear off for days. It is also, characteristically, a suddenly aroused experience; it begins abruptly, though it dies down gradually; the accident comes upon you all at once, and drives everything else out of mind. It is highly complex, since its stimulus is not a single object, a perceptive stimulus, but a total situation or predicament, which may arouse all sorts of ideas. It is coloured through and through by feeling, since both the situation itself and the organic sensations of the emotive response are definitely pleasant or unpleasant. It is, at any rate in its more intense phases, insistently organic; we took the testimony of language on p. 65, and you can easily add to the instances there cited; though it must be said also that the proportion of organic sensations to ideas varies greatly from emotion to emotion and from individual to individual. Finally, it is always a predetermined experience, issuing from determining tendencies and moving forward, in the given case, to a natural end; though here, too, there is great variability, since the determining tendencies to which the situation makes appeal may be almost wholly instinctive, or may (as in the illustration we have chosen) be partly instinctive and partly acquired.

The older books on psychology devote a great deal of space to the classification of emotions; modern psychology has rather been concerned to bring emotion into the laboratory, and to trace the emotive pattern under experimental control. It was natural to begin with the simpler modes of feeling, and to proceed from them to the more complex; and experiments were therefore made on the sense-feelings. We have seen that the results are not yet definitely assured (pp. 83 f.), so that it is still too early to write an adequate psychology of the emotions. On the whole, however, it seems that the three dimensions of sense-feeling will serve for a classification of emotion: joy and fear are agreeable and disagreeable emotions, anger and grief are exciting and subduing, hope and relief are straining and relaxing. It is not difficult to carry this classification further; to find, for instance, agreeable-exciting, disagreeable-exciting, agreeable-subduing, disagreeable-subduing, even agreeable-exciting-straining, agreeable-subduing-relaxing forms, and so on and so forth; but nothing is gained, at present, by drawing such distinctions. We shall therefore leave the classification thus in the rough. One point only calls for comment. We said that emotion is a suddenly aroused experience, beginning abruptly and dying down slowly; yet the straining and relaxing emotions—hope, anxiety, disappointment, relief—seem, on the contrary, to arise slowly and gradually. It is difficult to be sure of the facts; but we must be careful not to confuse the starting of an emotion with what occurs after it has started. It may very likely grow in strength; and it will follow, as we have said, a characteristic course in time, until it reaches its natural end. Either of these things—the growth in intensity or the development in time—may give the illusion of a gradual beginning. If we abstract from them, then it appears that these straining-relaxing emotions really come suddenly; they occupy the mind all at once; we shift directly from grief to hope, from satisfaction to anxiety, from fear to relief; the emotions may alternate in our experience, but they set in abruptly. We say of a sick friend ‘The doctor says that we may begin to hope,’ or ‘The relatives are beginning to be a little anxious’; but as a matter of psychological fact the hope and the anxiety appear to come and go, as mental patterns, quite suddenly; the situation touches off, actualises, now the one set of tendencies, and now the other. So our general description of emotion may stand.

§ 50. The James-Lange Theory of Emotion.—We saw that emotion, at any rate in its intenser phases, is insistently organic; the organic sensations readily blend both with one another and with feeling; and the resultant massive fusion is as characteristic of emotion as the organic surge (p. 211) is characteristic of instinct. Everyone can distinguish, even in imagination, the rushing, swelling ‘feel’ of anger from the sinking, shrinking ‘feel’ of fear. Psychology has always had an open eye for the organic constituent of emotion; Aristotle and many later writers refer to it; and in France emphasis upon the organic stir in emotion became almost a matter of psychological orthodoxy. The whole subject was, however, set in a new light when the late Professor James propounded in 1884 his famous ‘theory of emotion.’ “My thesis is,” James wrote, “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;” “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.” The view thus paradoxically stated aroused much discussion; and it gained further impetus by the publication in 1885 of an essay on emotion by Carl Lange, professor of medicine in Copenhagen; Lange independently comes to a conclusion which, in principle, is the same as that of James.

James’ position is, evidently, twofold. He affirms, in the first place, that emotions have an instinctive basis. A situation is presented; the organism perceives it; and immediately, directly, because the situation appeals to instinctive tendencies in the nervous system, the emotive response is evoked. With that statement we have no quarrel. James also affirms, however, that the ‘feel’ of what we have called the emotive response is itself the experience of emotion; having the organic sensations, you have the emotion; if you had not the organic sensations, there would be no emotion. In a later essay he modified or amplified his position: he grants the presence in emotion of ideas and of pleasant and unpleasant feelings, but still maintains that the one thing characteristic of the emotions is a general seizure of excitement, a churning-up of the interior of the organism; and this rank excitement is a matter of the organic sensations.

So there arise two questions of fact: is emotion possible if the organic sensations are lacking? and is the organic fusion sufficiently differentiated, in the various emotions, to give them their distinctive ‘feels’ in experience?

To answer the first question we have observations both upon dogs and upon human beings. Emotive responses “occur in dogs in which practically all the main viscera and the great bulk of skeletal muscle have been removed from subjection to, and from influence upon, the brain by severance of the vagus nerves and the spinal cord. In these animals no alteration whatever was noticed in the occurrence, under appropriate circumstances, of characteristic expressions of voice and features, indicating anger, delight or fear.” So far, then, the evidence tells against the necessity of organic sensations. As regards human beings, we cannot, of course, produce a visceral anÆsthesia at will, by operating upon the living nervous system; we must wait until cases turn up in the hospitals. Some such cases have been examined; and while the observations made upon them are not conclusive, still, they lend themselves more readily to the same than to the opposite interpretation; if emotion is lacking, the lack seems due rather to a general impairment of nervous function, including that of the brain, than to the specific loss of the organic sensations. The evidence as a whole is thus unfavourable to James.

To answer the second question we may refer to the results of experiments recently conducted by Professor W. B. Cannon in the physiological laboratory of Harvard University. “If various strong emotions can thus be expressed in the diffused activities of [a certain division of the nervous system]—the division which accelerates the heart, inhibits the movements of the stomach and intestines, contracts the blood vessels, erects the hairs, liberates sugar, and discharges adrenin—it would appear that the bodily conditions which have been assumed, by some psychologists, to distinguish emotions from one another must be sought for elsewhere than in the viscera. We do not ‘feel sorry because we cry,’ as James contended, but we cry because, when we are sorry or overjoyed or violently angry or full of tender affection,—when any one of these diverse emotional states is present,—there are nervous discharges by sympathetic channels to various viscera, including the lachrymal glands. In terror and rage and intense elation, for example, the responses in the viscera seem too uniform to offer a satisfactory means of distinguishing states which, in man at least, are very different in subjective quality.... The viscera are relatively unimportant in an emotional complex, especially in contributing differential features.” The technicalities of this quotation do not here concern us; you will understand them if you read Dr. Cannon’s book; but it is clear that, again, the evidence is against James’ view.

We must conclude, then, that the emotive pattern is a more complicated affair than the James-Lange theory represented it to be. All the component processes—perception, ideas, kinÆsthesis, organic sensations, feeling—play their part in the total experience. We must conclude, too, that the pattern varies, at least in the matter of emphasis, from one individual to another; that the processes which ‘mean’ anger or fear to A may differ from those which ‘mean’ the same emotion to B; the ideas, the kinÆsthetic set, the organic sensations, may be more or less vivid, more or less extended, more or less stable features of the mental pattern. In fine, we agree with James that all emotions have an instinctive basis; and we agree with him, further, that the organic commotion, always present in some measure and degree, is characteristic of the experience; but we cannot regard this organic commotion either as constitutive, as the one thing necessary to emotion, or as differential, the one thing that marks of any particular emotion from all the rest. From an Æsthetic point of view we may regret this conclusion; it is always more satisfactory to end up a discussion with some positive, clean-cut statement than to leave the subject with a ‘safe’ generalisation and a balanced judgement; but when we are seeking scientific truth, we may not outrun the facts we have; and when a science is in the making, the facts will not often round off prettily into a comprehensive theory.

§ 51. The Expression of Emotion.—If the classification of emotions is a pleasant exercise for authors of a logical turn, the outward show of emotion in gesture and facial expression has always been attractive to those who pondered the relations of mind and body. It may even be true that observation of these expressive movements lies at the very root of psychology; for in emotion a man is changed, transformed; he is unlike himself, out of himself, beside himself; and what could suggest, more plainly than such transformation, the activity of an indwelling mind? However that may be, there is a long list, stretching down the centuries, of works that deal with emotive expression. We must ourselves pass over everything that appeared before the time of Charles Darwin.

Darwin, who was naturally anxious to bring the facts of expression under his formula of evolution, began to collect data as early as 1838; and with characteristic thoroughness he went to all available sources,—to animals, to the human infant, to the insane, to works of art, to the play of the facial muscles under the electric current, to the different races of mankind. In his book of 1872 he distinguishes three main principles of expression; the titles will be understood from the examples. The first principle is that of serviceable associated habits. We all jump when we are startled, and wince when we are threatened; and the jump and wince of man are weakened survivals of the frightened animal’s leap out of danger, and of its cowering self-effacement in presence of a stronger enemy. The face of scorn, “curving a contumelious lip,” lays bare the canine teeth, as if for actual attack; the sneer of man is but a weakened survival of the snarl by which our stronger-jawed ancestors unfleshed their teeth for the combat. The second principle is that of antithesis. If indignation shows itself (according to the first principle) by squared shoulders and out-thrown chest, the opposite of this aggressive indignation, humiliation or self-abasement, shows itself in the opposed attitude of raised shoulders and indrawn chest, Shylock’s “patient shrug.” The third principle, lastly, is that of the direct action of the nervous system. Thus we all tremble from fear; and trembling is of no service, often of much disservice, and cannot have been at first acquired through the will, and then rendered habitual in association with any emotion; it must be directly due to the constitution of the nervous system.

Darwin’s principles have been much criticised; in particular, the purely negative principle of antithesis has received short shrift from later writers. One of the things that he fails to account for is the imitative play of the lips. The disgusted man looks as if he were about to retch; the injured man looks bitter; the disappointed, sour; the satisfied, sweet; the mouth, in these latter cases, is set as it is when we have a bitter, sour, or sweet taste. What is the reason? We may remind ourselves that primitive language was concrete, and not abstract; that it abounded in what we should nowadays call metaphor. We may remember also that the one thing necessary in a primitive society is food, and that primitive metaphors would naturally be, to a large extent, metaphors drawn from the preparing and obtaining of food, from cooking and hunting. So we may imagine that the successful hunter, returning to camp, licked his lips, seemed already to be sucking the sweet morsel; while the unsuccessful drew his lips out sideways, as if he were trying to taste as little as possible of his sour draught. In course of time the metaphor will lapse; or, more strictly, the old concrete way of speech will give place to an abstract phrasing, and will hold its own only as metaphor, as a bit of picturesque imagery; we still talk to-day of the sweets of love and revenge, of tasting success, of tainted money, of a soured disposition, of the bitter end. Meanwhile the original gesture, if only it is fitted for communication, will persist unchanged; gesture is far more conservative than language; and the look of a bitter taste will thus express the emotion of a man who is suffering, perhaps, under an unjust accusation.

We may say of all such attempts at explanation what we said of the biological theory of feeling: it would be foolish to reject them outright, and yet they are too general, too open to criticism, to satisfy the requirements of science. We need detailed work, both upon the physiological and upon the psychological side. Consider, for example, the erection of the hair in fear and rage. This is a result of the diffused activity of the ‘sympathetic’ nervous system, the total effect of which is to energise the organism; when two boys are wrestling, the friends of the weaker or less skilful shout to him to ‘get angry’; and terrified men achieve wonderful feats of leaping and running. But how precisely does the contraction of the muscles beneath the skin subserve this energising? Is it an accident, so to speak, due merely to the diffusion of the nervous activity? or has it a special physiological function? and has it, further, anything of the biological significance that Darwin attached to it? Until such questions are answered in detail, we cannot formulate general principles of the expression of emotion.

§ 52. Mood, Passion, Temperament.—The weaker emotive states, which persist for some time together, are called moods; the stronger, which exhaust the organism in a comparatively short time, are called passions. No sharp line of distinction, however, can be drawn, either as regards intensity or as regards duration, between these various experiences.

We have special names for the moods which correspond with most of the emotions; thus, cheerfulness is the mood of joy, and depression the mood of grief. As a rule, the mood appears suddenly, rises slowly to a relative maximum, and then slowly dies down. You wake in the morning, feeling irritable; you proceed to take everything irritably, and so become more irritable still; and after a while the incidents that prompt to irritability seem to grow rarer, and the mood gradually disappears. There are times, however, when some intercurrent event brings about a quick and total change of mood; and there are times when the mood passes off abruptly, without assignable reason; you are surprised to find yourself suddenly cheerful. It is a commonplace that mood depends, in large measure, upon bodily health; but the correlation has not been worked out.

Language also has many words for the passions: fury is the passion of anger, terror the passion of fear. These states imply a severe shock to the nervous system; and though their first effect is to energise the organism, they must soon exhaust its reserve powers; we notice, in fact, that very violent emotions are likely to give way to lassitude or even to unconsciousness. The name of passion is further given, in ordinary speech, to any abiding interest, natural (p. 207) or acquired,—to any mode of emotive response that is specific and lasting. We say that a man has a passion for success, for science, for gambling; and we mean that a situation which shows any sort of reference to these things will appeal to him, dominatingly and one-sidedly, through that reference.

The word ‘temperament’ comes to us from popular psychology, which classifies mental phenomena under the headings of intellect, feeling and will, and places individual endowment under the corresponding headings of talent, temperament and character. Temperament, so far as the term can be employed in a strictly psychological sense, is thus a very general term for the innate susceptibility of the individual to emotive situations and for the typical character of his emotive responses. The doctrine of temperaments was first systematised by the Greek physician Galen in the second century of our era, though the germs of the current fourfold classification—into choleric, melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic—go back much further in the history of thought. This classification takes account of the strength and the duration of the emotive response: the choleric person responds quickly and strongly, the melancholic slowly and strongly, the sanguine quickly and weakly, the phlegmatic slowly and weakly, to the situation which evokes emotion. Crude to the last degree! we say: and yet it is astonishing to see what a master can do with such crudity. Thackeray, in The Newcomes, has drawn almost pure types of temperament; Madame de Florac is melancholic, Fred Bayham is choleric, Mrs. Hobson Newcome is sanguine, and Rosey is phlegmatic; and the minor characters in a great many of our best novels tend in the same way to personify the four temperaments.

But has not psychology advanced beyond this fourfold classification? Not appreciably. There are books, written by psychologists, on temperament and character; but the resulting classifications, though more elaborate and more ingenious, are also individually coloured; nothing like finality has been reached. A good deal might be done, in this field, by the roughest kind of observation, provided it were long enough continued. If you kept a diary for a couple of years, putting down the nature and occasion of your emotions, and the nature and duration and occasion and course of your moods, you would be gathering material which psychology still lacks, and which might serve as starting-point for detailed analytical study.

Questions and Exercises

(1) In the passage which heads this chapter, Descartes expresses the opinion that joy, sorrow, love and hate are the primary emotions. Do you agree with him? Why? How would you set to work to discover the primary emotions?

(2) Do you think that there is an instinct of imitation? Give reasons for your answer; then consult the books.

(3) Write a paragraph, as if for insertion in this chapter, on the psychology of surprise.

(4) Give instances of emotive expression, from your own observation, that seem to illustrate Darwin’s three principles.

(5) Define, without looking at the book, instinct, emotion, determining tendency, suggestion.