Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/758

 744 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

I have found it convenient to use the current division of mental process into the three aspects: affective, cognitive, and conative. The affective states of the members of my groups are discerned through their conversation when the feelings are con- scious and through their emotional expression and reactions when the feelings are subconscious. The feelings most often observed, conscious and subconscious, fall into three classes. They are feelings of vigor, strength, resolution, conviction, which I gen- eralize as forceful; or they are feelings of contentment, restful- ness, cheerfulness, good-will, which I generalize as expansive ; or they are feelings of weariness, despondency, anxiety, commisera- tion, which I generalize as agitative.

The traditional pleasure-pain classification^ I have been un- able to use because the two kinds of pleasurable feelings, the forceful and the expansive, are as distinct from one another as both are distinct from pain. The word pain I do not use because I want a word of wider connotation, one which will include such widely different feeling-states as the feeling of weariness, of anxiety, which we discern in the anxious look of the overworked, of confused ideas and perplexity, which sometimes cause contor- tions of the face while speaking, and that chronic hypersensitive- ness, resulting from constant attention to intricate problems, which is seen, for instance, in Darwin who is said to have been so disturbed by the visit of a stranger as to lose his night's rest.^

Having classified the feelings which with the instincts are the elements^ out of which the motives of personality are built up, we have next to note the succession of feelings, in individuals, in order to ascertain whether there be any invariable succession. After long and intimate association with certain individuals of my groups I have observed a feeling-movement which seems fundamental. It is an oscillation from forceful to expansive feeling with a possible sinking into agitative feeling during the transition if either forceful or expansive feeling is too prolonged,

masters, pain and pleasure." — Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, p. i.
 * "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign

' Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order, p. 177.

•Wundt, Logik, pp. 268, 269.