Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/783

 A THEORY OF SOCIAL MOTIVES 769

"suggestibility," and term the concomitant feeling sympathy. Thus one's suggestibility shades off from the fine suggestibility with which one feels the slightest look or tone of one's mother, wife, or child to the obtuseness with which one regards one's neighbors.

The relation of instinct to feeling is now clear.'^'^ We have physiological states registered in consciousness as feeling. We cannot analyze the physiological states and processes associated with motives so that we must rely on introspection which gives the antecedents in terms of feeling. One reason why no serious attempt has been made to give the feelings the attention their fundamental nature deserves is found in their vagueness, and in the difficulties of classification. If objective proof, as distin- guished from introspective facts, is necessary in order to prove that the various feelings may be included in one of the three fundamental classes, note how various feelings and emotions classified as expansive give rise to the same kind of cognition and the same instinctive acts. The same is true of agitative feel- ings. Thus sense of inferiority, hunger,'^® and other feelings as apparently different as these, are accompanied by alert attention. Again, the feeling of repulsion at a loathsome sight, the disagree- able feeling which comes from digestive disorders, and the feeling of contempt at a complaining or cowardly man all manifest them- selves in the same instinctive acts and bodily expressions. Is this to be explained in any other way than that these different feelings and emotions are merely different shades of a more fundamental feeling concomitant with one and the same physiological state?

" McDougal (Social Psychology), approaching the subject from the stand- point of genetic psychology, says : "Directly or indirectly the instincts are the prime movers of all human action" (p. 44). ".. . . pleasure and pain are not in themselves springs of action, but, at the most, of indirected movements ; they serve rather to modify instinctive processes, pleasure tending to sustain and prolong any mode of action, pain to cut it short" (p. 43). If this is true still the important problem is. How do the feelings perform their function of modify- ing the instinctive processes?

'* Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 19. Savages usually do not hunt until impelled by hunger and then they show marvelous skill in tracking game and in handling weapons and great ingenuity in disguise and mimicry.