Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/426

 412 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

is conative, appetitive, and "appetition is a motive and impels to action" (p. 102). Now, if feeling acts as a motive, it would seem as though there must be intellect there. If there is no cognitive side to it, it can be only motor, propulsive. He meets this by saying that "motive" here means mobile, not motif. He insists that the psychic (feeling) can be without being recognized as such (intellect). But is not this being recognized as such the very essence of the psychic? If there is no consciousness of the process, how does this " motive" differ from any other movement from a tropism, for example ?

Again, he says, "action is certain to follow the motive, unless pre- vented by some physical obstacle or by other motives that antagonize it and produce a state of psychic equilibrium." But such antagonism of motives leading to psychic equilibrium is the very essence of what we mean by the cognitive the tension of means and ends, of motives. He says that feeling takes the form of appetition and desire. " It not only consists of an awareness of self, but of an awareness of some need" (p. 102). Now, what is this but cognition? In so far as this is not simply a consciousness of need or lack in general (a form which consciousness never takes in the lower forms at least), it is conscious- ness of some specific need, and this specification is cognitive.

The fallacy of making feeling prior in the evolution of conscious- ness has been exposed so often in psychological controversy that one hesitates to devote much space to a new example of the error. But consider one more instance. On a later page he says : " Although feeling is a conscious state, still there is no consciousness, at least in the lower stages of development, of the relation of feeling to function. The conscious creature is conscious only of its own states. It is not conscious of the functional effect of its actions in response to those states" (p. 126). " It subserves function but not for the sake of func- tion" (p. 128). Here we have the reductio ad absurdum of this notion. Of what "states" could any creature be conscious if not states of the " relation of feeling to function " ? That is all any consciousness con- sists of feelings, sensations, and these in relation to "its actions in response." If feeling came into existence as a means to the perform- ance of function, as the author insists, then that means must have been means to some end : a means apart from an end to which it is a means is not truly a means. There must have been some " foresight," how- ever vague, if there was any feeling whatever, for otherwise there would be no significance in the appearance of the feeling. Bare or mere or pure feeling is an abstraction of the psychologist.