Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/124

 108 CRITICAL NOTICES : to our knowledge of normal emotions which is made by the pathology of mind. In an Introductory Chapter on the evolution of affective life M. Bibot gives a preliminary indication of the scope of his work. He begins by marking the cardinal distinction, upon which his idea of a psychology of feeling depends, between the two elements which constitute affective states. He conceives the fundamental or primary element to be motor states or tendances (a word to which in his whole discussion he gives a very extended and rather indefinite application); while the consciousness of pleasure or pain, which most psychologists consider to be the main characteristic of feeling, is a secondary, and in a sense, superfluous, addition. In vital sensibility, which he follows Sachs, Verworn, Bastian, and others in regarding not as even a rudimentary consciousness, but as purely physical and chemical, he finds an embryonic form of conscious sensibility a root of the affective life independent of consciousness ; and in this basis of the affective life he finds proofs of the existence of states w T hich are purely affective, and from which every " intellectual " element is completely absent. M. Eibot distinguishes four classes of these states : viz., a pleasurable state, a painfuj state, a state of fear, and a state of excitability. His argument against les intellectualistes, who conceive a cognitive element to be essential to human feeling, is chiefly directed, both here and elsewhere, against Lehmann, whose Hanptgesetze des Menschlichen Gefuhlslebens is made to bear the brunt of M. Ribot's criticism. The case for purely affective states is made to rest chiefly upon the early period of child-life, and upon the funda- mentally physiological character of emotional disturbances in adolescence and in mental disease. But it can hardly be said that the author establishes the existence of affective conditions of consciousness vhich are wholly non-intellectual; and indeed it is not easy to suggest how complete demonstration of their existence could be offered. This sharp distinction between the physical and psychical con- stituents of affective states determines the classification in which M. Eibot presents his account of the evolution of feeling. Above organic sensibility he finds four distinct classes of affective states, which he names in the order of their development. First comes the period of needs of vital or physiological tendances accompanied by consciousness which are generally and conveniently summed up as the manifestations of an instinct of self-preservation. This is followed by the period of primitive emotions fear, anger, affection, self-feeling, and sexual emotion among vhich M. Bibot refuses to classify pleasure and pain, since all emotion is particular and definite while these are general characteristics of the affective life. After these come the abstract or complex emotions, which depend upon general ideas, and finally the passions, which occupy in the affective life a position analogous to that which is held by fixed ideas in the intellectual process.