Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/254

 240 CRITICAL NOTICES : actual development demands a good deal of assistance from individual experiences of the most manifold character. So that in the end we might even admit a primitive but undifferentiated voluminous- ness in the optical sensations, and yet hold that all consciousness of spatial differences, and particularly the excentric projection of sensations, was a function of other contents gradually assimilating to themselves the visual sensations and not primitive at all. The affective phenomena are treated as at the primary stage/ sense-feelings and elementary aesthetic feelings ; at the second and third stages there is a classificatory division into formal and per- sonal feelings, a section on the dynamics of the secondary feelings and a further section on the complex aesthetic and ethical feelings. The fundamental feeling elements at all stages are said to be the two opposed qualities of pleasure and pain ; complications of these with other elements in various modes make up the concrete life of the feelings. Pleasures and pains differ respectively only in intensity ; qualitative differences are derived from the elements which they accompany. The real reason assigned for distinguish- ing the feeling elements from the sensations is that the former can never in any way be made objective. Just how this statement is to be reconciled with the doctrine referred to above, that feelings can be remembered, is not made clear. A distinction is drawn between Gefuhlsvorstellung and Vorstellungsgefuhl ; but in the memory of a feeling either the feeling is actually reproduced, in which case it is by definition a Vorstellungsgefuhl, or it is not, in which case it is not easy to see how it can be represented. Strange to say, the author makes no distinction between Unlust&ud Schmerz, i regarding even cutaneous pain as a purely" affective phenomenon and not considering the many reasons for the opposite view. The law of feeling is deduced from a consideration of the relation of stimulus to capacity : there exists for each sensitive organ and for the organism as a whole a condition of equilibrium relative to the incoming stimuli, and this equilibrium is of such a sort that any departure from the mean whether towards the plus or towards the minus of intensity and extensity of stimulus, is felt as disagreeable, while a return towards the mean is felt as agreeable. Neither the view of Wundt nor that of Horwicz regarding the relation of the threshold of sensation to the threshold of feeling agrees with the facts. In the section on the dynamics of the secondary feelings, there is a criticism of the James-Lange theory which is singularly ineffective. Its ineffectiveness results from the failure to make any attempt to exhibit the structure of the emotional process as a whole or to grasp the unity of its function. It amounts practically merely to saying that the "Affect" is not the reflex in consciousness of the bodily resonance because it is a certain state of intensive feel- ing accompanied by these bodily reflexes. The real questions, of course, are, into what besides sensations, ideas and feelings of pleasure and pain can the emotional state be analysed, and what explanation, apart from that of an instinctive reaction, can be given