Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/78

 FEELING AND EMOTION. 67 tion peripherally initiated, or emotion centrally initiated. This physiological definition does not clear up the psychological nature of emotion. Mr. Spencer mixes up physiological and psychological classifications. After dividing physically into peripherally and centrally initiated, he then divides these transversely into actual and ideal, or vivid and faint, or presentative and representative. If mind be built up, after the Humist fashion, of impressions and ideas, it is evident that the fundamental psychological division is this into presentative and representative (at any power). The emotions belong to the latter class. We are now led to ask, What is the essence of feeling as such, whether emotion or sensation ? What makes feeling, feeling ? and the answer is, as we have seen, the negative distinction of non-relational. If with Hamilton and Mr. Spencer we empha- sise the nature of feeling as subjective and non-relational, it seems evident that the growth of mind has been from an almost complete subjectivity of feeling to a very considerable degree of objectivity in perception. We may believe with Mr. Spencer in the subject-object nature of all consciousness, and yet insist on this law of the growth of mind, which is, perhaps, noticed by Mr. Spencer only indirectly in his discussion of correspondence. In the lowest forms of consciousness, as seen in low forms of animal life, consciousness is, no doubt, maximum of subject and minimum of object. There is probably but little localisation of feeling, pain and pleasure being mostly organic. The externality of its body is but vaguely known, if known at all, and externality beyond is not recognised. We view our hands as in a measure external ; the lowest animal feels its body as itself, does not in proper sense perceive its body. Its consciousness is, as it were, part and parcel of matter, and it is only in higher forms that con- sciousness rises to a perception, to a knowledge of itself over against object. In the progress of mind feeling decreases, cogni- tion increases, till, as in scientific human eyesight, perception becomes almost pure from feeling. Mr. Spencer is inclined to believe that each state of consciousness as subject -object relation is compounded of the feeling and the relational element, knowing ; but it seems rather more probable that in the final analysis feeling and knowing are to be considered as closely consecutive states, feeling being precedent in the order of evolution. The subjective is first wakened first feeling, then knowing. The earliest stages of psychical life in the young of the human species and higher animals is almost purely organic sensa- tion, perception rising later, and we judge that the history of the individual is indicative of the history of the race. At least we may say this, that the earliest psychical life is prevailingly that of feeling, because perception, if it in any true sense occurs, is speedily obscured by feeling leading to the action demanded in the struggle for life. The necessary immediacy of reaction in presence of environment in early life is secured only through