Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/92

 MR. MERCIER'S CLASSIFICATION OP FEELINGS. 81 If it is true that the simpler emotions enter into the more com- plex, and are elements of them ; if the activity of the more com- plex consists in the simultaneous activity of simpler ones ; if (physiologically considered) it is probable that complex emotions do not depend on special cerebral tracts, but chiefly on centres of the co-ordination of those tracts that simpler feelings depend on, it follows that complex emotions cannot be classed apart from the simpler. And if one simpler emotion enters into several complex ones, the complex cannot be classified apart from one another. As we cannot classify animals and the entrails of animals, so we cannot classify the feelings of Proprietary Justice and of Property, nor Love and Admiration ; nor Awe and Fear. And if the feeling of Property enters into both Justice and personal Love, we cannot separate and classify Love and Justice : it is not as if Property were a generic attribute in which Love and Justice resembled each other ; the common ele- ment is not a mere resemblance ; it is a true identity one root common to two trees that have other roots distinct. Yet all over Mr. Mercier's tables these feelings are widely dis- tributed. And this is an inevitable result of the imperfect principle on which he proceeds, in regarding feelings as corre- sponding to single interactions of organism and environment, and overlooking the correspondence of the higher feelings with groups of interactions. If feelings have equal simplicity of excitation, why have they not equal simplicity of constitu- tion ? And surely that is not the case. If, on the other hand, some feelings correspond to groups of interactions between organism and environment, and therefore have a complex excita- tion, their constitution may be equally complex. And what more natural, what better economy, than that their constitution should be the union of simpler feelings severally corresponding to those interactions that together make up the groups of inter- actions to which they (the complex feelings) correspond ? The having no regard to such considerations as these seems to me the fundamental weakness of Mr. Mercier's scheme, and one that must greatly lessen its value to Psychology ; though it may have seemed a brilliant, I may say, dazzling performance to many readers as to me certainly for a time it did, in spite of an indefinite suspicion that its acceptance implied the ' labefaction ' of all the principles of the science. It would indeed be too much to declare such a classification useless : every catalogue made upon a principle not only aids the memory and facilitates a survey of the subject, but is pretty sure in some way to disclose important relationships, and so to be light-giving and suggestive. But to put it forward as carrying out the doctrine of Evolution was particularly unfortunate ; for every such classification must follow the lines of origin, growth and pedigree, and precisely these the scheme before us tends to conceal and obliterate. It cannot therefore, I think, become incorporated with Psychology.