Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/433

 "WHAT IS AN EMOTION?" By EDMUND GUENEY. Professor James's recent discussion of this question (MiND XXXIV.) was from any point of view most excellent reading. If it were possible to regard a paper so full of true observation otherwise than as an admirable piece of serious work, it would still be open to one to applaud it as an extremely good joke. Not that I should be inclined to join issue with the writer at the point where he himself presents his doctrine in a humorous light. I am able, or all but able, to swallow the statement that, when I meet a bear, I feel afraid because I tremble, instead of trembling because I feel afraid that I am angry because I strike a rival, instead of striking him because I am angry ; and Prof .-James has certainly brought out with characteristic clearness and pictures- queness the very large part which the bodily sensations of the skin, the muscles, and the viscera, may play in what we call emotion. But it is hard to follow his argument that all emotion may be resolved into such sensations without a feeling of amused resistance ; and if one seeks some immediate justification for this feeling, his own crowning case may surely save one all trouble. There we find a lady, who was suffering from extra- ordinary loss of sensibility over the whole surface of the body, quoted as a crucial instance of concurrent emotional insensibility, because she had lost delight in her ordinary occupations and in her family affections. Yet, reading her own words, we discover that she was all the time a prey to emotion of the most poignant aid spent her life in agonised rebellion against its strange conditions. This, however, is beginning at the end. Let us first glance at the emotions to which Prof. James's theory may seem completely, or almost completely, to apply. It is not hard to see what they are ; and the ground of their peculiarity is practically supplied by Prof. James himself. Fear and rage are perhaps the most prominent examples. In such cases, the relation of the organism to some particular feature of the physical environment, which evokes the passion, is exceptionally close and direct ; and it is inevitable that the mere sense of the bodily reaction should make up a large portion of all that is felt. The civilised man is here within a measurable distance of the lowlier creatures whose tissues contract at the touch or approach of an alien body; where if we can conceive any true psychical reaction to take place, the sense of contracting would undoubtedly hold a large place in it. And more refined emotions, which we should not describe in terms of fear or rage, may still present obvious relationships to those cruder and more primitive forms. Our sense of " all-over- ishness " when our friend approaches the edge of a precipice, is clearly only a step or two removed from the apprehension or the 29