Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/437

 " WHAT IS AN EMOTION ? " 425 say that this brooding mass of emotion, whenever it makes its darkening presence felt, induces the bodily conditions associated with the first shock of sorrow ; and equally so to maintain that in such a case the image in the mind is a representation of those bodily conditions, and not of the actual loss sustained. The utmost that I could here concede to Prof. James would be that at the times when the emotion is most distinctive times of solitude, for instance there may now and again be faint initiations of " expression," which help to characterise the whole psychic state ; and that when these particular contributions fail as when the mourner is engaged in ordinary talk or in some other occupation which precludes them the emotion to some extent loses colour and becomes a vaguer sort of misery. But if as is surely indis- putable its mass, and its character qua 'painful, remain unaffected under these latter conditions, it is just as truly emotion as before, and emotion to which the physical signs so far from constituting it do not now even contribute. But the difficulties naturally culminate when we pass on to " the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic feelings ". Against the view that " concords of sounds, of colours, of lines, logical con- sistencies, teleological fitnesses, affect us with a pleasure that seems ingrained in the very form of the representation itself," Prof. James maintains that "unless there actually be coupled with the intellectual feeling a bodily reverberation of some kind, unless we actually laugh at the neatness of the mechanical device, thrill at the justice of the act, or tingle at the perfection of the musical form our mental condition is more allied to a judgment of right than to anything else ". He proceeds to draw a clear distinction between cognition and emotion, and illustrates it in a striking way by the coldly critical view of a connoisseur, and the naive thrills of a layman, in presence of a work of art. Even here I should be glad to know if he really thinks that Titian or Mr. Euskin have derived less emotion from the " As- sumption " than the honest English couple whose attitude he so amusingly describes. But one may surely recognise the difference between the judgment of Tightness and the emotion of aesthetic pleasure (whether true or false, healthy or morbid), without having to concede that the latter is a mere wave of diffused sensory disturbance. There can be no better illustration of the issue before us than is afforded by one of Prof. James's own examples that of music. His view goes far to confound the two things which, in my opinion, it is the prime necessity of musical psychology to distinguish the effect, chiefly sensuous, of mere streams or masses of finely-coloured sound, and the dis- tinctive musical emotion to which the form of a sequence of sound, its melodic and harmonic individuality, even realised in complete silence, is the vital and essential object. It is with the former of these two very different things that the physical reactions the stirring of the hair, the tingling and the shiver