Page:Outlines of Psychology (Wundt) 1907.djvu/219

 § 13- Emotions. l8g fective state as if it were held constant. This can be done the more easily the more slowly and continuously the psy- chical processes occur, so that the word feeling has come to be used mainly for relatively slow processes and for those which in their regular form of occurrence never pass beyond a certain medium intensity, such as the feelings of rhythm, Where, on the other hand, a series of feelings succeeding one another in time unite into an interconnected process which is distinguished from preceding and following processes as an individual whole, and which has in general a more intense effect on the subject than a single feeling, we call such a succession of feelings an emotion. This very name indicates that it is not some specific sub- jective content of experience which distinguishes emotion from feeling, but rather the arousing effect which comes from a special combination of particular affective contents. In this way it comes that there is no sharp line of demarcation between feeling and emotion. Every feeling of greater in- tensity passes into an emotion. The separation of the feel- ings within an emotion from one another is always a more or less arbitrary sundering of complete relations. In the case of feelings which have a certain particular form of oc- currence, that is in feelings of rhythm, such a breaking up of the emotions is entirely impossible. The feeling of rhythm is distinguished from an emotion only by the small inten- sity of its moving effect on the subject, which is what gives "emotion" its name. And even this distinction is by no means fixed, for when the feelings produced by rhythmical impres- sions become somewhat more intense, as is usually the case especially when the rhythm is connected with sensation contents which arouse the feelings greatly, the feelings of rhythm become in fact emotions. Rhythms are for this reason the important means both in music and poetry of portraying emotions and arousing them in the auditor.