Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/547

No. 5.] addition to the peripheral sensation, is the proper pleasure feeling or emotion corresponding to such a discharge. Not that this need be all ' additionally ' that the child might feel ; for other a priori or 'fringe' feelings would also be likely to be awakened at an early date. Nor would the child always 'kick and coo' at sight of a red blanket. At another time, the same optic stimulation might come to him compounded with other stimulations, say with a pang of stomach-ache. In which case the modified discharge would be quite different; the child now might cry and kick. And the child might thus have developed, in pursuance of the laws of use and habit, an aesthetic 'prejudice' against the color red, lasting an indefinite time thereafter, in place of a 'liking' for the color, as in the first instance.

So much for first occurrences ; now for subsequent ones partially involving paths used in previous occasions. It is a primary neural law that the exercise of any inherited tendency modifies that tendency. This paper may presuppose a knowledge of psychologic association, according to the laws of which our mental events are persistently 'objectified' and grouped into the percepts and concepts which, as we say, correspond to outer events. Yet, for our subject, we must emphasize the truth that it is not the association of outer things, but the different associations of inner neural tendencies which is the immediate source of modification and of persistent grouping in these processes. No matter how the paths got into the brain, and no matter what sort of stimulations, associative or peripheral, the currents be which traverse them, the same laws of use and habit will govern all alike.

The manner in which our peripheral senses are associatively 'worked up' under the dual influences of outer events and inherited conditions is commonly thought to be pretty plain. Why then should it now be less plain how, under circumstances fundamentally of the same nature, our aesthetic feelings come to be worked up in the manner in which we know them? All our senses work under these dual conditions of inherited function and of the outer influences which these functions subject them to. All our senses are made up differently