Page:Philosophical Review Volume 24.djvu/185

No. 2.] the superfluous nervous energy, unable to find escape through ordinary efferent channels, will overflow into the sympathetic system and cause general turmoil and upheaval in the viscera, and intense emotional excitement will be felt. These startling emotional phenomena, being the most conspicuous, were the first to be studied and described—by Darwin, Mosso, Mantegazza, et al.—and inspired the James-Lange theory, which is applicable only to them. Professor Dewey was perhaps the first to work out an explanation of these upheavals as due to conflicts between impulses to different reactions evoked by the stimulus. To Shand belongs the credit of making it evident that these extreme emotional phenomena are not the fundamental feature of all emotion, and that really to understand emotions we must interpret them in the light of the part that they play in the economy of the organism as a whole, which means, in the light of innate and other dispositions that determine the course of mental activity, and only develop these startling organic manifestations under special conditions.

If action follows stimulation, with only slight or even intense consciousness of impulse and emotion, shall we say that there is value present? Or shall we say that value is present wherever there is tendency in a given direction without the presence of consciousness at all? Some recent writers would reply even