Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/290

278 action; and these emotions are fully developed and unmistakably exhibited. Here, then, we have the emotional part of our nature apparently full-grown, while the intellectual is yet in its early infancy. We know that it is in vain to reason with such a child: we control and manage him. These feelings are all expansions of the self-feeling which is plainly seen to be the feeling of the entire bodily organization. The child at first derives pleasure or pain from that which affects its bodily sensations, from the light or the color which pleases its sense of sight, from the song which gratifies its ear, from the warmth which is grateful to its skin, from the food which satisfies its stomach; and it extends its likings to those persons or things which minister to its comfort, its dislike to such as cause it discomfort, and so it displays its love, its hate and fear. These feelings are all reflected upon and through the medium of the body in facial and other movements. As the nerve-centres in which this self-feeling resides are roused and excited, so, according to the centre stimulated and according to the degree of stimulation, we have a corresponding series of movements as the result. There is a direct outcome of action, a direct conversion of force into motion, so to speak; without this we should not know that such stimulation had taken place.

How motion immediately follows the application of a stimulus to the centres is especially shown at this time of life. There is no deliberation, no delay; the action, the demonstration of joy, or sorrow, or resentment, or approval, is instantaneous. The motor centres respond to the stimulus as immediately as the pupil responds to the light, and the reflex action of the one is as purely physical as that of the other. A child at this age possesses ideas formed from the memories of sensations and their associations, but its ideas are few, and it does not link them into chains of reasoning. Its intellectual processes are scanty, and so it comes to pass that the excitants of its nerve-centres are for the most part external events and sights, which at once result in bodily or facial demonstration rather than in internal mental action.

If mankind had stopped at the level of a child, if the higher and more complex emotions did not exist, it is not likely that various seats of emotion would have been mapped out in the brain. Emotion in children and animals is manifestly so much more a bodily excitation, the bodily movement follows so immediately as the result, that we do not confine it to a mental phenomenon as we do the higher emotions of man. But physiologically there seems to be no line of demarcation between simple feelings and the highest emotions. Before we examine the adult as we see him in the educated and refined inhabitant of the cities of Europe, we may pause and consider the various intermediate stages which carry on the succession from the child upward. There is the savage of all grades of savagery, from the Earthman to the stoical brave of North America who scorns to exhibit emotion of any kind. Many travellers have told us how like the tribes of Africa are