Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/292

280 directly following a stimulus, whether this be one exciting bodily pain, as a blow, or mental, as a shocking sight or piece of news But, when we examine the mind of man in its highest development we find in the highly-intellectual individual certain emotions, which are clearly the feelings corresponding to the very complex ideas acquired and organized by years of culture and training. We read of the Ethical Emotion, or moral sense; of the Æsthetic Emotion; of other emotions arising out of the Intellect. But all these appear to illustrate and to be illustrated by what I have said concerning the simple emotions. Here, instead of a single and simple idea-centre which, when excited, at once responds in outward bodily movement, we have an extremely complex chain of ideas. The training and preparation of years, as well as previous organization, are required to bring about in the brain that complex series of ideas which represents a knowledge of the tine arts, and which is presupposed when we speak of experiencing aesthetic emotion. Instead of a single and lowly-endowed centre, such as we may find in children or animals, we have a coordinated and complex chain of high centres, which, when excited, respond not in immediate bodily movement accompanied by bodily feeling, but in deliberate action, the result of reflection; in intellectual, rather than bodily movement. For the activity of thought must be due to a stimulus applied to the intellectual centres, no less than the activity of body: and not only the activity of thought, but action in thought, the desire for action of body which would become action, did not some other reflection intervene, must also be set down as an outcome of nerve-force emitted by some centre or centres, which have been set in motion by a stimulus. Repressed action, whether in thought alone, or in the clinched hands and quivering lips of suppressed passion, must be taken as an emission of force. The complex coordination of ideas arrived at after years of study and experience, which causes the connoisseur the keen delight experienced when he gazes at a rare Rembrandt etching or a matchless coin, must include within itself the feelings belonging to it. The uninitiated cannot feel the delight, because he possesses not the ideas. We cannot suppose that the feeling resides in one part of the brain, and the ideas in another; rather would it appear that the stimulation of the ideas by the sight of the object causes the feeling. The ideas exist in the brain as knowledge, but when called into action we have the feeling of pleasure or pain which is special and appropriate to such a group of ideas, in addition to the knowledge and the ideas themselves. It may be said that emotions are so varied that they must require a special organization; that the emotion of delight just named is something totally different from such a feeling as self-denial. But we must remember that ideas are formed in the educated mind into large and complex groups—associated ideas, as they are called—and that these act as units, just as groups of muscles always act together; and the association of the