Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/467

Rh were somewhat calmed when I pointed out that, taking the whole population of London, and the number of deaths per week from small-pox, this was about the rate of mortality at that time caused by it. Yet in other minds, as in her mind, panic had produced an entire incapacity for forming a rational estimate of the danger. Nay, indeed, so perturbing was the emotion that an unusual amount of danger to life was imagined at a time when the danger to life was smaller than usual. For the returns showed that the mortality from all causes was rather below the average than above it. While the evidence proved that the risk of death was unusually small, this wave of feeling which spread through society produced an irresistible conviction that it was unusually great.

These examples show in a clear way, what is less clearly shown in countless other examples, that the associated ideas constituting a judgment are much affected in their relations to one another by the coexisting emotion. Two ideas will cohere feebly or strongly according as the correlative nervous states involve a feeble or a strong discharge along the lines of nervous connection; and hence a large wave of feeling, implying as it does a voluminous discharge in all directions, renders such two ideas more coherent. This is so even when the feeling is irrelevant, as is shown by the vivid recollection of trivialities observed on occasions of great excitement; and it is still more so when the feeling is relevant—that is, when the proposition formed by these ideas is itself the cause of excitement. Much of the emotion tends in such case to discharge itself through the channels connecting the elements of the proposition; and predicate follows subject with a vividness and persistence out of all proportion to that which is justified by experience.

We see this with emotions of all orders. How greatly maternal affection falsifies a mother's estimate of her child, every one observes. How those in love fancy superiorities where none are visible to unconcerned spectators, and remain blind to defects that are conspicuous to every one else, is matter of common remark. Note, too, how in the holder of a lottery-ticket hope generates a belief utterly at variance with probability as numerically estimated, and how an excited inventor has a confidence in success which calm judges see to be impossible. That "the wish is father to the thought," here so obviously true, is true more or less in nearly all cases where there is a wish. And in other cases, again, as where horror is aroused by the fancy of something supernatural, we see that, in the absence of wish to believe, there may yet arise belief if violent emotion goes along with the ideas that are joined together.

Though there is some recognition of the fact that men's judgments on social questions are distorted by their emotions, the recognition is