Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/840

820 but Mr. Bain has shown that they are the ones the contraction of which is related to the relaxation of the other muscles. "With a little force a greater one is relaxed." The expenditure in this case is made for saving, and takes place, we think, because the first motion in the face of pain being a movement of conservation and concentration on self, is also a tendency to save the force which is felt to he diminishing—we retire from the pain, and try to recover ourselves. The first stage of pain does not last long, for the reaction begins at once. While the will can consent to pleasure, it can not consent to pain. It defends itself, it struggles, against it. After the first stroke of pain that casts down, we perceive the signs of effort. Sometimes the effort is spasmodic, and involves a prodigality of force that can hardly fail to bring on quick prostration.

Suffering and joy are always accompanied by aversion and desire. The movement of concentration upon self and of the defensive, common to all personal or egotistical feelings, gives to their expression, as M. Mantegazza has remarked, a character essentially concentric or centripetal, while the expression of the benevolent affections is centrifugal and "eccentric." Fear presents the type of the concentric physiognomy pertaining to the affections which have for their center the me.

While the feelings derived from aversion are concentric, those derived from desire are expansive. The setting forth of them is expressed by the body, the arms, the head, lips, and eyes, by a tendency to enlargement and touch, the aspect of which is varied according to the nature of the objects and of the possible touch. With joy and suffering, aversion and desire, Ave have the four fundamental passions, the commingling of which is sufficient to account for all the others, and the expression of which in like manner engenders the most complex mimicry. Physiologists have not taken enough notice of the simplifications which could thus be effected by psychology. The whole can be definitely relegated to a general movement of the will toward the objects or their opposites; and it is the correlative movement of organic expansion or contraction that is the real generator of the language of the emotions.

We pass next to the considerations, ordinarily neglected, that can be borrowed from sociology. When the series of brain-disturbances is produced which have their origin in the appetite or the zest of life, the movement is then inevitably propagated to all the organs. There is in this case, in the first instance, a mechanical contagion, but there is, also, we think, a psychological contagion, and consequently a social phenomenon. The organism, in fact, is a compound of elementary organisms, a society of living cells, united among one another by bonds more or less strict. The cerebral cells being analogous to all the other cells, it is hardly probable that these should not also have their mental side—that is, that they should not be the seat of