Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/87

Rh. Needless to say, the kinesthetic image is similarly accompanied and an extraordinary power of introspection would be required to observe a distinction.

The close association between the motor sensation and the affective phases of consciousness betrays itself in the terms used to indicate the latter. The following may be cited: émotion, Gemütsbewegung, commotion, répulsion, aversion, Abstossung, agitation, Unruhe, moving, stirring, aufregend, rührend, erschütterend and émouvant. Even touching and touchant (duco) might be added, though in them as in das Gefühl, le sentiment and feeling, the tactual predominates over the kinesthetic as the fundamental idea. The fact, however, can not be ignored that feel and toucher mean to pass the hand over and have consequently an important motor implication.

It is not then surprising to hear it maintained that the kinesthetic (strain and relaxation) is a necessary ingredient, not certainly of feeling-tone, which, though it depends upon sensory and ideational activities, can not be analyzed into motor elements, but of the complex emotional state, of which the feeling tone, or affection, is the characteristic feature. Whether the physiological complex that gives an emotion its special value can be analyzed into merely three pairs of elements, strain and relaxation, exaltation and depression, the agreeable and the disagreeable, or whether other ingredients might be mentioned, as the secretions and excretions and the cerebral circulation, the part played by the first pair is undoubted. In fact from the genetic point of view it might have been anticipated that the sthenic emotions would be accompanied by muscle strain and the asthenic by a corresponding relaxation; so much of the physiology of both fear and anger can be explained in terms of preparedness for action.

The value of such a view for the present study is that it enables us to trace the relation of the emotions to the imagination. The kinesthetic element forms, on the one hand, part of that physiological complex which gives to emotion color and zest, while on the other hand it supplies material for imaginative elaboration and renders more vivid imagery from other sensory sources. In fact it is solely the presence of this element of feeling that distinguishes the imagination from the understanding. The image, the raw material of the one, differs from the concept, the raw material of the other, just in that vividness which an accompanying kinesthetic sensation is able to impart. Moreover, a critical examination of an imaginative masterpiece will reveal, that a poet is guided by his feeling in the choice of subject, in his selection and rejection of the aspects of the theme which are to receive emphasis, in his use of phraseology and epithets—in fact, in the employment of all the devices of poetic art. The conveyance of a mood is the substance of art. For this contribution to truth we stand indebted to an