Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/127

TH. BIBOT, La Psychologie des Sentiments. Ill easy but inexact identification of conscious processes with those phenomena of animal life which resemble their outward manifesta- tions. It may be said that this is throughout the weakest side of M. Eibot's book. He excels in the use of those important results which are obtained by comparative methods ; but he neglects direct psychological analysis, and his work suffers accordingly. This is particularly noticeable in the chapters on Eeligious and /Esthetic Feeling. We might reasonably have hoped for a systematic attempt to analyse these feelings to give an account of them in terms of simpler elements out of which they may be sup- posed to be built up. Instead of this we find little more than a comparative description of the phenomena, which, though sug- gestive, is generally rather external, and which leads to no real account of the mental states in question. Undoubtedly, the most serious question for a critic of M. Ribot's work is the theory of emotion which is maintained. It has already been pointed out that M. Ribot is one of those psychologists who follow James and Lange in conceiving emotion to be merely and absolutely the consciousness or sensation arising from expressive action. That the theory is not a private view of M. Ribot's and that he has made no considerable alteration in it might be taken as sufficient excuse for omitting a criticism which must be too short to serve any good purpose. Yet the theory is, in the nature of the case, so integral to M. Ribot's whole account of emotion that a single remark must be allowed. It is, of course, impossible to deny, and one can only be surprised that it has been found so generally possible to ignore, the vast part which expression plays in the development of emotional consciousness. Undoubtedly, the consciousness or more strictly, the effect in consciousness of its physical resonance or organic expression, forms an element, and an element of first-rate importance, in every emotional state. Yet there is no emotion because there is no state of consciousness within our experience, which is so wholly destitute of cognitive or ideational content that it can rightly be called a mere feeling or the psychical equivalent of an expressive movement ; and in emotion the relation between these two elements or constituents of the complex state of consciousness is such that it is impossible to suggest that either could be without the other precisely what it is in the complex concrete reality. It is easy, indeed, to speak of simple emotions ; yet any actual emotion is not simple but intensely complex a synthesis not merely of impressions due to vascular and motor functioning, but of these with other contributions of sense and memory. There is no emotion which is not, in one way or another, a consciousness of an object, and in which this consciousness does not impart definite character to the state of mind produced by expressive reactions, so that these have a significance which they would not otherwise possess. It is perhaps in some ways unreasonable to advance such