Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/77

VI. DISCUSSION. FEELING AND EMOTION. By H. M. STANLEY. As Prof. Wundt well remarks, the chapter on the Feelings is one of the darkest in the history of psychology, and Dr. Nahlowsky speaks of the feelings as a world the entrance to which is as dark as that of the Hades of old. Prof. Wundt gives three divisions of psychologists with respect to their treatment of the feelings : first are those who have treated feeling as the deepest activity of the cognitive faculty ; second, those who make feeling depend on "interaction of presentations"; third, those who emphasise feeling as subjective complement of " ob- jective sensations and representations ". The fundamental dis- tinction is, however, deeper than these distinctions with reference to the relation of knowledge and feeling ; it is that of spiritual and physiological treatment. Psychologists as a whole are divided into the two schools, physio- logical and spiritual, and the treatment of the feelings varies most manifestly between them. The one school emphasises the objective side, the other the subjective. The physiological school relates all feelings, higher and lower, to the organism ; while the spiritualistic school connects the lower feelings with the organism, but the higher, as love of truth, &c., are related only to the spiritual nature. With the physiological school, feelings are merely the subjective side of objective changes, are determined by the objective ; with the spiritual school, subjectivity per- ceives and determines objectivity. With the physiological school there is a hard and fast pre-established harmony of subjective and objective changes, but the subjective face is incidental con- comitant or function of the objective ; with the spiritual school, all is ideal and subjective, or at least the subjective moulds the objective and expresses itself in the material. What is the nature of an emotion? Most psychologists are content to simply refer us to our own conscious experience, as Messrs. Bain, Allen and Thompson. Mr. Spencer seeks to go deeper. All states of consciousness are divided by him into feelings and relations between feelings, which 1 i, of course, as he admits, relational feelings. Every state of conscious- ness is such by virtue of its having a relational or cognitive clement. Some states are more relational than others, but none are absolutely non-relational ; thus the sense of smell is less relational than that of sight, but still to some extent relational. Every feeling is thus feeling of something and has cognitive value. The non-relational element is feeling proper, and may be sensa-