Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/80

FEELING AND EMOTION. 69 ledge enters into our common conception of emotion is negatively evident from the phrase ' blinded by passion ' which is applied to one who has almost lost the relational element from consciousness. Emotions in the higher stages are filled out by knowledge and will, but if we extract the pure feeling from any given emotion, we can have as mere subjectivity only pleasure and pain. When objects come clearly before the mind, the accompanying pain or pleasure is recognised in memory as coloured by the object, by knowledge. We feel pain differently through perception by eye and ear ; but where there is no eye or ear, distinctions" of this kind must disappear. And so we recognise that psychical life is at bottom and in its earliest forms simply pleasure and pain with little or no differentiation from objects. Developed psychical life perceives, feels, wills; undeveloped psychical life feels, wills, per- ceives. The unfeeling stone is not roused to self-preservation by feeling, it passively endures its fate. The animal, however, through feeling reacts by locomotion or self-defence and pre- serves itself. Thus by virtue of feeling there exist in nature active beings which have a worth of being in themselves. Feeling then, we conclude, is the purely subjective factor in consciousness ; and per se, both as developed and undeveloped, is merely pleasure and pain. The older psychologists, as Spinoza and Leibniz, were inclined to view the feelings as inadequate or confused ideas. This view was easily suggested by the fact that in intense subjectivity of feeling perception is obscured, but this does not help us to any clear conception of the nature of feeling, which is best gained through studying the history of mind. We will now consider some aspects of the perplexing subject of Emotion and its expression. Theories of expression are plainly divisible according to the method of treatment by spiritual and physiological schools respectively, according as the relation of mind to body is regarded as initiative, or as concomitant or resultant. Expression in literal significance, according to common opinion, and as urged by the spiritual school, is subsequent on, and determined by, emotional consciousness. It is the bodily expression of mental action. With the other school the physiological factors are the determining ones. Descartes viewed the passions as reactions from the body. Expression is connected with physical support by Prof. Bain. Prof. James makes feelings reflexive movements in consciousness due to the so-called expressions; Hamilton makes feelings of pleasure and pain reflexive, not only, however, of impeded or unimpeded bodily movements, but also and primarily of impeded and unimpeded conscious activities, and he belongs then rather to the spiritual school. Mr, Grant Allen has extended the physiological explanation to the feeling of beauty, and intimates that all the higher feelings have their true philosophy in this point of view. Prof. Wundt views feelings as reactions from sensation.