Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/339

A CLASSIFICATION OF FEELINGS. 327 and implications are brought out in detail. The classifica- tion proposed by Mr. Spencer (ii. 514) is as follows : " Presentative feelings, ordinarily called sensations, are those mental states in which, instead of regarding a corporeal impression as of this or that kind, or as located here or there, we contemplate it in itself as pleasure or pain : as when inhaling a perfume. " Presentative-representatire feelings, embracing a great part of what we commonly call emotions, are those in which a sensation, or group of sensa- tions, or group of sensations and ideas, arouses a vast aggregation of represented sensations ; partly of individual experience, but chiefly deeper than individual experience, and, consequently, indefinite. The emotion of terror may serve as an example. Along with certain impressions made on the eyes or ears, or both, are recalled into consciousness many of the pains to which such impressions have before been the antecedents ; and when the relation between such impressions and such pains has been habitual in the race, the definite ideas of the pains which individual experience has given, are accompanied by the indefinite pains that result from inherited experi- ence vague feelings which we may call organic representations. " Representative feelings, comprehending the ideas of the feelings above classed, when they are called up apart from the appropriate external excite- ments. The feelings so represented may either be simple ones of the kinds first named, as tastes, colours, sounds, &c. ; or they may be involved ones of the kinds last named. Instances of these are the feelings with which the descriptive poet writes, and which are aroused in the minds of his readers." So that, according to this classification, feelings so dif- ferent as those of Anger, Love, Beauty, Contempt, Per- plexity, and Fear all of them feelings " in which a sensation or group of sensations, or group of sensations and ideas, arouses a vast aggregation of represented sensations " belong to the same class that of Presentative-representative feelings. Feelings so different as Blueness, Triumph, Salt- ness, Hatred and Hardness, if remembered, and not called up by any appropriate external excitement, belong to the same class that of Representative feelings. But a feeling of Anger arising in the presence of a detested person, and the same feeling arising from the remembrance of him, are classed in separate groups the one is a Representative feeling, the other is Present at ive-representative. Mr. Spencer finally includes under the head of " He-representative feelings . . . those more complex sentient states that are less the direct results of external excitements than the indirect or reflex results of them. The love of property is a feeling of this kind. It is awakened not by the presence of any special object, but by ownable objects at large ; and it is not from the mere presence of such objects, but from a certain ideal relation to them, that it arises. It consists, not of the repre- sented advantages of possessing this or that, but of the represented advan- tages of possession in general is not made up of certain concrete represen- tations, but of the abstracts of many concrete representations ; and so is re-representative. ' '