Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/353

A CLASSIFICATION OF FEELINGS. 341 of corresponding value, and the reason is not far to seek. If the feelings correspond with the interactions between the organism and its environment, and if they have come into existence by a slow process of evolution extending from the dawn of life down to the present time, then the largest and most important group of feelings will be that which corres- ponds with that group of interactions which in the history of the race have been most numerous and most important. To which interactions this description applies there can scarcely be two opinions. Man, like every other organism, has arrived at his present state of development by the survival of the fittest in a ceaseless struggle for existence that has been in progress for countless myriads of years. During all this incalculable time the circumstance that has been most potent in shaping his organisation, has been the pruning and moulding influence of the adverse conditions against which he has had to struggle ; in other words the action of noxious agents in the environment. From this consideration we might predict that the group of feelings corresponding with the action of such agents must be the most important group of the environmentally-initiated Emotions, and when we find that it is so, we may fairly regard the fact as tending to corroborate the naturalness of the classification. The most fundamental division that can be made of agents of this class refers, it is manifest, to the magnitude of their power with respect to that of the organism. No quality of a noxious agent can be of such importance, or exert so much influence on the state of the organism pro- duced by its proximity, as the relative powers of this agent and of the organism. Since, as has already been pointed out, in feelings of this class the agent is not actually acting upon the organism, but is separated from it by an interval in time and space, it is clear that not only must cognition of the agent precede the occurrence of any feeling, not only must cognition of its noxiousness precede the occurrence of any Antagonistic feeling, but a cognition of the relative power of the agent is also necessary before a feeling of any definiteness can exist. Furthermore, just as the quality of the feeling as Antagonistic depends, not upon the attribute of the agent as it actually exists, but upon its attribute as cognised a cognition which may be widely discrepant from the truth ; so the sub-group, or sub-genus of antagonisms into which the feeling will fall will depend, not on the actual relation which the power of the agent bears to that of the organism, but on the relation that is cognised. To take an 24