CONCLUSION.
The place of the feelings in psychic life—They come first—Physiological proofs—Psychological proofs.
Through the multiple aspects of our subject and the diversity of questions we have dealt with, the fundamental idea of this book has been to show that the foundation of the affective life is appetite or its contrary—that is to say, movement or arrest of movement; that at its root it is an impulse, a tendency, an act in the nascent or complete state, independent of intelligence, which has nothing to do with it and may not even be present. It is unnecessary to inflict upon the reader any new variations on a theme so often repeated. I only desire, in conclusion, to add some remarks on the place of the feelings in the total psychic life, and to show that that place is the first.
This statement must be made precise. To compare “sensibility” and “intelligence,” as some authors have done, to see which of these two “faculties” is inferior to the other, is an artificial and unreasonable task, since there is no common measure of the two, and there can be no solution of the question which is not arbitrary. But we may proceed objectively, and ask if the one is not primary and the other secondary, if the one is not grafted on the other, and in that case which is the stock and which the graft. If the feelings appear first it is clear that they cannot be derived, and are not a mode or function of knowledge, since they exist by themselves and are irreducible.
Thus stated the question is simple and the reply evident.
The physiological evidence in favour of the priority of the feelings need only be briefly recalled; it all centres in one point: organic vegetative life always and everywhere appears before animal life; physiologists constantly repeat that the animal is grafted on the vegetable which precedes him. Now organic life is directly expressed by the needs and appetites, which are the stuff of the affective life; animal life by the sensations, the stuff of the intellectual life. The primordial part played by organic sensibility has been shown in the Introduction. We may remember also the myriads of animals which are only bundles of needs, their psychology consisting in the search for food, in defence, and in propagation; their senses (often reduced to touch alone) are only tools, coarse instruments, teleological weapons in the service of their needs; but closed in as they may be from the external world, appetite in them is not less intense. Even in man is not fœtal life, and that of the first months after birth, much the same, almost wholly made up of satisfied or unsatisfied needs, and consequently of pleasures and pains? From the purely physiological point of view, knowledge appears not as a mistress but as a servant.
The psychological evidence is not difficult to supply, and has indeed already been presented by Schopenhauer in so brilliant and complete a manner that it would be a bold task to present it afresh. The chapter entitled “The Primacy of Will in Self-Consciousness”[[258]] is a long argument in favour of the priority of impulse over knowledge. We need not be duped by the equivocal use of the word “will,” since for Schopenhauer “to will is to desire, to aspire, to flee, to hope, to fear, to love, to hate; in a word, all that directly constitutes our good and our ill, our pleasure and our pain.” Nor need we occupy ourselves with his metaphysics nor his antiquated physiology, nor his personal hatred of intelligence, which he treats as an enemy and usurper, “because all the philosophers up to to-day have made it the intimate primitive essence of their so-called soul;” and having made these eliminations we may find many of his pages full of penetrating and consummate psychology. I recall his chief arguments.
Will (in the sense above indicated) is universal. The basis of consciousness in every animal is desire. This fundamental fact is translated into the impulse to preserve life and well-being, and to propagate. This foundation is common to the polypus and to man. The differences among animals are due to a difference in knowledge; as we descend in the series intelligence becomes weaker and more imperfect; there is no similar degradation in will (or desire); the smallest insect wills what it wills as fully as man; will is everywhere equal to itself. Relatively to intelligence it is the robust blind man carrying on his shoulders the paralytic who sees clearly.
It is fundamental. The will to live, with the horror of death which results from it, is a fact anterior to all intelligence and independent of it. In it is the basis of identity and of character; “the man is hidden in the heart and not in the head.” It is the source and the bond of all stable associations, religious, political, or professional. It makes the strength of party spirit, of sects, and of factions. Compare the fragility of friendships founded on similarity of intelligence with those that spring from the heart. Thus religions have had every reason to promise eternal recompense to man’s moral qualities, and not to the gifts of the mind.
Its power is sovereign. It is not reason which uses passion, it is passion which uses reason to reach its ends. Under the influence of intense desire, the intellect sometimes rises to a degree of vigour of which none would believe it capable. Desire, love, fear render the most obtuse understanding lucid. And besides, if will and intelligence were identical in nature, their development would proceed side by side, whereas nothing is more frequent than a great intellect united to an inferior character, and “we sometimes find violent desires, impassioned and impetuous impulses, joined to a feeble intellect, that is to say a small brain badly enclosed in a thick skull.”
Memory, which is commonly considered a purely intellectual phenomenon, often depends—as we have seen—on the state of the feelings. This had not escaped Schopenhauer. “Even a weak memory sometimes retains perfectly what concerns the passion dominant at the moment; the lover never forgets a favourable opportunity, the ambitious nothing that serves their projects; the miser never forgets his losses, nor the proud man a wound to his honour; the vain remember every word of praise and every distinction they receive.... That is what might be called the heart’s memory, more intimate than the mind’s.”
How is it that facts of common observation, so clear and so numerous, requiring for their discovery neither experiment nor special research, nor even long reflection, have been so generally misunderstood; and that the contrary opinion has always predominated, reducing the manifestations of feeling to “qualities of sensation,” to “confused intelligence,” and other oft-repeated formulas? The only reason I can find is that during centuries this subject has been treated philosophically, not psychologically, and the method of philosophy is necessarily intellectualist. Only the adult and complex forms of the affective life were considered, without regard to their evolution, which alone brings us to their origin. The parts played by movements as psychological factors, and by unconscious activity, were forgotten or misunderstood. Pleasures and pains in their manifold forms were regarded as the essential phenomena in place of the hidden springs which give rise to them.
To sum up, the psychology of the emotions has its point of departure in those complex feelings which daily life brings beneath our eyes every moment. Their complexity is the work of our intellectual nature, which associates and dissociates, mixing and combining perceptions, images, ideas, each of which, in so far as it relates to the individual or social conditions of existence, to the physiological needs, to the offensive and defensive instinct of conservation, to the social, moral, religious, æsthetic, and scientific tendencies, produces in the organism variable effects which, translated into consciousness, impart an affective tone to intellectual states. Analysis shows that these complex forms are reducible to a few simple emotions. The simple emotion itself is a complexus made up of impulses, that is of motor elements, and agreeable, painful, or mixed states of consciousness; these two factors form a whole apparently indissoluble. Finally, the fundamental motor or dynamic element manifests itself under two forms: conscious impulses or desires, unconscious impulses or appetites; there is identity of nature, the first possessing consciousness in addition. Hence for the desires (the psychological form), thanks to consciousness, there is the possibility of manifold adaptations and indefinite plasticity. Hence for the appetites (the physiological form) there is stability, fixity, automatism, the absence of invention, and of that state of indecision arising simultaneously with consciousness.
If we include all the primitive conscious impulses beneath the name of desire (or its opposite, aversion), we find two apparently contradictory theses concerning its origin. According to one, desire is a primitive phenomenon, anterior on the one hand to all knowledge, and on the other to all experience of pleasure or pain. According to the other, desire is a secondary phenomenon, the anticipation of a known pleasure to seek for, a known pain to avoid; the latter counts most partisans, and is also condensed into well-known axiomatic sayings and formulas: “We cannot desire what we do not know,” “We can only desire what seems to be for our advantage,” “Desire is founded on a proved pleasure.” Both theses are true, each for a separate moment, and the first alone relates to the question of origin.
At the first moment desire is anterior to all experience, to every consideration of pleasure or of pain; it acts as a blind force; it is a vis a tergo, a propulsion only explicable by the physical and mental organism. It must necessarily act at once without knowing whither it goes, else it would act too late or not at all.
At the second moment, it is guided by experience and rests on proved pleasure or pain, seeking one and avoiding the other. It is to this moment that the sayings above quoted apply. That is the final form, and it embraces the immense majority of cases. Even in the adult, however, we have noted examples of vague desire, without object or determined aim.
Blind impulse, when it reaches its end, finds its satisfaction there, and seeks it anew because it is pleasant. But the pleasant and the unpleasant are relative qualities, varying in individuals, and at different moments in the same individual. If the physical and mental organisation changes, the impulses, the position of pleasure and pain change also; pathology furnishes us with unquestionable proof.
Impulse, therefore, is the primordial fact in the life of the feelings, and I cannot better conclude than by borrowing from Spinoza a passage which sums up the whole spirit of this book: “Appetite is the very essence of man, from which necessarily flow all those things which seem to preserve him.... Between appetite and desire there is no difference, save that desire is self-conscious appetite. It follows from all this that we desire and follow after nothing because we deem it to be good, but on the contrary deem that to be good which we desire and follow after.”[[259]]