I.
This name stands for the emotional states—agreeable, disagreeable, or mixed—which accompany the exercise of the intellectual operations. Intellectual emotion may be connected with images, ideas, reasoning, and the logical course of thought; in a word, with all the forms of knowledge. Except in some rare cases, which will be pointed out later on, it scarcely ever rises beyond a medium tone, especially in its higher manifestations.
After having traced it to its origin, we shall have to follow its evolution, which passes through three principal phases: the first, utilitarian and practical; the second, disinterested and scientific; in the third, which is much less frequent, it attains the power and exclusiveness of a passion.
I. This feeling, like all the others, depends on an instinct, a tendency, a craving; it expresses in consciousness its satisfaction or non-satisfaction. This primitive craving—the craving for knowledge—under its instinctive form is called curiosity. It exists in all degrees, from the animal which touches or smells an unknown object, to the all-examining, all-embracing scrutiny of a Goethe; from puerile investigation to the highest speculations; but whatever may be the differences in its object, in its point of application, in its intensity, it always remains identical with itself. Those devoid of it, such as idiots, are eunuchs in the intellectual order.
Assuming this innate craving, how is it developed during the first period?
The first stage is that of surprise. It appears early in the child; quite clearly, at latest, in the twenty-second week, according to Preyer. It is a special emotional state which cannot be traced back to any other, consisting of a shock, a disadaptation. In my opinion, its special and peculiar character lies in its being without contents, without object, save a relation. Its material is a relation, a transition between two states—a mere movement of the mind, and nothing more. The mode of expression and the physiological accompaniments of surprise are very clearly defined. The description of these will be found in Darwin (Expression of the Emotions, ch. xii.); the eyes and mouth are wide open, the eyebrows raised, the sudden shock is followed by immobility, the pulsations of the heart and the respiratory movements are accelerated, etc.
The second stage is that of wonder. I think with Bain and Sully,[[229]] that the distinction between these two stages is not a vain subtlety. Surprise is momentary, wonder is stable; one is a disadaptation, the other a readaptation; one is without objective material, the other has for its material some strange or unaccustomed object. It is this second stage, no doubt, which Descartes called admiration, and which he placed among his six primary passions:—"Admiration is a sudden surprise of the soul which leads it to consider with attention the objects which appear to it rare and extraordinary."[[230]] In fact, wonder is the awakening of the attention, of which it has the principal characteristics—unity of consciousness, convergence towards a single object, intensity of perception or representation, adaptation of movements.[[231]] In the beginning, before wonder is accompanied by pleasure (or pain, as the case may be), it has a peculiar character approximating to what we have called the neutral state, or that of simple excitation.
The third stage is that of interrogation, of reflections succeeding to the consternation produced by the first shock. This is the stage of curiosity properly so called, which consists in two questions, put implicitly and explicitly: What is that? What is the use of it? What is the concrete nature of this object? and what can be its utility? Primitive peoples, children, animals, incessantly put to themselves this double question; not, certainly, in clear and analytical terms, but instinctively and by their actions. The dog, brought face to face with an unknown object, looks at it, smells it, approaches, withdraws, ventures to touch it, returns, and begins again; he is pursuing this investigation after his own fashion; he is solving a double problem of nature and utility.[[232]] The interrogation consists in assimilating the new object to our former perceptions or representations—classing it, in fact.
Is primitive man curious? Herbert Spencer alleges a large number of facts in proof of his distaste for novelty.[[233]] However, the craving for knowledge seems to be very unequally distributed among the various races; the only universal fact appearing to be that primitive curiosity is limited to very simple things, all of which have, or seem to have, some practical utility. Curiosity and the emotional state which accompanies it have no other end than the preservation of the individual—just as we have seen with regard to the tendency to live in communities, or to revere the gods, in this same initial period of evolution. To be wide awake, to make inquiries as to what will help or harm one, in a word, knowledge in the practical order, is a powerful weapon in the struggle for life; a cause of selection in favour of the curious, and at the expense of the incurious. It is the survival of this entirely utilitarian curiosity which explains why, at the present day, uncultured and even semi-civilised peoples object to the entrance into their country of travellers from a distance for the purpose of geological or other scientific explorations; they are always suspicious of a search for treasure, of espionage, or of some unknown ill deed on the part of the strangers.
II. How did the transition to the disinterested period come about? We may admit, with Sully,[[234]] that this took place through the natural, innate inclination of the human intellect towards the extraordinary, the strange, the marvellous. The same tendency which, under its creative form, engenders religious, poetical, social myths, attempts under the form of research to discover instead of imagining causes.[[235]]
We are here at the point of junction between the æsthetic and the intellectual sentiments, which will presently bifurcate, and pursue each its own course. This inquiry is only half disinterested, however, for if man tries to penetrate the mystery of things it is in the hope of profiting thereby.
For the rest, however this transition may have come about, it took place when the struggle for existence became less keen, and it was possible to cultivate disinterested research for its own sake. Next, curiosity became scientific emotion, and gradually extended itself to every kind of investigation: the intellectual sentiment was formed in all its fulness.
It has been studied with a certain favour by psychologists, especially those of the school of Herbart, or those who have felt his influence, under the name of “feelings of relation,” "feelings connected with the cause of representations." I do not intend to follow them through their tedious and uninstructive task of divisions, subdivisions, and distinctions worthy of the schoolmen of the fourteenth century. Besides, the alleged classification of the intellectual feelings varies from one writer to another—one giving fifteen, another sixty. It is an artificial method, a labyrinth, a source, not of clearness, but of obscurity. I defy the subtlest psychologist to note and fix the delicate gradations of feeling which, ex hypothesi, should answer to this endless enumeration.[[236]] But its most serious defect lies in its including only the intellectual and not the emotional states.
I can only admit one division, which has the advantage of simplicity, and, more especially, of being based on the very nature of the emotional process. This is, into the pleasures and pains accompanying research or the acquisition of knowledge, and those which are attached to its possession, or the state of being without it. The former are dynamic, the second static.
Intellectual emotion, under its dynamic form, depends on the quantity of energy expended. In fact, it is only a particular case of the emotional state accompanying every form of activity directed towards an end compatible with success or failure; it is only one form of self-feeling, differing only in its object, not in its nature, from the feeling of the explorer or the hunter. The search for knowledge is a hunt like any other, truth being the game, and just as many sportsmen find more charm in the vicissitudes of their expedition than in their spoils, so many truth-seekers will accept as their own, Lessing’s well-known saying: “If I were offered the choice between already ascertained truth and the pleasure of finding it out, I would choose the second.”
Under its static form, intellectual emotion is still a particular case of self-feeling, whose principal manifestation is the sense of power, or its opposite. It is one form of this sense, by the same right as the pleasure of physical strength, the pleasure of riches, or their opposites. It approximates especially to the feeling inspired by possession or property; it is felt, under its positive form as augmentation, under its negative as diminution and poverty; ignorance is a retrenchment, a limit.
To sum up, intellectual emotion is simple enough; it is only the transfer of the emotional manifestations already known to us, to a group of mental operations. There is no need, therefore, to insist further on the matter.
III. We have still to follow it into a third stage, which it rarely attains, because pure ideas have little attraction for average human beings—viz., the cases in which it becomes a passion. It is evident that the intellectual passion cannot exist outside the dynamic group, possession being, in the nature of things, a calm pleasure, or, as the ancients said, a pleasure at rest.
We might find numberless instances in the biographies of scientific men and philosophers. Some names suggest themselves at once: Kepler, Spinoza, and many others who devoted their lives strictly and exclusively to the pursuit of truth. It may be objected, however, that, in certain cases and with certain men, nothing proves that the intellectual passion has not been fed or sustained by foreign elements; that the love of learning, though the principal motive, has been the only one; that it has not been adulterated with others—e.g., desire for position, influence, riches, fame, glory, in short, ambition under its manifold aspects. It is not easy to find absolutely pure cases; for, besides the rarity of the intellectual passion, the terms in which the demand is framed are almost contradictory, since the men we want to find must be unknown to fame. The following instance, however, seems to me to answer perfectly to all the conditions. Descuret, in his Médécine des Passions, gives a brief biographical sketch of a Hungarian named Mentelli, a philologist and mathematician, who, without a definite end in view, simply for the pleasure of learning and to satisfy his intellectual cravings, consecrated his whole life to study, having apparently no other want. “Living at Paris, in a filthy lodging, the use of which was allowed him out of charity, he had cut off from his expenditure all that was not absolutely necessary to sustain life. His outlay—apart from the purchase of books—amounted to seven sous a day, three of which went for food and four for light; for he worked twenty hours a day, without intermission, except on one day in the week, when he gave lessons in mathematics, on the fees received for which he subsisted. All he needed was water, which he fetched for himself, potatoes which he cooked over his lamp, oil to feed the latter, and coarse brown bread. He slept in a large packing-case, into which, during the day, he used to put his feet wrapped in a blanket or a little hay. An old arm-chair, a table, a jug, a tin pot, and a piece of tin roughly bent into a convex shape, and serving as a lamp, formed the rest of his furniture. Mentelli saved the price of washing by wearing no linen. A soldier’s coat bought at the barracks and only replaced in the last extremity, a pair of nankeen trousers, a fur cap, and huge sabots composed his entire costume. In 1814 the cannon-balls of the allies fell all round the lodging he was then occupying, but failed to disturb him.... During the first epidemic of cholera at Paris, it was necessary to employ armed force to compel this scientific anchorite to interrupt his studies, so as to clean out his pestilential cell. He lived thus, uncomplainingly, and indeed happily, for thirty years, without a day’s illness. At last (on December 22nd, 1836), at the age of sixty, having gone as usual to fetch water from the Seine, his foot slipped, he fell into the river, then in flood, and was drowned. Mentelli left no work behind him, in fact there remains no trace of his long researches.”[[237]]
Other instances might be quoted, but they would appear trifling by comparison with this. Great anonymous collaborations, like those of the Benedictines, have certainly enlisted the services of enthusiasts of this kind; thus Dom Mabillon was the type of a worker animated with passionate fervour, modest, unknown, punctually fulfilling his religious duties, and when free from these, travelling about the world on foot to collect historical documents.
Thus we find cases where the love of knowledge alone, untarnished by other motives, has all the characteristics of a fixed and tenacious passion, filling the whole of life, and expressing the whole nature of a man.