CHAPTER VI
THE FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS
I.—Impulse, Interest, and Emotion
Any discussion of animal behaviour must deal largely with what is termed the conative aspect of consciousness. “The states designated by such words as craving, longing, yearning, endeavour, effort, desire, wish, and will,” says Dr. Stout, in his admirable “Manual of Psychology,”[117] “have one characteristic in common. In all of these there is an inherent tendency to pass beyond themselves and become something different. This tendency is not only a fact, but an experience; and the peculiar mode of being conscious, which constitutes the experience, is called conation.” Closely associated with this conation is impulse, which Dr. Stout defines as “any conative tendency, so far as it operates by its own isolated intensity, apart from its relation to a general system of motives. Action on impulse is thus contrasted with action which results from reflection and deliberation.”[118] In the interpretation we have advocated, animals are essentially creatures of impulse, and not to any large extent, if at all, reflective agents. And their impulses may be associated either with their inherited and congenital behaviour, or with that which is due to acquired experience. In other words, their impulses may be divided broadly into two classes, the one instinctive, the other acquired.
Dr. Stout says that conation is not only a fact, but an experience. Now, first as to the fact. It seems to be the correlative in consciousness of the behaviour of the nervous system under stimulation. Let us take some simple case such as that, for example, of a hungry chick pecking at a grain of corn. This is explained from the physiological point of view by saying that internal and external stimulation—internal from the digestive organs and system in need of food, external through the eye—gives rise to a state of unstable equilibrium in the nerve-centres; and that, when the instability reaches a certain value, the nervous system discharges into the motor organs, the chick pecks, and stable equilibrium is restored. The tendency to discharge in some way under stimulation is an essential characteristic of a nervous system. It is one of the facts of physiological science. So, too, the conative tendency is one of the facts of psychological science; it is a change in the situation introduced by the effects of the physiological discharge.
Let us here parenthetically notice that the physiological tendency in the nervous system is an evolved complication and a specialized development of one of the fundamental properties of protoplasm—that which is often spoken of as irritability. One of the characteristics of all living matter is its “explosive” instability. So that at the very threshold of organic behaviour we have the analogue of that which, in its developed form, becomes the tendency of the nervous system to discharge as the result of stimulation. The conative tendency of the psychologist, therefore, has its roots deep down in the elemental germs of all organic life.
And this conative tendency is, says Dr. Stout, not only a fact but an experience. Let us return to our hungry chick that pecks at a grain of corn. And let us grant that as the result of stimulation there arise states of consciousness which we describe as a feeling of hunger and the sight of the grain of corn. The nervous system now discharges; and there are introduced into the situation a further group of data, the motor consciousness of the actual behaviour, sensory data from the results of the act, the seizing of the grain and so forth. The situation has unquestionably changed. But is there any specific consciousness of the conative tendency as such? Is there any “peculiar mode of being conscious which constitutes the experience which is called conation”? It is difficult to say. Hence we find differences of opinion among psychologists as to what, from the psychological point of view, the impulse actually is. Is it simply the conscious situation prior to the response? Is it a feeling of the change from the initial to the succeeding phase? Or are new data introduced apart from those afforded by stimulation on the one hand and response on the other? We will not attempt to decide. Without determining its exact nature we may rest content with the very general statement that impulse is a concomitant of a change in the conscious situation.
There is, however, a use of the term concerning which it seems necessarily to enter a word of protest. Impulse is by some regarded as the underlying cause of the conative tendency. Now science, as such, has nothing whatever to do with underlying causes. If, as a matter of observation and inference, we have reason to believe that there is such a tendency, science simply accepts the fact, and endeavours to formulate the conditions under which it arises, and to trace its observed or inferred antecedents. No doubt many of us find it difficult or impossible to rest content with the strictly scientific position, that of unquestioning acceptance of the facts of nature as we find them given in experience. We say: Here is an observed tendency the conditions and antecedents of which are described by science. But what causes the tendency; what is the impelling force? Now to such questions science can give no answer. Science deals with phenomena, and tries to tell us all about their conditions and their antecedents. But whenever Science is asked: “What is the underlying cause of the phenomena,—that which calls them into being?” Science should always give one answer and one only: “Frankly, I do not know; that lies outside my province; ask my sister Metaphysics.” Science ought to have nothing whatever to do with force as the underlying cause of anything in this universe of phenomena. And impulse, as the impelling force which calls a conative tendency into being, is a metaphysical, not a scientific conception.
We need not further discuss the psychological nature of impulse. Indeed, the little that has been said would not have been necessary to our inquiry were it not that we frequently have occasion to speak of animals as “creatures of impulse,” and to refer to their behaviour as due to impulse. What do we mean by such expressions? If we regard conative tendency as a fact (whatever may be said for or against its being also a specific experience), and if this fact is the tendency of the conscious situation to develope in certain definite ways, then we may define impulse with sufficient clearness by saying, with Dr. Stout, that it is characterized by being unreflective. Conative tendency thus comprises two categories—impulse and volition; the one unreflective, the other involving deliberation.
Before passing on to consider how impulse is partly determined by the feeling-tone and the emotional attributes of the conscious situation, we may first draw attention to the important way in which the results of conative tendency afford the data through which consciousness attains its unity in the midst of diversity of experience.
We said that the impulses might be divided broadly into two classes—the one instinctive, the other acquired. Now, from the point of view suggested by a study of behaviour, if not also, as I am disposed to think, from the more general standpoint of a genetic study of mental development, it is convenient to start with the instinctive act and the conscious situation it implies. We have here a piece of experience which, if we may so phrase it, hangs together; in which experience of things in the environment is included in the same elemental synthesis with that of bodily acts in organic relation to these things. It is closely linked, on the one hand, with a foregoing act of attention, itself of the instinctive type; closely linked, on the other hand, with the results of behaviour through which the environing things call forth a new conscious situation and evoke a further response. Thus not only does the experience of an instinctive act hang together, but a series of such acts do so likewise. And coalescent association not only links and groups the elements within the situation called forth by the single act, but comprises also the elements of the developing situation afforded by the whole series. We see this in the young chick, where, as the result of experience, attention is emphasized where the material is palatable, and lapses where it is nauseous—such nauseous substances being soon ignored. Furthermore many environing things appeal in different ways to the same limited number of sense organs, while the same motor organs respond in different ways in successive modes of instinctive behaviour. The same brain forms the physical basis of varied situations overlapping in many ways, and receives afferent messages from the same body. Hence, in its organic unity it affords the conditions for an underlying stratum of mental unity, amid all the diversities of experience; while the multiplicity of messages on the one hand from external things, and on the other hand from internal happenings, lays the foundations of a differentiation between the external world and the self—a differentiation long to remain implicit, and only to be rendered explicit on a far higher level of mental development. For at this early stage, and perhaps throughout animal life, “there is no single continuous self contrasted with a single continuous world. Self, as a whole, uniting present, past, and future phases, and the world as a single coherent system of things and processes, are ideal constructions, built up gradually in the course of human development. The ideal construction of self and the world is comparatively rudimentary in the lower races of mankind, and it never can be complete. On the purely perceptual plane [with which we are now dealing] it has not even begun.”[119] But though the ideal constructions of self and the world have not, as Dr. Stout says, at this stage, even begun, yet, as the same author observes,[120] “animals distinguish in the environment, and treat as a separate thing, whatever portion of matter appeals to their peculiar instincts, and affords occasion for their characteristic modes of activity.” And this differentiation of specially interesting things from each other, and from their relatively uninteresting surroundings, must be accompanied by some differentiation of these things from themselves as affected by them and reacting to them. So that here, as we have seen to be the case in other matters, what is commonly called the perceptual life of animals affords the rough-hewn materials from which ideal constructions may be elaborated by rational beings.