The older books on psychology devote a great deal of space to the classification of emotions; modern psychology has rather been concerned to bring emotion into the laboratory, and to trace the emotive pattern under experimental control. It was natural to begin with the simpler modes of feeling, and to proceed from them to the more complex; and experiments were therefore made on the sense-feelings. We have seen that the results are not yet definitely assured (pp. 83 f.), so that it is still too early to write an adequate psychology of the emotions. On the whole, however, it seems that the three dimensions of sense-feeling will serve for a classification of emotion: joy and fear are agreeable and disagreeable emotions, anger and grief are exciting and subduing, hope and relief are straining and relaxing. It is not difficult to carry this classification further; to find, for instance, agreeable-exciting, disagreeable-exciting, agreeable-subduing, disagreeable-subduing, even agreeable-exciting-straining, agreeable-subduing-relaxing forms, and so on and so forth; but nothing is gained, at present, by drawing such distinctions. We shall therefore leave the classification thus in the rough. One point only calls for comment. We said that emotion is a suddenly aroused experience, beginning abruptly and dying down slowly; yet the straining and relaxing emotions—hope, anxiety, disappointment, relief—seem, on the contrary, to arise slowly and gradually. It is difficult to be sure of the facts; but we must be careful not to confuse the starting of an emotion with what occurs after it has started. It may very likely grow in strength; and it will follow, as we have said, a characteristic course in time, until it reaches its natural end. Either of these things—the growth in intensity or the development in time—may give the illusion of a gradual beginning. If we abstract from them, then it appears that these straining-relaxing emotions really come suddenly; they occupy the mind all at once; we shift directly from grief to hope, from satisfaction to anxiety, from fear to relief; the emotions may alternate in our experience, but they set in abruptly. We say of a sick friend ‘The doctor says that we may begin to hope,’ or ‘The relatives are beginning to be a little anxious’; but as a matter of psychological fact the hope and the anxiety appear to come and go, as mental patterns, quite suddenly; the situation touches off, actualises, now the one set of tendencies, and now the other. So our general description of emotion may stand.
[§ 50]. The James-Lange Theory of Emotion.—We saw that emotion, at any rate in its intenser phases, is insistently organic; the organic sensations readily blend both with one another and with feeling; and the resultant massive fusion is as characteristic of emotion as the organic surge (p. 211) is characteristic of instinct. Everyone can distinguish, even in imagination, the rushing, swelling ‘feel’ of anger from the sinking, shrinking ‘feel’ of fear. Psychology has always had an open eye for the organic constituent of emotion; Aristotle and many later writers refer to it; and in France emphasis upon the organic stir in emotion became almost a matter of psychological orthodoxy. The whole subject was, however, set in a new light when the late Professor James propounded in 1884 his famous ‘theory of emotion.’ “My thesis is,” James wrote, “that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion;” “The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be.” The view thus paradoxically stated aroused much discussion; and it gained further impetus by the publication in 1885 of an essay on emotion by Carl Lange, professor of medicine in Copenhagen; Lange independently comes to a conclusion which, in principle, is the same as that of James.
James’ position is, evidently, twofold. He affirms, in the first place, that emotions have an instinctive basis. A situation is presented; the organism perceives it; and immediately, directly, because the situation appeals to instinctive tendencies in the nervous system, the emotive response is evoked. With that statement we have no quarrel. James also affirms, however, that the ‘feel’ of what we have called the emotive response is itself the experience of emotion; having the organic sensations, you have the emotion; if you had not the organic sensations, there would be no emotion. In a later essay he modified or amplified his position: he grants the presence in emotion of ideas and of pleasant and unpleasant feelings, but still maintains that the one thing characteristic of the emotions is a general seizure of excitement, a churning-up of the interior of the organism; and this rank excitement is a matter of the organic sensations.
So there arise two questions of fact: is emotion possible if the organic sensations are lacking? and is the organic fusion sufficiently differentiated, in the various emotions, to give them their distinctive ‘feels’ in experience?
To answer the first question we have observations both upon dogs and upon human beings. Emotive responses “occur in dogs in which practically all the main viscera and the great bulk of skeletal muscle have been removed from subjection to, and from influence upon, the brain by severance of the vagus nerves and the spinal cord. In these animals no alteration whatever was noticed in the occurrence, under appropriate circumstances, of characteristic expressions of voice and features, indicating anger, delight or fear.” So far, then, the evidence tells against the necessity of organic sensations. As regards human beings, we cannot, of course, produce a visceral anæsthesia at will, by operating upon the living nervous system; we must wait until cases turn up in the hospitals. Some such cases have been examined; and while the observations made upon them are not conclusive, still, they lend themselves more readily to the same than to the opposite interpretation; if emotion is lacking, the lack seems due rather to a general impairment of nervous function, including that of the brain, than to the specific loss of the organic sensations. The evidence as a whole is thus unfavourable to James.
To answer the second question we may refer to the results of experiments recently conducted by Professor W. B. Cannon in the physiological laboratory of Harvard University. “If various strong emotions can thus be expressed in the diffused activities of or violently angry or full of tender affection,—when any one of these diverse emotional states is present,—there are nervous discharges by sympathetic channels to various viscera, including the lachrymal glands. In terror and rage and intense elation, for example, the responses in the viscera seem too uniform to offer a satisfactory means of distinguishing states which, in man at least, are very different in subjective quality.... The viscera are relatively unimportant in an emotional complex, especially in contributing differential features.” The technicalities of this quotation do not here concern us; you will understand them if you read Dr. Cannon’s book; but it is clear that, again, the evidence is against James’ view.
We must conclude, then, that the emotive pattern is a more complicated affair than the James-Lange theory represented it to be. All the component processes—perception, ideas, kinæsthesis, organic sensations, feeling—play their part in the total experience. We must conclude, too, that the pattern varies, at least in the matter of emphasis, from one individual to another; that the processes which ‘mean’ anger or fear to A may differ from those which ‘mean’ the same emotion to B; the ideas, the kinæsthetic set, the organic sensations, may be more or less vivid, more or less extended, more or less stable features of the mental pattern. In fine, we agree with James that all emotions have an instinctive basis; and we agree with him, further, that the organic commotion, always present in some measure and degree, is characteristic of the experience; but we cannot regard this organic commotion either as constitutive, as the one thing necessary to emotion, or as differential, the one thing that marks of any particular emotion from all the rest. From an æsthetic point of view we may regret this conclusion; it is always more satisfactory to end up a discussion with some positive, clean-cut statement than to leave the subject with a ‘safe’ generalisation and a balanced judgement; but when we are seeking scientific truth, we may not outrun the facts we have; and when a science is in the making, the facts will not often round off prettily into a comprehensive theory.
[§ 51]. The Expression of Emotion.—If the classification of emotions is a pleasant exercise for authors of a logical turn, the outward show of emotion in gesture and facial expression has always been attractive to those who pondered the relations of mind and body. It may even be true that observation of these expressive movements lies at the very root of psychology; for in emotion a man is changed, transformed; he is unlike himself, out of himself, beside himself; and what could suggest, more plainly than such transformation, the activity of an indwelling mind? However that may be, there is a long list, stretching down the centuries, of works that deal with emotive expression. We must ourselves pass over everything that appeared before the time of Charles Darwin.
Darwin, who was naturally anxious to bring the facts of expression under his formula of evolution, began to collect data as early as 1838; and with characteristic thoroughness he went to all available sources,—to animals, to the human infant, to the insane, to works of art, to the play of the facial muscles under the electric current, to the different races of mankind. In his book of 1872 he distinguishes three main principles of expression; the titles will be understood from the examples. The first principle is that of serviceable associated habits. We all jump when we are startled, and wince when we are threatened; and the jump and wince of man are weakened survivals of the frightened animal’s leap out of danger, and of its cowering self-effacement in presence of a stronger enemy. The face of scorn, “curving a contumelious lip,” lays bare the canine teeth, as if for actual attack; the sneer of man is but a weakened survival of the snarl by which our stronger-jawed ancestors unfleshed their teeth for the combat. The second principle is that of antithesis. If indignation shows itself (according to the first principle) by squared shoulders and out-thrown chest, the opposite of this aggressive indignation, humiliation or self-abasement, shows itself in the opposed attitude of raised shoulders and indrawn chest, Shylock’s “patient shrug.” The third principle, lastly, is that of the direct action of the nervous system. Thus we all tremble from fear; and trembling is of no service, often of much disservice, and cannot have been at first acquired through the will, and then rendered habitual in association with any emotion; it must be directly due to the constitution of the nervous system.
Darwin’s principles have been much criticised; in particular, the purely negative principle of antithesis has received short shrift from later writers. One of the things that he fails to account for is the imitative play of the lips. The disgusted man looks as if he were about to retch; the injured man looks bitter; the disappointed, sour; the satisfied, sweet; the mouth, in these latter cases, is set as it is when we have a bitter, sour, or sweet taste. What is the reason? We may remind ourselves that primitive language was concrete, and not abstract; that it abounded in what we should nowadays call metaphor. We may remember also that the one thing necessary in a primitive society is food, and that primitive metaphors would naturally be, to a large extent, metaphors drawn from the preparing and obtaining of food, from cooking and hunting. So we may imagine that the successful hunter, returning to camp, licked his lips, seemed already to be sucking the sweet morsel; while the unsuccessful drew his lips out sideways, as if he were trying to taste as little as possible of his sour draught. In course of time the metaphor will lapse; or, more strictly, the old concrete way of speech will give place to an abstract phrasing, and will hold its own only as metaphor, as a bit of picturesque imagery; we still talk to-day of the sweets of love and revenge, of tasting success, of tainted money, of a soured disposition, of the bitter end. Meanwhile the original gesture, if only it is fitted for communication, will persist unchanged; gesture is far more conservative than language; and the look of a bitter taste will thus express the emotion of a man who is suffering, perhaps, under an unjust accusation.