We may say of all such attempts at explanation what we said of the biological theory of feeling: it would be foolish to reject them outright, and yet they are too general, too open to criticism, to satisfy the requirements of science. We need detailed work, both upon the physiological and upon the psychological side. Consider, for example, the erection of the hair in fear and rage. This is a result of the diffused activity of the ‘sympathetic’ nervous system, the total effect of which is to energise the organism; when two boys are wrestling, the friends of the weaker or less skilful shout to him to ‘get angry’; and terrified men achieve wonderful feats of leaping and running. But how precisely does the contraction of the muscles beneath the skin subserve this energising? Is it an accident, so to speak, due merely to the diffusion of the nervous activity? or has it a special physiological function? and has it, further, anything of the biological significance that Darwin attached to it? Until such questions are answered in detail, we cannot formulate general principles of the expression of emotion.
[§ 52]. Mood, Passion, Temperament.—The weaker emotive states, which persist for some time together, are called moods; the stronger, which exhaust the organism in a comparatively short time, are called passions. No sharp line of distinction, however, can be drawn, either as regards intensity or as regards duration, between these various experiences.
We have special names for the moods which correspond with most of the emotions; thus, cheerfulness is the mood of joy, and depression the mood of grief. As a rule, the mood appears suddenly, rises slowly to a relative maximum, and then slowly dies down. You wake in the morning, feeling irritable; you proceed to take everything irritably, and so become more irritable still; and after a while the incidents that prompt to irritability seem to grow rarer, and the mood gradually disappears. There are times, however, when some intercurrent event brings about a quick and total change of mood; and there are times when the mood passes off abruptly, without assignable reason; you are surprised to find yourself suddenly cheerful. It is a commonplace that mood depends, in large measure, upon bodily health; but the correlation has not been worked out.
Language also has many words for the passions: fury is the passion of anger, terror the passion of fear. These states imply a severe shock to the nervous system; and though their first effect is to energise the organism, they must soon exhaust its reserve powers; we notice, in fact, that very violent emotions are likely to give way to lassitude or even to unconsciousness. The name of passion is further given, in ordinary speech, to any abiding interest, natural (p. 207) or acquired,—to any mode of emotive response that is specific and lasting. We say that a man has a passion for success, for science, for gambling; and we mean that a situation which shows any sort of reference to these things will appeal to him, dominatingly and one-sidedly, through that reference.
The word ‘temperament’ comes to us from popular psychology, which classifies mental phenomena under the headings of intellect, feeling and will, and places individual endowment under the corresponding headings of talent, temperament and character. Temperament, so far as the term can be employed in a strictly psychological sense, is thus a very general term for the innate susceptibility of the individual to emotive situations and for the typical character of his emotive responses. The doctrine of temperaments was first systematised by the Greek physician Galen in the second century of our era, though the germs of the current fourfold classification—into choleric, melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic—go back much further in the history of thought. This classification takes account of the strength and the duration of the emotive response: the choleric person responds quickly and strongly, the melancholic slowly and strongly, the sanguine quickly and weakly, the phlegmatic slowly and weakly, to the situation which evokes emotion. Crude to the last degree! we say: and yet it is astonishing to see what a master can do with such crudity. Thackeray, in The Newcomes, has drawn almost pure types of temperament; Madame de Florac is melancholic, Fred Bayham is choleric, Mrs. Hobson Newcome is sanguine, and Rosey is phlegmatic; and the minor characters in a great many of our best novels tend in the same way to personify the four temperaments.
But has not psychology advanced beyond this fourfold classification? Not appreciably. There are books, written by psychologists, on temperament and character; but the resulting classifications, though more elaborate and more ingenious, are also individually coloured; nothing like finality has been reached. A good deal might be done, in this field, by the roughest kind of observation, provided it were long enough continued. If you kept a diary for a couple of years, putting down the nature and occasion of your emotions, and the nature and duration and occasion and course of your moods, you would be gathering material which psychology still lacks, and which might serve as starting-point for detailed analytical study.
(1) In the passage which heads this chapter, Descartes expresses the opinion that joy, sorrow, love and hate are the primary emotions. Do you agree with him? Why? How would you set to work to discover the primary emotions?
(2) Do you think that there is an instinct of imitation? Give reasons for your answer; then consult the books.