[87] Turner, ‘Ethnology of the Ungava District,’ in Ann. Rep. Bur. Ethn. xi. 270 (Hudson Bay Indians). Georgi, Russia, iii. 205 (Aleuts). Sarasin, Ergebnisse naturwiss. Forschungen auf Ceylon, iii. 537 (Veddahs). von Wrede, Reise in Ḥadhramaut, p. 157 (Bedouins). Winterbottom, Native Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, i. 211.
[88] Seneca, De ira, iii. 28.
[89] Plutarch, De cohibenda ira, 12.
[90] Bacon, ‘Essay LVII. Of Anger,’ in Essays, p. 514.
[91] Bain, Emotions and the Will, p. 177.
[92] Boas, First General Report on the Indians of British Columbia, read at the Newcastle-upon-Tyne meeting of the British Association, 1889, p. 19.
In the feeling of gratification which results from successful resentment, the pleasure of power or superiority also may form a very important element, but it is never the exclusive element.[93] As the satisfaction of every desire is accompanied by pleasure, so the satisfaction of the desire involved in resentment gives a pleasure by itself. The angry or revengeful man who succeeds in what he aims at, delights in the pain he inflicts for the very reason that he desired to inflict it.
[93] Cf. Ribot, op. cit. p. 221 sq.
Revenge thus only forms a link in a chain of emotional phenomena, for which “non-moral resentment” may be used as a common name. In this long chain there is no missing link. Anger without any definite desire to cause suffering, anger with such a desire, more deliberate resentment—all these phenomena are so inseparably connected with each other that no one can say where one passes into another. Their common characteristic is that they are mental states marked by an aggressive attitude towards the cause of pain.
As to their origin, the evolutionist can hardly entertain a doubt. Resentment, like protective reflex action, out of which it has gradually developed, is a means of protection for the animal. Its intrinsic object is to remove a cause of pain, or, what is the same, a cause of danger. Two different attitudes may be taken by an animal towards another which has made it feel pain: it may either shun or attack its enemy. In the former case its action is prompted by fear, in the latter by anger, and it depends on the circumstances which of these emotions is the actual determinant. Both of them are of supreme importance for the preservation of the species, and may consequently be regarded as elements in the animal’s mental constitution which have been acquired by means of natural selection in the struggle for existence. We have already noted that, originally, the impulse of attacking the enemy could hardly have been guided by a representation of the enemy as suffering. But, as a successful attack is necessarily accompanied by such suffering, the desire to produce it naturally, with the increase of intelligence, entered as an important element in resentment. The need for protection thus lies at the foundation of resentment in all its forms.