The Mind and Its Education

by George Herbert Betts

1. THE NATURE OF FEELING

It will be our purpose in the next few chapters to study the affective content of consciousness—the feelings and emotions. The present chapter will be devoted to the feelings and the one that follows to the emotions.

The Different Feeling Qualities.—At least six (some writers say even more) distinct and qualitatively different feeling states are easily distinguished. These are: pleasure, pain; desire, repugnance; interest, apathy. Pleasure and pain, and desire and repugnance, are directly opposite or antagonistic feelings. Interest and apathy are not opposites in a similar way, since apathy is but the absence of interest, and not its antagonist. In place of the terms pleasure and pain, the pleasant and the unpleasant, or the agreeable and the disagreeable, are often used. Aversion is frequently employed as a synonym for repugnance.

It is somewhat hard to believe on first thought that feeling comprises but the classes given. For have we not often felt the pain from a toothache, from not being able to take a long-planned trip, from the loss of a dear friend? Surely these are very different classes of feelings! Likewise we have been happy from the very joy of living, from being praised for some well-doing, or from the presence of friend or lover. And here again we seem to have widely different classes of feelings.

We must remember, however, that feeling is always based on something known. It never appears alone in consciousness as mere pleasures or pains. The mind must have something about which to feel. The "what" must precede the "how." What we commonly call a feeling is a complex state of consciousness in which feeling predominates, but which has, nevertheless, a basis of sensation, or memory, or some other cognitive process. And what so greatly varies in the different cases of the illustrations just given is precisely this knowledge element, and not the feeling element. A feeling of unpleasantness is a feeling of unpleasantness whether it comes from an aching tooth or from the loss of a friend. It may differ in degree, and the entire mental states of which the feeling is a part may differ vastly, but the simple feeling itself is of the same quality.

Feeling Always Present in Mental Content.—No phase of our mental life is without the feeling element. We look at the rainbow with its beautiful and harmonious blending of colors, and a feeling of pleasure accompanies the sensation; then we turn and gaze at the glaring sun, and a disagreeable feeling is the result. A strong feeling of pleasantness accompanies the experience of the voluptuous warmth of a cozy bed on a cold morning, but the plunge between the icy sheets on the preceding evening was accompanied by the opposite feeling. The touch of a hand may occasion a thrill of ecstatic pleasure, or it may be accompanied by a feeling equally disagreeable. And so on through the whole range of sensation; we not only know the various objects about us through sensation and perception, but we also feel while we know. Cognition, or the knowing processes, gives us our "whats"; and feeling, or the affective processes, gives us our "hows." What is yonder object? A bouquet. How does it affect you? Pleasurably.

If, instead of the simpler sensory processes which we have just considered, we take the more complex processes, such as memory, imagination, and thinking, the case is no different. Who has not reveled in the pleasure accompanying the memories of past joys? On the other hand, who is free from all unpleasant memories—from regrets, from pangs of remorse? Who has not dreamed away an hour in pleasant anticipation of some desired object, or spent a miserable hour in dreading some calamity which imagination pictured to him? Feeling also accompanies our thought processes. Everyone has experienced the feeling of the pleasure of intellectual victory over some difficult problem which had baffled the reason, or over some doubtful case in which our judgment proved correct. And likewise none has escaped the feeling of unpleasantness which accompanies intellectual defeat. Whatever the contents of our mental stream, "we find in them, everywhere present, a certain color of passing estimate, an immediate sense that they are worth something to us at any given moment, or that they then have an interest to us."

The Seeming Neutral Feeling Zone.—It is probable that there is so little feeling connected with many of the humdrum and habitual experiences of our everyday lives, that we are but slightly, if at all, aware of a feeling state in connection with them. Yet a state of consciousness with absolutely no feeling side to it is as unthinkable as the obverse side of a coin without the reverse. Some sort of feeling tone or mood is always present. The width of the affective neutral zone—that is, of a feeling state so little marked as not to be discriminated as either pleasure or pain, desire or aversion—varies with different persons, and with the same person at different times. It is conditioned largely by the amount of attention given in the direction of feeling, and also on the fineness of the power of feeling discrimination. It is safe to say that the zero range is usually so small as to be negligible.

2. MOOD AND DISPOSITION

The sum total of all the feeling accompanying the various sensory and thought processes at any given time results in what we may call our feeling tone, or mood.