From which and other like facts, does it not seem an unavoidable inference that new emotions are developed by new experiences—new habits of life? All are familiar with the truth, that in the individual, each feeling may be strengthened by performing those actions which it prompts; and to say that the feeling is strengthened, is to say that it is in part made by these actions. We know further, that not unfrequently, individuals, by persistence in special courses of conduct, acquire special likings for such courses disagreeable as these may be to others; and these whims, or morbid tastes, imply incipient emotions corresponding to these special activities. We know that emotional characteristics, in common with all others, are hereditary; and the differences between civilized nations descended from the same stock, show us the cumulative results of small modifications hereditarily transmitted. And when we see that between savage and civilized races, which diverged from each other in the remote past, and have for a hundred generations followed modes of life becoming ever more unlike, there exist still greater emotional contrasts; may we not infer that the more or less distinct emotions which characterize civilized races, are the organized results of certain daily-repeated combinations of mental states which social life involves? Must we not say that habits not only modify emotions in the individual, and not only beget tendencies to like habits and accompanying emotions in descendants, but that when the conditions of the race make the habits persistent, this progressive modification may go on to the extent of producing emotions so far distinct as to seem new? And if so, we may suspect that such new emotions, and by implication all emotions analytically considered, consist of aggregated and consolidated groups of those simpler feelings which habitually occur together in experience: that they result from combined experiences, and are constituted of them.
When, in the circumstances of any race, some one kind of action or set of actions, sensation or set of sensations, is usually followed, or accompanied by, various other sets of actions or sensations, and so entails a large mass of pleasurable or painful states of consciousness; these, by frequent repetition, become so connected together that the initial action or sensation brings the ideas of all the rest crowding into consciousness: producing, in a degree, the pleasures or pains that have before been felt in reality. And when this relation, besides being frequently repeated in the individual, occurs in successive generations, all the many nervous actions involved tend to grow organically connected. They become incipiently reflex; and on the occurrence of the appropriate stimulus, the whole nervous apparatus which in past generations was brought into activity by this stimulus, becomes nascently excited. Even while yet there have been no individual experiences, a vague feeling of pleasure or pain is produced; constituting what we may call the body of the emotion. And when the experiences of past generations come to be repeated in the individual, the emotion gains both strength and definiteness; and is accompanied by the appropriate specific ideas.
This view of the matter, which we believe the established truths of Physiology and Psychology unite in indicating, and which is the view that generalizes the phenomena of habit, of national characteristics, of civilization in its moral aspects, at the same time that it gives us a conception of emotion in its origin and ultimate nature, may be illustrated from the mental modifications undergone by animals.
It is well-known that on newly-discovered lands not inhabited by man, birds are so devoid of fear as to allow themselves to be knocked over with sticks; but that in the course of generations, they acquire such a dread of man as to fly on his approach; and that this dread is manifested by young as well as old. Now unless this change be ascribed to the killing-off of the least fearful, and the preservation and multiplication of the more fearful, which, considering the comparatively small number killed by man, is an inadequate cause; it must be ascribed to accumulated experiences; and each experience must be held to have a share in producing it. We must conclude that in each bird that escapes with injuries inflicted by man, or is alarmed by the outcries of other members of the flock (gregarious creatures of any intelligence being necessarily more or less sympathetic), there is established an association of ideas between the human aspect and the pains, direct and indirect, suffered from human agency. And we must further conclude, that the state of consciousness which impels the bird to take flight, is at first nothing more than an ideal reproduction of those painful impressions which before followed man's approach; that such ideal reproduction becomes more vivid and more massive as the painful experiences, direct or sympathetic, increase; and that thus the emotion in its incipient state, is nothing else than an aggregation of the revived pains before experienced.
As, in the course of generations, the young birds of this race begin to display a fear of man before yet they have been injured by him; it is an unavoidable inference that the nervous system of the race has been organically modified by these experiences: we have no choice but to conclude that when a young bird is thus led to fly, it is because the impression produced on its senses by the approaching man, entails, through an incipiently-reflex action, a partial excitement of all those nerves which in its ancestors had been excited under the like conditions; that this partial excitement has its accompanying painful consciousness; and that the vague painful consciousness thus arising, constitutes emotion proper—emotion undecomposable into specific experiences, and therefore seemingly homogeneous.
If such be the explanation of the fact in this case, then it is in all cases. If emotion is so generated here, then it is so generated throughout. We must perforce conclude that the emotional modifications displayed by different nations, and those higher emotions by which civilized are distinguished from savage, are to be accounted for on the same principle. And concluding this, we are led strongly to suspect that the emotions in general have severally thus originated.
Perhaps we have now made sufficiently clear what we mean by the study of the emotions through analysis and development. We have aimed to justify the positions that, without analysis aided by development, there cannot be a true natural history of the emotions; and that a natural history of the emotions based on external characters, can be but provisional. We think that Mr. Bain, in confining himself to an account of the emotions as they exist in the adult civilized man, has neglected those classes of facts out of which the science of the matter must chiefly be built. It is true that he has treated of habits as modifying emotions in the individual; but he has not recognized the fact, that where conditions render habits persistent in successive generations, such modifications are cumulative: he has not hinted that the modifications produced by habit are emotions in the making. It is true, also, that he occasionally refers to the characteristics of children; but he does not systematically trace the changes through which childhood passes into manhood, as throwing light on the order and genesis of the emotions. It is further true that he here and there refers to national traits in illustration of his subject; but these stand as isolated facts, having no general significance: there is no hint of any relation between them and the national circumstances; while all those many moral contrasts between lower and higher races which throw great light on classification, are passed over. And once more, it is true that many passages of his work, and sometimes, indeed, whole sections of it, are analytical; but his analyses are incidental—they do not underlie his entire scheme, but are here and there added to it. In brief, he has written a Descriptive Psychology, which does not appeal to Comparative Psychology and Analytical Psychology for its leading ideas. And in doing this, he has omitted much that should be included in a natural history of the mind; while to that part of the subject with which he has dealt, he has given a necessarily-imperfect organization.
Even leaving out of view the absence of those methods and criteria on which we have been insisting, it appears to us that meritorious as is Mr. Bain's book in its details, it is defective in some of its leading ideas. The first paragraphs of his first chapter, quite startled us by the strangeness of their definitions—a strangeness which can scarcely be ascribed to laxity of expression. The paragraphs run thus:—
"Mind is comprised under three heads—Emotion, Volition, and Intellect.