Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling

by Hiram Miner Stanley

The early phase of mind where consciousnesses are wholly un-unified from within by any central or continuous consciousness, and whose solidarity is wholly in an unconscious integration is so foreign to us who have minds where experience of experience is continually in process, that it is with the utmost difficulty we can in any wise conceive it. It is evident that a very low organism may have consciousnesses, but no mind, that is, no self-unifying whole of consciousnesses. It does not possess a mind, but during its whole life it attains psychoses which are merely disjecta reached to help an immediate necessity of existence, and then fading completely away. Each psychosis is achieved more easily than the former by reason of the former, though there is no consciousness of connection with it. The increment and qualifying of a given experience by past experience is not reached by it. Some differentiation is attained under pressure of struggle for existence, and experience is constituted, but is wholly unknowing of itself and in no wise self-formative.

We have now, however, to consider the problem, how experience came to itself, and how and why representation and emotion should arise in the struggle of existence.

At the first, as we have seen, organisms responded in conscious form only in pleasure and pain, and this only when the actual damage or benefit to the individual was very considerable. When the hurt was critical, then only was pain accomplished as a function to secure self-preservative action, but gradually through survival of the fittest the greater susceptibility was attained, so that minor lesions are felt in pain terms, and some general sensing and objectifying lead to some differentiation in adjustment. The external parts of the body become specially sensitive, and ciliate extensions are formed. Injury to these results in pain and consequent reactions, and in this wise by injury to a small part great harm to the organism as a whole is prevented. The low forms of life are thus enabled to avoid the hurtful before they meet it in full annihilatory force. These practically anticipatory reactions—though there is no real anticipation in consciousness, no real experience of experience—I term the method of incipiency. Pain reactions are thus reached with less and less actual harm until the very slightest injury to a minute tentacle will suffice to awaken pain.

This tentacular experience, however, is obviously very limited, and has incidental disadvantages. Further, that pain should be attained when there is little actual harm, is good, but to attain pain, and self-conservative action before any injury is done, but only about to be done is better. Reaction to potential harm is a most important advantageous step. In the earlier form of mentality, the animal must actually be in the process of being devoured by an enemy before a pain reaction is achieved, but in the later representative form of reaction there is complete anticipation, and the animal can come off with an absolutely whole skin. Ideal pains, as fear, anger, and other emotions, are gradually substituted for pains which are real in the sense that they arise in a positive hurt to the life of the organism. The saving which is effected through emotion is most important, and this economy is reason for the rise of emotion in the struggle of existence. Those animals who are able, not merely to react on slight injuries to themselves, but also through fear, etc., to avoid all actual injury, have a very manifest advantage.

If now the rationale of the rise of emotion is apparent, let us next proceed to some analysis of emotional process in general. The mental mechanism by which anticipatory function is secured is certainly complex, and a complete analysis presents many difficulties.

In the incipiency stage, which we have just discussed, the organism was enabled to avoid the full force of the injurious by meeting it half-way with extensions from its own body, but we cannot suppose that this was purposely accomplished, or that the lesser pain conveyed in any form sense of the greater pain. There was no fear, no anger, not any experience at experience in consciousness. There is simply pain on less and less injury, but no anticipation of pain.

In early consciousness there is, of course, frequent return of a given object which becomes the occasion of a large number of objectifyings which are identical in nature yet do not contain sense of identity. There is repeated reaction to the same objective stimulus, yet with no sense of sameness, there is frequent cognition of the same thing yet no recognition. With primitive consciousness, no matter how often a thing is experienced, it is equally new; revival of the past is not stimulated, nor sense of identity attained. Mere return of a state is not sense of return, and no amount of re-occurrence or combinations thereof will make sense of re-occurrence. Re-occurrence of a psychosis is nothing more subjectively than occurrence unless there arise sense of re-occurrence or revival. The pure feeling states in primitive consciousness are perfectly identical in nature, and they arise on occasions which are the same, yet there is of course no sense of identity. A young child may see a thing a hundred times without recognising it; there are a hundred re-occurrences of state yet no sense of re-occurrence. The hundredth perception does not differ materially from the first, does not include any true representative element. The immediate image does not stand for the past, the mind does not revive previous presentation on the strength of it.

Mind is regarded by many as consisting fundamentally of vivid sense presentations and their faint reproductions, of sense impressions and their representations. That which has been repeatedly experienced has a tendency to re-occur without the particular objective stimulus, but merely indirectly by some connected stimulus, through an association of states. But this revival, however attained, does not constitute real representation, it does not really differ from the presentation simply because it re-occurs without the original particular objective stimulus. Representation in true sense of term is representation with sense of re-presentation. A representation is a repetition of a presentation with no consciousness of repetition or any added nature. Repetition is a fact in consciousness before it is a fact for consciousness. All presentations and re-presentations have mere immediate validity and value, they point to nothing, and mean nothing, there is no going beyond what is immediately given, no prescience of a possible experience.

Revival often occurs in mind without sense of revival, and so is not true representation. In disordered states of the nerves we frequently see objects which have no real existence, the states are revival states as objectively interpreted, yet there being no sense of revival they stand in consciousness for real presentations. When I see a person sitting in a chair but afterwards find that no one was there, I characterize the state very naturally as a mere imagination, a representation; yet in fact it was in subjective quality a presentation. We are not to psychologically classify, as is too often done, psychical states according to presence or absence of object, but as to sense of presence or absence of object. It is only as consciousness takes note with reference to object that there is differentiation in consciousness to make presentation and representation.

We must consider it probable that the earliest revivals by consciousness were solely of the unconscious sort, or, objectively speaking, were hallucinatory. A sense order is formed, which attends to a series of objective realities; let now, on some occasion, one of these objects drop out, yet there will be attaining of some sense of it as though it were present, and the proper reaction will be carried out. The mind gets its early revivals without sense of revival. They have presentative force, and are sensings of objective reality though there is no objective reality there at the time to sense.