[B]. Originally appeared in part in Philosophical Review, i. pp. 241-256.
It is unnecessary to dwell at length on child life and savage life as illustrating the primitive quality and function of fear. The earliest experiences of the child with things are lessons of fear. The burnt child dreads the fire, and thus is enabled to preserve himself from threatened injury. Fear is a primary and most important motive to action in a very wide range of the lower mental life. Those who have observed animals and man in a state of nature are always greatly impressed with the constant and large part which this emotion plays in their consciousness. With the timid and weaker species, like the rabbit and squirrel, it is likely that a majority of their cognitions prompt to fear or are prompted by fear, and with some persecuted races of savages the same may be said.
The necessity and value of anticipatory reaction being acknowledged in the struggle of existence, we plainly see a primitive motive thereto in fear, and the earliest emotional life which we can clearly interpret likewise seems to be fear.
It is sufficiently easy to see the general function of fear and its primitive character, but we find it very hard to make a satisfactory analysis, and to show the exact steps of its evolution. It is obvious, however, in the first place, that fear, like other emotions, is purely indirect and secondary experience; it pre-supposes previous painful experience of the feared object. Pain experienced in connection with cognition of object is the basis of all fear. Animals that have not felt pain from man do not fear him. But fear while thus based on previous direct experience is always hindered by simultaneous direct experience, as, for example, sensation. Thus when we, whip in hand, say to a child crying from fear, “I will give you something to cry for,” we imply the law that direct pain and sensation tend to supplant indirect feeling as emotion. This common expression emphasizes the essential representativeness of emotion, its imaginary nature, as also the supplanting power of direct real experience. The sight of the whip inspires fear in the child who has been whipped, but this fear is in the course of a punishment wholly eliminated by the direct pain endured. The direct experience is thus the basis of every fear, but only as it is cognized, and not felt.
The great difficulty in analysing fear is in clearly apprehending the mode in which previous experience is utilized. If we could study in ourselves the genesis of a simple emotion, we should doubtless be enabled to see the steps by which experience reacts upon itself so as to give a reflex form like the emotion of fear, but this is hardly possible. However, cognition is evolved at the instance of pain, and all objects are viewed, not for themselves, but in their feeling significance. Cognition is embedded in feeling, and at first is a mere tone of feeling. Things are not at first known for themselves but solely as sources of present pleasure and pain. Things are perceived in and through the feeling which has stimulated the perception. The immediate feeling value of the object is given by the very origin and process of cognition. When an animal is pained by contact with a sharp rock, and this pain stimulates cognition of the rock, this is solely on the pain account. Repeated experiences enable the percept to arise at stimulus of less and less pain, and so the proper reaction is accomplished more and more economically.
We may say that the order of evolution is this: first, a pain; second, a cognition of pain-giver—“it hurts”—third, emotion about pain-giver, as fear thereof—“I am afraid of it.” Primitive and normal cognition always implies emotion as impelling self-preservative action. Knowledge which does not spring into emotion and action is abortive. At first the known is always startling.
The original pain-impelled cognition brings in the painful emotion, primitive fear. And as knowledge has brought in fear, so fear reacts on knowledge, and fearfulness incites to knowing even when the pain from object ceases. Thus before any actual experience of an object it may be known and felt about. Thus that habit of objectivity is formed, of alertness, of a fearful sensing and perceiving, which is noticeable in many animals. A cognitive-emotive, emotive-cognitive life is formed and developed. It is a tremendous stride onward to be able through fearful cognition to wholly pre-perceive and anticipate the injurious, instead of having to suffer it in part before being enabled to get away.
Now primitive fear and all primitive emotion plainly utilizes the past experience as interpreting the future; emotion is about a known potency. Yet it is often stated that emotion is but a summation of revivals of past experience. Having often been burnt by fires that I have coincidently been looking at, it sometimes happens that I see a fire which has not yet harmed me, but still the mere sight affects me with what I call the emotion of fear, which, in closest analysis, means merely the revival of the burning pains associated with this seeing in the past. “I am afraid” equals “I re-experience the pains of burning” by suggestion. Pains faintly re-occurring constitute the painful fear. There is in this mass of re-awakenings no real cognition of experience and no feeling about it as such, no psychosis at the experienceable. And it is certainly true that when a fixed sequence of experiences tend to recur together, there will follow upon the cognition, revival waves of pain before any actual increase of pain is really inflicted in the given case. These waves stand for, and are the echoes of, the former real pain sequences of cognition. Thus the perception of a great mass of ice will often cause a shivery feeling, a painful sensation is revived as correlated with former cognition experiences. Even the image or representation, the purely and consciously ideal cognition, may bring in painful feeling, as when I say, “It makes me shiver to think of it.” Here the painful sensation-bringing idea is cognized as such, but the representation here is the occasion of a direct painful sensation, and evidently does not imply fear or other emotion.