Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling

by Hiram Miner Stanley

While not arising from actual injuries, revivals strengthen both cognition and volition. They have recurred before further hurtful experiences with the fire which originally incited them. These revival pains of previous sequences to the cognition, which are carried along with the present cognition, are real enough in themselves, yet they are objectively anticipatory of actual injury. The whole order of previous experience is by the nature of mind and nervous system re-enacted before the actual injuries are inflicted. It is always a race between mind and nature, but it is a prime function of mind to anticipate practically the movements of nature. Mind by its revival forms accomplishes this, but if it lags in its work the real injuries are mercilessly inflicted by slow but sure nature. When the sequence of revival is quicker than the objective sequence, the reactions anticipate objective order, and thus a manifest economy is achieved. But pain revivals of this kind are not fear, nor is there a real pre-perception. Since the revival forms are, to the observer’s point of view, incentive to anticipatory reaction, psychologists must often, especially with low organisms, mistake them for fear; the animal is often, doubtless, merely suffering revival pains when it appears to be fearing pain. Thus we may suspect that organisms which seem to fear shadows or real objects are often merely suffering revival pains brought up in conjunction with the cognition, and not really fearing as result of perceiving feeling quality inherent in the object. Manifestation of pain must often be mistaken for manifestations of emotion, and there is as yet no accurate objective determination for fear or other emotions.

Revival pains are not representations of pains as in some way coming from object. Emotion requires representation, and cannot occur in any presentation or re-presentation chain. True pre-perception is not merely perceiving the thing before its effects in feeling are experienced, but it is a representing the feeling quality of the object before, in any given case, this quality is directly experienced. This obviously rests on past experience, but the connecting of object with pleasure-pain experience is at all times, as before intimated, equally a problem. Emotion and representation are built not of revivals, but upon them perceived as such. At some critical moment, in some rather early period in mental development, a consciousness which was pain plus sense of object, realized, under the pressure of struggle for existence, the feeling quality of the object, and there arose with the knowledge of object as pain-giver the painful emotion. And as soon as object is not merely cognized, but cognized as pain-giver, it may be feared. The moment that object was known as a pain agent, then fear of the object came, and thus true anticipatory action arose. We are said, indeed, to fear objects, to fear men, animals, etc., but, in truth, the fear is never of the object as such, but only in view of its pain agency. The cognizing the experienced and experienceable as such seems then a peculiar and distinct process in fear and in all emotion, a genus apart which cannot be constituted by interaction of simple elements. The growth of mind is largely in multiplying and enlarging the signs of experience.

The connecting once achieved of object with pain, it becomes increasingly easy to cognize the feeling value of objects, and before full and extreme pain experience therefrom to pre-react through emotion. Thus emotion saves both direct pain and injury. As it becomes a permanent tendency, and an impulse of consciousness to proceed from all pure feelings to cognition of object, so also to cognition of object in its feeling quality, and thus by inherent tendency it ultimately comes about that there is attaching of pain to various objects cognized, even when there is no immediate experience of pain to be connected therewith. Finally the precedent inciting pains to cognition become such minor factors, and knowledge arises with such apparent spontaneity, that emotion as involving pain significance becomes dominant rather than the immediate pain. An order of consciousness becomes established in which the notable event is emotional cognition of experience values as bringing in permanent emotion rather than an order of pleasure-pain inciting cognition with evanescent emotion. But at the first it is evident that fear was but a slight event in a consciousness which was mainly absorbed in immediate pain experience and some sense of object. It is so habitual and instinctive for us to perceive all things as having feeling value, that it is most difficult to appreciate the standpoint of a consciousness which is just attaining emotion life.

The preliminary elements to simple primitive fear, as expressed by any such phrase as, “it hurts,” are at least four: pain, cognition of object, cognition of the pain, cognition of the pain agency of object. These operations, as being at first successive, do not necessarily imply, however, sense of time. The consciousness of a pain is certainly, at first, consciousness of pain really past, yet not consciousness of it as past. The pain stands as immediately antecedent act to the consciousness which is cognition of it, but sense of experience is not thereby sense of experience in time. The sense of time-relations of experiences is wholly subsequent to the simple sense of experience. All experience is, of course, in time, but far from being of time.

An organism, which has suffered knowingly from an object, and so feared, attains at length the power of fearing antecedent to any real injury. This seems to be brought about somewhat in the following manner: If I in any way, as by a pin pricking, rouse a sleeping animal to a cognition of an object which has often injured it, and which it has often feared, immediately there would re-occur the original concomitants of the cognition in the previous cases; there would be pain, cognition of pain, ascription to object, and fear, all merely revivals, and happening most probably before any actual injury, etc., received in the present case. Now these revivals, as before insisted, do not and cannot in themselves alone form a new fear. This is only constituted when the revival pains are known as such, when they are not merely presented in consciousness, but represented as belonging to past experience of thing, and so to be experienced. The thing is thereby truly interpreted for its feeling value. Not merely pain, as being experienced, is connected with thing, but as having been experienced, and to be experienced. Thus only arises that sense of the experienceable, that real apprehension for the future, which is so valuable an acquisition in the struggle for existence. Feeling quality comes thus to be assigned as real and permanent property of things, and every cognition comes to imply representation of feeling value, and so to be a basis for emotion. But all sense of experienceability is founded on sense of experience; the sense of things as possibilities of sensation and feeling is based on actual relatings of feelings to objects in simple direct experiences.

Fear is in itself pre-eminently a painful state, and we have to inquire as to the origin and nature of this pain. The statement of the problem in general form is, how does that which does not yet please or pain, but is only cognized as about to do so, give immediate pleasure or pain?

We have already expressed the opinion that fear is based on more than mere pain revivals; there must be true representation, the revival must be appreciated as representation of past experience, and indicative of future. The painful agitation consequent on prospect of pain seems, indeed, to include as pain element more than revival pain, but it is only seeming. Where does the pain come from which a person feels at the mere prospect of pain unless from the past? The pain is, of course, not the identical pain feared. Again, one cannot see how a cognition in itself, entirely empty of feeling, can cause a pain, except as acting as a link in a chain of association whereby conjoined past pains are revived. So far as fear is pain, it is, we may be told, revival, for representation of pain is not pain, and cannot cause pain. The pain which arises from cognition of pain to be experienced appears in a strict analysis to be wholly re-occurrence stimulated thereby, and not any new and peculiar mode of pain at pain. That this is the case is apparent from the fact that we can only have the pain of fear so far as we have experienced pain. Poignant pains experienced are the basis of poignant pain in fear. The knowledge that you are soon to re-experience an intense pain leads to an intense dread, in which the intense pain is revived from former experience. There are, to be sure, in the phenomena of fear in highly developed consciousness, complex pains which cannot be ascribed to revivals, reflexes upon consciousness of the great tension and agitation thereof, pain of loss of self-possession and self-power, and other modes which proceed from consciousness of consciousness, but this does not bear upon the question how mere cognition of pain, as to be experienced, can in itself give pain; how there arises from mere apprehension a pain which is more than and distinct from the revival pains.

But, however we may be puzzled to see how mere cognition of experienceable pain develops a peculiar pain which is the essence of fear, yet we must acknowledge its production to be a fact. We may say, indeed, that the bare thought of pain even when conveyed by the printed word—the abstract sign of an arbitrary vocal name—is not without a tinge of a peculiar fear-pain which does not wholly consist of revivals. When preparing to go out into the storm on a very cold day I have pain in anticipation of the pain I am to receive from the bitterly cold wind. Now I may have preliminary shiverings, and there may be recurrent painful sensations as I look intently at the raging elements, pains which return from actual experiences which I have before undergone and at the time knowingly connected with wind and snow. But all these revivals, while the basis of my fear, do not give the distinct pain quality of the fear. The pain which I do experience when I actually step into the biting blast I know at once to be entirely distinct in quality from that which I before felt at the anticipation, the real pain, of fear. Again, when I say, “I was deeply pained to hear of it,” and when I say, “The noise pained me greatly,” I indicate that difference between purely mental distress and sensuous pain, between pain at representation and pain referred to presentation, which is to be emphasized in all our study of emotion. With a man in the hands of hostile Indians the tortures of fear are quite distinct in quality from the tortures actually endured. The agony of fear is a genus apart from the agony of physical pain.

Again, if the pain in fear were derived from revivals, then the nature of the pain in different states of fear would be as different as the sensations feared. But as a matter of fact the pain in fear of cold, fear of heat, of famine, of punishment, etc., is substantially of the same quality. I may fear one more than another, but the real mental agitation and pain which constitute the fear are in all cases essentially the same. If the pain in fear were sensation revivals, then fear of cold and fear of heat would be quite diverse and contrary in quality of pain value, but we all know that the dread of a cold day and of a hot day are in themselves essentially the same in nature. As far as the states are pure fear and have a pain quality, the conscious activity in both is entirely similar.

Further, if the pain in fear were wholly of revival nature, not only should we expect fear of different sensations to be correspondingly distinct, but we should also expect the pain in fear to never exceed in amount and intensity the pain feared as indicated by measure of past experience. But we know that our fears are often much more painful than pain feared and than our experience of past pain. The pang of fear, of sudden fright, is often more acute and intense than any direct pain we have ever experienced. The terrible convulsions of fear which we see in the insane give evidence of pain which could not have been reflection from direct experience. That excessive and sudden fear which turns men’s hair gray in a few hours and transforms their whole physical system is plainly not any revival from the individual’s past experience. As revealed by its effects it is often, perhaps, greater than the whole amount of pain they have ever suffered. Where, in the direct-experience form, pain is greater in the fear than the real pain suffered, we express the fact by the common phrase, “more scared than hurt.” In all such cases the pain in fear is not the revival of past experiences of the object feared.