Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling

by Hiram Miner Stanley

Dismay is another form closely akin to despair. Dismay is the immediate result for feeling of a sudden cognition of great difficulties and pains as imminent. As the transition stage of rapid movement in feeling toward despair, as the sudden falling in temperature from hope, it is really incipient despair. Dismay is essentially temporary, and settles quickly into despair or rises into renewed hope. Though but such a passing mode, it yet has for the moment that sense of self-efficiency annihilated which is so characteristic of despair. Consternation is very intense dismay.

But what now is the real quality and inner nature of despair? what essentially is this strange drooping before inevitable loss, injury and pain? and what is its significance for life? Despair is certainly a very advanced and complex emotion, and we can do no more at present than merely remark on some of its most striking features.

A most noticeable and remarkable quality of despair is its introactive tendency. When the whole strength and vital motive, of a full-grown teleologic psychic life—the dilettante is not capable of despair—is suddenly and completely withdrawn, there results, not indifference nor ennui but a deep disturbance which is active on the minus side of mental life. The complete breaking up of great and absorbing hopes and of the free objective activity flowing from them brings will tension down, not simply to nil, but gives it a spring back into the negative region beyond the line of mere quiescence and indifferentism. Despair is a revulsive process by which the whole mind is broken up, just as a propeller wheel running at high speed out of water or an engine working at high pressure when disconnected from its shafting, tend to wrench and shatter themselves. Desire is not really extinct, but latent; though smothered it burns inward. This is that peculiar cankering, corroding quality, which is always so marked in despair. Will, not self-shattered, but forcibly pent by external circumstances, gives a sullen restlessness to the mental life now turned in upon itself. Hence the capacity for despair will be directly as the co-ordinate capacity for action and reflection in any individual, and as such co-ordination marks the highest level of conscious life, despair is certainly a phenomenon of exceptionally complex and advanced consciousness.

Again, we note that despair is intensely and oppressively a pain state, but the dull despair pain is distinct from racking fear pain. What now is the nature of despair pain, and what the reason for its peculiar quality? Here is not as in fear a feeling pain at pain, but at the idea of its inevitability and completely destructive power. The actual pain foreseen may seem bearable and excite little feeling, but it is the total loss of personal success, the complete thwarting of self-realization, that moves the mind to despair, that causes that sickening, dull, emotional pain which we term despair. Thus despair is eminently a disease of self-hood, an egoistic distemper, the strong and large individuality being peculiarly subject to it. However, the general problem of despair pain is practically the same as of the origin and nature of fear pain, which has already been discussed. Whether any mere representation induces pain, and how it does so, is certainly one of the most difficult problems of emotional psychology. We have in a previous chapter sought to indicate in a general way that purely subjective or mental pain which is not in any wise revival of sensation or objective does really exist. Also since pain per se is always simple and identical, the differentiation of pains as seemingly quite different in kind, as fear pain, despair pain, etc., is really due to sensation, will, and other elements which closely adhere to pain and give it a certain local colouring. The whole emotion is a complex of various factors which are closely knit into a single state which to common observation seems simple, but which is really constituted in its ensemble by the total specific forces of many elements. In psychics, as in physics, we know that common sense analysis of phenomena must be at fault, and that one who says “I certainly have an entirely different pain when I fear and when I despair,” is as much in the wrong as he who maintains essential diversities in material substance, or radical distinctions of species in the organic world. So we must believe that the peculiar quality of the pain in despair exists, not in the pain itself, but is really the colouring result from various coincident sensations and ideas. The lowering of the mental tone far below the zero point is greatly accentuated by refluent waves of organic sensation set up from the physical basis of the psychic disturbance.

How, we may now ask, did despair ever evolve and become a well-defined psychic form? in what way in the course of natural selection could such an apparently disadvantageous variation have arisen and been developed? The serviceability of fear is plain to every one, but of what possible value could despair be in the struggle of life? The one who gives up in despair is but very rarely doing the best thing. If we cannot look to the general principle of evolution, serviceability, how can we account for the appearance and growth of such a phase as despair, except as abnormal variation, a disease, profitable to the enemies of the individual, and so developed by and for external organisms. As there is an abnormal pathological variation of fear, which we have previously noticed, and which is forced in its development by enemies who profit by it, so despair is a psychic disease, entirely hurtful to the individual, and, so far, only advantageous for its enemies. Despair is, without doubt, one of those altruistic variations which serve, not the individual, but some antagonist in the struggle of existence. To bring one to despair is to make him entirely helpless and wholly at our mercy for our own ends. The possibility that active-reflective natures may prey upon themselves is thus stimulated into an actual phenomenon whose growth is continually fostered by those whose advantage it is to reduce the individual to a helpless condition. Despair is hardly an hypertrophy or atrophy of any normal tendency, it is rather a pathological genus by itself. The capacity for despair being inherent in the general formation of mind as subject to collapse, it arose solely in response to the needs of organisms warring upon the organism afflicted. The whole field of physical and psychical altruistic variation under the general law of natural selection, decadent and self-injurious characteristics being stimulated and maintained in a kind of artificial selection, is an interesting but unexplored field, attention so far having been turned to the individually advantageous as determining element in evolution.

Despair is a disease of advanced and mature psychic life. Children are, in general, incapable of despair. It implies a well-developed sense of self and a general experience of the world. High and strong emotional natures, but rather weak-willed and narrow of intelligence, are predisposed to it. Occasions which would lead to despair will with lower natures be unnoticed or lead merely to stolidity; while with the highest natures, there comes heroic endeavour and wide searching for means and methods.

CHAPTER X
ANGER

In studying any state of consciousness we first inquire what constitutes its dominant factor; if this is sense of object, we call it a cognition; if effortful action, it is a volition; if the marked feature is pleasure-pain, we term it a feeling. Finding that the consciousness is a feeling, we would next inquire whether the pleasure-pain is mainly determined in its colouring by direct presentation, and so is a sensation, or whether this dominant colouring comes indirectly through representation, and is thus what we term an emotion. For example, the distinction between “I feel a pain in my shoulder,” and “I feel pained at your conduct” illustrates the most radical division of feeling. If emotion is founded on an appreciation of the experienceable, which has developed under natural selection, we must look upon the emotional power in general and upon the various emotions in particular as merely advantageous psychoses which are as clearly determined by general evolutionary laws as the merely physical organs like heart, lungs, wings, horns, etc. It is clearly desirable that the organism should look before, should anticipate experience and so direct its way; but bare anticipation has no value in itself unless it powerfully stimulates will through emotion. All conscious life above the most primitive is eminently and increasingly anticipatory, and so becomes more and more infused with emotional powers. Among the earliest developed of these in the struggle for existence are fear and anger. The fear group, embracing large numbers of allied forms, simple and complex, has been discussed in a general way in the preceding pages, and we now come to some consideration of the correlative anger group.

The rationale of the evolution of anger is not far to seek. We have seen that fear is the spring of defensive action, and it is obvious that anger is the stimulant to offensive action. Fear is regressive, anger aggressive. Fear is contractile, anger expansive. Fear is the emotion of the pursued, of the prey; anger the emotion of the pursuer, of the predacious. Emotion in the service of life evidently has two great psychic ramifications from this point, and the whole world of emotion-beings, which compose the greater mass of organisms, is hence divided in two great divisions, a fear class and an anger class. Likewise in relation to opposing natural forces as to neighbouring competing and destroying organisms, the same distinction is to be made according as the animal either combats or flees. Shyness or fierceness, timidity or irascibility, these are characters which divide the animate world into two grand antagonistic groups. Zoology has recognised this psychic differentiation as a marked and essential feature in its nomenclature, thus lepus timidus. In fact, the most important part of evolution is the psychical; in this, indeed, lies the whole significance and value of the organism. The attainment of more and more advantageous psychic qualities is the main trend of evolution, for psychic power as distinct from main force, like that of the elements, is far and away of the most value in the struggle for existence, and ultimately, as in man, it achieves the subduing all lower powers, natural, vegetable and brute, to its own ends. It is psychical quality, moreover, which determines physical, and not vice versâ. Thus it is not the possession of claws, fangs, etc., that makes an animal fierce, but it is fierceness which develops and maintains these weapons of offence. Thus it is, though thus far practically overlooked by scientists, that psychic development, especially on the emotional side, is of the utmost importance as the prime factor and motive in organic processes. The central core of life is emotional capacity, and this in its evolution determines the whole external morphological trend of evolution of organisms which is so closely followed by the science of to-day. But the science of the future is comparative psychology, which, when once placed on a secure basis of interpretation, will determine the real and inner law of evolution as a psychic movement incarnating itself in a succession of animate forms. But a sure method of knowing a psychic fact as such when it occurs, and what, how, and why it is, is yet to be discovered and applied, and extra-human and even extra-ego consciousness is a field, so far, for little else than hypothesis. If this remark be turned against us, we say that our work is mainly a deductive interpretation of the course of psychic evolution from the general standpoint of natural selection, reinforced and illustrated by introspective investigation, and merely using the most obvious facts of comparative psychology in a very general and provisional way. We do not profess to show where, how, and when mind originated, or what particular powers any certain organisms possess, but we do endeavour to show how the principle of utility may be made a key to the study of a very perplexing region of mental life—the emotions. We proffer then merely a very general sketch of the history of emotion as a life factor, hoping that it may, at least in its general scope, be of service to future explorers. In taking up this subject of anger we do then thus reiterate the position we occupy and the method we follow.

Anger like fear certainly originated at some critical point in some individuals life as an advantageous variation of essential value. A vital issue at some early point in the history of life determined the genesis of this new psychic mode and function as a stimulant of aggressive will action. Very likely it was in competition of organisms for food that some favoured individual first attained the power of getting mad and violently attacking its fellows, and so obtaining sustenance. However this may be, certain it is that a direct attack is often more self-conservative than attempts at escape when injury threatens; it is a greater advantage to destroy pain-giver than to shun it. Fear enables organisms to avoid loss, but it does not accomplish positive gain, as anger does through overcoming hindrance. Anger is often also more economical for the forces of the organism, and thus, in general, predacious animals are longer-lived than even those of their prey who may attain a full length of life. Even in the face of great odds a direct attack is often more serviceable than attempt at escape. Anger is certainly the primitive motive force of all offensive action, though of course we cannot say that the animal got mad because it saw the serviceability. Psychic evolution, at least as far as new powers are concerned, never comes by teleologic foresight, and, indeed, cannot by the nature of the case. The animal did not definitely set out to get angry because it foresaw the value, yet in the earliest angers there must have been effort, a certain nisus which marked the new form as a real attainment, a marked achievement. That the provoking occasion gives rise now to anger inevitably and naturally, that anger comes upon us and overcomes us is true enough, but in its earliest phases anger must have been, like other just evolving factors, supported only by powerful will effort. The oftener the early psychism got mad, the easier it got mad. Facility came only by practice, and a large variety of occasions, besides the simple critical and original one, were gradually utilized by the anger faculty. But in its original form and occasion anger was, no doubt, akin to that we see when an extremely timid animal at the last extremity will turn in anger and fiercely fight for its life. Such an attempt, sometimes successful, marks an origin of a new mode of conscious emotion which may never return to the individual again during all its future life for lack of occasion. If often returning and often improved, a definite new habit of emotion is established, and from being a fearful animal it may at length become dominantly irascible, and so belong to a totally distinct psychic genus.