Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling

by Hiram Miner Stanley

While hate often views its object very largely from the retrospective side, as opposed to fear and anger, which are generally prospective, yet hate originally must have applied to the present or latent potency of the object for harm, for only in this wise does it reach self-conservative value. In early psychic life there is no time or place for purely retrospective emotion like revenge and resentment. Hate is not essentially a paying back for the past offence, but a will-inciting emotion of immediate, or imminently prospective value. In fact, though we say, “he has done me injury and I hate him for it,” yet we do not hate the dead injurer or the one so crippled as to be entirely powerless against us. Certainly there is no value for our interests in injuring the one who is past injuring us, and from the self-conservative point of view to exercise ourselves in hate or anger in such a case is to waste energy. Feeling for what has been done against us, purely as such, is plainly sheer waste of force. The past is irretrievable, and emotion about it is valuable for life only so far as the past implies the future. Thus it is that hate, arising because of self-conservative value, and developing under natural selection, never becomes wholly retrospective.

Hate then is at first much the same in its elements as anger. It is always objective. Hate is always of something, though extreme passion dulls perception, yet at its normal tension hate, like other emotions, is incentive to beneficial cognition. We are closely observant of those we hate. Beside sense of object, there is the will-stirring, the hostility, which is prominent in anger, though here more controlled and not so impetuous and naïve. Hate thus often allies itself with fear, but anger is very rarely coincident with it, though there may be rapid alternations. There is also a hate pain which is a parallel complex to the anger pain already analysed. We might term hate a distilled anger, and yet this signifies little, for the innermost emotion seems very distinct. Like fear and anger, hate seems a genus by itself, and in its essential feature as emotion-reaction, quite beyond scientific analysis, which can point out its conditions, but not account for their total value or for the peculiar quality of hate disturbance by which hate is hate. Hate can be appreciated only by realization, but no matter how long we reflect upon and try to catch its exact nature in some definite formula, the essence of hate always eludes, and presents itself as only a bare simple psychosis wholly indefinable and inexplicable in its essential nature.

But if we turn now to the origin and development of hate, shall we arrive at anything more satisfactory? Is hate a modified anger, or is it from the first a wholly distinct emotion and not slowly differentiated from any preceding psychosis? Hate evidently belongs with anger as aggressive emotional reaction, but it is very hard to see how it could originate by any slow growth, and it seems easier and simpler to regard it as being a unique response to some very pressing demand in the struggle of existence.

The whole subject of mental differentiation needs clarifying. Are we to consider mind merely as a sum of many distinct modes each of which has, in the course of evolution, appeared suddenly in answer to the demands of life at a critical period, and is faint, indeed, yet from the first having a distinct and peculiar quality by which it suitably stimulates will, and that the sole growth of these diverse forms has been in intensity and by various associations with other states? or are we to consider that mind was originally a very general vague state, which, by a continuous and traceable differentiation, has slowly developed into many different modes? Certainly the latter seems the more rational. To conceive that there are no essential and radical subdivisions in mind, that not even knowing, feeling, and willing, are fundamentally primitive, but each, and each form of each, but modifications of precedent modes, this is a theory which is enticing in its simplicity and in its analogy to physical evolution from a single underlying material element. But when we come to particular investigations, as this of the origin and development of hate, we cannot well discover any modes intermediate between it and say, anger, which are the links in a continuous evolution, but for aught we can see or conceive, hate is as much hate the first time it appears as at any subsequent time. The links in the evolution of mind from phase to phase are all missing, and how are we to supply them? Of necessity as subjective facts they must first be realized, before they can be known, but how can this be done by a consciousness which has long outgrown them? We cannot discover these fossil and extinct forms objectively, as the paleontologist discovers extinct species, but in some way we must re-enact and re-experience them in our own consciousness before we can know anything about them. If every mind embryologically passes through the several stages of its general evolution in the race, still the strange intermediate forms which might then have existed are beyond the recall of the reflective stage, when we first demand to know the history of mind. And when we appeal to comparative psychology we are equally in the dark, for we must judge animals by ourselves, we can interpret their consciousness only by our own, and they may have very rude and peculiar forms which are unknown and unknowable by us. Thus the limitations and difficulties of subjective research are especially brought up to us in evolutionary study which thus seems wholly confined to a priori speculation. While we can conceive it likely that hate was suddenly brought into full being by the demands of life, yet it is hardly a rational view of emotion to regard it as a per saltum series of distinct psychical species called successively into being by the exigencies of existence, which indeed, is a view almost as ultra-scientific as that which regards all mental modes as direct endowments from Deity.

But though on general scientific analogy we are led to believe in fossil mental forms, in missing psychic links now extinct as regards our own consciousness, but which were the germs of our present distinct emotions, perceptions, etc., how are we to discover and investigate them? Can we work our own consciousness back through the multitudinous stages of its past evolution, through myriads of human and pre-human forms to the confused, primal, undifferentiated psychoses?

Certainly the forms which lead up to such an emotion as hate and from which it is gradually evolved must be realized, must be actually felt in some measure before they can be understood and analyzed. Here then seems a great barrier to introspective evolutionary psychology, perhaps insuperable, for how can mind retrace itself, involute itself, in the interests of science? Mind is fundamentally action, motive-feeling, which, in connection with cognitive forms gradually achieved, becomes from mere pure pleasure-pain a very complex manifold. We feel many of these forms in our own experience, and we can say of some that they are the higher, of others that they are the lower and more primitive. Thus fear, anger, and hate are generally regarded as low action-motives as compared with love of truth or justice. But while we distinguish in our own consciousness and by analogy in the consciousness of others a considerable variety of psychic forms, they are, so far as we are able to see—and we have given some special attention to this in discussing fear and other emotions—invariably distinct, and each has its own peculiar quality, and we do not find, and we should not expect to find, the intermediate forms any more than the anatomist would expect to find in man a radial starfish structure. The hazy, indefinite phases which mark evolving consciousness into new forms have been long done away with for such emotions as hate, and it would seem an impossible task to ever bring them back. When we let consciousness lapse of its own regressive tendency—and undirected consciousness tends always to revert to wild states—we fall down through a series, but it is by steps, and no gradual descent, that is, defined mental forms succeed each other, with no transitional phases which are both as differentiating into either. We have mixed states, indeed, but these have no evolutionary value in this line, being merely coincident distinct psychoses, and not an intermediate differentiating mode. The psychoses which we call lower and which we naturally fall into, were really a higher level once for some remote ancestors, and it was only by occasional great efforts that fear, anger, hate, etc., were reached, by just such efforts as now are required by many a worldling who would be religious and would attain a feeling for holiness, or that of a Philistine, ambitious of reaching æsthetic feeling, who endeavours to appreciate the refined, elaborate power in a poem by Rossetti, or the simple human grandeur in a painting by Millet. In some forms we know what it is to try to feel, to have dim and vague stirring of æsthetic emotion, and to reach new levels in emotion generally, and we know the stages of differentiation and the severe nisus of the earlier realizations. On the nisus side of our psychic life there is abundant opportunity for every one to observe the process of mental differentiation, and how slowly evolving a new emotion is, for instance, before it reaches a definite form, but there is the great range of purely natural, spontaneous life, deriving its whole impetus from ancestral minds, where, as in hate and anger, it is impossible to study the slowly modifying forms precursory to the distinct mode. How can we find or produce in ourselves a state which is not yet hate, but merely hate in becoming, a half-differentiated, half-evolved hate? If we could put ourselves on the nisus side, and look up to hate as something to be reached, instead of something we may fall into, we might attain some idea of its process of formation. But since hate, anger, and so forth, invariably come upon us and overcome us, how can we appreciate their evolutionary stages? If we could trace these old intermediate disused forms which merely lead up to others, we should find them very strange, and should need an entirely new nomenclature for them. But to reach back and realize long outgrown and fossil psychoses, will, if ever possible, require more exertion and ability than even the intense struggle of the actual psychical advances which adds, by the efforts of exceptional individuals—“geniuses”—new modes of cognition and feeling to the mind of a race. To regress beyond a certain point is harder than to progress.

How then hate developed from non-hate, from anger, or from any other emotion, is obviously a very difficult problem. It would seem to us in our present stage of mentality that the first hate phenomenon was definitely and inexplicably such. We cannot perceive or conceive how the origin of hate is other than a sudden apparition of a new and elementary emotion in response to an extraordinary call upon some extraordinary organism in its life career. Yet we may easily believe that the direct occasion of its rise and progress was as complement to anger. Anger is certainly in general a very advantageous self-conservative factor, but by reason of its violence it requires a vast amount of vital energy to accomplish its end, and it thus also tends to disturb the cognitive power in its clear and cool actions. A burst of passion, though it may succeed in destroying the injurious, is both uneconomical and unintelligent. It is also a very transient phase. Anger will be defeated and supplanted in the evolution of life by some factor which has not these incidental disadvantages. Hate is such a superior psychosis, and is surer, steadier, and more economical than anger, and defeats it in the long run.

Hate then may be taken to exemplify the principle of antithetic evolution. We are careful not to raise the anger of some men and of some animals, and thus anger, or the capacity for anger, serves them as advantage and defence. We fear to make them mad. However, the antagonists of many individuals, knowing the weakening effect of such a strong emotion as anger, and knowing also how apt the angry one is to “lose his head,” purposely stimulate anger to their own advantage, and the disadvantage of the angered. Thus, cunning and wary animals, impelled by hate, often tease and torment their stronger and larger adversaries and competitors into a furious rage, which is so rash and unintelligent that they are completely at the mercy of the weaker. Where in such a way as this an advantageous variation is turned into disadvantageous by an opposing form, as anger by hate, we have what may be called an antithetic evolution. New psychic variations are then continually stimulated by the earlier, and it is only for a short time that any variation maintains itself as purely beneficial, but an answering one soon takes advantage of its weak points and turns it from self-conservative into self-destructive. Under the constant success of opposing factors, there is gradual loss of value and soon disuse, with the inception of some new form to combat more effectively the opponent. This opposing form meanwhile attains dominancy, culminates, and is gradually ousted by some variation which has been attained in order to meet the new weapons on the other side. Thus, in the battle of life, offence and defence, attack versus retreat and counter-attack, mutually stimulate to a series of new and higher antithetic psychic variations.

The so-called problem of evil is, then, tolerably easy to a thorough-going evolutionist. All developments, all perversions which are self-destructive rather than self-conservative to the individual, have received their original stimulus from other antagonistic individuals to whose interest it is to promote these evils to the utmost. What is an evil to me is first so much of a good to him whose interest lies in defeating and destroying me, and he will take advantage of all my weaknesses to his own profit. Competition and struggle involve the existence of evils to individuals who are conquered and maltreated in the battle of life. Disease and death itself is necessary to evolution on a finite sphere. As long as the good and desirable is limited as compared with the number of those who want, competition must exist, and this competition must be by both cultivating advantageous variations in ourselves, and also by cultivating the disadvantageous variations latent in our enemies. Thus, evil sown in others that our own good may be advanced is the general law of all life. To injure as much as possible all those who oppose, and to get as many as possible well affected towards us, and to be subservient to our ends, this is the meaning of psychical evolution in all its earlier, and most of its later, course. On any scheme of evolution by struggle, evil to particular individuals is a necessary fact. We throw, then, the problem back to how and why life arose and developed through this competition mode; and all science at present can say is that it is the “nature of things,” an expression which covers ignorance and is really metaphysical.

In all its later stages anger, and likewise hate as well, and all the allied emotions, attach only to what is distinctly known as animate. The futility and self-destructiveness of anger against the inanimate and insentient comes to be fully recognised. But early anger is quite undiscriminating. The hunter, who, pursued by an enraged bear, scatters his clothes and accoutrements behind him for the bear to tear in pieces, takes advantage of the unintelligent anger of the bear for his own ends. Since animals do not wear clothes they have no conception of what they are as independent insentient things distinct from the wearer. To the bear the weapons and clothes dropped by the hunter appear not as inanimate beings, but as living, vitally-connected parts of the creature pursued. The error arose, not from senselessness, but from lack of range of experience, and it is akin to the error of the ancient Mexicans who, having never seen a horse by itself, regarded a man on horseback as a single creature. A dog, the first time he sees his master unclothed, is greatly puzzled, and but slowly learns that clothes are something the master has and not what he is. When weapons, clothes, etc., are at length distinguished as property, there is yet a natural and right impulse to destroy them as injuring the owner; but the animal which stops to do this commits an error of judgment, as it is usually of more importance to despatch the hunter than to destroy his implements. It is the tendency of anger to destroy all which is in any wise connected with its object. This is true, not only of the animal world, but also of the lower human development. A savage in a fit of fury will slay, not only an offending fellow, but also his family and relations, and also destroy all his property. The uselessness, not to say the injustice, of such an indulgence of anger is only recognised at a comparatively late stage of evolution. Anger in its later form concerns itself only with purposive offence in its object, and vents itself solely on the individual offending. A clear distinction is drawn between animate and inanimate. Thus, my dog, playing with another, hurt itself by running into a tree, and gave an angry growl; but noticing the real nature of the paingiver as, not the other dog, but an inoffensive tree, his attitude immediately changed, and he seemed to take the injury as a matter of course. A puppy would in like case senselessly continue its demonstrations of anger to no good and perhaps to its own injury.