Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling

by Hiram Miner Stanley

One of the most interesting and most retrospective of emotions is sorrow. Sorrow, grief and regret are wholly regardful of the past, are pains at the past. They are purely subjective or “mental” pains at the past, and in no wise pains from the past; they are not pains recurrent from past pains, but purely a painful emotion at the representation of past pain. Thus, a man says, “I did it to my own harm and hurt, and I have always been sorry I did it.” Here the sorrow-pain is evidently quite distinct from the direct pain of the injury; pain for the harm done is one thing, and pain from the harm done is another. I hurt myself, and I not only have this pain, but, being sorry that I did it, I have this new emotional pain added. Sorrow as painful emotion for the past is thus plainly unique and peculiar. To feel sorry over what has happened is a mode of feeling altogether different from feeling proud of it, angry at it, etc., and we may reasonably regard sorrow as a distinct genus of retrospective emotion. What, now, is the nature and function of this special emotion reaction?

We have to consider here only that simple primitive sorrow which is a painful emotion at regarding personal loss or failure. Such simple sorrow we see in the child who cries over spilled milk, in the man who expresses deep regret at the careless misstep by which he broke his leg. In this emotional reaction at the injurious the harmful is neither escaped nor repelled, as through fear and anger; the feeling disturbance is comparatively passive and purely reflective, and is not a spur to some immediate advantageous defensive or offensive activity. In sorrow we are pained emotionally at the trouble which has come upon us through our own agency or otherwise, but we do not struggle from it or against it, but there is purely helpless retrospection. Harm and loss which might provoke in one nature to fear or anger, in another lead only to inactive sorrow.

The cognition form in sorrow means always sense of personal loss. I may fear a thing, or I may be angry at a thing, but I can be sorry only for a person. I do not feel sorry for a broken chair, though I may feel sorry for having broken it. This view of one’s own personal agency in causing harm to one’s self and harm to others is very prominent in a large range of sorrow. In viewing any action which determined some evil, I say, “I am sorry I did it.” This is, however, a later mode of the emotion, which at the first cannot take account of any agency, but is simply an acute feeling of distress at the injury received. Thus the one who grieves over the spilled milk regards, not his own agency, but only his loss; he is sorry, not that he spilled the milk, but that his milk was spilled. Yet the sense of personal agency certainly forms a great part in much sorrow, and tends to intensify it. I may grieve over any harm that has come upon me, but my grief is intensified as I remember my own agency in bringing it about. I may feel sorry over the loss of my goods by fire, but if I lose them by my own careless act, my sorrow is redoubled. Strictly speaking, perhaps, the sorrows are distinct, I feel sorry for having done it and I am sorry at it done; yet they may be said to constitute a single psychic state. Sense of our own agency, however, in having produced harm to self is as likely to produce anger at self or even fear of self. Hence our intensest and purest sorrows are apt to be those occasioned by considering injuries occasioned by elemental forces. That harm which we did not help because we could not, the inevitable injury, this excites a keen regret and deep mourning.

The pain in sorrow is as peculiar, searching, unanalyzable and undescribable as other simple emotion pains, and only conceivable through realization. This sinking, helpless pain over what has happened is clearly distinct from the sensation order of pains, and is in no wise a reflection from them. The pain I have at remembrance of some great loss which has befallen me is certainly very distinct from that which came from the loss itself.

What part now does sorrow play as a psychic life-function, and how explain it on the general principle of natural selection? At first sight, sorrow or grief over the past seems utterly valueless, seems to be mental energy thrown away. The past is irretrievable, of what use then is any grief? Is not all regret vain? To deplore its loss does not tend to restore a lost arm, and it is of no use crying over spilled milk. Indeed, he who bewails spilled milk has not only the actual loss but the ideal pain about the loss. He who grieves suffers doubly. But while it is true that sorrow for what has happened cannot alter the occurrence, yet it has a permanent salutary effect on the one who sorrows to give more caution for the future. The child will carry the pitcher of milk the more carefully next time by the more he has grieved over the past occurrence. By increasing sensitiveness and capacity for sorrow experience is strengthened, deepened, and completely adjusted to environment. Shallow and volatile natures, who take all loss and harm easily, and even gaily, have little strength, and attain no great and permanent growth. But with most, when the object of strong desire is suddenly lost, not only will there be a disappearance of the positive feeling about it, but an actual minus or negative state will be generated, a reaction mode we term grief. By this grief the chief lessons of all higher experience are made possible. Grief is not a pathological phenomenon in mind, but in its place thoroughly normal and useful. Indeed, if under certain circumstances grief did not appear, mind would be proved very crude, obtuse, or diseased. He who never feels sad about what has happened, is not of a progressive or highly advanced type. If one does not feel sorry for his past errors and hurtful actions, he plainly has so much the less motive force to higher action for the future. If sorrow had never entered the world of mind, if the whole corrective for injurious actions or want of action lay wholly in the immediate pain resulting or in the direct simple emotions like fear and anger, a most potent factor in psychic progress would be lacking. The possibility of going wrong, i.e., literally aside, and contrariwise to one’s own interests, is implied in the struggle for existence. The next best thing to the impossible status of being unable to do wrong, is to have the capacity of feeling for the wrong, that is, of experiencing grief. Sorrow is thus a corrective of the highest importance in the history of experience. The slips, willed and unwilled, from the narrow path of upward evolution are of necessity many; but a man is, on the whole, best doing the largest part in the evolution scheme in which he finds himself, who both knows the wrong as such, and is sorry for it, whether in the primitive selfish mode, or better still, on the higher ethical and religious grounds. The greatest and most efficient minds are those who have felt most keenly for their errors, faults, and sins.

As to the origin of grief, we may say with confidence that it is tolerably late, and certainly subsequent to anger and hate and like reactions. Under certain circumstances sorrow must be accounted a more favourable reaction than these. Rage is certainly impotent and useless on many occasions of recalled injury, and rage is besides a very intense emotion and expensive of energy. The general law in the development of emotion is toward milder, more economical, and more permanent forms, and then it is that sorrow must at some time have originated under the demands of life, and been preserved and developed under natural selection. Sorrow most probably originated as supplanting rage at the view or remembrance of injury done. In young children we often see rage mingled with the first manifestation of grief, and but slowly is the rage eliminated and pure grief attained. Sorrow exercises its function where rage is useless. The child cries over spilled milk partly from rage, partly from grief, but such mishaps will tend more and more to be attended by grief only, as the better and more economical reaction. Further, in a certain range of cases, sorrow in its manifestations serves to appease revenger, and sincere regret, unmistakably expressed, often saves the wrong-doer an equivalent harm. This form of sorrow function is distinctly cultivated in the education of children where they are taught to feel sorry for faults if they would be forgiven and escape punishment.

Grief in its origin and its earlier occurrence is not the spontaneous and almost irresistible impulse of our adult human experience, but, like all emotion and all progressive psychism, is by effort of will. That is, we must suppose that grief has its origin in some such nisus as a child exhibits when he is taught to be sorry for something he has done. Hence it is only gradually and with the lapse of many generations after its origin that sorrow becomes hereditary and spontaneous. At first sorrow was a distinct attainment, rarely and but occasionally reached by any individual, and it is comparatively late in psychic history that it becomes a permanent and innate power. Sorrow also very gradually widens its sphere. At first purely selfish, a retrospective reaction at one’s own hurt, it becomes at length, through sociality and its concurrent advantages, altruistic; sorrow is felt for others and the springs of sympathy and pity are developed. That this altruism is very late development is obvious, in that it has still to be taught even among the most advanced of the human race to their children. The child is taught to feel sorry for the cat he has hurt, for the blind man, for the cripple. And we must conclude that at one time in psychic history egoistic sorrow was likewise at the stage of development at which we now see altruistic, and we may suppose that in the far future the altruistic may come to the present status of the egoistic sorrow. However, for both there is an indefinite field for expansion, for refinement of sensibility, and for readiness and appropriateness of manifestation. Sorrow also will develop more and more on ethical and religious grounds. Remorse arises and develops; and also the “godly sorrow for sin.” We learn to feel, not merely sorry over the past as affecting our disadvantage, but to feel sorry conscientiously as our deeds or those of others conflict with the law of right or with the law of God. Those who have no God-consciousness, and so no feeling about their action in the sight of God, no sense of sinfulness, have yet often acute moral sense and feelings. However, the origin and function of the moral and religious sense in the light of natural selection is a wide subject which can only be alluded to here; suffice it to say that sorrow is thereby lifted to a peculiar and new plane of self-contained spirituality. That is, the bearing of it is often without relation to physical life-function, and even adverse thereto, and throughout has its value and sanction in itself alone.

One of the deepest and most significant of late forms of sorrow is that for the dead, and its importance is obvious from the fact that a word is especially coined to denote its expression, namely, mourning. Nothing can be more useless than mourning for the dead as far as the individual object is concerned; the most poignant sorrow cannot in anywise tend to reanimate the corpse. However, it plainly serves as an index to the value put upon life, and so in general has a most powerful effect on conservation and upbuilding of life. Other things being equal, sensitiveness to this form of sorrow measures accurately possibly self-conservative effort or effort for others’ conservation, which in a state of sociality, is equivalent in value to one’s self. The lives for which there is the most mourning and real sorrow when death comes are the most valuable to the community, and for the conserving of which the utmost combined effort would be extended. Where life has little value attached to it, sorrow is slight and mourning short. As compared with the savage state, loss and injury to life is infinitely more respected in the great centres of modern civilization—the nuclei of progress. It is because we feel strongly for the safety of friends and relatives that we employ the best devices to insure their protection from injury and death. One who has sorrowed most deeply over the death of a friend caused by his own careless handling of a gun, will for the future be much more careful for himself and others. To be sure we sorrow deeply because we place a high estimate upon the life rather than place high estimate because we sorrow greatly; but if there were no sorrow reaction, there would be no emotion basis for the future caution and care, and it affects our general estimate of life. Thus there is ever a cumulative emotional development.

Perhaps the latest developed form of sorrow is the feeling of sadness which comes over one in reflecting upon pain as a universal fact of existence. The pessimistic mood, with its converse, the optimistic, as based on philosophic generalization, is certainly extremely late. Pain at pain in general, pleasure at pleasure as a purely general fact, are equally remote from primitive modes, and mark culminating phases. While, perhaps, there is a certain justification and value in being saddened by the spectacle of universal pain, yet a gravity rather than a despondency is its proper measure. Pain, punitive and premonitory, plays, as we have already noted more than once in our discussions, a most beneficent and essential part in the struggle for existence and in all the higher struggle. It is a necessary and salutary phenomenon, involved in the very nature of evolution by struggle; hence he who impugns pain and is offended at it, really impugns the psychic nature of things and desires with Schopenhauer the annihilation of will. As a matter of fact the extreme pessimistic spirit is more destructive to progress than even the most buoyant optimism, in that it nips all earnest and forceful activity in the bud. A foolishly happy-go-lucky activity is better than a paralysis of effort through conviction of its inherent painfulness and ultimate inutility. The scientific evidence, so far as we can now read it, points decisively to the belief that pain-will activity, an intense struggle, is the earliest mind, and the condition of its birth has been the law of its development, and for aught that we can see, ever will be. Into this we are born, and it is as foolish to run counter to it as to the law of gravitation. A philosophy which runs counter to reality must either build a new reality or subside; but it is most certainly to be doubted whether the philosophic spirit ever has or ever will determine a general innovation in psychic evolution. But we cannot do more than merely advert to these large questions here.

With reference to the development of sorrow it is an obvious remark that much which causes grief in the earlier stages of mental growth ceases to have that effect with maturer experience. Thus the man may not notice, or may laugh at, or may feel irritation at occasions which in his early life would have wakened grief. On the contrary, much that seems grievous to the old is not so regarded by the young. In general, grief tends to become less frequent and paroxysmal, but more profound and lasting with the growth of mind.