Summary of Classes.—To the three comprehensive classes now named, Simple Emotions, Affections, and Desires may be referred, if I mistake not, the various sensibilities of our nature; or, if the analysis and classification be not complete and exhaustive, it is at least sufficiently minute for our present purpose.
Historical Sketch of the leading Divisions of the Sensibilities adopted by different Writers.
Important to know the Principles of Division adopted by others.—The discussion of the present topic would be incomplete without a glance at the history of the same. It is of service, having obtained some definite results and conclusions of our own, to know also what have been the views and conclusions of others upon the same matter. As with regard to the intellectual powers, so also with respect to the sensibilities, different principles of division and classification have been adopted by different writers. Our limits will allow us to glance only at the more important of these.
General Principles of Classification.—Of those who have written upon the sensibilities, some have placed them in contrast to each other, as hope and fear, love and hate, etc., making this the principle of division; others have classed them as personal, social, etc.; others as relating to time, the past, the present, and the future; others as instinctive and rational; while most who have had occasion to treat of this part of our mental constitution, have considered it with reference solely or mainly to the science of ethics or morals, and have adopted such a division and arrangement as best suited that end, without special regard to the psychology of the matter.
Of the Greek Schools.—Among the Greeks, the Academicians included the various emotions under the four principal ones, fear, desire, joy, and grief, classing despair and aversion under grief, while hope, courage, and anger were comprised under desire.
To denote the passivity of the mind, as acted upon, and under the influence of emotion, the Greeks named the passions in general, παθος, suffering, whence our terms pathos, pathetic, etc., whence also the Latin passio and patior, from which our word passion. The Stoics, in particular, designated all emotions as παθη, diseases, regarding them as disorders of the mind.
Hartley's Division.—Among the moderns, Hartley divides the sensibilities into the two leading classes of grateful and ungrateful ones; under the former, including love, desire, hope, joy, and pleasing recollection; under the latter, the opposites of these emotions, hatred, aversion, fear, grief displeasing recollection.
Distinction of primitive and derivative.—Certain other English writers, as Watts and Grove, derive all the emotions ultimately from the three principal ones, admiration, love, and hatred, which they term the primitive passions, all others being derivative.
Division of Cogan.—Cogan, whose treatise on the passions is a work of much interest, divides the sensibilities into passions, emotions, and affections; by the first of these terms designating the first impression which the mind receives from some impulsive cause; by the second, the more permanent feeling which succeeds, and which betrays itself by visible signs in the expressions of the countenance and the motions of the body; while by affections, he denotes the less intense and more durable influence exerted upon the mind by the objects of its regard. The passions and affections are, by this author, further divided into those which spring from self-love and those which are derived from the social principle.
Classification of Dr. Reid.—Dr. Reid divides the active principles, as he terms them, into three classes, the mechanical, the animal, and the rational, including, under the first, our instincts and habits, under the second, our appetites, under the third, our higher principles of action.