The principle that I assume at the outset is that every idea tends to act itself out. If it is an isolated idea, or if it is not counterbalanced by a stronger force, its realization must take place. Thus the principle of the struggle for existence and of selection, taking the latter word in its broadest sense, is in my opinion as applicable to ideas as to individuals and living species; a selection takes place in the brain to the advantage of the strongest and most exclusive idea, which is thus able to control the whole organism. In particular, the child's brain is an arena of conflict for ideas and the impulses they include; in the brain the new idea is a new force which encounters the ideas already installed, and the impulses already developed therein. Assume a mind, as yet a blank, and suddenly introduce into it the representation of any movement, the idea of any action—such as raising the arm. This idea being isolated and unopposed, the wave of disturbance arising in the brain will take the direction of the arm, because the nerves terminating in the arm are disturbed by the representation of the arm. The arm will therefore be lifted. Before a movement begins, we must think of this; now no movement that has taken place is lost; it is necessarily communicated from the brain to the organs if unchecked by any other representation or impulse. The transmission of the idea to the limbs is inevitable as long as the idea is isolated or unopposed. This I have called the law of idea-forces, and I think I have satisfactorily explained the curious facts in connection with the impulsive actions of the idea.
The well-known experiments of Chevreul on the "pendule explorateur," and on the divining rod, show that if we represent to ourselves a movement in a certain direction, the hand will finally execute this movement without our consciousness, and so will transmit it to the instrument. Table-turning is the realization of the expected movement by means of the unconscious motion of the hands. Thought-reading is the interpretation of imperceptible movements, in which the thought of the subject betrays itself, even without his being conscious of it. In the process that goes on when we are fascinated or on the point of fainting, a process more obvious in children than in adults, there is an inchoate movement which the paralysis of the will fails to check. When I was a lad, I was once running over a plank across the weir of a river, it never entering my head that I ran any risk of falling; suddenly this idea came into play like a force obliquely compounded with the straight course of thought which had up to that moment been guiding my footsteps. I felt as if an invisible arm had seized me and was dragging me down. I shrieked and stood trembling above the foaming water until assistance came. Here the mere idea of vertigo produced vertigo. A plank on the ground may be crossed without arousing any idea of falling; but if it is above a precipice, and we think of the distance below, the impulse to fall is very strong. Even when we are in perfect safety we may feel what is known as the "fascination" of a precipice. The sight of the gulf below, becoming a fixed idea, produces a resultant inhibition on all other ideas. Temptation, which is always besetting a child because everything is new to it, is nothing but the power of an idea and its motor impulse.
The power of an idea is the greater, the more prominently it is singled out from the general content of consciousness. This selection of an idea, which becomes so exclusive that the whole consciousness is absorbed in it, is called monoïdeism. This state is precisely that of a person who has been hypnotized. What is called hypnotic suggestion is nothing but the artificial selection of one idea to the exclusion of all others, so that it passes into action. Natural somnambulism similarly exhibits the force of ideas; whatever idea is conceived by the somnambulist, he carries into action. The kind of dream in which children often live is not without analogy to somnambulism. The fixed idea is another instance of the same phenomenon, which is produced in the waking state, and which, when exaggerated, becomes monomania, a kind of morbid monoïdeism; children, having very few ideas, would very soon acquire fixed ideas, if it were not for the mobility of attention which the ceaseless variation of the surrounding world produces in them. Thus all the facts grouped nowadays under the name of auto-suggestion may, in my opinion, be explained. Here we shall generalize the law in this form: every idea conceived by the mind is an auto-suggestion, the selective effect of which is only counterbalanced by other ideas producing a different auto-suggestion. This is especially noticeable in the young, who so rapidly carry into action what is passing through their minds.
The philosophers of the seventeenth century, with Descartes and Pascal, considered sentiments and passions as indistinct thoughts, as "thoughts, as it were, in process of precipitation." This is true. Beneath all our sentiments lies a totality of imperfectly analyzed ideas, a swelling stream of crowded and indistinct reasons by the momentum of which we are carried away and swept along. Inversely, sentiments underlie all our ideas; they smoulder in the dying embers of abstractions. Even language has a power because it arouses all the sentiments which it condenses in a formula; the mere names "honor" and "duty" arouse infinite echoes in the consciousness. At the name of "honor" alone, a legion of images is on the point of surging up; vaguely, as with eyes open in the dark, we see all the possible witnesses of our acts, from father and mother to friends and fellow-countrymen; further, if our imagination is vivid enough, we can see those great ancestors who did not hesitate under similar circumstances. "We must; forward!" We feel that we are enrolled in an army of gallant men; the whole race, in its most heroic representatives, is urging us on. There is a social and even a historical element beneath moral ideas. Besides, language, a social product, is also a social force. The pious mind goes farther still; duty is personified as a being—the living Good whose voice we hear.
Some speak of lifeless formulas; of these there are very few. A word, an idea, is a formula of possible action and of sentiments ready to pass into acts; they are "verbs." Now, every sentiment, every impulse which becomes formulated with, as it were, a fiat, acquires by this alone a new and quasi-creative force; it is not merely rendered visible by its own light to itself but it is defined, specified, and selected from the rest, and ipso facto directed in its course. That is why formulas relative to action are so powerful for good or evil; a child feels a vague temptation, a tendency for which it cannot account. Pronounce in its hearing the formula, change the blind impulse into the luminous idea, and this will be a new suggestion which may, perhaps, cause it to fall in the direction to which it was already inclined. On the other hand, some formulas of generous sentiments will carry away a vast audience immediately they are uttered. The genius is often the man who translates the aspirations of his age into ideas; at the sound of his voice a whole nation is moved. Great moral, religious, and social revolutions ensue when the sentiments, long restrained and scarcely conscious of their own existence, become formulated into ideas and words; the way is then opened, the means and the goal are visible alike, selection takes place, all the volitions are simultaneously guided in the same direction, like a torrent which has found the weakest point in the dam.
5. Sentiments[164]
We seldom experience the primary emotions in the pure or unmixed forms in which they are commonly manifested by the animals. Our emotional states commonly arise from the simultaneous excitement of two or more of the instinctive dispositions; and the majority of the names currently used to denote our various emotions are the names of such mixed, secondary, or complex emotions. That the great variety of our emotional states may be properly regarded as the result of the compounding of a relatively small number of primary or simple emotions is no new discovery. Descartes, for example, recognized only six primary emotions, or passions as he termed them, namely—admiration, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness, and he wrote, "All the others are composed of some out of these six and derived from them." He does not seem to have formulated any principles for the determination of the primaries and the distinction of them from the secondaries.
The compounding of the primary emotions is largely, though not wholly, due to the existence of sentiments, and some of the complex emotional processes can only be generated from sentiments. Before going on to discuss the complex emotions, we must therefore try to understand as clearly as possible the nature of a sentiment.
The word "sentiment" is still used in several different senses. M. Ribot and other French authors use its French equivalent as covering all the feelings and emotions, as the most general name for the affective aspect of mental processes. We owe to Mr. A. F. Shand the recognition of features of our mental constitution of a most important kind that have been strangely overlooked by other psychologists, and the application of the word "sentiments" to denote features of this kind. Mr. Shand points out that our emotions, or, more strictly speaking, our emotional dispositions, tend to become organized in systems about the various objects and classes of objects that excite them. Such an organized system of emotional tendencies is not a fact or mode of experience, but is a feature of the complexly organized structure of the mind that underlies all our mental activity. To such an organized system of emotional tendencies centered about some object Mr. Shand proposes to apply the name "sentiment." This application of the word is in fair accordance with its usage in popular speech, and there can be little doubt that it will rapidly be adopted by psychologists.
The organization of the sentiments in the developing mind is determined by the course of experience; that is to say, the sentiment is a growth in the structure of the mind that is not natively given in the inherited constitution. This is certainly true in the main, though the maternal sentiment might almost seem to be innate; but we have to remember that in the human mother this sentiment may, and generally does, begin to grow up about the idea of its object, before the child is born.