H. C. Warren, in Chapter VI of his Human Psychology, 1919, gives a brief survey of the reflexes and instincts.
CHAPTER IX
THE FEELINGS
PLEASANTNESS AND UNPLEASANTNESS, AND OTHER STATES OF FEELINGS AND THEIR INFLUENCE UPON BEHAVIOR
Feeling is subjective and unanalyzed. It is conscious, and an "unconscious feeling" would be a contradiction in terms. But, while conscious, it is not cognitive; it is not "knowing something", even about your subjective condition; it is simply "the way you feel". As soon as you begin to analyze it, and say, "I feel badly here or there, in this way or in that", you know something about your subjective condition, but the feeling has evaporated for the instant. In passing over into definite knowledge of facts, it has ceased to be feeling.
Feeling is an undercurrent of consciousness, or we might call it a background. The foreground consists of what you are taking notice of or thinking about, or of what you are intending to do; that is to say, the foreground is cognitive or impulsive, or it may be both at once, as when we are intent on throwing this stone and hitting that tree. In the background lies the conscious subjective condition. Behind facts observed and acts intended lies the state of the individual's feeling, sometimes calm, sometimes excited, sometimes expectant, sometimes gloomy, sometimes buoyant.
The number of different ways of feeling must be very great, and it would be no great task to find a hundred different words, some of them no doubt partly synonymous, to complete the sentence, "I feel _______". All the [{173}] emotions, as "stirred-up states of mind", belong under the general head of the feelings.
But when the psychologist speaks of the feelings, he usually means the elementary feelings. An emotion is far from elementary. If you accept the James-Lange theory, you think of an emotion as a blend of organic sensations; and if you reject that theory, you would still probably agree that such an emotion as anger or fear seems a big, complex state of feeling. It seems more complex than such a sensation as red, warm, or bitter, which are called elementary sensations because no one has ever succeeded in decomposing them into simpler sensations. Now, the question is whether any feelings can be indicated that are as elementary as these simple sensations.
Pleasantness and Unpleasantness Are Simple Feelings
No one has ever been able to break up the feelings of pleasantness and unpleasantness into anything simpler. "Pleasure" and "displeasure" are not always so simple; they are names for whole states of mind which may be very complex, including sensations and thoughts in addition to the feelings of pleasantness and unpleasantness. "Pain" does not make a satisfactory substitute for the long word "unpleasantness", because "pain", as we shall see in the next chapter, is properly the name of a certain sensation, and feelings are to be distinguished from sensations. Red, warm and bitter, along with many others, are sensations, but pleasantness and unpleasantness are not sensations.