The Psychology of the Emotions

by Th. Ribot

This disposition might be found fault with as being too ideal. In truth, invariable characters, all of a piece, are rare enough; yet some exist, and it is the conscious or sub-conscious notion of this type which influences our judgment. There is an instinctive craving for this ideal unity in our psychological, moral, æsthetic conception of character. It does not please us to see a contradiction between a man’s beliefs and his acts. We are annoyed if an ascertained rascal should show a good side, or a very good person some weakness. Yet what more frequent? On the stage, or in a novel, undecided or contradictory characters do not attract us. This is because individuality appears to us as an organisation which must be governed by an inner logic following inflexible laws. We are very ready to put down to duplicity and hypocrisy what is often only a conflict between incoherent tendencies; and it is not the least important among the practical results of recent investigations into personality to have shown that its unity is merely ideal, and that, without going the length of mental dissolution and madness, it may be full of unreconciled contradictions.

These reserves being made, our definition of character has the advantage of supplying us with a criterion which remarkably simplifies our task; for it is clear that, among the innumerable individuals of the human species, there must be some, and these by far the greater number, who have neither unity nor stability nor personal characteristics peculiar to themselves. This immense number of defective cases, which are ruled out of our study, may be divided into two categories—the amorphous and the unstable.

The amorphous are legion. I understand, by this term, those who have no special form of their own, the acquired characters. In these there is nothing innate, nothing resembling a vocation; nature has made them plastic to excess. They are entirely the product of circumstances, of their environment, of the education they have received from men and things. Some other person, or, failing that, the social environment, wills for them, and acts through them. They are not voices, but echoes. They are this or that, according to circumstances. Chance decides on their occupation, their marriage, and other things; once caught in the machinery of life, they act like every one else. They represent, not an individual, but a specific, professional character; they are copies, to an unlimited number, of an original which once existed. It has been said that the production of amorphous people is the speciality of civilisation, to which we owe their present abundance. This is only half true. It is certain that excessive culture rubs down the angles of character, and that, by raising some and lowering others, it tends to a general dead level. But we must not forget that, at the other extreme of social life, in the savage state, where the manners, customs, ritual, traditions of the tribe or clan, which can neither be discussed nor infringed, weigh heavily on each individual, where every innovation is rejected with horror (this is what Lombroso calls misoneism), the conditions are also very unfavourable to individual development. It seems, if we may judge from history, as if the period best suited for the growth of true characters were the half-civilised ages, such as the first centuries of the Roman Republic and of the Middle Ages, or epochs of disturbance like the Italian Renaissance, and, in general, all periods of revolution.

The unstable are the disjecta and scoriæ of civilisation, which may justly be accused of multiplying them. They are the complete antithesis of our definition, having neither unity nor permanence. Capricious, changing from instant to instant, by turns inert and explosive, uncertain and disproportionate in their reactions, acting in the same manner under different circumstances, and varying their actions in the same circumstances, they are indefiniteness itself. These are, in different degrees, morbid forms, expressing the inability of tendencies and desires to attain cohesion, convergence, unity. We shall return to these in the next chapter.

These two categories being excluded, the first because they are simply a product of their environment, and the second as being only an incoherent bundle of almost impersonal impulses, there remain the self-existent characters, which we must attempt to classify. Like every good classification, this must be systematically conducted—i.e., descending, step by step, from the general to the particular. It must determine genera, species, varieties, and thus, at last, reach the individual. The principal defect in the doctrine of the four temperaments (adapted to psychology, as we have already seen) is that of being too general: it remains, as it were, suspended in air, without intermediary, without middle term, or anything to connect it with the individual. It states the genera, nothing more. For the rest, some writers appear to have perceived this lacuna, having described mixed temperaments, but they are far from being agreed as to the nature and number of the latter.

The attempt at classification I am about to make includes four degrees of increasing definiteness and diminishing generality. On the first stage, we have the most general conditions, a mere framework, almost empty, and not corresponding to any concrete reality, but analogous to the zoological and botanical genera. In the second degree (corresponding to species), we have the fundamental types of character, pure forms, but real, this time, and, later on, justified and verified by observation. In the third degree, the mixed or composite forms (corresponding to varieties) are less clearly defined than the preceding. In the fourth degree, we have those substitutes or equivalents for character (they might also be called partial characters) which depart more and more widely from the pure type, but, in many people, take its place.

II.

We may begin by laying down the most general conditions for the determination of character, the main guiding lines, the dominant traits which impress on it a clear and decisive mark.

As the psychic life, considered from the most general point of view, can be reduced to two fundamental manifestations: feeling and acting, we have in the first place, broadly speaking, distinguished two types: the sensitive and the active.

1. The sensitive, who might also be called the affective or emotional, have as their special characteristic the exclusive predominance of sensibility. Impressionable to excess, they are like instruments in a perpetual state of vibration, and their life is for the most part inward. The physiological bases of this type of character are not easy to enumerate; but if we admit what seems to me incontestable—viz., that the internal organic sensations of vegetative life are the principal source of the affective development, as external sensations are the source of the intellectual development,—we must admit also that here the balance inclines in favour of the first. It may be known by the extreme susceptibility of the nervous system to agreeable or disagreeable impressions. In general, this type may be said especially to include the pessimists; for experience as old as the world itself proves that sensitive subjects suffer more from a small misfortune than they enjoy a great happiness. Uneasy, timid, fearful, meditative, contemplative, such are the very vague terms in which they may be for the moment characterised, without passing beyond the region of generalities.