The Psychology of the Emotions

by Th. Ribot

The physical stigmata, which have been enumerated at great length by specialist writers, consist in anomalies of the skeleton, the muscular and the digestive system, of the respiratory, circulatory, and genito-urinary apparatus, of the skin, the special sense-organs, of speech, and especially of the central and peripheral nervous system. The detailed lists contain about sixty items.

The psychic stigmata are more vaguely defined. The principal are: irritability, showing itself in a marked disproportion between action and reaction; instability of character, absence of unity, of consent, incessant changes, eccentric conduct, painful haunting by fixed ideas, irresistible impulses, or extraordinary apathy.

It has been objected to this doctrine that, of a thousand individuals taken at random, there is perhaps not a single one who does not show one or more of the stigmata, so that the whole human race would be included in the alleged class of degenerates. No stigma, it has been said, is specific by itself; neither is any group of symptoms, at least in a clear and indisputable form; so that one can come to no conclusion from them.

This and other difficulties have supplied matter for many discussions, into which this is not the place to enter. Degenerescence, whatever its value as an explanation, and the abuse to which it has been subjected, is not a mere word; it expresses a reality: it sums up in itself a number of characters. This is sufficient for us, and allows us to eliminate one hypothesis: that the decay of the feelings is necessarily dependent on intellectual decay.

To say truth, the question stated above: Is the retrogression of the feelings a primary, and that of ideas a secondary fact? or the contrary? is, under this form, somewhat factitious. It is only by analytical artifice that we separate thought and feeling, which, by their nature, are closely connected. The law of retrogression is generally valid in biology, and probably also in psychology; it does not act on isolated points, it gradually surrounds and saps the whole building, no matter on what side it begins. It is clear that all weakening of the intellect, such as that produced by old age and disease (difficulty in understanding general ideas, loss of certain groups of recollections, etc.), involves the disappearance of the corresponding affective states: one of the observations already quoted (Case B.) is an instance in point. But we must not thence conclude that the retrogression of the affective life is, by right, always subordinated to that of knowledge. Most cases of degenerescence prove the contrary; it is essentially an organic decadence, a state of physiological poverty, showing itself first of all by alterations in the range of the emotions, tendencies, actions, and movements. The intellect, for its part, is better able to stand the shock, and sometimes remains uninjured. More than this, the adherents of this doctrine have shown that the degenerate are sometimes endowed with brilliant intellectual faculties; while some have even maintained that degenerescence is a necessary condition of high mental originality (“genius a neurosis,” etc).

Apart from all exaggeration, the mass of facts permits us to make the induction that decadence is primarily (not exclusively) that of the affective tendencies and manifestations, since it is on them that degenerescence (taking the word in its least vague sense) first and principally acts.

CONCLUSION.

The place of the feelings in psychic life—They come first—Physiological proofs—Psychological proofs.

Through the multiple aspects of our subject and the diversity of questions we have dealt with, the fundamental idea of this book has been to show that the foundation of the affective life is appetite or its contrary—that is to say, movement or arrest of movement; that at its root it is an impulse, a tendency, an act in the nascent or complete state, independent of intelligence, which has nothing to do with it and may not even be present. It is unnecessary to inflict upon the reader any new variations on a theme so often repeated. I only desire, in conclusion, to add some remarks on the place of the feelings in the total psychic life, and to show that that place is the first.

This statement must be made precise. To compare “sensibility” and “intelligence,” as some authors have done, to see which of these two “faculties” is inferior to the other, is an artificial and unreasonable task, since there is no common measure of the two, and there can be no solution of the question which is not arbitrary. But we may proceed objectively, and ask if the one is not primary and the other secondary, if the one is not grafted on the other, and in that case which is the stock and which the graft. If the feelings appear first it is clear that they cannot be derived, and are not a mode or function of knowledge, since they exist by themselves and are irreducible.