1. The principle of direct modification of innervation—that is to say, that the intensity of the muscular and vasomotor movements depends on the intensity of the emotions; the movements which most escape the control of the will more especially depend on this principle. This is the equivalent to Darwin’s third principle, placed first, which is, in fact, its right position.
2. The principle of the association of analogous sensations consists in those dispositions of the mind which are analogous to certain sensory impressions, manifesting themselves in the same manner. At the outset, we have only pleasures, pains, and needs of the physical order, whose mode of expression is innate, and, so to speak, anatomical. Later on come the pleasures, pains, and desires of the moral order, which make use of the pre-existent modes of expression in order to show themselves outwardly. It is a language turned aside from its primary signification, which in the order of gestures is the equivalent of a metaphor. This principle explains much more easily than Darwin’s a number of apparently very perplexing modes of expression. If a man, when puzzled, scratches his head, coughs, rubs his eyes, it is because a slight malaise of physical origin and a slight embarrassment of psychical origin have a deep-seated analogy, betraying themselves by the same expressive movements. Wundt has well described the mimicry of the mouth in the tasting of sweet, acid, or bitter substances; as soon as an emotion arises which has some affinity with these gustatory sensations (sweet joy, bitter grief, sharp reproaches), the expression of the mouth, the nose, the face reappears. This is because, in both cases, the state of the feelings, the emotional tone are the same, the expressive movements identical. As Mantegazza has rightly said, there are such things as mimic synonyms.
3. The principle of the relation between movements and sensory representations lies in the fact that the muscular movements of expression relate to imaginary objects. Wundt considers as chiefly amenable to this principle the mimicry of the eyes, the arms, and the hands. We represent something large by raising the hand, a small object by lowering it; the future by a forward movement, the past by a backward one. It might be objected that these gestures indicate intellectual rather than affective states; but it is certain that many emotions have a mimicry addressed to absent objects. Gratiolet (1857) collected a tolerably large number. The indignant man, even if alone, clenches his fist against an absent adversary. We shut our eyes, or turn aside our face, to escape the sight of a disagreeable object; we do the same when disapproving of an opinion. When we approve, we incline the head forward, as if in contemplation. In negation, we turn the head to right and left, exactly as is done by children and animals, when an unattractive object is placed in front of the mouth. The expression of disdain, contempt, disgust, reproduces the physiognomy of a man rejecting nauseating food.
I am not quite sure that Wundt’s third principle is of the same importance as the other two, or that it cannot be reduced to a still simpler form. But the theory I have just summarised, with a few examples borrowed elsewhere, presents itself as the one most calculated to bring out the importance of the physiological factors, unduly neglected by the pioneers of the science.
All the work relating to this question, whatever may be its lacunæ at present, has demonstrated that the expression of the emotions is not an adventitious, purely external, extra-physiological fact, whose study is only incumbent, as science, on the physiologist, and, as art, on the physiognomist, but emotion itself objectivised, its inseparable embodiment. In my opinion, we have to distinguish two strata in the very numerous modes of muscular movement which express the emotions. One is primary, depending on the anatomical and physiological constitution; the other, secondary, depending on the psychological constitution. The relation between them is that which in every developed language exists between the primary and the derived sense of words. Analogy is the great artisan of intellectual language; its action is more restricted as regards emotional language. But when, to the emotion of the first hour, having already its fixed mode of expression, there succeeds a new emotion, which the consciousness, rightly or wrongly, has felt as analogous, the pre-established expressive mechanism has served a new purpose, like an old word whose meaning is extended and modified. In both cases the mind proceeds in the same way, obeying the guidance of one and the same unconscious law.
CHAPTER X.
CLASSIFICATIONS.
Their discrepancies—Reduced to three types: (1) Classification of pleasures and pains—(2) Classification of emotions: two forms, empiric and analytico-comparative—(3) Classification of representations, intellectualist form—Critical remarks—Impossibility of any classification.
The confusion of that department of psychology which deals with the feelings and the vagueness of its terminology appear in all their fulness with the problem of classification. Although, for reasons which will be given at the end of the chapter, a complete and satisfactory classification seems to me impossible, there has been no lack of attempts, and it must be admitted that they are not illegitimate, at any rate as approximative efforts towards a provisional order.
Within the last fifty years, in spite of the very moderate amount of zeal with which psychologists have studied the feelings, we find about twenty treatises signed by well-known names, not to mention minor variants.[[90]] They are far from being in agreement, except on some few points, and when they are compared, in order, if possible, to reconcile them, the first impression is one of inextricable confusion and hopeless divergence. If we examine them a little more carefully, we begin to see light. We see that the differences are only in the objects classed and the methods followed; in one word, it is possible to attempt a classification of these classifications; and when this is done, we find, if I am not mistaken, that they can all be reduced to three types. (1) Some writers, virtually, classify only pleasures and pains, tracing back the whole of affective life to their modalities. (2) Others classify the emotions properly so called; and here we must distinguish two groups, according as the method employed is purely empiric, and founded on current observation, or has recourse to analysis and genetic research, after the manner of the so-called natural classifications. (3) Lastly, others classify intellectual states pure and simple, and, conversely, the affective states which accompany them: this is the intellectualist method.
In order to justify our distinction, we shall successively examine these three types. This excursion on an ungrateful soil will not be altogether without, at least, a negative utility.