(1) The first strongly resembles the so-called artificial classifications, which might also be called concrete or synthetic. It takes the emotions as realities and places itself before them as the zoologist and the botanist place themselves before the varieties of animals and plants. It is empirical—i.e., it has no guiding principle; it classifies according to observation only, following external resemblances and differences.
Bain may be cited as one of the principal representatives of this method. I will not insist on a piece of work unworthy of such a psychologist; yet he has done it twice over, without arriving at an agreement with himself.
His earlier classification gives as fundamental the emotion of relativity (surprise, astonishment), terror, tenderness, self-esteem, anger, the sense of power, of activity, of mental exercise, æsthetic emotion, moral emotion.
The later includes eleven groups: love, anger, fear, the sentiment of property, the pleasure of power and its correlative pain of subjection, pride, vanity, activity (“plot-interest”), knowledge (the intellectual feeling), æsthetic emotion (beauty), moral sentiment. Three of these are “simple”—anger, love, and fear; but we find, a little later on, that love and anger are called “the giants of the group, the commanding and indispensable members of the emotional scheme;” so that fear would seem to be eliminated.
The incoherence and inconsistency of this attempt are sufficiently obvious, and I need not insist on them. (It should be noted that, in both cases, the religious sentiment is omitted.) I can find only one valuable remark—viz., that “pleasures and pains are contained in every one of the classes to be described, just as the natural orders of plants may each contain food and poison, sweet aromas and nauseating stinks.”[[92]] I have only referred to this classification in order to show how, by its very nature, it is condemned to failure. Floating at haphazard, without fixed principle, when not contradictory, it can only be arbitrary.
Herbert Spencer has criticised it in a well-known passage, which I will briefly recapitulate, since it serves as a transition to the second form of classification, and throws some light on the latter.[[93]] Bain has overlooked the fact that in confining his attention to the most obvious characteristics of the emotions, he is following the method of the ancient naturalists, who classed the cetacea among fishes. Every classification should be preceded by a rigorous analysis. For this purpose it would be necessary, as a preliminary, to study the ascending evolution of the emotions through the animal kingdom, to find out which of them are the first to appear, coexisting with the lowest forms of organisation and intelligence, and to note the existing differences, as regards emotion, between the higher and lower human races. Those common to all may be considered as simple, and those peculiar to the civilised races as ulterior and derivative.
2. Inspired by the above observations, Dr. Mercier has worked out a classification which I shall give as an example of the analytic and comparative method. It is in any case the most recent and the most detailed.[[94]] Proceeding after the manner of zoologists and botanists, he divides into classes, sub-classes, genera, and species, forming seventeen tables. We gather from these that there are 6 classes and 23 genera, under which may be ranged (after deducting all repetitions and duplicate entries) 128 manifestations of feeling, such as are to be found in common experience and rendered in current language. It is not possible, nor would it serve any useful purpose, to present this classification here in detail; I shall only indicate the 6 great classes with some sub-divisions, which will enable us to understand their nature.
The first class includes the feelings primarily affecting the conservation of the physical or mental organism. It comprises 2 sub-classes (according as the primary excitation is initiated by the environment, or within the organism itself), 2 orders, and 9 genera.
The second is that of the feelings primarily affecting the perpetuation of the race, considered as simple wants. Two sub-classes: primary (sexual emotion and its varieties) and secondary (paternal, maternal, filial, etc., feelings).
With the third class we leave behind the region of the primitive and fundamental feelings. It includes those which relate to the common welfare (community, family, etc.). It comprises 2 orders, each of which is further divided into several genera—viz., the patriotic and the ethical emotions.