The only merit of this classification is its showing that there are affective manifestations depending only on relations—transitions from one intellectual state to another. This merit, however, depends on the essential defect of the system, which consists in dealing with perceptions, representations, and ideas only—not with affective states taken in themselves, and directly. As this method of procedure is, definitively, an intellectual classification, it ought not to omit any form of knowledge, not even those blurred and evanescent states—the relations—which unite, disjoin, exclude, draw together, eliminate, subordinate, in short, indicate the movements of thought, and which students have often made the mistake of forgetting. It remains to be known whether many relations are not states of an affective rather than an intellectual nature; this is a point which I shall examine later on.
We may console ourselves for this multiplicity and divergence of classifications by saying that the naturalists have not been more successful. It will be granted without difficulty that it is easier to classify animals than affective states; yet, to take our own century only, how many systems!—from Lamarck, Cuvier, Oken, to Blanville, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, Siebold, Ehrenberg, Richard Owen, Von Baer, Vogt, Agassiz, and finally to Häckel—if we cite only the principal names!
I have indicated in passing why a true classification of the emotions—i.e., a distribution into orders, genera, species, according to the dominant and subordinate characters—is impossible. Every classification, if not purely empirical, expresses a general theory of affective life, a “system,” and, consequently, a hypothesis. More than this, it can never congratulate itself on having exhausted its matter, for every emotion, simple or compound, admits of innumerable varieties determined by the individual, the race, the epoch, and the course of civilisation; some are extinct, others, again, of recent origin. Lastly, the existence of mixed emotions—which are numerous—is a fatal objection to every attempt at distribution into a linear series. The only track to follow is that of genetic filiation—viz., to state first the simple, primary emotions, then to find out by what mental processes, conscious or unconscious, the composite and derived emotions have arisen from them. We shall attempt to define these in a future chapter.[[95]] But this work is no longer a classification.
CHAPTER XI.
THE MEMORY OF FEELINGS.
Can emotional images be revived, spontaneously or voluntarily?—Summary of scattered facts relating to this subject—Inquiry into this question, and method followed—Emotional and gustative images—Internal sensations (hunger, thirst, fatigue, disgust, etc.)—Pleasures and pains; observations—Emotions: three distinct forms of revivability according to observations—Reduction of the images to three groups: revivability direct and easy, indirect and comparatively easy, difficult and sometimes direct, sometimes indirect.—The revivability of a representation is in proportion to its complexity and the motor elements included in it.—Reservations to be made on this last point—Is there such a thing as a real emotional memory?—Two cases: false or abstract, and true or concrete memory—Peculiar characters and differences of each case—Change of the emotional into an intellectual recollection—Emotional amnesia: its practical consequences—There exists a general emotional type and partial emotional types—Confirmatory observations—Comparative revivability of agreeable and disagreeable states—To feel acutely and to recall an acute impression of the feeling are two different operations.
I.
After the numerous researches made, during the last twenty years, into the nature and the revivability of visual, auditory, tactile-motor, and verbal images, it seems paradoxical to maintain that there is still an unexplored region in the domain of memory. As a matter of fact, however, we find at most a few scattered remarks on the images derived from smell, taste, internal sensations, pleasure, pain, and emotion in general. The question of the emotional memory remains nearly, if not quite, untouched.[[96]] The object of this chapter is to begin its study.
The impressions of smell and taste, our visceral sensations, our pleasant or painful states, our emotions and passions, like the perceptions of sight and hearing, can leave memories behind them. This is a matter of common experience on which it is needless to insist. These residua, fixed in an organisation, may return into the consciousness; and it is known that images may be revived in two ways—by provocation, or spontaneously.
Revivability on provocation is the simplest of all. It consists in an actual occurrence awakening the images of similar occurrences at some former time, and takes place, beyond possibility of doubt, in the class of images which occupies us just now. The actual sensation of fatigue, of the smell of a lily, of the taste of pepper, of pain in a certain tooth, appear to me as the repetition of sensations formerly experienced, similar to the present one, or at least apparently identical, so that, consequently, it revives them.
But can the images of olfactory and gustatory sensations, of internal sensations, of past pains and pleasures, of emotions formerly experienced, be revived in the consciousness spontaneously, or at will, independently of any actual occurrence which might provoke them? We know that, in some painters, the inner vision is so clear that they can draw a portrait from memory; that, in some musicians, the inner hearing is so perfect that they can, like Habeneck, ideally hear a symphony just played, recalling all the details of the execution, and the slightest variations in the time. Are there in the order of emotional representations any cases analogous to these? Such is, in its precise form, the question which we shall examine in detail. We shall subsequently see that it has a practical bearing, and is not a mere psychological curiosity.