The Psychology of the Emotions

by Th. Ribot

All these needs have a point of convergence—the preservation of the individual; to use the current expression, we see in them the exercise of the instinct of preservation. On the subject of this instinct there have recently been discussions which seem to me sufficiently idle. Is the instinct of preservation primitive? is it derived? Some authors are for the first hypothesis; others (especially James and Sergi) lean towards the second. According to the point of view each of these two solutions is admissible and true. From the synthetic point of view the instinct of preservation is primordial, since it is nothing else but the resultant and sum of all the particular tendencies of each essential organ; it is only a collective formula. From the analytic point of view, it is secondary, since it presupposes all the particular tendencies into which it is dissolved, since each of its elements is simple, and since it adds nothing and is nothing but their translation into consciousness. One might ask in the same way if a sensation of sound is simple or compound, and here also, according to the point of view, the answer would vary. For consciousness the event is one, simple and irreducible; for objective analysis the event is compound, reducible to a definite number of vibrations. In the various regions of psychology we might find many problems of the same kind. The important point is to understand that the instinct of preservation is not an entity, but an abbreviated expression indicating a group of tendencies.

2. Emerging from the period of needs, which are thus reducible to tendencies of physiological order accompanied by physical pleasures or pains, we now enter the period of primitive emotions.

We cannot at the present point determine rigorously and in detail what is meant by an emotion (see Part I., Chap. vii.); it is enough to give a rough but comprehensible definition. From our standpoint, emotion is in the order of feeling the equivalent of perception in the intellectual order, a complex synthetic state essentially made up of produced or arrested movements, of organic modifications (in circulation, respiration, etc.), of an agreeable or painful or mixed state of consciousness peculiar to each emotion. It is a phenomenon of sudden appearance and limited duration; it is always related to the preservation of the individual or the species—directly as regards primitive emotions, indirectly as regards derived emotions.

Emotion then, even while we keep to its primitive forms, introduces us into a higher region of the affective life in which its manifestations become complex. But how can we determine these primitive forms—the simple irreducible emotions—for this is our principal aim? Many neglect this determination, or leave it to arbitrary chance. The old authors seem at this point to have followed a method of abstraction and generalisation which could only lead them to entities. It was an accredited doctrine among them that all the “passions” can finally be reduced to love and hate; we meet this thesis throughout. To reach this conclusion they seem to have brought together and compared the different passions, disengaged the resemblances, eliminated the differences, and by continued reductions abstracted from this multiplicity its most general characters.[^[6]]

If by love and hate we are to understand the movements of attraction or repulsion which lie at the bottom of the emotions, there is nothing to be said; but we are only given abstractions and theoretical concepts; such a determination is illusory and without practical utility. If we understand love (what love? for nothing is vaguer than this word) and hate in a more concrete sense, and pretend to consider them as the primitive source from which to derive all the other emotions, that is a purely mental opinion, an assertion which nothing justifies.

The determination of the primitive emotions must be made not by abstraction and generalisation, but by verification. To attain this I can see but one method to follow—the method of observation, which teaches us the order and the date of appearance of the various emotions, and gives us their genealogical and chronological list. We may count as primitive all those which cannot be reduced to previous manifestations, all those which appear as a new manifestation, and those alone; all the others are secondary and derived.

The materials for this investigation can only be sought in the psychology of animals and in that of children. The first will give us but little help. No doubt special and authoritative treatises enumerate the emotions of animals, but without any distinction between the simple and the compound, and with no precise indication as to the order of their appearance. It is not the same with infantile psychology; the numerous studies published on this subject during the last thirty years have rendered possible an attempt which could not be made before.

The question is then to determine in accordance with facts the order in which the emotions appear, only taking into account those which seem primitive—that is to say, not reducible to other emotions. I limit myself to their simple enumeration, with an indication of their chief characters; each of them will be the object of a special study in the second part of this book.

1. Fear is the first in date, according to unanimous observations. Preyer finds that it is manifested from the second day. At the same time the fact which he records seems to me to agree with surprise rather than with fear properly so called. In any case, according to the same author, it is easy to note it after twenty-four hours. Darwin thought he could only observe it at the end of four months, Perez at two months. The last is inclined to believe that this emotion is first aroused by auditory sensations, and then by visual sensations. The precocity of its appearance has been attributed to hereditary transmission, an assertion which we shall have to examine.

2. After the defensive emotion, the offensive emotion appears in the form of anger. Perez notes it between two and three months; Preyer and Darwin at ten months; they mean real anger, marked by the contraction of the eyebrows and other clear symptoms (to throw itself about, crying, etc.). Naturally the dates indicated for each emotion are not rigorously fixed; they must vary according to the child’s temperament and circumstances.