The Psychology of the Emotions

by Th. Ribot

I.

The transition by evolution, complete or incomplete, is the simplest and most general case. It consists, like all evolution, in the passage from simplicity to complexity, from the undifferentiated to the differentiated, from the lower to the higher. It depends on the intellectual development, and is based on the law of transference already described (Pt. I., chap. xii.), which is its active and unconscious instrument. However feeble the development of the emotions may be in any race or individual it is never entirely wanting (idiots excepted), because the events of national and individual life have always some variety and some changes of aspect, which influence the emotional life.

It is convenient to distinguish two cases, according as the evolution takes place in a homogeneous or a heterogeneous form.

I. Evolution in homogeneous form.—The primary emotion remains identical with itself, through the whole course of evolution; it only increases in complexity. Here are some examples:[^[164]]

Æsthetic emotion has its origin in a surplus of activity expending itself in a particular direction, under the influence of the creative imagination; and it preserves this fundamental character from the drawings scratched on flints by quaternary man, or the symbolic dances of savages, through the classic ages, to the quintessential refinements of the decadents. It is true that all are not disposed to admit this: a person of delicate artistic temperament, brought up in a very cultured environment, and suddenly thrown into the midst of savage æsthetics, would deny any community of nature, but in this he would be mistaken. Those centuries which had no sense of evolution, of the continuity of development (the seventeenth and eighteenth), could see nothing in the origin of art but incomprehensible crudities, not worth notice. The transition from simplicity to complexity took place through the accumulation of knowledge, of ideas, and technical skill, and of causes or occasions of new ways of feeling: thus were formed juxtaposed aggregates acting by quality and quantity. This progress from simplicity to complexity is seen better than anywhere else in the development of the feeling for music, the most emotional of all the arts.

The religious sentiment is not of simple origin. It results: (1) from the fusion of two primary emotions—fear, and love in the larger sense (tender emotion); it is therefore a binary compound; (2) from a process of evolution which we shall have to follow in detail and which depends on intellectual conditions: predominance, first, of images, then of inferior concepts, then of superior concepts. Here, too, the continuity escapes the notice of many who do not see the bond connecting fetichism with the most idealistic of religions. How many travellers and ethnographers, after having ascertained the existence, among a given tribe, of magic, amulets, funeral rites, seriously affirm that these people are devoid of all religious feelings! It is because for them complex and highly organised forms are the only ones that count, and because they are accustomed to think of religious feelings as formulated by the great established religions.

II. Evolution in heterogeneous form.—The primary feeling is transformed to such a degree as to become unrecognisable, and can, in many cases, only be recovered by laborious analysis. This case resembles that of the morphological development of animals: the forms of the adult give no hint of the forms of embryonic and fœtal life.

The best example I can give is the genesis of the benevolent emotions, which, however, will be more suitably placed in the next chapter. We can, however, examine another case.

The instinct of conservation is, as we have seen, a collective term, an abridged formula, used to designate the totality of particular tendencies which assure the persistence of the individual, and one of which, the craving for food, is fundamental. It manifests itself in all its simplicity in most animals and in savage tribes who live, strictly speaking, from day to day. Yet ants, bees, foxes, and many other animals put aside a reserve store of food for future needs. The human race has very rapidly acquired the habits of foresight and care for the future, even while still in the savage stage and living by hunting and fishing. With a nomadic or agricultural life, the need of possession affirms itself more and more. As social progress substitutes for exchanges in kind the use of the precious metals, first in ingots, then as coined money, and later still, of paper money, feeling follows the same course, transferring itself from things to the values which represent them and the representations of these values, in many cases with well-known tenacity; and we see people who prefer illness to the expense of a cure, the risk of being murdered to the unpleasantness of giving up their purses. So that those values and signs of values which represent the possibility of satisfying needs (food, clothes, lodging, etc.), become in and for themselves a cause of desire and pleasure, and, amassed as a security for life, remain useless—if, indeed, they do not cause death. Avarice is a passion very well suited to illustrate this evolution in heterogeneous form, which, in spite of a strictly logical development, undergoes so many changes that its extreme point seems the negation of its point of departure.

The feeling of strength, self-feeling in its positive form, is at first, as we have seen, the consciousness of physical energy; but, with the intellectual development, it radiates in different directions, according to temperament and disposition. We can at least note two very different directions: (1) an evolution in the theoretical and purely individual sense, which leads a man to take up all questions, examine and criticise everything, form an independent opinion on every subject—in short, to have as his ideal an absolute liberty of thought, without any sort of restriction; (2) an evolution in the practical and social sense, extending one’s power over things and men; the child who domineers over his playmates may, at a later age, impose his personality on a party, a nation, a number of nations (Cæsar, Napoleon). The quality of the emotions felt in the two cases is very different; however, the original source is common to both, the divergence is the effect of character and intellectual evolution.