To sum up, all the emotions of this group whose genesis depends on an arrest of development are reducible to a single formula: intellectualised emotions, because the intellectual element becomes dominant. We might also call them attenuated emotions, because they tend towards emotional weakening. The two contrary and reciprocally dependent tendencies peculiar to this group, determine, not a medium emotion, but a new form which, relatively to the primary emotion, and to the general quantity of emotional life, is a loss.
III.
Transformation by composition is a general term including two different cases: mixture and combination. This process consists of additions, and can be thus formulated: When two or more intellectual states coexist, each having its own peculiar emotional colouring, there arises a complete emotional state; in other words, intellectual complexity involves emotional complexity. If we compare the primary emotions to the simplest perceptions of sight and hearing, the complex emotions will correspond to the perception of an extensive landscape or a symphony. It is thus formed by the addition or fusion of binary, tertiary, quaternary compounds, and so on, these terms implying the number of simple emotions which compose them. The composition may be brought about in two ways, which we shall distinguish by calling them respectively mixture and combination, in the sense in which these words are employed by writers on chemistry.
I. Composition by mixture.—In the emotions derived from this mental procedure, the constituent elements can be recovered from the compound; they embrace without interpenetrating one another, and a psychological analysis conducted with sufficient thoroughness is able to determine and enumerate them. For greater clearness, I distinguish two cases in the mixture of feelings.
(a.) The elements are homogeneous or convergent. If they are numerous, since they all tend in the same direction, the resultant emotion will be of great intensity. We have found one example of this in sexual love, an aggregate compound (according to Herbert Spencer’s analysis) of physical attraction, æsthetic impressions, sympathy, tenderness, admiration, self-love, love of approbation, love of possession, and desire of liberty.
(b.) The elements are heterogeneous or divergent. As an example I take jealousy, which many authorities consider primary, perhaps because it is manifested by animals and infants, which simply proves that it is precocious,—quite a different thing. A contemporary writer tries to define it by saying: “It is a morbid fear passing from inert stupidity to active or passive rage.” I greatly prefer Descartes’ definition: “Jealousy is a kind of fear related to the desire we have of keeping some possession” (Passions, art. 167). This passion deserves a monograph to itself, and one will certainly be written when this style of work comes to be applied more frequently to the psychology of the emotions. Our task at present is not to study its gradations, from mild cases up to madness and homicide, but to inquire into its composition. There is, firstly, the representation of some good, possessed or denied—a pleasurable element acting by way of excitement and attraction; and, secondly, the idea of dispossession or privation (e.g., of the lover with regard to his mistress, of the rejected candidate against his fortunate rival, and in general, of any who fail against all who succeed), an element of vexation which acts depressively; and, thirdly, the idea of the real or imaginary cause of this dispossession or privation, awakening, in various degrees, the destructive tendency (anger, hatred, etc.). In the passive or inert forms of jealousy this last element is very slight. This emotion is, therefore, a binary compound.
We might further mention the religious sentiment (a binary compound), the feeling of respect, composed of sympathy and a slight degree of fear, and the moral sentiment, which we are about to analyse in the next chapter.
I must remark that these derivative emotions, by reason of their complexity, ought logically to show as many shades of variety as they have constituent elements. In sexual love, where analysis discovers at least ten tendencies, whether primary or not, the predominance of one or more among these changes the aspect of the emotion according to times and individuals. The instability of the passions, of which we hear so much, is partly caused by their composite character.
II. Composition by combination.—The emotion resulting from this mental procedure differs, in its nature and characteristics, from its constituent elements, and appears in the consciousness as a new product, an irreducible unit. Here the analysis, uncertain and hazardous as it often is, cannot give us everything which we find in the synthesis—a psychological case which has well-known equivalents in chemistry.
A Danish psychologist, Sibbern, whom I believe to have been the first to point out this mode of composition of the emotions under the name of mixed sentiments, defines them as “Those in which the disagreeable excites the agreeable, and vice versâ, so that one is not antecedent to the other, but both act simultaneously, and the disappearance of the one involves the disappearance of the other.”[[165]] In fact, there is not merely coexistence, but reciprocity of action; if you suppress a single term the emotion changes its nature, as we shall see by the following examples.