3. Then comes affection. Some authors use the word sympathy, which seems to me too vague. It shows itself by its fundamental method of expression, the movement of attraction, the seeking for contact. Darwin, who has well described it, remarks that it probably appears very early in life, judging by the infant’s smile, in the second month, but that he had no clear proof that the child recognised any one before the fourth month; at the fifth month he showed a wish to go towards his nurse, but only at twelve months did he show affection spontaneously and by plain gestures. Darwin adds that sympathy (?) was manifested exactly at ten months, eleven days, when the child’s nurse pretended to cry.[[7]] According to Perez, it appears towards ten months.[[8]] It is from this source that complex forms of great importance must later on be derived—the social and moral emotions.
With fear, anger, and affection we remain in the region of the emotions which man shares with animals; for even affection is met with very low in the animal series, at all events in the form of maternal love. These three emotions have therefore a very clear character of universality. We now make a step which introduces us into a purely human region.
4. This stage is marked by the appearance of emotions connected with the personality, the ego. Hitherto we have had an individual, a living being with more or less vague consciousness of his life; but the child, usually towards the age of at least three years, becomes conscious of himself as a person. Then appear new emotional manifestations, of which the source may be called for lack of a better term the self-feeling or egoistic emotion (selbstgefühl, amour propre), and which may translate itself in two forms: in a negative form as a feeling of powerlessness and debility, and in a positive form as a feeling of strength and audacity. This feeling of plenitude and exuberance is the source from which later numerous emotional forms are derived (pride, vanity, ambition). Perhaps also we must connect with it all those which express a superfluity of life: the need of physical exercise, play in all its forms, curiosity or the desire for knowledge, the need of creation by imagination or action.
5. There remains the sexual emotion; it is the last in chronological order and the moment of its appearance is easy to fix, since it has objective physiological marks. It is an error to suppose that it can be derived from affection, or that affection can be derived from it, as has sometimes been maintained. The observation of facts completely condemns this thesis, and shows that they cannot be reduced one to the other. Later on we shall meet with evident proofs.
Now we meet with one of those embarrassing questions with which our subject is full. Must we here conclude our list of primitive emotions, or must we add two others: joy and grief? It is possible to incline to the latter view. Thus Lange has included joy and grief among the four or five simple “emotions” which he has chosen as types of his descriptions. The following reasons, in my opinion, are against this solution. No doubt joy and grief present all the characters which constitute an emotion: movements or arrest of movements, changes in the organic life, and a state of consciousness sui generis. But in that case physical pleasure and physical pain must also be included among the emotions, for they both present the characters above enumerated; moreover, there is an identity of nature between physical pleasure and joy on one side, physical pain and grief on the other side, as I hope to prove later on; the only difference is that the physical form is preceded by a state of the organism, the moral form (joy, grief) by a representation. In other words, we should have to class pleasure and pain (without qualification or restriction) among the primitive emotions. Now these two alleged emotions present, with reference to the five already named, an evident and capital difference: their character of generality. Fear is quite distinct from anger, affection from self-feeling, and sexual emotion from the other four by its specific mark. Each of them is a complex state, distinct and impenetrable; just as vision is in relation to hearing, or touch to smell. Each expresses a particular tendency (defensive, offensive, attraction to the like, etc.), and is adapted to a particular end. Pleasure and pain, on the contrary, express general conditions of being; they are diffused everywhere and penetrate everywhere. There is pain in fear, in certain moments of anger and of the self-feeling; there is pleasure in sexual emotion, in certain moments of anger and of the self-feeling. These two states have no domain of their own. Emotion, by its nature, particularises; pleasure and pain by their nature universalise; they are the general marks of the affective life, and if they coincide like the emotions with motor, vaso-motor, and other phenomena, that is because no form of feeling can exist without its physiological conditions.
Such are the reasons for which I refuse to class the agreeable and painful states among primitive emotions, and to consider them as of the same nature. As to the moment of their appearance, physical pain is held to co-exist with the very beginning of extra-uterine life; physical pleasure resulting from satisfied appetite, the sensation of warmth, etc., must begin almost at the same period. Joy and grief are later. According to Preyer, the smile and brightness of the eyes indicate joy; “from the second month an infant takes pleasure in hearing singing and the piano.” I am not sure that this example is very decisive; I prefer to see here the pleasure that is mostly physical. Darwin observed it towards the fourth month, perhaps before, but very clearly towards twelve months on the return of an absent person. Grief may manifest itself, according to Preyer, towards the fourth month (tears before the fourth week). Darwin, in the observation already quoted, makes the first appearance at six months. On the whole, the observations are few and wanting in harmony, because of the great difficulty at this moment of life in distinguishing with certainty between the two forms of pleasure and the two forms of pain.
At the root of each of the primitive emotions there is a tendency, an instinct; but I do not claim that this list exhausts the human instincts; later on we shall have to return to this point (Part II., Introduction). Let us admit as a provisional hypothesis that these five emotions alone are irreducible, and all the others derived from them. In the sequel I shall try to indicate how these secondary emotions are the result of a complete evolution, of an arrest of development, or of a mixture and combination (Part II., Chapter vii.).
III.
Above these emotions, which, though composed of several elements, are simple as emotions, and may be called innate since they are furnished by the organism itself, there are numerous forms of feeling manifested in the course of life, aroused by representations of the past or the future, by the construction of images, by concepts, by an ideal. As each primitive emotion will be studied in its total development, from its lower to its most highly intellectualised forms, it is useless now to attempt a sketch of this ascending march, which, when reduced to generalities, would be vague and confused. It reaches its last stage in the loftiest regions of science, art, religion, and morals.
One may assert without risk that these higher forms are unattainable by the great majority of men. Perhaps scarcely one person in a hundred thousand or a million reaches them; the others know them not, or only suspect them approximately and by hearsay. They are a promised land only entered by a few of the elect.