Again:
"There are outbreaks of rage so groundless and unbridled that all must admit them to be expressions of disease. For the medical layman hardly anything can be more instructive than the observation of such a pathological attack of rage, especially when it presents itself pure and unmixed with other psychical disturbances. This happens in that rather rare disease named transitory mania. The patient predisposed to this—otherwise an entirely reasonable person—will be attacked suddenly without the slightest outward provocation, and thrown (to use the words of the latest writer on the subject, O. Schwartzer, Die transitorische Tobsucht, Wien, 1880), 'into a paroxysm of the wildest rage, with a fearful and blindly furious impulse to do violence and destroy.' He flies at those about him; strikes, kicks, and throttles whomever he can catch; dashes every object about which he can lay his hands on; breaks and crushes what is near him; tears his clothes; shouts, howls, and roars, with eyes that flash and roll, and shows meanwhile all those symptoms of vaso-motor congestion which we have learned to know as the concomitants of anger. His face is red, swollen, his cheeks hot, his eyes protuberant and their whites bloodshot, the heart beats violently, the pulse marks 100-120 strokes a minutes. The arteries of the neck are full and pulsating, the veins are swollen, the saliva flows. The fit lasts only a few hours, and ends suddenly with a sleep of from 8 to 12 hours, on waking from which the patient has entirely forgotten what has happened."[408]
In these (outwardly) causeless emotional conditions the particular paths which are explosive are discharged by any and every incoming sensation. Just as, when we are seasick, every smell, every taste, every sound, every sight, every movement, every sensible experience whatever, augments our nausea, so the morbid terror or anger is increased by each and every sensation which stirs up the nerve-centres. Absolute quiet is the only treatment for the time. It seems impossible not to admit that in all this the bodily condition takes the lead, and that the mental emotion follows. The intellect may, in fact, be so little affected as to play the cold-blooded spectator all the while, and note the absence of a real object for the emotion.[409]
A few words from Henle may close my reply to this first objection:
"Does it not seem as if the excitations of the bodily nerves met the ideas half way, in order to raise the latter to the height of emotions? [Note how justly this expresses our theory!] That they do so is proved by the cases in which particular nerves, when specially irritable, share in the emotion and determine its quality. When one is suffering from an open wound, any grievous or horrid spectacle will cause pain in the wound. In sufferers from heart-disease there is developed a psychic excitability, which is often incomprehensible to the patients themselves, but which comes from the heart's liability to palpitate. I said that the very quality of the emotion is determined by the organs disposed to participate in it. Just as surely as a dark foreboding, rightly grounded on inference from the constellations, will be accompanied by a feeling of oppression in the chest, so surely will a similar feeling of oppression, when due to disease of the thoracic organs, be accompanied by groundless forebodings. So small a thing as a bubble of air rising from the stomach through the œsophagus, and loitering on its way a few minutes and exerting pressure on the heart, is able during sleep to occasion a nightmare, and during waking to produce a vague anxiety. On the other hand, we see that joyous thoughts dilate our blood-vessels, and that a suitable quantity of wine, because it dilates the vessels, also disposes us to joyous thoughts. If both the jest and the wine work together, they supplement each other in producing the emotional effect, and our demands on the jest are the more modest in proportion as the wine takes upon itself a larger part of the task."[410]
Second Objection. If our theory be true, a necessary corollary of it ought to be this: that any voluntary and cold-blooded arousal of the so-called manifestations of a special emotion ought to give us the emotion itself. Now this (the objection says) is not found to be the case. An actor can perfectly simulate an emotion and yet be inwardly cold; and we can all pretend to cry and not feel grief; and feign laughter without being amused.
Reply. In the majority of emotions this test is inapplicable; for many of the manifestations are in organs over which we have no voluntary control. Few people in pretending to cry can shed real tears, for example. But, within the limits in which it can be verified, experience corroborates rather than disproves the corollary from our theory, upon which the present objection rests. Every one knows how panic is increased by flight, and how the giving way to the symptoms of grief or anger increases those passions themselves. Each fit of sobbing makes the sorrow more acute, and calls forth another fit stronger still, until at last repose only ensues with lassitude and with the apparent exhaustion of the machinery. In rage, it is notorious how we 'work ourselves up' to a climax by repeated outbreaks of expression. Refuse to express a passion, and it dies. Count ten before venting your anger, and its occasion seems ridiculous. Whistling to keep up courage is no mere figure of speech. On the other hand, sit all day in a moping posture, sigh, and reply to everything with a dismal voice, and your melancholy lingers. There is no more valuable precept in moral education than this, as all who have experience know: if we wish to conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in ourselves, we must assiduously, and in the first instance cold-bloodedly, go through the outward movements of those contrary dispositions which we prefer to cultivate. The reward of persistency will infallibly come, in the fading out of the sullenness or depression, and the advent of real cheerfulness and kindliness in their stead. Smooth the brow, brighten the eye, contract the dorsal rather than the ventral aspect of the frame, and speak in a major key, pass the genial compliment, and your heart must be frigid indeed if it do not gradually thaw!
This is recognized by all psychologists, only they fail to see its full import. Professor Bain writes, for example:
"We find that a feeble [emotional] wave... is suspended inwardly by being arrested outwardly; the currents of the brain and the agitation of the centres die away if the external vent is resisted at every point. It is by such restraint that we are in the habit of suppressing pity, anger, fear, pride—on many trifling occasions. If so, it is a fact that the suppression of the actual movements has a tendency to suppress the nervous currents that incite them, so that the external quiescence is followed by the internal. The effect would not happen in any case if there were not some dependence of the cerebral wave upon the free outward vent or manifestation.... By the same interposition we may summon up a dormant feeling. By acting out the external manifestations, we gradually infect the nerves leading to them, and finally waken up the diffusive current by a sort of action ab extra.... Thus it is that we are sometimes able to assume a cheerful tone of mind by forcing a hilarious expression."[411]