Another proof of the difference and distinction between sensation and feeling is the fact that the same sensation will produce different feelings in different persons experiencing the former, even at the same time. For instance, the same sight will cause one person to feel elated, and the other depressed; the same words will produce a feeling of joy in one, and a feeling of sorrow in another. The same sensation will produce different feelings in the same person at different times. An authority well says: "You drop your purse, and you see it lying on the ground as you stoop to pick it up, with no feeling either of pleasure or pain. But if you see it after you have lost it and have hunted for it a long time in vain, you have a pronounced feeling of pleasure."
There is a vast range of degree and kind in feeling. Gordy says: "All forms of pleasure and pain are called feelings. Between the pleasure which comes from eating a peach and that which results from solving a difficult problem, or learning good news of a friend, or thinking of the progress of civilization—between the pain that results from a cut in the hand and that which results from the failure of a long-cherished plan or the death of a friend—there is a long distance. But the one group are all pleasures; the other all pains. And, whatever the source of the pleasure or pain, it is alike feeling."
There are many different kinds of feelings. Some arise from sensations of physical comfort or discomfort; others from purely physiological conditions; others from the satisfaction of accustomed tastes, or the dissatisfaction arising from the stimulation of unaccustomed tastes; others from the presence or absence of comfort; others from the presence or absence of things or persons for whom we have an affection or liking. Over-indulgence often transforms the feeling of pleasure into that of pain; and, likewise, habit and practice may cause us to experience a pleasurable feeling from that which formerly inspired feeling of an opposite kind. Feelings also differ in degree; that is to say, some things cause us to experience pleasurable feelings of a greater intensity than do others, and some cause us to experience painful feelings of a greater intensity than do others. These degrees of intensity depend more or less upon the habit or experience of the individual. As a general rule, feelings may be classified into (1) those arising from physical sensations, and (2) those arising from ideas.
The feelings depending upon physical sensations arise either from inherited tendencies and inclinations or from acquired habits and experience. It is an axiom of the evolutionary school that any physical activity that has been a habit of the race, long continued, becomes an instinctive pleasure-giving activity in the individual. For instance, the race for many generations was compelled to hunt, fish, travel, swim, etc., in order to maintain existence. The result is that we, the descendants, are apt to find pleasure in the same activities as sport, games, exercise, etc. Many of our tendencies and feelings are inherited in this way. To these we have added many acquired habits of physical activity, which follow the same rule, i.e., that habit and practice impart more or less pleasurable feeling. We find more pleasure in doing those things which we can do easily or quite well than in the opposite kind of things.
The feelings depending upon ideas may also arise from inheritance. Many of our mental tendencies and inclinations have come down to us from the past. There are certain feelings that are born in one, without a doubt; that is to say, there is a great capacity for such feelings which will be transformed into manifestation upon the presentation of the proper stimulus. Other mental feelings depend upon our individual past experience, association, or suggestions from others—upon our past environment, in fact. The ideals of those around us will cause us to experience pleasure or pain, as the case may be, under certain circumstances; the force of suggestion along these lines is very strong indeed. Not only do we experience feelings in response to present sensations, but the recollection of some previous experience will also arouse feeling. In fact, feelings of this kind are closely bound up with memory and imagination. Persons of vivid imagination are apt to feel far more than others. They suffer more, and enjoy more. Our sympathies, which depend largely upon our imaginative power, are the cause of many of our feelings of this kind.
Many of the facts which we generally ascribe to feeling are really a part of the phenomena of emotion, the latter being the more complex phase of feeling. For the purposes of this consideration we have regarded simple feeling as the raw material of emotion, the relation being compared to that existing between sensation and perception. In our consideration of emotion we shall see the fuller manifestation of feeling, and its more complex expressions.
CHAPTER XI.
The Emotions.
AS we have seen in the preceding lessons, an emotion is the more complex phase of feeling. As a rule an emotion arises from a number of feelings. Moreover, it is of a higher order of mental activity. As we have seen, a feeling may arise either from a physical sensation or from an idea. Emotion, however, as a rule, is dependent upon an idea for its expression, and always upon an idea for its direction and its continuance. Feeling, of course, is the elemental spirit of all emotional states, and, as an authority has said, is the thread upon which the emotional states are strung.
Halleck says: "When representative ideas appear, the feeling in combination with them produces emotion. After the waters of the Missouri combine with another stream, they receive a different name, although they flow toward the gulf in as great volume as before. Suppose we liken the feeling due to sensation to the Missouri River; the train of representative ideas to the Mississippi before its junction with the Missouri. Emotion may then be likened to the Mississippi after its junction—after feeling has combined with representative ideas. The emotional stream will not be broader and deeper than before. This analogy is employed only to make the distinction clearer. The student must remember that mental powers are never actually as distinct as two rivers before their union. * * * The student must beware of thinking that we have done with feeling when we consider emotion. Just as the waters of the Missouri flow on until they reach the gulf, so does feeling run through every emotional state." In the above analogy the term "representative ideas," of course, means the ideas of memory and imagination as explained in previous chapters.