The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion. Common -sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep ; we meet a

bear, are frightened and run ; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to strike, but we should not actually /eeZ afraid or angry.

Stated in this crude way, the hypothesis is pretty sure to meet with immediate disbelief. And yet neither many nor far-fetched considerations are required to mitigate its paradoxical character, and possibly to produce conviction of its truth. To begin with, no reader of the last two chapters will be inclined to doubt the fact that objects do excite bodily changes by a preorganized mechanism, or the farther fact that the changes are so indefinitely numerous and subtle that the entire organism may be called a sounding-board, which every change of consciousness, however slight, may make reverberate. The various permutations and combinations of which these organic activities are susceptible make it ab= stractly possible that no shade of emotion, however slight, should be without a bodily reverberation as unique, when taken in its totality, as is the mental mood itself. The immense number of parts modified in each emotion is what makes it so difiicult for us to reproduce in cold blood the total and integral expression of any one of them. We may catch the trick with the voluntary muscles, but fail with the skin, glands, heart, and other viscera. Just as an artificially imitated sneeze lacks something of the reality, so the attempt to imitate an emotion in the absence of its normal instigating cause is apt to be rather * hollow-*

bodily chxnges, whatsoever it be, is felt, acutely or obscurely , the moment it occurs. If the reader has never paid attention to this matter, he will be both interested and astonished to learn how many different local bodily feelings he can detect in himself as characteristic of his various emotional moods. It would be perhaps too much to expect him to arrest the tide of any strong gust of passion for the sake of any such curious analysis as this ; but he can observe more tranquil states, and that may be assumed here to be true of the greater which is shown to be true of the less. Our whole cubic capacity is sensibly alive ; and each morsel of it contributes its pulsations of feeling, dim or sharp, pleasant, painful, or dubious, to that sense of personality that every one of us unfailingly carries with him. It is surprising what little items give accent to these complexes of sensibility. "When worried by any slight trouble, one may find that the focus of one's bodily consciousness is the contraction, often quite inconsiderable, of the eyes and brows. When momentarily embarrassed, it is something in the pharynx that compels either a swallow, a clearing of the throat, or a slight cough ; and so on for as many more instances as might be named. Our concern here being with the general view rather than with the details, I will not linger to discuss these, but, assuming the point admitted that every change that occurs must be felt, I will pass on.

I now proceed to urge the vital point of my whole theory, which is this : 1/ we faricy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms , we find we have nothing left behind, no * mind-stuff ' out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains. It is true that, although most people when asked say that their introspection verifies this statement, some persist in saying theirs does not. Many cannot be made to understand the question. When you beg them to imagine away every feeling of laughter and of tendency to laugh from their consciousness of the ludicrousness of an object, and then to tell you what the feeling of its ludicrousness would be like, whether it be anything more than, the perception that the object belongs to the class * funny,*

they persist in replying that the thing proposed is a physical impossibility, and that they always must laugh if they see a funny object. Of course the task proposed is not the practical one of seeing a ludicrous object and annihilating one's tendency ' to laugh. It is the purely speculative one of subtracting certain elements of feeling from an emotional state supposed to exist in its fulness, and saying what the residual elements are. I cannot help thinking that all who rightly apprehend this problem will agree with the proposition above laid down. What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible for me to think. Can one fancy the state of rage and picture no ebullition in the chest, no flushing of the face, no dil' atation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face ? The present writer, for one^ certainly cannot. The rage is as completely evaporated as the sensation of its so-called manifestations, and the only thing that can possibly be supposed to take its place is some cold-blooded and dispassionate judicial sentence, confined entirely to the intellectual realm, to the effect that a certain person or persons merit chastisement for their sins. In like manner of grief : what would it be without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breastbone ? A feelingless cognition that certain circumstances are deplorable, and nothing more. Every passion in turn tells the same story. A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.

I do not say that it is a contradiction in the nature of things, or that pure spirits are necessarily condemned to cold intellectual lives ; but I say that for us, emotion dissociated from all bodily feeling is inconceivable. The more closely I scrutinize my states, the more persuaded I become that whatever moods, affections, and passions I have are in very truth constituted by, and made up of, those bodily changes which we ordinarily call their expression or consequence ; and the more it seems to me that if I were to become corporeally anaesthetic, I should be ex

eluded from the life of tlie aflfections, harsh and tender alike, and drag out an existence of merely cognitive or intellectual form. Such an existence, although it seems to have been the ideal of ancient sages, is too apathetic to be keenly sought after by those born after the revival of the worship of sensibility, a few generations ago. Let not this view be called materialistic. It is neither more nor less materialistic than any other view which says that our emotions are conditioned by nervous processes. No reader of this book is likely to rebel against such a saying so long as it is expressed in general terms ; and if any one still finds materialism in the thesis now defended, that must be because of the special processes invoked. They are sensational processes, processes due to inward currents set up by physical happenings. Such processes have, it is true, always been regarded by the platonizers in psychology as having something peculiarly base about them. But our emotions must always be inwardly what they are, whatever be the physiological ground of their apparition. If they are deep, pure, worthy, spiritual facts on any conceivable theory of their physiological source, they remain no less deep, pure, spiritual, and worthy of regard on this present sensational theory. They carry their own inner measure of worth with them ; and it is just as logical to use the present theory of the emotions for proving that sensational processes need not be vile and material, as to use their vileness and materiality as a proof that such a theory cannot be true.

If such a theory is true, then each emotion is the resultant of a sum of elements, and each element is caused by a physiological process of a sort already well known. The elements are all organic changes, and each of them is the reflex effect of the exciting object. Definite questions now immediately arise — questions very different from those which were the only possible ones without this view. Those were questions of classification : " Which are the proper genera of emotion, and which the species under each ?" or of description : " By what expression is each emotion characterized?" The questions now are causal: Just what changes does this object and what changes does that object

excite?" and "How come they to excite these particular changes and not others. " We step from a superficial to a deep order of inquiry. Classification and description are the lowest stage of science. They sink into the background the moment questions of genesis are formulated, and remain important only so far as they facilitate our answering these. Now the moment the genesis of an emotion is accounted for, as the arousal by an object of a lot of reflex acts which are forthwith felt, we immediately see why there is no limit to the number of possible different emotions which may exist, and why the emotions of different individuals may vary indefnitdy , both as to their constitution and fts to objects which call them forth. For there is nothing sacramental or eternally fixed in reflex action. Any sort of reflex efi'e ct is possible, and reflexes actually vary indefinitely, as we know.

"We have all seen men dumb, instead of talkative, with joy; we have seen fright drive the blood into the head of its victim, instead of making him pale ; we have seen grief run restlessly about lamenting, instead of sitting bowed down and mute ; etc., etc., and this naturally enough, for one and the same cause can work differently on different men's blood-vessels (since these do not always react alike), whilst moreover the impulse on its way through the brain to the vaso-motor centre is differently influenced by different earlier impressions in the form of recollections or associations of ideas." *

In short, any cUissiflcation of the emotions is seen to be as true and as * natural ' as any other, if it only serves some purpose ; and such a question as " What is the * real ' or * typical ' expression of anger, or fear ?" is seen to have no objective meaning at all. Instead of it we now have the question as to how any given * expression ' of anger or fear may have come to exist ; and that is a real question of physiological mechanics on the one hand, and of history on the other, which (like all real questions) is in essence answerable, although the answer may be hard *iO find. On a later page I shall mention the attempts to answer it which have been made.

I have thus fairly propounded what seems to me the most fruitful way of conceiving of the emotions. It must be admitted that it is so far only a hypothesis, only possibly a true conception, and that much is lacking to its definite proof. The only way coercively to disproye it, however, would be to take some emotion, and then exhibit qualities of feeling in it which should be demonstrably additional to all those which could possibly be derived from the organs affected at the time. But to detect with certainty such purely spiritual qualities of feeling would obviously be a task beyond human power. We have, as Professor Lange says, absolutely no immediate criterion by which to distinguish between spiritual and corporeal feelings; and, I may add, the more we sharpen our introspection, the more localized all our qualities of feeling become (see above. Vol. I. p. 300) and the more difficult the discrimination consequently grows.*

A positive proof of the theory would, on the other hand, be given if we could find a subject absolutely anaesthetic inside and out, but not paralytic, so that emotion-inspiring objects might evoke the usual bodily expressions from him, but who, on being consulted, should say that no subjective emotional affection was felt. Such a man would be like one who, because he eats, appears to bystanders to be hungry, but who afterwards confesses that he had no appetite at all. Cases like this are extremely hard to find. Medical literature contains reports, so far as I know, of but three. In the famous one of Remigius Leins no mention is made by the reporters of his emotional condition. In Dr. G. Winter's case f the patient is said to be inert and phlegmatic, but no particular attention, as I learn from Dr. W., was paid to his psychic condition. In the extraordinary case reported by Professor Strumpell (to which I must refer later in another connection) J we read that the patient, a shoemaker's apprentice of fifteen, entirely anaesthetic, inside

* Professor Hoffding, in his excellent treatise on Psychology, admits (p. 342) the mixture of bodily sensation with purely spiritual affection in the emotions. He does not, however, discuss the difficulties of discerning the spiritual affection (nor even show that he has fairly considered them) in his contention that it exists. X Ziemssen's Deutsches Archiv fiir klinische Medicin, xxii. 321- and out, with the exception of one eye and one ear, had shown shame on the occasion of soiling his bed, and griefs when a formerly favorite dish was set before him, at the thought that he could no longer taste its flavor. Dr. Strumpell is also kind enough to inform me that he manifested surprise, fear, and anger on certain occasions. In observing him, however, no such theory as the present one seems to have been thought of ; and it always remains possible that, just as he satisfied his natural appetites and necessities in cold blood, with no inward feeling, so his emotional expressions may have been accompanied by a quite cold heart.* Any new case which turns up of generalized anaesthesia ought to be carefully examined as to the inward emotional sensibility as distinct from the * expressions ' of emotion which circumstances may bring forth.

Let me now notice a few objections. The replies will make the theory still more plausible. * The not very uncommon cases of hysterical hemianajsthesia are not complete enough to be utilized in this inquiry. Moreover, the recent researches, of which some account was given in Chapter IV, tend to show that hysterical anaesthesia is not a real absence of sensibility, but a ' dissociatiou,' as M. Pierre Janet calls it, or splitting-off of certain sensations from the rest of the person's consciousness, this res^ forming the self which remains connected with the ordinary organs of expression. The split-off consciousness forms a secondary self ; and M. Janet writes me that he sees no reason why sensations whose ' dissociation ' from the body of consciousness makes the patient practically anaesthetic, might not, nevertheless, contribute to the emotional life of the patient. They do still contribute to the function of locomotion; for in his patient L. there was no ataxia in spite of the anaesthesia. M. Janet writes me, apropos of his anaesthetic patient L., that she seemed to ' suffer by hallucination.' " I have often pricked or burned her without warning, and when she did not see me. She never moved, and evidently perceived nothing. But if afterwards in her movements she caught sight of her wounded arm, and saw on her skin a little drop of blood resulting from a slight cut, she would begin to cry out and lament as if she suffered a great deal. ' My blood flows,' she said one day ; *lmu8i be suffering a great deal!' She suffered by hallucination. This sort of suffering is very general in hysterics. It is enough for them to receive the slightest hint of a modification in their body, when their imagination fills up the rest and invents changes that were not felt.' See the rentarks published at a later date in Janet's Automatisme PsychologiQU^ pp. 214-1&

for the assumption that particular perceptions do produce wide-spread bodily effects by a sort of immediate physica' influence, antecedent to the arousal of an emotion or emotional idea. Beply, There is most assuredly such evidence. In listening to poetry, drama, or heroic narrative we are often surprised at the cutaneous shiver which like a sudden wave flows over us, and at the heart-swelling and the lachrymal effusion that unexpectedly catch us at intervals. In listening to music the same is even more strikingly true. If we abruptly see a dark moving form in the woods, our heari stops beating, and we catch our breath instantly and before any articulate idea of danger can arise. If our friend goes near to the edge oi a precipice, we get the well-known feel* ing of * all-overishness.' and we shrink back, although we positively know him to be safe, and have no distinct imagination of his fall. The writer well remembers his astonishment, when a boy of seven or eight, at fainting when he saw a horse bled. The blood was in a bucket, with a stick in it, and, if memory does not deceive him, he stirred it round and saw it drip from the stick with no feeling save that of childish curiosity. Suddenly the world grew black before his eyes, his ears began to buzz, and he knew no more. He had never heard of the sight of blood producing faintness or sickness, and he had so little repugnance to it, and so little apprehension of any other sort of danger from it, that even at that tender age, as he well remembers, he could not help wondering how the mere physical presence of a pailful of crimson fluid could occasion in him such formidable bodily effects.

** No one has ever thought of separating the emotion produced by an unusually loud sound from the true inward affections. No one hesitates to call it a sort of fright, and it shows the ordinary signs of fright. And yet it is by no means combined with the idea of danger, or in any way occasioned by associations, memories, or other mental processes. The phenomena of fright follow the noise immediately without a trace of 'spiritual' fear. Many men can never grow used to standing beside a cannon when it is fired off, although they perfectly know that there is danger neither for themselves nor for others — the bare sound is too much for them. " *

Imagine two steel knife-blades with their keen edges crossing each other at right angles, and moving to and fro. Our whole nervous organization is ' on-edge ' at the thought ; ind yet what emotion can be there except the unpleasant dervous feeling itself, or the dread that more of it may come ? The entire fund and capital of the emotion here is the 3enseless bodily effect which the blades immediately arouse. This case is typical of a class : where an ideal emotion ^eems to precede the bodily symptoms, it is often nothing out an anticipation of the symptoms themselves. One who has already fainted at the sight of blood may witness the oreparations for a surgical operation with uncontrollable heart-sinking and anxiety. He anticipates certain feelings, and the anticipation precipitates their arrival. In cases of morbid terror the subjects often confess that what possesses nhem seems, more than anything, to be fear of the fear itself. Ln the various forms of what Professor Bain calls ' tender emotion,' although the appropriate object must usually be iirectly contemplated before the emotion can be aroused, y^et spmetimes thinking of the symptoms of the emotion itself may have the same effect. In sentimental natures the thought of 'yearning' will produce real * yearning.' And, not to speak of coarser examples, a mother's imagination of the caresses she bestows on her child may arouse a spasm of parental longing.

Jn such cases as these we see plainly how the emotion both begins and ends with what we call its effects or manifestations. It has no mental statics except as either the '/ivid feeling of the manifestations, or the idea of them ; and the latter thus constitute its entire material, and sum ^-nd substance. And these cases ought to make us see how in all cases the feeling of the manifestations may play H much deeper part in the constitution of the emotion than ve are wont to suppose.

The best proof that the immediate cause of emotion is I: physical effect on the nerves is furnished by those patJio- ■J g leal cases in which the emotion is objectless. One of the chief merits, in fact, of the view which I propose seems to be tliat we can so easily formulate by its means patha logical cases and normal cases under a common scheme. In every asylum we find examples of absolutely unmotived fear, anger, melancholy, or conceit ; and others of an equally unmotived apathy which persists in spite of the best of outward reasons why it should give way. In the iormer cases we must suppose the nervous machinery to be so * labile ' in some one emotional direction that almost every stimulus (however inappropriate) causes it to upset in that way, and to engender the particular complex of feelings of which the psychic body of the emotion consists. Thus, to take one special instance, if inability to draw deep breath, fluttering of the heart, and that peculiar epigastric change felt as * precordial anxiety,' with an irresistible tendency to take a somewhat crouching attitude and to sit still, and with perhaps other visceral processes not now known, all spontaneously occur together in a certain person ; his feeling oi their combination is the emotion of dread, and he is the victim of what is known as morbid fear. A friend who has had occasional attacks of this most distressing of all maladies tells me that in his case the whole drama seems to centre about the region ol the heart and respiratory apparatus, that his main effort during the attacks is to get control of his inspirations and to slow his heart, and that the moment he attains to breathing deeply and to holding himself erect, the dread, ipso factOy seems to depart.^

The emotion here is nothing but the feeling of a bodilj state, and it has a purely bodily cause. * It must be confessed that there are cases of morbid fear in which objectively the heart is not much perturbed. These, however, fail to prove anything against our theory, for it is of course possible that the cortical centres normally percipient of dread as a complex of cardiac and other organic sensations due to real bodily change, should become primarily excited in brain-disease, and give rise to an hallucination of the changes being there, — an hallucination of dread, consequently, coexistent with a comparatively calm pulse, etc. I say it is possible, for I am ignorant of observations which might test the fact. Trance, ecstasy, ate. , offer analogous examples, — not to speak of ordinary dreaming. Under all these conditions one may have the liveliest subjective feelings, either of eye or ear, or of the more visceral and emotional sort, as a result of pure nerve-central activity, and yet, as I believe, with complete peripheral repose.

'' ' All physicians who have been much engaged in general practice have seen cases of dyspepsia in which constant low spirits and occa eional attacks of terror rendered the patient's condition pitiable in the extreme. I have observed these cases often, and have watched them closely, and I have never seen greater suffering of any kind than I have witnessed during these attacks. . . . Thus, a man is suffering from what we call nervous dyspepsia. Some day, we will suppose m the middle of the afternoon, without any warning or visible cause, one ol these attacks of terror comes on. The first thing the man feels is grea* but vague discomfort. Then he notices that his heart is beating much too violently. At the same time shocks or flashes as of electrical dis charges, so violent as to be almost painful, pass one after another through his body and limbs. Then in a few minutes he falls into a condition of the most intense fear. He is not afraid of anything ; he 1^3 simply afraid. His mind is perfectly clear. He looks for a cause ol his wretched condition, but sees none. Presently his terror is such that he trembles violently and utters low moans ; his body is damp with perspiration; his mouth is perfectly dry ; and at this stage there are no tears in his eyes, though his suffering is intense. When the climax of the attack is reached and passed, there is a copious flow ot tears, or else a mental condition in which the person weeps upon the least provocation. At this stage a large quantity of pale urine is passed. Then the heart's action becomes again normal, and the attack passes off." *

"There are outbreaks of rage so groundless and unbridled that ail 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 feartul and blindly furious impulse to do violence and destroy.' Fe 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, hig eyes protuberant and their whites bloodshot, the heart beats vio"

(ently, the pnlse 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 13 hours, on waking from which the patient has entirely forgotten what kas happened." * In these (outwardly) causeless emotional conditions the particular paths which are explosive are discharged by any aud every incoming sensatiou. Just as, when we are seasick, Gvery 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 -is to play the cold-blooded spectator all the while, and note the absence of a real object for the emotion, f

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 I] 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

f I am inclined to think that in some hysteriform conditions of grief, rage, etc., the visceral disturbances are less strong than those which go to outward expression. We have then a tremendous verbal display with a hollow inside. Whilst the bystanders are wrung with compassion, or pale with alarm, the subject all the while lets himself go, but feels his insincerity, and wonders how long he can keep up the performance. The attacks are often surprisingly st dden in their onset. The treatment here is to intimidate the patient by a stronger will. Take out your temper, if he takes out his — "Nay, if thou'lt mouth, I'll rant as well as thou." These are the cases of apparently great bodily manifestation with comparatively little real subjective emotion, which may be used to throw discredit on the theorj' advanced in the text. — It is probable that the visceral manifestations in these cases are quite disproportionately slight, compared with those of the vocal organs. The subject's state is somewhat similar to that of an actor who does not feel his part

wound. In sufferers from heart-disease there is developed a psychw 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 oesophagus, 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. " *

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

* Op, Git. p. 72. — Lange lays great stress on the neurotic drugs, as parts of his proof that influences of a physical nature upon the body are the first thing iu order in the production of emotions. Apparent exhaustion of the machinery. In rage, it is notorious how we * work ourselves up ' to a climax by repeated outbreaks of expression. Kef use 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 !