The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

On a former page (pp. 453-4) I said that two questions, and only two, are important, if we regard the emotions as constituted by feelings due to the diffusive wave. (1) WJiat special diffusive effects do the various special objective and subjective experiences excite ? and The works on physiognomy and expression are all of them attempts to answer question 1. As is but natural, the sort. The other emotions are themselves primary impulsive tenciencies, of a diffusive sort (involving, as M. P. rightly says, a multiplicite des pJienom^nes); and just in proportion as more and more of these multiple tendencies are checked, and replaced by some few narrow forms of discharge, does the original emotion tend to disappear.

effects upon the face have received the most careful attention. The reader who wishes details additional to those given above on pp. 443-7 is referred to the works mentioDed in the note below.* As regards question 2, some little progress has of recent years been made in answering it. Two things are certain : a. The facial muscles of expression are not given us simply for expression's sake ;f h. Each muscle is not affected to some one emotion exclusively, as certain writers have thought.

Some movements of expression can be accounted for as weakened repetitions of movements which formerly (when they were stronger) were of utility to the subject. Others are similarly weakened repetitions of movements which under other conditions were physiologically necessary effects. Of the latter reactions the respiratory disturbances in anger and fear might be taken as examples — organic reminiscences, as it were, reverberations in imagination of the blowings of the man making a series of combative efforts, of the pantings of one in precipitate flight. Such at least is a suggestion made by Mr. Spencer which has found approval. And he also was the first, so far as I know, to suggest that other movements in anger and fear could be explained by the nascent excitation of formerly useful acts.

" To have in a slight degree," he says, "such psychical states as accompany the reception of wounds, and are experienced during flight, is to be in a state of what we call fear. And to have in a slight degree such psychical states as the processes of cjitching, killing, and eating imply, is to have the desires to catch, kill, and eat. That the propensities to the acts are nothing else than nascent excitations of the * A list of the older writings on the subject is given in Mantegazza's work, La Physionomie et I'Expression, chap, i ; others in Darwin's first chapter. Bell's Anatomy of Expression, Mosso's La Paura, Piderit's Wissenschaftliches System der Mimik und Physiognomik, Duchenue's Mecanisme de la Physionomie Humaine, are, besides Lange and Darwin, the most useful works with which I am acquainted. Compare also Sully: Sensation and Intuition, chap. ii.

f One must remember, however, that just in so far forth as sexual selection may have played a part in determining the human organism, selection of expressive faces must have increased the average mobility of the human countenance. psychical state involved in the acts, is proved by the natural language of the propensities. Fear, when strong, expresses itself in cries, in efforts to escape, in palpitations, in tremblings ; and these are just the manifestations that go along with an actual suffering of the evil feared. The destructive passion is shown in a general tension of the muscular system, in gnashing of teeth and protrusion of the claws, in dilated eyes and nostrils, in growls ; and these are weaker forms of the actions that accompany the killing of prey. To such objective evidences every one can add subjective evidences. Every one can testify that the psychical state called fear consists of mental representations of certain painful results ; and that the one called anger consists of mental representations of the actions and impressions which would occur while inflicting some kind of pain. " *

About fear I shall have more to say presently. Meanwhile the principle of revival in iveakened form of reactions tjLseful in more violent dealings with tJie object inspiring the emotion, has found many applications. So slight a symptom as the snarl or sneer, the one-sided uncovering of the upper teeth, is accounted for by Darwin as a survival from the time when our ancestors had large canines, and unfleshed them (as dogs now do) for attack. Similarly the raising of the eyebrows in outward attention, the opening of the mouth in astonishment, come, according to the same author, from the utility of these movements in extreme cases. The raising of the eyebrows goes with the opening of the eye for better vision ; the opening of the mouth with the intensest listening, and with the rapid catching of the breath which precedes muscular effort. The distention of the nostrils in anger is interpreted by Spencer as an echo of the way in which our ancestors had to breathe when, during combat, their " mouth was filled up by a part of an antagonist's body that had been seized (!)." The trembling of fear is supposed by Mantegazza to be for the sake of warming the blood(!). The reddening of the face and neck is called by Wundt a compensatory arrangement for relieving the brain of the blood-pressure which the simultaneous excitement of the heart brings with it. The effusion of tears is explained both by this author and by Darwin to be a blood-withdrawing agency of a similar sort. The contraction of the muscles around the eyes, of which the primitive use is to

protect those organs from being too mucli gorged with blood during the screaming fits of infancy, survives in adult life in the shape of the frown, which instantly comes over the brow when anything difiicult or displeasing presents itself either to thought or action. '* As the habit of contracting the brows has been followed by infants during innumerable generations, at the commencement of every crying or screaming fit," says Darwin, " it has become firmly associated with the incipient sense of something distressing or disagreeable. Hence, under similar circumstances, it would be apt to be continued during maturity, although never then developed, into a crying fit. Screaming or weeping begins to be voluntarily restrained at an early period of life, whereas frowning is hardly ever restrained at any age."*

The intermittent expirations which constitute laughter have, according to Dr. Hecker, the purpose of counteracting the ansBmia of the brain, which he supposes to be brought about by the action of the joyous or comic stimulus upon the vasomotor nerves. f A smile is the weak vestige of a laugh. The tight closure of the mouth in all effort is useful for retaining the air in the lungs so as to fix the chest and give a firm basis of insertion for the muscles of the flanks. Accordingly, we see the lips compress themselves upon every slight occasion of resolve. The blood-pressure has to be high during the sexual embrace ; hence the palpi-

* Weeping in childhood is almost as regular a symptom of anger as it is of grief, which would account (on Darwin's principles) for the frown of anger. Mr. Spencer has an account of the angry frown as having arisen through the survival of the fittest, by its utility in keeping the sim out of one's eyes when engaged in mortal combat (1). (Principles ot rsychology, u. 546.) Professor Mosso objects to any explanation of the frown by its utility for vision, that it is coupled, during emotional excitement, with a dilatation of the pupil which is very unfavorable for distinct vision, and that this ought to have been weeded out by natural selection, if natural selection had the power to fix the frown (see La Paura, chap. ix. § vi). Unfortunately this very able author speaks as if all the emotions affected the pupil in the same way. Fear certainly does make it dilate. But Gratiolet is quoted by Darwin and others as saying that the pupils contraci in anger. I have made no observations of my own on the point, and Mosso's earlier paper on the pupil (Turin, 1875) I have not seen. I must repeat, with Darwin, that we need more minute observations on this subject.

fcations, and hence also the tendency to caressing action, which accompanies tender emotion in its fainter forms. Other examples might be given ; but these are quite enough to show the scope of the principle of revival of useful action in weaker form. Another principle, to which Darwin perhaps hardly does sufficient justice, may be called the principle of reacting similarly to analogotts-feding stimuli. There is a whole vocabulary of descriptive adjectives common to impressions belonging to different sensible spheres — experiences of all classes are sweet ^ impressions of all classes rich or solid, sensations of all classes sharp. Wundt and Piderit accordingly explain many of our most expressive reactions upon moral causes as symbolic gustatory movements. As soon as any experience arises which has an affinity with the feeling of sweet, or bitter, or sour, the same movements are executed which would result from the taste in point.* " All the states of mind which language designates by the metaphors bitter, harsh, sweet, combine themselves, therefore, with the corresponding mimetic movements of the mouth." Certainly the emotions of disgust and satisfaction do express themselves in this mimetic way. Disgust is an incipient regurgitation or retching, limiting its expression often to the grimace of the lips and nose ; satisfaction goes with a sucking smile, or tasting motion of the lips. In Mantegazza's loose if learned work, the attempt is made, much less successfully, to bring in the eye and ear as additional sources of symbolically expressive reaction. The ordinary gesture of negation — among us, moving the head about its axis from side to side — is a reaction originally used by babies to keep disagreeables from getting into their mouth, and may be observed in perfection in any nursery. f

* These movements are explained teleologically, in the first instance, by the efforts which the tongue is forced to make to adapt itself to the better perception or avoidance of the sapid body. (Cf. Physiol. Psych., ii. f Professor Henle derives the negative wag of the head from an incipi ent shudder, and remarks how fortunate is the abbreviation, as when a lady declines a partner in the ballroom . The clapping of the hands for applause he explains as a symbolic abridgment of an embrace. The pro*

It is now evoked where the stimulus is only an unwelcome idea. Similarly the nod forward in affirmation is after the analogy of taking food into the mouth. The connection of the expression of moral or social disdain or dislike, especially in women, with movements having a perfectly definite original olfactory function, is too obvious for comment Winking is the effect of any threatening surprise, not only of what puts the eyes in danger ; and a momentary aversion of the eyes is very apt to be one's first symptom of response to an unexpectedly unwelcome proposition. — These may suffice as examples of movements expressive from analogy.

But if certain of our emotional reactions can be explained by the two principles invoked — and the reader will himself have felt how conjectural and fallible in some of the instances the explanation is — there remain many reactions which cannot so be explained at all, and these we must write down for the present as purely idiopathic effects of the stimulus. Amongst them are the effects on the viscera and internal glands, the dryness of the mouth and diarrhoea and nausea of fear, the liver-disturbances which sometimes produce jaundice after excessive rage, the urinary secretion of sanguine excitement, and the bladder-contraction of apprehension, the gaping of expectancy, the ' lump in the throat ' of grief, the tickling there and the swallowing of embarrassment, the * precordial ' anxiety ' of dread, the changes in the pupil, the various sweatings of the skin, cold or hot, local or general, and its flushings, together with other symptoms which probably exist but are too hidden to have been noticed or named. It seems as if even the changes of blood-pressure and heart-beat during emotional excitement might, instead of being teleologically determined, prove to be purely mechanical or physiological outpourings through the easiest drainage-channels — the pneumogastrics and sympathetic nerves happening under ordinary circumstances to be such channels.

trusion of the lips {der prufende Zug) which goes with all sorts of dubious and questioning states of mind is derived by Dr. Piderit from the tasting movement which we can see on any one's mouth when deciding whether a wine Is good or not. Mr. Spencer argues that the smallest muscles must be such channels ; and instances the tail in dogs, cats, and birds, the ears in horses, the crest in parrots, the face and fingers in man, as the first organs to be moved by emotional stimuli.^ This principle (if it be one) would apply still more easily to the muscles of the smaller arteries (though not exactly to the heart) ; whilst the great variability of the circulatory symptoms would also suggest that they are determined by causes into which utility does not enter. The quickening of the heart lends itself, it is true, rather easily to explanation by inherited habit, organic memory of more violent excitement ; and Darwin speaks in favor of this view (see his Expression, etc., pp. 74-5). But, on the other hand, we have so many cases of reaction which are indisputably pathological, as we may say, and which could never be serviceable or derived from what was serviceable, that I think we should be cautious about pushing our explanations of the varied heart-beat too far in the teleologica] direction. Trembling, which is found in many excitements besides that of terror, is, pace Mr. Spencer and Sig. Mantegazza, quite pathological. So are terror's other strong symptoms. Professor Mosso, as the total result of his study, writes as follows :

'' We have seen that the graver the peril becomes, the more do the reactions which are positively harmful to the animal prevail in number and in efficacy. We already saw that the trembling and the palsy make it incapable of flight or defence ; we have also convinced ourselves that in the most decisive moments of danger we are less able to see [or to think] than when we are tranquil. In face of such facts we must admit that the phenomena of fear cannot all be accounted for by ' selection.' Their extreme degrees are morbid phenomena which show an imperfection in the organism. We might almost say that Nature had not been

* Loc. cii. § 497. Why a dog's face-muscles are not more mobile than they are Mr. Spencer fails to explain, as also why different stimuli should innervate these small muscles in such different ways, if easy drainage be the only principle involved. Charles Bell accounted for the special part played by the facial muscles in expression by their being accessory missclet of respiration, governed by nerves whose origin is close to the respiratory centre in the medulla oblongata. They are an adjuvant of voice, and like it their function is communication. (See Bell's Anatomy of Expression. Appendix by Alexander Shaw.)

able to frame a substance which should be excitable enough to com pose the brain and spinal marrow, and yet which should not be so excited by exceptional stimulation as to overstep in its reactions those physiological bounds which are useful to the conservation of the creature."* Professor Bain, if I mistake not, had long previously commented upon fear in a similar way. Mr. Darwin accounts for many emotional expressions by what he calls the principle of antithesis. In virtue of this principle, if a certain stimulus prompted a certain set of movements, then a contrary-feeling stimulus would prompt exactly the opposite movements, although these might otherwise have neither utility nor significance. It is in this wise that Darwin explains the expression of impotence, raised eyebrows, and shrugged shoulders, dropped arms and open palms, as being the antithesis of the frowning brow, the thrown-back shoulders, and clenched fists of rage, which is the emotion of power. No doubt a certain number of movements can be formulated under this law ; but whether it expresses a causal principle is more than doubtful. It has been by most critics considered the least successful of Darwin's speculations on this subject.

To sum up, we see the reason for a few emotional reactions ; for others a possible species of reason may be guessed ; but others remain for which no plausible reason can even be conceived. These may be reactions which are purely mechanical results of the way in which our nervous centres are framed, reactions which, although permanent in us now, may be called accidental as far as their origin goes. In fact, in an organism as complex as the nervous system there must be many such reactions, incidental to others evolved for utility's sake, but which would never themselves have been evolved independently, for any utility they might possess. Sea-sickness, the love of music, of the various intoxicants, nay, the entire aesthetic life of man, shall have to trace to this accidental origin.f It would be foolish to suppose that none of the reactions called emo tional could have arisen in this gmis^'-accidental way.

This is all I have to say about the emotions. If one should seek to name each particular one of them of which the human heart is the seat, it is plain that the limit to their number would lie in the introspective vocabulary of the seeker, each race of men having found names for some shade of feeling which other races have left undiscriminated. If then we should seek to break the emotions, thus enumerated, into groups, according to their affinities, it is again plain that all sorts of groupings would be possible, according as we chose this character or that as a basis, and that all groupings would be equally real and true. The only question would be, does this grouping or that suit our purpose best? The reader may then class the emotions as he will, as sad or joyous, sthenic or asthenic, natural or acquired, inspired by animate or inanimate things, formal or material, sensuous or ideal, direct or reflective, egoistic or non-egoistic, retrospective, prospective or immediate, organismally or environmentally initiated, or what more besides. All these are divisions which have been actually proposed. Each of them has its merits, and each one brings together some emotions which the others keep apart. For a fuller account, and for other classificatory schemes, I refer to the Appendix to Bain*s Emotions and the Will, and to Mercier's, Stanley's, and Read's articles on the Emotions, in Mind, vols, ix, x, and xi. In vol. IX. p. 421 there is also an article by the lamented Edmund Gurney in criticism of the view which in this chapter I continue to defend.

Desibe, wish, will, are states of mind which everyone knows, and which no definition can make plainer. We desire to feel, to have, to do, all sorts of things which at the moment are not felt, had, or done. If with the desire there goes a sense that attainment is not possible, we simply toish ; but if we believe that the end is in our power, we wiU that the desired feeling, having, or doing shall be real ; and real it presently becomes, either immediately upon the willing or after certain preliminaries have been fulfilled.

The only ends which follow immediately upon our willing seem to be movements of our own bodies. Whatever feelings and havings we may will to get, come in as results of preliminary movements which we make for the purpose. This fact is too familiar to need illustration; so that we may start with the proposition that the only direct outward effects of our will are bodily movements. The mechanism of production of these voluntary movements is what befalls us to study now. The subject involves a good many separate points which it is difficult to arrange in any continuous logical order. I will treat of them successively in the mere order of convenience ; trusting that at the end the reader will gain a clear and connected view.

The movements we have studied hitherto have been automatic and reflex, and (on the first occasion of their performance, at any rate) unforeseen by the agent. The movements to the study of which we now address ourselves, being desired and intended beforehand, are of course done * Parts of this chapter have appeared in an essay called " The Feeling of Effort," published in the Anniversary Memoirs of the Boston Society of Natural History, IbbO ; and parts in Scribner's Magazine for Feb. 1888.

with full prevision of what they are to be. It follows from this that voluntary movements must he secondary ^ not primary functions of our organism. This is the first point to understand in the psychology of Volition. Reflex, instinctive, and emotional movements are all primary performances. The nerve-centres are so organized that certain stimuli pull the trigger of certain explosive parts ; and a creature going through one of these explosions for the first time undergoes an entirely novel experience. The other day I was standing at a railroad station with a little child, when an express-train went thundering by. The child, who was near the edge of the platform, started, winked, had his breathing convulsed, turned pale, burst out crying, and ran frantically towards me and hid his face. I have no doubt that this youngster was almost as much astonished by his own behavior as he was by the train, and more than I was, who stood by. Of course if such a reaction has many times occurred we learn what to expect of ourselves, and can then foresee our conduct, even though it remain as involuntary and uncontrollable as it was before. But if, in voluntary action properly so-called, the act must be foreseen, it follows that no creature not endowed with divinatory power can perform an act voluntarily for the first time. Well, we are no more endowed with prophetic vision of what movements lie in our power, than we are endowed with prophetic vision of what sensations we are capable of receiving. As we must wait for the sensations to be given us, so we must wait for the movements to be performed involuntarily,* before we can frame ideas of what either of these things are. We learn all our possibilities by the way of experience.

When a particular movement, having once occurred in a random, reflex, or involuntary way, has left an image of itself in the memory, then the movement can be desired again, proposed as an end, and deliberately willea. But it is impossible to see how it could be willed before. *I am abstracting at present for simplicity's sake, and so as to keep to the elements of the matter, from the learning of acts by seeing others do %em. A sujyply of ideas of the various movements that are possibU left in the memory by experiences of their involuntary performance is thus the first prerequisite of th^ volunto,ry life.

Now the same movement involuntarily performed may leave many different kinds of ideas of itself in the memory. If performed by another person, we of course see it, or we fed it if the moving part strikes another part of our own body. Similarly we have an auditory image of its effects if it produces sounds, as for example when it is one of the movements made in vocalization, or in playing on a musical instrument. All these remote effects of the movement^ as we may call them, are also produced by movements which we ourselves perform ; and they leave innumerable ideas in our mind by which we distinguish each movement from the rest. It looks distinct ; it feels distinct to some distant part of the body which it strikes ; or it sounds distinct. These remote effects would then, rigorously speaking, suffice to furnish the mind with the supply of ideas required.

But in addition to these impressions upon remote organs of sense, we have, whenever we perform a movement ourselves, another set of impressions, those, namely, which come up from the parts that are actually moved. These kincesthetic impressions, as Dr. Bastian has called them, are so many resident effects of the motion. Not only are our muscles supplied with afferent as well as with efferent nerves, but the tendons, the ligaments, the articular surfaces, and the skin about the joints are all sensitive, and, being stretched and squeezed in ways characteristic of each particular movement, give us as many distinctive feelings as there are mo^ ements possible to perform.

It is by these resident impressions that we are made conscious of passive movements — movements communicated to our limbs by others. If you lie with closed eyes, and another person noiselessly places your arm or leg m any arbitrarily chosen attitude, you receive an accurate feeling of what attitude it is, and can immediately reproduce it yourself in the arm or leg of the opposite side. Similarly a man waked suddenly from sleep in the dark is aware of how he finds himself lying. At least this is what happens

when the nervous apparatus is normal. But in cases of disease we sometimes find that the resident impressions do not normally excite the centres, and that then the sense of attitude is lost. It is only recently that pathologists have begun to study these anaesthesias with the delicacy which they require ; and we have doubtless yet a great deal to learn about them. The skin may be anaesthetic, and the muscles may not feel the cramp-like pain which is produced by faradic currents sent through them, and yet the sense of passive movement may be retained. It seems, in fact, to persist more obstinately than the other forms of sensibility, for cases are comparatively common in which all the other feelings in the limb but this one of attitude are lost. In Chapter XX I have tried to make it appear that the articular surfaces are probably the most important source of the resident kinsesthetic feelings. But the determination of their special organ is indifferent to oui present quest. It is enough to know that the existence of these feelings cannot be denied.

When the feelings of passive movement as well as all the other feelings of a limb are lost, we get such results as are given in the following account by Professor A. Striimpell of his wonderful anaesthetic boy, whose only sources of feeling were the right eye and the left ear : * "Passive movements could be imprinted on all the extremities to the greatest extent, without attracting the patient's notice. Only in violent forced hyperextension of the joints, especially of the knees, there arose a dull vague feeling of strain, but this was seldom precisely localized. We have often, after bandaging the eyes of the patient, carried him about the room, laid him on a table, given to his arms and legs the most fantastic and apparently the most inconvenient attitudes, without his having a suspicion of it. The expression of astonishment in his face, when all at once the removal of the handkerchief revealed his situation, is indescribable in words. Only when his head was made to hang away down he immediately spoke of dizziness, but could not assign its ground. Later he sometimes inferred from the sounds connected with the manipulation that something special was being done with him .... He had no feelings of muscular fatigue. If, with his eyes shut, we told him to raise his arm and to keep it up, he did so without trouble. After one or two minutes, however, the arm began to

tremble and sink without his being aware of it. He asserted still his ability to keep it up. . . . Passively holding still his fingers did not affect him. He thought constantly that he opened and shut his hand, whereas it was really fixed." " Voluntary movements cannot be estimated the moment the patient ceases to take note of them by his eyes. Thus, after having made him close his eyes, if one asks him to move one of his limbs either wholly or in part, he does it but cannot tell whether the effected movement is large or small, strong or weak, or even if it has taken place at all. And when he opens his eyes after moving his leg from right to left, for example, he declares that he had a very inexact notion of the extent of the effected movement. ... If, having the intention of executing a certain movement, I prevent him, he does not perceive it, and supposes the limb to have taken the position he intended to give it." *