Importance of the study of special feelings—Utility of historical documents—Causes of the evolution of the feelings: (1) intellectual development; (2) hereditary influence, perhaps reducible to influences of environment—Cases in which the evolution of ideas precedes that of feelings—Inverse cases—The intellect swayed by the principle of contradiction; feeling by that of finality—Classification of primitive tendencies—Method to be followed—Group I.: physiological (reception, transformation, restitution)—Group II.: psycho-physiological—Group III.: psychological—Their enumeration.
The special study of the various manifestations of the emotional life enables us to penetrate much further into psychology than do the preceding generalities. This study is not a merely supplementary or elucidatory one to be abbreviated, treated cursorily, or even omitted altogether, as is done by some representatives of the intellectualist theory. As long as we have not considered, seriatim and in detail, every feeling, whether simple or compound, we have no idea of their rich multiplicity of aspects, of which general formulas are only meagre abridgments.
Some say or imply, contemptuously, that this is a purely descriptive study. But so long as we have found no other method of treating the question, it will always be better than silence. Hitherto, experimentation applied to the feelings has been kept within very narrow limits, and has done scarcely anything beyond corroborating the data furnished by observation. We must therefore modify our point of view and seek elsewhere; anthropology, the history of customs, of arts, religions and sciences, will often be more useful to us than the contributions of physiology. The experiments of the laboratory inspire some with a faith not to be shaken; but the evolution of the feelings in time and space, through centuries and races, is a laboratory, operating, for thousands of years, on millions of men; and its documentary value is a high one. It would be a great loss to psychology if these documents were neglected. Having been long confined to introspective observation, it has deliberately cut itself off from the biological sciences, considering them alien or useless to its work. It would not be desirable to fall into a similar error with regard to the concrete development of human life, and, after mutilating the study from below, to do so from above. If the intellectual life has its roots in biology, it is only in social facts that it can find its full development. A science never gains by excessive restriction of its scope; it is better to err in the opposite direction.[123]
Since, therefore, we have to pass in review all the forms of feeling, lower and higher, primary and derived, to note the successive moments of their development, and to follow them in their transformations, one question dominates our whole subject: what causes determine the evolution of the feelings?
In order to give to this question a clear and concrete form, let us take primitive man, as reconstructed by the anthropologists, not without much hypothesis and conjecture. Whether he were the ferocious wild beast described by some, or a puny, feeble, naked being, chipping his first weapons among the rolled flints of a river-bed, keeping up with difficulty his famished life from day to day, and finding a precarious shelter from incessant dangers in the hollows of the rocks, it is in any case certain that he made originally but a poor figure on the surface of the globe. How has he progressed from primitive cannibalism to his present moral and social culture? from the bestial sexual act to chivalrous love? from coarse fetichism to religious metaphysics or mysticism? from the rude drawings of the Neolithic age to the refinements of the æsthetic sentiment? from a narrow and limited curiosity to a disinterested enthusiasm for science? How has the passage been accomplished from one extreme to the other? It is clear that a new form of feeling cannot arise by spontaneous generation; it can only be the work of a transformation, of a physiological development. How has this happened? What causes have brought about this metamorphosis?
The principal, essential, fundamental cause is intellectual development.
Another cause, adduced by many writers, but more doubtful and more limited in its action, is transmission by heredity.
1. In spite of its importance, the first cause need not detain us long, since it can only be presented, for the moment, under the form of vague generalities. Its action consists in the ascending progression which rises from the inferior forms of knowledge (sensations and perceptions) to concrete representations, then to abstract representations (generic images), then to the medium and superior forms of abstraction, and involves in its movement concomitant modifications of affective life produced by reaction. Primitive man, like the child and the animal, is at first only a bundle of wants, tendencies, instincts which, when not simply unconscious, are connected with external or internal tendencies. The instinct of self-preservation, a synthetic formula expressing a group of subordinate and convergent instincts, adjusts itself differently according to circumstances—sometimes defensive, sometimes offensive. It is only determined by the successive ends which it has to attain, just as the muscular force of my arm may be equally well employed in raising a weight, in firing a gun, in striking a blow, or in caressing. The intellectual element, whatever it may be, is always the determining principle; never, alone and by itself, the spring of action. The process always follows the same course, and remains identical from start to finish; it passes from the simple into the complex, as we shall see in discussing each separate emotion. The child who feels acutely the possession of a toy, or the deprivation of it, is not affected by the beauty of a landscape, by reason of his limited intellectual power. We know that (in spite of common opinion) a savage, even a barbarian, is not moved by the splendours of civilised life, but only by its petty and puerile sides. Its greater aspects inspire him neither with desire, admiration, nor jealousy, because he does not understand them. Bougainville, in the last century, had already remarked this fact, which has frequently been confirmed since. Speaking of the profound indifference of the Pacific Islanders to the skilled construction of his ships and the instruments belonging to them, he says, “They treat the masterpieces of human industry as laws and phenomena of nature.”
2. Must we admit heredity as a special and independent cause of emotional evolution? This problem has been hotly debated. Darwin, Spencer, and many others following them, admit that certain acquired variations or modifications in the range of the feelings may be hereditarily transmitted, then fixed and organised in a race. They give as examples, fear, the benevolent feelings, the love of nature, the musical sense, etc.; the sudden return of so-called civilised individuals to savage or nomad life, for want of a hereditary tendency fixed by the habit of several generations; while the co-existence of predatory tendencies with the highest culture is for them a case of atavism or reversion.[124] On the other hand, the dominant opinion for the last twenty years (I think it shows symptoms of declining) is radically opposed to the inheritance of acquired modifications. Weismann and Wallace, who, more than others, have touched on the psychological parts of this subject, are decidedly for the negative. The question is therefore an open one, and I accept it as such, in order to escape the accusation of a bias in favour of heredity. But even while admitting that there is no fact strictly conclusive in favour of the transmission of psychic peculiarities, it nevertheless remains true that some occurrences of this sort are probable enough, especially in the pathological order. These belong to the category of appetites, tendencies, and passions, much more than to the group of intellectual states. This might have been foreseen, physiological heredity being more stable than psychological, and physiological conditions affecting the emotional life much more immediately than the intellectual.
If then, by a reserve which is perhaps superfluous, we eliminate heredity as a factor in the evolution of the feelings, the functions of conservation and consolidation ordinarily attributed to it ought to be assigned to other causes—the influences of environment, imitation, tradition, education, with its multitudinous influences. It is clear that a new mode of emotion, arising in an isolated human consciousness, cannot last, increase, or become contagious, in totally different and uncongenial surroundings. Religious mysticism was irreconcilable with the bloodthirsty cult of the Aztecs; and what could a native St. Vincent de Paul have done among a tribe of cannibals, or a Mozart among the Fuegians?
But these influences of environment bring us back, indirectly, to our original cause; for manners, customs, traditions, institutions, all these are ideas which, with their accompanying feelings, have fixed and incarnated themselves in certain acts serving as starting-points for a new stage in evolution.
Nevertheless, the preceding statements cannot be admitted without qualification. We have stated it as a law that the intellectual development involves the evolution of the feelings; but this rule is not absolute, and should be taken with important reservations. In the first place, these two forms of evolution rarely advance pari passu. Not to mention the cases in which ideas remain completely ineffectual and abortive, and produce no movement, their action, in general, is only felt in the long run, and emotional evolution is retarded. In the second place, there are certain cases where the evolution of feelings is direct, and precedes that of ideas.
The philosophical historian, Buckle, in his study of the factors of civilisation, points out two as essential—intellectual progress and moral progress; after which he puts to himself what he calls a very grave question: which of these two is the more important, and dominant over the other? He is decisive in choosing the first. Buckle’s question is in great part ours; for, though not comprehending all the manifestations of the emotional life, the moral sentiments form at least a very important fraction of it. His answer seems to me a legitimate one; but he was too much imbued with the notion that it is sufficient for an idea to be true and clearly conceived to make it an incentive to action; and he seems never to suspect that an idea can only supplant a feeling on condition of becoming a feeling itself.[125]
The intellect is capable of instantaneously finding out a new truth, or recognising an idea as just and conformable to the nature of things; but all this remains in a theoretic condition—i.e., without emotional colouring or tendency to realise itself. That which is discovered so rapidly by means of logic, takes years, or even centuries, to become a motive for action. “If the Greeks were unable to extend their feelings of humanity so as to include the barbarians, the cause lay, not in intellectual insufficiency, but in the arrestive power of their national feeling. Christianity overthrew these barriers, not by means of intellectual reflection, but by the effect of an acute and deeply-seated feeling. Afterwards, within the limits of Christianity, intolerance raised new barriers, and fettered the natural development of religion.”[126] We might find in history numerous examples of this inertia of the feelings, as in the case of slavery, etc. We imagine the emotions as in a state of perpetual motion and instability, whilst a habitual manner of feeling, in fact, possesses a formidable arrestive power, only gradually lost under the influence of time. It is a common saying that an argument has never changed a conviction; but this is only the case if we regard the present; it can act by incubation and at a great distance of time.
Another reason for disagreement between the two modes of development, the intellectual and the emotional, may be expressed under a form which, though rather pedantic, is clear and precise. Intellectual evolution is subject to the principle of contradiction, emotional evolution is not; it is, indeed, subject to a logical principle to be determined later, but the principle is another. Let us suppose a purely intellectual being: affirmations and negations regarding the same object cannot co-exist in his brain; one eliminates the other. If we suppose a purely emotional being it will be found that two opposite tendencies can be simultaneously active in him, each working towards its own end, provided that they do not bring about the destruction of the individual. In every individual who contradicts himself there is, at the moment when he contradicts himself, an emotional element at work. We shall see later on that this is the key to all contradictory characters, which are quite natural from the emotional point of view, though they are the stumbling-blocks of the intellect.
Finally, in certain cases the emotional development is completely detached from the other, and even in advance of it; this is direct evolution. Feeling, as has been said, is the pioneer of knowledge—i.e., it sometimes involves a confused knowledge; it is the anticipation of an ideal. In this case it is not an idea which excites a feeling, but the development of a feeling which ends by taking concrete form in an idea; its source is in the temperament and the character. The theory of evolution has familiarised us with the notion of spontaneous variations in animals and plants. This phenomenon is also found in psychology—in the intellectual order, in the emotional order, in the order of action. We are too much inclined to believe that inventors, revealers, initiators, exist only in the region of knowledge or activity; but in the region of feeling, too, there are spontaneous variations, both serviceable and injurious. If there are original ways of thinking, there are also original ways of feeling, which impose themselves on others, create a contagion. We shall find examples of this in abundance, for these “variations” have played a great part, especially in the evolution of the moral sentiment.
These remarks are of too general a character, but will be supplemented later on, when we come to study each form of emotion in its turn. Such is the object of our second part. It will consist of a series of monographs of varying length. Except for a general survey of the law which seems to govern the dissolution of the feelings, their pathology will not be treated in a special section, but will be distributed throughout the work, terminating the study of each normal form, but only in such measure as will serve to render their nature more comprehensible, in which case it partakes of the character of psychology.
Before setting out on our journey we must map out our route. At the beginning of this work I presented the reader with a general survey of the emotional life; it will be necessary to return to this subject in a briefer, more precise, and more limited manner. Since complex emotions are derived from simple emotions, and the latter from needs and instincts, whether satisfied or thwarted, from tendencies which are the direct and immediate expression of our physical and mental constitution; since the irreducible element is a motor phenomenon, actual or virtual, realised or in a nascent condition, it is indispensable to draw up a list of those primitive tendencies or instincts which are the roots of emotion.
On this point we have very little clear knowledge. Some writers do not notice it at all; others content themselves with a haphazard enumeration. W. James, who has seriously occupied himself with the question, lays down the principle that man has as many instincts as the animals, and even more, which seems to me indisputable. But his list, which he closes by saying that some will find it too long and others too short, contains very heterogeneous elements: instincts which are certainly primitive, derived instincts (as the love of possession), instincts whose existence as such is disputed (as imitation), pathological instincts (as the phobias or pathological fears, kleptomania, etc.), which last can only be considered anomalous, and, therefore, very different from simple and indecomposable instincts.[127]
Although it is rash to engage in a campaign in which some have fled and others failed, we must nevertheless attempt to draw up a list of primitive instincts (or tendencies), since these are the sources of all pleasures, pains, emotions, and passions. I can see but one method of attaining this end—a method long employed in animal psychology: that of admitting to the list of human instincts only those which present the following characteristics:—(1) They are innate. This does not imply that they appear at the very hour of birth, but that they are anterior to experience, not acquired; that they appear ready made, as soon as the fitting conditions exist. Those which are called deferred instincts, which make their appearance late, such as the sexual instinct in man and many animals, are none the less innate. (2) They are specific. They exist in the entire race, except for some individuals, who by reason of their exemption are, on the point in question, abnormal; so various instincts are wanting in the idiot. (3) They are fixed, in a relative sense; for no one now maintains the theory of the absolute invariability of instinct; and in man its plasticity is extreme, because a superior power, that of intelligence, moulds and adapts it to its designs.
These characteristics being determined, it remains to apply them in chronological order, and, starting with the birth of the individual, to draw up the catalogue of actual, strictly innate instincts. We shall then follow the course of life, noting the appearance of every new and indecomposable instinct, and thus continue till we have exhausted the list.
I propose to divide the instincts into three groups: the earliest in date being essentially physiological in its nature, the second psycho-physiological, the third essentially psychological. We shall not need to study them all, because some are outside the domain of general psychology, and others unconnected with the psychology of the emotions. The enumeration will be made, for the moment, in a very bald form, like a table of contents.
Group I. These belong to the life which biologists call organic or vegetative, as opposed to the life of relation. All these converge towards a single end, the fundamental act of life—nutrition. To simplify the matter as much as possible, let us divide this act into three stages: reception, transformation, and restitution.
(1) The first only has any psychological interest, showing itself in consciousness by two very energetic needs—hunger and thirst. It is almost superfluous to say that these instincts pass beyond the bounds of psychology into the domain of sociology, where their function is a very important one, as is seen by the phenomena of dearth, famine, theft, crimes, cannibalism, deadly combats for the possession of a little water, etc. Their pathology is thus more instructive than one would think, because it states and resolves, as we shall see, in a simple form, the problem of whether the tendency is anterior to pleasure and pain.
(2) The stage of transformation is purely physiological. It, too, shows itself in needs, of which the most pressing is that of breathing, an indispensable condition of the combustion of matter and the consequent interstitialinterstitial exchanges. If air had to be acquired and conquered, like food, this instinct would show itself in consciousness, as do hunger and thirst; but this rarely happens (dyspnœa, asphyxia). Its pathology is not instructive, and only comprises individual peculiarities, such as always breathing either hot or cold air, sleeping with open windows, etc.
(3) The stage of restitution outwards (secretions, excretions, etc.), though showing itself by instinctive movements, is only very indirectly connected with our subject; and though, in fact, nothing which takes place in the organism is quite unconnected with psychology, we may pass this over in silence.
Group II. These instincts belong to the so called relative life, and correspond to two stages—those of reception and restitution. The first stage is represented by all the forms of external perception, and comprises the tendencies connected with the exercise of each of our senses, the tendency of each sensory organ to fulfil its function: the eye tends to see, the hand to grasp and feel. These tendencies, if satisfied, are agreeable; if obstructed, unpleasant. Hence result pleasure and pain, but not emotions properly so called. The second stage is represented by all the forms of muscular movement, tendencies to action, to the production of noises, as in certain animals, to cries, vocalisation, gestures, and bodily attitudes. We have seen that all these things, in popular opinion, serve to express emotions, while, in our view, they are integral parts of them.
Group III. This group of tendencies no longer has for its end reception or restitution, but the conservation and development of the individual as a conscious being. They express not his physical, but his psychical constitution, his mental organisation under its different aspects; they embody his needs as a spiritual being; as breathing, hunger, thirst, etc. embody his needs as a living being. They all therefore have a psychological character, and are the source of that complexus of pleasant, painful, or mixed movements and states which we call emotions.
Let us recall the chronological order of their appearance already indicated elsewhere: (1) The instinct of conservation under its defensive form expressed by fear, with its varieties and morbid forms (phobias). (2) The instinct of conservation under its aggressive form—i.e., anger and its derivatives, and (in a morbid form) the destructive impulses. (3) The sympathetic tendencies and the tender (non-sexual) emotions. It may, however, be questioned whether sympathy can be called a tendency in the strict sense; it seems to me to be rather a general property of sentient beings, a point which will be examined later. The same thing may be said of the imitative instinct or tendency to imitation, which does not appear to be indecomposable.
These three primitive tendencies and emotions, with their derivatives, form the first storey of the building. Fear and anger especially have an extremely general character; we can descend very low in the animal scale before we find them absent. The tender emotions, based on sympathy (the source of social and moral emotions), cover a much narrower area; they are, however, to be found among the lower animals under the form of temporary or permanent associations.
The other tendencies are slower in appearing, and their circle is more restricted: (4) The play-instinct, if we use this word to designate the tendency to expend superfluous activity. This is a stock which puts forth several branches: (a) the need of physical exercise; (b) the taste for a life of adventure; (c) the passion for gambling, which so soon becomes morbid; (d) æsthetic activity. (5) The tendency towards knowledge (curiosity) only appears with a certain degree of intelligence and attention; at first connected with the exercise of the senses (looking at an object, touching it, etc.), it is strictly practical, though at a later stage producing all the varieties of the intellectual sentiment. (6) At a later epoch, and perhaps in man alone, are manifested the egotistic tendencies (self-feeling, Selbstgefühl, amor proprius), which express the ego, the personality as conscious of itself, and show themselves in the emotion of pride, or its opposite, and their varieties. (7) There remains the latest in date (at least in man), the sex-instinct, of which the exceedingly general character is well known.
Such are the tendencies which, in my opinion, are the roots of all simple or compound emotions, present, past, or future. This assertion will be justified or invalidated by the following studies.
Hypothesis regarding the relation between the nutritive organs and the brain—Perversion of the instincts relating to nutrition—Pathology of hunger and thirst—Proofs furnished of the priority of these tendencies in relation to pleasure and pain—Facts in support of this—Negative tendency; disgust—Its biological value as a protective instinct.
The above title may seem quite unconnected with psychology, or at least of a nature to throw little light on our subject. This is not the case. This group of tendencies—for we have seen that the conservative instinct is a sum, a total—represents the principal factors in what is called cœnæsthesia, the very soil on which emotional life grows and bears fruit. Moreover, the nutritive instincts have their pathology, which enables us to watch, not the genesis (which would be impossible) of new tendencies, but a radical transformation, a complete change of orientation, whose effects are easily observable and instructive. In a normal state the instincts are presented to us as ready made and in action; we cannot, either in ourselves or in others, go back to that distant and obscure period when the unconscious impulse, the blind tendency, showed itself for the first time, without antecedent experience of the pleasant or unpleasant consequences. So that our affirmation that tendency is antecedent to pleasure and pain may be stigmatised as merely theoretical so long as we are unable to cite indubitable facts in demonstration of it. These facts we are about to furnish.
The nutritive acts take place in the inmost recesses of the tissues and organs. By what channels are they connected with the cortex, either when undergoing its influence or transmitting the echoes of their slackening, accelerative, and other modifications? On this point physiologists know little. According to some (Schiff, Brown-Séquard), there are relations between the digestive tube and the optic layer, the striated body, the cerebral peduncles; the psychic actions which modify respiration being transmitted through the third ventricle and the anterior corpora quadrigemina. The experiments of Pitres and François-Franck on the sensori-motor zone of the cortex show that excitement, at any given point, results in: augmentation, retardation, or even arrest of breathing; acceleration of the cardiac rhythm, and, if powerful, inhibition or even syncope; vaso-motor effects, a contraction or relaxation of the bladder; an influence on uterine contractions; on the secretion of the saliva and the pancreatic juice, and on trophic action in general. According to Goltz, the destruction of the anterior lobes produces atrophy, that of the posterior the contrary effect. These discrepancies and uncertainties are to us of small importance; but it remains certain that the nutritive functions especially depend on the pneumogastric and the great sympathetic nerves, that they are in some manner represented in the cerebral cortex and form the principal contents of cœnæsthesia. Though in the adult they play only a latent and intermittent part by reason of the preponderance of external sensations, images, and ideas, it is probable that in animals, particularly in voracious ones, the functions are inverted, and that cœnæsthesia, as a synthesis of the organic functions, passes to the front rank. This has even been asserted to be the case in children and savages, the argument being based on the fact that they have, in proportion, larger stomachs and longer intestines, and on various other characteristics.[128] However this may be, when deep-seated disturbances take place in the organism, cœnæsthesia is modified; which involves modification of the tendencies, and, consequently, of the position of pleasure and pain.
The facts I am about to enumerate relate to nutritive needs only; but we shall find their equivalents or analogies in the other manifestations of emotional life. We can, therefore, already generalise so far as to say that when abnormal or morbid tendencies, however absurd or violent, show themselves, their satisfaction involves pleasure, their non-satisfaction, pain. Where the normal man, with normal tendencies, places pleasure, the abnormal man, with abnormal tendencies, places pain. Conversely, that which the man with normal tendencies feels to be agreeable, the man with abnormal tendencies feels to be unpleasant. Pleasure and pain follow the changes of tendency, as the shadow follows the movements of the body.
Let us look at the facts. We have at this moment to do only with the perversion of instincts relative to nutrition.
Pregnancy produces during the first few months digestive, circulatory, secretory disturbances, incomplete nutrition, and at the same time those grotesque aberrations of appetite, those depraved tastes, which every one knows, and of which the catalogue would be endless. Not to digress from the subject of this chapter, I say nothing of those morbid tendencies of another kind which show themselves at the same time in some women—homicidal or suicidal tendencies, aversion to husband, kleptomania, etc.
In anæmic, chlorotic, hysteric, and other subjects, if badly nourished, we sometimes find an acute pleasure in earth, straw, tobacco, chalk, sand, charcoal, etc., and an aversion to the most savoury foods.[129]
There are many instances of hypochondriacs searching for and devouring with enjoyment worms, toads, spiders, caterpillars, etc.; and the beginning of insanity is often marked by an eccentric and disordered dietary.
Again, at a still lower stage, we have coprophagy and scatophagy (the swallowing of excrements, urine, the contents of spittoons, etc.), which are rarely, if ever, found in any but idiots and those suffering from dementia, i.e., in beings whose simplest instincts have been abolished or perverted. The voracity of certain idiots has been attributed to paralysis of the gastric branch of the vagus nerve.[130]
The same would apply to the sense of smell, so intimately associated with that of taste that it has justly been called “tasting at a distance.” (We must not, moreover, forget its close connection with the sex-instinct.) Certain persons, who cannot endure the most delicate aromas, enjoy the odour of valerian, of asafœtida, and of still more repulsive substances.
To sum up, we may say that, in a given race, at a given moment of its development, there is a certain average of alimentary tastes, whose satisfaction is pleasurable; but on the appearance of deep-seated disturbances in the organism everything is changed, tendencies, desires, and aversions; the pleasurable and painful states, which are merely effects, vary with and in the same manner as their cause.
The physiological acts, which have for their aim the maintenance of nutrition, scarcely enter into the consciousness, except under the guise of hunger and thirst, whose psychology cannot be studied here, because it forms part of another department—that of the sensations. All the phenomena previously enumerated are reducible to anomalies or deviations of hunger. The pathology of thirst is simpler, for it may be summed up as dipsomania, a condition whose modalities and clinical varieties have no interest as regards the psychology of instinct; but so far as this need is concerned, the transformation of the normal and natural tendency into a morbid one does not differ in its mechanism and results from what we have already stated in the case of hunger.
There exist, in general and special treatises, many descriptions of dipsomania to which we may refer the reader. Leaving aside all hallucinations, motor disturbances, intellectual and moral decadence, we shall only consider the genesis, the development, and the consolidation of this morbid tendency.
“It is not every one who can be a dipsomaniac.” To drink too much, whether voluntarily or by accident, is a thing which may happen to any one; but such an occurrence does not necessarily bear the fatal and inexorable character of an insatiable instinct. The period of incubation—i.e., of gradual action tending towards complete metamorphosis—presents clearly-marked psychological characteristics, showing a disturbed state of cœnæsthesia and belonging to the region of the emotions: malaise, sadness, lack of energy and courage, apathy, moral insensibility, vague presentiments of danger. After this the eruption takes place in the form of an intense, devouring thirst. Many try to react on this and cheat themselves by the aid of water or mucilaginous substances, which shows, as several writers on the subject have remarked, that alcoholism properly so called is only a paroxysm: under the pressure of a progressively intensified craving the decisive step is taken. We shall find a great variety in the numerous observations published on this subject, a struggle at the beginning only, a struggle preceding every attack, indignation of the patient against himself, under the influence of which he calls himself names, and forces himself to swallow strange and repugnant beverages; all these phenomena are found in various cases. To sum up, the history of this psychological metamorphosis is briefly this: incubation, formation of a fixed idea, obsession, final fall.
It is scarcely necessary to point out once more that the primary fact is the transformation of a natural tendency, in consequence of changes in the organism, and that satisfaction and appeasement only come afterwards.
Nutrition—i.e., the essential act of physiological life—is safeguarded by two distinct kinds of tendencies. (I am still speaking of those only which come within the bounds of consciousness, and therefore have a psychological character.) On the one hand, we have the positive tendencies, consisting in an attraction towards and attack on the external world (in this case, food and drink)—viz., hunger and thirst. On the other hand, the negative tendencies consisting in aversion, refusal, flight, and summed up in the state known as disgust.
Disgust is due to excitement of the pneumogastric nerve, producing vomiting, nausea, or mere malaise. This repulsive instinct is connected (1) directly and immediately with taste and smell, two senses which can scarcely be isolated, and whose function is to watch over all substances entering the organism; (2) indirectly and through association of ideas with visual and tactile sensations (sticky, slimy bodies, etc.), by analogy and metaphorically with certain objects which have nothing in common with the nutritive functions—the ugly, the immoral, etc. In virtue of that law of transference or association of analogous sensations, of which we have spoken, the tendency departs more and more from its primary form; but in all cases there is a common groundwork of repulsion, refusal, desire to escape, etc.
Disgust under its primary form (the only one now occupying us) has not been much studied. Writers have contented themselves with classing it among organic sensations, while neglecting its emotional side, i.e., its function in the conservation of the individual. The only work I know on this subject is the excellent monograph of Ch. Richet,[131] of which I here give a summary.
Disgust is connected with conservation; it is “an instinctive feeling of protection.” In order to justify this statement, the author passes in review the various objects in nature, noting those which inspire us with disgust, and inquiring into the cause of this. The inorganic kingdom, in general, leaves us indifferent; yet sulphuretted hydrogen, ammonia, and various other gases cause a marked repulsion. This is the effect of an association of ideas; the smell recalls that of decomposition, of a corpse. As regards the vegetable kingdom, the herbivora, by reason of their diet, are the best subjects for observation; their instinct scarcely ever deceives them in the choice of food. We are reminded that, on their arrival in the New World, the Spaniards, hesitating before an unknown flora, whose properties were unknown to them, trusted the judgment of their horses. In man, Richet attributes the repellent influence exerted by bitter aromas to the fact that they frequently co-exist with toxic properties; he takes as types the vegetable alkaloids (quinine, nicotine, etc.), whose power as poisons is in some degree proportioned to their bitterness. So that we have always, at bottom, “the love of life and the horror of death.” In the animal kingdom disgust is aroused by putrescent matter, which indicates or suggests cadaveric decomposition and toxic substances; by parasites, by animals really venomous, or so reputed; for instinct, which sees everything in mass, confounds in the same repugnance the toad and the frog, the venomous serpent and the harmless snake.
In its general bearing, the thesis of the finality of disgust is incontestable. There are, no doubt, many exceptions, many facts difficult to explain (some have been pointed out by Richet); but if we take into account the complexity of the question, all objections fall to the ground.
That tastes are not to be argued about is a platitude which has been worn threadbare for centuries past. Taken literally, it would reduce disgust to a purely intellectual manifestation, with no biological bearing; it would deprive it of all specific character, and utterly eliminate it as an instinct. This, however, is a merely superficial position. Contradictions in taste may be compared with contradictions in morality. Variations in manners and customs, according to race, epoch, country, and even caste, do not exclude the existence of a law which has this characteristic common to all cases—that it is derived from the conditions of existence of each group, and is by that right imposed on it. In the same way, disgust exists everywhere, under one form or another, as a protective instinct. The question is complicated, in man, by his intellectual development, and the consequent modification, transformation, or even suppression of this instinct. Between reasoned knowledge and instinctive tendency a battle has been fought, in which the victory inclined sometimes to one side, sometimes to the other. We know the repugnance of animals towards a change of food. The same thing is seen in children, and in the inferior races, when not pressed by necessity. Plasticity grows with civilisation.
We may add to this the necessity for new adaptations; thus, in a besieged town, people devour unclean food; the instinct of physiological conservation is a “divided house,” where the positive form struggles against the negative with results, varying in different individuals. To this antagonism between primitive instinct and more complex rational motives let us add the influence of imitation and of fashion, and there will remain few or no unexplained exceptions.
As for the origin of this instinct, if we accept the hypothesis of acquired modifications, we may say that the animals and men best fitted for abstaining from hurtful substances, have ipso facto better chances of survival, and that they have been able to transmit to their descendants certain qualities which became fixed and organised as an innate tendency. Whether or not we admit this hypothesis does not matter, our only aim being to remind the reader that disgust is not a capricious and irrelevant phenomenon, but has its roots in the unconscious depths of our organisation.
Fear the conservative instinct under its defensive form—Physiology—Psychology—First stage: Instinctive fear—Hypothesis of heredity—Second stage: Fear founded on experience—Pathology—Morbid or pathological fears—Two periods in their study—Attempts at classification—How are they derived from normal fear? Two groups, connected respectively with fear and disgust—Inquiry into the immediate causes: events in life of which a recollection has been retained; of which no recollection has been retained—Occasional transformation of a vague state into a precise form.
The instinct of individual conservation, under its defensive form, is the origin of the emotion called fear, and its varieties. We have already said, more than once, that it is the first in chronological order of appearance, showing itself, according to Preyer, at twenty-three days; according to Perez, at two months; while Darwin puts it as late as the fourth month. It is the first manifestation in the consciousness of emotion properly so called, as a psycho-physiological complexus. Following the method which will be invariably applied to every emotion, simple or composite, we shall examine in turn its psychology and its pathology.
It has been defined as “the particular emotive reaction which takes place through a sufficiently vivid and persistent representation of possible pain or evil.”[132] This formula, though good in the majority of cases, does not seem applicable to the first stage of fear, as we shall see presently.
The physiology of fear has been worked out by Darwin, Mantegazza, Mosso, and Lange. I prefer the last writer’s description, as being more systematic; it is not a collection of isolated facts, but a logically arranged synopsis. We know already the importance attached by him to the physiological conditions of each emotion. The characteristic marks of fear are:—
1. As regards the innervation of the voluntary muscles: a greater weakening than in the case of sorrow, a convulsive tremor; in extreme cases, suppression of all movement, one is fixed to the spot; voice hoarse and broken, or complete dumbness; in short, a more or less accentuated paralysis of the whole voluntary motor apparatus.
2. As regards the muscles of organic life: arrest of the lacteal secretion, of menstruation, of the salivary secretion; the mouth dry, the tongue adhering to the palate; cold sweats, “goose-flesh,” bristling of the hair, arrest of respiration, oppression, constriction of the throat. Fear also, as is well known, influences the intestinal secretions.
3. As regards the vaso-motor apparatus: a spasmodic constriction of the vessels, shiverings, violent spasm of the heart; and if the impression is of excessive violence, paralysis, which may end in death; pallor, and peripheral anæmia.
These manifestations collectively express a lowering of the vital tone which in no other emotion is so complete and so clearly marked. It has been maintained with reason that fear has a teleological character, that it is adapted to an end—that of withdrawing, escaping, exposing one’s self as little as possible to attack, and remaining on the defensive in view of possible approaching evil. However, the case is not so simple as it appears. The slight or moderate forms of fear, through the feeling of weakness produced by them in the consciousness, are a protection against hurtful actions by inducing withdrawal or flight. But the grave forms, such as terror and fright, accompanied by trembling and motor annihilation, place us face to face with a great difficulty. When existence is menaced, at the most decisive moment, when attack, defence, or flight is urgently demanded, we see men and animals, paralysed with agitation, fall victims, unable to make any use of what strength they have. Darwin confines himself to remarking that the problem is very obscure (ch. xiii.). Mantegazza (op. cit., ch. vii.) alleges that trembling is extremely useful, because it tends to produce heat and warm the blood, which, under the influence of terror, would soon grow cold. Mosso has very good reasons to oppose to his compatriot’s thesis. He considers the “cataplexy” which accompanies the extreme forms of fear as a grave imperfection of the organism. “One would think that nature, in making the brain and spinal cord, was unable to devise a substance of extreme excitability which should at the same time, under the influence of exceptionally strong stimuli, be capable of never passing in its reactions beyond the limits needful for the preservation of the animal.” In short, terror and fright appear to him in the light of morbid phenomena. From the naturalistic point of view this extra-teleological position is perfectly admissible. A finalist conception of the world admits of no exceptions, and has to explain everything according to its own principle; but if we content ourselves with saying that the conditions of existence of a living being are sometimes given, sometimes absent, we have no more to do but verify the cases in which they are wanting and the occurrences logically following therefrom.
The psychology of fear includes two stages, to be studied quite distinctly. There is a primary, instinctive, unreasoning fear preceding all individual experience, and a secondary, conscious, reasoned fear posterior to experience. They are generally confounded with one another, and as the second is by far the most frequent, it serves as the typical form in descriptions.
First Stage.—Numerous observations prove the existence of an innate fear, not attributable to any individual experience. In children, Preyer[133] maintains the existence of “a hereditary fear manifesting itself on occasion.” Many are afraid of dogs and cats, though they have never been bitten or scratched; thunder makes them cry out—why? The fear of falling, says the same author, during first attempts at walking, is as strange as the fear shown towards animals. At fourteen months, this writer’s son could not venture to take a step without support, and was full of terror if the person holding him let go; yet he had never experienced a fall. He concludes, very justly, that “it is quite erroneous to think that the child who has not been taught to fear things does not know fear. The courage or fearfulness of the mother certainly exercises a great influence; but there are in children so many cases of motiveless fear that we must admit some hereditary influence.” The same fact has been observed in young animals: Spalding’s experiments on newly-hatched chickens and their instinctive terror of the hawk are well known. Preyer repeated this experiment, with like results. Gratiolet, as I have already said, relates that a little dog, who had never seen a wolf, on smelling a piece of the skin of that animal, was seized with indescribable terror. Adult man, though his fears are in general based on experience, sometimes manifests (at least this is the case with ignorant and primitive people) vague, unconscious fears of the unknown, of darkness, of mysterious powers, witchcraft, sorcery, magic, etc. Ignorance is a great source of terror; and Bain has said, not without reason, that knowledge is the great remedy against fear.
How shall we explain the apprehension of an evil which has never been experienced? Even if we admit that fear may sometimes, and from the very beginning of life onward, start from analogies, resemblances, associations of ideas, there remain many cases which can be reduced to no simple form. We have seen that Preyer, following Darwin, Spencer, and other evolutionists, admits the influence of heredity. It is a well-known fact that birds on uninhabited islands show no fear when they see man for the first time; they are taught by hard experience to distrust him, and the acquired fear is, on this theory, transmitted to their descendants. According to this hypothesis, fear would be, always and everywhere, the result of experience, whether individual or ancestral, and what we have called the second stage would be the first, and indeed the only one.
This explanation is naturally rejected by those who refuse to believe in the inheritance of acquired qualities, though they have nothing satisfactory to propose in its place. Besides, this is a question of origin, on which experimental psychology may well recognise its incompetence. Not to remain on debatable ground, we must admit—since individual experience cannot be appealed to—that the bases of fear exist in the organism, form part of the constitution of animals and men, and help them to live by a defensive adaptation, which in most cases proves useful. As for the obscure mechanism of this instinctive fear, we may suppose that certain sensations produce a painful shock which excites the organic, motor, and vaso-motor relations constituting emotion, and that the conservative instinct, in order to escape actual pain, reacts blindly, with or without profit. This makes it impossible to explain certain innate fears by reason.
For my own part, I consider the hypothesis of a hereditary disposition to certain fears as extremely probable.[134]
Second Stage.—The definition given above may be unrestrictedly applied to conscious and reasoned fear posterior to experience. It is based, not on the intellectual, but on the emotional memory. The attempts of the earlier associationists to account for fear as a mere product of association, as in James Mill’s doctrine that it is the idea of a painful sensation associated with the idea of its being future, were wholly inadequate through ignoring the essential factor, the emotional element, the organic disturbance.[135] If I am to be afraid of the extraction of a tooth, it is necessary that, in the memory of a former operation, its painful colouring should be revived, at any rate in a modified form; if I have only a dry recollection, with no physiological vibration, fear will not arise. There is no need to insist on a point already fully treated of in the First Part.
It results from this that we are accessible to fear in proportion as the representation of future evil is intense, i.e., emotional and not intellectual, felt and not understood. In many persons the absence of fear only amounts to the absence of imagination. This explains how it is that every lowering of vitality, whether permanent or temporary, predisposes to this emotion; the physiological conditions which engender (or accompany it) are all ready; in a weakened organism fear is always in a nascent condition.
The emotion which now occupies us exists in all degrees, from such feeble forms as suspicion and apprehension to the extreme ones of panic and terror. These gradations, fixed by language, cannot have a distinct psychological description made of each of them. Nevertheless, Bain has attempted to enumerate the different kinds of fear, and some experiments of Féré’s indicate the different physiological effects following each degree of fear.[136] When an owl, a serpent, or a spectre was caused to appear, by suggestion, the muscular reaction, shown in graphic tracings, was different in every case.
To draw a distinction between the normal and morbid forms of fear is a task which, at first sight, might appear tolerably difficult. We have, however, a criterion to guide us. Every form of fear which, instead of being useful, becomes hurtful, which, ceasing to be a means of protection, becomes a means of destruction, is pathological. We have already (Part I., chap. iv.) indicated the marks which enable us to discriminate between the healthy and the morbid; I recall them once more.
Morbid emotion presents one or more of the following characteristics: it is apparently disproportionate to its cause; it is chronic; its physical accompaniments are of extraordinary intensity.
On the question of morbid fears, now known by the name of phobias, there exists a great mass of observations, notes, and papers, which is increasing day by day, and contains far more enumerations and descriptions than attempts at explanation. J. Falret and Westphal (in his essay on agoraphobia, 1872) seem to be the first who have entered on this path. To Westphal’s fear of open spaces and Falret’s fear of contact may be added many others; and we pass through a first period, where we find a veritable deluge of phobias, each having its special name; one person fears needles, another glass, one low places, another high places, one water, another fire, etc. Every morbid manifestation of fear is immediately fitted with a Greek designation, or one so reputed, and we have aïcmophobia, belenophobia, thalassophobia, potamophobia, etc., even siderodromophobia (the fear of railways) and triakaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13!). The list of these phobias would fill pages, and it is clear that there is no reason why it should ever stop; all the objects in creation might be included in it, if clothed in pseudo-Greek garb.
Accordingly, a reaction has taken place. Instead of, as was at first done, considering each phobia separately, naming it after its object, and so losing one’s self in endless varieties, the tendency now is to regard them only as individual cases of a general morbid disposition, whose essential psychological characteristics are a fixed idea or obsession, and symptoms of fear sometimes reaching the dimensions of a paroxysm, and expressing themselves in convulsions and hysterical attacks.
Several classifications have been proposed, with a view to introducing some order into this multiplicity. Some proceed subjectively, classifying according to the sensations, perceptions, images, ideas, or feelings which form the basis of the fear. Thus the fear of contact is connected with touch, agoraphobia with sight, and so on. Others proceed objectively; Régis proposes five groups: (1) the fear of inanimate objects; (2) of living beings (fear of crowds, solitude, inoffensive animals); (3) of spaces (agoraphobia, claustrophobia); (4) of meteorological phenomena; (5) of illness (nosophobia, with its very numerous varieties). To be accurate, these classifications, though they may be useful to the clinical lecturer, are of no great advantage to the psychology of fear; the interesting problem lies elsewhere.
Before reaching this, let us remark that, apart from any particular fears, there exist some observations on a vague but permanent state of anxiety or terror, which has been called panphobia, or pantophobia (Beard). This is a state in which the patient fears everything or nothing, where anxiety, instead of being riveted on one object, floats as in a dream, and only becomes fixed for an instant at a time, passing from one object to another, as circumstances may determine.
If, leaving aside the endless enumeration of the kinds of fear and their description, we seek—for this is the task incumbent on psychology—to determine their derivation from normal fear, and the causes which excite them, we enter an almost unexplored region and pass from riches to indigence.
As far as concerns their psychological origin, i.e., the determination of the normal type from which they are deviations, I propose reducing them to two groups.
The first is directly connected with fear, and includes all manifestations implying in any degree whatever the fear of pain, from that of a fall or the prick of a needle to that of illness or death. The second is directly connected with disgust, and seems to me to include the forms which have sometimes been called pseudophobia (Gélineau). Such are the fear of contact, the horror of blood, and of innocuous animals, and many strange and causeless aversions.
Let us remark, furthermore, that fear and disgust have a common basis, being both instruments of protection or defence. The first is the defensive-conservative instinct of the relative life, the second the defensive-conservative instinct of the organic life. As both have a common basis of aversion, they show themselves in equivalent ways: fear by withdrawal, departure, flight; disgust by vomiting or nausea. The reflexes of disgust are the succedanea of flight; the organism cannot escape by movement in space from the repugnant body which it has taken into itself, and goes through a movement of expulsion instead.
After having traced back all morbid fears to two sources—which may indeed be reduced to one—we have to seek for their causes. One very general cause, with which most authors content themselves, is degeneracy. I shall speak of this elsewhere (see Conclusion); but as it is constantly brought in to explain the most dissimilar manifestations, it assumes such a general character that it becomes necessary to supplement it. Let us then, if any importance is attached to this, assume degeneracy as the soil on which morbid fears spring up and multiply; then let us seek the complementary causes, which are less vague and nearer to the facts. I would propose three such.
1. The cause is in some event of a man’s previous life of which he retains the recollection. For example: A man walking on a terrace on the top of his house failed to perceive that the balustrade was missing at one spot; he was walking backwards, and would have fallen over the edge had he not been stopped; he contracted permanent agoraphobia.[137] A morbid fear of railways is frequently found in overworked engineers, and especially in men who have narrowly escaped with their lives in a railway accident. The well-known case of Pascal seeing an abyss at his left side, which prevented him from walking forward unless some one held him by the hand, or a chair was placed for him to lean on, was a consequence of his accident at the bridge of Neuilly. It is also said that Peter the Great, having been nearly drowned when a child, felt, on passing a bridge, a fear which he had some difficulty in overcoming.
We can easily see that many phobias come under this category. Now, the cause here is only the exaggeration of a normal fact. Every serious accident leaves behind it a recollection, which, for some, is merely a bald record of the event and the circumstances (intellectual memory), for others, a revival in some degree of the fear formerly experienced (emotional memory); for “phobic” subjects it is (at least potentially) a permanent state, ready to arise when suggested by some association.[138]
2. Some morbid fears have their origin in occurrences of childhood of which no recollection has been retained. When appealing to the unconscious memory, we place ourselves in a fatally unfavourable position; we enter the domain of the obscure and hypothetical, and lay ourselves open to criticism of all sorts, all the more so as some writers have made an excessive use of the explanation by the unconscious. A minute inquiry into each particular case would be needed. If, however, this hypothesis is difficult to justify by means of positive proof, the part played by the unconscious in psychic life, and particularly with regard to the memory, is so incontestable that we may legitimately admit its sure though secret action. Perhaps those who are seized by strange fears might, if they questioned themselves, discover the cause in some past occurrence. Here, at least, is a case which I give as typical of this group. Mosso asked a soldier, aged seventy, what he had been most afraid of in his life, and the man’s reply was, “I have been face to face with death in many battles; but I am never so frightened as when I come across a lonely chapel in a remote part of the mountains; because, when quite a child, I once saw in such a place the corpse of a murdered man, and a maidservant wished to shut me up with it as a punishment.”[139] Supposing the conscious recollection to be gradually effaced with years, the impression might well remain indelible, though latent, becoming active under given circumstances. Is it rash to say that there are many cases of this kind, with this difference, that the traces leading back to the original cause have vanished?
Cases of strange and insurmountable fear or antipathy have been noticed in some celebrated men: Scaliger was seized with nervous trembling at the sight of water-cress, Bacon fainted during eclipses, Bayle at the sound of running water, James I. at the sight of a naked sword (Morel). Among average human beings many like cases occur, but never become known, for lack of biographers to record them. I am inclined to think that there lies at the root of them some impression of early childhood, embedded in the constitution of the individual, and originating a repulsive tendency which acts as though it were natural.
3. The morbid fear may be the result of the occasional passage of a vague and indeterminate state into a precise form. Panphobia, mentioned above, might be a preparatory stage, an undifferentiated period, to which chance, a sudden shock, for instance, may give a direction and fix it, as in the fear of epidemics, of microbes, of hydrophobia, etc. This is the passage from a diffused emotional state to the intellectualised state, i.e., one concentrated and embodied in a fixed idea: an analogous process to that of the “delusions of persecution,” in which the suspicion, at first vague, attaches itself to an individual and will not be diverted from him. The cases, much less frequent than others, in which several distinct fears coexist, seem to me to be distinguished from this group. In short, the true cause is a general state (an emotive condition of fear), but chance plays a great part in it.
I do not pretend to explain everything by means of these three kinds of causes. When we come to examine the legion of morbid fears we are often greatly embarrassed by cases which refuse to come under any of the rules. Here is a well-known and very trite one: the sight of blood producing malaise or even syncope. This is inexplicable by reason, since the blood is the life; but reason has nothing to do with the matter. Let us seek elsewhere. It might be said that blood recalls violent pain, destruction, slaughter; but its sight affects children who can have no such recollections. Some have tried to explain it by constitutional weakness or nervousness, but syncope sometimes takes place in very vigorous subjects,[140] while neuropaths remain unaffected. Heredity has been called in, but I fail to see what it explains, for, going back from generation to generation, we must come at last to the primitive men, fighters who were not afraid of blood. Many other explanations might be proposed, which might be met by other criticisms.
I have cited this single fact in order to show that, so soon as we pass beyond the enumeration and description of morbid fears, and try to trace their origin, we enter on a part of the subject which is almost untouched.