Anger the conservative instinct in its offensive form—Physiology—Psychology—Anger passes through two stages, one simple, the other mixed—Its evolution—Animal form, or that of actual aggression—Emotional form, or that of simulated aggression—Appearance of a pleasurable element—Intellectualised form, or that of deferred aggression—Pathology: Epileptic insanity, corresponding to the animal form; the maniacal state, corresponding to the affective form—Disintegrated forms of anger—Overpowering tendencies to destructiveness—How do they arise and take a definite direction?—Return to the reflex state—Essential cause: temperament—Accidental causes.
The instinct of individual conservation, under its offensive form, is the origin of anger—the type of violent and destructive tendencies. This emotion is the second in chronological order, appearing at two months, according to Perez, and, definitely, at ten months, according to Darwin and Preyer.
Bain defines it as “a conscious impulse which drives one to inflict suffering and to draw a positive enjoyment from the fact.” This definition does not seem to me strictly applicable to the inferior or animal forms of anger, as we shall see presently.
Considered objectively, or from without, anger presents itself with very clearly defined characters as regards its physiology and its mode of expression.[141]
1. Dilatation of the blood-vessels, augmentation of the cutaneous circulation, redness and swelling. This is also found in joy, but, remarks Lange, with less intensity. Besides, anger has a special manifestation of its own—i.e., the distention of the greater veins, especially on the face and forehead. In its extreme form (rage) it may cause nasal or pulmonary hæmorrhage, the rupture of vessels, and death.
2. The innervation of the voluntary muscles is increased, but in an un-coordinated and spasmodic form; the voice is broken and harsh, the body leans forward in the attitude of aggression, the movements are violent and destructive; “one strikes blindly,” the breath comes in gasps with the well-known symptom of the dilated nostrils, the object of which, according to Piderit, is that of taking a full breath while the mouth is shut and the teeth clenched. According to Charles Bell, it is due to the habitual co-action of all the respiratory muscles, as the nostrils of an angry man may be seen to become dilated, although his mouth is open.
3. According to Lange, and in spite of popular opinion, there is no increase in the biliary secretion; but this is not the case with the saliva, as is proved by the phrase, “foaming with wrath.” It is important to note that anger sometimes gives the secretions a toxic character. Van Swieten, Bichat, Trousseau, and others have verified this in the case of the saliva, when the quantity of ptomaine is augmented; and it has long been known that the bite of furious animals is dangerous, while analogous facts have been ascertained in the case of one human being bitten by another in a fit of rage. The lacteal secretion may also become toxic, and produce on the nursling the effect of poison. These facts once more show the close relations between emotion and physiological or even chemical phenomena.
In short, the organism in general, and the active organs in particular, being excited, we may say with Spencer, “that what we call the natural language of anger is due to a partial constriction of the muscles which actual combat would call into full activity, all signs of irritation, beginning with the rapid shadow which passes over the brow when some slight cause of irritation occurs, being different degrees of the same contractions.”
Anger and fear form an antithesis, but the former has, both physiologically and psychologically, a more complex character. In fact, fear, in all its degrees and throughout its whole duration, invariably remains within the category of painful emotions, while anger passes through two stages. The first, or asthenic, corresponds to the cause, the external occurrence, the immediate shock, and consists in a short depression, which is an entirely painful state; the second, or sthenic, corresponds to the offensive reaction, and, by its symptoms, approaches much more closely to pleasure than to pain. We need only remember the sardonic laughter which accompanies not merely the outbreak of anger, but some of its mitigated forms, and expresses the joy of seeing others suffer. Anger is therefore a mixed emotion; it does not belong altogether to the category of painful states of consciousness, though the painful side is predominant.
Considered as an internal and purely psychical phenomenon, it eludes description, like every state which defies further analysis, and, in its acute forms, cannot be seized by internal observation. It scarcely admits of retrospective examination. Its psychology is the history of its evolution, comprising three principal periods:—
1. The animal form, or that of real aggression. It is primitive and general. In animals it is seen in a pure state, because there are no antagonistic, alterative, or restraining tendencies. Those which live by prey, the voracious carnivora, present the complete type. Besides the physiological phenomena already described there is the actual attack, each species using its natural weapons—teeth, claws, poisonous liquids. The feeling has the violence of a hurricane, of an unchained force of nature. This is because it is connected with extremely powerful instincts; that of nutrition, which requires its prey, the struggle for life under its most implacable form, that of attack—the necessity of destroying or being destroyed. At this stage the element of pleasure is nil, or very slight, because the destruction has a blind and unconscious character. Bain thinks that monkeys are almost capable of enjoying the agonies of their victims, and perhaps elephants also. If this is correct, the fact is only met with in the case of the higher animals. It is needless to add that this animal form of anger is seen not merely in savage, but also in civilised man.
2. The emotional form properly so called, or that of simulated aggression. Much less general than the preceding, this is peculiarly human. Through the preponderance of the psychic element, or at least, the relative effacement of the destructive impulses, it appears to me the typical stage of anger as an emotion. It is frequently seen in the higher animals; the dog, meeting his enemy, stops, growls, erects his hair, and offers all the symptoms of aggression in the nascent stage. Man most usually confines himself to threats, with some degree of violence, unaccompanied by destructiveness. The affinity of this form with the first is evident, and evolutionists have drawn from it a psychological argument in favour of descent from animals; those beings nearest to nature—i.e., the lowest in evolution—are continually exercising their anger: children on animals and weak people; savages, coarse-natured people, idiots and imbeciles on any one who does not resist them.
But the important point to note at this stage of evolution is the definite appearance of a new element—the pleasure of seeing suffering. With this, anger begins to grow refined. “There seems little doubt,” says Bain, “that the primary fact in the pleasure of anger is the fascination for the sight of bodily affliction and suffering. Singular and horrible as the fact may appear, the evidence is incontestable” (The Emotions, p. 178). The author goes on to give instances which need not be repeated.
In my opinion, the fact is not so “singular” as the author supposes, it can be explained if we notice that, at this juncture, another instinct makes its appearance—one we have not yet studied, that of domination. We find here the first germ of a more slowly evolved emotion, that of triumphant power, of strength, superiority, pride. Henceforth, so far as psychological analysis is concerned, anger is no longer in a perfectly pure state. We have the destructive instinct plus a variable dose of the satisfied instinct of domination.
3. The intellectualised form, or that of deferred aggression. We may also say that this is the civilised form of anger. The principal representatives of this group are hatred, envy, resentment, rancour, etc. We have here two antagonistic forces confronting one another: on one side the aggressive instinct which urges forward, on the other, reason and calculation, which obstruct and restrain the tendency to attack. The result is an arrest of development. I do not wish to insist on a point which will be freely treated later on, in studying the transition from simple to composite emotions; a few brief remarks will suffice. In biology, the arrest of development modifies the organ in its function and structure, and often acts by rebound on other organs; in psychology the same thing happens, and, in addition, the arrested development of a tendency modifies its nature and its reaction on cognate phenomena. Mantegazza (op. cit., chap. xiii.) has drawn up a good synoptic table of the mimicry of hatred. Those who will take the trouble to study it in detail, comparing it with the expression of outspoken anger, will understand, better than by means of any dissertation, what constitutes an arrest of development in the psychological order, and the modifications which it involves. I note, among others, one accurately observed point: the suffering which one inflicts on one’s self, such as biting one’s hands or gnawing one’s nails; the destructive tendency when repressed, expends itself internally, at the cost of the envious man.
In this intellectualised form of anger, the feeling of the pleasure of destruction, realised, or merely imagined, becomes acute, as proved by the expressions, “tasting his hatred,” “enjoying his revenge,” etc.
Such are the three stages in this ascending evolution, and their identity of nature and common basis are clearly shown by the fact that hatred, if the power of arrest ceases, becomes outspoken anger; and the latter, if it increases, assumes the form of actual aggression, thus coming back to the primitive type.
The ancients defined anger as a short madness, which would relegate it at once and entirely to the region of pathology. Without qualification, this formula cannot be accepted. So long as anger is not injurious either to the individual himself, or to others, it is normal, and even useful; for an animal or man devoid of any instinct for active defence and reprisals, would be very poorly provided. However, it must be recognised that the area of normal anger is exceedingly restricted, and that no emotion more quickly assumes a morbid character. Of the three tests which permit us to judge whether it does so or not, one—that of violent reaction on the organism—is of no use, because it gives too much scope to personal estimates and conjecture. There remain two others: the absence of rational motives, and chronicity, or excessive duration, normal anger being only a passing affection. Now, we find among mental diseases two derivatives of anger, two heightenings of this condition in paroxysmal form, and we have to establish between them a psychological difference which is the repetition of the normal state.
Epileptic madness corresponds to the blind, animal, often bestial form of anger, composed entirely of violent movements and painful feelings.
The maniacal state corresponds to the violent and conscious form of anger, mingled with a pleasurable element.
1. I have nothing to say of the numerous varieties of epilepsy, its concomitant hallucinations, and its intellectual and moral consequences; I confine myself to those aspects which assimilate it to anger.
Even in periods of calm, the universally noted psychological traits reveal a sombre, morose, irritable, but above all, irascible disposition—the “choleric” character par excellence. In the paroxysmal period, we find the symptoms of anger carried to extremity: “The patient” (I borrow Schüle’s description) “throws himself on his surroundings with a blind rage, a bestial fury; he spits, strikes, bites, breaks everything he can reach, shouts and storms. His face is congested, his pupils are sometimes contracted, sometimes—and more frequently—dilated, the conjunctivæ are much injected, the look is fixed; there is abundant salivation, pulsation of the carotid, acceleration of the pulse.” Where is the starting-point of these discharges of fury, and by what mechanism are they produced? The authorities are not at one on this question, some attributing the principal share in this activity to the bulb, others to the brain. Recently an auto-intoxication of the nervous centres has been admitted. However, all this is only indirectly concerned with psychology. In the ensuing period of stupor, the acts of blind violence usually leave no trace in the memory; for it is a sort of psychological law that the intensity of consciousness should vary inversely as the intensity of the movements produced.
2. Mania presents many varieties. Let us take the typical form, acute mania, the nearest to anger. After a period of incubation, during which melancholia prevails, a violent reaction takes place, in sudden paroxysms. The maniacal state may pass through all degrees, from simple excitement to fury. Externally, it shows itself, in its milder form, by continual goings and comings, by an incessant craving for motion, a possibility of performing active exercise without feeling fatigue; in the intense form, we have the symptoms of rage already described: congestion of the vaso-motor system, redness of the face, violent palpitations of the heart, foaming at the mouth, furious and destructive impulses, etc. Internally the case is analogous; it is “chaos in motion” (Esquirol): and as the principal external symptom consists of motor disturbances, the principal internal symptom consists in an intellectual exuberance, a flux of ideas so disorderly and rapid that they succeed each other by no fixed rule, and the laws of association seem to be suspended, and speech, in its impetuous course, betrays the swiftness and discontinuity of thought. But there is besides, though not always, an expansive humour, a state of satisfaction, a feeling of pleasure scarcely in accordance with the rest. Many, after recovery, declare that they never felt so happy as during their illness.
The cause of this unexpected tendency to joy has been much discussed. Some attribute it to the superabundance of ideas, and consequently assign to it an intellectual origin. This is a fresh example of intellectualist prejudice which sees but a single effect in the modifications of the emotional life. Besides, as Krafft-Ebing remarks (vol. ii., sec. 1, chap. 2), in delirious fever-patients there is a flow of ideas without accompanying joyousness, and, inversely, alcohol may produce gaiety without accelerating the course of thought; and, accordingly, this author admits—and rightly, as it seems to me—that these two phenomena, viz., increased intellectual activity and pleasurable feeling, are subordinated to a deeper cause; they have their functional basis in an easier expenditure, and a deceptive sense of power and vigour, depending on pathological over-activity.
These two morbid forms, which have their psychological prototype in anger, suggest one remark. They are not evoked by any external excitement, such as the sight of an enemy, injury, or disobedience. Their cause, whatever it may be, is internal; it sets going a pre-established mechanism identical with that of anger (violent and disordered movements, vaso-motor phenomena, etc.), and the psychic state which follows is anger, or an analogous emotional form, with or without a concomitant state of pleasure. This seems to me a new argument in favour of James’s and Lange’s theory.
Epileptic and maniac rages are not the only ones to be entered under the heading of anger; there is besides these a group of irresistible impulses of a destructive character which ought, psychologically, to be included in the same class. With a difference, however: in the epileptic and maniac, the physical and psychical symptoms constitute a complexus similar or analogous to the normal form, and only to be reckoned as pathological on account of the want of adaptation and rational motives, while the irresistible impulses are only partial manifestations—disaggregated forms of anger.
Among overpowering tendencies we can only examine at present those which concern the offensive instinct. I therefore eliminate those grafted on another stem (dipsomania, erotomania, kleptomania, etc.) and those which, by their nature, are inoffensive, ridiculous, or puerile (the incessant craving for travelling, for counting, for discovering the names of men and things), and confine myself to those which have the violent and destructive character of anger, such as the impulses to wound, kill, destroy, or set on fire (pyromania). The fatal impulse to suicide will be studied under another heading (Chap. V.). It is needless to describe these violent impulses separately, or to recapitulate observations which may be found almost anywhere; a sketch of the characteristics common to all will be sufficient.
1. They pass through a physiological period of incubation, marked by palpitations and vaso-motor disturbances, rushes of heat to the head, headaches, præcordial anxiety, insomnia, agitation, fatigue, malaise, and undefined suffering. 2. The entrance into the psychological period is marked by the appearance of a fixed idea. Why one rather than another? This question will be examined later. The fixed idea, reigning as a tyrant in the consciousness, gives an aim to the tendency, determines its orientation. Some maintain that there are such things as purely intellectual fixed ideas, with no emotional accompaniment. Others think that the fixed idea always includes in some degree an emotional state. I share this second opinion, since every fixed idea is the beginning of an impulse. 3. The third period is that when it passes into action, sometimes sudden, more often preceded by a violent struggle between the overmastering impulse and the arrestive power of the will.[142] There are some cases where the fixed idea never passes beyond the second stage; these are abortive forms, of incomplete development. The passage into action is the rule, it being a psychological law that every intense representation of a movement or an act is the beginning of a movement. The act, whatever it may be, is accomplished, and there results a feeling of satisfaction, peace, and relief.
As regards those destructive tendencies which are to anger what phobias are to fear, a problem presents itself, the only psychological problem: that of their origin or cause. This question I divide into two: How do they arise? How do they take a determinate direction?
I. To explain the origin and appearance of irresistible impulses, most writers have recourse to the hypothesis of degeneration. As it is also called in to explain the converse phenomenon of phobias, it becomes necessary to be a little more precise. Without entering for the moment on the discussion of the different interpretations of this vague word, degeneration, let us take it as synonymous with dissolution or regression.
The ideal of heredity, as a conservative principle, is to transmit under a healthy form a healthy organisation, i.e. (so far as our subject is concerned), one with harmonious and convergent tendencies. If dissolution is total, we have the idiot, or the dementia patient. If it is partial, we have a breach of equilibrium in favour of one or more tendencies. This disaggregation is not fortuitous; it has a retrogressive character, it is a return to the reflex movements. It approaches the character of the animal, the idiot, or the imbecile; it goes back to that stage of psychic life when the will under its higher form, the arrestive power, was not yet constituted.
II. In any case, there remains the principal question: Why was such a tendency predominant? What causes determined the particular direction taken by retrogression—homicide in one case, suicide or erotomania in another? Attempts have been made to explain this by alleging that every irresistible impulse results from the excessive irritation of an isolated group of brain-cells. Besides being purely hypothetical, this explanation is, in spite of its apparent precision, extremely vague. Is there an isolated group of homicidal, or one of kleptomaniac cells? This explanation is really too simple.
As far as we can penetrate the very obscure psychological genesis of the destructive impulses (and this may be held to apply to the whole group of irresistible tendencies), we find two sorts of causes at work, the essential and the accidental.
1. The essential, principal, fundamental cause which, after the period of physiological incubation, gives a determinate direction to the tendency is constitution, temperament, character. It may be admitted, at least theoretically, that all tendencies exist, actually or potentially, in every one of us. In ordinary cases, one or more predominate. Contemporary research has familiarised us with the fact of the varieties of memory. Such and such a person has an excellent one for figures, or music, or colour, or form, but only moderate for everything else. This is a natural gift singularly capable of being developed by exercise. This fact has its equivalent in the motor order, or that of tendencies: there exist natural dispositions only wanting an opportunity to become preponderant, and morbid conditions are the culture-medium which favours their development. The most violent tendency has its source in normal life. “There is,” says Gall, “an inclination gradually rising from the pleasure of seeing anything killed to the most overpowering desire to kill.” This is not put strongly enough; it is possible to pass, by imperceptible gradations, from the extreme case to the normal state in the following order: the pleasure of killing, the overpowering desire to kill, the pleasure of looking on at killing (the sight of a murder, gladiatorial combats, etc.), the pleasure of seeing the blood of animals shed (bull-fights, cock-fights, etc.), the pleasure due to the representation of violent and bloodthirsty melodramas (this is only in appearance, but the stage always presents a momentary illusion of reality); lastly, the pleasure of reading bloodthirsty novels, or hearing accounts of murders, which is purely an affair of the imagination. We thus pass from the act to the perception, the simulacrum, the mere image suggested by signs read or heard. I do not wish to assert, assuredly, that the spectators of the drama or readers of the novel are all potential murderers; but, as there are other men to whom such sights and such reading are abhorrent, we must recognise certain differences of natural disposition. Now the peculiarity of retrogression (or degeneration) is to act on the line of the strongest attraction or the least resistance, which is a characteristic of reflex action and the opposite of the inhibitive will, which acts on the lines of weakest attraction and strongest resistance.
2. The accidental causes which determine the direction of a tendency cannot be enumerated, because they vary for every individual case: we may note sex, social position, degree of culture, various maladies, etc. Tendencies to homicide and suicide are apt to spring up in a melancholic nature; alcoholism favours the incendiary impulse (pyromania); the epileptic and the general paralytic are more inclined to theft, and so on. Still more: the same impulse is variously modified, according to the soil in which it germinates; “the epileptic kills in a different way from the hypochondriac, the latter otherwise than the alcoholic or paralytic” (Schüle).
This shows the part played by accidental and consequently unassignable causes, and is still better shown in the abrupt substitution of one irresistible tendency for another in the same individual. Ordinarily, each shows his own special peculiarity; one constantly repeats his attempts at suicide, another at theft. But in cases of deep-seated dissolution, the direction is uncertain. The author of the theory of degeneration gives an excellent example of this: a hypochondriac possessed in turn by irresistible impulses to suicide, homicide, sexual excesses, dipsomania, and pyromania, and who finally gave himself up to justice, saying that he was “happy, because his sufferings were about to end.”[143] We may say of all these overmastering impulses, in radice conveniunt; and thus the study of those which tend to destruction has led us, more than once, to speak of the other kinds.
Sympathy is not an instinct, but a highly generalised psycho-physiological property—Complete sense and restricted sense—Physiological phase: imitation—Psychological phase: first stage, psychological unison; second stage, addition of tender emotion—Tender emotion—Its physiological expression—Its relations with touch—The smile—Tears: hypotheses as to their causes—Tender emotion indecomposable.
Sympathy is not an instinct or a tendency, i.e., a group of co-ordinated movements adapted to a particular end, and showing itself in consciousness as an emotion, such as fear, anger, sex-attraction; it is, on the contrary, a highly generalised psycho-physiological property. To the specialised character of each emotion, it opposes a character of almost unlimited plasticity. We have not to consider it under all its aspects, but as one of the most important manifestations of emotional life, as the basis of the tender emotions, and one of the foundations of social and moral existence.
Sympathy, in the etymological sense (σῦν, πάθος), which is also the complete one, consists in the existence of identical conditions in two or more individuals of the same or a different species; or, according to Bain, the tendency of an individual to enter into the active or emotional states of others, these states being revealed by certain media of expression. In its general and original form it is that and nothing else. We must therefore begin by getting rid of a prejudice, consecrated by usage in various languages, which identifies sympathy with pity, tenderness, benevolence, and the feelings which establish a tie of concord and a state of reciprocity between two beings. Thus understood, in its restricted sense, the term sympathy is neither accurate nor sufficient; for in all benevolent inclinations there are, besides the general fact of sympathy, other emotional elements, which will be determined in their proper place.
Before it becomes moral, before even it becomes psychological, it is biological. At bottom, it is a property of life, and its complete study would be a chapter of general psychology. If, limiting ourselves to what is strictly necessary, we try to follow the evolution of sympathy, from its most rudimentary to its highest forms, we distinguish three principal phases. The first, or physiological, consists in an agreement of motor tendencies, a synergia; the second, or psychological, consists in an agreement of the emotional states, a synæsthesia; the third, or intellectual, results from a community of representations or ideas, connected with feelings and movements.
First Phase.—In its primitive form sympathy is reflex, automatic, unconscious, or very slightly conscious; it is, according to Bain, the tendency to produce in ourselves an attitude, a state, a bodily movement which we perceive in another person. This is imitation in its most rudimentary form. Between sympathy and imitation, at any rate in this primitive period, I see only one difference of aspect: sympathy everywhere marks the passive, receptive side of the phenomenon—imitation, its active and motor side.[144]
It manifests itself in animals forming aggregates (not societies), such as a flock of sheep, or a pack of dogs who run, stop, bark all at the same time, through a purely physical impulse of imitation: in man, infectious laughter or yawning, walking in step, imitating the movements of a rope-walker while watching him, feeling a shock in one’s legs when one sees a man falling, and a hundred other occurrences of this kind are cases of physiological sympathy. It plays a great part in the psychology of crowds, with their rapid attacks and sudden panics. In nervous diseases, there is a superfluity of examples: epidemics of hysteric fits, convulsive barking, hiccup, etc. I omit the mental maladies (epidemics of suicide, double or triple madness) since we are only considering the purely physiological stage.
To sum up, sympathy is originally a property of living matter: as there is an organic memory and an organic sensitiveness, being those of the tissues and ultimate elements which compose them, there is an organic sympathy, made up of receptivity and imitative movements.
The second phase is that of sympathy in the psychological sense, necessarily accompanied by consciousness; it creates, in two or more individuals, analogous emotional states. Such are the cases in which we say that fear, indignation, joy or sorrow are communicated. It consists in feeling an emotion existing in another, and is revealed to us by its physiological expression. This phase consists of two stages.
1. The first might be defined as psychological unison. If, during this period of unison, we could read the minds of those who sympathise, we should see a single emotional fact reflected in the consciousness of several individuals. L. Noiré, in his book, Ursprung der Sprache, has proposed the theory that language originated in community of action among the earliest human beings. When working, marching, dancing, rowing, they uttered (according to this writer) sounds which became the appellatives of these different actions, or of various objects; and these sounds, being uttered by all, must have been understood by all. Whether this theory be correct or not (it has been accepted as such by Max Müller), it will serve as an illustration. But this state of sympathy does not, by itself, constitute a tie of affection or tenderness between those who feel it: it only prepares the way for such an emotion. It may be the basis of a certain social solidarity, because the same internal states excite the same acts, of a mechanical, exterior, non-moral solidarity.
2. The second stage is that of sympathy, in the restricted and popular sense of the word. This consists of psychological unison, plus a new element: there is added another emotional manifestation, tender emotion (benevolence, sympathy, pity, etc.). It is no longer sympathy pure and simple, it is a binary compound. The common habit of considering phenomena only under their higher and complete forms often misleads us as to their origin and constitution. Moreover, in order to understand that this is a case of duality—the fusion of two distinct elements—and that our analysis is not a factitious one, it is sufficient to point out that sympathy (in the etymological sense) may exist without any tender emotion—nay, that it may exclude instead of exciting it. According to Lubbock, while ants carry away their wounded, bees—though forming a society—are indifferent towards each other. It is well known that gregarious animals nearly always shun and desert a wounded member of the herd. Among men, how many there are who when they see suffering hasten to withdraw themselves from the spectacle, in order to escape the pain which it sympathetically awakens in them. This impulse may go the length of aversion, as typified by Dives in the Gospel. It is therefore a complete psychological error to consider sympathy as capable, unaided, of delivering men from egoism; it only takes the first step, and not always that.
Third Phase.—Under its intellectual form, sympathy is an agreement in feelings and actions, founded on unity of representation. The law of development is summed up in Spencer’s formula, “The degree and range of sympathy depend on the clearness and extent of representation.”[145] I should, however, add: on condition of being based on an emotional temperament. This last is the source par excellence of sympathy, because it vibrates like an echo; the active temperament lends itself less to such impulses, because it has so much to do in manifesting its own individuality that it can scarcely manifest those of others; finally, the phlegmatic temperament does so least of all, because it presents a minimum of emotional life; like Leibnitz’s monads, it has no windows.
In passing from the emotional to the intellectual phase, sympathy gains in extent and stability. In fact, emotional sympathy requires some analogy in temperament or nature; it can scarcely be established between the timid and the daring, between the cheerful and the melancholic; it may be extended to all human beings and to the animals nearest us, but not beyond them. On the contrary, it is the special attribute of intelligence to seek resemblances or analogies everywhere, to unify; it embraces the whole of nature. By the law of transfer (which we have already studied) sympathy follows this invading march, and comprehends even inanimate objects, as in the case of the poet, who feels himself in communion with the sea, the woods, the lakes, or the mountains. Besides, intellectual sympathy participates in the relative fixity of representation: we find a simple instance of this in animal societies, such as those of the bees, where unity, or sympathy among the members, is only maintained by the perception or representation of the queen.
Tender emotion marks an important stage in the evolution of affective life; with it we pass beyond the period of the purely egoistic emotions. The date of its appearance, as I have said, is not fixed with certainty; it may be at two months, according to Darwin, who noted at this age one of his characteristic modes of expression, the smile; more probably about nine months (Darwin) or twelve months (Perez), according to definite observations.
The physiological expression of tenderness, as far as movements are concerned, is reducible to a single formula—attraction. It shows itself either by elementary movements of approach, or by contact, or by the embrace which is its ultimate end, of which all the rest are but mitigated and arrested forms. It therefore stands in relation to the primordial sense, touch, of which Bain says, “Touch is both the alpha and the omega of affection.”[146] The movements have a general character of relaxation, contrasting greatly with that of anger. One mode of expression which is specially, if not exclusively, appropriated to it is the smile. Is this the initial stage of laughter? or is it, on the contrary, only a weakened form of it, an arrest of development? This question has been discussed without much advantage. Darwin adopts the former view, which scarcely seems reconcilable with the general law of evolution; the child smiles before it laughs, whereas we should expect to meet with the inverse order of phenomena. Tender emotion approximates to joy; and its circulatory and respiratory modifications are analogous. There is acceleration, as in the case of pleasure, but to a less degree; tenderness suiting better with moderate and reposeful sensations.
It is also accompanied by an increase in the secretions, especially in that of the mammary glands in the woman. In the case of the lachrymal glands this symptom is more difficult to explain. It is known that tenderness often moistens the eyes; but tears are produced under conditions so varied, and sometimes so contradictory, that, even after all the recent work which has appeared on the expression of the emotions, the question of the causes seems to me very far from being exhausted. The pressure of the blood has a direct influence on this secretion, which is always accompanied by an increase in the circulation; but the simplicity of the mechanism is not incompatible with a diversity of causes. Tears may be provoked by mechanical or physiological acts: irritation of the conjunctiva, coughing, effort, vomiting; and by totally distinct psychic states, sorrow, joy, tenderness. In fact, all attempts at explanation relate to the painful states only; cases of this kind being, though not of exclusive occurrence, more frequent than others. Darwin admits that screaming, in infants, causes the vessels of the eye to become gorged with blood, and this produces a contraction of the orbicular muscles as a means of protection, whence a reflex action on the lachrymal glands; the shedding of tears continuing even after the suppression of the screams. Wundt rejects this explanation, seeing in the lachrymal glands derivative organs assuagingassuaging pain; this secretion, which is permanent, cleanses the eye from foreign bodies, such as dust and insects, etc. As the visual images are the most important of all, the shedding of tears would be an unconscious effort to drive away sad representations, having for its foundation an analogy between the painful sensations and the images. Whatever one may think of these hypotheses, they consider tears as signs of pain exclusively.
The augmentation of the lachrymal secretion depends on the increase in the pressure of the blood; now, the circulation is accelerated by joy and tenderness, as is proved by the shining of the eyes. The appearance of tears—not very abundant, however, in such cases—would be the natural consequence. Sorrow, on the contrary, is accompanied by a lowering of the circulation, and very often, in the early stage, tears are entirely wanting. The shedding of tears produces relief, it is a safety-valve; it would answer to a second stage—that of slackened tension—in which the return of vitality has begun. In other words, the tears of joy and tenderness would correspond to the stage of action, the tears of sadness to the stage of reaction.
The psychology of tender emotion seems to me reducible to a single question—that of its origin. The description of its varieties is without interest, and may be found elsewhere. We have stated it as simple and primary. Being the source of all altruistic, social, and moral manifestations, it will be worth our while to consider its nature at the period of its appearance.
In children, and the higher animals, the first manifestation of tenderness is towards the mother or the nurse.
"The relation involved in the sustenance of the child, a relation only a degree less close than that of the fœtus to the maternal organism, constitutes in itself the chief source of the feeling. Along with the supply of nutriment there goes that of warmth, support, or propping, which again is a continuation of the fœtal dependence. This first instinctive or sensuous attachment of the child grows into what we call fondness by the complication of this instinctive feeling with numerous “ideal” or transferred feelings, the product of the many pleasurable sensations, including those of the eye and of the ear, of which the mother is the source."[147] The primary tendency, therefore, is directed, in children and animals, to those who have been pleasant to them, or who have done them good, and from whom they hope to receive it again. This is an emotion which, in Herbert Spencer’s nomenclature, might legitimately be called ego-altruistic, or even one with a marked preponderance of egoism. It must be so, for altruism cannot be innate.
The faculty of knowledge begins with an undifferentiated period, in which there is neither subject nor object, but only the consciousness of something without qualification. The separation of the ego and the non-ego in the order of cognition is the stage corresponding to the division, in the emotional order, between conscious egoism and altruism. How does this partial alienation from ourselves come about? How can it arise and be consolidated? These questions will be discussed later, when treating of moral emotion (Chap. VIII.). For the moment, I confine myself to a single question: Are we confronted with a veritable instinct—with an innate tendency incapable of being analysed, showing itself in the consciousness by the tender emotion or its varieties?
We know all the efforts made (especially in the eighteenth century) to reduce altruism by analysis to an extremely refined egoism, to a calculation; thus the tenderness of parents for their children was explained by the expectation of services to be rendered by them in the future. I think it needless to insist on this point.
In favour of inneity, the best argument that can be alleged, because founded on fact, is, that affection and attachment are met with even among animals, to whom we cannot attribute calculation or interested foresight. Apart from maternal love, which manifests itself energetically in very low stages of the animal kingdom, we find examples of benevolent and active sympathy between animals of the same species, and even (though this is rarer) of different species,[148] apart from any sexual attraction. Let us add, if necessary, in the case of human beings: “the instantaneous, unreflecting impulses of pity to creatures in distress, although strangers, enemies, criminals, noxious beasts, the absence of all balancings of immediate loss with ultimate gain.... Long-sighted selfishness does not explain the conduct of the Good Samaritan. Again, the hosts of human beings that in all ages have voluntarily given up their lives for their country, could not be influenced by their own advantage. For, although many of these have been taught the hopes of a future existence, this has been by no means universal; and there could be little certainty in the mass of minds that the surrender of this life would receive a full compensation in another.”[149]
The inneity of the altruistic instinct, therefore, seems to me proved beyond the possibility of reply. It may be very energetic in some individuals, or very weak in others; in this it only resembles all instinctive tendencies. As a genus, this instinct comprises several varieties, of a general character, such as benevolence, affection, pity, etc. Finally, it is one of the elements which make up several composite emotions—veneration, admiration, sexual love, etc.
It remains only to inquire in what form it first made its entry into the world, what was its earliest manifestation. With regard to this matter, there are only three possible hypotheses: those of maternal love, gregarious instinct, and the very improbable one of sexual instinct. The value of these hypotheses will be discussed later on, in the chapter on moral emotion, which is the natural complement to the present one.[150]
Reducible to one primary fact: the feeling of strength or weakness—Positive form: type, pride. Its physiological and psychological characteristics. Its relation to joy and anger. Its evolution—Negative form: humility. Its semi-social character—Pathology, positive form: monomania of power, megalomania—Extreme negative form: suicidal tendency—Psychological problem of this practical negation of the fundamental instinct.
The English designate by the term of self-feeling, and the Germans by that of Selbstgefühl, a group of sentiments directly derived from the ego. I scarcely know what to call them: “personal” would be too vague a term, “egoistic” too ambiguous (“egotistic” would be better). To identify them with pride and its opposite would be to restrict them too far, for they have other forms. We might, for want of a better, include them under the term amour-propre (in its etymological meaning, amor proprius), i.e., satisfaction or dissatisfaction with one’s self, with its different varieties.
Whatever name we may give them, these emotional forms are reducible to one primary fact of which they are the embodiment in consciousness—viz., the feeling (well-founded, or not) of personal strength or weakness, with the tendency to action or arrest of action which is its motor manifestation. We can also, but in a less direct manner, connect them with the instinct of conservation, and say, with Höffding, that they result from that instinct “arrived at the full consciousness of itself and incarnated in the idea of the Ego.”
This group has its peculiar characteristics. It is almost, if not quite, exclusively human, while the emotions hitherto studied have been as much animal as human. It is late in making its appearance (about the end of the third year), and is the last in chronological order, except the sex-instinct. This is because it soon assumes a reflective character, and because it implies that the ego is constituted and that the individual is conscious of himself as such.
The self-feeling has two forms, one positive, the other negative, of which pride and humility may respectively be taken as the types.
Under its positive form, it has a well-known physiological expression,[151] which consists of a series of movements tending to two ends—(1) Increase in size: the respiration is deep, the thorax greatly dilated, the gestures eccentric, and, as it were, aggressive, whence the popular expressions “puffed up” or “swollen” with pride. (2) Increase in height: the body and head are held more erect, the gait is assured, the mouth firmly closed, the teeth clenched; in megalomaniacs, who present, so to speak, the caricature of pride, these traits are still further emphasised. Some writers note, besides, as a specific character, the action of the musculus superbus, which everts the lower lip.
Psychologically, the feeling of strength is sui generis and irreducible. It is related on one side to joy, being the sthenic emotion par excellence, on the other to anger, because the feeling of superiority soon leads to contempt, insolence, brutality, and the exercise of strength under its aggressive form. Let us remember that we have, on a previous occasion, connected with this feeling the pleasure which frequently accompanies satisfied anger. As it depends, more than any other primary emotion, on reflection, its development is determined by intellectual conditions.
Is there any equivalent to it among animals? Certain facts allow us to suppose that there is. The courteous contests of pretended battle, the song, the dances by which the males attempt to captivate the females, the triumph of some and the defeat of others, must produce some states analogous to pride and humiliation. The arrogant attitudes of the cock and the turkey-cock, the ostentatious display of the peacock, are taken as symbols of naïf pride; and if the expression of an emotion is that emotion objectivised, we can easily suppose that it exists in some manner. In children, the personal feeling is at first connected with the exercise of physical strength expended in struggling with each other and in games; later on, with personal appearance, clothes and ornaments, especially in girls. In consequence of an increasing irradiation, the self-feeling envelops everything entering into its sphere of action which may help to swell its importance—house, furniture, relations. Later on comes the consciousness of intellectual force, and the advantages procured by it—fame, power, riches, etc.
As derivative, or different aspects of egotistic emotion, under its positive form, we find pride, vanity, contempt, love of glory, ambition, emulation, courage, daring, boldness, etc. The special study of each of these feelings belongs rather to the moralist than the psychologist.[152]
Under its negative form, personal emotion cannot detain us long, as it would only be a repetition of what we have previously studied under the converse aspect. It has for its basis a feeling of weakness and impotence. It shows itself by diminution or arrest of movement; its gestures are concentric, and it consists in belittling instead of aggrandising, of lowering instead of raising. It is related on one side to sadness, and on the other to fear; in short, it is the complete antithesis to the positive form.
From this source flow, with different adaptations, humility, timidity, modesty, resignation, patience, meanness, cowardice, want of self-confidence, etc. Most of these manifestations are not simple, but result from the combined action of several causes, as we shall see later on.
The positive or negative feeling of personal strength is a normal and healthy emotion when it remains within the limits of adaptation; for it has an individual and even social utility.
For the individual, it is the instinct of conservation become reflective, and by the consciousness of his strength or weakness, it permits him to measure his pretensions by his degree of power.
Socially, it makes us in a certain measure dependent on others. Although strictly egoistic in its origin, self-feeling cannot develop unless it becomes ego-altruistic, or semi-social. According to Bain, self-esteem is a reflective sentiment which consists in judging ourselves as we judge others. This opinion has been criticised and scarcely seems tenable, in so far, at least, as it takes away from amour propre its instinctive and self-generated character and considers it as a return action. However, it is certain that the desire of approbation and the fear of blame are the external elements which count in the constitution and consolidation of the feeling of self-complacency; praise gives it extension, criticism impairs and mutilates it. This does not imply any great amount of reflection or culture. The child is extremely sensitive to the judgment of his equals. Primitive man is imprisoned in a network of custom, tradition, and prejudice which he cannot break without incurring excommunication; and those people are very rare who content themselves with their own approbation only.
But from a semi-social feeling, the love of ourselves can easily become an anti-social feeling. There is no emotion which passes so simply and definitely from the normal form to passion, and from passion to madness. At the bottom of the tendency of the ego to affirm itself there is a potentiality of limitless expansion and indefinite radiation. A man whose self-feeling is vigorous resembles those species of animals and vegetables which—prolific and of tenacious vitality—would, if left to themselves, cover the whole surface of the globe; his expansion is only kept in check by that of others.
Our path towards the pathology of the subject is already marked out. We have, first, the semi-morbid forms which have been called the monomania of power. Place a man in conditions where this tendency to unlimited expansion meets with no obstacle, and it will go to any extreme. This is the case with absolute power. No doubt this unique and, so to speak, superhuman position is not of itself sufficient. The madness of power (folie du pouvoir) is the resultant of two factors: first, the character, i.e., the violence of the egoistic appetites, which, continually satisfied, continually increase; while the will, the antagonistic, inhibitive force, keeps on diminishing; and next, external circumstances—the absence of all restraint, of any equal power which might overawe by threats. A religious sanction, or the fear of a political catastrophe, has restrained more than one, and limited that unbridled tendency which is only the ego’s feeling of its own power carried to the acute stage. It is needless to give examples from history, for they are known to every one.[153]
Self-feeling, under its positive form, has its ultimate incarnation in a well-known pathological manifestation—the delusion of greatness, or megalomania. Perhaps, indeed, in this case, the exaggeration produced by disease shows itself most clearly and without altering the original.
Megalomania is met with in general paralysis of the insane as a transitory phase; but especially in systematised chronic delusions (paranoia). We may pass over the period of incubation, which is often melancholic; thus, in a case of persecution-delusions, the patient is at first tormented by vague suspicions; he accuses no one in particular, he has as yet no accredited enemies; but one day he discovers them, and nothing will ever divert his thoughts from them again. Then, in some cases, the disease passing through another evolutionary stage, he arrives, by logical deduction, at the conclusion that it is his great merit, his high position, which are exciting jealousy. Thenceforth megalomania is fully developed; the subject thinks himself a millionaire, an unrecognised genius, a great inventor, a king, the pope, or even the Deity.
There is nothing more characteristic than such a description as the following, which has often been drawn up, and is yet another proof that emotion, its expressive and its physiological bases, are but parts of the same phenomenon. “He walks with head erect, with assurance; his speech is laconic and imperious, he seeks solitude, and is full of contempt for the society which surrounds him. His style of dress is in accordance with the tendency of his aberration. Like the maniac, he is restlessly active; but, in him, no movement is fortuitous or without a motive; his will is always active, his actions have a definite aim; if he shows violence, it is in order to ensure the execution of his commands, to show that he has strength sufficient to annihilate everything; it is not a destructive spirit which animates him, but the necessity for showing his power. The functions of the assimilative life have undergone no alteration; they take place, as a rule, with perfect regularity. It seems as if the expansive form of their feelings, their contentment with themselves, the extreme and unbroken satisfaction surrounding their life, imparted to the organic vital apparatus a surplus of activity, resulting, in a manner, in an excess of health.” Frequent cases of longevity among megalomaniacs have been noted. Finally, the following observation has its value, on account of the change—at once organic and psychic—there recorded:—"We have watched a patient who, after having suffered from melancholia for several years, suddenly became megalomaniac. His constitution had undergone great alterations, and his health was much weakened, so that he became a chronic melancholic; but so soon as his mental affection took on the character of megalomania he was not long in acquiring new vigour."[154]
We might add that the tendency of men is rather to pride, of women to vanity, which favours the views of those who maintain that madness is often only the exaggeration of the habitual character: it is sufficient to have shown that the feeling (though illusory) of personal strength in an extreme degree is only the normal state amplified, but not changed.
It may seem strange to close this chapter by some remarks on a phenomenon which, both by its internal and external characteristics, belongs to the class of irresistible tendencies—the fatal impulse to suicide. Its affinity with homicidal obsession is undeniable, as is proved by the persons who are tormented, in turn, by the craving to kill others and to kill themselves. However, if self-love, in its positive form, reaches its culminating point in megalomania, it seems to me quite legitimate to maintain that self-feeling, under its negative form, attains its supreme negation in suicide.
Without insisting on a merely accessory point, it is certain that suicide, as a manifestation of emotional life, brings us face to face with a psychological problem as yet insufficiently noticed. If there is an incontestable fact—one which, even among the ancients, was familiar to triteness—it is that in every animal the fundamental, ineradicable instinct is that of self-preservation, of existing, and persisting in existence. Now, suicide, whether voluntary or unreflecting, deliberate or impulsive, is the negation of the fundamental tendency, not a theoretic or partial negation, or one in word only, but in deed and absolute. And the sacrifice of life is not subordinated to some other end which acts by superior attraction, such as devotion to a belief, to friends, to humanity, to one’s country, it is a suppression pure and simple, a liberation desired in and for itself.
The ethnological, moral, and social study of suicide does not form part of our subject, having already been fully worked out.[155] Our aim is merely the psychological problem, which we must now define with more precision.
The act of suicide results from two very different mental states, that of reflection and that of impulsion.
In deliberate, reflective, voluntary suicide there is a struggle between two factors: the instinct of conservation and the insupportable state caused by pain (incurable disease, ruin, misery, grief, frustrated ambition, dishonour). Reflection decides, and as pain is always a beginning of destruction, it prefers a total and rapid destruction to a partial and slow one. The act is rational, since it tends towards the lesser evil, or at least what is judged to be such.
Impulsive suicide is harder to explain. A man throws himself suddenly out of a window, poisons himself, cuts his throat. In some cases death has been premeditated, but always appears as a compelling, inevitable force, inexorably claiming its victim; the epithet “irresistible” says everything. To the outside spectator the act appears motiveless, without reason, without cause. It is all the more surprising that the struggle, in this case, is no longer between instinct and reflection, but between two instincts, the conservative and the destructive, of which the one which usually is the strongest succumbs, and the individual turns against himself the destructive tendency originally destined to act on others.
Yet the psychology of deliberate suicide gives us the key to that of the impulsive variety. What in the first case results from conscious, clear, reasoned motives, results in the second from blind, obscure, unconscious states: it is an act of organic life, and its cause is found in cœnæsthesia. Impulsive suicide is the expression of the destructive process, slow, permanent, dimly felt, going on in the depths of the organism. Any one who presses in rage on an aching tooth, who rolls on the ground, strikes his head against the wall, or mutilates himself, is attempting an instinctive though absurd reaction in order to get rid of his pain. These are modified forms, it is true, but they will serve to show that the man who yields to an overmastering impulse to strangle or drown himself seeks a deliverance of the same kind.
Leaving degeneration (which is perpetually being dragged into this question) out of account, observation shows us that the difference between the two forms of suicide is reduced to that between psychic and purely organic causes. Impulsive suicide flourishes best on the soil of melancholia and hypochondria—i.e., in states which involve deep dejection and a disorganisation of vital action. We may also notice the part played (as was long ago pointed out) by heredity, the descendants of suicidal ancestors often killing themselves at the same age and in the same manner as the latter;[156] now, psychological heredity is based on organic. Finally, the automatic character of these impulses approximates them to the class of reflex actions, attempts at suicide being repeated in the same form during a recurrence of the same circumstances—e.g., somnambulism, intoxication, the menstrual period. All these characteristics assign to irresistible suicide an organic origin, which is equivalent to saying that its ultimate cause lies in temperament. The conservative instinct exists in all men, but it may exist in any degree. In some there is an innate joy of life capable of resisting all disasters; in others, a constitutional melancholy, or (which comes to the same thing) the conservative instinct is very weak and yields to the least shock. Impulsive suicide represents self-feeling at its last stage of regression, or, in other words, at its negative extreme.