Its physiology—Its evolution: Instinctive period—Emotional period (Individual choice)—Intellectual period (Platonic love)—Its pathology—How can sexual instinct deviate from the normal course?—Anatomical and social causes—Psychological causes: (a) unconscious, (b) conscious.

I.

The sex-instinct, the last in chronological order with man and the higher animals, gives rise to the emotion of love with its numerous individual varieties. Most psychologists have been very sparing of details where it is concerned, and one might mention certain voluminous treatises which contain no mention of it. Is this through exaggerated delicacy? Or is it because the authors think that their place has been usurped by the novelists who have so obstinately confined themselves to the study of this passion? But the novelist’s mode of analysis is different from the psychological mode, and does not exclude it.

Sexual love being an emotion whose evolution is complete, it is impossible to determine the physiological and psychical signs suiting all cases, from the blind instinct to the most refined and intellectualised forms. Nevertheless, there are certain specific characters which it always preserves, one special mark which is never effaced throughout its various metamorphoses, and that is, its origin. For the moment, let us take as typical the common and average forms which, as we shall see later on, are met with half-way, as we follow the evolution of sexual love from the lowest to the highest.

1. Though neither James nor Lange has cited it among his typical cases, love is certainly one of the emotions which express most clearly the state of the organism, and offer the clearest proof in favour of their theory. Let the reader suppress, in imagination, all the physiological manifestations which accompany it. What remains? not even the consciousness of a vague attraction, for that supposes an actual or nascent movement.

Love, as a sthenic emotion, presents physical characteristics which connect it on the one hand with joy, on the other with tenderness, which have already been described. The circulation is accelerated, sometimes to an extreme degree, the respiration likewise, and they react on the organic functions. (We have already seen how, in many animals, the period of love corresponds to deeply-seated chemical modifications—usually of a toxic character—in the organism.) We find, further, movements of mutual repulsion, or of mutual attraction, the dominant part played by touch resumed in its essential organ, the hand, caresses, embraces, fusion; the movements of attraction being all the more noisy and violent, in proportion as the instinct predominates. Finally, as the specific mark, we find a particular state of the sexual organs, varying from slight excitement to paroxysm. This disturbance,—whether strong or weak,—even when it has no echo in the consciousness, influences the unconscious activity.^[157]

If from the organic, motor, and vaso-motor manifestations we pass to the nervous centres, where impressions are received and movements initiated, we can find scarcely anything but hypotheses. One point only has been fixed since Budge’s researches: the existence in the spinal cord of a centre or an area on the level of the fourth lumbar vertebra, which governs the movements of the sexual act. Its psychological function is slight or non-existent: it is properly an instinctive centre, whose action is not obstructed by the removal of the cerebral hemispheres and the cerebellum, in the inferior vertebrates, and even in the dog, as proved by the experiments of Goltz and others. Some authors admit, without precise localisation, a second centre, situated near the ganglia at the base of the encephalon, which they suppose to be the seat of the brute sensations and their corresponding movements, and in relation with the centres of olfactory and visual sensations. This centre would have a psychological value. Lastly, a third and last centre in the cortical layer, the organ of perception properly so called, and of the revival of images. Nothing precise is known as to its position, whether it is localised in a certain area, or diffused. On this point we find nothing but hypotheses—if so much as that. The occipital lobes, the neighbourhood of the olfactory centre, have been suggested, but these are extremely doubtful. We have to be content with the admission that, from the genital organs, impressions are first transmitted to the lower or spinal centre, which exercises a reflex action on the corresponding systems of vascular, motor, and secretory innervation, and thence—whether there is an intermediate centre, or not—reach the cerebral cortex, where they produce a more or less definite state of consciousness, according to circumstances.

Anatomy and physiology are not the only sciences concerned in this question; for if the existence of these superposed centres, connected with each other, though distinct in function, were thoroughly established, this would give us certain landmarks, and lay down fixed conditions, or stages, in the development of sexual emotion, which may result from a state of the organs (instinctive form) or from an external perception, or from a pure representation (imaginative love). In the absence of an anatomical basis which might serve for the normal psychology of the subject, and still better for the comprehension of the pathological facts, let us follow the evolution of sexual love so far as observation enables us to do so. It has already been sketched in the Introduction, but too briefly for our present purpose.

2. We have distinguished, in this psychological evolution, three principal periods: the instinctive, the emotional, and the intellectualised.

Taking the question at its remotest origin, some naturalists and philosophers assert that the equivalents of sexual attraction exist in living beings devoid of nervous systems, in vegetable or animal micro-organisms. “It is curious,” says Balbiani, “to find, in beings who from their small size, and the external simplicity of their organisation, have been placed by all zoologists at the furthest limit of the animal world, actions denoting the existence of phenomena analogous to those by which the sex-instinct manifests itself in a great number of metazoa.... Thus, with the paramæcids, at the moment of propagation ... a higher instinct seems to govern these little animals; they seek and pursue each other, they go from one to another, feeling each other with their cilia, cling to one another for some instants in the attitude of sexual approach, and then let go in order to seize each other again. These singular games, by which these animalcules seem in turn to provoke one another to the act of copulation, often last for several days before the act becomes definitive.” Other facts of the same nature have been cited. Finally, it has been said that “the coupling of the two sexual elements is analogous to the coupling of the two animals whence these elements are derived: the spermatozoid and the ovule do on a small scale what the two individuals do on a large one; the spermatic element, in directing itself towards the ovule which it is to fertilise, is animated by the same sexual instinct which guides the complete being towards the female of the same species.”^[158]

If we confine ourselves to the micro-organisms, these facts of sexual attraction have been interpreted in two ways, as we have already seen—one psychological, the other chemical. Some, as we have just heard, admit a desire, an elective action, a choice, quoting in support of this not only the phenomena of generation, but several others: as the habitat, the use of a certain substance in the formation of the carapace, the movements of certain micro-organisms in seeking and seizing a determined prey. Others reject this psychology, which they call anthropomorphism, and maintain that chemical action is sufficient to explain the whole. Pfeffer had already shown, as far as generation is concerned, that the spermatozoids of the cryptogamia are attracted by certain chemical substances varying according to the vegetable species. More recently, Maupas and Verworn, who have successively studied the alleged cases of choice, eliminate all psychical elements and reduce the whole to a purely mechanical process. I am inclined to adopt the second opinion, while recognising that, as far as problems of origin are concerned, we decide by probabilities rather than proofs.

Above this chemical or organic attraction we find the sex-instinct properly so called, which, with its numberless adaptations, embraces the whole animal world. It is useless to prove that this instinct is fatal, blind, not acquired, anterior to all experience; but, as by its nature it consists essentially of motor manifestations, its psychology is scanty enough. Some remarks on this point may not be without advantage. In fact, as regards the problem of instinct, an entirely new position has been taken up.

During the first half of this century the inneity of instinct was placed in the order of cognition, while recent psychology places it in the order of movements, or, to be more accurate, in a fixed relation between certain states of consciousness and certain movements. According to the first hypothesis, stated in a masterly manner by F. Cuvier, instinct consists in images, or innate and constant sensations, which determine to action in the same manner as ordinary sensations; it is “a sort of vision, a dream, analogous to somnambulism.” According to the second hypothesis, sensations, perceptions, and images excite movements determined by the organisation, as in the case of ducklings when they see the water, the kitten scenting a mouse, the squirrel laying up its winter store. There are no innate representations, or even innate movements, but a pre-established relation between some fortuitous impressions and a group of movements: instinct is the innate motor reaction to an external or internal excitement; it results from the nature of the animal. The impression only pulls the trigger and the shot is fired. Like every other instinct, that of sex consists in a fixed relation between internal sensations coming from the genital organs, or tactile, visual or olfactory perceptions on the one hand, and movements adapted to an end on the other. As far as it is an instinct, it is that and nothing but that. In the immense majority of animals, and frequently in men, it does not rise above this level; in plainer words, it is not accompanied by any tender emotion. The act once accomplished, there is separation and oblivion. More than this, in some cases there is not even indifference, but hostility: the males of the queen bee are put to death as useless, and it is well known that the mate of the female spider often runs the risk of being devoured.

Sexual love corresponds to a higher form of evolution. Over and above instinct, it implies the addition of a certain degree of tender feeling. It is not therefore a simple emotion, even in the tolerably numerous species of animals in which it can be studied. In man, more especially in civilised man, its complexity becomes extreme. The analysis made by Herbert Spencer is well known and somewhat lengthy, yet I do not hesitate to transcribe it, since I can find no other to equal it, nor any point which could be added or subtracted:—

This evolutionary moment gives the complete type of love. As it goes on, a breach of equilibrium is produced at the expense of the physiological and instinctive elements, which gradually efface themselves before a more and more intellectualised image.

Certainly, there lies at the root of all love the unconscious search for an ideal, but for an ideal perceived in a concrete, personal form, incarnate for the moment in an individual. By a process of mental abstraction similar to that which draws from perceptions the most general ideas, the concrete image is transformed into a vague scheme, a concept, an absolute ideal, and we have a purely intellectual, Platonic, mystical love; the emotion is totally intellectualised. Let us remark that this last stage of evolution is not so very rare. Not only do we meet with it sporadically, but it has been fixed and expressed, at certain moments of history, in institutions, such as the chivalric love, of which Geoffrey Rudel seeking the Lady of Tripoli is the most perfect example; the troubadours, the Provençal Courts of Love, deciding that true love cannot exist in marriage, and excludes all cohabitation, etc. We must not, however, allow ourselves to be misled by appearances. Platonic and mystic lovers have always maintained that their sentiment is perfectly pure, and has nothing in common with the senses; the contrary opinion seeming to them a profanation and a sacrilege. Yet how could love exist without physical conditions, however attenuated we may suppose them? If they are wanting, all we have or can have is a purely intellectual state, the representation of an ideal conceived but not felt. Besides, we have more satisfactory evidence than suppositions and arguments; facts of tolerably frequent occurrence show how rapidly we may fall from the ideal plane. It is only because all the circumstances are in its favour that the fall is so easy.^[160]

In this ascending evolution from the instinctive to the idealistic form there is a decisive moment—viz., the appearance of the individual choice. This is the special criterion which differentiates instinct from emotion. Sexual instinct contents itself with a specific satisfaction; sexual love does not. And as choice manifests itself among the superior representatives of the animal kingdom, not only by sanguinary combats between the males, or by the more pacific tournaments which precede sexual selection, but, in the absence of all rivalry and competition, by the exclusive preference of one male for one female, chosen among many others whom he might possess, we may admit a fortiori that primitive humanity must very soon have left behind the stage of Venus Volgivaga. We know that Schopenhauer, and after him Hartmann, have tried to determine the reasons of choice; but such attempts must always be partial failures, because we can never be sure of discovering all the unconscious factors.

For the rest, the psychology of love contains many other mysteries. Whence comes the blind violence which astonishes and sometimes terrifies the calm spectator? Bain thinks it can be explained by the concentration of the attention on an individual, and by the fact that intensity and unity of object are associated in love. But this applies also to other passions, such as ambition and hatred. Herbert Spencer, in the analysis already quoted, attributes it to the complexity of the passion, love being an aggregate of heterogeneous tendencies all converging to one end and carrying the individual in the same direction. At bottom, the irresistible element is in the sexual instinct, and only exists in virtue of it; instinctive activity alone has such power. This is what Schopenhauer calls, in metaphysical terms, the Genius of the species, which makes of the individual an instrument for the furtherance of its ends. We might also call it, in biological terms, according to the hypothesis of Weismann now in vogue: the continuity of the germ-plasm which energetically manifests and affirms itself, safeguarding the rights of the species against individual fancies. But all these metaphors explain nothing, add nothing to the simple verification of the fact. Sexual instinct remains the centre round which everything revolves; nothing exists but through it. Character, imagination, vanity, imitation, fashion, time, place, and many other individual circumstances or social influences give to love—as emotion or passion—an unlimited plasticity. It is the task of the novelists to describe all its various shapes, and one which they have not failed to perform.

II.

Though love, even in its average manifestations, is inseparable from obsession and impulsion, I see in these two characteristics no legitimate reason for placing it unrestrictedly—as some writers have been pleased to do—in the category of pathology.^[161] It has its natural end, and tends to fulfil it by appropriate means. Every one knows that it sometimes reaches the confines of madness; but in this it does not differ from the majority of the emotions. There are the impulsive and irresistible forms of love (erotomania), but they remain within natural limits; the true pathology of love is elsewhere—outside nature.

On the deviations and interversions of the sexual instinct so many observations have been published,—especially in our own day,—so many books written, so many medico-legal theses discussed, that we might think the psychology of the subject had thereby been cleared up. Nothing of the sort; and it is this alone which interests us.

Reduced to its simplest expression, the psychological problem is this: The sex-instinct having a clearly-defined and easily-verifiable end, how can it deviate therefrom? Other instincts—that of conservation under its offensive and defensive forms, that of self-feeling—have no mechanism exclusively appropriated to them, and are susceptible of various and multiple adaptations. This, on the contrary, is confined by nature within strict limits. No doubt every instinct has its oscillations; but it is only the means which vary, the end remains the same. The ant, the bee, the beaver, the spider, modify their manner of acting in accordance with their environment, because they are confronted with the dilemma that they must either adapt themselves or perish; but they always arrive at the same end. The nutritive instinct in man utilises animals and vegetables—the raw caterpillars of the savage or the scientific cookery of the civilised man—but the same end is always aimed at and attained. With the deviations—at least the extreme ones—of the sex-instinct it is otherwise: everything changes, means and end alike. The normal end, generation and the perpetuity of the species, is ignored or annihilated. This aspect of the question does not appear to me to have been sufficiently noticed. How can an instinct so solidly based, and having its own special mechanism, go astray?

This subject deserves a purely psychological monograph, a very difficult piece of work for which this is not the proper place. I would only seek to inquire into the principal causes of the alteration of this instinct. I shall cite no facts—they are sufficiently well known, or will suggest themselves; besides, the choice lies between excessive abundance and nothing. I pass over the extreme cases, those of necrophily, or of sexual erethism accompanied by a craving for violence, destruction, or blood. These are the equivalent of the animal manifestations already mentioned, in which the state of general excitement, so far from producing tenderness, awakens by preference the aggressive tendencies. These are merely insane impulses. I am limiting myself to deviations and interversions—i.e., to cases where the natural mechanism of instinct is falsified (excitations caused by impressions having nothing to do with sexuality, attraction towards the same sex, etc.).

We may pass over in silence the general causes, which are not particularly instructive: degeneracy, brought in, as usual, to serve as an explanation, and heredity, which is no explanation at all, being merely a repetition, and brings us back to the primary case, which states the question afresh. The inquiry can only be profitable when directed to particular causes.

1. One principal anatomical and physiological cause is found in the conformation of the genital organs: arrest of development, incomplete sexuality, hermaphrodism, malformations, etc. This is the simplest and most easily verifiable cause, and is found to be sufficient in some cases. The action, from below upwards, of the organ and its lower centre on the brain, is no longer normal; the conditions of existence of the instinct are absent or altered.

2. Other causes are not so easily assignable. One of a sociological order may be indicated: it is known what takes place when a number of individuals of the same sex are shut up together, as in boarding-schools, convents, prisons, barracks, ships on long voyages. But the most numerous causes are of psychological origin, and we may divide them into unconscious and conscious.

3. The existence of the unconscious, and therefore involuntary, causes is rather suspected than proved. They consist in strange associations of ideas formed at the period of puberty, whose ultimate reason eludes observation; they might be compared to certain cases of audition colorée, when a connection is formed between a sound and a colour, apparently fortuitous, but in reality resting on a common emotional basis. More than this, observation seems to show that, at a much earlier age, in the fifth or sixth year, there are apt to occur “unconscious genital impulses provoking associations of ideas which frequently serve, in later years, as a substratum to our sentiments and volitions. Most of these associations are unstable, and remain outside the consciousness. In the degenerate they take on the impulsive and overpowering character which distinguishes their psychology; their intensity expresses the degree of consciousness which accompanies them, the recollection which is still connected with them, even the importance they assume in later existence. The existence of an unconscious sub-personality directing the conscious one manifests itself here rather than elsewhere with undeniable clearness.”^[162]

4. There remain the conscious voluntary causes which are the converse of the physical causes, representing an action from above downwards of the superior centres on the inferior centre and the organs. It is here that instinct finds itself in conflict with its most redoubtable enemy, the intense and persistent image. In predisposed subjects the creative power of the imagination works at some construction on an erotic theme, as in others it produces a mechanical invention, a work of art, a scientific discovery. Every vivid image tends to realise itself; in the present case it has the power to divert instinct from its natural channel if its motor power is stronger, and the sexual instinct has not in all men an equal stability.

I do not think, however, that these causes are sufficient to explain everything, even if we take account of imitation which fixes itself in custom, and of the contagion of example. If the facts were taken in detail, omitting nothing, we should meet with more than one embarrassing complication. Thus, sexual aberrations are found in animals, though of but moderate intelligence and living quite free from constraint. Can we, considering this, throw all the blame on imagination? They are also found among primitive races: the Huns, say ancient historians, had made of unnatural love a regular institution; can we blame civilisation? Many other difficulties of this kind might be raised; but I may remind the reader that pathology is only introduced into this work by way of elucidation, and it seems to me that, in the present subject, it receives from normal psychology more light than it throws on it.

The complex emotions are derived from the simple (1) by way of complete evolution; in a homogeneous form: Examples—In a heterogeneous form: Examples—(2) by arrest of development—(3) by composition; two forms—Composition by mixture; with convergent elements; with divergent elements—Composition by combination (sublimity, humour)—Modesty—Is it an instinct?—Hypotheses as to its origin.

Having studied in succession each of the tendencies which we look upon as incapable of further analysis, together with the simple emotion which expresses each, we now pass to the composite emotions. There is no need to point out that a simple emotion (fear, anger, etc.) is, in itself, a very complex phenomenon, and that “simple” means irreducible by analysis to any other emotion. All those which do not present this characteristic are complex. The problem to be stated, then, is this: How have the secondary and derivative emotions arisen from the primary or principal ones? Since it is admitted that these are typical emotions, and, on the other hand, the observation of human life shows us numerous emotional states, with their individual varieties and gradations, their transformations in the course of ages, how has this multiplicity been produced?

It is under this form that the masters of the seventeenth century had stated the question, and I take it up again, because this method seems to me far superior to that of classifications, which has since become prevalent. We know that Descartes admitted only six primary passions: admiration, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness. “All the others,” he says, “are composed of some out of these six, or else they are different species of the same, and derived from them;”^[163] and he goes on to describe about forty. Spinoza admits only three principal: desire, joy, and sadness, whence he deduces the others, which, after eliminating some repetitions, amount to forty-six. However, it is not very clearly shown by what method these philosophers determine their primary passions; it seems as though the criterion were their extremely general character, except in the case of admiration. As for the other passions, they are deduced, and in order to show this clearly, Spinoza always takes care in his definitions to connect the primary with the derived passion. Thus: “Fear is an ill-assured sadness, arising from the idea of some past or future thing of which we are in some doubt as to the result.” In short, their method is geometrical and deductive, especially in the Ethics; but we can, with slight modifications, adapt it to the exigencies of experimental psychology. Thus we have determined the primary emotions by derivation, from the chronological order of their appearance, not by their extremely general character. As for the derivative emotions, we are about to seek to determine the very various conditions of their genesis, not by way of deduction, but by that of analysis or synthesis based on observation, i.e., as far as possible by a genetic method. We have elsewhere spoken of classification and the insurmountable difficulties inherent in it; accordingly, the aim which we propose to ourselves is not, given a composite emotion, to determine its genus and species, but to know from what primary emotion, and in what manner, it is derived.

These natural methods of transition from the simple to the complex seems to me capable of being ranged under three heads: (1) evolution, (2) arrest of development, (3) composition (mixture and combination). These three methods may act separately or conjointly; the more complex emotions are usually the result of their co-operation. We shall examine them in succession.

The transition by evolution, complete or incomplete, is the simplest and most general case. It consists, like all evolution, in the passage from simplicity to complexity, from the undifferentiated to the differentiated, from the lower to the higher. It depends on the intellectual development, and is based on the law of transference already described (Pt. I., chap. xii.), which is its active and unconscious instrument. However feeble the development of the emotions may be in any race or individual it is never entirely wanting (idiots excepted), because the events of national and individual life have always some variety and some changes of aspect, which influence the emotional life.

It is convenient to distinguish two cases, according as the evolution takes place in a homogeneous or a heterogeneous form.

I. Evolution in homogeneous form.—The primary emotion remains identical with itself, through the whole course of evolution; it only increases in complexity. Here are some examples:^[164]

Æsthetic emotion has its origin in a surplus of activity expending itself in a particular direction, under the influence of the creative imagination; and it preserves this fundamental character from the drawings scratched on flints by quaternary man, or the symbolic dances of savages, through the classic ages, to the quintessential refinements of the decadents. It is true that all are not disposed to admit this: a person of delicate artistic temperament, brought up in a very cultured environment, and suddenly thrown into the midst of savage æsthetics, would deny any community of nature, but in this he would be mistaken. Those centuries which had no sense of evolution, of the continuity of development (the seventeenth and eighteenth), could see nothing in the origin of art but incomprehensible crudities, not worth notice. The transition from simplicity to complexity took place through the accumulation of knowledge, of ideas, and technical skill, and of causes or occasions of new ways of feeling: thus were formed juxtaposed aggregates acting by quality and quantity. This progress from simplicity to complexity is seen better than anywhere else in the development of the feeling for music, the most emotional of all the arts.

The religious sentiment is not of simple origin. It results: (1) from the fusion of two primary emotions—fear, and love in the larger sense (tender emotion); it is therefore a binary compound; (2) from a process of evolution which we shall have to follow in detail and which depends on intellectual conditions: predominance, first, of images, then of inferior concepts, then of superior concepts. Here, too, the continuity escapes the notice of many who do not see the bond connecting fetichism with the most idealistic of religions. How many travellers and ethnographers, after having ascertained the existence, among a given tribe, of magic, amulets, funeral rites, seriously affirm that these people are devoid of all religious feelings! It is because for them complex and highly organised forms are the only ones that count, and because they are accustomed to think of religious feelings as formulated by the great established religions.

II. Evolution in heterogeneous form.—The primary feeling is transformed to such a degree as to become unrecognisable, and can, in many cases, only be recovered by laborious analysis. This case resembles that of the morphological development of animals: the forms of the adult give no hint of the forms of embryonic and fœtal life.

The best example I can give is the genesis of the benevolent emotions, which, however, will be more suitably placed in the next chapter. We can, however, examine another case.

The instinct of conservation is, as we have seen, a collective term, an abridged formula, used to designate the totality of particular tendencies which assure the persistence of the individual, and one of which, the craving for food, is fundamental. It manifests itself in all its simplicity in most animals and in savage tribes who live, strictly speaking, from day to day. Yet ants, bees, foxes, and many other animals put aside a reserve store of food for future needs. The human race has very rapidly acquired the habits of foresight and care for the future, even while still in the savage stage and living by hunting and fishing. With a nomadic or agricultural life, the need of possession affirms itself more and more. As social progress substitutes for exchanges in kind the use of the precious metals, first in ingots, then as coined money, and later still, of paper money, feeling follows the same course, transferring itself from things to the values which represent them and the representations of these values, in many cases with well-known tenacity; and we see people who prefer illness to the expense of a cure, the risk of being murdered to the unpleasantness of giving up their purses. So that those values and signs of values which represent the possibility of satisfying needs (food, clothes, lodging, etc.), become in and for themselves a cause of desire and pleasure, and, amassed as a security for life, remain useless—if, indeed, they do not cause death. Avarice is a passion very well suited to illustrate this evolution in heterogeneous form, which, in spite of a strictly logical development, undergoes so many changes that its extreme point seems the negation of its point of departure.

The feeling of strength, self-feeling in its positive form, is at first, as we have seen, the consciousness of physical energy; but, with the intellectual development, it radiates in different directions, according to temperament and disposition. We can at least note two very different directions: (1) an evolution in the theoretical and purely individual sense, which leads a man to take up all questions, examine and criticise everything, form an independent opinion on every subject—in short, to have as his ideal an absolute liberty of thought, without any sort of restriction; (2) an evolution in the practical and social sense, extending one’s power over things and men; the child who domineers over his playmates may, at a later age, impose his personality on a party, a nation, a number of nations (Cæsar, Napoleon). The quality of the emotions felt in the two cases is very different; however, the original source is common to both, the divergence is the effect of character and intellectual evolution.

II.

The transformation of simple into derivative emotions, by arrest of development, is of less frequent occurrence. While, in the preceding case, there was a forward movement in a straight line, intellectual evolution involving emotional evolution according to the law of transference, here the mental process is more complicated; it supposes an antagonism between two states of consciousness, resolving itself into a compromise. There are, on the one hand, emotional tendencies going in the direction of impulse; on the other, images, ideas, intellectual states of all sorts acting by way of arrest, so that the resultant emotion is composed at the same time of movements and inhibitions of movement.

Except fear, all primary emotions imply tendencies to movement, sometimes blind and violent, like natural forces. This is seen in infants, animals, savages, the Barbarians of the first centuries of our era as depicted by contemporary chroniclers; the passage of emotion into action, good or bad, is instantaneous, rapid, and fatal as a reflex movement.

Reflection is, by its nature, slow and inhibitory. How can an image or a conception produce an arrest of movement? This is a very obscure question, the psychological and physiological mechanism of which has had but little light thrown on it; it is useless to treat it here in a cursory manner; we need only remark that the arrest exists as a matter of fact.

The intervention of this new factor, reflection, may result in two ways. On the one hand, it may obstruct and finally suppress; thus a passion kept in check ends, after various oscillations backward and forward, in being altogether extinguished. The second is a transformation or metamorphosis by arrest of development; the passion is not extinguished, but it has changed its nature.

The biological sciences have familiarised us with the notion of arrested development and the morphological modifications resulting therefrom. We know that the parts of a living being are so closely connected that none can change without involving a change on the part of the others; such is the formula of the “Law of Organic Correlations,” and it has its equivalent in the functional order. The “compensation of development” exists beyond all doubt in psychology, though it has not been as much studied as it deserves; thus experience shows us that hypertrophy of certain faculties entails as a consequence the hypertrophy or atrophy of certain others.

I have previously (Chap. III.) mentioned hatred as an abortive form of anger, the result of arrested development. I have only to add a few supplementary remarks on the two antagonistic elements. One is primary and tends to the partial or total destruction of the enemy, attacking him in his own person or in that of his friends, in his reputation, his honour, his interests. The other, made up of reflection and calculation, consists in the representation of consequences, in the fear of reprisals and of Divine or human laws. Hence arises an emotional state comparable to the movement of a body rotating on itself and incapable of passing certain limits; and it must be admitted that the metamorphic process is here very thorough-going, since many writers, so far from grasping the affinities between hatred and anger, set up the former as a primary emotion, the antithesis of love. Yet it is very clear that hatred, by the inhibitory character peculiar to it, is not and cannot be a primary emotion; it corresponds to a second stage. If it is objected that we might as well assert that anger is the developed form of hatred (i.e., that the latter is primary), and not hatred an abortive form of anger, I should answer that this position is inadmissible, because in experience we have no example of the inhibitory form appearing before the corresponding impulsive form. What is primary is an instinctive, unconscious movement of retreat, of aversion (in the etymological sense), but this is no more the emotion of hatred than the instinctive and unconscious movement of attraction is the emotion of love.

Resignation, with its varieties and gradations, is an abortive form of grief. Its mode of expression has been described in detail by Darwin (Chap. XI.). This state is the resultant of two currents: on one side, moral pain, grief, which by itself and in its complete form shows itself in prostration, tears, etc.; on the other hand, an intellectual notion—that of the irreparable and irremediable, of the futility of all efforts. The intellect has its teleology, which is not that of feeling; if it prevails and asserts itself in the consciousness, we shall have, after a period of oscillation, a fixed state, in which the loss will be accepted and perceived in a mitigated form.

Mystic, platonic, or intellectual love (there is no advantage in distinguishing the exact shades expressed by these various epithets) is, as we have seen, an abortive form of sexual love. Predominance of the intellectual element, the conceived ideal; weakening of the physiological and emotional manifestations and the organic erethism, of the tendency to movements of contact and embrace, and everything which constitutes emotion in its plenitude: such are its characteristics. Here, more than elsewhere, the term “arrest of development” is strictly accurate, because mystical love results, not from a voluntary inhibition which mutilates or checks emotion, but from an impotence on the part of emotion to develop its complete form.

Experience furnishes the counterproof: let the antagonistic action of reflection, or of the intellectual state—whatever it may be—cease, and hatred will once more become anger, resignation grief, or despair; mystical will change to sexual love, and the primitive form reappears under the ruins of the derivative.

To sum up, all the emotions of this group whose genesis depends on an arrest of development are reducible to a single formula: intellectualised emotions, because the intellectual element becomes dominant. We might also call them attenuated emotions, because they tend towards emotional weakening. The two contrary and reciprocally dependent tendencies peculiar to this group, determine, not a medium emotion, but a new form which, relatively to the primary emotion, and to the general quantity of emotional life, is a loss.

III.

Transformation by composition is a general term including two different cases: mixture and combination. This process consists of additions, and can be thus formulated: When two or more intellectual states coexist, each having its own peculiar emotional colouring, there arises a complete emotional state; in other words, intellectual complexity involves emotional complexity. If we compare the primary emotions to the simplest perceptions of sight and hearing, the complex emotions will correspond to the perception of an extensive landscape or a symphony. It is thus formed by the addition or fusion of binary, tertiary, quaternary compounds, and so on, these terms implying the number of simple emotions which compose them. The composition may be brought about in two ways, which we shall distinguish by calling them respectively mixture and combination, in the sense in which these words are employed by writers on chemistry.

I. Composition by mixture.—In the emotions derived from this mental procedure, the constituent elements can be recovered from the compound; they embrace without interpenetrating one another, and a psychological analysis conducted with sufficient thoroughness is able to determine and enumerate them. For greater clearness, I distinguish two cases in the mixture of feelings.

(a.) The elements are homogeneous or convergent. If they are numerous, since they all tend in the same direction, the resultant emotion will be of great intensity. We have found one example of this in sexual love, an aggregate compound (according to Herbert Spencer’s analysis) of physical attraction, æsthetic impressions, sympathy, tenderness, admiration, self-love, love of approbation, love of possession, and desire of liberty.

(b.) The elements are heterogeneous or divergent. As an example I take jealousy, which many authorities consider primary, perhaps because it is manifested by animals and infants, which simply proves that it is precocious,—quite a different thing. A contemporary writer tries to define it by saying: “It is a morbid fear passing from inert stupidity to active or passive rage.” I greatly prefer Descartes’ definition: “Jealousy is a kind of fear related to the desire we have of keeping some possession” (Passions, art. 167). This passion deserves a monograph to itself, and one will certainly be written when this style of work comes to be applied more frequently to the psychology of the emotions. Our task at present is not to study its gradations, from mild cases up to madness and homicide, but to inquire into its composition. There is, firstly, the representation of some good, possessed or denied—a pleasurable element acting by way of excitement and attraction; and, secondly, the idea of dispossession or privation (e.g., of the lover with regard to his mistress, of the rejected candidate against his fortunate rival, and in general, of any who fail against all who succeed), an element of vexation which acts depressively; and, thirdly, the idea of the real or imaginary cause of this dispossession or privation, awakening, in various degrees, the destructive tendency (anger, hatred, etc.). In the passive or inert forms of jealousy this last element is very slight. This emotion is, therefore, a binary compound.

We might further mention the religious sentiment (a binary compound), the feeling of respect, composed of sympathy and a slight degree of fear, and the moral sentiment, which we are about to analyse in the next chapter.

I must remark that these derivative emotions, by reason of their complexity, ought logically to show as many shades of variety as they have constituent elements. In sexual love, where analysis discovers at least ten tendencies, whether primary or not, the predominance of one or more among these changes the aspect of the emotion according to times and individuals. The instability of the passions, of which we hear so much, is partly caused by their composite character.

II. Composition by combination.—The emotion resulting from this mental procedure differs, in its nature and characteristics, from its constituent elements, and appears in the consciousness as a new product, an irreducible unit. Here the analysis, uncertain and hazardous as it often is, cannot give us everything which we find in the synthesis—a psychological case which has well-known equivalents in chemistry.

A Danish psychologist, Sibbern, whom I believe to have been the first to point out this mode of composition of the emotions under the name of mixed sentiments, defines them as “Those in which the disagreeable excites the agreeable, and vice versâ, so that one is not antecedent to the other, but both act simultaneously, and the disappearance of the one involves the disappearance of the other.”^[165] In fact, there is not merely coexistence, but reciprocity of action; if you suppress a single term the emotion changes its nature, as we shall see by the following examples.

In the emotion accompanying all forms of activity in which we seek great difficulties to overcome, or risks to run (as in hunting wild animals, dangerous mountain climbing, exploring expeditions, etc.), if we suppress the unknown element, the risk, the danger, there is no longer any attraction. If we suppress this attraction and its accompanying pleasure we have nothing left but fear or disgust. This particular emotion exists only through the interdependence of its various elements. It can be produced in a modified form, but without changing its nature, in the spectators of bull-fights, wild beast tamers, violent struggles, and thrilling dramas, and in a lesser degree by mere recitation or reading.

I have already mentioned melancholy (in the ordinary, not the medical sense) as one form of the luxury of grief. It implies the calling up of pleasant states, past or distant, plus a state of present sadness which surrounds them. Suppress one or other of these elements and the melancholy vanishes. If the pleasurable element, however slight, disappears, nothing remains but grief pure and simple. In this combination sometimes the one element predominates, sometimes the other, and the resultant feeling receives a special emotional timbre, as the case may be.

The feeling of the sublime is usually considered as a form of the æsthetic sentiment, and we shall have to return to it later on. Whatever it may have for its object—whether the spectacle of sullen glaciers, of a boundless desert, or of a man who throws himself recklessly into some great act of self-devotion,—it is composed of discordant elements fused into a single synthesis: (1) a painful feeling of oppression, of lowered vitality, of annihilation, which drags us down and depresses us; (2) the consciousness of an upward rush, of unfolded energy, of an inward lifting up, of an increase of vital power; (3) the conscious or unconscious feeling of security in presence of a formidable power. Without the last-named the emotion would change its nature, and we should feel fear. These three co-existent and interdependent elements enter collectively into the consciousness, and present themselves to it as an irreducible unit.

Höffding (op. cit., p. 407) gives humour as an example of a combination, or, as he calls it, a mixed feeling. He defines it as “the sentiment of the ridiculous based on sympathy.” This state consists in seeing simultaneously and indissolubly the petty side of great events and the great side of the most trivial things. It is the synthesis of two antithetic elements: the destructive and contemptuous laugh which makes us feel ourselves superior; and the indulgence, pity, and compassion which place us on a footing of equality with others. This emotional manifestation may be simply a passing whim, or it may be a permanent trait of character, a peculiar manner of understanding nature and human life, striking an average between optimism, which finds everything too bright, and pessimism, which sees the ugly side of everything. The school of “irony,” which, with Solger, Schlegel, and others, played its part in German æsthetics at the opening of this century, proposed humour—negative and destructive in form, positive and constructive in reality—as its fundamental principle in the interpretation of the universe.

I am inclined to place in this group an emotional state which has given rise to many dissertations and discussions—I mean modesty. I look upon it as a binary compound capable of being resolved into two primary emotions: self-feeling and fear. Whatever may be thought of this explanation, the subject is worth the trouble of a little examination; it could scarcely be omitted from a treatise on the psychology of the feelings.

There is no lack of documents respecting the manifestations of modesty among different peoples; they may be found in the narratives of travellers, and in works on anthropology and ethnology. The psychological question of its nature and origin has been treated by Spencer, Sergi, James, Mantegazza, to mention contemporary writers only. The last-named even gives us a definition of it: “Modesty is physical self-respect.”

It has a physical mode of expression peculiar to it, or at least only met with in the emotions related to modesty (shame, timidity, shyness), viz., the sudden redness of the face due to momentary paralysis of the vaso-constrictor nerves. We know Darwin’s ingenious explanations of this point: a person who thinks others are looking at him directs his attention to his own face, whence results a flow of blood towards that part. These explanations are now rejected. The experiments of Mosso and others on the circulation of the blood rather justify the view taken by Wundt, who sees in the momentary relaxation of the vaso-motor innervation, causing the redness of the face, a compensation for the accelerated pulsations of the heart, produced by emotion.

Besides this special mode of expression, modesty shows itself by concentric, defensive movements, by a tendency to cover or disguise certain parts of the body. The means employed to this end are of the most various description, according to race, country, or period: some hide the whole body, some the sexual parts only, or the face, or the bosom, some paint the body, or the face, etc. It is impossible to determine the exact part played in this diversity by circumstances, climatic conditions, the association of ideas, compulsion, fashion, imitation, and even chance.

So far as psychology is concerned, it is especially the question of origin which has been discussed: Is modesty an instinct? is it innate or acquired, primary or derived? Some writers, rather carelessly, assume that it is an instinct, on no other evidence than its quasi-universal character, which they deduce, legitimately enough, from its multiple manifestations. Most, however, adopt the contrary opinion, alleging the example of children, and of certain primitive races who seem totally devoid of it. This second view seems the more tenable, though it is difficult to find a categoric solution which is free from objections. Modesty, being an ego-altruistic feeling (and the same applies to shame and shyness), presupposes some degree of reflection.

The conditions of its origin are little understood. H. Spencer, and, after him, Sergi, maintain that it results from the habit of wearing clothes, which began with men (not with women) from motives of ostentation and ornament. There are tribes where both sexes go naked, others where clothing is the privilege of the male sex: immodesty would thus be, in its origin, a lack of æsthetic feeling. Exclusively appropriated, at first, to the male sex, the feeling of modesty would then have transferred itself to the other. This explanation seems very precarious, not to mention the theory incidentally implied, that the feeling is not stronger in women than in men.^[166]

W. James proposes another, which is less simple, but more acceptable.^[167] Briefly, it is this: The emotional state which lies at the root of modesty, shame, and other similar manifestations, arises from the application in the second instance to ourselves of a judgment primarily passed upon others. The sight of certain parts of the body, and the ideas which they suggest, inspire repulsion, and “it is not easy to believe that even among the nakedest savages an unusual degree of cynicism and indecency in an individual should not beget a certain degree of contempt, and cheapen him in his neighbours’ eyes.” (In our opinion, this psychological state approximates to disgust, of which we have already seen the causes and the significance.) What is repugnant to us in others must be repugnant to them in us: whence the habit of covering certain parts and concealing certain bodily functions. Modesty cannot be considered an instinct in the strict sense of the word, i.e., as an excito-motor phenomenon. Under the influence of custom, public opinion, civilisation, it passes through its evolution, till it reaches “the New England pitch of sensitiveness and range, making us say stomach instead of belly, limb instead of leg, retire instead of go to bed, and forbidding us to call a female dog by name” (James, ii. p. 437).

Taken as a whole, this emotion approximates most by its external symptoms to fear. It also contains elements derived from self-feeling. Must we add other elements derived from the sex-instinct? This is only admissible in certain cases. In short, its composition is variable. We cannot consider it as instinctive, primitive, innate. On the other hand, analysis cannot clearly resolve it into its constituent parts; we are inclined to see in it a particular case of mental synthesis, a combination.

To conclude, with regard to the emotions formed by combination:—

They are based on an association of intellectual states, which is, in most cases, an association by contrast.

They presuppose a fusion, in varying proportions, of agreeable and disagreeable states, which justly entitles them to be called mixed emotions.

The whole differs from the sum of its constituent elements.

Analysis ascertains and isolates these elements, but cannot boast of having discovered them all.