Chapter I: Preface

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The psychology of states of feelings, it is generally recognised, is still in a confused and backward condition. Although it has benefited in some measure by the contemporary allurement of psychological research, it must be acknowledged that it has only exerted a moderate seduction upon workers; the preference has been given to other studies, such as those of perception, of memory, of images, of movement, of attention. If any proof is necessary we may find it in the bibliographies, now published in Germany, America, and France, which give the psychological inventory of each year; of the whole number of books, memoirs, and articles which appear, less than the twentieth part, on an average, relates to the feelings and emotions. It is a very small part compared to the part played by the emotions and passions in human life, and this region of psychology is not deserving of such neglect. It is true that in recent years W. James and Lange seem to have brought this state of stagnation to an end. Their thesis, paradoxical in appearance, has aroused, especially in America, many discussions, criticisms, defences, and, what is of more value, observations and researches.

It must be acknowledged that for those who have any care for precision and clearness the study of the feelings and emotions presents great difficulties. Internal observation, always an uncertain guide which leads us but a little way, is here especially questionable. Experiment has given some very useful results, but they are much less important and numerous than in other regions of psychology. Detailed researches and monographs are lacking, so that the subject abounds with questions on which little light has yet been thrown. Finally, the dominant prejudice which assimilates emotional states to intellectual states, considering them as analogous, or even treating the former as dependent oh the latter, can only lead to error.

We have, in fact, in every study of the psychology of feeling to choose between two radically distinct positions, and this choice involves a difference in method. Concerning the final and essential nature of states of feeling there are two contrary opinions. According to one, they are secondary and derived, the qualities, modes, or functions of knowledge; they only exist through it; they are “confused intelligence”: that is the _intellectualist_ thesis. According to the other, they are primitive, autonomous, not reducible to intelligence, able to exist outside it and without it; they have a totally different origin: that is the thesis which under its present form may be called _physiological_. These two doctrines exhibit variations which I ignore, as I am not writing their history, but they all come into one or the other of these two great currents.

The intellectualist theory, which is of considerable age, has found its most complete expression in Herbart and his school, for whom every state of feeling only exists through the reciprocal relation of representations; every emotion results from the co-existence in the mind of ideas which agree or disagree; it is the immediate consciousness of the momentary elevation or depression of psychic activity, of a free or impeded state of tension. But it does not exist by itself; it resembles musical harmonies and dissonances, which differ from elementary sounds though only existing through them. Suppress every intellectual state, and feeling vanishes; it only possesses a borrowed life, that of a parasite. The influence of Herbart still persists in Germany, and, with some exceptions (Horwicz, Schneider, etc.), complete or mitigated intellectualism predominates.

The doctrine which I have called physiological (Bain, Spencer, Maudsley, James, Lange[1]) connects all states of feeling with biological conditions, and considers them as the direct and immediate expression of the vegetative life. It is the thesis which has been adopted, without any restriction, in this work. From this standpoint feelings and emotions are no longer a superficial manifestation, a simple efflorescence; they plunge into the individual’s depths; they have their roots in the needs and instincts, that is to say, in movements. Consciousness only delivers up a part of their secrets; it can never reveal them completely; we must descend beneath it. No doubt it is awkward to have to invoke an unconscious activity, to call in the intervention of an obscure and ill-determined factor; but to wish to reduce emotional states to clear and definite ideas, or to imagine that by this process we can fix them, is to misunderstand them completely and to condemn ourselves beforehand to failure.

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Footnote 1:

It may be doubted whether all the English writers here mentioned can
be strictly classed with the physiological school as understood by M.
Ribot. With regard to Mr. Spencer, for instance, this is indicated by
a brief summary of his own position in a private letter to the Rev.
Angus Mackay, who had presented a statement of the “confused
intelligence” theory, “which I conceive to be a part of the truth,”
wrote Mr. Spencer, adding that “joined with the dimly aroused
association of ideas derived from the experiences of the individual, I
hold that the body of the emotion consists more largely of the
inherited associations of experiences and still more vague states of
consciousness which result from excitement of them.” It is clear that
the evolutionary view does not necessarily fall wholly into the
“physiological” group.—ED.

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For the rest, this is neither the place to criticise the intellectualist thesis, nor to justify the other in passing; the whole work is devoted to this task.

The book consists of two parts. The first studies the more general manifestations of feeling: pleasure and pain, the characteristic signs of this form of psychic life, everywhere diffused under manifold aspects; then the nature of emotion, a complex state which in the order of feelings corresponds to perception in the order of knowledge.

The second deals with the special emotions. This detailed study is of great importance for reasons which will be explained later on, especially because we must not rest in generalities; it furnishes a means of control and verification. The nature of the emotional life cannot be understood unless we follow it in its incessant transformations—that is to say, in its history. To separate it from social, moral, and religious institutions, from the æsthetic and intellectual movements which translate it and incarnate it, is to reduce it to a dead and empty abstraction. Thus an attempt has been made to follow all the emotions one after the other in the progress of their development, noting the successive movements of their evolution or their retrogression.

The pathology of each emotion has been sketched to complete and throw light on the study. I have tried to show that beneath an appearance of confusion, incoherence, and promiscuity, there is, from the morbid to the normal, from the complex to the simple, a conducting thread which will always bring us back to the point of origin.

A work which has for its aim to set forth the present situation of the psychology of feeling and emotion might have been made very long. By eliminating every digression and all historical exposition, it has been made as short as possible.

TH. RIBOT.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

INTRODUCTION—THE EVOLUTION OF THE AFFECTIVE LIFE 1

In all affective manifestations there are two elements:
the motor states or impulses, which are primary; the
agreeable or painful states, which are
secondary—Unconscious (organic or protoplasmic)
sensibility; micro-organisms—Chemical interpretation;
psychological interpretation—Are there pure states of
feeling?—Affirmative facts—The period of needs, the
instinct of conservation-The period of primitive
emotions—How they may be determined; the genetic or
chronological method—Fear, anger, affection, the
self-feeling, sexual emotion—Are joy and grief
emotions?—The abstract emotions and their conditions—The
passions are the equivalent in feeling of an intellectual
obsession.

_Part I._—GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY.

CHAPTER I.

PHYSICAL PAIN 25

Its anatomical and physiological conditions; pain nerves,
transmission to the centres—Modifications of the organism
accompanying physical pain: circulation, respiration,
nutrition, movements—Are they the effects of pain?—Pain is
only a sign—The analgesias: unconsciousness of pain and
intellectual consciousness—Retardation of pain after
sensation—Hyperalgesia—Nature of pain: theory that it is a
sensation; theory that it is a quality of sensation—Pain
may result from the quality or the intensity of the
stimulus—Hypotheses regarding its ultimate cause: it
depends on a form of movement, a chemical modification.

CHAPTER II.

MORAL PAIN 42

Identity of all the forms of pain—Evolution of moral pain:
(1) the pure result of memory; (2) connected with
representations; positive form, negative form; (3)
connected with concepts—Its external study; physical
signs—Therapeutics—Conclusions—A typical case of
hypochondriasis.

CHAPTER III.

PLEASURE 48

Subject little studied—Is Pleasure a sensation or a
quality?—Its physical concomitants: circulation,
respiration, movements—Pleasure, like pain, is separable:
physical and moral anhedonia—Identity of the different
forms of pleasure—The alleged transformation of pleasure
into pain—Common ground of the two states—Hypothesis of a
difference in kind and in degree—Simultaneity of two
opposite processes: what falls under consciousness is the
result of a difference—Physiological facts in support of
the above.

CHAPTER IV.

MORBID PLEASURES AND PAINS 61

Utility of the pathological method—Search for a criterion
of the morbid state; abnormal reaction through excess or
defect; apparent disproportion between cause and effect;
chronicity—I. Morbid pleasures, not peculiar to advanced
civilisation—Different attempts at explanation—This state
cannot be explained by normal psychology: it is the
rudimentary form of the suicidal
tendency—Classification—Semi-pathological pleasures: those
destructive of the individual, those destructive of the
social order—II. Abnormal pains—Melancholic type—Whence
does the painful state arise in its permanent form? from
an organic disposition? or from a fixed idea?—Examples of
the two cases.

CHAPTER V.

THE NEUTRAL STATES 73

Two methods of study—Affirmative thesis founded on
observation, deduction, and psycho-physics—Negative
thesis: the psychological trinity; confusion between
consciousness and introspection—Diversity of temperaments.

CHAPTER VI.

CONCLUSIONS ON PLEASURE AND PAIN 80

The beginning of life—I. Conditions of existence of
pleasure and pain; lowering and heightening of vital
energy—Féré’s experiments—Meynert’s theory—II. Finality of
pleasure and pain—Exceptions: explicable cases;
irreducible cases.