The Psychology of the Emotions

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) 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.

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.

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.

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.

CHAPTER VII.

THE NATURE OF EMOTION 91

Analogy between perception and emotion—Constituent elements of emotion—Summary of the theory of James and Lange—Application of this theory to the higher emotions (religious, moral, æsthetic, intellectual)—Illegitimate confusion between the quality and intensity of emotion—Examination of a typical case: musical emotion—The most emotional of all the arts is the most dependent on physiological conditions—Proofs: its action on animals, on primitive man, on civilised man; its therapeutic action—Why certain sensations, images, and ideas awaken organic and motor states, and, consequently, emotion—They are connected either with natural or social conditions of existence—Differences and resemblances between the two cases—Antecedents of the physiological theory of emotion—Dualist position, or that of the relation between cause and effect—Unitary position; its advantages.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE INTERNAL CONDITIONS OF EMOTION 113

Confused state of this question—Popular versus Medical Psychology—Part played by the brain, the centre of psychic life—Hypotheses on the "seat" of the emotions—Part played by the heart, the centre of vegetative life—Popular metaphors and their physiological interpretation—Are the internal sensations reducible to a single process?—Part played by chemical action in the genesis of emotion—Cases of the introduction of toxic substances—Auto-intoxication—Modifications in the course of mental maladies.

CHAPTER IX.

THE EXTERNAL CONDITIONS OF EMOTION 124

Empiric period—Pre-Darwinian period of scientific research—Examination of Darwin's three principles—Wundt and his explanatory formulas: Innervation directly modified, Association of analogous sensations, Relations of motion with sensory representations.

CHAPTER X.

CLASSIFICATIONS 130

Their discrepancies—Reduced to three types: (1) Classification of pleasures and pains—(2) Classification of emotions: two forms, empiric and analytico-comparative—(3) Classification of representations, intellectualist form—Critical remarks—Impossibility of any classification.

CHAPTER XI.

THE MEMORY OF FEELINGS 140

Can emotional images be revived, spontaneously or voluntarily?—Summary of scattered facts relating to this subject—Inquiry into this question, and method followed—Emotional and gustative images—Internal sensations (hunger, thirst, fatigue, disgust, etc.)—Pleasures and pains; observations—Emotions: three distinct forms of revivability according to observations—Reduction of the images to three groups: revivability, direct and easy, indirect and comparatively easy, difficult and sometimes direct, sometimes indirect—The revivability of a representation is in proportion to its complexity and the motor elements included in it—Reservations to be made on this last point—Is there such a thing as a real emotional memory?—Two cases: false or abstract, and true or concrete memory—Peculiar characters and differences of each case—Change of the emotional into an intellectual recollection—Emotional amnesia: its practical consequences—There exists a general emotional type and partial emotional types—Confirmatory observations—Comparative revivability of agreeable and disagreeable states—To feel acutely and to recall an acute impression of the feeling are two different operations.

CHAPTER XII.

THE FEELINGS AND THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS 172

The function of the feelings, as the cause of association—The law of affective association, conceived as general, and as local—I. Function of unconscious feeling: ancestral or hereditary unconsciousness; personal unconsciousness arising from cœnæsthesia; personal unconsciousness arising from the events of our life—Law of transference by contiguity, by resemblance: wide or narrow—II. Function of the conscious feelings: accidental cases, permanent cases, exceptional or rare cases.

Part II.—SPECIAL PSYCHOLOGY.

INTRODUCTION 187

Importance of the study of special feelings—Utility of historical documents—Causes of the evolution of the feelings: (1) intellectual development; (2) hereditary influence, perhaps reducible to influences of environment—Cases in which the evolution of ideas precedes that of feelings—Inverse cases—The intellect swayed by the principle of contradiction; feeling by that of finality—Classification of primitive tendencies—Method to be followed—Group I.: physiological (reception, transformation, restitution)—Group II.: psychophysiological—Group III.: psychological—Their enumeration.

CHAPTER I.

THE INSTINCT OF CONSERVATION IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL FORM 199

Hypothesis regarding the relation between the nutritive organs and the brain—Perversion of the instincts relating to nutrition—Pathology of hunger and thirst—Proofs furnished of the priority of these tendencies in relation to pleasure and pain—Facts in support of this—Negative tendency; disgust—Its biological value as a protective instinct.

CHAPTER II.

FEAR 207

Fear the conservative instinct under its defensive form—Physiology—Psychology—First stage: Instinctive fear—Hypothesis of heredity—Second stage: Fear founded on experience—Pathology—Morbid or pathological fears—Two periods in their study—Attempts at classification—How are they derived from normal fear? Two groups, connected respectively with fear and disgust—Inquiry into the immediate causes: events in life of which a recollection has been retained; of which no recollection has been retained—Occasional transformation of a vague state into a precise form.

CHAPTER III.

ANGER 218

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.

CHAPTER IV.

SYMPATHY AND THE TENDER EMOTIONS 230

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.

CHAPTER V.

THE EGO AND ITS EMOTIONAL MANIFESTATIONS 239

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.

CHAPTER VI.

THE SEXUAL INSTINCT 248

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.

CHAPTER VII.

TRANSITION FROM THE SIMPLE TO THE COMPLEX EMOTIONS 260

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.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE SOCIAL AND MORAL FEELINGS 275

Origin of the Social Feelings—Animal societies—Nutritive societies—The individual and society—Domestic societies—Social instinct has its source neither in sexual nor in maternal love—Gregarious societies—Attraction of like for like—Origin of social tendencies—Accidental and transitory unions, of variable duration, and voluntary—The social tendencies arise from the conditions of existence—Social life does not spring from domestic life—The higher societies among animals: they exclude family relations—Human societies—Two opposite theories of their origin: the family, the horde—Evolution of the family-Evolution of social life—The family and the clan not similar institutions—The moral sense. Two views of its origin: (a) the intellectual, (b) the emotional—They correspond to two stages in its development—Its innateness and its necessity belong to the motor, not the intellectual order—Genesis of the benevolent feeling. Psychological analysis of its generative elements. Facts in support of this—Discoverers in morality—Genesis of the sense of justice—Phases of its development—Conclusion: complexity of the moral sense—Pathology. Elimination of the questions of criminal anthropology. Moral insensibility.

CHAPTER IX.

THE RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 304

Importance of the subject—Its Divisions. First Period: origin of the religious feeling—Primitive notions of the Infinite (Max Müller); Ancestor-worship (H. Spencer)—Fetichism, animism; Predominance of fear—Practical, utilitarian, social, but not moral character—Second period: (1) Intellectual evolution; Conception of a Cosmic Order first physical, then moral—Function of increasing generalisation; its stages; (2) Emotional evolution; Predominance of love; addition of the moral sentiment—Third Period: Supremacy of the rational element; Transformation into religious philosophy; Effacement of the emotional element—Religious emotion is a complete emotion—Manifold physiological states accompanying it; ritual, a special form of the expression of emotion—The religious sentiment as a passion—Pathology—Depressive forms: religious melancholy, demonomania—Exalted forms: ecstasy, theomania.

CHAPTER X.

THE ÆSTHETIC SENTIMENT 328

Its origin: the theory of play, and its variants—Æsthetic activity is the play of the creative imagination in its disinterested form. Its instinctive nature—Transition from simple play to aesthetic play: primitive art of pantomimic dancing—Derivation of the arts in motion; of the arts at rest—Why was æsthetic activity evolved?—Art had, in the beginning, a social utility—Evolution of the æsthetic sentiment—Its sociological aspect: progression from the strictly social character towards individualism in the different arts—Its anthropological aspect: progress from strictly human character towards beings and things as a whole—The feeling for nature—The feeling for the sublime only partially belongs to æsthetics—Its evolution: it is not æsthetic in its origin, but becomes so—Why there are not two æsthetic senses—The sense of the comic—Psychology of laughter—It has more than one cause—Theory of superiority. Theory of discord—These correspond to two distinct stages, one of which is foreign to æsthetics—Physiology of laughter. Theory of nervous derivation—Theory of tickling—Pathology. Are there cases of complete æsthetic insensibility? Difficulties and transpositions of the subject—Pathological function of emotion: pessimistic tendencies, megalomania, influence of unconscious activity—Pathological aspects of the creative imagination; its degrees—Reason why the intense image, in artists, does not pass into action; ways in which it is modified—Cause of this deviation; its advantages.

CHAPTER XI.

THE INTELLECTUAL SENTIMENT 368

Its origin: the craving for knowledge—Its evolution—Utilitarian period: surprise, astonishment, interrogation—Disinterested period: transition forms—Classification according to intellectual states—Classification according to emotional states: dynamic forms, static forms—Period of passion: its rarity—Pathology—Simple doubt—Dramatic doubt—Folie du doute—Mysticism in science: deviation comes, not from the object, but from the method of research.

CHAPTER XII.

NORMAL CHARACTERS 380

Necessity of the synthetic point of view in psychology—Historical summary of theories of character: physiological direction, psychological direction—Two marks of the real character: unity, stability—Elimination of acquired characters—Classificatory procedure: four degrees—Genera: the sensitive, the active, the apathetic—Species—Secondary function of the intellect: its mode of action—Sensitives: the humble, the contemplative, the analytical, the purely emotional—Active type: the medium, the superior—Apathetic type: pure type, intelligent type, calculators—Varieties: the sensitive-active, the apathetic-active, the apathetic-sensitive, the temperate—Substitutes for character: partial characters; (a) intellectual form, (b) emotional form.

CHAPTER XIII.

ABNORMAL AND MORBID CHARACTERS 405

Are all normal characters mutually equivalent?—Attempt at classification according to their value-Marks of abnormal character: absence of unity, impossibility of prevision—Class I. Successive contradictory characters: anomalies, conversions; their psychological mechanism. Alternating characters—Second class: Contradictory coexistent characters. Incomplete form: contradiction between principles and tendencies. Complete form. Contradiction between one tendency and another—Third class: Unstable characters. Their physiological and psychological characters—Psychological infantilism.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE DECAY OF THE AFFECTIVE LIFE 423

Law of Decay: its formula, and its general application in psychology—Difficulties where the affective life is concerned—Successive disappearance of the disinterested emotions (the æsthetic and intellectual), of the altruistic (moral and social), the ego-altruistic (religious feeling, ambition, etc.), and lastly, the egoistic—Converse proof: cases of arrested development—Theory of degeneration—Its relation to decay.

CONCLUSION 438

The place of the feelings in psychic life—They come first—Physiological proofs—Psychological proofs.

INTRODUCTION.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE AFFECTIVE LIFE.

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 protoplasmic sensibility; microorganisms—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.

At the outset it may be useful to sketch in rough outline the general evolution of the life of feeling from its humble origin in organic sensibility to its highest and most complex forms. Afterwards we shall present the corresponding and inverse picture, that of its dissolution.

If we take at random, in the form in which daily experience gives them to us, the states known under the vague names of "sentiments," "emotions," "passions": joy and sorrow, a toothache, a pleasurable perfume, love or anger, fear or ambition, æsthetic enjoyment or religious emotion, the rage of gambling or benevolence, the shudder of the sublime or the discomfort of disgust, and so on, for they are innumerable, one first observation is obvious even on a superficial examination: all these states, whatever they may be, offer a double aspect, objective or external, subjective or internal.

We note in the first place the motor manifestations: movements, gestures, and attitude of the body, a modification in the voice, blushing or pallor, tremors, changes in the secretions or excretions, and other bodily phenomena, varying in different cases. We may observe them in ourselves, in our fellows, and in animals. Although they may not always be motor in the strict sense, we may so call them, since they are all the result of a centrifugal action.

We note also, in ourselves directly and by the evidence of consciousness, in others indirectly and by induction, the existence of certain states which are agreeable, painful, or mixed, with their modes or shades, extremely variable in quality and in intensity.

Of these two groups—the motor manifestations on one side, the pleasures, pains, and their compounds on the other side—which is fundamental? Can we put them on the same level, and if we cannot, which is that which supports the other?

My reply to this question is clear: it is the motor manifestations which are essential. In other words, what are called agreeable or painful states only constitute the superficial part of the life of feeling, of which the deep element consists in tendencies, appetites, needs, desires, translated into movements. Most classical treatises (and even some others) say that sensibility is the faculty of experiencing pleasure and pain. I should say, using the same terminology, that sensibility is the faculty of tending or desiring, and consequently of experiencing pleasure and pain. There is nothing mysterious in the tendency; it is a movement or an arrest of movement in the nascent stage. I employ this word "tendency" as synonymous with needs, appetites, instincts, inclinations, desires; it is the generic term of which the others are varieties; it has the advantage over them of embracing at the same time both the psychological and physiological aspects of the phenomenon.

All the tendencies suppose a motor innervation; they translate the needs of the individual, whatever they may be, physical or mental; the basis, the root of the affective life is in them, not in the consciousness of pleasure and pain which accompanies them according as they are satisfied or opposed. These agreeable or painful states are only signs and indications; and just as symptoms reveal to us the existence of a disease, and not its essential nature, which must be sought in the hidden lesions of the tissues, organs, and functions, so pleasure and pain are only effects which must guide us in the search and determination of causes hidden in the region of the instincts.

If the contrary opinion has generally prevailed, and priority been accorded to the study of agreeable and painful manifestations considered as the essential element in the emotional life and serving to define it, that is the result of a bad method, of an exclusive faith in the evidence of consciousness, of a common illusion which consists in believing that the conscious portion of an event is its principal portion, but especially the consequence of the radically false idea that the bodily phenomena which accompany all states of feeling are factors that are negligible and external, foreign to psychology, and without interest for it.

For the present what has just been said is only an affirmation; the proofs will come later, and will occupy the whole of this book; at the outset it is only necessary to indicate clearly the position taken up. We may now follow the evolution of the life of feeling in its chief stages, which are—pre-conscious sensibility, the appearance of the primitive emotions, their transformation either into complex and abstract emotions or into that stable and chronic state which constitutes the passions.

The first period is that of protoplasmic, vital, organic pre-conscious sensibility. We know that the organism has its memory; it preserves certain impressions, certain normal or morbid modifications; it is capable of adaptation: this point has been well established by Bering (who had been preceded by Laycock and Jessen). It is the outline of the superior form of psychic conscious memory. In the same way there exists an inferior unconscious form—organic sensibility—which is the preparation and the outline of superior conscious emotional life. Vital sensibility is to conscious feeling what organic memory is to memory in the ordinary sense of the word.

This vital sensibility is the capacity to receive stimuli and to re-act to them. In a well-known memoir, now of ancient date, Claude Bernard wrote: "Philosophers generally only know and admit conscious sensibility, that which their ego bears witness to. It is for them the psychic modification, pleasure or pain, determined by external modifications... Physiologists necessarily place themselves at another point of view. They have to study the phenomenon objectively, under all the forms which it puts on. They observe that at the moment when a modifying agent acts on man, it not only provokes pleasure and pain, it not only affects the soul: it affects the body, it determines other re-actions besides the psychic re-actions, and these automatic re-actions, far from being an accessory part of the phenomenon, are on the contrary its essential element." Then he showed experimentally that the employment of anæsthetics, pushed to an extreme, first abolished conscious sensibility, then the unconscious sensibility of the intestines and glands, then muscular irritability, finally the lively movements of the epithelial tissue. In the same way among plants: under the influence of ether the sensitive plant loses its singular properties, seeds cease to germinate, yeast to ferment, etc. Whence follows the conclusion that sensibility resides, not in the organs or tissues, but in their anatomical elements.

Footnote 2:

"La sensibilité dans le règne animal et le règne végétal", (1876, in Science expérimentale, pp. 218 et seq.).

Since then these investigations into protoplasmic sensibility have been pursued with much ardour among micro-organisms. These beings, sometimes animal, sometimes vegetable, are simple masses of protoplasm, generally monocellular, appearing homogeneous, without differentiation of tissues. Now very varied tendencies have been found among these organisms. Some seek light, others flee from it persistently. The protoplasmic mass of myxomycetes which live in the bark of the oak, if placed in a watch-glass full of water, remain there in repose; but if sawdust is placed around them they immediately emigrate towards it as if seized by home-sickness. The actynophrys acts in the same way with regard to starch. Bacteria can discover even the trillionth part of a milligram of oxygen in a neighbouring body. Certain sedentary ciliated creatures appear to choose their food. Some also have thought that they detected an elective tendency in the movement which draws the male ovule towards the female ovule. I have only recalled a few of the many facts which have been enumerated.

If it is necessary to mention other examples, I may refer to the case studied in our own days under the name of "phagocytosis." The struggle for life goes on, not only among individuals, but also among the anatomical elements which constitute the individual. Every tissue—muscular, connective, adipose, etc.—possesses phagocytes (devouring cells), of which the duty consists in devouring and destroying old or enfeebled cells of the same kind. Besides these special phagocytes there are general phagocytes, such as the white corpuscles of the blood, which come to the help of the others when they are not equal to their task. They stand against the pathogenic microbes, waging upon them an internal struggle, and opposing the invasion of infectious germs. This apparently teleological property seems at first very surprising. Later investigations have shown that the phagocytes are endowed with a sensibility (called chemiotaxic), owing to which they are able to distinguish the chemical composition of their environment and to approach it or leave it accordingly; deteriorated tissues attract certain of them which incorporate the feeble or dead cells, while the healthy and vigorous elements are perhaps able to defend themselves by secreting some substance which preserves them from phagocytosis.

These facts, taken from among many others to which I shall again have to refer when dealing with the sexual instinct, have been interpreted in two very different ways: one psychological, the other chemical.

For some there is in all these phenomena a rudiment of consciousness. Since the movements are adapted and appropriate, varying according to circumstances, there must be choice they say, and choice involves a psychic element; the mobility is the revelation of an obscure "psyche" endowed with attractive and repulsive tendencies.

For the others (whose opinion I adopt), the whole may be explained on physico-chemical grounds. No doubt there is affinity, attraction and repulsion, but only in the scientific sense; these words are metaphors derived from the language of consciousness which should be purged of all anthropomorphic elements. Several authors have shown by numerous observations and experiments the chemical conditions which determine or prevent this pretended choice (Sachs, Verworn, Löb, Maupas, Bastian, etc.).

On this point, as on all questions of origin, we must decide according to probabilities, and the probabilities appear to be all in favour of the chemical hypothesis. In any case, this matter has only a secondary interest for us here. If we admit conscious tendencies, then the origin of the emotional life coincides with the very origin of physiological life. If we eliminate all psychology, there still remains the physiological tendency, that is to say the motor element, which in some degree, from the lowest to the highest, is never quite wanting.

This excursion into the pre-conscious period—since we so regard it—puts us in possession of one result. At the end of this investigation we find two well-defined tendencies, physico-chemical and organic—the one of attraction, the other of repulsion; these are the two poles of the life of feeling. What is attraction in this sense? Simply assimilation; it blends with nutrition. With sexual attraction, however, we must note that we already reach a higher grade; the phenomenon is more complex, the monocellular being no longer acts to preserve itself but to maintain the species. As to repulsion, we may remark that it is manifested in two ways. On one side it is the opposite of assimilation: the cell or the tissue rejects what does not suit it. On another side, at a somewhat superior stage, it is in some degree already defensive.

We have thus gained a basis for our subject by finding that beneath the conscious life of feeling there exists a very low and obscure region, that of vital or organic sensibility, which is an embryonic form of conscious sensibility and supports it.

II.