What is an Emotion? William James (1884)
The physiologists who, during the past few years, have been so industriously exploring the functions of the brain, have limited their attempts at explanation to its cognitive and volitional performances.
Dividing the brain into sensorial and motor centres, they have found their division to be exactly paralleled by the analysis made by empirical psychology, of the perceptive and volitional parts of the mind into their simplest elements.
But the aesthetic sphere of the mind, its longings, its pleasures and pains, and its emotions, have been so ignored in all these researches that one is tempted to suppose that if either Dr. Ferrier or Dr. Munk were asked for a theory in brain-terms of the latter mental facts, they might both reply, either that they had as yet bestowed no thought upon the subject, or that they had found it so difficult to make distinct hypotheses, that the matter lay for them among the problems of the future, only to be taken up after the simpler ones of the present should have been definitively solved.
And yet it is even now certain that of two things concerning the emotions, one must be true.
Either separate and special centres, affected to them alone, are their brain-seat, or else they correspond to processes occurring in the motor and sensory centres, already assigned, or in others like them, not yet mapped out.
If the former be the case we must deny the current view, and hold the cortex to be something more than the surface of “projection” for every sensitive spot and every muscle in the body.
If the latter be the case, we must ask whether the emotional “process” in the sensory or motor centre be an altogether peculiar one, or whether it resembles the ordinary perceptive processes of which those centres are already recognised to be the seat.
The purpose of the following pages is to show that the last alternative comes nearest to the truth, and that the emotional brain-processes no only resemble the ordinary sensorial brainprocesses, but in very truth are nothing but such processes variously combined.
The main result of this will be to simplify our notions of the possible complications of brain-physiology, and to make us see that we have already a brain-scheme in our hands whose appli [p.189] cations are much wider than its authors dreamed.
But although this seems to be the chief result of the arguments I am to urge, I should say that they were not originally framed for the sake of any such result.
They grew out of fragmentary introspective observations, and it was only when these had already combined into a theory that the thought of the simplification the theory might bring to cerebral physiology occurred to me, and made it seem more important than before.
I should say first of all that the only emotions I propose expressly to consider here are those that have a distinct bodily expression.
That there are feelings of pleasure and displeasure, of interest and excitement, bound up with mental operations, but having no obvious bodily expression for their consequence, would, I suppose, be held true by most readers.
Certain Livros Grátis arrangements of sounds, of lines, of colours, are agreeable, and others the reverse, without the degree of the feeling being sufficient to quicken the pulse or breathing, or to prompt to movements of either the body or the face.
Certain sequences of ideas charm us as much as others tire us. It is a real intellectual delight to get a problem solved, and a real intellectual torment to have to leave it unfinished.
The first set of examples, the sounds, lines, and colours, are either bodily sensations, or the images of such.
The second set seem to depend on processes in the ideational centres exclusively.
Taken together, they appear to prove that there are pleasures and pains inherent in certain forms of nerve-action as such, wherever that action occur.
The case of these feelings we will at present leave entirely aside, and confine our attention to the more complicated cases in which a wave of bodily disturbance of some kind accompanies the perception of the interesting sights or sounds, or the passage of the exciting train of ideas.
Surprise, curiosity, rapture, fear, anger, lust, greed, and the like, become then the names of the mental states with which the person is possessed.
The bodily disturbances are said to be the “manifestation” of these several emotions, their “expression” or “natural language”; and these emotions themselves, being so strongly characterized both from within and without, may be called the standard emotions.
Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the [p.190] same changes as they occur IS the emotion. Common sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike.
The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be.
Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colourless, destitute of emotional warmth.
We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it
right to strike, but we could not actually feel afraid or angry.
Stated in this crude way, the hypothesis is pretty sure to meet with immediate disbelief.
And yet neither many nor far-fetched considerations are required to mitigate its paradoxical character, and possibly to produce conviction of its truth.
To begin with, readers of the Journal do not need to be reminded that the nervous system of every living thing is but a bundle of predispositions to react in particular ways upon the contact of particular features of the environment.
As surely as the hermit-crab’s abdomen presupposes the existence of empty whelk-shells somewhere to be found,so surely do the hound’s olfactories imply the existence, on the one hand, of deer’s or foxes’ feet, and on the other, the tendency to follow up their tracks.
The neural machinery is but a hyphen between determinate arrangements of matter ourtside the body and determinate impulses to inhibition or discharge within its organs.
When the hen sees a white oval object on the ground, she cannot leave it; she must keep upon it and return to it, until at last its transformation into a little mass of moving chirping down elicits from her machinery an entirely new set of performances.
The love of man for woman, or of the human mother for her babe, our wrath at snakes and our fear of precipices, may all be described similarly, as instances of the way in which peculiarly conformed pieces of the world’s furniture will fatally call forth most particular mental and bodily reactions, in advance of, and often in direct opposition to, the verdict of our deliberate reason concerning them.
The labours of Darwin and his successors are only just beginning to reveal the universal parasitism of each creature upon other special things, [p.191] and the way in which each creature brings the signature of its special relations stampted on its nervous system with it upon the scene.
Every living creature is in fact a sort of lock, whose wards and springs presuppose special forms of key, – which keys however are not born attached to the locks, but are sure to be found in the world near by as life goes on.
And the locks are indifferent to any but their own keys.
The egg fails to fascinate the hound, the bird does not fear the precipice, the snake waxes not wroth at his kind, the deer cares nothing for the woman or the human babe.
Those who wish for a full development of this point of view, should read Schneider’s Der thierische Wille, – no other book shows how accurately anticipatory are the actions of animals, of the specific features of the environment in which they are to live.
Now among these nervous anticipations are of course to be reckoned the emotions, so far as these may be called forth directly by the perception of certain facts.
In advance of all experience of elephants no child can but be frightened if he suddenly find one trumpeting and charging upon him.
No woman can see a handsome little naked baby without delight, no man in the wilderness see a human form in the distance without excitement and curiosity.
I said I should consider these emotions only so far as they have bodily movements of some sort for their accompaniments.
But my first point is to show that their bodily accompaniments are much more far-reaching and complicated than we ordinarily suppose.
In the earlier books on Expression, written mostly from the artistic point of view, the signs of emotion visible from without were the only ones taken account of. Sir Charles Bell’s celebrated Anatomy of Expression noticed the respiratory changes; and Bain’s and Darwin’s treatises went more thoroughly still into the study of the visceral factors involved,- changes in the functioning of glands and muscles, and in that of the circulatory apparatus.
But not even a Darwin has exhaustively enumerated all the bodily affections characteristic of any one of the standard emotions.
More and more, as physiology advances, we begin to discern how almost infinitely numerous and subtle they must be.
The researches of Mosso with the plethysmograph have shown that not only the heart, but the entire circulatory system, forms a sort of sounding-board, which every change of our consciousness, however slight, may make reverberate.
Hardly a sensation comes to us without sending waves of [p.192] alternate constriction and dilatation down the arteries of our arms.
The blood-vessels of the abdomen act reciprocally with those of the more outward parts.
The bladder and bowels, the glands of the mouth, throat, and skin, and the liver, are known to be affected gravely in certain severe emotions, and are unquestionably affected transiently when the emotions are of a lighter sort.
That the heart-beats and the rhythm of breathing play a leading part in all emotions whatsoever, is a matter too notorious for proof.
And what is really equally prominent, but less likely to be admitted until special attention is drawn to the fact, is the continuous co-operation of the voluntary muscles in our emotional states.
Even when no change of outward attitude is produced, their inward tension alters to suit each varying mood, and is felt as a difference of tone or of strain.
In depression the flexors tend to prevail; in elation or belligerent excitement the extensors take the lead.
And the various permutations and combinations of which these organic activities are susceptible, make it abstractly possible that no shade of emotion, however slight, should be without a bodily reverberation as unique, when taken in its totality, as is the mental mood itself.
The immense number of parts modified in each emotion is what makes it so difficult for us to reproduce in cold blood the total and integral expression of any one of them.
We may catch the trick with the voluntary muscles, but fail with the skin, glands, heart, and other viscera.
Just as an artificially imitated sneeze lacks something of the reality, so the attempt to imitate an emotion in the absence of its normal instigating cause is apt to be rather “hollow”.
The next thing to be noticed is this, that every one of the bodily changes, whatsoever it be, is felt, acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs.
If the reader has never paid attention to this matter, he will be both interested and astonished to learn how many different local bodily feelings he can detect in himself as characteristic of his various emotional moods.
It would be perhaps too much to expect him to arrest the tide of any strong gust of passion for the sake of any such curious analysis as this; but he can observe more tranquil states, and that may be assumed here to be true of the greater which is shown to be true of the less.
Our whole cubic capacity is sensibly alive; and each morsel of it contributes its pulsations of feeling, dim or sharp, pleasant, painful, or dubious, to that sense of personality that every one of us unfailingly carries with him.
It is surprisingly what little items give accent to these complexes of sensibility.
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When worried by any slight trouble, one may find that the focus of one’s bodily consciousness is the contraction, often quite inconsiderable, of the eyes and brows.
When momentarily embarrassed, it is something in the pharynx that compels either a swallow, a clearing of the throat, or a slight cough; and so on for as many more instances as might be named.
Our concern here being with the general view rather than with the details, I will not
linger to discuss these but, assuming the point admitted that every change that occurs must be felt, I will pass on.[1]
I now proceed to urge the vital point of my whole theory, which is this.
If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its characteristic bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no “mind-stuff” out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains.
It is true, that although most people, when asked say that their introspection verifies this statement, some persist in saying theirs does not.
Many cannot be made to understand the question.
When you beg them to imagine away every feeling of laughter and of tendency to laugh from their consciousness of the ludicrousness of an object, and then to tell you what the feeling of its ludicrousness would be like, whether it be anything
more than the perception that the object belongs to the class “funny,” they persist in replying that the thing proposed is a physical impossibility, and that they always must laugh, if they see a funny object.
Of course the task proposed is not the practical one of seeing a ludicrous object
and annihilating one’s tendency to laugh. It is the purely speculative one of subtracting certain elements of feeling from an emotional state supposed to exist in its fulness, and saying what the residual elements are.
I cannot help thinking that all who rightly apprehend this problem will agree with the proposition above laid down.
What kind of an emotion of fear would be left, if the feelings [p.194] neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is
quite impossible to think.
Can one fancy the state of rage and picture no ebullition of it in the chest, no flushing of the face, no dilatation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face?
The present writer, for one, certainly cannot.
The rage is as completely evaporated as the sensation of its so-called manifestations, and the only thing that can possibly be supposed to take its place is some cold-blooded and dispassionate judicial sentence, confined entirely to the intellectual realm, to the effect that a certain person or persons merit chastisement for their sins.
In like manner of grief: what would it be without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breast-bone?
A feelingless cognition that certain circumstances are deplorable, and nothing more.
Every passion in turn tells the same story.
A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
I do not say that it is a contradiction in the nature of things, or that pure spirits are necessarily condemned to cold intellectual lives; but I say that for us, emotion dissociated from all bodily feeling is inconceivable.
The more closely I scrutinise my states, the more persuaded I become, that whatever moods, affections, and passions I have, are in very truth constituted by, and made up of, those bodily changes we ordinarily call their expression or consequence; and the more it seems to me that if I were to become corporeally anaesthetic, I should be excluded from the life of the affections, harsh and tender alike, and drag out an existence of merely cognitive or intellectual form.
Such an existence, although it seems to have been the ideal of ancient sages, is too apathetic to be keenly sought after by those born after the revival of the worship of sensibility, a few generations ago.
But if the emotion is nothing but the feeling of the reflex bodily effects of what we call its objects,” effects due to the connate adaptation of the nervous system to that object, we seem immediately faced by this objection: most of the objects of civilised men’s emotions are things to which it would be preposterous to suppose their nervous systems connately adapted.
Most occasions of shame and many insults are purely conventional, and vary with the social environment.
The same is true of many matters of dread and of desire, and of many occasions of melancholy and regret.
In these cases, at least, it would seem that the [p.195] ideas of shame, desire, regret, &c., must first have been attached by education and association to these conventional objects before the bodily changes could possibly be awakened.
And if in these cases the bodily changes follow the ideas, instead of giving rise to them, why not then in all cases?
To discuss thoroughly this objection would carry us deep into the study of purely intellectual Aesthetics.
A few words must here suffice.
We will say nothing of the argument’s failure to distinguish between the idea of an emotion and the emotion itself.
We will only recall the wellknown evolutionary principle that when a certain power has once been fixed in an animal by virtue of its utility in presence of certain features of the environment, it may turn out to be useful in presence of other features of the environment that had originally nothing to do with either producing or preserving it.
A nervous tendency to discharge being once there, all sorts of unforeseen things may pull the trigger and let loose the effects.
That among these things should be conventionalities of man’s contriving is a matter of no psychological consequence whatever.
The most important part of my environment is my fellow-man.
The consciousness of his attitude towards me is the perception that normally unlocks most of my shames and indignations and fears.
The extraordinary sensitiveness of this consciousness is shown by the bodily modifications wrought in us by the awareness that our fellow-man is noticing us at all.
No one can walk across the platform at a public meeting with just the same muscular innervation he uses to walk across his room at home.
No one can give a message to such a meeting without organic excitement. “Stage-fright” is only the extreme degree of that wholly irrational personal self-consciousness which every one gets in some measure, as soon as he feels the eyes of a number of strangers fixed upon him, even though he be inwardly convinced that their feeling towards him is of no practical account [2] .
This being so, it is not surprising that the additional persuasion that my fellow-man’s attitude means either well or ill for me, should awaken stronger emotions still. In primitive societies “Well” may mean handing me a piece of beef, and “Ill” may mean aiming a blow at my skull. In our “cultured [p.196] age,” “Ill” may mean
cutting me in the street, and “Well,” giving me an honorary degree.
What the action itself may be is quite insignificant, so long as I can perceive in it intent or animus.
That is the emotionarousing perception; and may give rise to as strong bodily convulsions in me, a civilised man experiencing the treatment of an artificial society, as in any savage prisoner of war, learning whether his captors are about to eat him or to make him a member of their tribe.
But now, this objection disposed of, there arises a more general doubt.
Is there any evidence, it may be asked, for the assumption that particular perceptions do produce widespread bodily effects by a sort of immediate physical influence, antecedent to the arousal of an emotion or emotional idea?
The only possible reply is, that there is most assuredly such evidence.
In listening to poetry, drama, or heroic narrative, we are often surprised at the cutaneous shiver which like a sudden wave flows over us, and at the heart-swelling and the lachrymal effusion that unexpectedly catch us at intervals.
In listening to music, the same is even more strikingly true.
If we abruptly see a dark moving form in the woods, our heart stops beating, and we catch our breath instantly and before any articulate idea of danger can arise.
If our friend goes near to the edge of a precipice, we get the well-known feeling of “all-overishness,” and we shrink back, although we positively know him to be safe, and have no distinct imagination of his fall.
The writer well remembers his astonishment, when a boy of seven or eight, at fainting when he saw a horse bled.
The blood was in a bucket, with a stick in it, and, if memory does not deceive him, he stirred it round and saw it drip from the stick with no feeling save that of childish curiosity.
Suddenly the world grew black before his eyes, his ears began to buzz, and he knew no more.
He had never heard of the sight of blood producing faintness or sickness, and he had so little repugnance to it, and so little apprehension of any other sort of danger from it, that even at that tender age, as he well remembers, he could not help wondering how the mere physical presence of a pailful of crimson fluid occasion in him such formidable bodily effects.
Imagine two steel knife-blades with their keen edges crossing each other at right-angles, and moving too and fro.
Our whole nervous organisation is “on-edge” at the thought; and yet what emotion can be there except the unpleasant nervous feeling itself, or the dread that more of it may come? ~William James, First published in Mind, 9, 188-205
