Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1895 edition. Excerpt: ... anger in studying any state of consciousness we first inquire what constitutes its dominant factor; if this is sense of object, we call it a cognition; if effortful action, it is a volition; if the marked feature is pleasure-pairi, we term it a feeling. Finding that the consciousness is a feeling, we would next inquire whether the pleasure-pain is mainly determined in its colouring by direct presentation, and so is a sensation, or whether this dominant colouring comes indirectly through representation, and is thus what we term an emotion. For example, the distinction between " I feel a pain in my shoulder," and "I feel pained at your conduct" illustrates the most radical division of feeling. If emotion is founded on an appreciation of the experienceable, which has developed under natural selection, we must look upon the emotional power in general and upon the various emotions in particular as merely advantageous psychoses which are as clearly determined by general evolutionary laws as the merely physical organs like heart, lungs, wings, horns, etc. It is clearly desirable that the organism should look before, should anticipate experience and so direct its way; but bare anticipation has no value in itself unless it powerfully stimulates will through emotion. All conscious life above the most primitive is eminently and increasingly anticipatory, and so becomes more and more infused with emotional powers. Among the earliest developed of these in the struggle for existence are fear and anger. The fear group, embracing large numbers of allied forms, simple and complex, has been discussed in a general way in the preceding pages, and we now come to some consideration of the correlative anger group. The rationale of the evolution of anger is not...