THE PHYSIOLOGY OF EMOTION. 285 



Nevertheless, it is a fact that two great displays of force cannot co- 

 exist ; violent muscular exertion and intense thought cannot go on 

 together; the thinker sits, or stands, abstracted, motionless. The 

 man who is rowing or running a race cannot command his thoughts ; 

 ideas come and go through his mind, but he cannot keep up a con- 

 tinuous current of mental work. His force is being expended on 

 bodily movement. 



What is the answer to those who say they believe that emotions 

 reside in this or that part of the brain? We may object, first, 

 that every attempt to locate emotions has signally failed, from 

 the days of Gall, Spurzheim, and Combe, to those of Schroder 

 van der Kolk. Some have separated the seat of emotion from 

 the seat of the consciousness thereof, and have placed the latter 

 in the sensory ganglia. Others have placed emotions in the hemi- 

 spheres alone, and so would deny every thing of the kind to those 

 beings which have no cerebral hemispheres ; yet we see considerable 

 emotional feeling manifested by such creatures as the ant and the bee. 



Secondly, by an analysis of emotions we may perceive that there 

 is no real line of demarcation between them and mere feelings of a 

 much lower order, and that one and the other belong to the action 

 of the moment, and not to any past or future time. If we are 

 watching, say, a splendid sunset, we experience a feeling of intense 

 delight as the heavens are lit in gorgeous color. The following 

 day we may recall the scene, but we do not feel the pleasure. We 

 remember the pleasure, but it remains, like the scene, only as an 

 idea, it is not now a feeling. Now, few, I presume, would assert that 

 the perception of this sight resides in one part of the brain, and the* 

 feeling attending it in another. If this were so, we ought to be able 

 to excite the feeling by means of the idea preserved in the memory ; 

 but this we cannot do. The original stimulation causes the pleasure, 

 and this vanishes, never again to return. It is only in complexity 

 that the highest emotions differ from this simple feeling ; they involve 

 more ideas, more acquisitions, previously laid up, but the effect of the 

 immediate stimulation is the same ; this it is which, according to its 

 intensity, causes the pleasure or pain. The same may be said of pain 

 experienced ; we may recall the memory of it, but this is not the 

 same thing ; even the memory may be distressing and saddening, but 

 this is different from the acute pang which we suffer at the first shock. 



The brain is a sealed book far more than some of the other organs 

 of the body, as the lungs and heart ; but, if we could inspect it at 

 work, it is not probable that we should be able to note those molecular 

 changes, which, nevertheless, we believe to take place when mental 

 action is going on. What we should see, however, would be alterations 

 in the circulation of the blood. We should see that the whole circu- 

 lation, or portions of it, would be affected by mental excitation, by 

 the stimulation of the various cells or groups of cells, which we call 



