1892.] Sir James Crichton-Browne, on Emotional Expression. 653 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, May 27, 1892, 



Sir Frederick Bramwell, Bart. D.C.L. LL.D. F.R.S. 

 Honorary Secretary and Vice-President, in the Chair. 



Sir James Crichton-Browne, M.D. LL.D. F.R.S. Treas. B.L 



Emotional Expression. 



It has been argued that any detailed list or description of the emo- 

 tions is impossible, and that so numerous and varied are the feelings 

 of the mind that it is as futile and unprofitable to catalogue them as 

 it would be to register the ever shifting patterns of the kaleidoscope. 

 These feelings, it is alleged, are not specific mental entities like the 

 old immutable species of plants and animals, but ever changing 

 phases of life which defy analysis and classification. Now, allowing 

 that many psychologists have divided and subdivided the feelings 

 with too much elaboration, have drawn artificial distinctions between 

 them, and have mistaken mere passing phenomena for permanent 

 types, I must still maintain that the feelings do admit of arrangement 

 in certain great natural orders, and that however multifarious or 

 blended their manifestations may be, we can always recognise in 

 them some of the ingredients of which they are made up. When we 

 look at a painting — a landscape, portrait, or historical scene, and 

 delight in its rich and delicate colouring, we soon perceive that the 

 colours that please us are cunningly and perplexingly mixed. Almost 

 every touch is compounded of several pigments, and in no two touches 

 do the same pigments mingle in exactly the same proportion. And 

 yet in these compounded touches we can say in most instances what 

 pigments have gone to their composition, while every here and there, 

 amongst them we discern a point or streak of pure colour, and so in 

 the end we can affirm with tolerable certainty what paints — crimson- 

 lake, burnt-sienna, flake- white, or Vandyke-brown — were on the 

 palette of the painter who produced the picture. And so when we 

 witness on the canvas of the human face, representations of feeling, 

 trivial, stirring, or profound, we are at first struck by the high com- 

 plexity and infinite variety of their constituent parts. The features 

 move in ever new and subtle combinations, and for no two seconds 

 are their aspects exactly alike. But when we look a little deeper we 

 find that we are able to identify in the flux of feeling many of its 

 constituent elements, while here and there we detect flashes of pure 

 primitive emotion, and the result is that we are able to say with some 

 confidence what feelings — curiosity, rage, hatred, or pride — were in 

 the mind of the man or woman whose agitated countenance we have 

 been watching. 



