1892.] on Emotional Expression. 655 



body, each feeling has at the same time special channels, internal 

 and external, through which it principally discharges itself, and 

 makes its existence known. Each feeling has its appropriate 

 expression different from the expression of every other feeling, and 

 our main objects this evening are to inquire what are the appropriate 

 expressions of certain feelings, and how comes it that these appropriate 

 expressions have been attached to certain feelings ? What is the 

 origin and significance of emotional expression ? 



In the investigation of these questions — and few questions are 

 more difficult or obscure^ — the illustrious Darwin has, as I daresay 

 you know, taken the foremost place. By an elaborate research he 

 endeavours to explain the origin of the expressions, used by man and 

 animals under the influence of emotions, and he arrives at the con- 

 clusion that these are to be explained by three principles which he 

 calls the principles of Associated Serviceable Habits, of Antithesis, 

 and of the Action of the Nervous System. 



Movements, he argues, which have been found serviceable to 

 escape from danger, or to relieve distress, which were at first 

 voluntarily performed for a definite object, have by frequent repetition 

 become innate or inherited, and are afterwards performed whether of 

 service or not, whenever the desire or sensation out of which they 

 originally arose is again experienced. Horses, which fight with their 

 teeth in their native state, at some remote period found it serviceable 

 to prevent their prominent ears from being bitten or torn ; by 

 retracting them and laying them flat against the head when engaged 

 in combat. In the course of generations this, at first purposive and 

 voluntary movement, becomes involuntary and habitual, and now we 

 have the laying back of the ears as the sure sign of anger in the 

 horse — the expression of those emotions which were stirred in it by 

 conflict, even when those emotions recur in a much milder degree, 

 and are provoked by some insignificant cause, such as the tickling of 

 the curry-comb, and when its ears are no longer in danger. When 

 infants scream loudly to intimate hunger or pain, the circulation in 

 the eyeballs and their sockets is affected. These parts become 

 gorged with blood, an uneasy sensation results, and the infant finds 

 that contraction of the muscles in front of the eye — the muscles of 

 the eyelids and eyebrows — is serviceable to relieve this sensation and 

 afford protection. By frequent repetition of this experience through 

 many generations of infants, the acti(m, at first wiltul, has become 

 fixed and inherited, so that now, even in grown men nnd women who 

 have learnt to suppress screaming when in pain or distress, contrac- 

 tion of the muscles round the eyes still betrays the existence of these 

 feelings, contraction of these muscles having become the expression 

 of the emotion of pain or distress. This is Darwin's principle of 

 Associated Serviceable Movements. 



But movements, again Darwin argues, which have never them- 

 selves been serviceable, but which are the opposites of movements 

 that have been so, have come to be representative of states of emotion 



