Herrick, Modem Algedonic Theories. 1 5 



of behaving — a certain practical attitude. By thus making 

 emotion include sentiment and temperamental moduli he lays 

 his own theories open to easy attack. The mode of behavior is 

 for him the primary thing. The feeling element is super-in- 

 duced. Thus the instinct to fight may have arisen and become 

 perpetuated by natural selection until it is the inevitable re- 

 sponse of the organism to a given presentation but no feeling 

 of anger is necessarily implied. When the impulse is inhibited 

 and is dammed up, as it were, by conscious coordination it be- 

 comes anger. Emotion is then the adjustment or tension of 

 habit and ideal. So far as Professor Dewey's theory empha- 

 sises the inhibitory element in complex emotions he adds force 

 to our own physiological theory by indicating how the higher 

 emotional elements are translated into the proper physiological 

 terms to produce feeling; namely, by inhibition, which soon 

 gives rise to summation phenomena such as afford the peculiar 

 nisus of feeling. We have here a dash of the resistance the- 

 ory also. 



Professor Dewey offers the following summary: "Certain 

 movements, formerly useful in themselves, become reduced to 

 tendencies to action, to attitudes. As such they serve, vvhen 

 instinctively aroused into action, as means for realizing ends. 

 But so far as there is difficulty in adjusting the organic activity 

 represented by the attitude with that which stands for the idea 

 or end, there is affect, or emotional seizure. Let the coordina- 

 tion be effected in one act, instead of in a successive series of 

 mutually exclusive stimuli and we have interest. Let such 

 coordinations become thoroughly habitual and hereditary, and 

 we have Gefuhlston.'' We may remark that the theory as thus 

 stated does not explain the appetencies and simple sensuous 

 pleasures or gratifications ; it is less happy in dealing with pleas- 

 ure than with pain ; the use of the term " attitude " is very un- 

 fortunate ; and, finally, it fails to recognize many simple physi- 

 ological facts. When we have agreed upon the nature of the 

 simplest sense, pain and gratification, the foundation will have 

 been laid for the more complex aesthetic phenomena. This 

 foundation we believe consists in the recognition of a special 



