302 UAIN ON THE EMOTIONS AND THE WILL. 



stock, show us the cumulative results of small modifications 

 hereditarily transmitted. And when we see that between 

 savage and civilized races, which diverged from each other 

 in the remote past, and have fop a hundred generations fol 

 lowed modes of life becoming over more unlike, there ex 

 ist still greater emotional contrasts ; may we not infer that 

 the more or less d.stinct emotions which characterize civil 

 ized races, are the organized results of certain daily-repeat 

 ed combinations of mental states which social life involves ? 

 Must we not say that habits not only modify emotions in 

 the individual, and not only beget tendencies to like 

 habits and accompanying emotions in descendants, but that 

 when the conditions of the race make the habits per 

 sistent, this progressive modification may go on to the ex 

 tent of producing emotions so far distinct as to seem new ? 

 And if so, we may suspect that such new emotions, and 

 by implication all emotions analytically considered, consist 

 of aggregated and consolidated groups of those simpler 

 feelings which habitually occur together in experience : 

 that they result from combined experiences, and are con 

 stituted of them. 



When, in the circumstances of any race, some one kind of 

 action or set of actions, sensation or set of sensations, is usual 

 ly followed, or accompanied by, various other sets of actions 

 or sensations, and so entails a large mass of pleasurable or 

 painful states of consciousness ; these, by frequent repetition, 

 become so connected together that the initial action or sensa 

 tion brings the ideas of all the rest crowding into conscious 

 ness : producing, in a degree, the pleasures or pains that 

 have before been felt in reality. And when this relation, 

 besides being frequently repeated in the individual, occurs 

 in successive generations, all the many nervous actions in 

 volved tend to grow organically connected. They become 

 incipiently reflex ; and on the occurrence of the appropriate 

 stimulus, the whole nervous apparatus which in past gener- 



