30-i BAIN ON THE EMOTIONS AND THE WILL. 



bird to take Hight, is at first nothing more than an ide.u 

 reproduction of those painful impressions which before fol 

 lowed man s approach ; that such ideal reproduction be 

 comes more vivid and more massive as the paiuful expe 

 riences, direct or sympathetic, increase ; and that thus the 

 emotion in its incipient state, is nothing else than an aggre 

 gation of the revived pains before experienced. 



As, in the course of generations, the young birds of this 

 race begin to display a fear of man before yet they have 

 been injured by him ; it is an unavoidable inference that 

 the nervous system of the race lias been organically modi- 

 lied by these experiences : AVC have no choice but to con 

 clude that when a young bird is thus led to fly, it is be 

 cause the impression produced on its senses by the ap 

 proaching man, entails, through an incipiently-reilex action, 

 a partial excitement of all those nerves which in its ances 

 tors had been excited under the like conditions ; that this 

 partial excitement has its accompanying painful conscious 

 ness ; and that the vague painful consciousness thus arising, 

 constitutes emotion proper emotion undecomposfible into 

 specific experiences, and therefore seemingly homogeneous. 



If such be the explanation of the fact in this case, then 

 it is in all cases. If emotion is so generated here, then it 

 is so generated throughout. We must perforce conclude 

 that the emotional modifications displayed by diilerent na 

 tions, and those higher emotions by which civilized are dis 

 tinguished from savage, are to be accounted for on the 

 same principle. And concluding this, we are led strongly 

 to suspect that the emotions in general have severally thus 

 originated. 



Perhaps we have now made sufficiently clear what we 

 mean by the study of the emotions through analysis and 

 development. We have aimed to justify the positions that, 

 without analysis aided by development, there cannot be a 

 true natural history of the emotions ; and that a natural 



