302 BAIN 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 for a hundred generations fol- 

 lowed modes of life becoming ever more unlike, there ex- 

 ist still greater emotional contrasts ; may we not infer that 

 the more or less distinct 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 groujjs 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 rej^etition, 

 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 ajDpropriate 

 stimulus, the whole nervous apparatus which in past gener 



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