304 BAIN ON THE EMOTIONS AND THE WILL. 



bird to take flight, is at first nothing more than an ide»\i 

 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 painful expe- 

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

 emotion m 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 has been organically modi- 

 fied by these experiences : we 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-reflex 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 jDainful consciousness thus arising, 

 constitutes emotion proper — emotion tmdecomposahle 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 difierent 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 develupment, there cannot be a 

 true natural history of the emotions ; and that a natural 



