The Emotions in their Relation to Instinct. 201 



something clearly distinguishable from an emotional state. 

 If I read aright the testimony of my own consciousness 

 I often experience pleasurable or painful activity-feelings 

 without emotion, and sometimes have a strong emotion 

 in which there seems to be no recognizable contribution, 

 presentative or re-presentative, from the activity-feelings. 



It would seem then, if there be any truth in the con- 

 siderations just hinted at rather than developed, that what 

 is specially characteristic of emotion, as such, does not 

 take its origin in the motor elements; and it becomes 

 probable that it is the visceral elements which afford the 

 differentiae of emotion. If so, it is not the instinct-feeling 

 in its motor aspect — what we may term the activity-feeling 

 — that is concerned in the primary genesis of an emotion, 

 but rather the concurrent and associated set of visceral 

 actions. Let us see, therefore, whether observations on 

 the active and emotional life of young birds throw any 

 light upon this problem. Take the case of a young 

 frightened moorhen. On land he runs away, and perhaps 

 crouches in the rushes ; in the water he dives, and comes 

 up quietly under the bank and there stays still. The 

 activities involved in running and diving are very different ; 

 must not the activity-feelings be very different too ? And 

 yet we must surely suppose them to have a common 

 emotional element. Again, when a moorhen catches sight 

 of a worm and runs hard to secure it, the activity-feelings 

 must, as such, one would suppose, be very similar to those 

 experienced when the moorhen runs vigorously away from 

 a goose. And yet in the one case he is frightened, and in 

 the other case he is not. Here similar activity-feelings 

 are associated with wholly different emotional states. 



Frightened chicks scatter and crouch ; but many birds 

 seem to show more markedly than the chick a crouching 

 response and a running-away response. As I have 



