208 Habit and Instinct. 



as visceral) ; these visceral data, I submit, are what give 

 to the states of consciousness their distinctive emotional 

 character. What therefore is congenital in emotion is 

 of like nature with that which is congenital in the 

 activities termed instinctive, namely, an organized group 

 of outgoing impulses. What we have termed " activity - 

 feelings " are the conscious effects of the back-stroke from 

 the motor-activities, more or less tinged no doubt with 

 pleasure or pain. What I regard as distinctively 

 emotional is the conscious effect of the back-stroke from 

 the visceral actions, more or less tinged again with 

 pleasure or pain. This back-stroke, whether from motor- 

 activity or visceral action, is a matter of primary genesis. 

 In subsequent experience, memory through association, 

 affords re-presentative echoes of primary presentations, 

 and these, together with modifications introduced by 

 individual acquisition, serve to render extraordinarily 

 complex the emotional states of adult animals, and still 

 more the emotional states of adult human beings, in 

 whom conceptual thought, with all that it involves and 

 brings with it, has been developed. 



It must not be supposed, then, that, in tracing the 

 genetic connection that exists between instinct-feelings 

 (motor in origin) and emotional back-stroke (visceral in 

 origin), I am contending that what is commonly termed 

 an emotional state is just this and nothing more. That 

 would be absurd. The whole state of consciousness to 

 which the term emotion may be conveniently applied, 

 because it contains the emotional factor, is by no means 

 so simple as this. What we commonly describe as an 

 emotion is, indeed, a highly complex state of consciousness 

 involving a great number of diverse elements; elements 

 due to the special senses, sight, hearing, and so forth, 

 through which we are aware of the presence of the object 



