August 2, 1900] 



NA TURE 



329 



play special and characteristic rdles in the various emotions. 

 These viscera, though otherwise remote from the general play 

 of psychical process, are affected vividly by the emotional. 

 Hence many a picturesque metaphor of proverb and phrase and 

 name — "the heart is better than the head," anger "swells 

 within the breast," " Richard Cneur de Lion." It was Descartes 

 who first relegated the emotions to the brain. Even this century 

 Bichat wrote, "The brain is the seat of cognition, and is 

 never affected by the emotions, whose sole seat lies in the 

 viscera." But brain is now admittedly a factor necessary in 

 all higher animal forms to every mechanism whose working has 

 consciousness adjunct. 



What is the meaning of the intimate linkage of visceral 

 actions to psychical states emotional ? To the ordinary day's 

 consciousness of the healthy individual, the life of the 

 viscera contributes little at all, except under emotion. The 

 perceptions of the normal consciousness are rather those of 

 outlook upon the circumambent universe than inlook into the 

 microcosm of the " mateiial me." Yet heightened beating of 

 the heart, blanching or flushing of the blood-vessels, the pallor 

 of fear, the blush of shame, the Rabelaisian effect of fright 

 upon the bowel, the action of the lacrymal gland in grief, 

 all these are prominent characters in the pantomime of 

 natural emotion. Visceral disturbance is evidently a part of 

 the corporeal expression of emotion. The explanation is a 

 particular case in that of movements of expression in general. 

 The hypothesis of Evolution afforded a new vantage point 

 for study of that question. Fixed bodily expressions of emo- 

 tion are hereditary. They are, especially in the "coarser or 

 animal emotions," largely common to man and higher animals. 

 The point of view is exemplified by Darwin's argument con- 

 cerning the contraction of the muscles round the eyes during 

 screaming. "Children when wanting food or suffering in any 

 way cry out loudly like the young of most animals, partly as a call 

 to their parents for aid, and partly from any great exertion 

 serving as relief. Prolonged screaming inevitably leads to the 

 engorging of the blood-vessels of the eye ; and this will have led 

 at first consciously and at last habitually to the contraction of the 

 muscles round the eyes in order to protect them." Mr. Spencer 

 writes : " Fear, when strong, expresses itself in cries, in efforts 

 to hide or escape, in palpitations and tremblings ; and 

 these are just the manifestations which would accompany 

 an actual experience of the evil feared. The destructive 

 passions are shown in a general tension of the muscular system, 

 in gnashing of the teeth and protrusion of the claws, in dilated 

 eyes and nostrils, in growls : and these are weaker forms of the 

 actions that accompany the killing of prey." In a word, expres- 

 sion of emotion is instinctive action. 



Movement of expression, be it facial or vocal, let it involve 

 the skeletal or the visceral musculature, must have an explana- 

 tion the same in kind as that of other instinctive movement. 

 To enter upon its "why" is to enter upon the "why" of 

 instinct. Suffice it to say here that if we follow the doctrine 

 of evolution we cannot admit any absolute break between 

 man and brute even in the matter of mental endowment. 

 The instinctive bodily expressions of emotion probably arose 

 as attitudes useful in the animal's environment for defence, 

 escape, seizure, embrace, &c. These as survivals have be- 

 come symbolic for states of mind. Hence the intelligible 

 nexus between the muscular attitude, the pose of feature, &c., 

 and the emotional state of mind. But between action of the 

 viscera and the psychical state the nexus is less obviously 

 explicable. This latter connection adds a difficult corollary to 

 the general problem. 



The fact of the connection is on all hands admitted, but 

 as to the manner of it opinion is at issue. Does (i) the 

 psychical part of the emotion arise and its correlate nervous 

 action then excite the viscera ? Or (2) does the same stimulus 

 which excites the mind excite concurrently and per se the 

 nervous centres ruling the viscera ? Or (3) does the stimulus 

 which is the exciting cause of the emotion act first on the 

 nervous centres ruling the viscera, and their action then gene- 

 rate visceral sensations ; and do these latter, laden with affective 

 quality as we know they will be, induce the emotion of the 

 mind ? On the first of the three hypotheses the visceral 

 reaction will be secondary to the psychical, on the second the 

 two will be collateral and concurrent, on the third the psychical 

 process will be secondary to the visceral. 



To examine the last supposition first. It is a view which in 

 recent years has won notable adherents. Prof, William James 



NO. 1605, VOL. 62] 



writes : " Our natural way of thinking about these coarser 

 emotions {e.g. "grief, fear, rage, love") is that the mental per- 

 ception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emo- 

 tion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily 

 expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily 

 changes Jollow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and 

 that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion.^' 

 ' ' Every one of the bodily changes, whatsoever it be, is FELT, 

 acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs. If the reader has 

 never paid attention to this matter, he will be both interested 

 and astonished to learn how many different local bodily feelings 

 he can detect in himself as characteristic of his various emotional 

 moods." "If we fancy some strong emotion and then try to 

 abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily 

 symptoms we find we have nothing left behind, no "mind- 

 stuff" out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a 

 cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that 

 remains." "If I were to become corporeally anaesthetic, I 

 should be excluded from the life of the affections, harsh and 

 tender alike, and drag out an existence of merely cognitive or 

 intellectual form." 



Prof. Lange traces the whole psycho-physiology of emotion 

 to certain excitations of the vasomotor centre. For him, as 

 f >r Prof. James, the emotion is the outcome and not the cause 

 or the concomitant of the organic reaction ; but for him the 

 foundation and corner-stone of the organic reaction is as to 

 physiological quality vascular, namely, vasomotor. Emotion 

 is an outcome of vasomotor reaction to stimuli of a particular 

 kind. This stimulus induces a vasomotor action in viscera 

 skin, and brain. The change thus induced in the circulatory 

 condition of these organs induces changes in the actions of tlie 

 organs themselves, and these latter changes evoke sensations 

 which constitute the essential part of emotion. It is by excita- 

 tion of the vasomotor centre, therefore, that the exciting cause, 

 whatever it chance to be, of emotion produces the organic 

 phenomena which as felt constitute for Lange the whole essence 

 of emotion. The teaching of I'rof, Sergi closely approximates 

 to that of Lange. 



The views of James, Lange, and Sergi have common to them 

 this, that the psychical process of emotion is secondary to a dis- 

 charge of nervous impulses into the vascular and visceral organs 

 of the body suddenly excited by certain peculiar stimuli, and 

 that it depends upon the reaction of those organs. Prof. James's 

 position in the matter is, however, not wholly like that of Prof. 

 Lange. In the first place, he does not consider vasomotor re- 

 action to be primary to all the other organic and visceral dis- 

 turbances that carry in their train the psychological appanage of 

 emotion ; and Prof Sergi, though more nearly in harmony 

 with Lange, agrees with James in this. In the second place, 

 Prof. James seems to distinctly include other "motor" sensa- 

 tions and centripetal impulses from musculature other than 

 visceral and vascular, among those which causally contribute 

 to emotion. Thirdly, he urges his theory as one com- 

 pletely competent only for the " coarser " emotion*, among which 

 he instances "fear, anger, love, grief." For Lange and 

 Sergi the basis of apparition of all feeling and emotion is 

 physiological, visceral, and organic, and has seat for the former 

 authority exclusively, and for the latter eminently, in the 

 vasomotor system. 



To obtain some test of this view is not difficult by experiment. 

 Appropriate spinal and vagal transection removes completely 

 and immediately the sensation of all the viscera and of all the 

 skin and muscles below the shoulder (see Fig. i on p. 330). The 

 procedure at the same time cuts from connection with the organs 

 of consciousness the whole of the circulatory apparatus of the 

 body. I have had under observation dogs in which this had 

 been carried out. I will cite an animal selected because of 

 markedly emotional temperament. Affectionate toward the 

 laboratory attendants, one of whom bad her in charge, to- 

 ward some persons and toward several inmates of the animal 

 house she frequently showed violent anger. Her ebullitions of 

 rage were sudden. Their expression accorded with a description 

 furni.shed by Darwin. Besides the utterance of the growl, " the 

 ears are pressed closely backwards, and the upper lip is re- 

 tracted out of the way of the teeth, especially of the canines." 

 The mouth was slightly opened and lifted ; the eyelids widely 

 parted ; the pupils dilated. The hair along the mid-dorsum, 

 from close behind the head to a point more than half way 

 down the trunk, became rough and bristling. 



The reduction of the field of sensation in this animal by the 



