Reduction 5 3 



ment. Emotions are adverse to specialization 

 and their first effects are destructive to the parts 

 affected. If they are adverse to growth, they 

 tend, by weakening the vegetative forces, to favor 

 those that end in reproduction. This thought 

 leads me to assume that reduction is the physi- 

 ologic expression of facts, the psychic expres- 

 sion of which is emotion ; in other words 

 if the psychic feeling could be measured 

 when a reduction takes place, it would 

 appear in consciousness as an emotion, and 

 if the physiologic changes that accompany 

 emotions could be observed, they would be 

 found to be reductions. To put the same 

 facts in still another way, emotions and re- 

 ductions are both due to shocks which dis- 

 turb the rhythm of organisms, and, in their 

 disturbance, the specialized parts suffer most 

 and are often severed from the organism and 

 ejected as polar bodies. 



These facts are difficult to verify because 

 the reductions that can be readily observed 

 are in simple organisms of whose psychic 

 states we know little, while the emotions we 

 could measure are in beings so complex that 



