106 AN ATTEMPT AT A NEW THEORY OF HUMAN EMOTIONS. 



excitement is considerable. Joy, which means pleasurable emotion 

 arising from the actual possession or immediate anticipation of good, 

 with its direct contrast grief, are the simplest emotions for which we 

 have names. If the pleasure or pain be actually present, and refer- 

 able to a specific part of our frame, especially if its too great vividness 

 does not confuse our perceptions, the transition from actual sense of 

 pleasure or pain to pleasing or painful emotions is very perceptible. 

 If the satisfaction is derived from the acquired command of the means 

 of pleasure, the emotion depends on such complex associations that 

 its nature is not discerned with any peculiar facility. Love expresses 

 the simple pleasurable emotion, so associated with an object or person 

 that has frequently excited it, or is believed capable of exciting it, as 

 to be very readily called up by the presence, name, or recollection of 

 that object or person. Gratitude, again, is the name we employ to 

 express the same simple, pleasing emotion, strongly excited in connec- 

 tion with specific benefits received from an intelligent agent, with the 

 corresponding desire of conferring pleasure on the object of our grati- 

 tude. We will add the analysis of a still more complex state belong- 

 ing to this class, to which our attention is naturally led by the 

 examples already brought forward. I refer to the filial afPection. 

 Scarcely any one would pretend that this is a simple emotion. Every- 

 thing which belongs to it is fully expressed by describing it as made 

 up of love, gratitude, confidence, and reverence. We have. seen the 

 nature of the two former : confidence is the feeling with which an 

 inferior and dependent looks up to a superior and controlling being, 

 in whose knowledge of what is really good and desire to bestow it 

 experience has taught him to trust. Reverence is only a certain 

 amount of fear, the simple painful emotion associated with an object 

 which has caused restraint, disappointment, or suffering of any kind, 

 intermingled with the other emotions already named as entering into 

 the filial feeling. We might in this manner examine any of the 

 various emotions attributed to human beings, and we should find them 

 all to be the emotion belonging to pleasure or to pain excited in cer- 

 tain circumstances, or the two intermingled in such a manner that 

 convenience dictates the use for them of separate names, but I have 

 also endeavoured to shew in what manner a mere pleasure or pain 

 passes from the condition of a sensation to an emotion by its sympa- 

 thetic diffusion so as to belong no longer to a particular nerve or 

 organ, but to our frame generally. We have thus the elements of a 



