THE EMOTIONS. 449 



is to get to ever deeper levels. Is there no way out from this 

 level of individual description in the case of the emotions ? 

 I believe there is a way out, but I fear that few will take it. 

 The trouble with the emotions in psychology is that 

 they are regarded too much as absolutely individual things. 

 So long as they are set down as so many eternal and sacred 

 psychic entities, like the old immutable species in natural 

 history, so long all that can be done with them is reverently 

 to catalogue their separate characters, points, and efiects. 

 But if we regard them as products of more general causes 

 (as ' species ' are now regarded as products of heredity and 

 variation), the mere distinguishing and cataloguing becomes 

 of subsidiary importance. Having the goose which lays 

 the golden eggs, the description of each egg already laid is 

 a minor matter. Now the general causes of the emotions 

 are indubitably physiological. Prof. C. Lange, of Copen- 

 hagen, in the pamphlet from which I have already quoted, 

 published in 1885 a physiological theory of their constitu- 

 tion and conditioning, which I had already broached the 

 previous year in an article in Mind. None of the criti- 

 cisms which I have heard of it have made me doubt its 

 essential truth. I will therefore devote the next few pages 

 to explaining what it is. I shall limit myself in the first 

 instance to what may be called the coarser emotions, grief, 

 fear, lage, love, in which every one recognizes a strong 

 organic reverberation, and afterwards speak of the subtler 

 emotions, or of those whose organic reverberation is less 

 obvious and strong. 



EMOTION FOLLOWS UPON THE BODILY EXPEESSION IN 

 THE COARSER EMOTIONS AT LEAST. 



Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emo- 

 tions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the 

 mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter 

 state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My 

 theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow di- 

 rectly the perception of the. exciting fact, and that our feeling of 

 the same changes as they occur is the emotion. Common-sense 

 says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep ; we meet a 



