450 PSYCHOLOGY. 



bear, are frightened and run ; we are insulted by a rival, 

 are angry and strike. Tlie liypothesis here to be defended 

 savs that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one 

 mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that 

 the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, 

 and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry 

 because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because 

 we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, be- 

 cause we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. 

 Without the bodily states following on the perception, the 

 latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, 

 destitute of emotional warmth. "We might then see the 

 bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem 

 it right to strike, but we should not actually /ee? afraid or 

 angry. 



Stated in this crude way, the hypothesis is pretty sure 

 to meet with immediate disbelief. And yet neither many 

 nor far-fetched considerations are required to mitigate its 

 paradoxical character, and possibly to produce conviction 

 of its truth. 



To begin with, no reader of the last two chapters will 

 be inclined to doubt the fact that objects do excite bodily 

 changes by a preorganized mechanism, or the farther fact 

 that the changes are so indefinitely numerous and subtle that the 

 entire organism may be called a sounding-board, which every 

 change of consciousness, however slight, may make rever- 

 berate. The various permutations and combinations of 

 which these organic activities are susceptible make it ab= 

 stractly possible that no shade of emotion, however slight, 

 should be without a bodily reverberation as unique, when 

 taken in its totality, as is the mental mood itself. The 

 immense number of parts modified in each emotion is what 

 makes it so difiicult for us to reproduce in cold blood the 

 total and integral expression of any one of them. We may 

 catch the trick with the voluntary muscles, but fail with 

 the skin, glands, heart, and other viscera. Just as an arti- 

 ficially imitated sneeze lacks something of the reality, so 

 the attempt to imitate an emotion in the absence of its 

 normal instigating cause is apt to be rather ' hollow.' 



The next thing to be noticed is this, that every one of the 



