THE EMOTIONS. 451 



bodily cha7iges, ivhatsoever it he, 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. 

 It would be perhaps too much to expect him to arrest the 

 tide of any strong gust of passion for the sake of any such 

 curious analj'sis as this ; but he can observe more tranquil 

 states, and that may be assumed here to be true of the 

 greater which is shown to be true of the less. Our whole 

 cubic cajjacity is sensibly alive ; and each morsel of it con- 

 tributes its pulsations of feeling, dim or sharp, pleasant, 

 painful, or dubious, to that sense of personality that every 

 one of us unfailingly carries with him. It is surprising what 

 little items give accent to these complexes of sensibility. 

 When worried by any slight trouble, one may find that the 

 focus of one's bodily consciousness is the contraction, often 

 quite inconsiderable, of the eyes and brows. When mo- 

 mentaril}' embarrassed, it is something in the pharynx that 

 compels either a swallow, a clearing of the throat, or a 

 slight cough ; and so on for as many more instances as 

 might be named. Our concern here being with the general 

 view rather than with the details, I will not linger to discuss 

 these, but, assuming the point admitted that every change 

 that occurs must be felt, I will pass on. 



I now proceed to urge the vital point of my whole 

 theorj^ which is this : If ive faticy some strong emotion, and 

 then try to abstract from 02tr consciousness of it all the feelings 

 of its bodily symptoms, we find ive 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. It is true that, although most people 

 when asked say that their introspection verifies this state- 

 ment, some persist in saying theirs does not. Many cannot 

 be made to understand the question. When you beg them 

 to imagine away every feeling of laughter and of tendency 

 to laugh from their consciousness of the ludicrousness of 

 an object, and then to tell you what the feeling of its ludi- 

 crousness would be like, whether it be anything more than 

 the perception that the object belongs to the class * funny,* 



