452 PSYCHOLOGY. 



tliej persist in replying that the thing proposed is a 

 physical impossibility, and that they always must laugh if 

 they see a funny object. Of course the task proposed is 

 not the practical one of seeing a ludicrous object and anni- 

 hilating one's tendency to laugh. It is the purely specu- 

 lative one of subtracting certain elements of feeling from 

 an emotional state supposed to exist in its fulness, and say- 

 ing what the residual elements are. I cannot help think- 

 ing that all who rightly apprehend this problem will agree 

 with the proposition above laid down. What kind of an 

 emotion of fear Avould be left if the feeling neither of 

 quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of 

 trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh 

 nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible 

 for me to think. Can one fancy the state of rage and pic- 

 ture no ebullition in the chest, no flushing of the face, no dil- 

 atation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse 

 to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles, calm 

 breathing, and a placid face ? The present writer, for one, 

 certainly cannot. The rage is as comjjletely evaporated as 

 the sensation of its so-called manifestations, and the only 

 thing that can possibly be supposed to take its place is some 

 cold-blooded and disjjassionate judicial sentence, confined 

 entirely to the intellectual realm, to the efi'ect that a certain 

 person or persons merit chastisement for their sins. In 

 like manner of grief : w hat would it be Avithout its tears, its 

 sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breast- 

 bone ? A feelingless cognition that certain circumstances are 

 deplorable, and nothing more. Every passion in turn tells 

 the same story. A purely disembodied human emotion is 

 a nonentity. I do not say that it is a contradiction in the 

 nature of things, or that pure spirits are necessarily con- 

 demned to cold intellectual lives ; but I say that for us, 

 emotion dissociated from all bodily feeling is inconceivable. 

 The more closely I scrutinize my states, the more persuaded 

 I become that whatever moods, affections, and passions I 

 have are in very truth constituted by, and made up of, 

 those bodily changes which we ordinarily call their expres- 

 sion or consequence ; and the more it seems to me that if I 

 were to become corporeally anaesthetic, I should be ex- 



