THE EMOTIONS. 459 



logical cases and normal cases under a common scheme. 

 In every asylum we find examples of absolutely unmotived 

 fear, auger, melancholy, or conceit ; and others of an 

 equally unmotived apathy which persists in spite of the 

 best of outward reasons why it should give way. In the 

 former cases we must suppose the nervous machinery to be 

 so * labile ' in some one emotional direction that almost 

 every stimulus (however inappropriate) causes it to upset 

 in that way, and to engender the particular complex 

 of feelings of which the psychic body of the emotion 

 consists. Thus, to take one special instance, if inability 

 to draw deep breath, fluttering of the heart, and that 

 peculiar epigastric change felt as ' precordial anxiety,' 

 with an irresistible tendency to take a somewhat crouching 

 attitude and to sit still, and with perhaps other visceral 

 processes not now known, all spontaneously occur together 

 in a certain person ; his feeling oi their combination is the 

 emotion of dread, and he is the victim of what is known as 

 morbid fear. A friend who has had occasional attacks of 

 this most distressing of all maladies tells me that in his 

 case the whole drama seems to centre about the region of 

 the heart and respiratory apj^aratus, that his main effort 

 during the attacks is to get control of his inspirations and 

 to slow his heart, and that the moment he attains to breath- 

 ing deeply and to holding himself erect, the dread, ipso 

 foicto, seems to depart.* 



The emotion here is nothing but the feeling of a bodily 

 state, and it has a purely bodily cause. 



* It must be confessed that there are cases of morbid fear in which 

 objectively the heart is not much perturbed. These, however, fail to prove 

 anything against our theory, for it is of course possible that the cortical 

 centres normally percipient of dread as a complex of cardiac and other 

 organic sensations due to real bodily change, should become primarily ex- 

 cited in brain-disease, and give rise to an hallucination of the changes 

 being there, — an hallucination of dread, consequently, coexistent with a 

 comparatively calm pulse, etc. I say it is possible, for 1 am ignorant of 

 observations which might test the fact. Trance, ecstasy, etc., offer analo- 

 gous examples, — not to speak of ordinary dreaming. Under all these con- 

 ditions one may have the liveliest subjective feelings, either of eye or ear, 

 or of the more visceral and emotional sort, as a result of pure nerve-central 

 activity, and yet, as I believe, with complete peripheral repose. 



