468 PSYCHOLOGY. 



THE SUBTLER EMOTION'S. 



These are the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic feelings. 

 Concords of sounds, of colors, of lines, logical consistencies, 

 teleological fitnesses, afi'ect us with a pleasure that seems 

 ingrained in the very form of the representation itself, and 

 to borroAv nothing from any reverberation surging up from 

 the parts below the brain. The Herbartian psychologists 

 have distinguished feelings due to the /orm in which ideas 

 may be arranged. A mathematical demonstration may be 

 as ' pretty,' and an act of justice as ' neat,' as a drawing or 

 a tune, although the prettiness and neatness seem to have 

 nothing to do with sensation. We have, then, or some of 

 us seem to have, genuinely cerebral forms of pleasure and 

 displeasure, apparently not agreeing in their mode of pro- 

 duction with the ' coarser ' emotions we have been analyzing. 

 And it is certain that readers whom our reasons have hitherto 

 failed to convince will now start up at this admission, and 

 consider that by it we give up our whole case. Since musi- 

 cal perceptions, since logical ideas, can immediately arouse 

 a form of emotional feeling, they will say, is it not more 

 natural to suppose that in the case of the so-called ' coarser ' 

 emotions, prompted by other kinds of objects, the emotional 

 feeling is equally immediate, and the bodily expression 

 something that comes later and is added on? 



In reply to this we must immediately insist that aesthetic 

 emotion, pure and simple, the pleasure given us by certain 

 lines and masses, and combinations of colors and sounds, is 

 an absolutely sensational experience, an optical or auricular 

 feeling that is primary, and not due to the repercussion 

 backwards of other sensations elsewhere consecutively 

 aroused. To this simple primary and immediate pleasure 

 in certain pure sensations and harmonious combinations 

 of them, there may, it is true, be added secondary pleas- 

 ures ; and in the practical enjoyment of works of art by 

 the masses of mankind these secondary pleasures play a 

 great part. The more classic one's taste is, however, the 

 less relatively important are the secondary pleasures felt to 

 be in comparison with those of the primary sensation as it 



