THE EMOTIONS. 473 



ology of the brain becomes a simpler matter than has been 

 hitherto supposed. Sensational, associational, and motor 

 elements are all that the organ need contain. The physi- 

 ologists who, during the past few years, have been so in- 

 dustriously exploring the brain's functions, have limited 

 their explanations to its cognitive and volitional per- 

 formances. Dividing the brain into sensory and motor 

 centres, they have found their division to be exactly paral- 

 leled by the analysis made by empirical psychology of 

 the perceptive and volitional parts of the mind into their 

 simplest elements. But the emotions have been so ignored 

 in all these researches that one is tempted to suppose that 

 if these investigators were asked for a theory of them 

 in brain-terms, they would have to reply, either that they 

 had as yet bestowed no thought upon the subject, or that 

 they had found it so difficult to make distinct hypotheses 

 that the matter lay among the problems of the future, only 

 to be taken up after the simpler ones of the present should 

 have been definitively solved. 



And yet it is even now certain that of two things con- 

 cerning the emotions, one must be true. Either separate 

 and special centres, affected to them alone, are their brain- 

 seat, or else they correspond to processes occurring in the 

 motor and sensory centres already assigned, or in others 

 like them, not yet known. If the former be the case, we 

 must deny the view that is current, and hold the cortex to 

 be something more than the surface of * projection ' for every 

 sensitive spot and every muscle in the body. If the latter 

 be the case, we must ask whether the emotional process 

 in the sensory or motor centre be an altogether peculiar 

 one, or whether it resembles the ordinary perceptive pro- 

 cesses of which those centres are already recognized to be 

 the seat. Now if the theory I have defended be true, the 

 latter alternative is all that it demands. Supposing the 

 cortex to contain parts, liable to be excited by changes 

 in each special sense-organ, in each portion of the skin, 

 in each muscle, each joint, and each viscus, and to contain 

 absolutely nothing else, we still have a scheme capable of 

 representing the process of the emotions. An object falls 

 on a sense-organ, affects a cortical part, and is perceived ; 



