476 PSYCHOLOGY. 



we employ ; and just so, the oftener we meet an object, 

 the more definitely we think and behave about it ; and 

 the less is the organic perturbation to which it gives rise. 

 The first time we saw it we could perhaps neither act nor 

 think at all, and had no reaction but organic perturbation. 

 The emotions of startled surprise, wonder, or curiosity were 

 the result. Now we look on with absolutely no emotion.* 

 This tendency to economy in the nerve-paths through which 

 our sensations and ideas discharge, is the basis of all growth 

 in efiiciency, readiness, and skill. Where would the general, 

 the surgeon, the presiding chairman, be, if their nerve-cur- 

 Tents kept running down into their viscera, instead of keep- 

 ing up amid their convolutions ? But what they gain for prac- 

 tice by this law, they lose, it must be confessed, for feeling. 

 For the world-worn and experienced man, the sense of 

 pleasure which he gets from the free and powerful flow of 

 thoughts, overcoming obstacles as they arise, is the only 

 compensation for that freshness of the heart which he once 

 enjoyed. This free and powerful flow means that brain- 

 paths of association and memory have more and more 

 organized themselves in him, and that through them the 

 stimulus is drafted off into nerves which lead merely to the 

 writing finger or the speaking tongue, t The trains of intel- 

 lectual association, the memories, the logical relations, may, 



* Those feelings -which Prof. Bain calls ' emotions of relativity,' excite- 

 ment of novelty, wonder, rapture of freedom, sense of power, hardly 

 survive any repetition of the experience. But as the text goes on to ex- 

 plain, and as Goethe as quoted by Prof. Hoffding says, this is because " the 

 soul is inwardly grown larger without knowing it, and can no longer be 

 filled by that tirst sensation. The man thinks that he has lo.st, but really he 

 has gained. What he has lost in rapture, he has gained in inward growth." 

 "It is," as Prof. Hoffding himself adds, in a beautiful figure of speech, 

 •" with our virgin feelings, as with the first breath drawn by the new-born 

 child, in which the lung expands itself so that it can never be emptied to 

 the same degree again. No later breath can feel just like that first one." On 

 this whole subject of emotional blunting, compare Hoflfding's Psychologic, 

 VI. E., and Bain's Emotions and Will, chapter iv. of the first part. 



f M. Fv. PauUian, in a little work full of accurate observations of de- 

 tail (Les Phenomenes Affectifs et les Lois de leur Apparition), seems to me 

 rather to turn the truth upside down by his formula that emotions are due 

 to an inhibition of impulsive tendencies. One kind of emotion, namely, 

 uneasiness, annoyance, distress, does occur when any definite impulsive 

 tendency is checked, and all of M. P.'s illustrations are drawn from this 



