THE EMOTIONS. 477 



however, be voluminous in the extreme. Past emotions 

 may be among the things remembered. The more of all 

 these trains an object can set going in us, the richer our 

 cognitive intimacy with it is. This cerebral sense of rich- 

 ness seems itself to be a source of pleasure, possibly 

 even apart from the euphoria which from time to time comes 

 up from respiratory organs. If there he such a thing as a 

 purely spiritual emotion, I should be inclined to restrict 

 it to this cerebral sense of abundance and ease, this 

 feeling, as Sir W. Hamilton would call it, of unimpeded 

 and not overstrained activity of thought. Under ordinary 

 conditions, it is a fine and serene but not an excited state 

 of consciousness. In certain intoxications it becomes 

 exciting, and it may be intensely exciting. I can hardly 

 imagine a more frenzied excitement than that which 

 goes with the consciousness of seeing absolute truth, which 

 characterizes the coming to from nitrous-oxide drunken- 

 ness. Chloroform, ether, and alcohol all produce this 

 deepening sense of insight into truth ; and with all of them 

 it may be a ' strong ' emotion ; but then there also come 

 with it all sorts of strange bodily feelings and changes in 

 the incoming sensibilities. I cannot see my way to afiirraing 

 that the emotion is independent of these. I will concede, 

 however, that if its independence is anywhere to be main- 

 tained, these theoretic raptures seem the place at which 

 to begin the defence. 



THE GENESIS OF THE VARIOUS EMOTIONS. 



On a former page (pp. 453-4) I said that two questions, 

 and only two, are important, if we regard the emotions as 

 constituted by feelings due to the diffusive wave. 



(1) What special diffusive effects do the various special ob- 

 jective and subjective experiences excite ? and 



(2) How come they to excite them? 



The works on physiognomy and expression are all of 

 them attempts to answer question 1. As is but natural, the 



aort. The otlier emotions are themselves primary impulsive ten(iencies, of 

 a diffusive sort (involving, as M. P. rightly says, a multipUcite des phe- 

 nomhies); and just in proportion as more and more of these multiple ten- 

 dencies are checked, and replaced by some few narrow forms of discharge, 

 does the original emotion tend to disappear. 



