THE EMOTIONS. 481 



tations, and lieuce also the tendency to caressing action, 

 wliicli accompanies tender emotion in its fainter forms. 

 Other examples might be given ; but these are quite 

 enough to show the scope of the principle of revival of 

 useful action in weaker form. 



Another principle, to which Darwin perhaps hardly 

 does sufficient justice, may be called the principle of 

 reacting similarly to analogous-feeling stimuli. There is a 

 whole vocabulary of descriptive adjectives common to im- 

 pressions belonging to different sensible spheres — experi- 

 ences of all classes are sweet, impressions of all classes rich 

 or solid, sensations of all classes sharp. Wundt and Piderit 

 accordingly explain many of our most expressive reactions 

 upon moral causes as symbolic gustatory movements. As 

 soon as any experience arises which has an affinity with the 

 feeling of sweet, or bitter, or sour, the same movements are 

 executed which would result from the taste in point.* 

 " All the states of mind which language designates by the 

 metaphors bitter, harsh, sweet, combine themselves, there- 

 fore, with the corresjjondiug mimetic movements of the 

 mouth." Certainly the emotions of disgust and satisfac- 

 tion do express themselves in this mimetic way. Disgust is 

 an incipient regurgitation or retching, limiting its expres- 

 sion often to the grimace of the lips and nose ; satisfaction 

 goes with a sucking smile, or tasting motion of the lips. 

 In Mantegazza's loose if learned work, the attempt is made, 

 much less successfully, to bring in the eye and ear as ad- 

 ditional sources of symbolically expressive reaction. The 

 ordinary gesture of negation — among us, moving the head 

 about its axis from side to side — is a reaction originally used 

 by babies to keep disagreeables from getting into their 

 mouth, and may be observed in perfection in any nursery. f 



* These movements are explaiued teleologically, ia the first instance, 

 by the efforts which the tongue is forced to make to adapt itself to the 

 better perception or avoidance of the sapid body. (Cf. Physiol. Psych., ii. 

 423.) 



f Professor Henle derives the negative wag of the head from an incipi 

 ent shudder, and remarks how fortunate is the abbreviation, as when a lady 

 declines a partner in the ballroom. The clapping of the liands for ap- 

 plause he explains as a symbolic abridgment of an embrace. The pro« 



