THE EMOTIONS. 483 



Mr. Spencer argues that the smallest muscles must be 

 such channels ; and instances the tail in dogs, cats, and 

 birds, the ears in horses, the crest in parrots, the face and 

 fingers in man, as the first organs to be moved by emotional 

 stimuli.* This principle (if it be one) would apply still 

 more easily to the muscles of the smaller arteries (though 

 not exactly to the heart) ; whilst the great variability of the 

 circulatory symptoms would also suggest that they are de- 

 termined by causes into which utility does not enter. The 

 quickening of the heart lends itself, it is true, rather easily 

 to explanation by inherited habit, organic memory of more 

 violent excitement ; and Darwin speaks in favor of this 

 view (see his Expression, etc., pp. 74-5). But, on the 

 other hand, we have so many cases of reaction which are 

 indisputably pathological, as we may say, and which could 

 never be serviceable or derived from what was serviceable, 

 that I think we should be cautious about pushing our ex- 

 planations of the varied heart-beat too far in the teleological 

 direction. Trembling, which is found in many excitements 

 besides that of terror, is, pace Mr. Spencer and Sig. Mante- 

 gazza, quite pathological. So are terror's other strong 

 symptoms. Professor Mosso, as the total result of his 

 study, writes as follows : 



'* We have seen that the graver the peril becomes, the more do the 

 reactions which are positively harmful to the animal prevail in number 

 and in efficacy. We already saw that the trembling and the palsy make 

 it incapable of flight or defence ; we have also convinced ourselves that 

 in the most decisive moments of danger we are less able to see [or to 

 think] than when we are tranquil. In face of such facts we must admit 

 that the phenomena of fear cannot all be accounted for by ' selection.' 

 Their extreme degrees are morbid phenomena which show an imperfec- 

 tion in the organism. We might almost say that Nature had not been 



* Loc. cit. % 497. Why a dog's face-muscles are not more mobile than 

 they are Mr. Spencer fails to explain, as also why different stimuli should 

 innervate these small muscles in such different ways, if easy drainage be 

 the only principle involved. Charles Bell accounted for the special part 

 played by the facial muscles in expression by their being accessory muscles 

 of respiration, governed by nerves whose origin is close to the respiratory 

 centre in the medulla oblongata. They are an adjuvant of voice, and like 

 it their function is communication. (See Bell's Anatomy of Expression. 

 Appendix by Alexander Shaw.) 



