Individual through the Nervous System. loi 



preconceived notions, formulated and transmitted by language; 

 and, thanks to the intervention of language, sensorial impres- 

 sions in which we are passive need not be confounded with 

 those in which we are active. 



We have now to consider the intervention of language 

 in touching or moving phenomena. The acts of affective im- 

 pressionability are not generally defined with clearness and 

 exactness, and too frequently the phraseology of the educated 

 and the uneducated displays the same confusion. We often find 

 emotions, sentiments, desires, and passions confounded. To 

 avoid such inaccuracies care must be taken to analyse and 

 correctly name the acts, after having discerned the causes which 

 produce them. Now, the acts of affective impressionability 

 must be distinguished into desires and passions, while passions 

 are in reality desires beyond control. Instinctive appeals are 

 simply veritable desires, while sentiments agree altogether with 

 the emotions and desires. At the same time, emotions only 

 come under this head so long as they are associated with desires. 

 Thus pity, which is a sympathetic emotion, occasioned by the 

 sight or the conception of an individual in pain or distress, is; 

 at the same time, a sentiment, because, if real, it is accompanied 

 by a desire to assuage the pain or alleviate the distress. The 

 more nearly an emotion approaches a desire, the more does it 

 partake of the character of a sentiment. The affective im- 

 pressions, which have for their object the preservation of the 

 individual, are common to man and beasts. In man alone 

 exist those sentiments which result from the educator which we 

 call society. Such sentiments are those which induce love to 

 God, humanity, country, and family, and make us chaste, 

 charitable, and worthy citizens. Such are the sentiments, too, 

 which impel us to seek glory, power, renown, luxury, and 

 wealth, and which manifest themselves in our social life. 

 Further, the instinctive appeals common to animate creation 

 find in man, in the intervention of ideas by language, a source 

 of energetic and persistent excitants wholly wanting in brutes. 

 Thus, a word which designates a food, which characterises the 



