1 88 Habit and Instinct. 



the lower emotions of animal life, and are not at present 

 concerned with the more subtle emotions, the higher 

 emotions and sentiments, intellectual, moral, aesthetic, and 

 so forth — remembering this, I say, let us see how the facts 

 may be interpreted. 



The view that has been until recently almost universally 

 accepted may be put briefly thus : When Tony sees the 

 butcher's cur, he at once experiences an emotion, and the 

 result of the emotion is that he acts in certain definite 

 ways, and that his heart, his respiration, his salivary 

 glands, and so forth, are more or less affected. The emotion, 

 on this view, produces these effects ; it is the middle term 

 of a series of events. From the physiological point of view, 

 this middle term is a commotion of some kind in the cortex 

 of the brain ; it results from the stimuli which give rise to 

 the sight of the cur ; it produces a number of nerve- 

 currents running down the appropriate nerves so as to 

 cause on the one hand certain motor effects, and on the 

 other hand certain visceral effects. The commotion in 

 the brain is what the dog feels as an emotion; and it 

 precedes any expression of the emotion in the activities 

 of his body. 



Hints more or less definite of a different interpretation 

 may be found in the literature of the emotions prior to 

 1884. In that year Prof. "William James published a paper 

 in Mind* in which he boldly contended, and backed up his 

 contention with well-directed arguments, that the motor 

 and visceral effects are not generated by the emotion, but 

 are themselves its source and origin. The series of events, 

 on Prof. James's view, may be put briefly as follows (subject 

 to certain modifications to be noticed presently) : The sight 

 of the butcher's cur gives rise to a commotion in the lower 



* Mind, 1884, vol. ix. p. 188. Prof. Lange, of Copenhagen, published 

 independently in the same year a similar theory of the emotions. 



