Vascular and Visceral Factors for the Genesis of Amotion. 391 



My theory on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the 

 perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as 

 they occur is the emotion."* " Every cne of the bodily changes, whatsoever it 

 he, is FELT, acutely w obscurely, the moment it occurs. If the reader has 

 never paid attention to this matter, he will be both interested and 

 astonished to learn how many different local bodily feelings he can 

 detect in himself as characteristic of his various emotional moods, "f 

 " If we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our 

 consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms we find we 

 have nothing left behind, no ' mindstuff ' out of which the emotion can 

 be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual per- 

 ception is all that remains."! " If I were to become corporeally 

 anaesthetic, I should be excluded from the life of the affections, harsh 

 and tender alike, and drag out an existence of merely cognitive or 

 intellectual form."§ 



This view is the extreme antithesis to the spiritualistic conception of 

 emotion. On it the " coarser emotions " come to consist in essence 

 merely of sensations which arise in consequence of the effect of an 

 idea upon the internal organs. M. Jules Soury says,|| "Pour James 

 I'emotion n'est que la conscience que nous avons des reactions organ- 

 iques, vasculaires, glandulaires, matrices, &c., provoques par certaines 

 perceptions ou certains souvenirs." 



Professor Lange traces the whole psycho-physiology of emotion to 

 certain excitations of the vasomotor centre. He conceives all the 

 other of the organic reflexes occurrent in emotion to be attributable 

 mediately to the vasomotor. For him, as for Professor James, the 

 emotion is the outcome and not the cause or the concomitant of the 

 organic reaction ; but for him the foundation and corner-stone of the 

 organic reaction is as to physiological quality vascular, namely, vaso- 

 motor. Emotion is an outcome of vasomotor reaction to stimuli of a 

 particular kind. The stimulus is some sensation acting often by inter- 

 mediation through some memorial-idea linked to it by association. This 

 stimulus induces a vasomotor action in viscera, skin, and brain. The 

 change thus induced in the circulatory condition of these organs induces 

 changes in the actions of the organs themselves, and these latter changes 

 evoke sensations which constitute the essential part of emotion. It is 

 by excitation of the vasomotor centre therefore that the exciting cause, 

 whatever it may chance to be, of emotion produces the organic phe- 

 nomena which as felt constitute for Lange the whole essence of 

 ^emotion. It is noteworthy that in Lange's view the action of the 



* The italics and emphasis stand as in the original. 



t ' Principles of Psychology,' vol. 2, p. 450, London, 1890. 



X Ibid., vol. 2, p. 451. 



§ Ibid., vol. 2, p. 452. 



II ' Du Systdme Nerveux,' Paris, 1899, Tol. 2, p. 1338. 



2 G 2 



