Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling

Of all the sciences psychology is, perhaps, the most imperfect. If a science is a body of knowledge obtained by special research and accepted by the general consensus of specialists, then psychology is so defective as to scarcely merit the name of science. This want of consensus is everywhere apparent, and must especially impress any one who compares the lack of harmony in manuals of psychology with the practical unanimity in manuals of botany, geology, physics, and other sciences. Even in the most fundamental points there is no agreement, as will be evident in a most summary statement.

It is now something more than a century since the general division of psychic phenomena into intellect, feeling and will, first came into repute, but still some psychologists of note do not agree to this fundamental classification, but would unite feeling and will in a single order. As to the subdivisions of feeling and will we are confessedly wholly at sea. In intellect it is only on the lower side, sensation and perception, that anything of great scientific value has been accomplished; and even now it cannot be said that the classes of sensation have been marked off with perfect certainty. In the higher range of intellect psychology can do scarcely more than accept some ready-made divisions from common observation and logic. And if so little has been settled in the comparatively simple work of a descriptive classification of the facts of mind, we may be assured that still less has been accomplished toward a scientific consensus for the laws of mind. Weber’s law alone seems to stand on any secure basis of experiment, but its range and meaning are still far from being determined. Even the laws of the association of ideas are still the subjects of endless controversy. Also in method there is manifestly the greatest disagreement. The physiological and introspective schools each magnify their own methods, sometimes so far as to discredit all others. Physiological method has won for itself a certain standing, indeed, but just what are its limitations is still far from being settled.

But the grievous lack of generally accepted results is most apparent in the domain of feeling. The discussion of feeling in most manuals is very meagre and unsatisfactory. Professor James’s recent treatise, for instance, gives some 900 pages to the Intellect, and about 100 pages each to Feeling and Will. There is little thorough analysis and no perfected inductive classification. We often, indeed, find essays of literary value which appeal to the authority of literature. But to refer to Shakspeare or Goethe as psychological authorities, or in illustration or proof of psychological laws, is generally a doubtful procedure. The literary and artistic treatment of human nature is quite distinct from the scientific, and literature and art cannot be said to be of much more value for psychology than for physics, chemistry, or biology. To appeal to the Bible or Shakspeare in matters psychological, is usually as misleading as to consult them for light on geology or botany. Even the fuller treatises on the subject of feeling rarely reach beyond literary method and common observation, being for the most part a collection and arrangement of the results of common sense, accepting common definitions, terms, and classifications. Now, science is always more than common sense and common perception, it is uncommon sense; it is an insight and a prolonged special investigation which penetrates beneath the surface of things and shows them in those inner and deeper relations which are entirely hid from general observation. Common views in psychology are likely to be as untrustworthy as in physics or astronomy, or any other department. Science must, indeed, start with common sense, but it does not deserve the name of science till it gets beyond it.

Again, the subject of pleasure, pain, and emotion, is usually discussed with considerable ethical or philosophical bias. The whole subject of feeling has been so naturally associated with ethics and philosophy from the earliest period of Greek thought that a purely colourless scientific treatment is quite difficult. Furthermore, feeling has been too often discussed from an a priori point of view, as in the rigid following out of the Herbartian theory of feeling as connected with hindrance or furtherance of representation. Still further, the physical side of emotion has been so emphasized by the physiological school as to distract attention from purely psychological investigation.

It is obvious, then, on the most cursory review, that very little has been accomplished in the pure psychology of feeling. Here is a region almost unexplored, and which, by reason of the elusiveness and obscurity of the phenomena, has seemed to some quite unexplorable. Dr. Nahlowsky truly remarks, that feeling is a “strange mysterious world, and the entrance to it is dark as to Hades of old.” Is there any way out of this darkness and confusion? If the study of feeling is to become scientific, we must, I think, assume that all feeling is a biological function governed by the general laws of life and subject in origin and development to the law of struggle for existence. Assuming this strictly scientific point of view, we have to point out some difficulties in the way of the introspective psychology of feeling as compared with other departments of biological science.

We trace directly and with comparative ease any physiological organ and function from its simplest to its most complex form; for example, in the circulation of the blood there is clearly observable a connected series from the most elementary to the most specialized heart as developed through the principle of serviceability. In some cases, as in the orohippus, a form in the evolution of the horse, we are able to predict an intermediate organism. Psychology is still far from this deductive stage; we have no analogous series of psychic forms, much less are able to supply, a priori, the gaps in a series. The reason for this is mainly the inevitable automorphism of psychological method. In biology we are not driven to understand life solely through analogy with our own life, but in psychology mind in general must be interpreted through the self-observation of the human mind. In biology we see without effort facts and forms of life most diverse from our own; the most strange and primitive types are as readily discernible as the most familiar and advanced, the most simple as the most complex. We study a fish just as readily as a human body, but the fish’s mind—if it has any—seems beyond our ken, at least is not susceptible of direct study, but a matter for doubtful inference and speculation. Whether a given action does or does not indicate consciousness, and what kind of consciousness, this is most difficult to determine. Thus we have the most various interpretations, some, as Clifford, even going so far as to make psychic phenomena universal in matter, others, on the other hand, as Descartes, limiting them to man alone.

The difficulty of this subjective method, this reflex investigation, is almost insurmountable. Consciousness must act as both revealer and revealed, must be a light which enlightens itself. A fact of consciousness to be known must not simply exist like a physical fact or object, as a piece of stone, but it must be such that the observing consciousness realizes or re-enacts it. To know the fact we must have the fact, we must be what we know. Mind is pure activity; we do not see an organ and ask what it is for, what does it do; but we are immediately conscious of consciousness as activity, and not as an objective organ. We must here, then, reverse the general order and know the activity before we can identify the organ as a physical basis.

By the purely objective vision of the lower sciences we can easily determine a genetic series of forms most remote from our own life, but in psychology, mind can be for us only what mind is in us. The primitive types of psychosis are, no doubt, as remote and foreign from our own as is the primitive type of heart or nervous system from that of man’s. In the case of heart and nerve we can objectively trace with certainty the successive steps, but in endeavouring to realize by subjective method the evolution of mind we are involved in great doubt and perplexity. How can we understand an insect’s feelings? How can we appreciate minds which are without apprehension of object, though there is reason to believe such minds exist? Only to a very limited extent can a trained and sympathetic mind project itself back into some of its immediately antecedent stages. Consciousness, because of its self-directive and self-reflective power, is the most elastic of functions, yet it can never attain the power of realizing all its previous stages. Sometimes, however, the mind in perfect quiescence tends to relapse into primitive modes, which may afterward be noted by reflection, but such occasions are comparatively rare. The subjective method means a commonalty of experience which is often impossible to attain. Thus a man may believe there are feelings of maternity; he has observed the expression of nursing mothers, and knows in a general way that here is a peculiar psychosis into which he can never enter, and which is, therefore, beyond his scientific analysis. The psychic life of the child is more akin to his than that of the mother; yet it is only by an incessant cultivation of receptivity and repression of adult propensities that one can ever attain any true inkling of infant experience. There is then, I think, a vast range of psychic life which must for ever lie wholly hidden from us, either as infinitely below or infinitely above us; there is also an immense realm where we can only doubtfully infer the presence of some form of consciousness without being able to discriminate its quality, or in exceptional cases to know it very partially; and there is but a relatively small sphere where scientific results of any large value may be expected. By reason of its objective method the realm of physical science is practically illimitable, but psychic science is, by reason of its subjective method, kept for ever within narrow boundaries.

We must then take into account the inherent difficulties of the subjective method as applied to the study of feeling and mind in general, and yet we must recognise its necessity. No amount of objective physiological research can tell us anything about the real nature of a feeling, or can discover new feelings. Granting that neural processes are at the basis of all feelings as of all mental activities, we can infer nothing from the physiological activity as to the nature of the psychic process. It is only such feelings and elements as we have already discovered and analyzed by introspection that can be correlated with a physical process. Nor can we gain much light even if we suppose—which is granting a good deal in our present state of knowledge—that there exists a general analogy between nerve growth and activity, and mental operations. If relating, i.e., cognition, is established on basis of inter-relation in brain tissue, if every mental connecting means a connecting of brain fibres, we might, indeed, determine the number of thoughts, but we could not tell what the thoughts were. So if mental disturbance always means bodily disturbance, we can still tell nothing more about the nature of each emotion than we knew before. We must first know fear, anger, etc., as experiences in consciousness before we can correlate them with corporeal acts.